Security Implications of Climate Change in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671035
Author(s): Dr Diksha Shukla
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671035
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Volume 15 | Issue 3 | June 2024
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The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165
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Security Implications of Climate Change in The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Dr Diksha Shukla
Assistant Professor,
Department of English, School of Languages,
CSJM University, Kanpur.
Article History: Submitted-07/05/2024, Revised-19/06/2024, Accepted-21/06/2024, Published-30/06/2024.
Abstract:
Amitav Ghosh’s thought-provoking book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and
the Unthinkable examines how climate change is noticeably absent from modern literary and
cultural conversation. Published in 2016, Ghosh, an acclaimed Indian author known for his
novels exploring historical and environmental themes, challenges the literary world to confront
the profound implications of climate change through his compelling analysis. Ghosh argues that
despite the escalating threats posed by global warming, literature, especially the novel, has
largely remained indifferent or silent on the subject. He identifies this absence as a significant
oversight, considering the immense impact climate change has and will continue to have on
human societies and the planet.
One of Ghosh’s central arguments is that the Western literary tradition, emphasising
individualism and human exceptionalism, struggles to grapple with our time’s complex,
interconnected ecological crises. He suggests that the novel’s focus on human drama and
individual lives often sidelines broader environmental concerns, leading to a “derangement” – a
collective failure to recognize and respond to the existential threat of climate change.
Drawing on examples from literature, history, and his own experiences, Ghosh illustrates
how narratives of progress and development have shaped our understanding of the world, often
at the expense of ecological sustainability. He critiques the cultural and political structures
perpetuating this denial and argues for a more inclusive and ecologically informed approach to
storytelling.
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https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671035
Security Implications of Climate Change in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by
Amitav Ghosh
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Keywords:
Climate
Change,
Cultural
Ecological
Discourse,
Global
Warming,
Urbanization.
In addition to being a criticism, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable is a call to action. Ghosh challenges writers, scholars, and readers to broaden their
literary horizons and engage with the urgent realities of climate change. He advocates for
literature that embraces complexity, acknowledges interdependence, and acknowledges the
profound transformations reshaping our world.
Overall, The Great Derangement is a compelling and timely exploration of the
intersection between literature, culture, and climate change. Through his wise investigation,
Ghosh encourages us to reconsider how we relate to nature and how literature may help us
confront today’s most critical issues.
Our immediate surroundings comprise the environment we live in. It’s divided into two
categories: non-living and living. The six categories of nature dissects warm water, insects,
reptiles, plants, animals, and humans. Given his superior intelligence, man is regarded by nature
as a padrone. Man and nature are inextricably linked. While nature provides for man’s basic
needs, living things also aid in the growth and development of nature. A species’ ability to
flourish and coexist with other species depends on the health of the entire ecosystem. Nature has
forcefully retaliated against human exploitation of the environment by causing floods,
earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, and other natural calamities. Even though man has advanced
to any degree, ecological balance remains as vital to the survival of all living things as it did in
prehistoric times. In addition to scientists, ecologists, environmentalists, and nature enthusiasts,
writers, poets, philosophers, thinkers, and artists also have a strong interest in and a deep concern
for maintaining the ecological balance and protecting the environment.
An entirely different world existed before urbanisation. Worldwide, industrialization has
harmed the environment. Environmental issues are discussed everywhere in the world. New
technologies are causing the environment to deteriorate daily, and people are finally beginning to
realise how essential nature and ecology are—something they had long ignored. All of these
topics are being discussed in the literature, which has led to the development of a brand-new
field of study known as ecocriticism.
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Ecocriticism studies how nature is depicted in literature and how literature engages with
the natural world. Ecocriticism examines how the natural world impacts human life. In his essay
Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism, William Rueckert created a new phrase
in 1978 for showing care for the environment. Although its roots date to the 1970s, ecocriticism
as an academic field only began to take shape in the 1990s. It examines different literary
treatments of nature and evaluates texts highlighting environmental issues. Ecocriticism is “the
study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” according to one of
the discipline’s pioneers, Cheryll Grotfelty. Lawrence Buell states this study needs to be
“conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis.” “Ecocriticism has
distinguished itself, debate notwithstanding,” according to Simon Estok (2001). “Firstly by the
ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the natural world as an important…..” Estok argues that
ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is
any theory that is committed to effecting change by analysing the function-thematic, artistic,
social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise the natural environment…”. Shakespeare’s
works have also been included in the ecocriticism movement’s current expansion. This kind of
research falls under the functional approach of the ecocriticism branch known as cultural
ecology. It examines the similarities between literary works and ecosystems and suggests that
creative writings may have an ecological purpose within the cultural system.
Joseph W. Meeker writes in The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology that the
only literary creature on Earth is the human. If literature creation is a significant aspect of the
human species, then it should be thoroughly and honestly studied to determine how it affects
human conduct and the environment. (PP 3-4)
Culture and nature are inextricably linked to one another since neither can exist alone.
Cheryll Grotfelty points out that it comes under the fundamental premise that human culture and
this cosmos are interconnected and affect each other (19). Throughout the book, Amitav Ghosh
tries to highlight the significance of this connection. Man is not as robust or dominant as nature.
Since ancient times, people have believed that nature can preserve and destroy. Like a mother
goddess, nature can sometimes be merciful and kind, yet it can also be highly destructive.
Preserving the plants and animals at the expense of the eviction of tribe members is one of the
main concerns. It has been said in an article titled Literature and Ecology that “in ecology, man’s
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tragic flaw is his anthropocentric vision and his compulsion to conquer, humanise, domesticate,
violate and exploit every natural thing” (Rueckert 113).
Environmental consciousness must be raised globally to encourage people to live in an
environmentally friendly environment by safeguarding wildlife and plants. These days, natural
disasters and wars threaten global peace, disputes, and destruction. According to Jonathan Bate,
“Nature” should be challenged rather than rejected. Since nature provides for all of man’s basic
requirements, how could we conclude that “there is no nature”? After all, there isn’t a single area
of the planet that humans haven’t touched.
The writers’ attention has recently been drawn to ecological concerns and the peril
humanity faces from ongoing environmental abuse. With their love and concern for nature
depicted in their writings, writers such as Amitav Ghosh become highly relevant against the
backdrop of the expanding worldwide ecological issues. An ecological interpretation of Amitav
Ghosh’s body of work emphasises the need for careful environmental stewardship and preserving
the intricate system of created order that sustains life on Earth.
This study aims to examine The Great Derangement, one of his well-known works, from
the standpoint of the security implications of climate change. Using ecocritical glasses to read
the work highlights the need to protect the environment to ensure a better future. The non-fiction
exposes environmental degradation through examples of exploitation, neglect, and destruction to
undermine the corrupt political practices pervasive in the community. This further piques our
curiosity about how ecology affects civilization and how crucial the environment is to human
survival.
The book is a nominee for the Booker Prize and is about the absurd inactivity of
humanity against climate change. This book is a compilation of lectures given at the University
of Chicago. Stories, History, and Politics are the three divisions that Ghosh separated it into. In
the first, he presents the facts regarding climate change and our incapacity to consider it; in the
next two, he discusses how literature and politics relate to it. The primary argument posited by
Ghosh in The Great Derangement is that, upon reflection on this book, future generations will
hold politicians, writers, and leaders responsible for their failure to acknowledge the seriousness
of the climate crisis.
Ghosh’s book mainly discusses droughts, cyclones, and floods. It is about thinking about
climate change, not thinking about it at all, or being unable to. Anyone who has read any of
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Ghosh’s recent books, particularly The Hungry Tide (2004), should not be surprised by this set of
knowledge that affects humans; in fact, it is a logical progression of the authorial concerns that
set Ghosh apart in his early works as well. An Antique Land is a significant non-fiction work
focusing on human connections, routes, and tales not included in the mainstream discourse. In
the two books, Ghosh had published prior, In An Antique Land, these little human voices beneath
and below the Empire-Enlightenment-capitalized “Human” had also troubled him. In the
following novel, The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), they were brilliantly transformed into a
science fiction story.
As we talk in this work, Ghosh communicates from dim human voices to even more
obscure non-human sounds surrounding us. Silent action is a natural occurrence. In an era of
“unthinkable” climate change, Ghosh asked: When will we learn to listen to and converse with
the non-human voices of the planet that have always spoken to us as humans and will do so
under intense pressure?
Non-human agencies are more pronounced than they were in earlier narratives. Verbal
communication is accepted more so than non-verbal communication. Examples from Indian
epics, such as The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, demonstrate how nature—trees, animals,
insects, birds, and all other living things—expresses emotions more effectively than words or
written words. Animals and birds were conversing like humanity. The workings of the narrative
apparatus depend on the intervention of God, animals, and the elements. There are numerous
instances where Jatayu (the Bird) aids Ram, Fire (considered God) aids Sita, and so forth. When
Ram was searching for Sita, he called Mother Nature:
हे खगमृग हे मधुकरश्रयणी, तुम देिखसीता मृग नयनी||
Man attains self-apotheosis when he separates from this material world and confronts an
arbitrary God.
This applies not only to a belief system but also to storytelling techniques: non-humans
provide epics with a lot of momentum because they are the ones who come up with the answers
that make the story continue, which holds not only for Asian, African, Mediterranean, and other
narrative traditions but also for many more. (Chap14)
The Hebrew Bible does not contain any exceptions. It bears similarities to previous
national epics. A theologian argues that the central idea of Judaism is that God is not revealed via
words and texts but rather through nature and experiences. Christianity and Islam, in comparison,
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are more text-based religions with less connection to the environment, political power, and
weather. (Chap14)
This begs the issue: Where does the non-human figure fit into the modern novel? The
bizarre effect of global warming is addressed when we try to explain that, at this time, human
activity was disrupting the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a literary imagination centring on
humans and including non-human characters.
Ghosh contends that there needs to be more discussion or description of climate change
in modern culture due to the historical rejection of diverse modernity in favour of the single,
monolithic paradigm of European modernity, which is still held by ideologues who purport to be
sceptical of the West, including those who adhere to Hindutva. Not despite it, but precisely
because of its self-definition as “enavant,” contemporary literature has failed.
Climate change is not a natural catastrophe in this book; instead, it is a “crisis of culture
and thus of imagination” because, when it occurs, culture destroys:
Is the current of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of
narration?….(Chap3)
Climate changes are strange. An inexplicable sense of mystery can be found in the
Sunderbans stories. Undoubtedly, the term “uncanny” is frequently used regarding climate
change. There was an explosion at the Deep water Horizon oil gulf on the Mexico rig; according
to news reports, the disaster claimed the lives of up to a dozen persons. It was determined that
the influence would still be felt, nevertheless. The oil split accident in U.S. history spilt millions
of gallons of crude into the waterway. It is mysterious how it was cleaned from that water.
From November 1 to April 30, Australian regions were hit with at least 11 cyclones.
Some of them are more destructive and dangerous, which is the cause of stronger winds and
heavy rain. Timothy Morton raises a question: “Isn’t it the case that the effect delivered to us in
the [unaccustomed] rain, the weird cyclone, the oil slick is something uncanny”? George
Marshall says, “Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, and the high carbon
lifestyle that are changing them, are extremely familiar and yet have now been given a new
menace an uncertainty.”
Uncanniness is seen in Gothic literature. In unimaginable shapes and forms, the
“mysterious work of our own hands” is returning to haunt us. The ghost stories of Charles
Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Henry James, and Rabindranath Tagore are among the most
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famous novelists’ eerie tales. Literary fiction’s ghosts are projections of once-alive humans, not
actual human beings. There are no human counterparts for animals like Sundarbans tigers or odd
meteorological events like the Delhi Tornado. Writing on climate change in a lyrical, elegiac, or
romantic style is not appropriate because it is too potent, horrific, and frightening. Despite
confusing the notion of ecological writing or environmental writing and our strange bond with
non-human animals, these events are not of nature.
Ghosh envisions an extraordinary natural calamity in Mumbai early in the book—one the
city has never experienced due to the Arabian Sea’s mild climate. We can also go through the
writing of Mridula Ramesh’s The Climate Solution, where she talked about the disasters in
Mumbai. We live on a planet becoming less and less familiar to us, though the chances of this
happening are small. He creates a scenario wherein South Mumbai’s hills and promontories will
revert to islands, emerging from a highly turbulent body of water as a strange cyclone
approaches Mumbai from the south. In the last section of his book The Hungry Tide, there was a
scene where a hurricane sent a massive storm surge into the Sundarbans. It was pretty
challenging to depict this disastrous scene in fiction.
The separation of Si-fi from the literary mainstream was not sudden, but. It was a gradual
process. The seismic event of Mount Tambora in April 1815 was a tremendous volcanic eruption
that spread in the air. Famines in Europe and China were the cause of significant temperature
changes. Asia’s population dramatically increases the effects of global warming on humans. The
Bengal Delta, which is heavily inhabited worldwide and includes most of Bangladesh and a large
portion of West Bengal, was created by the meeting of the Ganges and the Bramhaputra rivers.
In the area, there are more than 5,000,000 residents. The Bengal Delta has seen some of the
biggest natural disasters due to its high population density. The Bhola Cyclone of 1971 claimed
the lives of over 3,000,000. A recent typhoon in 1991 claimed 1,38,000 lives; the majority of the
victims were women as a result of the storm’s ferocity and rising sea level.
According to our research on climate change, at least 24% of India’s fertile land is
gradually becoming desert, and a 2-degree Celsius increase in the world’s average temperature
will result in less food being produced there. This desertification will not even protect China and
Pakistan. The worsening water issue in Asia dwarfs them. The Himalayan Glaciers are expected
to vanish by 2050, having already lost all of the ice that has accumulated since the mid-1940s,
according to research done in 2008. The Himalayan Glacier is accelerating, causing the flow to
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increase daily. This was the cause of the 2008 Kosi River disaster in Bihar and the 2010 Indus
floods. The glacier will bring catastrophic water if it keeps receding. Within a decade or two,
there will be a severe water deficit if the glacier keeps shrinking.
Asia’s population was crucial to the industrialization of the region’s popular nations and
global warming. The 1980s saw the start of industrialization, which led to the height of the
climate catastrophe. We have embraced a way of life that is inappropriate for our surroundings.
Men today use refrigerators, vehicles, and other appliances they cannot own. They are utilising it
since man would make this procedure smoother rather than due to technical or financial
limitations. But the warning signs of this self-created catastrophe have been around for a while.
Ghosh asserts:
It is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the
Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its handiwork….(Ghosh)
Because of the significant climate upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution, much
study points to the early modern period, which spanned the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Technology and information exchanges peaked then and continued until the early modern era.
This was a period of new inventions and increased trade, especially with the U.S. and the Asian
continent. It provides a broad overview of the field’s research. Deepesh Chakrabarty states that
natural philosophers of freedom were primarily concerned with how people would be freed from
repression, injustice, inequality, and even uniformity imposed upon them by other people or by
systems that humans created. (Ghosh)
We can agree with Ghosh that climate warming is a “wicked problem” based on these
concerns. Ghosh argues that politics, like literature, has evolved from a field of group action to
one of individual moral reflection. However, there is a high price for restricting politics and
literature to individual moral adventures. According to Ghosh, fiction is the most appropriate
cultural form for imagining alternative human existences, which the climate catastrophe forces
us to consider. His book is a call to action from a great writer to take on the most pressing issue
of our day.
This excellent work is the most recent example of the limitations of modern language and
intellect and the dissatisfaction with human intellect over the universe we believed to be familiar
with. We have become disinherited of Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that “each blind lurch of
the world leaves its disinherited, to whom no longer the past nor yet the future belongs.” We are
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not only deranged, but we are also gradually losing our possessions. But isn’t our mortal fate this
contingency of meaning? Isn’t the only thing that can rejuvenate ourselves, ideas, people, and
worlds? Their mortality? It should be recalled by those who are looking for a final, unchanging
“end” that everything in hell is also present in heaven. Not to mention that you can never go;
both results are equally pointless.
Works Cited:
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The University
of Chicago Press, 2016.
Kerridge, Richard. “Environmentalism and Ecocriticism.” Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed.
Patricia Waugh.NewYork: O.U.P., 2006. 530-41.
Meeker, Joseph W. “The Comic Mode.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
155-69.
Sheenam. “The Hungry Tide: A Blend of Historico-Environmental Concerns.” The Criterion:
An International Journal of English 5.5 (2014): n.pag. Web. May 18, 2016.
Ghosh, Amitav. “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable”. The Penguin
Book. 2016.
Chaudhuri, Rajat. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by
Amitav Ghosh
//kitaab.org/2017/01/14/book-review-the-great-derangement-climate-change-and-the-
unthinkable-by-amitav-ghosh/
Khair, Tabish. “Outside Imagination”,
http://www.thehindu.com/books/literaryreview/Outsideimagination/article14504723.ece.JULY
23, 2016 16:20 IST.UPDATED: J.U.L.Y. 23, 2016 14:31 I.S.T.
Ramesh, Mridula.The Climate Solution: India’s Climate-Change Crisis and What We Can Do
about It. Hachette India, 2018.
Estok, Simon C. “The Ecophobia Hypothesis. New York: Routledge.” 2018.
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Security Implications of Climate Change in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by
Amitav Ghosh
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Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” The
Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold
Fromm. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xv-xxxii.
Bounding:
Writing
Water
Worlds.
(n.d.).
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/oa_monograph/chapter/3118946
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Dr Diksha Shukla