“But it would be a mistake to think that hyper-modern, hyper-technological people don’t live by stories,” Amitav Ghosh says. In a May 3, 2025 interview with Scroll.in about his book Wild Fictions, the novelist argues that stories shape how people understand their surroundings and picture possible futures—not only in communities closely tied to the natural world, but also in technologically advanced societies.
How stories guide people’s relationship with the world
Ghosh offers the story of Bon Bibi in the Sundarban as an example of a narrative that does more than entertain. He calls it a “living charter”: a story that guides how people relate to their environment. In this account, stories can influence how people interpret a place and their responsibilities within it.
He sets that example beside the visions of billionaires who speak about colonising Mars. Ghosh interprets such ambitions as stories too—ones that, in his view, draw on childhood narratives and express a search for meaning beyond an Earth imagined as depleted. That is his reading of those visions, not independently established evidence about the motives of particular billionaires.
The contrast is not between story-bound traditional communities and rational technological societies. Ghosh’s point is that both make sense of the world through narratives, even when those narratives take very different forms.
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Why Ghosh connects storytelling to ecological crisis
Ghosh says he wrote The Great Derangement out of an effort to understand his own earlier blindness to aspects of planetary crisis. He frames the problem partly as one of language and vision: familiar metaphors may have become inadequate, while human-centred assumptions can make it difficult to imagine a world in which expression and significance are not exclusively human.
That argument makes literary imagination more than a matter of style. If inherited ways of describing the world leave nonhuman life at the margins, they can also limit what readers and writers are able to perceive. Ghosh’s concern is not simply whether a novel mentions environmental change, but whether its language and form can make room for a world that exceeds human experience.
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Literary forms can change—and still exclude
Ghosh acknowledges that Enlightenment rationality can constrain literary structures, but he does not treat those structures as unchangeable. He points to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a novel concerned with nonhuman intentionality, and invokes Kalidasa’s Meghaduta and W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as distinct works that resonate, in his account, through attention to the world beyond the human.
He also says the wider literary ecosystem and publishing world have tended to marginalise some kinds of work. The challenge, then, is not only for individual writers to experiment with form; it is also whether literary institutions make room for work that departs from dominant expectations.
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In discussing AI translation into dialects, Ghosh comments on its possible effect on “linguistic pyrotechnics.” The interview presents this as his observation; it does not establish a demonstrated outcome or provide evidence about the effects of AI translation.
What the interview says about Wild Fictions
Wild Fictions is the book at the centre of the Scroll.in conversation. The interview also places Ghosh’s ideas alongside The Great Derangement and refers to The Shadow Lines, as well as the works by Melville, Kalidasa and Sebald discussed above. It does not compare editions or formats of Wild Fictions.
Across the conversation, Ghosh treats storytelling as a way people make a world intelligible and imagine what may come next. His ecological argument follows from that premise: changing how people see the world may require changing the stories and forms through which they describe it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Interview source
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur’s interview with Amitav Ghosh, published by Scroll.in on May 3, 2025.
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