“Our bodies are central to the way we think”

“The world is a much stranger and, in a sense, for me, much more wonderful place than we imagine.” Returning to Mantova for one of his favourite literary festivals, Amitav Ghosh discusses his latest novel, Ghost-Eye. Together with Matteo De Giuli, he talks about memory, consciousness, the environment and the limits of what we think we know as central themes to his writing.

At the centre of Ghost-Eye is three-year-old Varsha, who develops a strong craving for fish despite growing up in a family that follows vegetarian customs. Shoma, a therapist working with children, begins to investigate Varsha’s memories, narrated by her nephew, and the story moves across time and place as its characters search for knowledge and identity.

Ghosh speaks of the many documented cases of children who remember past lives. “I don’t really like using the word reincarnation,” Ghosh says. As such, these cases are not simply metaphors or metaphysical ideas: “It is actually happening in the world.”

This openness to experiences that challenge conventional ideas of time and consciousness runs through Ghosh’s work. His novel Gun Island featured tornadoes and invasive spiders in Venice years before such events occurred. Many writers, he suggested, have similar experiences of premonition. Such instances, he argues, show us that “time is not linear.”

For Ghosh, writing itself is a way of exploring altered states of consciousness. “My consciousness-changing practice is writing,” he says. Consciousness cannot be understood as something that happens only in the brain. “Our bodies are central to the way we think.”

That idea returns to one of Ghost-Eye’s details: Varsha’s craving for fish and the role of food more generally. “In my view, food is the primary medium in which humans interact with their environment,” Ghosh says, noting that food is often overlooked in discussions of the environmental crisis.

Literature, too, has a role to play in confronting that crisis. It is not that writers have failed to address it, Ghosh argues, but that the wider literary ecosystem remains conservative and often marginalises work that does.

Ghosh leaves the audience with the possibility that the boundaries we draw between body and mind, past and present, human and environment may be far less fixed than we imagine.