Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) offers an incisive template of the intersecting history of Anthropocene and colonisation. The parables retold by Ghosh transport us to a sequestered past obscured by a Eurocentric discourse on colonial modernity. However, it is the same history which is now falling apart to reveal the devastating trajectory of the omnicidal enterprise carried out by the earliest colonising forces. The mapping of anthropogenic activities also helps us identify the locus of the philosophy that has bolstered the impetus of these forces. On one hand, the mechanistic view of life propagated by the colonisers had initiated the inception of colonial modernity; on the other hand, its boomeranging effect coupled with the “great acceleration” (133) has reached a tipping point leading to the present-day environmental crisis. Ghosh’s book is a percipient warning for denialists who believe that the earth is an inert entity and that non-humans are brute forces to be subjugated. To counter this climate crisis, Ghosh comes up with some reversal strategies in which storytellers and indigenous communities may play an active role in restoring “Gaia” with all its vitality.

The Nutmeg’s Curse was published in 2021 when the world was reeling under the devastating impact of COVID-19. The pandemic not only exposed our ill-preparedness to contain a virus, but it also bared our vulnerability towards non-human entities. Ghosh has pointed out that the pandemic has affected the poor more than the rich people in the developed countries, especially in the US because of “inaction” (Ghosh 2021: 62). The reason for this imbalance is wrought by several factors like racism, capitalism and colonial modernity. To reveal the interconnections among Anthropocene, capitalism, racism and colonialism, Ghosh delves deep into the distant past when European powers ferried across the vast stretch of unchartered waters to locate the source of spices which were under Venetian monopoly. One such spice was Nutmeg which was found in abundance in the Banda Islands but was a coveted luxury item in Europe because of its medicinal property. The book’s title implies how nature’s bounty on an archipelago in the Indian Ocean can eventually become a cursed fruit for the indigenous islanders very much like the forbidden apple. The Nutmeg tree was endemic to these islands because it came into existence after a volcanic eruption of “Gunung Api.” However, like stories, the nutmeg also travelled to other places. But before this, the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagni), while attempting to monopolise the trade, had unleashed a reign of terror on the Island by slaughtering and enslaving ninety percent of the island’s indigenous population (23). What’s more, they also fell the nutmeg trees in the surrounding islands of Lanthor to control the supply and demand chain. The dictum “No war without trade, no trade without war” (42) which we saw unfolding in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine had its root early on in the expedition of the East India Companies which carried out trade and war simultaneously. To quote Ghosh: “The dominance of Capitalism was made possible by western military conquests” (116). However, to carry on with the nutmeg extraction and plantation, the Dutch brought in slaves and indentured labourers from other colonies, which laid the inception of mass migration across the world. This was not an isolated incident in the Age of Enlightenment. The same strategy was carried on by other colonising powers across the world including the USA. Mbembe points out that colonial modernity triggered the voluntary uprooting of a huge population to new settlements once inhabited by indigenous people during colonial times (2019) and these new settlements can be considered to be a vital part of the “Colonial map-making” (Yumnam 2016: 159) and “Terraforming” (Ghosh 2021:49). Therefore, climate change inevitably became entangled with immigration, colonialism, empire building, capitalism and the theory of race formation.

The colonising strategy for resource extraction largely depended on two factors: terraforming and racial subjugation. Ghosh borrows the term terraforming from Jack Williamson to explain how the colonisers often tried to create a tabula rasa in the country they occupied. This was done by erasing the cultural and historical past of the indigenous communities and impressing new meanings on the place and the surviving population. The colonisers were capable of inflicting such cultural and geological violence because of their Darwinian worldview that civilised races of man will exterminate savage races (79). Eurocentric mechanistic world view garnered by thinkers like Rene Descartes, Bernard Mandeville, Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon, consolidated in The Age of Reason, argued about the divinely ordained superiority of the white race over other races. Citing Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Ghosh points out that “Bacon’s advertisement for a holy war was thus a call for several types of genocide, which found its sanction in biblical and classical antiquity” (26). Consequently, any idea relating to shared ancestry or “fraternal solidarity” (82) was considered preposterous. This gave a self-validating licence to the European colonisers to extinguish the life of non-humans as well as humans whom they imagined as brute and savage races. What happened in Lanthor also happened to the indigenous tribes in Australia and Africa. In the USA, too, the early settlers disrupted the indigenous lives of the native Indians (51) not only by disturbing the material basis of life but also by destroying the “entire web of non-human connections that sustained a certain way of life” (41). The settlers also used diseases as a bio-weapon to wipe out the indigenous population in many places (61). The “weaponisation of the environment” was further coupled with the killing of non-combatant forces like women and children in the colonies (57).

Therefore, the rise of the Global North as an ensemble of developed nations had its foundation in a gory past. After centuries of exploitation, resource extraction, the annihilation of indigenous communities and terraforming the world’s leading powers have established a world order which can function only by further aggravating the climate crisis. Ghosh maintains that such a worldview is precarious for mankind because it treats nature as inert, and the non-human entity as brute force. With such a philosophy, the affinity that man had with nature will be severed forever. Religion was not an exception either because like the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestants in Europe, the Salafi-influenced Islamists in Egypt stamped out the “conception of vitality” (211) from the communities who worshipped nature. The planetary crisis, according to Ghosh, can be contained if only we recognise the vitality that throbs within the earth. Ghosh uses the concept of Gaia (See Latour 2017) to emphasise the vitality of the earth in which non-humans and humans interact in specific ways. Although colonial modernity and specific forms of religion have shunned the relation between humans and non-humans, there are occasional emergences of the earth’s vitality through various means. On one hand, the shamans play a pivotal role by interacting with the spirit of nature; on the other hand, the terrain has also fought back through the manifestation of the uncanny. As I am writing this review, I received reports of landslides in Halflong (A hill district in Assam, India) that has not only disrupted communication but also claimed the lives of several people. This is nature’s way of responding to terraforming. Ghosh writes that the coastal areas of Mumbai and Miami are prone to similar threats because of climate change. Real estate agents who usually build posh properties are driven by profit-making motives. They not only undermine the vital force in nature but also endanger the lives of people through terraforming.

We have entered an era where the nation’s development is measured by its gross domestic product (GDP). No wonder such policies will further expedite and accelerate growth by exploiting natural resources. The problem with the pursuit of such models of development is that it will not only increase carbon emissions but will also lead to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of capitalists. Ghosh’s reference to the Gandhian model brings to our mind Anna Hazare’s model village Relegan Siddhi which has indeed solved the problem of water scarcity by developing a sustainable model. However, there are several geographical locations in India where water scarcity has led to crop failure and the drying of rivers. The vitality within the earth is gradually dying.

The shamans who claim to interact with the spirit of nature have repeatedly warned us of the impending disaster due to global warming and resource extraction. Shamans and indigenous people around the world are the new race of environmentalists who are striving to protect tribal lands and forests around the world. However, Ghosh warns us against the ecofascists whose environmentalism is “inextricably bound up with virulent xenophobic nationalism” as in the case of Germany (223–224). Ghosh points out that in India the Tribals and Adivasis are at the receiving ends and any protest against “rapaciously extractivist nationalism” (231) is considered anti-national and hence quelled strenuously. A recent instance is the construction of the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Power Project in Northeast India which is about to displace a good number of families besides submerging a huge area and bringing an end to the non-human form of life. Furthermore, the area in which this gravity dam is built falls under seismic zone v. However such precarity cannot deter a postcolonial nation like India which is still a developing nation. The logic behind this pursuit is that developed nations like the USA, Japan, Germany, UK and France are at the helm of world power by using coal and now it is the turn of upcoming economies like China and India to catch up on the train of development, no matter how much carbon footprint is left behind. Huggan and Tiffin write, “The naturalisation of uneven development relegated colonised peoples to a stage in the European past and the geography of difference was reconfigured as a living history of the rise of a civilised man, with European development as the natural goal” (2008:2). One also needs to consider what would be the impact on geopolitics if renewable sources of power like solar or wind replace coal and oil and how it may specifically impact the USA which is determined to control the energy flow across nations.

Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is an impassioned appeal to all classes of people (both specialist and non-specialist) to bolster mass movements against climate change across the world. Ghosh believes that storytellers can play an important role in addressing the environmental crisis. He has earlier raised this concern in The Great Derangement (2017) where he has specifically mentioned that environmental concerns are not treated as real; hence, stories about them are often left outside the ambit of serious fiction. Most writers are interested in addressing issues related to politics and society, but when it comes to climate change, there are only a handful of writers who talk about it. As climate change affects a huge chunk of the population, the climate fictions that emerge out of postcolonial nations seek to address the plight of communities instead of focussing on the individual’s moral journey. However, such an ideology of “morbid individualism” (Ghosh 2021: 177) cannot sustain the planet for too long; rather the communitarian life as exemplified by Tongans or a collective and pluralist society can stagger the impending crisis. By citing instances from the life of Kopenowa and Gandhi, Ghosh appeals to us to overcome the “divine angel of discontent” (174–175). As the world is becoming weary of climate-induced migration, powerful nations are turning into “war boats” (165) to stop those immigrants to get onto their nations. Under these circumstances, the future seems bleaker as small island nations and countries like Bangladesh and Mauritius will be greatly impacted by the rise in seawater levels, eventually forcing people to migrate from those locations to Europe or the USA.

Ghosh has brilliantly linked the history of Anthropocene to the colonising enterprise and immigration, a theme that he has handled in The Gun Island (2019) as well. Ghosh has transfused his book with vitality and his narrative style infuses life into the history of climate change and Anthropocene. The non-human entities become prominent and reactive to human agencies as presented in the different episodes in Nutmeg’s journey. The Nutmeg metaphorically transforms into a traveller and changes the lives and fortunes of the people who come in touch with it. Ghosh has invested his art of storytelling to shape the multi-plotted narrative on the history of Anthropocene.

Responding to Sverker Sorlin’s question “What do the humanities have to do with the environment?” Hubbel and Ryan write, “It demands that people from a range of disciplines listen to one another, participate in a lively dialogue, and contribute to the decision-making process” (2022:3). The response of storytellers and creative writers offers crisis-solving possibilities from humanistic and post-humanistic perspectives. Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis can be considered a redemptive panacea offering possibilities to solve the planetary crisis. Therefore, this book will be of use for students, researchers of environmental humanities, policymakers and general readers who are concerned with climate change.