Laudatio
On the 27th of August 2024, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, speaking from Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, issued what he called a “global SOS”. Evoking how rising sea levels are threatening not only the island country where he was speaking, but also many other vulnerable areas, he called on world leaders to reduce global emissions, to phase out fossil fuels and to boost climate adaptation investments.
The dire consequences of human-induced climate change and the grave inequalities with which these consequences manifest themselves in different regions of the world are among the biggest and most difficult problems facing humanity today. One could even say that all other problems in the world – as great as they may be for the people directly involved – are smaller than this. It is to be ardently hoped, therefore, that an SOS message from the leader of the most important international organization of states would lead to decisive action.
But the ugly truth is that something like a “global SOS” has no clearly defined recipient, no single responsible body or authority that is willing and able to respond and to act upon it. Some pessimists even doubt the systemic ability of democracies and international institutions to deal with the global complexity of climate change, especially in a world dominated by a capitalist, post-colonial order and destabilized by geopolitical tensions and armed conflicts.
It is in this turbulent, yet stagnant, atmosphere of climate change and climate injustice that the voice of the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh rings out clearly and distinctly. His work itself has the urgent quality of an SOS signal that spreads around the globe, in the many countries where his books are read and translated. He even excavated one of the warning signals of a far predecessor of Guterres, the Burmese UN Secretary-General U Thant, who more than half a century ago, in 1971, already warned: “As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: ‘With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas.’”
Still, it would be very unfair to reduce the work of Amitav Ghosh to conveying just a warning message. His more than twenty books are a highly individual blend of backgrounds, genres and techniques, in which imaginative splendour and grim realism are seamlessly fused.
For his well-documented novels, he reaches back to history, especially colonial history. In his Ibis trilogy, set against the historical canvas of the first Opium War in the nineteenth century, he shows how not only native inhabitants, but also nature and landscapes suffered from usurpation by occupying and rapacious powers. On the other hand, in his journalistic and essayistic works, Mr. Ghosh makes use of novelistic, narrative techniques so that, without swerving from the truth, the facts and histories that he unearths tell rich and convincing tales.
Half a dozen universities around the world have granted Amitav Ghosh honorary doctorates, and in many ways he himself has acquired throughout the years the versatility of a one-man university. As a novelist and an essayist, he is also a social, economic and political scientist, a cultural and natural historian, an anthropologist, a researcher in the fields of colonialism, genocide and ecocide. He is a teacher, a public speaker, but he is also an activist, a conscientious objector, a critic of established untruths and historical injustices. Especially, but not exclusively, for Dutch readers, his 2021 book The Nutmeg’s Curse about the very cruel history of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, on the Banda Islands was a painful confrontation, precisely because of its rigorous research, its moral passion and its narrative power. Rarely has the innermost force of what the Dutch sometimes used to call “the VOC mentality” been exposed in such a raw and unsparing way, and in such crystal-clear prose. This work also exposes how entities that lack language, like trees or volcanoes, have become muted in modern histories, but are very vivid and even living characters in old oral traditions.
In his book-length essay The Great Derangement from 2016, perhaps Mr. Ghosh’s most programmatic book, the author synthesizes his position as a fiction writer confronted with an unmanageable reality, and he tries to answer some of the most impossible questions that the subject has to offer. In doing so, he reframes the climate crisis as a crisis of culture too. He traces how much of current literature, just like the politics of modernity, with its emphasis on individual experience, is not equipped to tackle the unfathomable nature and scale of climate change. He lucidly traces how the unequal distribution of power, through capitalism and empire, may very well be one of the biggest impediments to confront and combat climate change. In doing so, he traces ways in which humanity can break through the all-encompassing political stagnation around climate change. And he calls upon his fellow writers to help imagine alternatives and confront the uncanny character of climate change head-on. He thus asks, dissects, and explores very urgent and universal matters, which have rarely been addressed in such a luminous, honest and personal way.
Amitav Ghosh has transformed the utter powerlessness of the individual, faced with the superhuman threat of climate change, into an appealing and convincing form of moral and intellectual leadership. Using a rich range of academic and literary techniques, he has imagined the unthinkable. He has shaped himself into an exemplary spokesman both for the past and for our own time, both for humans and for nature, both for his readers and for the people whose voices are usually insufficiently taken into account, both for the leaders and world citizens of today and for those of tomorrow.
Dear Amitav Ghosh, in light of these remarkable achievements, and in the hope that your writing and especially your imagination will continue to be an inspiring call to action for many people in the years to come, it gives me great pleasure to convey to you, on behalf of the Board of the Erasmus Prize Foundation, our warmest congratulations on being awarded the 2024 Erasmus Prize.
