Thammasat University students interested in literature, India, environmental science, ecology, climate change, sustainable development, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free Free 4 November Zoom webinar of the Indian author Amitav Ghosh speaking on The Nutmeg’s Curse: Non-human Voices and More-than-human Stories.
The event, on Wednesday, 4 November 2026 at noon Bangkok time, is organized by Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Students are invited to register for the event at this link.
The TU Library collection includes books by and about Amitav Ghosh.
The event announcement explains:
Abstract
Are humans the only beings that are endowed with the ability to communicate and make meaning?
For a long time it was assumed that this was axiomatically true.
But one effect of our increasingly climate-disrupted world is that it has made us aware that our minds and bodies are deeply intertwined with many other organisms, entities and forces.
As we look back now on the historical trajectory that has brought us to the point of a planetary catastrophe, we cannot but recognize that our plight is in large part a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans have actively muted all other beings by representing them as brutes, creatures whose presence on earth is solely material.
This lecture examines some of these entanglements through the story of the nutmeg tree.
Program
Lecturer
Amitav GHOSH (Writer)
Moderator
Trent BROWN (Associate Professor, Tokyo College)
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-American writer.
Ghosh’s novels examine the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia.
He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
Dr. Ghosh lectures at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University, Rhode Island, the United States of America, and is an invited professor at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo.
Earlier this year, he informed an interviewer:
I honestly cannot say whether fiction is uniquely capable of conveying the urgency of the planetary crisis or not.
However, I happen to be a writer of fiction so certainly for me this is the only way that I can contend with the various intersecting crises that now be set the planet.
But I would like to stress that for me this is not some kind of program as such.
I have always thought of myself as a writer who tries to write about the realities of the world and these crises are now the most evident and obvious aspect of that reality […]
I do believe that no single system of knowledge has a monopoly on truth.
There are many systems of knowledge and they all have their strengths and limitations.
Mechanistic approaches to knowledge can tell us about many aspects of the world, yet at the same time that approach like others, has its limitations.
What is important, in my view, is to try and put these various approaches to knowledge into conversation with each other […]
The Calcutta of the 1970s and ’80s was very different from the Kolkata of today. It was a city in turmoil, where strikes, morchas and bandhs were commonplace, and there were long spells of load shedding pretty much on a daily basis.
It was a city where the aftershocks of Partition could still be felt, most noticeably in the flow of refugees, not only from Eastern Bengal but also from Burma and many other places.
But at the same time it was also the city of Satyajit Ray and many other great filmmakers, artists and writers.
Today’s Kolkata is very different in some ways, although the city still retains many aspects of the past.
Brooklyn too has changed very much over the three decades that I have lived there.
When I first moved there in 1998, there were very few skyscrapers or even tall buildings.
Now when I look out of the window I can hardly recognize the cityscape in front of me.
There are dozens of skyscrapers and it looks no different from midtown Manhattan.
Yet Brooklyn too retains its distinctiveness […]
Our principal responsibility is to be true to the changing realities around us. It is to tell the stories of the world that is coming into being in all its terror and its strangeness.
He explained to another journalist the significant of nutmeg in his writing:
Well, I think the nutmeg’s history encapsulates the history of the planet in some bizarre way—the modern history of the nutmeg.
Because really, the nutmeg was a gift of volcanic earth.
It was a gift of incredible forests, of Maluku.
And in the end, for more than a millennium, it made the people of this tiny archipelago, the Banda Islands, rich and prosperous, and they had good lives.
They were rich.
They were great traders.
They were trading across the oceans.
But in the end, it brought doom upon them.
All that prosperity and wealth was really a kind of mirage, because ultimately those people were just massacred by the Dutch colonialists.
It was one of the first early modern genocides. So the people of the Banda Islands became among the earliest victims of what you might call the resource curse.
And in a sense, that’s exactly the curse that’s fallen upon the entire planet, and it’s come about now because we’ve treated the planet as a sort of inert repository of resources for a very long time.
But the planet is striking back, you might say, almost vindictively at us […]
Yes, I think that’s one of the myths of modernity.
You always hear people talking about how human beings have become independent of the Earth and so on, but in fact, it’s just a complete myth, because after all, fossil fuels are things of the Earth.
And we are completely dependent on fossil fuels today.
I mean, I’m just looking around this studio.
Every single thing in this studio runs on fossil fuel energy.
Today it’s not just our lighting or even the cars.
Even our food comes from fossil fuels.
You know, essentially, all these fertilizers, what are they?
Huge amounts of fossil fuels.
And you look around at—all around you—which is the most common material in this room?
It’s probably some kind of plastic.
Again, from fossil fuels.
So in a way, our lives have become so intertwined with these fossil fuels that we’ve stopped even noticing the degree to which we are dependent on these things […]
In Asia, Africa, I would say Latin America also, climate change is not seen in the way that it’s seen in the West.
In the West, climate change is conceived of as a technocratic thing, a technological thing, a sort of techno-scientific thing.
So when you get these COP meetings, who are the people who are there?
They’re basically a lot of technocrats, bureaucrats, economists, and now increasingly also billionaires of various kinds, big corporations, and so on.
If you go anywhere in Africa or Asia and speak to ordinary people and say, “What is climate change all about?” they’ll say it’s all about keeping us poor.
It’s all about the great disparity that’s occurred in the world during the period of colonialism.
So what I’m saying is actually just the common sense that prevails outside the West […]
