YOGA FOR THE MIND

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is essential reading for those who have any hope for the future

- MANDIRA NAYAR

The origin of climate change began with a spice in your kitchen cupboard. Amitav Ghosh, the writer of wonderful, gentle, sweeping epics with the power to transport readers across centuries, has chosen to use an everyday ingredient, an essential in your garam masala—an addition to every dish—nutmeg—to link climate change to colonialism.

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables For a Planet in Crisis comes with a generous sprinkle of Ghosh’s ability to conjure up events in the past and connect them with the present. The race for spices—Ghosh writes about nutmeg, a spice believed to have the power to cure plague victims—in Europe planted the flag of colonialism. Built on violence, colonialism erased people’s language, ancient ways of living, changed history, and also changed the way the earth is viewed. “Indeed, ‘subdue’ was a key word in these conquests, recurring again and again in reference to not just human beings, but also the terrain,’’ writes Ghosh. From this processes of subduing and muting, the land—to make it profitable—was born the idea of ‘nature’ as an inert entity, a concept that would in time become the basic tenet of what might be called ‘official modernity’.”