The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  I was then studying for an MA at Delhi University while also working as a part-time journalist. When the hailstorm broke, I was in a library. I had planned to stay late, but the unseasonal weather led to a change of mind and I decided to leave. I was on my way back to my room when, on an impulse, I changed direction and dropped in on a friend. But the weather continued to worsen as we were chatting, so after a few minutes I decided to head straight back by a route that I rarely had occasion to take.

  I had just passed a busy intersection called Maurice Nagar when I heard a rumbling sound somewhere above. Glancing over my shoulder I saw a gray, tube-like extrusion forming on the underside of a dark cloud: it grew rapidly as I watched, and then all of a sudden it turned and came whiplashing down to earth, heading in my direction.

  Across the street lay a large administrative building. I sprinted over and headed toward what seemed to be an entrance. But the glass-fronted doors were shut, and a small crowd stood huddled outside, in the shelter of an overhang. There was no room for me there so I ran around to the front of the building. Spotting a small balcony, I jumped over the parapet and crouched on the floor.

  The noise quickly rose to a frenzied pitch, and the wind began to tug fiercely at my clothes. Stealing a glance over the parapet, I saw, to my astonishment, that my surroundings had been darkened by a churning cloud of dust. In the dim glow that was shining down from above, I saw an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past—bicycles, scooters, lampposts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls. In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power.

  I buried my head in my arms and lay still. Moments later the noise died down and was replaced by an eerie silence. When at last I climbed out of the balcony, I was confronted by a scene of devastation such as I had never before beheld. Buses lay overturned, scooters sat perched on treetops, walls had been ripped out of buildings, exposing interiors in which ceiling fans had been twisted into tulip-like spirals. The place where I had first thought to take shelter, the glass-fronted doorway, had been reduced to a jumble of jagged debris. The panes had shattered, and many people had been wounded by the shards. I realized that I too would have been among the injured had I remained there. I walked away in a daze.

  Long afterward, I am not sure exactly when or where, I hunted down the Times of India’s New Delhi edition of March 18. I still have the photocopies I made of it.

  “30 Dead,” says the banner headline, “700 Hurt As Cyclone Hits North Delhi.”

  Here are some excerpts from the accompanying report: “Delhi, March 17: At least 30 people were killed and 700 injured, many of them seriously, this evening when a freak funnel-shaped whirlwind, accompanied by rain, left in its wake death and devastation in Maurice Nagar, a part of Kingsway Camp, Roshanara Road and Kamla Nagar in the Capital. The injured were admitted to different hospitals in the Capital.

  “The whirlwind followed almost a straight line. . . . Some eyewitnesses said the wind hit the Yamuna river and raised waves as high as 20 or 30 feet. . . . The Maurice Nagar road . . . presented a stark sight. It was littered with fallen poles . . . trees, branches, wires, bricks from the boundary walls of various institutions, tin roofs of staff quarters and dhabas and scores of scooters, buses and some cars. Not a tree was left standing on either side of the road.”

  The report quotes a witness: “I saw my own scooter, which I had abandoned on the road, during those terrifying moments, being carried away in the wind like a kite. We saw all this happening around but were dumbfounded. We saw people dying . . . but were unable to help them. The two tea-stalls at the Maurice Nagar corner were blown out of existence. At least 12 to 15 persons must have been buried under the debris at this spot. When the hellish fury had abated in just four minutes, we saw death and devastation around.”

  The vocabulary of the report is evidence of how unprecedented this disaster was. So unfamiliar was this phenomenon that the papers literally did not know what to call it: at a loss for words they resorted to “cyclone” and “funnel-shaped whirlwind.”

  Not till the next day was the right word found. The headlines of March 19 read, “A Very, Very Rare Phenomenon, Says Met Office”: “It was a tornado that hit northern parts of the Capital yesterday—the first of its kind. . . . According to the Indian Meteorological Department, the tornado was about 50 metres wide and covered a distance of about five k.m. in the space of two or three minutes.”

  This was, in effect, the first tornado to hit Delhi—and indeed the entire region—in recorded meteorological history. And somehow I, who almost never took that road, who rarely visited that part of the university, had found myself in its path.

  Only much later did I realize that the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld. And in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger that I had been in and the destruction that I had witnessed; something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life.

  6.

  As is often the case with people who are waylaid by unpredictable events, for years afterward my mind kept returning to my encounter with the tornado. Why had I walked down a road that I almost never took, just before it was struck by a phenomenon that was without historical precedent? To think of it in terms of chance and coincidence seemed only to impoverish the experience: it was like trying to understand a poem by counting the words. I found myself reaching instead for the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning—for the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the confounding. Yet these too did not do justice to my memory of the event.

  Novelists inevitably mine their own experience when they write. Unusual events being necessarily limited in number, it is but natural that these should be excavated over and again, in the hope of discovering a yet undiscovered vein.

  No less than any other writer have I dug into my own past while writing fiction. By rights then, my encounter with the tornado should have been a mother lode, a gift to be mined to the last little nugget.

  It is certainly true that storms, floods, and unusual weather events do recur in my books, and this may well be a legacy of the tornado. Yet oddly enough, no tornado has ever figured in my novels. Nor is this due to any lack of effort on my part. Indeed, the reason I still possess those cuttings from the Times of India is that I have returned to them often over the years, hoping to put them to use in a novel, but only to meet with failure at every attempt.

  On the face of it there is no reason why such an event should be difficult to translate into fiction; after all, many novels are filled with strange happenings. Why then did I fail, despite my best efforts, to send a character down a road that is imminently to be struck by a tornado?

  In reflecting on this, I find myself asking, What would I make of such a scene were I to come across it in a novel written by someone else? I suspect that my response would be one of incredulity; I would be inclined to think that the scene was a contrivance of last resort. Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability?

  Improbability is the key word here, so we have to ask, What does the word mean?

  Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability. But what does probability—a mathematical idea—have to do with fiction?

  The answer is: Everything. For, as Ian Hacking, a prominent historian of the concept, puts it, probability is a “manner of conceiving the world constituted without our being aware of it.”

  Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment
of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives like those of The Arabian Nights, The Journey to the West, and The Decameron proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another. This, after all, is how storytelling must necessarily proceed, inasmuch as it is a recounting of “what happened”—for such an inquiry can arise only in relation to something out of the ordinary, which is but another way of saying “exceptional” or “unlikely.” In essence, narrative proceeds by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different: these are, of course, nothing other than instances of exception.

  Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls “fillers.” According to Moretti, “fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the ‘narrativity’ of life under control—to give a regularity, a ‘style’ to existence.” It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative.”

  It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background . . . while the everyday moves into the foreground.”

  Thus was the novel midwifed into existence around the world, through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday. The process can be observed with exceptional clarity in the work of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a nineteenth-century Bengali writer and critic who self-consciously adopted the project of carving out a space in which realist European-style fiction could be written in the vernacular languages of India. Chatterjee’s enterprise, undertaken in a context that was far removed from the metropolitan mainstream, is one of those instances in which a circumstance of exception reveals the true life of a regime of thought and practice.

  Chatterjee was, in effect, seeking to supersede many old and very powerful forms of fiction, ranging from the ancient Indian epics to Buddhist Jataka stories and the immensely fecund Islamicate tradition of Urdu dastaans. Over time, these narrative forms had accumulated great weight and authority, extending far beyond the Indian subcontinent: his attempt to claim territory for a new kind of fiction was thus, in its own way, a heroic endeavor. That is why Chatterjee’s explorations are of particular interest: his charting of this new territory puts the contrasts between the Western novel and other, older forms of narrative in ever-sharper relief.

  In a long essay on Bengali literature, written in 1871, Chatterjee launched a frontal assault on writers who modeled their work on traditional forms of storytelling: his attack on this so-called Sanskrit school was focused precisely on the notion of “mere narrative.” What he advocated instead was a style of writing that would accord primacy to “sketches of character and pictures of Bengali life.”

  What this meant, in practice, is very well illustrated by Chatterjee’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, which was written in English in the early 1860s. Here is a passage: “The house of Mathur Ghose was a genuine specimen of mofussil [provincial] magnificence united with a mofussil want of cleanliness. . . . From the far-off paddy fields you could descry through the intervening foliage, its high palisades and blackened walls. On a nearer view might be seen pieces of plaster of a venerable antiquity prepared to bid farewell to their old and weather-beaten tenement.”

  Compare this with the following lines from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: “We leave the high road . . . whence the valley is seen. . . . The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields.”

  In both these passages, the reader is led into a “scene” through the eye and what it beholds: we are invited to “descry,” to “view,” to “see.” In relation to other forms of narrative, this is indeed something new: instead of being told about what happened we learn about what was observed. Chatterjee has, in a sense, gone straight to the heart of the realist novel’s “mimetic ambition”: detailed descriptions of everyday life (or “fillers”) are therefore central to his experiment with this new form.

  Why should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is “‘Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a ‘calm passion’ . . . they are part of what Weber called the ‘rationalization’ of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings. . . . Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.”

  This regime of thought imposed itself not only on the arts but also on the sciences. That is why Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant study of the geological theories of gradualism and catastrophism is, in essence, a study of narrative. In Gould’s telling of the story, the catastrophist recounting of the earth’s history is exemplified by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690) in which the narrative turns on events of “unrepeatable uniqueness.” As opposed to this, the gradualist approach, championed by James Hutton (1726–97) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), privileges slow processes that unfold over time at even, predictable rates. The central credo in this doctrine was “nothing could change otherwise than the way things were seen to change in the present.” Or, to put it simply: “Nature does not make leaps.”

  The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time, some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in the form of the Chicxulub asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is indisputable, in any event, that catastrophes waylay both the earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways.

  Which, then, has primacy in the real world, predictable processes or unlikely events? Gould’s response is “the only possible answer can be ‘both and neither.’” Or, as the National Research Council of the United States puts it: “It is not known whether the relocation of materials on the surface of the Earth is dominated by the slower but continuous fluxes operating all the time or by the spectacular large fluxes that operate during short-lived cataclysmic events.”

  It was not until quite recently that geology reached this agnostic consensus. Through much of the era when geology—and also the modern novel—were coming of age, the gradualist (or “uniformitarian”) view held absolute sway and catastrophism was exiled to the margins. Gradualists consolidated their victory by using one of modernity’s most effective weapons: its insistence that it has rendered other forms of knowledge obsolete. So, as Gould so beautifully demonstrates, Lyell triumphed over his adversaries by accusing them of being primitive: “In an early stage of advancement, when a great number of natural appearances are unintelligible, an eclipse, an earthquake, a flood, or the approach of a comet, with many other occurrences afterwards found to belong to the regular course of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and supernatural agents.”

  This is exactly the rhetoric that Chatterjee uses in attacking the “Sanskrit school”: he accuses those writers of depending on conventional modes of expression and fantastical forms of causality. “If love is to be the theme, Madana is invariably put into requisition with his five f
lower-tipped arrows; and the tyrannical king of Spring never fails to come to fight in his cause, with his army of bees, and soft breezes, and other ancient accompaniments. Are the pangs of separation to be sung? The moon is immediately cursed and anathematized, as scorching the poor victim with her cold beams.”

  Flaubert sounds a strikingly similar note in satirizing the narrative style that entrances the young Emma Rouault: in the novels that were smuggled into her convent, it was “all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves.” All of this is utterly foreign to the orderly bourgeois world that Emma Bovary is consigned to; such fantastical stuff belongs in the “dithyrambic lands” that she longs to inhabit.

  In a striking summation of her tastes in narrative, Emma declares, “I . . . adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in Nature.”

  “Commonplace”? “Moderate”? How did Nature ever come to be associated with words like these?

  The incredulity that these associations evoke today is a sign of the degree to which the Anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene. From the reversed perspective of our time, the complacency and confidence of the emergent bourgeois order appears as yet another of those uncanny instances in which the planet seems to have been toying with humanity, by allowing it to assume that it was free to shape its own destiny.