by Amitav Ghosh
But the environmental uncanny is not the same as the uncanniness of the supernatural: it is different precisely because it pertains to nonhuman forces and beings. The ghosts of literary fiction are not human either, of course, but they are certainly represented as projections of humans who were once alive. But animals like the Sundarbans tiger, and freakish weather events like the Delhi tornado, have no human referents at all.
There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change, one that did not figure in my experience of the Delhi tornado. This is that the freakish weather events of today, despite their radically nonhuman nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human actions. In that sense, the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past—this is because we have all contributed in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms.
All of this makes climate change events peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to “Nature”: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein. Indeed, in that these events are not entirely of Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of “Nature writing” or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman.
More than a quarter century has passed since Bill McKibben wrote, “We live in a post-natural world.” But did “Nature” in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that nonhuman agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.
9.
In the final part of my novel The Hungry Tide, there is a scene in which a cyclone sends a gigantic storm surge into the Sundarbans. The wave results in the death of one of the principal characters, who gives his life protecting another.
This scene was extraordinarily difficult to write. In preparation for it, I combed through a great deal of material on catastrophic waves—storm surges as well as tsunamis. In the process, as often happens in writing fiction, the plight of the book’s characters, as they faced the wave, became frighteningly real.
The Hungry Tide was published in the summer of 2004. A few months after the publication, on the night of December 25, I was back in my family home in Kolkata. The next morning, on logging on to the web, I learned that a cataclysmic tsunami had been set off by a massive undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the quake’s epicenter lay between the northernmost tip of Sumatra and the southernmost island in the Andaman and Nicobar chain. Although the full extent of the catastrophe was not yet known, it was already clear that the toll in human lives would be immense.
The news had a deeply unsettling effect on me: the images that had been implanted in my mind by the writing of The Hungry Tide merged with live television footage of the tsunami in a way that was almost overwhelming. I became frantic; I could not focus on anything.
A couple of days later, I wrote to a newspaper and obtained a commission to write about the impact of the tsunami on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. My first stop was the islands’ capital city, Port Blair, which was thronged with refugees but had not suffered much damage itself: its location, above a sheltered cove, had protected it. After spending a few days there, I was able to board an Indian Air Force plane that was carrying supplies to one of the worst affected of the Nicobar Islands.
Unlike the Andamans, which rise steeply from the sea, the Nicobars are low-lying islands. Being situated close to the quake’s epicenter, they had been very badly hit; many settlements had been razed. I visited a shoreside town called Malacca that had been reduced literally to its foundations: of the houses only the floors were left, and here and there the stump of a wall. It was as though the place had been hit by a bomb that was designed specifically to destroy all things human—for one of the strangest aspects of the scene was that the island’s coconut palms were largely unaffected; they stood serenely amid the rubble, their fronds waving gently in the breeze that was blowing in from the sparkling, sun-drenched sea.
I wrote in my notebook: “The damage was limited to a half-mile radius along the shore. In the island’s interior everything is tranquil, peaceful—indeed astonishingly beautiful. There are patches of tall, dark primary forest, beautiful padauk trees, and among these, in little clearings, huts built on stilts. . . . One of the ironies of the situation is that the most upwardly mobile people on the island were living at its edges.”
Such was the pattern of settlement here that the indigenous islanders lived mainly in the interior: they were largely unaffected by the tsunami. Those who had settled along the seashore, on the other hand, were mainly people from the mainland, many of whom were educated and middle class: in settling where they had, they had silently expressed their belief that highly improbable events belong not in the real world but in fantasy. In other words, even here, in a place about as far removed as possible from the metropolitan centers that have shaped middle-class lifestyles, the pattern of settlement had come to reflect the uniformitarian expectations that are rooted in the “regularity of bourgeois life.”
At the air force base where my plane had landed there was another, even more dramatic, illustration of this. The functional parts of the base—where the planes and machinery were kept—were located to the rear, well away from the water. The living areas, comprised of pretty little two-story houses, were built much closer to the sea, at the edge of a beautiful, palm-fringed beach. As always in military matters, the protocols of rank were strictly observed: the higher the rank of the officers, the closer their houses were to the water and the better the view that they and their families enjoyed.
Such was the design of the base that when the tsunami struck these houses the likelihood of survival was small, and inasmuch as it existed at all, it was in inverse relation to rank: the commander’s house was thus the first to be hit.
The sight of the devastated houses was disturbing for reasons beyond the immediate tragedy of the tsunami and the many lives that had been lost there: the design of the base suggested a complacency that was itself a kind of madness. Nor could the siting of these buildings be attributed to the usual improvisatory muddle of Indian patterns of settlement. The base had to have been designed and built by a government agency; the site had clearly been chosen and approved by hardheaded military men and state appointed engineers. It was as if, in being adopted by the state, the bourgeois belief in the regularity of the world had been carried to the point of derangement.
A special place ought to be reserved in hell, I thought to myself, for planners who build with such reckless disregard for their surroundings.
Not long afterward, while flying into New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, I looked out of the window and spotted Far Rockaway and Long Beach, the thickly populated Long Island neighborhoods that separate the airport from the Atlantic Ocean. Looking down on them from above, it was clear that those long rows of apartment blocks were sitting upon what had once been barrier islands, and that in the event of a major storm surge they would be swamped (as indeed they were when Hurricane Sandy hit the area in 2012). Yet it was clear also that these neighborhoods had not sprung up haphazardly; the sanction of the state was evident in the ordered geometry of their streets.
Only then did it strike me that the location of that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms. To the contrary, they had merely followed the example of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), New York, Singapore, and Hong Kong, all of which are sited directly on the ocean. I understood also that what I had seen in the Nicobars was but a microcosmi
c expression of a pattern of settlement that is now dominant around the world: proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a beachfront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe.
But haven’t people always liked to live by the water?
Not really; through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness. Even when they made their living from the sea, through fishing or trade, they generally did not build large settlements on the water’s edge: the great old port cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Hamburg, are all protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems. The same is true of old Asian ports: Cochin, Surat, Tamluk, Dhaka, Mrauk-U, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Malacca are all cases in point. It is as if, before the early modern era, there had existed a general acceptance that provision had to be made for the unpredictable furies of the ocean—tsunamis, storm surges, and the like.
An element of that caution seems to have lingered even after the age of European global expansion began in the sixteenth century: it was not till the seventeenth century that colonial cities began to rise on seafronts around the world. Mumbai, Chennai, New York, and Charleston were all founded in this period. This would be followed by another, even more confident wave of city building in the nineteenth century, with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong. These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change.
10.
Mumbai and New York, so different in so many ways, have in common that their destinies came to be linked to the British Empire at about the same time: the 1660s.
Although Giovanni da Verrazzano landed on Manhattan in 1524, the earliest European settlements in what is now New York State were built a long way up the Hudson River, in the area around Albany. It was not till 1625 that the Dutch built Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan island; this would later become New Amsterdam and then, when the British first seized the settlement in the 1660s, New York.
The site of today’s Mumbai first came under European rule in 1535 when it was ceded to the Portuguese by the ruler of Gujarat. The site consisted of an estuarine archipelago, with a couple of large hilly islands to the north, close to the mainland, and a cluster of mainly low-lying islands to the south. This being an estuarine region, the relationship between land and water was so porous that the topography of the archipelago varied with the tides and the seasons.
Networks of shrines, villages, forts, harbors, and bazaars had existed on the southern islands for millennia, but they were never the site of an urban center as such, even in the early years of European occupation. The Portuguese built several churches and fortifications on those islands, but their main settlements were located close to the mainland, at Bassein, and on Salsette.
The southern part of the archipelago passed into British control when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1661: the islands were included in her dowry (which also contained a chest of tea: this was the Pandora’s box that introduced the British public to the beverage, thereby setting in motion the vast cycles of trade that would turn nineteenth-century Bombay into the world’s leading opium exporting port). It was only after passing into British hands that the southern islands became the nucleus of a sprawling urban conglomeration. It was then too that a distinct line of separation between land and sea was conjured up through the application of techniques of surveying within a “milieu of colonial power.”
The appeal of the sites of both Mumbai and New York lay partly in their proximity to deepwater harbors and partly in the strategic advantages they presented: as islands, they were both easier to defend and easier to supply from the metropolis. A certain precariousness was thus etched upon them from the start by reason of their colonial origins.
The islands of south Mumbai did not long remain as they were when they were handed over to the British: links between them, in the form of causeways, bridges, embankments, and reclamation projects, began to rise in the eighteenth century. The reshaping of the estuarine landscape proceeded at such a pace that by the 1860s a Marathi chronicler, Govind Narayan, was able to predict with confidence that soon it would “never occur to anybody that Mumbai was an island once.”
Today the part of the city that is located on the former islands to the south of Salsette has a population of about 11.8 million (the population of the Greater Mumbai area is somewhere in the region of 19 to 20 million). This promontory, less than twenty kilometers in length, is the center of many industries, including India’s financial industry; the adjoining port handles more than half of the country’s containerized cargo. This part of Mumbai is also home to many millionaires and billionaires: naturally many of them live along the western edge of the peninsula, which offers the finest views of the Arabian Sea.
Because of the density of its population and the importance of its institutions and industries, Mumbai represents an extraordinary, possibly unique, “concentration of risk.” For this teeming metropolis, this great hub of economic, financial, and cultural activity, sits upon a wedge of cobbled-together land that is totally exposed to the ocean. It takes only a glance at a map to be aware of this: yet it was not till 2012 when Superstorm Sandy barreled into New York on October 29 that I began to think about the dangers of Mumbai’s topography.
My wife and I were actually in Goa at the time, but since New York is also home to us we followed the storm closely, on the web and on TV, watching with mounting apprehension and disbelief as the storm swept over the city, devastating the oceanfront neighborhoods that we had flown over so many times while coming in to land at JFK airport.
As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely: both Mumbai and Goa face the Arabian Sea, which, unlike the Bay of Bengal, has not historically generated a great deal of cyclonic activity. Nor, unlike India’s east coast, has the west coast had to deal with tsunamis: it was unaffected by the tsunami of 2004, for instance, which devastated large stretches of the eastern seaboard.
Still, the question intrigued me and I began to hunt for more information on the region’s seismic and cyclonic profiles. Soon enough I learned that the west coast’s good fortune might be merely a function of the providential protraction of geological time—for the Arabian Sea is by no means seismically inactive. A previously unknown, and probably very active, fault system was discovered in the Owen fracture zone a few years ago, off the coast of Oman; the system is eight hundred kilometers long and faces the west coast of India. This discovery was announced in an article that concludes with these words, chilling in their understatement: “These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean.”
Soon, I also had to rethink my assumptions about cyclones and the Arabian Sea. Reading about Hurricane Sandy, I came upon more and more evidence that climate change may indeed alter patterns of cyclonic activity around the world: Adam Sobel’s Storm Surge, for example, suggests that significant changes may be in the offing. When I began to look for information on the Arabian Sea in particular, I learned that there had been an uptick in cyclonic activity in those waters over the last couple of decades. Between 1998 and 2001, three cyclones had crashed into the Indian subcontinent to the north of Mumbai: they claimed over seventeen thousand lives. Then in 2007, the Arabian Sea generated its strongest ever recorded storm: Cyclone Gonu, a Category 5 hurricane, which hit Oman, Iran, and Pakistan in June that year causing widespread damage.
What do these storms portend? Hoping to find an answer, I reached out to Adam Sobel, who is a professor of atmospheric science at Columbia University. He agreed to an intervie
w, and on a fine October day in 2015, I made my way to his Manhattan apartment. He confirmed to me that the most up-to-date research indicates that the Arabian Sea is one of the regions of the world where cyclonic activity is indeed likely to increase: a 2012 paper by a Japanese research team predicts a 46 percent increase in tropical cyclone frequency in the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century, with a corresponding 31 percent decrease in the Bay of Bengal. It also predicts another change: in the past, cyclones were rare during the monsoon because wind flows in the northern Indian Ocean were not conducive to their formation in that season. Those patterns are now changing in such a way as to make cyclones more likely during and after the monsoons. Another paper, by an American research team, concludes that cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is also likely to intensify because of the cloud of dust and pollution that now hangs over the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding waters: this too is contributing to changes in the region’s wind patterns.
These findings prompted me to ask Adam whether he might be willing to write a short piece assessing the risks that changing climatic patterns pose for Mumbai. He agreed and thus began a very interesting series of exchanges.
A few weeks after our meeting, Adam sent me this message:
I have been doing a little research on Mumbai storm surge risk. There seems to be very little written about it. I have found a number of vague acknowledgments that the risk exists, but nothing that quantifies it.
However, are you aware of the 1882 Mumbai cyclone? I have found only very brief accounts of it so far, but the death toll appears to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, and one source says there was a 6m storm surge, which is enormous, and I presume would account for much if not all of that! This was in one paragraph of a book that seems to be out of print. I haven’t quickly found any more substantive sources online—most are single-line mentions in lists of deadly storms. I wonder if you have ever seen anything more in-depth?