Climate Change and Environmental Anxiety

Abstract

The intersection of climate crisis and literary imagination has produced one of the most urgent scholarly conversations of our era. This paper examines the way ecological disruption and environmental fear are articulated throughout the fiction and non-fiction prose of Amitav Ghosh, whose career-long engagement with the natural world sets him apart within the landscape of contemporary Indian writing in English. Anchored in the theoretical terrain of postcolonial ecocriticism, the study moves across Ghosh's major texts — from the tidal wilderness of The Hungry Tide (2004) through the colonial spice routes of the Ibis Trilogy (2008–2015) to the polemical arguments of The Great Derangement (2016) and the more recent fictions Gun Island (2019) and The Nutmeg's Curse (2021). Three interlocking claims organise the analysis. First, that Ghosh situates the ecological wounds of the present within the longer arc of colonial extraction, demonstrating that environmental crisis is never politically innocent. Second, that his narratives embed environmental anxiety in specific, deeply rendered landscapes — most memorably the mangrove archipelago of the Sundarbans — whose vulnerability becomes a measure of planetary fragility. Third, that his theoretical writing diagnoses a collective failure of cultural imagination, arguing that the conventions of the realist novel are structurally unsuited to representing the scale and strangeness of climate change. Through engagement with the frameworks of Rob Nixon, Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, and Timothy Morton, this study demonstrates that Ghosh's body of work constitutes a decisive contribution both to Indian English literature and to the wider field of environmental humanities.