School of Distance Education

Part 1 of 
The Great Derangement
deals with 
stories. By examining the conventions of science 
fiction, its obsession with futurity, Ghosh tries to 
determine the genre’s fitfulness to address the specter of 
the Anthropocene. He investigates how our story telling 
experience is incapable of perceiving a threat like this. 
Grappling climate change is not an easy task. Modernist 
predispositions toward realism and individualism make 
addressing climate change in the novel much more 
difficult. The realist tradition generally eschews the sort 
of dramatic, large-scale events that define climate 
change, such as weather-related disasters. When one 
encounters such an event in a novel, it often reads as 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
41 
implausible, despite the fact that such disasters are 
becoming more common year by year. Individualism 
involves a focus on the individual person and their 
character development over collectivism—there is no 
broad concern about the issues facing humankind as a 
whole. Climate change is one such issue. Ghosh also 
believes that people have a difficult time grasping the 
idea of nonhuman consciousnesses. He writes of the 
Sundarbans, a forested area in the Bay of Bengal 
populated by tigers. The residents there are particularly 
attuned to nonhuman consciousnesses because they are 
constantly scanning their environment for the presence 
of predators. He goes on to say how India and the 
surrounding countries are extremely vulnerable, Mumbai 
especially. The city is located on the water and has a 
population of 19-20 million residents. In 2005, Mumbai 
was struck by a major rainstorm that resulted in 
substantial flooding and the deaths of over 500 people. 
After this incident, city officials did not craft a 
contingency plan for the city's evacuation, should 
disaster strike again. Ghosh believes this is because such 
a plan would have caused property values on the coast to 
decline. In other words, ordinary people and government 
leaders alike turn a blind eye to climate change and its 
potential repercussions.
Ghosh begins the first part by talking about his 
ancestors who were ‘ecological refugees'. They were 
from what is now known as Bangladesh, near Padma 
river. In 1850s the river changed its course drowning the 
whole village And they began to move Westward. He 
remembers

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
42 
about the event that changed the course of the 
lives of his ancestors, an elemental force that untethered 
humans.
‘They awoke to the recognition of a presence', 
says Ghosh,’ that had molded their lives’. Regarding 
literary fiction change of climate doesn’t seem to affect 
that much. Even if one could seriously meditate upon 
using climate change as a relevant topic to his/ her 
fiction, literary journals might not take it seriously. 
Potentially life challenging threats are cast away into the 
oblivion. It is also a striking fact that novelists who 
choose to write about climate change, wont pick fiction 
as their genre.
Ghosh points out to Arundhati Roy as an 
example.
Ghosh then moves on to Dipesh Chakraborthy 
who wrote ‘The Climate of History'. He is of the opinion 
that historians may have to correct certain assumptions 
in this era of Anthropocene. It presents a challenge not 
only to arts and humanities, But to contemporary culture 
too. culture is widely related Histories of imperialism 
and capitalism that shaped the world. Throughout history 
these branches of culture have responded to war, 
ecological catastrophes, and to several crises. Fiction has 
always been a vehicle for presenting the atrocities to the 
world. Ghosh wonders what us it about climate change 
that writers find not suitable for fiction. 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
43