Rooted in Ruin: Colonial Histories and Ecological Resistance in Ghosh's Select Work

Abstract

This paper analyzes the environmental aspects of colonialism as illustrated in Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse and Smoke and Ashes. Ghosh's narrative lens traces the historical continuities between imperial extraction and the climate crises of today. He suggests that something in colonial domination was not simply or only political or economic. It was an event that shaped the ecology and changed Nature. Using ideas by Kishan Khoday (189–211) and D'Almeida & Ramachandran (312–319), the chapter examines how colonial logics of extracting resources, changing environments, and suppressing knowledge were revived in contemporary neoliberal development and technocratic governance. Ghosh highlights the impact of the empire on environmental collapse, theorizing ecological injustice as historically embedded, which lived on into the Anthropocene. The author's writings bring the consciousness of indigenous people and postcolonial critique to the fore. He has also challenged the Europe-centric paradigm. Further, the author has called for epistemic and ecological reparations. To decolonize the environment, we must recognize and dismantle the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. We can think of literature as a site of ecological resistance that recovers erased histories, reimagines human–nature relations, and conjoins justice and memory to offer decolonial futures.