{"id":20094006,"date":"2022-07-04T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thethirdpole.net\/?post_type=opinion&p=94006"},"modified":"2024-04-12T12:01:09","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T12:01:09","slug":"review-amitav-ghosh-the-living-mountain","status":"publish","type":"opinion","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/nature\/review-amitav-ghosh-the-living-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Amitav Ghosh fable pushes us to re-examine received wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Amitav Ghosh\u2019s latest book, The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times<\/em>, defies easy reactions. A review is supposed to describe what a book is trying to achieve, outline how the author has tried to do so and assess whether they have succeeded. But a slim volume of 35 pages cannot be treated in the same manner as a longer work, and a fable \u2013 by definition \u2013 has little to do with things like character development, or showing the decisions of normal people in extraordinary circumstances, as a novel would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to say that the book is light or superficial. Humanity has contemplated parables and koans for thousands of years. Their brevity adds to, rather than subtracts from, their power. Similarly, Ghosh\u2019s short tale, a story of a dream, draws power from its elegant simplicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond a simple retelling of colonialism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The story at the core of The Living Mountain<\/em> is of warring tribes living around a sacred, unscaled mountain, who are forced to become the servants of foreigners \u2013 the \u2018Anthropoi\u2019, who wish to climb and mine the mountain. With the support of the tribes, the conquering foreigners start up the slopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/div>
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In time, as the Antropoi climb, some among the conquered tribes start to conquer and achieve domination over their own. Ghosh describes how \u201cA great orgy of bloodletting filled our Valley, bringing slaughter and destruction on a scale far beyond that which the Anthropoi had inflicted on us in the past.\u201d Then the conquerors among the formerly conquered also climb the mountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As they do so, the mountain becomes destabilised. Ruin flows down in landslides. With every step upward, disaster comes closer, but neither the tribes nor Anthropoi can or want to head back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could see Ghosh\u2019s tale as a simple retelling of the history of colonisation and extractive industrialisation, the twin themes that he has explored at least since the publication of The Hungry Tide<\/em> in 2004. But it is a telling with no easy moral lessons. Nobody is spared \u2013 not the colonisers or the formerly colonised; not even the scientists among the Anthropoi counselling \u201csustainable development\u201d. A race to the top of the mountain while the world crumbles beneath our feet is what they have all condemned us to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The looming Himalayas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Like most widely applicable fables, The Living Mountain<\/em> is not set in a clearly recognisable place, but there are clues to the deep Himalayan nature of the piece. One is in its alternative Hindi title \u201cMahaparbat\u201d, meaning Great Mountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other is more subtle. While mountains have been considered sacred sites by many civilisations, the Himalayas hold a special place. Mount Kailash on the Tibetan Plateau, for example, is considered sacred in the Bon, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ban on scaling the mountain that is central to Ghosh\u2019s story echoes Bhutanese prohibitions today. The country, which has some of the highest peaks in the world, banned mountaineering<\/a> at over 6,000 metres in 1994, and then all mountaineering in 2003. The wisdom of this ban seems to have been borne out by the increasing dangers, brawls, ill-will and trash<\/a> that have sullied the commercial summits of Mount Everest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Recommended<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/a>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Recommended<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Another geographic marker of this fable is the declining role of women as decision-makers as new modes of \u2018development\u2019 take hold, leading to environmental degradation. A 2010 publication<\/a> by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, \u201cGender Perspectives in Mountain Development\u201d, noted that in the Himalayas, \u201cdespite receiving much smaller and more degraded forests, all-women groups outperform other groups and show better forest regeneration and improvement in canopy cover\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ghosh taps into powerful zeitgeist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, The Living Mountain<\/em> is hardly parochial in its vision. One of its interesting elements is how closely it links to similar cultural themes emerging from other parts of the world. Ghosh is famously well read, and might have \u2013 at least in passing \u2013 become familiar with the lyrics of a 2005 song by the alternative rock band Gorillaz, \u201cFire Coming Out of the Monkey\u2019s Head\u201d. In this the \u201cHappyfolk\u201d live in peace and harmony at the foot of a mountain named Monkey, until the arrival of the \u201cStangefolk\u201d and their mining of the mountain bring instability and destruction to the people and the wider world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the song, Ghosh\u2019s fable leaves us with a clear view of our chosen doom. Neither provide easy answers. What they do, though, is push us to re-examine received wisdom; to question whether wisdom can even be drawn from those who have brought us to where we are, or whether we need to learn to listen, once again, to old tales we have long dismissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What both works show us is that a powerful part of the global cultural zeitgeist revolves around environmental concerns. In these stories, great mountains stand in the centre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor\u2019s note: This is an expanded version of the review that ran in the 4 July edition of India Today.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In ‘The Living Mountain’, Amitav Ghosh draws a sharply etched story of humanity hurtling towards environmental apocalypse in its ill-advised efforts to scale forbidden peaks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":20094007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[764],"tags":[516,20000022],"country":[],"class_list":["post-20094006","opinion","type-opinion","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","tag-civil-society","tag-himalayas"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview: Amitav Ghosh fable 'The Living Mountain' | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 'The Living Mountain', Amitav Ghosh draws a sharply etched story of ill-advised efforts to scale sacred peaks leading to environmental apocalypse\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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