‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ review: Listening to nature’s voice
The Hindu
Connecting the dots between imperial practices and climate change, Amitav Ghosh traces the reasons for ecological disasters facing the world and the way ahead
Amitav Ghosh opens The Nutmeg’s Curse with soldiers from the Dutch East India Company unleashing their savagery on the people of the Banda Islands in the 17th century. Bandanese chiefs were mercilessly massacred, and the extermination of the people lasted 18 years, with “not a vestige of their language or peculiar customs” remaining.
Ghosh then moves from Indonesia to the heinous crimes of genocide of Native Americans in North America. His polemic links settler colonialism and its barbaric values to the sustained culture of domination and destruction of the land and people. For over three centuries, Europeans and Native Americans fought a “total war” in which “races, cultures, worldviews and ecosystems were pitted against each other”. In 1550, Charles V of Spain held a conference at Valladolid to resolve whether Amerindians had souls, but the question remained unsettled.
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When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.
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