The Politics of Vitality: Plead for Animism and Protection of Nature in Select Writings of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract: Mankind has wrought havoc on ecological poise in this planet and his avaricious soul has fizzled out to hearken to her voice. Being quite negligent of the perils embedded in his actions, he has rendered nature quite dead. The clear division between nature and culture in modern times has outlived its moral and epistemological efficiency. The so-called sustainable period of Holocene has yielded passage to the dreaded archaeological era called the Anthropocene.  So to sustain life upon this planet a radical re-examination of the relation between the human and the non-humans has been the need of the hour. In a broader sense, two distinct thoughts are there to usher sustainability of nature- the Westernized view of preservation and the indigenous view of protection of nature.   The latter concept adheres much to the animistic view of the world of nature- a view shared by many of the primitive indigenous people across the globe. Animism is the belief that plants, objects, weather and other natural objects have a living soul and that there is a power that controls and organizes the universe. Like human rights, animism pleads for ecological rights and animal rights. Some writers like Amitava Ghosh, Mamang Dai and some others in the North East of India, writers on Maori tribes in New Zealand have expressed their strong faith in animism for the sustainability of nature. As part of my research in this paper, I am keen on focusing on the literary representation of animistic faith in some of the texts of Amitava Ghosh (The Living Mountain, Gun Island, and The Hungry Tide), and thereby promote across the globe, what Ghosh says, the ‘politics of vitality’ for the protection of nature- a belief that all living beings have a vital force.

Keywords: animism, politics of vitality, primitivism, ecology, sustainability.