While researching for his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , Amitav Ghosh paid close attention to the way premodern texts are written and designed, specifically how they engage with the natural world. Among other things, the book elaborates upon two points: medieval texts across language and region have a wide-ranging engagement with nature, and a great many of them have a strong visual component to them. The illustrations aren’t static accessories; they are essential to the ‘grammar’ of these texts.
Ghosh’s latest offering embodies both these virtues. Jungle Nama is an illustrated verse retelling of a Sunderban legend of the forest deity, Bon Bibi. The two pre-existing print versions of the story (both from the 19th century) call it Bon Bibi Johuranama or ‘The Narrative of Bon Bibi’s Glory’ ( The Honey Hunter , a 2014 children’s book written by Karthika Nair and illustrated by Joelle Jolivet, gives us a shorter, condensed variation of the legend).
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Shared concerns
Jungle Nama introduces us to Dhona, a cunning merchant who enlists his nephew, Dukhey, in a honey-gathering mission into the Sunderban mangrove forest. Led by greed, he ends up invading the territory of Dokkhin Rai, a “mighty spirit feared by all under the sky” who “preyed on humans in a tiger avatar”. The beautiful, idiosyncratic illustrations of the book subtly drive home the story’s finer points.
Amitav Ghosh
In a telephonic interview, Ghosh describes how premodern texts like the Johuranama have been on his mind since the writing of The Great Derangement . “The - nama suffix comes from Persian but its usage in nomenclature was not limited to Persian texts alone,” he says. “When I wrote The Great Derangement , I was thinking about a lot of premodern texts from around the world that seemed to share certain concerns about natural resources and human greed. To my mind, their understanding of these issues was often more humane and sophisticated than books written hundreds of years afterwards.” It’s noteworthy that Ghosh’s last novel, Gun Island, is a modern-day parable woven around the legend of the snake goddess, Manasa.
“In that legend, Manasa Devi represents the natural world, or ecological concerns if you will,” Ghosh says. “Chand Saudagar is the human character, a trader. And how do we see the downfall of the human? We see it unfolding because of his greed. These are universal themes, the prospect of finite natural resources and the human penchant for extraction at all costs.”
Metre as magic
Jungle Nama ’s illustrations are by Salman Toor, the Pakistani-American artist whose solo show, How Will I Know , debuted in New York in November to enthusiastic reviews. Ghosh says he wanted an artist whose work “illuminated” the book à la medieval epics rather than “being images subservient to words”. Toor delivers handsomely on that count. His ‘illuminations’ are evocative of several different kinds of premodern visual media: the woodcuts of Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel, the illustrated Victorian serialised novel and, of course, the style of Persian epics like the Hamzanama .
Talking about the impact of these ‘illuminations’, Ghosh says: “Modern literature has become completely logocentric. If you look at the Persian epics or even something like Charles Dickens’ serialised novels, the images that they use are very distinctive. They add a dimension to the text that cannot be achieved by words alone. I wanted Jungle Nama to tap into those modes of creation that were not completely bound up with words.”
Jungle Nama , like the existing Johuranamas , is written in the form of an epic poem in dwipodi-payar , the ‘two-footed’ metre used in Bengali folk literature over hundreds of years. The metre consists of rhyming couplets, generally of 24 syllables each, with a caesura or pause. The metre is designed for chants and songs, meant to be read aloud. Ghosh says he “fell in love with this powerful, flexible metre.” “By the end of the story you realise that the dwipodi-payar is very much a protagonist. The metre becomes the magic that makes the miracle happen,” he says.
This is a reference to a poignant scene in Jungle Nama where Dukhey’s old mother advises him to pray to Bon Bibi in dwipodi-payar so that she may save him when the time comes (“Be sure to cast your call in dwipodi payar/ it’ll give your voice wings, it’s the metre of wonder.”)
Ghosh points out that reading or chanting these works was a community experience, unlike the modern-day habit of solitary reading and writing. “Reading alone and silently is very fresh as an idea, relatively speaking. It only started in 18th century Europe and has now become universal to the point where people subconsciously associate these acts with solitude. When we think of literature today, we think of a writer writing alone and a reader reading alone.”
Committed to memory
Moreover, working your ideas into verse was the linguistic equivalent of a preservative; it made sure that the core of your message survived transport and localised variations. As Ghosh says, “Verse is a way of harnessing the power of language. Verses can be read out aloud, you can sing or chant or perform them. In South Asia especially, even premodern grammatical or mathematical texts were in verse. Why? Because verse makes you concentrate what you’re saying. It makes you channel your message through very rigorous forms of expression and in doing so, makes it memorable.”
There are other linguistic delights to be found in Jungle Nama. Dukhey and Dhona are aboard the latter’s merchant ship alongside several lascars. As a result, there are several words here that were originally a part of Laskari Baat, the composite language used by lascars from the 16th century onwards, made up of languages as varied as Portuguese, English, Bengali and Tamil. Ghosh made free use of Laskari Baat throughout his Ibis trilogy ( Sea of Poppies , River of Smoke and Flood of Fire ) to add linguistic authenticity to the happenings. In Jungle Nama too, the pidgin speech explodes on the page late into the book. In a sonorous delight of a passage, we come across “alllieballie”, “dosootie” and “dastoorie”— all, as Ghosh explains, referring to different kinds of fabric.
“This is one of the things I noticed during my research for the Ibis books — that so many of the lascar words were fabric names. It was great fun incorporating them into the novels. In Jungle Nama , this process felt natural,” Ghosh says.
Jungle Nama ends with a couplet that encapsulates the book’s ecological message perfectly: “A world of endless appetite is a world possessed,/ is what your munshi’s learned, by way of this quest.” This has been the dominant strand running through all of Ghosh’s work from over the last decade or so, whether fiction or non-fiction. Like Barbara Kingsolver or Paul Kingsnorth (two writers Ghosh discusses in The Great Derangement ), Ghosh is deeply invested in the politics of relentless ‘development’ vis-à-vis climate change. Frankly, we could do with more mainstream writers shouting about this stuff from the rooftops.
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
