Imagining Apocalypse Through the Prism of Spiritual Crisis in The Living Mountain

Abstract:As several observers have pointed out, a common topic in environmental debate is the apocalypse. The word “apocalypse,” which originally applied to any kind of divine revelation, literally means “to uncover or disclose.” Despite having a genealogical connection to the Christian tradition, historians started using the term more liberally in the 20th century to refer to a variety of different religious and secular movements. Similar to other apocalyptic ideologies throughout religious history, environmental apocalypticism is defined by a set of common ideas regarding the past, present, and future. The narrative, which recounts humanity’s fall from ecological grace, can be divided into three acts. The first two are concerned with history, while the last act concerns the future. Act I presents mankind as existing in perfect harmony with the natural world and, in many cases, as considering it to be sacred and alive. Act II describes how people started to rebel against the natural world. All of the world’s issues stem from people’s anthropocentric, individualistic mind set. Due to ignorance, greed, arrogance, and the conviction that humans are essentially different from or superior to “nature,” as well as a desire to conquer the “feminine” natural world and gain overall control over it, humans started modifying nature to suit their needs at the expense of other living creatures. Act III opens in the twentieth century, as pollution, biodiversity loss, overpopulation, deforestation, climate change, and other environmental woes start to manifest as the consequences of humanity’s actions. All of these changes are said to be the catalyst for an ecological disaster that will “end the world as we know it” and have apocalyptic consequences. Amitav Ghosh’s brief work, The Living Mountains: A Fable of Our Times, is less than the length of a novella and covers a variety of subjects, such as colonialism and the ensuing exploitation of people and resources, the devaluing of traditional knowledge, de-sacralisation and disillusionment, consumerism and greed. Amitav Ghosh vividly depicts the saga of humanity’s reckless attempts to reach forbidden peaks, sending it hurtling towards environmental apocalypse in The Living Mountain. The novella serves as a warning about how human exploitation of nature has resulted in an environmental collapse. The paper examines how environmental storytelling, as a component of indigenous orality, is reinvented by Ghosh in his latest fiction, The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times (2022), which tends to view the Anthropocene through the prism of spiritual crisis. It draws on the insightful studies of the ecological aesthetics of stories and storytelling and the apocalyptic imagination. Key Words: Apocalypse, Anthropocene, Exploitation, Environment, Spiritual Crisis