The biopolitics of genocide and terraforming: Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse as a parable for contemporary modernity

Human history is defined, fashioned and determined by its inextricable entanglement with environmental forces. In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) Amitav Ghosh explores the impact of colonialism and the ‘civilising mission’ of the West on planetary ecology. The paper argues that wars of extermination were essentially biopolitical in nature where non-human forces partake in the settler-colonial conflict leading to the displacement or annihilation of aboriginal population. Material forces and natural processes triggered into action by structured colonial strategies mediate destruction of the natural environment culminating in ecological collapse that has far reaching regional as well as planetary consequences. The nutmeg - one of the most coveted and valued of all spices - sets in motion a progression of invasion, warfare, genocide, and terraforming in the Indonesian Banda islands. The paper would investigate the evolution of the nutmeg as a parable for the contemporary climate crisis placing it in the larger context of the Anthropocene. The intersection between human and non-human forms of agency in our centuries-old geopolitical order, governed largely by mechanistic ideologies of conquest and colonisation, has invariably plummeted the planet into a climate catastrophe. The paper would argue that collective flourishing where human and non-human life forms live in consonance and mutual dependence is the key to saving our planet in the face of unrelenting apocalyptic violence. The non-human voices which are an integral and manifest part of our natural world need to be heard and restored into the narrative of contemporary modernity to survive the impending ecological collapse.