Of Fiction And Philosophy: Review Of Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost Eye

In his last few works, Amitav Ghosh has increasingly come to question how knowledge is created, assimilated and disseminated. Disparate themes like post-colonialism, climate change, refugee crisis and hints of the supernatural jostle for space in his works, often productively but sometimes at the cost of narrative coherence.

In his latest novel Ghost Eye, Ghosh pushes the idea to its limit, recalling characters from earlier works and imbuing them with a messianic fervour. In doing this, the novel also comes to reflect the inherent problems involved in using fiction as a vessel for philosophical ideas.

The novel alternates between two timelines: 1969 and 2019. The first follows Varsha Gupta, a three-year-old born into a vegetarian Marwari family in Calcutta, who begins 'remembering' a previous life and develops an inexplicable craving for fish, bringing a shock to her family. She is examined by Shoma Bose, a psychologist who specialises in 'cases of the reincarnation type', and who deduces that Varsha's previous self was a fisherwoman in the Sundarbans.

The second timeline centres on an ageing Shoma Bose and her nephew Dinanath Datta, whose life oscillates between New York and Kolkata. He is drawn into the orbit of Tipu and Rafi - characters readers may recognise from Ghosh's previous novel Gun Island (2019) - who now manage a trust in the Sundarbans and are engaged in a struggle against corporate encroachment on the delta.

The 1969 story is more vivid, zestful and invokes the sounds and tastes of Kolkata. The Gupta family, as it faces a sudden change in their daughter’s culinary preferences, is forced to confront the possibility of reincarnation as a lived disruption, rather than a primitive folklore. The psychologist complicates the narrative as she deploys Varsha’s bodily memory of taste as a forensic tool to establish the veracity of Varsha’s reincarnation.

Shoma’s method of eking out fragments of Varsha’s past encapsulates Ghosh’s view of knowledge generation. He brings into sharp focus why modern science (itself a reaction to the dogmatism of the Church) struggles to absorb these methods of knowledge, and ends up terming them as myths and mysticism. It becomes an argument about what we chose to recognise as reality and what we banish as superstition.

At the heart of the book is Ghosh's critique of the Cartesian notion of mind-matter duality which assumes that consciousness is the exclusive property of the human mind and the non-human and non-living world is inert until humans lend it meaning. Ghosh argues that the assumption is not merely philosophically untenable but also historically enforced. The plight of the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose in Europe, referenced early in the novel, exemplifies the consequences of challenging this orthodoxy.

Bose's offence was not limited to questioning the separation between the living and the non-living. He conducted rigorous experiments on plant responses, but his conclusion that the boundary between the sentient and the insentient is more porous than assumed, was inadmissible within the prevailing framework because it resonated with traditions that European science had categorised as primitive. Ghosh navigates through scientific laboratories and archives of the subcontinent to propose a reality where consciousness is not limited to narrow confines.

Ghost Eye enforces the idea that the criteria by which we decide what counts as legitimate knowledge were set by a particular civilisation at a particular moment and that those criteria have hardened into an invisible infrastructure that determines what gets funded, published and ridiculed. Ghosh proposes a continuum of consciousness in which agency and awareness are distributed across species, matter and ecosystems rather than being limited to the human mind. The novel dramatises this perspective through Varsha's body remembering what her mind could not possibly know.

Reincarnation functions in the novel as a structural argument. By using it as the connective thread between the two timelines, Ghosh inverts the comfortable convention of linear time and argues for a cyclical narrative where identity, memory and moral responsibility are redistributed. He asks: if we assume that reincarnation occurs, what happens in the interregnum between the passing of a soul from one body to another? And a counter-question: what if the concept of karma is itself a human construct - an attempt to bring order and predictability to the cycle of birth and rebirth, to assert control over a process that may be fundamentally ungovernable?

Ghosh also takes aim at what might be called the techno-centric faith, the belief that catastrophe is an inevitable regulatory mechanism best managed through technological enclosures rather than through collective restraint or repair. The techno-centric vision, Ghosh suggests, crowds out older and less glamorous methods of advancement rooted in reciprocity and ecological balance; methods indigenous societies practised but the colonial modernity dismantled.

There is a brief passage where Tipu questions the entire scaffolding of artificial intelligence, arguing that AI was conceptualised as mimicking the human brain, assumed to be the site of intelligence. Whereas, it is the body, with its feelings, premonitions and forebodings, that generates knowledge and the brain merely processes it. The novel thus comes to reject the techno-utopian idea that the mind is merely about computation. It is also of a piece with Ghosh's broader argument that the hallowed institutions through which knowledge is validated such as universities, laboratories and peer-reviewed journals, are accessible only to a moneyed few and the hierarchy of knowledge is defined less by merit than by access to capital.

The philosophical ambition is real, but Ghost Eye is a novel and must be judged on novelistic parameters. And here the novel begins to falter. The 2019 timeline, which carries the burden of connecting Ghosh's ideas to contemporary stakes, is where the narrative topples. The dialogues between Tipu and Dinu are stilted and Tipu's Brooklyn affectation sounds forced and unconvincing. The coincidences that enable Dinu’s search are too numerous and too convenient, robbing the plot of the resistance that good fiction requires. Corporate power is rendered as a monolithic abstraction - evil, undifferentiated and without the internal contradictions that could make it credible.

The novel also hesitates from deepening its own intellectual query. Ghosh pushes against the epistemic hegemony of European science but the alternative ontology he offers, a continuum of consciousness distributed across all matter, is presented with an unwavering certainty. Both are propositions about the nature of reality and a novel willing to dismantle one must also examine the other with some rigour. When Ghosh critiques the constructed boundary between living and non-living as a product of European science, he does not fully reckon with the fact that JC Bose was working squarely within Western scientific method. Bose's challenge was powerful precisely because it used the master's tools. To frame his work primarily as a vindication of Eastern mysticism is to flatten what made it genuinely subversive.

The arguments he mounts against the tyranny of Cartesian dualism, the violence of technicism, against the insistence that only one kind of knowledge is legitimate are serious. But Ghost Eye might have been more persuasive in its critique had it trusted its own fiction to carry the answer, rather than forcing the narrative to explain its presumptions. As it argues against the rift between mind and body, reason and intuition, idea and experience, it gets neatly cleaved into two halves. One is populated by fiction and the other by philosophy, with few points of convergence between the two. The structural weakness, ingrained in the very manner the novel is conceived, eventually leaves the narrative parched and the reader disappointed.