Narrating the Anthropocene: Climate Change Concerns in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-10(IV)| October2025 17 Narrating the Anthropocene: Climate Change Concerns in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Vishakha Ambadas Dhonge1, Prof. Subhashree Mukherjee2 1Research Scholar, Kamla Nehru College, Nagpur. 2Research Supervisor, Kamla Nehru College, Nagpur. Manuscript ID: JRD -2025-171005 ISSN: 2230-9578 Volume 17 Issue 10(IV) Pp. 17-20 October 2025 Submitted: 20 Sept. 2025 Revised:25 Sept. 2025 Accepted:10 Oct. 2025 Published: 31 Oct. 2025 Abstract: This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable to highlight the intersections of climate change, literature, and human experience in the Anthropocene era. Ghosh critiques the limitations of modern literature in addressing ecological crises and argues that climate change narratives remain marginalized within cultural and literary discourse. By situating climate change not only as an environmental issue but also as a cultural and imaginative challenge, the paper explores how storytelling shapes human understanding of planetary crises. The analysis underscores the urgency of rethinking narrative forms to capture the scale, unpredictability, and ethical dimensions of climate change. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that literature can serve as a vital medium for reimagining human responsibility in the Anthropocene. Keywords: Climate, Ecocriticism, Anthropocene Introduction: The Anthropocene, defined as the epoch marked by profound human impact on the planet, has prompted urgent reflections on climate change and its far-reaching consequences. Beyond being a scientific and ecological crisis, climate change is also a cultural, ethical, and narrative challenge, demanding new ways of imagining and representing human experience. Literature, with its capacity to narrate collective fears and aspirations, plays a vital role in shaping how societies confront environmental realities. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh critiques the modern literature's failure to adequately engage with the climate crisis. This paper, titled Narrating the Anthropocene: Climate Change Concerns in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, explores how Ghosh links the ecological to the cultural, revealing literature’s potential to make visible the complexities of the Anthropocene. Climate Change Concerns in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh reflects on the inadequacies of modern literature and culture in addressing the planetary crisis of climate change. This concern directly resonates with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument in his essay The Climate of History, where he observes that humans have become “geological agents,” reshaping the earth’s fundamental physical processes. Such a recognition forces a rethinking of conventional categories—history, culture, and even human agency itself. Mr. Malou Srinivasa Chary writes, “In the Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh explores the intersection of climate change, literature, and culture. He argues that the failure to adequately address climate change in contemporary literature and culture is a symptom of a broader societal malaise” (739). Quick Response Code: Website: https://jrdrvb.org/ DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17464074 Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations ae licensed under the idential terms. Address for correspondence: Vishakha Ambadas Dhonge, Research Scholar, Kamla Nehru College, Nagpur. How to cite this article: Vishakha Ambadas Dhonge, Prof. Subhashree Mukherjee. (2025 Narrating the Anthropocene: Climate Change Concerns in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Journal of Research & Development, 17(10(IV)), 17-20 Original Article Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-10(IV)| October2025 18 Ghosh extends this line of thought by highlighting how the Anthropocene unsettles the very structures of storytelling, as traditional realist narratives falter in capturing non-human forces like storms, floods, and ecological disruptions. Thus, while Chakrabarty emphasizes the historiographical implications of climate change, Ghosh underscores the literary and cultural dimensions, together demonstrating how the Anthropocene challenges not only scholarly disciplines but also our everyday assumptions about human centrality and control. Ghosh writes, “I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our commonsense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general” (12). Culture generates desires for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering It excites us because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind in our hair; we envision James Dean and Peter Fonda racing towards the horizon; we think also of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov. Amitav Ghosh, in The Great Derangement, demonstrates how culture not only mirrors human desires but actively produces them, often in ways that accelerate ecological destruction. He points out that consumer objects like cars or suburban gardens do not attract us because of their intrinsic materiality or utility, but because of the cultural narratives attached to them—freedom, modernity, status, or romanticized images drawn from film and literature. This cultural framing aligns with the project of narrating the Anthropocene, for it reveals that climate change is not simply a technical or scientific crisis but a deeply cultural one, embedded in symbolic systems and collective imaginations. Ghosh states, “A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering” (13). In this sense, Ghosh shows that our carbon-intensive lifestyles are sustained not only by economic and industrial structures but by stories, images, and aspirations that culture itself manufactures. The Anthropocene thus unsettles the assumption that culture and nature are distinct spheres: instead, it exposes how culture directly shapes ecological realities, driving the very processes of planetary transformation. In the review of the book, Michael Welton writes, “Culture fuels desire; and our “exquisite consumerism” and “market society” floods us with goods as it conceals what is really-going-on beneath the surface of global neo-liberal capitalism.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh identifies climate change as a profound challenge to the modern conception of freedom, a principle that underpins not only politics but also the humanities, arts, and literature. Freedom, often imagined as limitless choice, mobility, and individual autonomy, has historically been tied to industrial expansion and the carbon economy. The freedom to consume, to travel, or to dominate landscapes is celebrated in cultural narratives, yet it is this very conception that intensifies the ecological crisis. In the context of narrating the Anthropocene, Ghosh’s critique reveals that climate change is not simply a scientific disruption but a philosophical and cultural one: it unsettles the foundations of liberal modernity by demonstrating that unrestrained freedom has planetary costs. Thus, narrating the Anthropocene entails rethinking freedom itself—not as unlimited desire and consumption, but as responsibility, restraint, and coexistence within ecological limits. Ghosh depicts, “Climate change poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single most important political conception of the modern era: the idea of freedom, which is central not only to contemporary politics but also to the humanities, the arts and literature” (159). Amitav Ghosh observes that while South Asia is among the region’s most vulnerable to climate change, the phenomenon has not inspired the same intensity of political mobilization that other social and cultural issues routinely provoke. Ghosh writes, “The lack of a transitive connection between political mobilization, on the one hand, and global warming, on the other, is nowhere more evident than in the countries of South Asia, all of which are extraordinarily vulnerable to climate change” (168). In India, despite a long history of environmental activism and the presence of grassroots movements, climate change remains strangely absent from the public imagination. This disconnect illustrates one of the central concerns of narrating the Anthropocene: the difficulty of translating a planetary crisis into immediate cultural and political urgency. In the review of the book, Sanika Potnis writes, “He looks at the role of nation-states, industrialization, and colonial rule in the evolution of the carbon economy and their contribution towards a culture of dissociation from the climate crisis.” Ghosh argues that the Anthropocene resists conventional modes of political expression because its scale is both vast and impersonal, often eluding the emotional triggers that mobilize collective action. Thus, while India’s streets and media are alive with protest and debate, the silence around climate change underscores the narrative challenge at the heart of the Anthropocene—how to tell stories that bridge global abstractions and lived local realities. Ghosh states, “The voices of the country's many eminent climate scientists, environmental activists and reporters do not appear to have made much of a mark either” (169). In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh situates climate change within the global political order, highlighting the pivotal role of the Anglosphere. Ghosh writes, “One of the most important factors in the global politics of climate change is the role the Anglosphere plays in today's world” (182). He argues that the cultural and ideological dominance of laissez-faire individualism, which underpins much of the political and economic thinking in the United Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-10(IV)| October2025 19 States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, directly contributes to climate inaction. This worldview sustains the belief that the free pursuit of individual interests will ultimately serve the common good—a principle starkly contradicted by the planetary reality of global warming. When viewed through the lens of narrating the Anthropocene, Ghosh’s critique reveals how political ideologies and cultural identities shape the narratives through which societies interpret environmental crises. The unusually high rates of climate denial in the Anglosphere underscore the entanglement of identity, ideology, and resistance to scientific consensus. Ghosh writes, “In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries” (182). Thus, narrating the Anthropocene cannot be disentangled from narrating the cultural histories and political imaginaries that continue to obstruct collective climate action. In the review of the book, Wendy Singer writes, “The result is a book that provides so much to think about regarding our social, cultural, and political relationships to the world, that one picks it up and reexamines it over time, not only because of its 428 pages, including a rich bibliography, but also because of Kinsella’s creative use of language.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh highlights how the politics of climate change in the Anglosphere is shaped by a deep cultural tension between denialism and activism. This polarization is especially visible in the United States, where debates over climate policy are not merely technical or scientific but bound to questions of identity and national self-definition. Ghosh notes that when politicians frame climate action as a threat to “our way of life,” they invoke a powerful narrative that links fossil fuel dependence to cultural belonging and national pride. This aligns with narrating the Anthropocene, for it illustrates how climate change discourse becomes inseparable from stories of who we are and what we value as communities. The invocation of Reagan’s rhetoric— casting reduced oil consumption as an assault on “being American”—shows how climate denial is sustained by cultural myths of freedom, prosperity, and identity. Thus, narrating the Anthropocene must account not only for environmental realities but also for the performative scripts and cultural narratives that obstruct collective climate action. Ghosh writes, “When American and Australian politicians speak of climate change negotiations as posing a threat to 'our way of life', they are following the same script that led Ronald Reagan to speak of the reduction of the use of oil as an assault on what it means to be American” (183). In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh highlights how the denial and dismissal of climate change are not accidental but deeply entangled with structures of power, politics, and global capitalism. The systematic opposition to climate science—funded by corporations, fossil-fuel billionaires, and propagated through mass media—reflects what Ghosh terms the “great derangement,” a cultural and political failure to recognize ecological reality. Ghosh writes, “The opposition to climate science is not, however, a self-subsisting phenomenon. As Oreskes, Conway and others have shown, it is enabled, encouraged and funded by certain corporations and energy billionaires” (184). By linking misinformation campaigns and corporate interests with the silencing or distortion of climate discourse, Ghosh shows how narratives of denialism shape public consciousness and delay urgent action. The dominance of climate sceptics in media ownership and the deliberate underplaying of scientific findings illustrate how cultural narratives are manipulated to protect economic interests. Thus, Ghosh’s work correlates with the idea that the Anthropocene cannot be understood merely as an environmental crisis; it must also be recognized as a narrative and political turmoil, where the forces of denial, power, and profit intersect to obscure the urgency of planetary survival. Ghosh writes, “This bias owes much, no doubt, to the fact that large sections of the media are now controlled by climate sceptics like Rupert Murdoch, and by corporations that have vested interests in the carbon economy” (184). Conclusion: Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable compels us to see climate change not simply as an environmental or scientific crisis, but as a profound cultural, political, and narrative challenge. By examining how literature, history, and human imagination have failed to account for the scale of the Anthropocene, Ghosh exposes the limits of realist storytelling, the inertia of political systems, and the grip of cultural myths on collective consciousness. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, humans have now become “geological agents,” reshaping planetary processes; Ghosh extends this insight by showing how our desires, cultural identities, and notions of freedom actively sustain the carbon economy. From the silence in South Asia’s politics to the polarizing denialism and identity-driven rhetoric in the Anglosphere, Ghosh demonstrates that climate change is entangled with cultural histories and global power structures. Narrating the Anthropocene, therefore, requires rethinking the very frameworks through which societies imagine progress, freedom, and belonging. Literature, in this regard, is not a passive reflection but an active force that can reshape human understanding and responsibility. Ultimately, Ghosh’s work insists that the Anthropocene must be narrated differently—through stories that acknowledge non-human agency, confront entrenched ideologies, and inspire new modes of collective imagination. Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-10(IV)| October2025 20 The challenge of climate change lies not only in mitigating emissions or drafting policies but also in transforming the cultural and narrative foundations of modernity. Thus, The Great Derangement stands as a call for reimagining both literature and life in the age of the Anthropocene. References: 1. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin Random House India, 2017. 2. Chary, Malloju Srinivasa. "A Study of Climate Change and the Unthinkable in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement." International Journal of Current Science (IJCSPUB), vol. 14, no. 3, Aug. 2024, pp. 739–743. ISSN: 2250-1770. 3. Welton, Michael. "The Great Derangement: Amitav Ghosh’s Text for Our Times." CounterPunch, 21 Apr. 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/21/the-great-derangement-amitav-ghoshs-text-for-our-times/. Accessed 1 June 2025. 4. Potnis, Sanika. "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh." Pune International Centre, 1 Oct. 2023, https://puneinternationalcentre.org/the-great-derangement-climate-change-andthe-unthinkable-by-amitav-ghosh/. Accessed 1 June 2025. 5. Singer, Wendy. “‘Polysituating' The Great Derangement." Kenyon Review, 3 Sept. 2018, https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-great-derangement-and-polysituatedness-738439/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2025.