Episteme and Ecology: Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain and the Decolonial Turn

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable of Our Times (2022) is an allegorical rendering of the repercussions of environmental degradation and the annihilation of indigenous ecological knowledge. As one of the notable public intellectuals of contemporary times, Ghosh in The Living Mountain deliberates on the ramifications of the discourses of colonialism and the Anthropocene, and depicts how those have been complicit in asserting a hegemonic Western episteme that has corroborated capitalist extraction and ecological commodification. This article examines Ghosh’s The Living Mountain as highlighting the layered operation of colonial capitalism in disrupting ecological systems and marginalizing indigenous epistemologies. The article brings to the foreground that such capitalist subjugation becomes instrumental in unleashing “testimonial injustice” on indigenous knowledge systems, culminating in horrendous forms of epistemicide and ecocide. To counter such a pervasive objectification, Ghosh calls through this narrative for a “decolonial turn” that is attendant on “epistemic disobedience” and repudiates the dominant meaning-formations. This article finally argues that Ghosh elucidates the necessity of a collective epistemic responsibility that would discard the hegemonic capitalist perceptions of nature and ecology and celebrate their primacy and organic existence. It is only through the recuperation of indigenous knowledge and an epistemic re-centering that escalating environmental disasters can be checked and new forms of sustainable planetarity and planetary solidarities can be accomplished.