GHOSH ON BOOKS THAT INFLUENCED THE WRITING OF ‘THE NUTMEG’S CURSE’

This is very hard to answer, as I have books in Indian languages, and in western languages, but Swedish author Sven Lindquist’s books are very influential to me. One of them is about Africa, called ‘Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origin of European Genocide’. It is powerful, and I would say it is also stylistically an interesting book. His book about Australia, ‘Terra Nullius’, is also a very important book, in the way he used landscape and place.

And the same vein I would say

Ben Ehrenreich’s book ‘Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the

End of Time’, which I read just as I started to write ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’, made a huge impression. It also uses landscape in a unique way. It made me think about a lot of things in a different way. It was also stylistically interesting because his book was written in the parabolic form.

‘The Falling Sky’ is a wonderful book by David Kopenawa Yanonami. It describes what it is like to see the world in a shamanic way. And in that same vein I would say Leslie Marmon Silko’s works ‘Ceremony’ and ‘Storyteller’ gave an indigenous perspective as well as she is able to bring storytelling and the non-human world together in very powerful ways, but the book of hers I particularly like and want to cite is her memoir, ‘The Turquoise

Ledge’. It is about growing up as an indigenous woman, and how her perceptions of the world were so different from that of the mainstream society.

‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is an indigenous botanist, brings together modern western science and indigenous perspectives on wisdom and knowledge. It is a wonderful book and you learn a lot from it.