Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama : Writing Beyond the Novel

The publication of Jungle Nama (2021) marks a new turn in Amitav Ghosh’s poetics. The author moves from his own studies in environmental humanities to question the aesthetics of the novel and to reevaluate the vitalism of peasants’ traditions, which he opposes to Western rationalism. With Jungle Nama the author turns to verse and myth to admonish and set an example of respect for the non-human. From an aesthetical viewpoint, Ghosh transposes the narrative from the traditional Bengali versions to the language and media of world literature and world arts. The result is what we call the Jungle Nama Project, where visual art, music, literature, philology, and drama come together to disrupt the epistemological dominance of the Western forms.