World facing radical uncertainty due to collision between imperial paramountcy and decolonisation: Amitav Ghosh
Renowned author and recipient of Jnanpith Award Amitav Ghosh on Tuesday said the world was seeing radical uncertainty as it witnessed a head-on collision between two contradictory historical impulses – imperial paramountcy and decolonisation.
“The first dynamic allowed a tiny minority of the world population to siphon off a hugely disproportionate share of the earth’s endowments at the expense of the majority, including often many of their own citizens. The second, countervailing, impulse has now led to an enormous expansion in the economies of the global South, though also often at the expense of many of their own people,” Ghosh said.
“This is what makes this a time of such a radical uncertainty,” Ghosh said, delivering the renowned Dr CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2025 on ‘Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections on an Interstitial Era’ at the India International Centre here.
Moderated by IIC president Shyam Saran, the event was attended by many prominent personalities, including former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra and several former bureaucrats and diplomats.
Quoting American strategist George Kennan, Ghosh said, “The fundamental challenge that now confronts the United States, and indeed the collective West, is that of preserving their hold on a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.”
He said what made this disparity possible was the enormous gap in military tactics and technology that opened up between the imperial core and the periphery over centuries of colonisation.
“Today, even though the West is responsible for 75% of the world’s military spending, this gap is closing fast and in many respects has already closed. Now even an impoverished country like Yemen can disrupt global trade with a few homemade missiles,” Ghosh pointed out.
Noting that the leadership of the collective West was pursuing the “fundamentally unachievable goal of maintaining its hold on a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s resources”, he said, “Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the goal will not be abandoned, and if it should prove to be the case that the only means of preserving the West’s historic advantage is by sowing chaos throughout the world, then so be it.”
Ghosh said, “It is not hard to predict, however, that ultimately this chaos will return to haunt the West, as it has already repeatedly done since the start of this millennium.”
Terming the military sector as “one of the most important drivers of climate change”, he said, “Here lies the most monstrous aspect of this.”
Ghosh said, “We are now in a time between ending of one epoch and the birth of another – ‘a time of monsters’ in the words of Antonio Gamsci (Italian Marxist philosopher). The strange thing about this interstitial era, however, is that it could also be described as a “time of possibilities” in that it has suddenly become possible to contemplate, and even embrace, potentialities that were denied or rejected during the age of high modernity.”
Questioning the concept of modernity, Ghosh said, “High modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed only to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes. In this time of possibilities, we are slowly beginning to understand that in order to hear the earth we must first learn to love it.”