Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

Hence the urgency of her search for the Merchant: for if he, and others like him, were to disavow her authority then all those unseen boundaries would vanish, and humans – driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest for profit – would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things.

No, of course not, because any number of inexplicable things could happen without disproving the possibility of their being connected by chance. In this, chance was like God – nothing that happened, no event or eventuality, could either prove or disprove its immanence. And at the same time, like God, chance provided reassurance, safety, cleanliness, purity. Wasn’t that why chance was so often said to be ‘pure’? – because it flowed over the world like a fresh mountain stream cleansing everything that it touched. To cease to believe in it was to cross over into the territory of fate and destiny, devils and demons, spells and miracles – or, more prosaically, into the conspiratorial universe of the paranoiac, where hidden forces decide everything.

‘Just look around you, caro.’ There was a touch of weariness in her voice now. ‘Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a liveable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea, or by creatures like that spider. Everybody knows … and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power.’

Haven’t you seen how every time you look at your phone, or a TV screen, there is always an ad telling you that you should do whatever you want; that you should chase your dream; that “impossible is nothing” – “Just do it!” What else do these messages mean but that you should try to live your dream? You ask any Italian and they will tell you that they have a fantasy, maybe they want to go to South America and see the Andes, or maybe they want to go to India and see the palaces and jungles. And if you’re white, it’s easy: you can go wherever you want and do anything you want – but we can’t. When I look back now and ask myself why I was so determined to go to Finland, I always come back to this: I wanted to go there because the world told me I couldn’t; because it was denied to me. When you deny people something, it becomes all the more desirable.’

Reading was my means, I thought, of escaping the narrowness of the world I lived in. But was it possible that my world had seemed narrow precisely because I was a voracious reader? After all, how can any reality match the worlds that exist only in books? Either way, the fact was that novels had done for me exactly what critics had anticipated when ‘romances’ first began to circulate widely, in the eighteenth century: they had created dreams and desires that were unsettling in the exact sense that they were the instruments of my uprooting. If mere words could have this effect, then what of the pictures and videos that scroll continuously past our eyes on laptops and cellphones? If it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words then what is the power of the billions of images that now permeate every corner of the globe? What is the potency of the dreams and desires they generate? Of the restlessness they breed?

My eyes wandered to the moonlit sea and I was reminded of a phrase that recurs often in the Merchant legends of Bengal: sasagara basumati – ‘the ocean’d earth’. At that moment I felt that I was surrounded by all that was best about our world – the wide open sea, the horizon, the bright moonlight, leaping dolphins, and also the outpouring of hope, goodness, love, charity and generosity that I could feel surging around me.

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not ob...