Monsoon Disruption and Climate Change in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement

The Indian monsoon is a characteristic ecological and cultural phenomenon, which has defined agricultural activities, social structure and literary landscape of the subcontinent throughout centuries. More recently, though climate change has profoundly disrupted the predictability and consistency of this seasonal cycle with disastrous outcomes of flooding, drought, displacement, and increasing ecological anxiety. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh (2016) is a critical perspective that can be used to comprehend these changes. This paper will discuss Ghosh’s interpretation of the changing monsoon as part of a larger crisis of climate, culture and human imagination. Based on the ecocritical and postcolonial approaches, the paper suggests that the disrupted monsoon can be seen as the representation of not only the instability of the environment, but also of how modern literature, historiography and political institutions fail to appropriately address climate change. The paper locates The Great Derangement in the context of ecological writing in Indian English and how this book is relevant to the theme of the changing scenario of the changing monsoon.