Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’.

Introduction: Colonialism and the Ethics of Western Modernity

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism, capitalism and anthropogenic activities. An ideological continuation of Ghosh’s earlier work, The Great Derangement (2016), which foregrounds a cognitive unawareness of and an imaginative failure to fathom the climate crisis, The Nutmeg’s Curse comes out as a ‘percipient warning’ (Biswas, 2022, p. 905) on escalating environmental degradation. Writing at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has hit the world in a deadly way, Ghosh in The Nutmeg’s Curse seeks to probe the vulnerability of humans as rooted in the notions of Western colonialism and modernity. Western modernity’s parameters, which emerged during the Age of Enlightenment, bolstered European cultural and intellectual supremacy in all forms. Modernity, according to the European Enlightenment, is about establishing rationality and a reformed social order in terms of the Enlightened philosophical thinking, which prioritizes ‘subject-centered reason and a meaning-legislating rationality’ (Dube, 2002, p. 198). The fundamental ethical premise of modernity rests on a privileging of mind over matter, a dualistic concept that has its foundation in the arguments of René Descartes, one of the notable philosophers of the Enlightenment age (Touraine, 1995, p. 47). In contrast to the external world, which remains inert and non-evolutionary, the inner mind, according to this concept, is subject to experientialities. Logic and reason have been seen as hallmarks of progressive human minds, which inherently have become synonymous with those of Europeans, and the opposites of these qualities are being ascribed to non-Europeans (Mignolo, 2012, p. 22; Said, 1978, p. 4;)—categorized as ‘non-humans’. This glorification becomes integral to the conceptualization of the European colonialist project, which started taking a substantial shape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and has been justified as an ‘imperative of historical progress’ (Dube, 2022, p. 197).

The spread of colonialism can be seen as the starting point of ‘European diffusionism’, through which a distinct pattern of Eurocentric worldview becomes pervasive, leading to the marginalization of non-European cultures and values (Blaut, 1989, p. 260). Eurocentric modernity endorses the homogenization and essentialization of ‘others’—all those who are deemed as irrational and uncultured, and therefore suppressible. In this context, Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is significant because it pinpoints the ramifications of Eurocentric progress informed by totalizing versions of Western modernity. The narrative goes back to the early days of European encroachments in different parts of the world and delineates how the indigenous masses, ecology and resources of the colonies have been commodified under the façade of progress. Colonies became sites of ‘plunder, cheap raw materials and markets’ (Krishnaswami, 1992, p. 81), and the masses and ecology of these regions were subjugated to meet the demands of European colonialist designs. Ghosh’s writing emphasizes the heinousness of this colonialist politics, in which coercion of indigenous peoples and the environment has been legitimized by the ethics of Western modernity. The story of nutmeg, a spice that grew in the Banda Islands and became a lucrative commodity in Europe, emerges as a historical narrative of the systemic processes of European colonialism. The title of Ghosh’s work is ironic in pointing out how the abundance of this tree on an archipelago in the Indian Ocean becomes the cause of havoc for the natives and the ecology of that place. The nutmeg tree found particularly in these islands after the volcanic eruption of ‘Gunung Api’ ¹ sealed the fate of the islanders at the hands of the Dutch traders who, for their profit, killed the people and ravaged the island. The nutmeg tree, much like the other plants of the island, was an intrinsic part of indigenous life and has been ‘woven into the songs and memories’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 36). With the arrival of the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagni) as traders on the Banda Islands, the trees, volcanoes and the vibrant landscape became perceived as mere resources for generating profit. The nutmeg trees, stripped of all their historicity and elemental connection with the livelihood of the islanders, became an object of trade (with no prior meaning of their own) and a product meant to serve the European population. Against the backdrop of this story of nutmeg’s devaluation at the hands of the Dutch colonizers, the narrative elaborately discusses colonialist mechanisms and how those functioned as corollaries of Western modernity that fostered a ‘mechanistic vision of the world’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 37).

This article explores Ghosh’s critique of colonialism in The Nutmeg’s Curse and unravels the systemic construction of an episteme through which the European way of visualizing and categorizing ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ percolated down the centuries. While the European definitions and knowledge systems gained dominance, those produced and practised by the indigenous or non-Europeans subsided. The European epistemic parameters imbibing the connotations of Western modernity perpetuated monolithic constructions of ‘human’ versus ‘non-human’ and ‘nature,’ in turn reinforcing an ethics of ‘othering’. This article brings to the foreground Ghosh’s exposition of the discrepancies of such categorizations. This article draws focus on the Western developmental goals that, with their underpinnings of hegemonic colonial episteme and anthropogenic drives, have unleashed violence in varied forms on indigenous people and ecology across the world. Colonialism functioned not as an isolated event of political and economic control but as a continual process of signifying the non-Western ‘other’ as passive and secondary. Drawing on Ghosh’s depictions of colonial oppressions, the article enunciates how colonialism unfolds as a ‘structure [and] not an event’ (Wolfe, 1999, p. 2) of Western modernity and its capitalist temperament. In line with this viewpoint, we probe that the colonialist ‘othering’ and subjugation of the natives, tribes and ecology have been corroborated by the discourse of the Anthropocene, a much-discussed topic over the last two decades.

The concept of the Anthropocene identifies the ‘cumulative human impacts on the Earth’s systems’ (Hoelle & Kawa, 2021, p. 655) that have aggravated environmental degradation and planetary crises. This article argues that Ghosh’s work in uncovering the workings of Western modernity’s episteme elucidates the perpetration of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (Fricker, 2007) that culminated in perpetual forms of ‘cognitive injustice’ (de Sousa Santos, 2016) on the non-Western ‘other’. In this regard, this article argues for the necessity to deconstruct the governing epistemological paradigms and engage with alternative or non-Western ones to repudiate the dualistic categorizations of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. The occurrence of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices has resulted in the subversion of indigenous ecological knowledge as well as the disruption of nature and ecology. In this regard, the article highlights how Ghosh’s work pinpoints that the need of the hour is to disrupt the ingrained ‘othering’ of ecology and indigeneity and dismantle the objectifying ethics of Western epistemic tradition. An engagement with subjugated epistemologies is indispensable, as that can undermine the hierarchical bifurcations of ‘human’ and involve the ‘other’ as an agential participant, thereby harnessing ethical justice in relation to ecology. Therein also lies the necessity to recognize that there is also an ecology of the exploited, one that preserves interlinkages with indigenous communities and was forged in the grip of modernity: ‘a decolonial ecology’ (Ferdinand, 2022, p. 13). An affirmation of the decolonial ecology can possibly counter the ethical exclusion of the knowledge of the ‘other’ and establish equity in epistemic representation. Finally, in reading Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, this article contends that the framework of ‘decolonial ecological ethics’ can emerge as a potential way to perpetuate ‘cognitive justice’ for accomplishing solidarity with the planet and the ecological systems.

Colonialism, Anthropocene and Ecoprecarity

Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a retrospective analysis of colonialism and evinces that the escalating ecological dangers and planetary crisis are the prolonged fallouts of the entrenched colonial episteme. Ghosh states that there is a need to go beyond the prevailing assumptions of the ‘Anthropocene’, a geological epoch that denotes a marked impact of human activities on the planet, and revisit the colonial histories to comprehend humans’ supremacist control of the ecologies. Colonialism, capitalism and the Anthropocene act as corollaries in perpetrating varied forms of injustice on the environment, indigeneity and indigenous people. The notion of the Anthropocene is commonly credited to Eugene F. Stoermer, who used the term in the 1980s and then popularized it by Paul J. Crutzen in the 2000s. Anthropocene, or the ‘age of the humans’, according to Crutzen and Stoemer (2000) begins with the invention of the steam engine and then the first Industrial Revolution, in which factories and the massive use of coal have been instrumental in releasing greenhouse gases and affecting the ecology of the planet (p. 12). In the frame of the Anthropocene, it has been since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that an explosion of human activities in the form of capitalist endeavours took place, threatening the planetary systems and putting ecology in jeopardy. The Nutmeg’s Curse critiques the timeline and discursive formation of the Anthropocene, interrogating its universalization of humans’ role as a ‘mono-cultural imaginary’ (Hayman et al., 2018, p. 78) for the environmental transformations. In homogenizing ‘a geologic common’ (Yusoff, 2018, p. 2) and obsoleting the particularities of racial and capitalist histories, the Anthropocene involves a ‘politics of denial’ of the sociopolitical categorizations that have been prevailing since the heyday of Western modernity—of who qualifies as ‘human’ and who does not. Further, in its apprehensions of environmental collapse as a problem of the future, the discourse of the Anthropocene happens to be more future directed, sidestepping the human involvement in the pre-Industrial period and obfuscating the ‘social differences’ that have germinated since then (Erickson, 2020, pp. 111–112). By bringing to the foreground the ingrained discrepancies that have been instrumental in multifaceted injustices on the ecological world since the onset of colonialism, Ghosh’s work claims a reversal of the assumptions of ‘Anthropocene’ and re-reads those as being embedded in ‘the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history’ (Chakrabarty, 2009, p. 220).

To consider the ‘era of climate change as radically new, separated from preceding ages by a clean break’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 152) is to affirm the role of colonial capitalism in shaping the planet’s system and lives for the past centuries, and ‘not just for the past 150 years in which carbon has been emitted’ (Satgar, 2018, p. 57). The discourse of the Anthropocene cannot be designated as “unprecedented and utterly novel” (Ghosh, 2021, p. 153) because of its roots in the processes of colonization, industrial modernity and its allied forms of violence. For instance, the early conquests, such as that of Columbus’s exploration in 1492, can be conceived as the originating period of Western capitalism and anthropogenic dominance in distinctive ways (Moore, 2015, p. 176). In sanctioning humans as the prime geologic agents and codifying nature to be subservient, the notion of the Anthropocene reiterates this ‘epistemic frame of modernity’ (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 214) that begins with colonialist expansions. Ghosh’s intervention in The Nutmeg’s Curse gains its relevance in this context by elucidating that the assumption that ‘global anthropogenic agency’ as ‘particularly new and exciting’ (Morrison, 2016, p. 3) is problematic. The anthropocentric ethics evolved with colonialist policies and continued through rugged capitalist actions, aligning civilization, humanity and progress with a Eurocentric worldview. To decipher the ‘political economy’ of environmental degradation and planetary disruptions, it is therefore essential to garner an understanding of the embeddedness of the ‘structural and political power of capital’ (Satgar, 2018, p. 48) since the days of colonial exploration.

The story of nutmegs’ extraction, which involved the killing of indigenous natives and huge ecological plundering, represents the hideousness of colonialist workings, according to which violence on uncivilized or savage entities was justified as logical and rational. The colonizers’ perpetration of violence was founded on their ideas of epistemic supremacy and their self-adopted mission of signifying and taming the ‘savage’ other. This outlook has its reflection in and substantiation through ideologies of civilization and race. The non-whites and indigenous people have been defined as inferior and uncivilized, and subsequently, the vanquishing of the savage was propagated as legitimate. This also constituted the basis of Western ‘ecological interventions’ in the colonies, as in the Europeans’ scheme of development, an untilled or uncultivated land was ‘savage’, ‘wild’ and hence ‘unproductive’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 63). Production or utilization, being one of the foremost motives of colonial capitalism since its inception (Foster & Clark, 2004, p. 232), the white colonizers or settlers measured land/environment in terms of its resources and assured profitability. Martin O’Connor (1994) refers to this as ‘capital’s conditions of productions’ (p. 8) that validate the projects of objectification and commodification. In settler colonies, such objectification has been accomplished through the ‘right to terraforming’, a term that owes its origin to Jack Williamson, a science fiction writer who used this term in a novella in 1942 (Ghosh, 2021, p. 53). Terraforming or “land-making” draws heavily on Western modernity’s epistemic conviction that ‘nature’ or external reality is ‘tabula rasa’—a blank space in which new meanings can be inscribed and imposed. So, classifying, cataloguing and re-naming land and existing natural resources formed viable ways through which the European invaders and policymakers exercised their imperialist/colonial hold. This power of naming has been one of the greatest privileges of empire as it gradually constructed the hegemonic modes of relating to and signifying the territories that the colonizers occupied. It is interesting to note that for the indigenous Banda masses, the land was never the site of production; as Ghosh aptly phrases it, ‘it was not land but Land’ (p. 36). The capital ‘L’ here symbolizes that ‘land’ and environment have never been a secondary or subservient entity in the indigenous epistemology, but rather comprised an essential component of their holistic sense of livelihood. Contrary to the European intruders who neglected the metaphysical value of land and asserted their capitalist prescriptions (Mackey, 2016; Pasternak, 2017), the indigenous people have always believed in the profound vitality of nature and ecology. The nutmeg trees could have grown and flourished in other places, but it was only in the Banda Islands that their ‘meaning in excess of [their] utility’ has been celebrated, as the ‘vision of the world as a resource’ has never existed in the indigenous episteme (Ghosh, 2021, p. 76).

The perception of nature as inert and secondary to the human world essentially goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as René Descartes, Bernard Mandeville, Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon (Ghosh, 2021, p. 89). They enunciate the Western ways of signification in which the metaphysical being and existence of nature, ecology and land are repudiated and white civilizational standards are endorsed. Fostering its claim to universality, the overriding philosophical and epistemological worldview of Western modernity can be grasped through Hegel’s (2000) assertion that:

It is in the Caucasian race that mind first attains to absolute unity with itself. Here for the first time mind enters into complete opposition to the life of Nature, apprehends itself in its absolute self-dependence, wrests itself from the fluctuation between one extreme and the other [the material and the spiritual], achieves self-determination, self-development, and in doing so creates world-history. (p. 42)

Hegel’s statements testify to the totalizing idealist understanding of history that eliminates the legacies and perspectives of non-European cultures and nations from any constructive and beneficial part in world history and condemns their innate inadequacy to contribute to that history (Sa’di, 2021, p. 2506). The dominant view that nature has no life of its own and can be used to fulfil the civilizational needs of humans has been reiterated in the writings of later Western thinkers and theorists. Some of them include Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, one of the earliest theorists of geological time in the eighteenth century; Antonio Stoppani, an Italian geologist; and George Perkins Marsh, an American conservationist of the nineteenth century (Ghosh, 2021, p. 108). These thinkers affirm that the advancement of human culture has been a ‘distinctive feature of European civilization’ and can be materialized by transforming the ‘savage state of nature’ (Simpson, 2020, p. 58). When Ghosh’s work refers to the forcible appropriation of the Banda islands’ resources through crude extractions and genocides, it exemplifies the Dutch’s viewing of indigeneity and ecology as deprived of any ontological or consequential value. Embodying the Western epistemic ethos, the Dutch colonizers considered nutmegs, indigenous trees, volcanoes and rivers on the Banda Islands as lifeless parts of an inanimate natural world, the extraction or plundering of which could be counted as harmless. Ignoring the fallout of the rampant extractive practises, the Dutch colonizers thus became instrumental in staging a series of colonialist-sanctioned ecological violence that eventually dismembered the ‘indigenous eco-social relations’ (Bacon, 2019, p. 59) of the Banda community, disrupting their reverence for and connection with nature.

With their actions of conquering land and its resources, the Dutch capitalists perpetrated ‘a multilevel ecological assault’ (Mann, 2007, p. 44) on the Banda Islands, making it increasingly difficult for the indigenous communities to survive. The rupture of indigenous peoples’ relationship with their land ensued an acute ‘epistemic, ontological, and cosmological violence’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 5). As the metric of colonial encounter with land remained steeped in extremities, land and ecology happened to be consistently exploited instead of revered as sources of learning or living (Watts, 2013, p. 26). In pursuit of their economic aggrandisement, the Dutch plundered the nutmeg trees and land of the Banda Islands and slaughtered those associated with them. Most natives were killed in 1621. The horrific violence on the Banda masses and community represented not only ‘ecocide’ or ‘genocide’, but also ‘omnicide’—a megalomaniac desire to terminate anything and everything that came in the way of capitalist agendas (Ghosh, 2021, p. 41). The disparaging of nutmeg and other trees, followed by a ravenous plundering of other resources, disintegrated the human–nature relationship on the Banda Islands, the harmonious interconnection that once bolstered the existential glory of the place.

Nevertheless, the 1621 massacre of the Banda population has not been a singular case of colonial subjugation and violence, as such exterminations have been carried out on indigenous populations in other regions too, such as Australia, Africa and America. When the native populations of these places strove to resist the white settlers, they were suppressed through military forces, biological means such as spreading diseases and most compulsively decimated through infringements of the ‘web of nonhuman connections that sustained’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 41) their indigenous epistemology and holistic livelihood. The method of destroying the web of life that nurtured several indigenous communities has been done through varied strategies. For example, in America, the silent extermination of the buffalo herds, the damming of rivers and other ecological diversions have been conspicuous techniques to curtail the Native Americans and their traditional pattern of survival. These kinds of land exploitation, long-term ecological degradation and murdering of indigenous ecological knowledge have been detrimental to the world’s ecosystems, habitats and climate patterns. With lands being transformed into farms, ranches and plantations, and natural resources being crassly commoditized, the planetary biodiversity has been endangered, followed by large-scale dispossessions and displacements. As the Dutch colonizers brought indentured labourers to the Banda Islands from other parts of the world (p. 57) for extraction works, similarly, people were transported from other colonies to work on the American plantations. Unrelenting resource extraction, uprooting of indigenous masses and coercive labour patterns to fulfil the European capitalist agenda escalated the ‘magnitude of human-caused planetary violence’ (DeBoom, 2021, p. 900) to almost an immeasurable and irreversible degree for ages. The prolonged devastations of ecology, land and non-human species hurl us into what can be termed states of ‘ecoprecarity’, manifesting catastrophic versions of ‘imperial ecocide’.

In Judith Butler’s (2004) notion, ‘precarity’ denotes the vulnerability that characterizes lives and existential conditions owing to the differential access to and functioning of sociopolitical structures (p. 6). In extension of this, ecoprecarity can be conceived of as the vulnerabilities that arise due to ecological disruptions, eventually exacerbating environmental and planetary imbalances (Nayar, 2019, p. 7). Ecoprecarity plays a grave role in peripheralizing the poor and the disadvantaged, enmeshing them in what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’—violence that occurs gradually and is spread over time and space, an ‘attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). Without being spectacular, slow violence’ takes place insidiously, unravelling gradually through calamities and tumults at different points in time. The impact of ecoprecarity can be appropriately deciphered only in association with the other systemic inequities because, while escalating environmental crises are a global menace, the sufferings of disadvantaged sections from such hazards are more pathetic and grimmer. Ghosh’s reference to the Amphan cyclone that struck the Sundarbans in West Bengal, India, exemplifies how the rural masses of the region have been adversely affected by the catastrophe, with a majority of them left homeless and destitute at the mercy of fate. Another such victim of ecoprecarity and ‘slow violence’ is Kokhon (fictional name)—a 30-old Bengali refugee in Italy, with whom Ghosh has the chance to interact. Kokhon, born in Bangladesh’s Kishoreganj district, later leaves his homeland penniless to survive on a meagre income in a foreign land. Kokhon’s story of migration is one of environmental-induced displacement and magnifying eco-precariousness, though he is utterly unaware of his status as a ‘climate migrant’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 157). In his recollection to Ghosh, Kokhon expresses his grievance against the political leaders in his village but fails to recognize that the deep-rooted causes of deterioration were environmental—continual heavy rains, irregular water release from dams, violent hailstorms and unseasonal downpours. The deteriorations in ecology amplified the disparities between rich and poor, inciting repressive political interferences and pushing poor people like Kokhon to move to places far away for a basic living. Kokhon’s narrative is representative of the numerous indigenous masses who are being warped by the past and the ongoing environmental disasters but have hardly been accounted for as victims of slow violence. The ‘injurious invisibility that trails slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 6), therefore, has larger repercussions in destabilizing the planetary ecosystem, posing threats for human and non-human survival. While nations pay attention to increasing their GDP, Ghosh claims, there is a more crucial need to acknowledge the imbricated asymmetries that are silently instrumental for human dislocation and the depletion of ecosystems. Unless the inequities are addressed or ameliorated, the possibilities of countering diverse forms of epistemic injustice are less feasible.

Epistemic and Cognitive Injustice

Ghosh’s writing invites a foray into how the inadequate credibility parameters of Western modernity can stem from and contribute to structural ‘epistemic injustice’ that, in the words of Miranda Fricker (2007), works in a testimonial and hermeneutical way to depict the relationship between credibility appraisals and epistemic justice. When a minimal agency for traditional ecological knowledge entails an epistemological objectification of indigenous testimony, this constitutes a radical ‘testimonial injustice’, a term coined by Fricker. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s testimony is not accorded the credibility it deserves by a prejudiced hearer, resulting in the speaker’s inability to impart her knowledge. Fricker argues that this undermines the speaker's social standing as a knower or epistemic agent by eliminating her from the communal epistemic mechanisms of disseminating and accumulating knowledge (Fricker, 2007, pp 1–2, 130). The ‘testimonial injustice’ occurs through the refutation and denigration of the indigenous communities’ knowledge system, beliefs and cultural ethos. The indigenous knowledge has always championed a deep faith in the vitalism and animism of nature, but the hegemonic Western modernity propagated this thought process as derogatory, finally devaluing the entire knowledge system. Animism being ‘a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert’ (Ingold, 2006, p. 9), it connotes a cognitive viewpoint or practise, diametrically opposite of Western science’s anthropocentrism. Much like the Banda community, most of the indigenous communities worshipped natural bounty and non-human entities as ‘makers of history as well as tellers of stories’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 32). Myths and folklore, symbolizing the intrinsic connection of the Indonesian and Japanese native communities with ecology, constituted their epistemic representations. Nature and the earth, considered ensouled’ have been adored as powerful sources of nourishment and spirituality too. The belief that ‘landscapes are alive has been reiterated again and again throughout Native American history’ (p. 51), evoking its abiding influence in the community. When the European colonizers condemned the indigenous community’s appreciation of nature, castigating their epistemic beliefs as superstitious and dreadful, it inescapably fostered the former’s biased assumptions about the latter’s epistemology and doubts about its credibility. The Western enlightened mindset has endorsed the idea that ‘to believe that the Earth was anything more than an inanimate resource was to declare oneself a superstitious savage’ (p. 87), and hence, the epistemology of the indigenous savage could never demand a sanction. Once the epistemic worth of the indigenous people has thus been delegitimized, their testimonies inevitably lose their validity. On the one hand, therefore, colonialism objectified nature and debunked the indigenous testimonies that tried to resist that, thereby committing injustices at two levels—environmental and epistemological.

The epistemic injustice has been carried out by normalizing the standards of humanity and civilization through ‘values attached to whiteness’, Western empiricism and rationalism (Erickson, 2020, p. 116), and vilifying everything outside it. The normalization has been pervasive, authenticated through scientific investigations and theories. One such example is John Wesley Powell, a famous nineteenth-century American geologist and explorer, who has extensively written against the beliefs of animism and vitalism of the Native Americans. For Powell, ‘vitalism and civilization were [so] mutually exclusive’ that he argued for an immediate necessity not only to abandon Native Americans’ beliefs but also their language, condemning it as afflicted with vicious ‘mythology and sorcery’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 87). Powell’s disgust and annoyance with Native Americans’ evocation of nature and practise of environmentalism are reflective of whites’ prohibitions on indigenous experientialities and censoring of their testimonies. The authority of the Western episteme, peripheralizing indigenous knowledge and all its expressions, thus contributed to the dissemination of the ideology of human exceptionalism, which underlined ‘Earth not as a nurturer or a life-giver, but as a dead weight whose enveloping ties must be escaped if Man is to rise to a higher stage of being’ (p. 82) and achieve progress.

The indigenous communities facing testimonial injustice have, historically, been deprived of a fundamental form of epistemic esteem; rather than being regarded as ‘informants’ or active epistemic agents, they are now only perceived as ‘repositories of information’ or epistemic objects from whom knowledge may not be obtained (Fricker, 2007, p. 132; Townsend & Townsend, 2021, p. 150). Further, when the hegemonic Eurocentric episteme acquires a surplus of credibility mostly from interlocutors (as a component of Western modernity), colonial ecological rhetoric develops an ‘epistemic arrogance’ that puts a spectrum of ‘epistemic virtues’ beyond its purview, making it ‘closed-minded, dogmatic, blithely impervious to criticism, and so on’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 20). This epistemic arrogance restricts indigenous peoples from articulating their relationship to land and traditional ecological knowledge, constituting a hermeneutical injustice. This kind of injustice is always structural and develops when a community lacks the hermeneutic capacities to make sense of significant aspects of a speaker’s narrative because she or members of her community have been unreasonably excluded from meaning-making processes (Fricker, 2007, pp. 158–159). This exclusion is evidenced by the absence or marginalization of the representations of indigenous tales, songs and myths from the ‘bulk of literature’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 158) that deal with environmental, climate, and planetary crises today. Hermeneutical injustice manifests itself in the discussions and deliberations that take place globally on combating eco-anxiety. What is intriguing to note is that those discussions controlled by institutions and think tanks of the Global North, and more particularly the solutions ranging from promoting ‘techno-economic framing, geoengineering, and climate economics’ (p. 148), centralize the opinions and knowledge that are produced by the West-backed Global North corporates and think tanks. The day-to-day experiences and traditional ancestral wisdom of those living in proximity to nature and making their livelihood from it are not permitted to have a say on the amelioration of environmental problems or climate change. Farmers, fishers and forest people, from their close observation and encounters with nature, possess more profound knowledge about alterations of ‘Earth’s physical realities’ and are often in a better-informed position to speculate or probe on ‘climatic disruptions’ than the ‘academically credentialed experts’ (p. 149). But their voices and perspectives are not heard or attributed primacy because of an entrenched epistemic arrogance that these people possess ‘no acquaintance with the expert literature’ (p. 148) of ecology. The overall consequences of this protracted sidelining of rural and indigenous masses are structured injustices and fallacious ways of confirming that it is only the UN panels, government committees and Western modernized institutions of learning that are authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge on ecology, climate and the future of the planet (p. 149). These discussions illustrate that this type of communicative disadvantage and silencing is not an innocent ‘gap’, but rather a type of impediment or ‘hermeneutical dominance’ (Catala, 2015) whereby the dominant group’s hermeneutical resources are deliberately enforced on the non-dominant community.

The subjugation of the indigenous epistemology and curtailing the scopes of its representations combine to inflict what Fricker sees as ‘a double epistemic injustice’—in which the marginal people are ‘doubly wronged: once by the structural prejudice in the shared hermeneutical resource and once by the hearer in making an identity-prejudiced credibility judgment’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 159). The indigenous knowledge, thus continually ‘defined and contained within the environmental imaginaries of the European environmentalists’ (Braun, 2002, p. 81), is shunned, making it difficult to recognize that the perceptive messages about the environment endorsed by the West-educated scientists reach the international audience conveniently not because ‘the scientists were the only people to notice what was under the way’ but because they ‘were more visible within the circles that wield power in the world’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 151). The poor folks and their testimonies are ‘too much on the margins of those circles to be visible enough’ (p. 151); in this frame of thinking, it must be understood that the accelerating environmental tensions need to be looked at as ‘social’, ecological and pressingly epistemological (Guerrero, 2018, p. 39). Environmental injustices are thus inextricably intertwined with the epistemic injustices, both converging to reinforce what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms the ‘cognitive injustice’, an inequity ‘between different ways of knowing and different forms of knowledge’ (de Sousa Santos, 2016, p. 237), which occurs when there is an ‘epistemicide’ or ‘murder of knowledge’. In Santos’ worldview, the hegemony of Western science and its related discourses silences the knowledge of the non-Westerners, which he aptly summarizes as:

Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide. The loss of epistemological confidence that currently afflicts modern science has facilitated the identification of the scope and gravity of the epistemicides perpetrated by hegemonic Eurocentric modernity. (de Sousa Santos, 2016, p. 92)

The repression and murder of the knowledge, which Santos terms ‘epistemicide’, eventually imbricates varying layers of cognitive injustice in refuting the existing knowledge and stifling the possibilities of further production of knowledge by the non-hegemonic/subalterns. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh’s discussion on Western modernity’s corroboration of civilizational values through the Enlightenment writings, colonial projects, capitalist missions and predominance of the Global North’s think tanks exemplifies the sustained ways in which the knowledge of indigenous communities, poor masses and environment-induced migrants has been ‘murdered’ or annihilated. The ‘cognitive injustice’ correlated with this epistemicide, in which West-inspired organizations and Global North agencies predominate as the decision-making authorities, also intensifies the social dichotomies and aggravates historically induced ecoprecarity and ecocide. Once the knowledge-making and knowledge-producing capabilities of the non-hegemonic and indigenous masses are repudiated and trampled, it culminates in multiple forms of social injustice and ecocide. Ecocide, broadly speaking, refers to the severing of fulfilling human–nature connections, the subversion of non-human forms and damaging of diversified planetary ecosystems.

The Global North organizations and Western institutions functioning as extended versions of neo-liberal capitalism replicate the colonial definitions ‘of who is a brute and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not, lie at the core of the planetary crisis’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 195), and accordingly devise strategies and solutions depriving the agential participation of indigenous people and their experienced knowledge. This happens because ‘bodies of knowledge’ catering to environmentalism reinforce that ecoprecarity, ecocide and climate changes have no connection with the past, and all projections related to these alarming issues are made ‘in relation to a future date’ (p. 152). The lacunae lie in understanding that human societies have been capable of comprehending and responding to environmental issues even in the absence of modern Western science. When ‘climate migration and climate justice are discussed by experts, they boast that their negotiations are to promote “equality, security, and justice,” but in skewed ways, they end up preserving the “systemic and historic inequalities” (p. 158) that are responsible for these crises. It is therefore indispensable to map the historical precedents of colonial capitalism and imperialism with the matrices of neo-liberalization and then analyse how epistemicide and ecocide are entangled with the question of ‘cognitive injustices’ at different points in time. The environmental injustices endured by the developing countries of the Global South and indigenous cultures are generated and reinforced by ‘cognitive injustice’ (Barreto, 2014, p. 401). Unless the cause for cognitive justice is envisaged as being elementary to the establishment of social justice, the hierarchical epistemic demarcation and dominance of the Global North over the Global South would also persist. The ‘monopoly of Eurocentric framing’ (Zembylas, 2017, p. 399) needs to be dismantled, as there can be ‘no global social justice without global cognitive justice’ (de Sousa Santos, 2016, p. 13). An overturning of hegemonic epistemology and ethics is required to mitigate these injustices, and Ghosh’s work in championing the ‘people who make their living from the land, or the forest, or the sea’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 149) and their acquired knowledge of the planet’s ecology ushers in the embrace of decolonial ecological ethics.

Ethics and Decolonial Ecology

The often-inhumane subjugation and displacement of indigenous communities and the epistemicide of their ecological knowledge systems relegate them to the social standing of ‘ecological others’ and marginalized ecological subjects upon whom the environmental discourse, as a rhetoric of disgrace, imposes collective hierarchies (Ray, 2013, p. 3). This notion of ‘ecological others’ implies the consideration of an ethics of ecology that can assist us in preserving the environmental integrity, equilibrium and understanding of the natural world. This is a prerequisite for achieving ecological justice, which can be defined as ensuring justice for indigenous populations and their ecological knowledge systems. The Nutmeg’s Curse emphasizes the importance of establishing a ‘true ecological approach’ in contemporary social and political epistemology to address the ‘questions of justice’ on the environment, earth and poor around the world (Ghosh, 2021, p. 233). This can be accomplished through a reengagement of ‘vitalist politics’—that underscore a belief ‘in the Earth’s sacredness and the vitality of trees, rivers, and mountains’ (p. 233), thereby debunking the exclusionary objectives of Western modernity’s ecological approaches.

Multifarious movements are being organized in different parts of the world for reinstating the centrality of ecology as an indispensable means of social justice and showing resistance to the repressive capitalist corporations that follow the ‘citadels of official modernity’ in their exploitative and extractive missions (p. 239). The legal fight of the Maori tribe of New Zealand for the preservation of the Whanganui River and their triumph in 2017 is a case in point. The court finally gave its verdict in favour of the river’s ecology, elucidating that the river possesses the ‘legal rights of a human being’ (p. 238). Another instance of the ‘effectiveness of a vitalist form of politics’ (p. 238) is that of the sustained protest movement of natives and environmental activists against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US. This long underground oil pipeline runs through the fields of North Dakota, reaching Iowa through South Dakota. What is significant in this campaign is not only its claim to recuperate the land but the mode it adapted. The campaign has been carried out through the exhibition of various indigenous artefacts, the retelling of oral stories and the enacting of folk myths—all of which have been de-popularized by the white colonialist and capitalist mode of thinking (Ingold, 2000, p. 315). Besides this, the campaign also fostered collective practises such as building communal encampments and spaces for dwelling, cooking and sharing mutual experiences. These alternative patterns of establishing the primacy of nature’s sanctity and restoring the human–nature connection through storytelling and sharing showcase a powerful subversion of the dominant ways of knowledge production and dissemination prevalent in formal academic circles or intellectual meetings in the Global North (Gordin, 2015, p. 307). By embracing storytelling as a medium for creating and facilitating dialogues on environmentalism, these campaigns reject the age-old preferences for documentation, written agreements and empirical detailing, which have become the established norms signifying rational takes and logical interpretations of any problem. Ghosh’s work highlights that indigenous storytelling needs to be rediscovered as a mode of ‘global politics of vitality’, and the songs performed by the shamans are seen as rejuvenated epistemic expressions of ecological conservation (Ghosh, 2021, p. 241). The stories and songs epitomize new ethical constructions celebrating notions of pluralities, diversities and inclusivity and declaring that ‘the time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles’ (Tsing, 2017, p. vii).

Ethics, in ‘vitalist politics,’ addresses ‘how we ought to live and how humans should relate to one another and to the rest of nature’ (Jamieson, 1992, p. 142) and responds to the structural injustices that have caused the degeneration of ecological biodiversity, the epistemicide of non-Western and indigenous forms, and are responsible for accelerating climate hazards and migration (Northcott, 2009, p. 58). The reinstatement of such ethical premises countering the colonial matrix of consumption involves a recentring of voices and agencies that have been ignored, sidelined or suppressed and is associated with the validation of new epistemologies that no longer surmise themselves as distinct expertise but emerge as ‘collective ethics in the face of the world’s fragility’ (Serres, 1995, p. 78). This is also what lies at the core of ‘decolonial ecology’—that which provides an explanation and envisioning of the ecological crisis in integration with the other sociopolitical injustices and paradigms of enslavement. The ‘decolonial ecology’ encapsulates an ecology liberated from colonial capitalism and is ‘a centuries-old cry for justice and an appeal for a world’ and effectively carries out the responsibility of linking together ‘antislavery, anticolonialism, and environmentalism’ and eliminating the insidiousness of the Anthropocene’s control (Ferdinand, 2022, pp. 3–16, 128). It is a double healing process characterized by a distinctive way of thinking about both decolonization and efforts to make humanity aware of the environmental degradation of the planet. Such healing is enacted through vitalist efforts, which, if ‘integrated into the grassroots and livelihood-oriented environment movements’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 243), can lay the foundation for social empathy and solidarity, the fundamental tenets of decolonial ethical perspectives.

In the context of decolonial ethics, the alleviation of the ecological crises can be effected through ‘the active and willing participation of the great majority of the world’s population’ (p. 242). It is only through the reassertion of the dispossessed people and their discounted knowledge, and a reinvigoration of the narrative of humility, mutuality and interdependence that an overturning of the colonist epistemology is possible. There is no denying that a critical reading of Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a nuanced understanding of the essentiality of decolonial ecological ethics with its emphasis on alternative forms of knowledge that originate from the spaces that have been stifled, restrained, vilified and devalued by the resounding chorus of self-promoting modern epistemology, political history and economy and its intrinsic disputes (Mignolo, 2010, p. 2). Ghosh’s discussion of the movements for environmental justice, conservation and global warming resonates with decolonial ecological ethics’ in their inclusion of a diversity of worldviews on human–nature relations and sustainable goals for addressing ‘planetary crisis through broad and inclusive transcontinental alliances’ (Ghosh, 2021, p. 243). The livingness, powerfulness and sanctity of the earth have to be recognized, which, as Ghosh’s work refers to, is echoed in the concept of ‘Gaia’. The Gaia hypothesis, also known as the Gaia theory or the Gaia principle, postulates that all species on Earth are closely integrated to form a single, self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. It was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Gaia’s concept of collective coexistence is analogous to the decolonial ecological ethics that uphold an epistemic necessity for what Bruno Latour conceptualizes as a ‘new universality’—diluting the social differences and affirming the natural histories for harnessing collective ethical justice (Latour, 2018, p. 9, 94).

Conclusion: Towards Cognitive Justice

Western environmental organizations have tended to be unresponsive to indigenous peoples and/or settler colonialism, or have generated depraved visualizations of ‘ecological others’ through metaphors including the ‘noble savage’, which have profound roots in the activities of early environmentalists and rely on the rudimentary understanding of the settler populace concerning the actual lived experiences of indigenous communities. In the ecological context of colonization and neo-imperialism, subjugated knowledge must be re-established by employing what Linda Tuhiwai Smith refers to as ‘decolonizing methodologies’. As she argues, ‘the globalization of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge, and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge’ (Smith, 2021, p. 72). Ghosh’s work also calls for a decolonial epistemology that would retrieve the ecological perspectives of the indigenous masses. This can be accomplished by embracing a few basic methodologies that involve decolonizing the mind; knowing the history; decolonizing access; decolonizing expertise, practising ethical ecology in inclusive teams; and thereby facilitating a decolonial ecology (Trisos et al., 2021, p. 1206). In chronicling the injustices on ecology and the ecological others, Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse elucidates an ethical move towards decolonizing Western modernity’s episteme and centralizing the non-Western, indigenous and subaltern to combat systemic epistemicide. An analysis of his work also manifests that an ethical critique of epistemicide and cognitive injustice produced by colonial habitation cannot be executed properly without a pluralistic integration of the diverse indigenous populations and their ecological practises and knowledge systems. To ensure cognitive justice, a term coined by Shiv Visvanathan (1997), a thorough re-evaluation of the exclusive discourses of globalization and various knowledge systems is inescapable. Cognitive justice, in the context of ecology, epistemology and society, can be achieved through a fundamental questioning of the existing exclusionary epistemologies of globalization, acknowledging ‘the plural availability of knowledges’ (Visvanathan, 2009) and valorizing the potentiality of diverse indigenous ecological knowledge systems. Replacing the mechanistic and totalizing ideologies of colonial capitalism, a more comprehensive, multi-level and sustainable ethic of ecology needs to be fostered, and this is what Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse perspicaciously affirms.