What if memory could transcend a single lifetime? What if a three-year-old child could recall a life she never lived, a mud house by a river, the taste of fish she's never eaten, a mother who isn't hers? One of our greatest living storytellers, Jnanpith Award Winner Amitav Ghosh, returns to the Royal Opera House, Mumbai, for the fourth time to launch Ghost-Eye, his urgent and expansive novel, a work that weaves together family, fate, and the fragile future of our planet.
Ghost-Eye follows Varsha Gupta, a young girl from a strict vegetarian Calcutta family who insists she remembers another life. Travelling between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, the novel connects generations through buried memories, unexpected encounters, and the questions that define our existence: Who are we? What do we inherit? And how do the echoes of the past shape our understanding of a planet in crisis? Through his masterful storytelling, a single case file becomes a lens through which to examine memory, identity, and our place in an uncertain world.
Join us for an evening of literature and conversation about a novel that moves seamlessly between intimate human stories and the largest questions facing our time.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire), The Great Derangement, Gun Island, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Jungle Nama, The Living Mountain, Smoke and Ashes and Wild Fictions. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive it. He was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 2024 for his writings on the planetary crisis and climate change and the Pak Kyongni Prize, a prestigious international literary award from Korea, in 2025.
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