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.
Read moreWhat does it mean to remember a life that is not your own. Across cultures and histories, memory has often been understood not only as personal recollection but as something that travels through generations, landscapes, and stories. Myths, epics, and oral traditions are filled with echoes of past lives, inherited knowledge, and ancestral voices that surface unexpectedly in the present. These ideas challenge the boundaries of time and self, suggesting that identity may be layered rather than singular, shaped as much by what we inherit as by what we experience.
At the heart of Ghost Eye lies this unsettling and deeply compelling question of memory beyond the individual. A child’s insistence on recalling another existence becomes the starting point for a meditation on family, belief, and belonging. These memories are sensory and specific. They are rooted in food, geography, relationships, and loss. They refuse to be dismissed as imagination alone. In tracing these recollections, the narrative moves between domestic interiors and distant cities, revealing how personal histories are entangled with broader cultural and historical shifts. The story invites readers to consider how migration, displacement, and inheritance leave marks that do not fade with time but resurface in unexpected forms.
The novel also engages with a growing unease about the state of the world we inhabit. Memory here is not only emotional but ecological. Landscapes once known intimately are altered beyond recognition. Rivers, coastlines, and cities bear the weight of human intervention. As past and present collide, the book asks how much of the planet’s history is carried quietly within us, even when we choose not to see it. The fragility of the environment mirrors the fragility of memory itself. Both are vulnerable to erasure, denial, and neglect. Both demand attention before it is too late.
What makes this exploration particularly resonant is its refusal to separate the intimate from the global. Family stories open into histories of colonialism, migration, and climate change. A single remembered life becomes a lens through which larger questions emerge. Who do we belong to. What do we owe the past. How do we live responsibly in a world shaped by inherited harm and shared futures. The narrative suggests that remembering is not a passive act but an ethical one. To remember is to acknowledge connection, accountability, and continuity.
Ghost Eye ultimately offers a vision of storytelling as a bridge between inner lives and planetary concerns. It reminds us that the stories we tell about ourselves are inseparable from the stories of the places we come from and the world we are leaving behind. In listening closely to memory, whether personal or collective, literature opens a space where empathy deepens and responsibility becomes unavoidable.
