When the price of Nutmeg fell subsequently, they set about destroying the trees to make the spice dearer. The Banda Islands are known for the Nutmeg, a spice once so highly valued – since it grew nowhere else – that the Dutch massacred the inhabitants of the island, and sold the survivors into slavery to gain control of its trade. Ghosh is increasingly involved in climate issues and he traces the present crisis to the doings of colonialism in the book. His books are based on extensive research and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, a work of non-fiction, was undertaken as a project based on a trip to the Banda Islands, an archipelago that is part of Indonesia. The Ibis Trilogy – constituted by three separate novels – covers spaces beginning in India, is about the migration of coolies (indentured labour) to Mauritius in the mid-19 th century. The Glass Palace (2000) is set in Burma, Bengal, and Malaya, and spans a century from the Third Anglo-Burmese War. In an Antique Land (1992) was a non-fiction narrative based on his doctoral dissertation and set in the Nile delta. His writing involves extensive travel from his earliest work onwards. Amitav Ghosh is an anthropologist by training but is best known as a fiction writer, and he chooses anthropological subjects around which he constructs fiction – for instance, the people, ecology and legends of the Ganges delta in The Hungry Tide (2004).
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