Chapter 7 - Learning from the Paradigmatic South: Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain as a Parable of Environmental Resistance

Amitav Ghosh’s short story The Living Mountain is here seen as a parable ap- pended to his previous Nutmeg’s Curse. The essay discusses the literary genre to which the story belongs, whether fable, as the subtitle suggests, or myth, high- lighting its relations with pop music, Western philosophy, and Hindu beliefs. Eventually, though much simpler in its structure, the short story may gesture towards a new way of perceiving the opposition North vs. South, as an opposi- tion of epistemic paradigms rather than a territorial question.