Kerala budget: how Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ influenced a maritime museum proposal

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"Only in Keralam," Amitav Ghosh wrote on X, would a chief minister build policy proposals around a book like his. The post, brief and laced with the kind of disbelief that comes from being taken more seriously than expected, was Ghosh's reaction to news that V.D. Satheesan, Kerala's Chief Minister, had cited The Nutmeg's Curse as inspiration for a line item in his state budget.

It is a small moment, an author noticing his own work travelling somewhere he did not send it. But it says something larger about a state where books still carry unusual weight in public life.

In April 1621, a lamp fell to the floor of a wooden meeting house on Banda Besar, a volcanic speck in the Indonesian archipelago barely visible on most maps of the world. The Dutch commander stationed there, Maarten Sonck, had already been ordered by the Dutch East India Company to destroy the village; when fire broke out from the fallen lamp, he panicked, convinced it was a signal for revolt, and his men began shooting in the dark.

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The campaign was carried out under the overall authority of Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, enforcing the VOC's monopoly on nutmeg and mace, the only place on earth where the trees then grew.

By the time it ended, an estimated fourteen thousand of the islands' fifteen thousand Bandanese had been killed, had fled, or were enslaved. That history, rendered by Ghosh as a parable for colonial extraction, is what Satheesan reached for while drafting his budget.

From spice routes to state policy

Speaking to students in Kochi at Malayala Manorama's "Read with VD" session, Satheesan said several of his budget proposals had come from his own reading.

Among the books he named was The Nutmeg's Curse, which, alongside historical accounts of the Portuguese, Dutch and British arrival on the Malabar coast, had convinced him of the state's potential to turn its maritime past into a serious tourism asset.

That conviction translated directly into a proposal for an International Maritime Museum near Muziris. He also credited the economist Yanis Varoufakis for his grip on public finance, and Japan's "Silver Economy" model for a new department for the elderly.

Ghosh's book is not, on its surface, a manual for tourism boards. It argues that the colonisation of the Banda Islands was the template for a way of thinking that turned land, people and nature into resources to be extracted, a logic Ghosh traces forward to the fossil-fuel economy and today's climate crisis. It is a book about extraction, not heritage tourism.

About a curse, not a brand. Kerala's own maritime history sits on both sides of that ledger. Muziris was trading pepper, ivory and gems with Rome by the first century BC, a history supported by hoards of Roman coins and Tamil Sangam literature. In 1741, the Travancore ruler Marthanda Varma defeated the Dutch East India Company at Colachel and declared a royal monopoly on the spice trade, the foundation of what came to be called the "Travancore Model."

Whether the proposed museum leans into that older, celebratory story of cosmopolitan trade or reckons with the violence Ghosh's book insists on is not yet clear.

When books shape the public imagination

None of this is entirely new for Kerala, a state that wears its reading habits as a kind of civic identity, where public libraries reach its smallest villages and literary festivals fill auditoriums the way film premieres do elsewhere. Satheesan's session was built around the idea that governance is shaped in the quiet corners of a library — hardly controversial in a state where book culture functions as public infrastructure rather than private hobby.

It is tempting to reach here for Shashi Tharoor, the Thiruvananthapuram MP who has written extensively about Kerala's ancient maritime cosmopolitanism, describing Muziris as a Roman-era port that traded wine and olive oil for ivory and spices, evidence of a state with global links going back two millennia, and who served as an honorary adviser to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

What is harder to dismiss is the oddity of the moment itself: a serious work of literary nonfiction, not a white paper, nudging an actual line in a state budget, and its author registering surprise from his own timeline.

Nutmeg, after all, has form here. A small seed once persuaded empires to sail around the world and fight wars over a handful of islands. That its story has now drifted, however briefly, into the budget papers of a state once central to that trade, and back into its author's own field of vision, is its own small footnote in a much older history.