Assignment: Contemporary Literature in English

 Name:- Hinaba D.Sarvaiya.

 

 M.A. sem 4

Paper no:- Contemporary Literature in English 

Roll no:- 09

Enrollment no:- 4069206420210032

Email ID:- hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com

Submitted by:- S.B.Gardi Department of English MKBU.

Batch:- 2021 to 2023

Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh's Novel 'The Gun lsland' :-

Introduction:-

In the 21st century new genres of literature are emerging. Through literature, art and creative interventions people are able to understand serious problems like climate change, global warming, racism, environmental conditions, Postcolonial elements, existentialism,colonialism and migration. These all things affect human life and the environment. Every step taken by humans is affecting the environment. That is why it is important to study these

effects. Literature tries to unfold and address these serious problems through different narratives. Among these all problems, climate change has a vast field of study. There are debates and talks going on about climate change. Amitav Ghosh. Gun Island told a very interesting story of a pilgrimage as well as climate change. The narrative of Ghosh use to the myth Manasa Devi helps readers to understand this issue. Small things are helping us to look at

how it's affecting the whole world.

Amitav Ghosh:-

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire and Gun Island. His book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016 and to give the answer that he

raised in this book he wrote Gun Island.

Amitav Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honors, by the President of India and second in 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on Amitav Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. 

His novel Gun Island talks about climate change and its effect on human beings and on animals. It's not talks about climate change only but other serious problem like human trafficking is also the concern of the novel. This novel was published in 2019. Recently he has published one book called "Jungle Nama".

Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh's Novel The Gun Island:-

Climate Change and Global Warming are already beginning to transform the life of being on Earth.They threaten to catastrophically damage our world. Human activities are principally responsible for the increasing alterations of climatic conditions. As Nupur Pancholi and Sanjit Mishra write in their article, Ghosh’s Gun Island reflects that the ecological mishaps occurring in the Sunderbans and Venice indicate that the planet is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe. Humans are taking nature as an object to exploit to fulfill their all desires. 

The Great Environmental Derangement: Climate Crisis and Crisis of Culture Ghosh's nonfiction, The Great Derangement prepares the understructure for his novel Gun Island. The nonfictional highlights the cataclysmic phenomena fuelled by changing climatic conditions and underscores the prime factors that create these predicaments. Climate change has been occurring across the globe and it is very evident in the form of frequent floods, increased intensity of hurricanes and melting ice caps resulting in the collapse of ice shelves and so forth. Human interventions and climate change, both are gearing up the geophysical alterations of the planet. Ghosh's The Great Derangement narrates this situation while representing rapid ecological destruction in the Sundarbans:

"The great mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta, the Sundarbans, where the flow of water and silt is such that geological processes that usually unfold in deep time appear to occur at a speed where they can be followed from week to week and month to month. Overnight, a stretch of riverbank will disappear, sometimes taking houses and people with it, but elsewhere a shallow mudbank will arise and within weeks the shore will have broadened by several feet. For the most part, these processes are, of course, cyclical. But even back then, in the first years of the twenty-first century, portents of accumulative and irreversible change could also be seen, in receding shorelines and a steady intrusion of saltwater on lands that had previously been cultivated". (Ghosh, 2016, p. 7)

“Gun Island,” his ninth novel, deals with two of the biggest issues of the current moment: climate change and human migration. But it’s not homework. Ghosh is mindful of his task as a novelist — to entertain. The confidence with which he shapes a good, old-fashioned diversion around these particular poles is instructive. Escapism has its virtues, but a book unafraid of ideas can be bracing.

The novel’s narrator is Deen, a 50-something rare-book dealer. He lives in Brooklyn, but we meet him in Kolkata, where he winters, and eventually follow him to Venice — the global village and all that. In India, a relative tells Deen the folk tale of Bonduki Sadagar, or the Gun Merchant.

The Sundarbans are now one of the world’s vanishing regions but have always been difficult terrain. The 1970 Bhola Cyclone killed half a million people in this corner of the globe. But the story Deen hears, from yet another relative, is that a small pocket of survivors rode out the storm inside the aforementioned shrine, protected by Manasa Devi.

Deen’s quest also involves Piya, a marine biologist whose research involves tracking river dolphins fleeing pollution in the Sundarbans. “Wouldn’t you be stressed, if you had to abandon all the places that you know and were forced to start all over again?” she laments over the creatures (who deliberately beach themselves in a genuinely affecting turn). The writer doesn’t want his reader to miss that the animal’s plight is no different from the migrant’s.

Subtlety has its virtues, but the authorial heavy hand in addition to the doomed dolphin, there are forest fires in Los Angeles, a flooding Venice, boats ferrying migrants to Europe, even a moment involving a book from 1592 that feels like something Dan Brown might enjoy does not grate. Of course, this is what the headlines are like these days. The truth is stranger than fiction, and “Gun Island” is a novel for our times.

The Crisis of Climate and Immigration:-

Cinta who is an Italian historian in the text offers a pragmatic interpretation of the ancient legendary story of the Gun Merchant. The parallel journey of the climate-driven migrants of the past (the Gun Merchant) and the present (the underprivileged from the Sundarbans) elucidates that the legend is “an apocryphal record of a real journey to Venice” (Ghosh, 2019, p. 138). 

According to Cinta, the Merchant’s 

“homeland, in eastern India, is struck by drought and floods brought on by the climatic disturbances of the Little Ice Age; he loses everything including his family, and decides to go overseas to recoup his fortune” (Ghosh, 2019, p. 141). Pia despondently describes the present environmental condition of the Sundarbans and the world, “We’re in a new world. No one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals” (Ghosh, 2019, p. 97). It is portrayed that the outcomes of anthropogenic environmental 

devastations like global warming, sea-level rise, and water pollution pose an existential threat to all living beings on earth during the climate apocalypse.

Inhabitants of the Sundarbans live a storm-tossed and cyclone-ravaged life of incessant struggle and are forced to adapt to the frequently changing climatic conditions. Horen, a fisherman from the Sundarbans, stopped his fishing business. One sees in Gun Island, the resolute young people of the lands taking the bold decision of moving abroad, albeit illegally, to earn money for an improved and stable life.

The number of traffickers increases after each cyclone and they come to trap the poor and earn profit by using their crisis as an opportunity; they manipulatively take women to faraway brothels and able-bodied men to worksites. According to Tipu, a local boy of the Sundarbans, the downtrodden people from the Sundarbans choose to cross national boundaries illegally since they cannot easily arrange officially authorized documents like passports and visas. 

Tipu remarks that “the Internet is the migrants’ magic carpet; it’s their conveyor belt” 

(Ghosh, 2019, p. 61) 

Tipu and Rafi plan their illegal journey to Western countries in search of employment. But they get caught in the web of international politics of migration that takes away their independence and strips them 

of their dignity. 

Conclusion:-

Gun Island showcases how in the time of climatological alterations and ecological damage, the natural resources of the mangrove region cease to be abundant, which ruins the lives of the poor of the Sundarbans leading to conspicuous mass migrations.

Work Citation:-

Alam, Rumaan. “With ‘Gun Island,’ Amitav Ghosh Turns Global Crises into Engaging Fiction.” 8 Sept. 2019, https://doi.org/https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/with-gun-island-amitav-ghosh-turns-global-crises-into-engaging-fiction/2019/09/08/efe6b35e-d0ce-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html.

“Amitav Ghosh.” 2011, Amitav Ghosh - Official Website,

https://www.amitavghosh.com/.

Bose, T., & Satapathy, A. (2021). 

The crisis of climate and immigration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. Litera, 31(2), 473-489.

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2021-871879

Ghosh, A. (2019a). Gun Island. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House.

Pancholi, Nupar, and Sanjit Kumar Mishra. “The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 13, no. 2, 15 June 2021, pp. 1–10., https://doi.org/https://rupkatha.com/v13n229/.