Analysing The Environmental Concerns And Human Interactions In Amitav Ghosh's The Gun Island

Abstract

As the world comes to terms with the grim truth of climate change and environmental destruction, literature is more important than ever in both reflecting and shaping our awareness of these complex issues. With massive environmental crises like rising sea levels, deforestation, and the extinction of organisms unfolding on worldwide stages, the deep connection between human societies and the world of nature has never been more evident. Literature, therefore, is a mirror to our common acts and stimulates reconsideration of how we treat the environment we live in, the impact of our actions and decisions in the long term.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Gun Island tells such a story, sad, as stated above, very sad, and as powerful, using instead a background of history, myth, and ecological disaster. Against the panorama of honey-hunters and school fire and a world essentially collapsing with the land upon which it lives, the novel traces Deen’s quest, from continent to continent as he requests a freedom, he’s not convinced he can handle and, in the process, uncovers not just personal fights, but the personal fight. Through his journey, Ghosh charts the plight of climate refugees, the world’s dynamic ecosystems and how the degradation of the natural world has contributed to the devastation that we are now facing. The way the novel intertwines mythical with urgent real-world concerns highlights not just the profound, invisible links between human behaviour and the environment, but the fundamental relationship between these two-and the way in which such symbiosis can quickly sour. This article offers an ecocritical analysis of The Gun Island by analysing Ghosh’s portrayal of the Anthropocene and its varying representations and criticism against human’s exploitative attitude towards their environment. Combining personal stories with an insistence on the larger environmental tropes, Ghosh brings down hard on the need to fix our environmental mess. In so doing, the novel prompts a critical reconsideration of our relations, personal, political, and ecological and a radical change in orientation towards our environmental crises.