Gun Island

Hello Readers,

I am Asari Bhavyang from Department of English and recently we have completed a discussion on Amitav Ghosh's novel "Gun Island". It was a very wonderful novel and we all enjoyed it. Dilip Barad sir has tried his best to explain to us. we have got thinking Activity task so, let's begin...

Amitav Ghosh:-

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, and studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford. He was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University. He has written for many publications including The Hindu, The New Yorker and Granta, and taught in universities in both India and the US. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, set in India and Africa and winner of the 1990 Prix Médicis Étranger, was published in 1986. Further novels are The Shadow Lines (1988); The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), about the search for a genetic strain which guarantees immortality and winner of the 1997 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction; The Glass Palace (2000), and The Hungry Tide (2004), a saga set in Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal. His books of non-fiction include 3 collections of essays: Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998); The Imam and the Indian (2002), around his experience in Egypt in the early 1980s; and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (2005). His recent novels form a trilogy: Sea of Poppies (2008), an epic saga set just before the Opium Wars, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Prize; River of Smoke (2011), shortlisted for the 2011 Man Asia Literary Prize; and Flood of Fire (2015), which concludes the story. He has also published The Great Derangement (2016), a non-fiction book on climate change. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian Government, for his distinguished contribution to literature.

Gun Island :-

A lonely, ageing Bengali man who deals in rare books and antiquities in New York finds himself reluctantly drawn into an obscure legend from the Sunderbans. This legend is connected to a shrine to a man called Bonduki Sadagar, or the Gun Merchant, who fled from the ire of the local snake goddess, Manasa Devi, and paid a price for doing so. This is the beguiling premise upon which Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, is built.

1. How does Amitav Ghosh use myth of Gun Merchant 'Bonduki Sadagar' and Manasa Devi to initiate discussion on the issue of Climate Change and Migration/Refugee crisis / Human Trafficking?

Myth:-

working at one of India’s most widely read news magazines, I would often be frustrated when my editor shot down one story idea or other by saying, “This is not what our readers want.” In his mind, there was this mythical magazine reader that could afford to pay the Rs 30 for the weekly shot of news we provided. This reader was not interested in what happened to the small-town boys that became criminal dons in Bombay, nor was this interested in the lives of neglect most of India’s sportsmen lived in, no matter how many awards they had won – unless they were cricketers, of course. These mythical readers were interested, though, in the new Rolls Royce just launched in India, priced at about Rs 40 million, or just about $1 million at that time, in 2007.

These mythical readers are also who the literary publishers cater to – aspirational, middle-class consumers who are far more interested in wasteful spending, even if only in their imagination, than in sustainable living. The grim challenges – or even small victories such as Chhewang Norphel’s artificial glaciers in Ladakh or a technological breakthrough to create a new arsenic filter – related to climate change are not the stuff of novels that publishers feel will sell. It may be that they are right, but if these stories are not commissioned, if they are not published and promoted, how will we ever cultivate the authors that can tease out the complexities of life in this increasingly fragile environment?

Ghosh had insisted that fiction about climate change would be more impactful if it is situated in strictly realistic worlds to drive home the consequences to this world as it is, in real terms. But the occult and the supernatural haunt the pages of Gun Island and propel it forward at every turn – whether it is via hauntings or by the repeated appearance of the creatures associated with Manasa Devi – snakes and spiders.

But Ghosh seems to have marvelously lost his own argument. Nothing about the non-realistic parts of his story takes away from the telling of its story about two intertwined issues – human rights (specifically the rights of refugees) and the climate crisis. He asks urgent, important questions about what migration and movement mean, what closed borders and xenophobia are doing to people whose own countries have been historically devastated by colonialism, what this repeating of imperialist history means for today’s world. They find their most compelling realization in the love story between Rafi and Tipu, two young men from the Sunderbans who make the perilous journey to Europe together until they get separated. Through repeated encounters with the natural world, which is given the same agency it was given in The Great Derangement, he brings home the horror of the climate crisis.

It is the turning over of several binaries and his deeply felt, gentle turning away from the ideals of anthropocentrism that is compelling about his approach to telling Gun Island. Cinta, who is in many ways Deen’s intellectual and emotional mentor tells him:

“You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable. Haven’t you heard it said that what makes us human, what separates us from animals, is the faculty of storytelling? But what if the truth were even stranger? What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves?”

This is done through the experiences of extreme weather events, but also through quieter encounters with the natural in ways that urban populations are increasingly not able to even contemplate – a snakebite in Los Angeles, a venomous spider in a big city apartment that has never been seen before. It is in the terror of these moments that our utter lack of preparedness with the hugest consequences of climate change, when they come, is reflected.

2. How does Amitav Ghosh make use of 'etymology' of common words to sustain mystery and suspense in the narrative?

Many of the events in the novel that seem magical are dismissed and explained away by its more ‘rational-minded characters almost immediately. A seemingly miraculous ecological event that happens in a climactic scene towards the end of the book theoretically has a logical explanation, as Piya hurriedly explains to Deen, who is finally worn down into being wonderstruck with what is happening to and around him. The hauntings in this book, too, could simply have emotional or talismanic value to the characters they are happening to.

In the end, Ghosh seems not to reject the rationale for the mysterious, but simply puts them both on a spectrum of emotional experience. And it is via this emotional self-awareness, this open-mindedness that his protagonist begins to approach the world, and it's very real and present problems. This is the mental journey that a privileged NRI bhadralok man like Deen, with his particular background and history, is not equipped to make. In the end, the lesson he seems to learn is deceptively simple – in this vast and unknowable world that is being torn apart by human systems, this vulnerability matters, and fuels what we ultimately do with what we have to face in front of us.

The story has its problems, including its flaws in pacing, or its preoccupation with the inner life of its principal character to the neglect of many of its other compelling people, particularly the women (especially Cinta, who feels woefully underused and whose perspective could liven up a novel like this immensely). Even so, this is in some ways Ghosh’s most tender, even most personal novel yet – while simultaneously being global in scope. It is a story full of that particular grace.

3. There are many Italian words in the novel. Have you tried to translate these words into English or Hindi with the help of the Google Translate App? If so, how is Machine Translation helping in the proper translation of Italian words into English and Hindi?

Yes, there are many Italian words in this novel and without goggle translation, it is impossible to tell what that word might be telling or what writer what to say. I think the writer what to see a real picture of readers that is why he has used that type of language so, readers may also feel that they are indifferent space. yes, I also tried to translate the word in English or a different language, and while doing that sometimes I was imagining that word from a different angle and its meaning was totally different. I would like to tell you it was a great experience and it is hard to just depend on goggle translation if we have some idea of background history then only we can get to know the sence.

4. What are your views on the use of myth and history in the novel Gun Island to draw the attention of the reader towards contemporary issues like climate change and migration?

we can say that Amitav Gosh has tried to see the real Image of the world. that what is going to happen or what is going on in the world we can see that what Amitav Ghosh has written in his Novel that become true in the world. It also wants to see the readers about the contemporary issues that what is happening and how they can come out from it. we can see the magical world in it and there are chance-making schemes that also play a vital role.

we also know that due to climate change people are facing many problems in the world somewhere there is heavy rain and somewhere it is too cold. we see that if tide might come then it can harm people who are close to the river. we also see that people are migrating from one place to another for their better future they just want to get the good lifestyle that is is a reason that they are going to live the city life and leaving the village.

5. Is there any connection between 'The Great Derangement' and 'Gun Island'?

The Great Derangement, one of the central questions of which was why authors of literary fiction do not tackle questions of climate change given its grave consequences for humanity. But Ghosh’s treatment of this story in Gun Island is still surprising in some ways. For one thing, although key characters from the Hungry Tide (Nilima Bose, Moyna and the cetologist Piya) return in this story, in its telling and concerns it feels far closer to what Ghosh did with the Calcutta Chromosome.

Like in the Chromosome, the presence of marginalized, even forgotten feminine power acts as a driving force. Similar to the Chromosome, this power is channeled through mysterious deities who are worshipped for who they are and do not feel the need to explain themselves. Like in the Chromosome, the presence of this power challenges hegemonic ways of thinking that rely on so-called ‘objective’ truths.

In the Great Derangement, the author has asked why one of the major issues of our time – climate change – has been neglected by the literary community. In South Asia, the answer is easy to see. By catering to an urban, prosperous and global community, authors and publishers produce books that allow us to ignore the damage taking place in the lives of the marginalized. The literary community is not innocently unaware, but actively complicit in a process that allows us to ignore the damage that climate change is doing to the lives of the poor.