Pandya Chandani : Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

Hello Friends!

Today I'm going to write about As part of the syllabus, we are studying Contemporary Literature in Semester 4. In this blog, I will discuss the novel "Gun Island" by Amitav Ghosh. This thinking activity is assigned by our professor Dilip Barad sir.

View Teacher's blog on this novel.

Amitav Ghosh

Official Website of Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956)is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary honor, best known for his work in English fiction. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and Southeast Asia.

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.

Gun Island

Presentation on Gun Island

There are journeys by land and water, diaspora and migration, experiences aboard ships, the world of animals and sea-creatures. Ghosh foregrounds environmental issues like climate change and the danger to fish from chemical waste dumped into rivers by factories, concerns that carry over from earlier books like The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement. Gun Island is also a very complex novel to understand. You have to read all chapters thoroughly. Otherwise you miss the connection of the story and won't be able to know further. We see the use of three languages in the novel; Bangla, Italian and English. The novel has two parts, the first one is Gun Merchant and the second one is Venice. Let's see some questions about the novel. 1. How does Amitav Ghosh use the myth of Gun Merchant 'Bonduki Sadagar' and Manasa Devi to initiate discussion on the issue of Climate Change and Migration/Refugee crisis / Human Trafficking? - In this novel Amitav Ghosh wants to talk about today's major situation that we are facing today, which is Climate change and migration. Also he talks about the myth of Manasa devi and Gun Merchant. From that reference he wants to talk about Gun merchants that he changed because of climate change and when he changed the places also he faced the problem of Migration. First we see the theme Climate change in Gun Island In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh makes a spirited foray into the world of climate fiction, a category which has received scant attention from writers, especially in our part of the world – a region, which for economic and other reasons is vulnerable, and will be disproportionately affected by the unfolding climate disaster.

The story of this legendary trader, Deen finds, has many parallels with the Bengali verse epics about Chand Sadagar and Manasa, the Hindu folk goddess of snakes, who is also central to the gun merchant’s story. He learns that the gun merchant has a “dham” or shrine in Sunderbans, the mangrove-covered deltas of south Bengal.(Ghosh)

Miss World Harnaaz Sandhu tallk about Climate Change

While discussing the theme of climate change our Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir gave the current example of wildfires that happened in California that we can connect with the theme of Climate change.

Migration

Deen talks about Animals Mogration in Gun Island

‘You know - temperatures are rising around the world because of global warming. This means that the habitats of various kinds of animals are also changing. The brown recluse soldier is extending its range into places where it wasn’t found before - like this part of Italy.’

- Deen (Gun Island). Pg. 214

Gun Island explores different forms of migration, starting from people and entire communities being uprooted from their native land to the drastic changes recently prevalent in the migratory patterns of different species. Ghosh gives many instances of climate related catastrophes being inductors of such migrations. He talks in detail about the cyclone Aila which hit the Sundarbans in 2009.

Aila’s long-term consequences were even more devastating than those of earlier cyclones. Hundreds of miles of embankment had been swept away and the sea had invaded places where it had never entered before; vast tracts of once fertile land had been swamped by salt water, rendering them uncultivable for a generation, if not forever.The evacuations too had produced effects that no one could have foretold. Having once been uprooted from their villages many evacuees had decided not to return, knowing that their lives, always hard, would be even more precarious now. Communities had been destroyed and families dispersed. . . (Ghosh 48)

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

- In Gun Island Amitav Ghosh used many words with it's 'etymology' that,....

1.Gun Island

2.Bhut - Ghost

3.Possession

4.Land of Palm Sugar Candy

5.Land of Kerchieves

6.Island of Chains

Gun Island

"Island within Island” (Rafi to Deen).

There is one foundry where armaments, including bullets, were cast. And the word used for foundry in Venetian dialect is "getto". And the world "ghetto" is derived from "getto" and it is connected with Jews.

3. 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?

- Yes, in contemporary times we have seen and faced this kind of problems like climate change and migration that is the current situation of today's time and Amitav Ghosh give idea about the current situation and threw that he make aware the people of the world through the work of art.

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

5. There are many Italian words in the novel. Have you tried to translate these words into English or Hindi with the help of google translate app ? If so, how is machine translation helping in proper translation of Italian words into English or Hindi ?