From Myth to Reality: Rewriting Environmental Derangement and Refugee Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019)

Abstract

The long-term alteration of the earth’s climate patterns associated with increasing
levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have impacted the earth’s atmosphere.
South Asian countries are witnessing the severe effects of climate change in the form of climate-
induced migration. Amitav Ghosh ponders over Bengali folk legend (Bonduki Sadagar) into an
autochthonous story and draws a parallel comparison of the “Little Ice Age” of the seventeenth
century with today’s planetary crisis. The author has juxtaposed the past with the present to
intensify the calamity and evaluate how both humans and nonhumans are witnessing the
precarity through migration from one country to another for survival. The changing climate is
already affecting the physical and emotional security of vulnerable communities in South Asia,
as exemplified in Gun Island. This paper re-examines the impact of the “refugee crisis” through
the idea of climate realism, and arguing that refugee crisis would be the problem of postcolonial
state. We furthermore delve into the climate-induced migration, the uncanny and calamity in the
nonhuman world, and the importance of climate justice from the perspective of Global South.
This research article is based on a standard approach of ecocriticism and thoroughly examines
migration related to human predicaments in Sundarbans as perceived by Ghosh.