The Changing Landscape and The Climate’s Fury In Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

Ghosh reflects the connection between today’s climate crisis and the Gun Merchant to highlight the ties between the past and the present to identify the origin of the crisis. The novel encounters the war between profit and nature that defines the modern world. Deen comes to know about the merchant from Nilam Bose, an elderly woman who had a trust and once visited the Shrine herself. The novel explains the extraordinary event in an ordinary human experience. Initially, Deen faces a challenge in learning to cope up with the experience and to connect with the human and nonhuman. Ghosh connects the Sundarbans forest scene with Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight Children’ where the protagonist Saleem Sinai takes refuge among the nonhumans. The novel reflects the scientific perspectives of climate change through the character Piya, a Bengali American marine biologist. When Nilima is in the Sundarbans, Piya visits the place from Kolkata to look over her research project. Deen meets Piya at Nilima’s lace before he visits to the Sundarbans. Piya acts as a center point to Deen long term friend Cinta, an Italian academic and renowned scholar of Venetian history, represents the spirit of science to explain the effect of climate change.