Thinking Activity Gun island

This blog is a response of thinking activity  which  is  assigned  by  Dr Dilip Barad  sir . In this blog deals with the novel Gun Island which is written by Amitav Ghosh and some question of that novel. in the activity there are at least three points to ponder i have discussed these points

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh, (born July 11, 1956, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India), Indian-born writer whose ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and Southeast Asia.

Amitav Ghosh is a contemporary writer of the twentieth century. He is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary honour, best known for his work in English fiction. 

works of Amitav Ghosh

 The Circle of Reason  

  The Shadow Lines 

sea of poppies

Hungry tide

Gun Island

The Great Derangment

About the novel 

Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, traces familiar crosscultural patterns evident in his earlier novels. 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 describes the quest of Deen, a scholar and collector of rare books, who returns from New York, his city of domicile, to the Sunderbans in West Bengal to unravel the mystery and legend of a seventeenth-century merchant, Bonduki Sada-gar, translated “The Gun Merchant,” and his persecution by Manasa Devi, mythical goddess of snakes. In a talk held in New Delhi after the release of the novel, Ghosh stated that the merchant “was a trope for trade.” The merchant and the goddess dramatize “the conflict between profit and the world.” In the novel, the goddess pursues the merchant to make him aware of other realities like the animal world: “Humans—driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest of profit—would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things.”

We learn that the old Arabic name for Venice was al-Bunduqevya, which is also the name for guns. Deen concludes that the name Bonduki Sadagar did not perhaps mean the Gun Merchant but the Merchant who went to Venice. When Deen travels to Venice to research further on the Gun Merchant, he discovers that many Bangladeshis are being employed as illegal migrant labor. Their hazardous journey across the Middle East and Africa and the strong, even militant opposition to their presence in the city by Italian authorities form a major segment of the second part of the novel, contrasting with the Gun Merchant’s past, prosperous journey to Venice.

Women are a stronger presence and force in the novel than in Ghosh’s earlier fiction. Cinta is a scholar from Venice working on the role of Venice in the medieval spice trade from India. Piya Roy, the cetologist from The Hungry Tide, reappears in this novel and offers the aging, lonely Deen hope of a romantic partner. Nilima Bose runs the Badabon Trust, an effective charitable organization, and Lubna is a Bangladeshi immigrant working for the cause of illegal immigrants.

In depicting a wide range of diverse characters from various countries and subtly invoking myth and history, fact and fiction, Ghosh has created a work that contrasts nostalgia for a lost past with concerns for the contemporaneous.

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

“Gun Island” as a response to “The Great Derangement”Amitav Ghosh had questioned contemporary fiction's failure to address climate change and other environmental issues

On the surface, Gun Island may seem like a fun, fast-paced adventure story, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that’s easy to miss on a first read. To really get the most out of this novel, it’s helpful to read it critically using Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book The Great Derangement as a guiding framework.

"It certainly is my attempt at an answer. When I finished writing 'The Great Derangement', I said to myself, 'What the hell have I done?' Look at this book questioning how fiction approaches these subjects and now I have to think of an answer,".

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The book revolves around the life of a Brooklyn-based book dealer, who, on a visit to hisbirthplace, Kolkata, finds his life becoming unexpectedly entangled with an ancient .

2.How does this novel develop your understanding of a rather new genre known as 'cli-fi'?

Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but scientifically-grounded, works may take place in the world as we know it or in the near future.

As the novel Gun island is also deals with climate changes and migration crisis the novel develop my understanding of cli-fi , the novel had focused on literature dealing with humanity’s interference with the natural environment, and the most pressing form of this interference — climate change — still plays substantially into my reading habit. 

Ghosh’s choice of spatial settings is one of the main reasons that climate change becomes a steady presence in the story: First, he places his protagonist in the Sundarbans, an endangered Indian mangrove forest; later, there is a brief stay in Los Angeles where wildfires are raging; and finally, the novel comes to an end in Venice, which is already sometimes referred to as the next Atlantis. However, since the Sundarbans are the root of the gun merchant’s tale, they remain the spatial anchor throughout the novel and most thought concerning climate change is given to their struggle for survival.