Gun Island

THINKING ACTIVITY - GUN ISLAND 

                                       Hello readers ! This blog is part of my Thinking Activity. The blog is about 'Gun Island' by Amitav Ghosh. 

About Writer - 

                             Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956) is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpithbaward, 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.

                                      Ghosh studied at The DoonvSchool, Dehradun, and University of Oxford, and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at in Oxford before he wrote his first novel, The Circle of Reason, which was published in 1986.

                               Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri,one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood of a Dan David prize, and 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal.He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.

                          Gun Island 

                               Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta’s world upside down.

                                A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey which will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood and about the world around him.

                                     Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

                               In 2016, Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement, an examination of collective denial in the face of climate breakdown. It posed a question: why did the gathering clouds of environmental catastrophe appear to present fiction – including his own, where he noted his tendency to address the subject only obliquely – with “peculiar forms of resistance”? Future generations would surely conclude that “ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight”.

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? 

Ans - 

                                 A crisis of climate is, therefore, also a crisis of culture, one in which writers’ fears of improbability, of depicting apocalyptic fractures of history and geography within the confines of a story expected to take its metre from the scale and scope of human lives, have resulted in evasion. Given that this dilemma affects science fiction and the scenarios of alternative history to a lesser degree, the problem seems to lie squarely with fiction in the realist mode.

                                 Gun Island brims with implausibility; outlandish coincidences and chance meetings blend with ancient myth and folklore, tales of heroism and the supernatural set in a contemporary world disrupted by the constant migrations of humans and animals.

"Amid the freak cyclones and oxygen-starved waters come the stories of migra­tion across the ages."

                                      Events turn on the mention of a Bengali legend, the tale of a merchant fated to travel the world seeking a safe haven from the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. It is a story passed down through centuries, with which Deen has been familiar since childhood; its retelling at a party sparks a journey that takes Deen from the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans to a Los Angeles benighted by forest fires to a gradually sinking Venice.

                             Here are some of the pictures of climate change :

                                 This picture can add in both of the aspect Climate Change and Migration. 

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

Ans - 

                                     Amitav Ghosh has used this type of words many times in the novel. Here are the list of that words.

* Land Of Palm Suger Candy - 

                                    “Land of Palm Sugar Candy” was Taal-misrir-desh. Desh is “country” in Bengali, and taal is a kind of palm tree that produces a sugary syrup which is used to make all kinds of sweets including a crystallized candy. I translated the phrase as “palm sugar candy” because the Bengali word for “sugar candy” is misri.’ “Misr” is but the Arabic word for Egypt. So here ‘ The Land of Palm Sugar candy’ means Egypt. 

* The Land of Kerchieves -

                                      In the legend it was called Rumaali-desh. In Bengali rumaal is a handkerchief .On the outskirts of Istanbul, where the Turks built their first stronghold in Europe. Rumeli comes from “Rum”, “Rome” – which is how Constantinople, the Byzantine “Rome”, was known in Arabic and Persian. The Rumaali of Gun merchant’s story is probably just a corruption of some version of “Rum” – does it not make sense that the Gun Merchant and Captain Ilyas would have gone from Egypt to Turkey. 

* The Land of Chains -

                                          In Bangla, it means ‘Shikol-dwip.’  ‘the Arabic name for Sicily is “Siqillia” – the resemblance to shikol. 

* The Gun Island -

                                          Banduki dwip, Getto in Venice where Gun factory was there. So in this way Amitav Ghose Unfolded the mystery of The Gun Island. Here Gun Island means Venice where our Banduki Sadagar was gone. 

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? 

Ans - 

                             We can discover theme of Climate Change and Migration in the novel 'Gun Island'. That's why we can see this both aspect many times in the novel. We can find History and Myth also in the novel. There are several characters who suffers from Migration and Climate Change in the novel. 

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

Ans - 

                                       In his last book, "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable", writer Amitav Ghosh had questioned contemporary fiction's failure to address climate change and other environmental issues, realising soon after that he had not done it in his eight novels spanning over a three decade long literary career.

                                      "Gun Island", Ghosh's latest, is his attempt at an answer to all those questions.

                                      "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," the author said.

                                        Ghosh was speaking at the launch of "Gun Island" on Thursday at the India Habitat Centre here. He was in conversation with journalist and writer Raghu Karnad.

                                   The book revolves around the life of a Brooklyn-based book dealer, who, on a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, finds his life becoming unexpectedly entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi.