When Myths Speak Climate: Re-thinking Ecological Knowledge in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’

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Video 1: Characters and Summary - 1 | Sundarbans | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

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Myth as Ecological Epistemology in ‘Gun Island’: Re-enchanting Climate Change Through Folklore and Non-Human Agency

To view the NotebookLM notebook related to this blog: Click here.

Prompt 1 - Create a table showing each source with its publication date, author credentials, and whether it's primary source, secondary analysis or opinion piece.

The following table provides a breakdown of the sources provided, detailing their publication dates, author credentials, and classifications based on the provided material.

Source Title/Author	Publication Date	Author Credentials	Source Type
Reclaiming the Unreal... (Zakiyah Tasnim)	15 August 2025	Department of English, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh	Secondary Analysis (Research Article)
Spectrum, Volume 18 (Various Authors)	June 2023	Senior Lecturer, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Central Women’s University	Secondary Analysis (Journal Issue)
A Powerful Translingual Cli-Fi Story... (Lisa Schantl)	8 October 2021	Writer for Tint Journal; specialist in translingual literature	Opinion Piece (Book Review)
Amitav Ghosh Meets His Own Demand... (Michael Berry)	2026 (Copyright date)	Freelance writer for the Boston Globe and LA Review of Books	Opinion Piece (Book Review)
Beyond Multiculturalism... (TIJER.org)	2025 (Contextual)	Open Access Journal for Engineering Research	Secondary Analysis (Academic Paper)
Reconstructing Bengali Popular Folklores... (Animesh Roy)	October 2024	Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of Humanistic Studies, IIT Varanasi	Secondary Analysis (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods... (Joseph & Koudur)	2023	PhD Candidate and Professor at National Institute of Technology Karnataka	Secondary Analysis (Academic Journal)
Eco-Spiritual Threads... (Religions Journal)	18 July 2025	Department of English, Ball State University	Secondary Analysis (Journal Article)
Exploring Environmental Degradation... (Dr. Deep Shikha Karthik)	31 October 2024	Assistant Professor of English, F.A.A Govt. P. G. College Mahmudabad	Secondary Analysis (Refereed Journal)
Exploring Porous Borders... (Sabine Lauret-Taft)	30 November 2025	Associate Professor, Université Marie & Louis Pasteur	Secondary Analysis (Academic Essay)
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh... (Keshava Guha)	July 2019	Contributor to Literary Review	Opinion Piece (Book Review)
HAUNTED ECOLOGIES... (Komal Nazir)	May 2025	Doctor of Philosophy in English, Oklahoma State University	Secondary Analysis (PhD Dissertation)
Humans and Nonhumans... (Eva-Karin Berlingieri)	5 January 2024	Bachelor’s Programme Student, Mid Sweden University	Secondary Analysis (Thesis Project)
Nonhuman and the Anthropocene... (Ramesh Fayez)	March 2024	Research Scholar, English Department, Aligarh Muslim University	Secondary Analysis (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Kritika Kultura - Archium Ateneo (Vincenz Serrano)	March 2025	Editor-in-Chief and Associate Professor, Ateneo de Manila University	Secondary Analysis (Scholarly Journal)
Myth as Epistemology... (Kalaivani & Selvi)	August 2025	PhD Research Scholar and Assistant Professor, Vellalar College for Women	Secondary Analysis (Academic Journal)
Nonhuman agency in the Anthropocene... (UNITesi)	2024/2026 (Contextual)	University-affiliated researcher (Thesis context)	Secondary Analysis (University Thesis)
Out of This World... (Emily Merson)	6 October 2025	York University, Canada	Secondary Analysis (Journal Article)
Gun Island and The Great Derangement... (Forrest Brown)	15 April 2021	Climate writer and creator of Stories for Earth	Opinion Piece (Podcast Summary/Analysis)
“Gun Island” by Amitav Ghosh (Arunava Sinha)	20 July 2019	Contributor to Asian Review of Books	Opinion Piece (Book Review)

Prompt 2- Which of these sources are most frequently cited or referenced by other sources in this notebook?

Based on the sources provided, the most frequently cited and referenced works within this notebook are the foundational texts by Amitav Ghosh himself, followed by several key scholarly articles and reviews that appear across multiple bibliographies.

Primary Foundational References

The two works that serve as the anchor for almost every other source in the notebook are:

• The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016): This non-fiction work is cited by nearly every secondary analysis to contextualise Ghosh's critique of modern literature and environmental "blindness".

• Gun Island (2019): As the primary subject of study, it is referenced as the core text in all analyses, reviews, and comparative studies provided.

Most Cited Secondary Sources

Among the secondary analyses and opinion pieces listed in your source table, the following are referenced most frequently by other scholars in the collection:

1. Bose, Trina and Amrita Satapathy ("The Crisis of Climate and Immigration..."): This study (contained within Source 2: Spectrum) is a major point of reference for other researchers exploring the intersection of migration and ecology.

2. Keshava Guha (Source 11: "Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh..."): This review is frequently cited as a significant critical reaction to the novel’s structure and themes.

3. Rakibul Hasan Khan ("Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism"): This 2024 article has quickly become a standard reference for the most recent scholarship in the notebook, appearing in the bibliographies of several other 2024 and 2025 sources.

4. Rob Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor): While not one of the individual source files, this 2011 book is a "theoretical staple" cited by nearly all the academic analyses to explain the gradual nature of environmental destruction in Ghosh's work.

Meta-References

Notably, Source 16 (Kalaivani & Selvi) includes a list of references that explicitly points to other sources in your notebook, including Source 5 (TIJER), Source 11 (Guha), Source 12 (Nazir), Source 10 (Lauret-Taft), and Source 17 (UNITesi). This indicates that these specific papers are being used as the primary data for comparative literary analysis within the collection.

To think of this relationship, imagine Amitav Ghosh is the sun at the centre of a solar system; all other sources are planets (like Guha, Khan, and Nazir) that orbit him, but they also frequently "reflect light" onto one another through their citations.

Prompt 3 - Summarize the primary perspective of the top five most substantial sources.

The following summaries outline the primary perspectives of the five most substantial academic contributions provided in the sources, focusing on their theoretical depth and analytical frameworks.

1. Jarula M.I. Wegner: The Decolonial Shift

Wegner describes a significant discursive shift from postcolonial to decolonial critiques, arguing that this transformation radicalises existing ideas to confront the "continuing aftermath of enslavement". This perspective demands a departure from European conceptual hegemony and the "coloniality of knowledge" that persists even in postcolonial studies. By moving beyond Western elite university paradigms and European languages, Wegner advocates for transculturality and South-South relations as essential tools for decolonizing national and imperial memories.

2. Komal Nazir: The Anthropocene Gothic

Nazir asserts that the narrative frameworks of the realist novel—grounded in Enlightenment ideals of linear progress and human mastery—are inherently inadequate for representing the ruptures of the climate crisis. This source proposes the "Anthropocene Gothic" as a generative theoretical lens, viewing the Earth as a "haunted archive" of unresolved violence and non-human agency. The perspective suggests that only by unsettling Enlightenment rationality and embracing mythic or folkloric epistemologies can literature reflect the affective textures of a damaged world.

3. Emily Merson: Decolonial Feminist Speculation

Merson adopts a decolonial feminist framework to critique neoliberal climate action models that prioritise state transparency and quantitative metrics. This perspective uses the "transnational uncanny" as a qualitative method to reassemble repressed knowledge regarding colonial extraction and hierarchies of precarity. By reading Ghosh's work as a speculative intertext, Merson argues that literature can unsettle the authority of disembodied objectivity and affirm the labor of care required for planetary climate justice.

4. Zakiyah Tasnim: Reclaiming the Unreal

Tasnim argues that the use of non-linear narrative and uncanny coincidences in climate fiction serves as a resistance against "capitalist realism" and Enlightenment binaries. This perspective posits that animals, natural forces, and mythic beings must be viewed as active agents rather than inert backdrops to human drama. Ultimately, Tasnim suggests that reclaiming wonder and myth is essential for cultivating the empathy and humility needed to face an uncertain ecological future.

5. Bhoj Raj Adhikari: Biocentrism and Relational Ethics

Adhikari examines the novel through biocentrism, a philosophy that affirms the intrinsic moral worth of all living beings independent of their utility to humans. This perspective critiques human exceptionalism and promotes an ethic of shared vulnerability and multispecies solidarity. The source contends that postcolonial climate fiction acts as a literary intervention, reorienting the human-nature relationship toward a model of sacred interdependence.

To contextualise these viewpoints, one might compare the realist novel to a map that attempts to provide a clear, flat, and rational direction; however, these sources argue that the Anthropocene is a storm so massive it renders the old map useless, requiring us to navigate instead by the stars of myth and the rhythms of the earth itself.

Prompt 4 - Identify 'Research Gap' for further research in this area.

Based on the sources provided, several significant research gaps exist for further academic inquiry into the intersections of climate fiction, postcolonial studies, and environmental ethics. Scholars have identified the following areas where deeper investigation is required:

1. Integration of Diverse Non-Western Cosmologies

While recent work has begun to examine Hindu eco-spiritual frameworks in the context of Gun Island, current scholarship remains conceptually fragmented, often focusing on isolated themes. There is a substantial gap in exploring how Indigenous, African, Islamic, Buddhist, and other non-Western cosmologies conceptualize ecological belonging, karmic causality, and ethical relationality within contemporary climate fiction.

2. Comparative Evolution of Ethics Across Ghosh’s Oeuvre

Much of the existing critical literature focuses on individual texts like The Hungry Tide or Gun Island in isolation. A clear research gap exists for comparative studies that investigate how biocentric, post-humanist, and environmental ethics operate across Ghosh’s entire body of work, specifically tracing the evolution of these ideas into his more recent non-fiction, such as The Nutmeg’s Curse.

3. Formal vs. Thematic Analysis of the "Anthropocene Gothic"

Scholars have noted that while many studies provide thematic readings of "environmental haunting," they often fail to account for the formal and narrative disruptions these conditions generate within the text. Further research could focus on how specific literary structures—such as non-linear timelines, fragmented narratives, and "Gothic materiality"—serve as formal analogues to the unpredictability of ecological collapse in the Global South.

4. The Lens of the "Postcolonial Nonhuman"

There is a specific call for research using the "unaddressed lens of the postcolonial nonhuman". This involves moving beyond viewing animals and natural forces as mere metaphors for human suffering and instead analyzing them as active agents that contest Western anthropocentric subjectivities shaped by colonial modernity.

5. Expanding the Scope of Precarity

Current research highlights a lack of adequate portrayal regarding the "age of precarity" in contemporary South Asian literature. Future studies could investigate how neoliberal capitalistic ideologies and anthropogenic crises intersect to create new, unregulated forms of "hyper-precarity" that distinguish this historical moment from previous eras of instability.

6. Philological and Cultural Transitions

A significant gap exists in understanding the multicultural transactions within these stories. Many scholars remain unfamiliar with the specific mythic roots (such as the Manasa myth) and the philological nuances of the texts, which are often overshadowed by purely environmental or scientific concerns.

To conceptualize these gaps, think of current research as a pioneer’s map of a new continent. We have identified the major mountains (the themes of climate change) and rivers (the primary myths), but the dense forests of how these myths interact with other global religions, and the subterranean caves of how the book's very structure mimics a broken world, remain largely unmapped and waiting for deeper exploration.

Prompt 5 - Draft a Literature Review ending with hypotheses and research questions pertaining to this research gap.

The following literature review examines the intersections of climate fiction (cli-fi), non-human agency, and decolonial epistemologies, primarily focusing on the critical reception of Amitav Ghosh’s recent works.

The Representational Crisis of the Anthropocene

Scholarship consistently identifies the Anthropocene as a fundamental crisis of representation that unsettles inherited frameworks of storytelling. Amitav Ghosh’s foundational non-fiction work, The Great Derangement (2016), argues that the modern realist novel, shaped by Enlightenment ideals of reason and linear progress, is "poorly equipped" to capture the strange, large-scale, and unpredictable realities of ecological disruption. Realism’s emphasis on the "mundane" and individual subjectivity acts as a mode of "concealment" that prevents readers from recognising the urgency of the climate emergency. Consequently, critics suggest that the "Great Derangement" is a crisis of the imagination, where contemporary culture fails to reckon with a world where the "improbable" has become the norm.

Reclaiming Myth as Ecological Epistemology

To address this representational impasse, Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) is viewed as a significant departure that reclaims myth, supernatural elements, and non-Western epistemologies. By reanimating the Bengali legend of the Gun Merchant (Bonduki Sadagar) and the snake goddess Manasa Devi, Ghosh constructs what scholars term a "mythic ecological epistemology". This framework validates myth not as superstition but as a "trans-historical archive" and a "survival manual" that encodes past climate events, such as those of the 17th-century Little Ice Age. Myth functions as an "ecological chronicle," helping communities adapt to "slow violence"—the gradual, invisible destruction wrought by environmental degradation.

The Postcolonial Non-human and Multispecies Agency

A central tenet of recent analysis is the restoration of non-human agency. Ghosh critiques "Cartesian dualism"—the Western belief that only humans possess minds while nature is an inert backdrop. In Gun Island, animals like snakes, spiders, and dolphins are elevated to the status of active historical agents and "non-human interlocutors". This perspective promotes a "biocentric ethic" that affirms the intrinsic moral worth of all living beings independent of their utility to humans. Some scholars define this as "multispecies justice," where human and non-human lives are seen as equally valuable and interconnected in shared ecological futures.

Precarity, Migration, and the Colonialocene

Current research identifies an inescapable link between colonial extraction and contemporary global warming, a condition sometimes referred to as the "Colonialocene". Gun Island illustrates how the global migration crisis is a "karmic reverberation" of centuries of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black colonial dispossession. The novel portrays "hyper-precarity"—a state of unregulated insecurity for migrant workers—situating them as the "new subalterns of the global capitalist order". This "everyday Anthropocene" manifests as a "sticky" undoing of bodily sovereignty, where the environment breaches the boundaries of the self through mud, venom, or "hazardous transcorporeality".

Research Gap: Diverse Non-Western Cosmologies

Despite the depth of current studies, a significant research gap remains in the integration of diverse non-Western cosmologies beyond the Bengali-Hindu context. While the Manasa myth is well-explored, current scholarship is "conceptually fragmented," lacking an investigation into how African, Islamic, Buddhist, or Indigenous American cosmologies might similarly re-enchant climate storytelling and provide alternative models of "relational repair" in the global South. Furthermore, there is a need for a comparative evolution of ethics across Ghosh’s entire oeuvre, tracing the transition from regional ecological concerns in The Hungry Tide to the globalised "planetary environmentalism" of his more recent works.

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Hypotheses

1. The integration of pluralistic non-Western cosmologies provides a more resilient narrative structure for representing "hyper-objects" like global warming than the frameworks of Western secular realism.

2. The deployment of the "postcolonial non-human" serves as a specific literary device to dismantle the "Colonial Matrix of Power," rendering the history of extractive capitalism visible through "storied matter".

Research Questions

1. How do diverse spiritual frameworks (beyond Bengali folklore) reconfigure the "environmental uncanny" to foster intergenerational and trans-species empathy?

2. In what ways does the formal structure of the "Anthropocene Gothic" evolve across Ghosh’s body of work to move from a "crisis of imagination" to a "decolonial subjectification" of the planet?

To understand this field, imagine Western Realism as a clinical laboratory where everything is measured, but nothing is felt; Ghosh’s work acts as a forest at night, where we must stop relying on our "logical eyes" and instead listen to the "ancient rhythms" of the Earth to find our way out.

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