Marshalling Narrative

In December 2019, Australia burned with nearly one hundred fires across New South Wales alone. In August 2019, the Amazon was ablaze with more than 30,000 fires, a tri-fold increase from the previous year. Between these enormous fires, a category 5 hurricane, Dorian, pummeled the Bahamas, and Cyclone Bulbul forced evacuations of millions of people in coastal Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, leading to closures of maritime and air ports. Extreme weather events were part and parcel of daily life as Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, made landfall in the US in September 2019. As California burned in October 2019 and Venice drowned in November 2019, several readers tweeted at Ghosh in awe of what appeared like prophetic scenes from the novel coming alive in the form of headline news.

The world is on fire in another way as well: people in Sudan, Hong Kong, Bolivia, Haiti, and Chile have been in the streets for months in protest of their governments. Since December 11, 2019, when the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the nation has erupted into protests against what the Act’s critics claim is yet another instantiation of India’s move toward a Hindu nationalist state. The kindling of this Indian fire began much earlier. One suspects that the crackdown in Kashmir last August was a harbinger (in addition to stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its statehood, the government imposed an internet blackout across the state, curtailing communication across the population, including journalists’ capacity to provide accurate reportage); or, one could go back to the beginning of the new millennium, 2002, when anti-Muslim violence rocked the state of Gujarat under the leadership of current Prime Minister Nahendra Modi (then Chief Minister of Gujarat).

It is amidst the twinned fires of ethno-nationalist fascism and climate change-induced disaster that Gun Island’s readers encounter a narrative that invites us to inhabit simultaneously the seventeenth-century Sundarbans and Venice and the twenty-first century fortresses of Europe, the United States, and India. Narrated by Brooklyn-based rare books dealer Dinanath (Deen) Datta, the novel reanimates the folktale of the Bonduki Sadagar (Gun Merchant) and the snake goddess, Manasa Devi, to uncover a submerged but enduring lesson about the folly of human communities, like Sylvia Wynter’s genre of Man, who believes itself to have conquered nature.

Gun Island treads familiar ground for those who have read deeply in Ghosh’s oeuvre. Not only because it involves characters and storylines from earlier work, such as his 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, but in how it continues to excavate from the historical archive stories that exceed the boundaries of the European literary and cultural imagination to which much mainstream history has been beholden. The novel opens in Kolkata (formerly Caluctta), during “the annual migration … of ‘foreign-settled’ Calcuttans” including Deen. His distant relative Kanai Dutt prompts him to investigate the tale of the Bonduki-Sadagar and Manasa Devi, who wanted the Merchant to be her devotee. Deen had not thought of the epic in quite some time despite having written his doctoral thesis on it. Unlocking the puzzle presented by the folktale shapes much of the narrative’s momentum; as Cinta puts it after watching a performance of it in Kolkata, “that poem is alive! It is about the here and now! It is more real than real life.” Much of the novel’s exposition happens through dialogue between Deen and two academics: Giacinta (Cinta) Schiavon, a historian of Venice, and Piyali (Piya) Roy, a field biologist who studies river dolphins. Cinta and Piya often occupy opposing positions and their differing approaches resonate with mainstream debates about the facts and fictions of climate change evidence as well as what causal relationships exist between human activity and the now commonplace climate catastrophes facing us.

Throughout the novel, Cinta guides Deen, and thus readers, towards the power of stories by disabusing Deen of the notion that folktales function as a form of escapism for the masses; rather, she suggests that we...