The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Nupur Pancholi¹, Sanjit Kumar Mishra²

¹Research Scholar, Department of Applied Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. E-mail: npancholi@as.iitr.ac.in, nupurvpancholi@gmail.com
²Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. E-mail: sanjit.mishra@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.29

Abstract

Drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) together with his nonfictional The Great Derangement (2016), the article strives to present that while advancing endless desires, human-centric culture and the idea of ‘good life’ drive climate change and environmental deterioration. It seeks to enumerate the devastating consequences of changing climatic conditions and degenerating ecosystems and their cumulative impacts on the humankind and non-human world. It aims to locate how human life at the margins has been affected by these cataclysmic consequences through analysing Ghosh’s Gun Island. It attempts to show that human interventions had significantly fuelled the global climate crisis in the seventeenth century, decoding the myth of Bonduki Sadagar that Ghosh identifies in Gun Island.

 Keywords: Climate change, human-centric culture, the idea of ‘good life’, environmental derangement, myth of Bonduki Sadagar