Gun Island – Amitav Ghosh; Penguin Random House, Rs.699, Pages 287 Amitav Ghosh is back with a fictional work after he declared in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) that “the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense” and therefore, such improbabilities are rarely “accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction”. Ghosh’s new novel – Gun Island spins a yarn that attempts to defy his own prognosis, while it is tenuously tied to his 2004 book The Hungry Tide, set in the Sunderbans marsh forests of West Bengal. Several characters — Nilima Bose, founder of the Badabon Trust of Lusibari; cetologist Piya, Moyna and Tipu, widow and son of Fokir; seasoned fisherman Horen Naskar — reappear in Gun Island. This novel weaves contemporary environmental concerns, border crossings and migration and human trafficking together against the backdrop of folk myths and resurgence of belief in extra-sensory perception. The story-line features the narrator Dinanath Dutta, aka Deen, a folklorist and rare-books dealer based in Brooklyn, who visits Kolkata every winter and is drawn into investigating the lore of Bonduki Sadagar (gun merchant) and rediscovering his forgotten shrine in the Sundarbans, “the frontier where commerce and the wilderness look each other directly in the eye” and the “war between profit and nature is fought”. However, although Ghosh’s latest oeuvre is a novel with a narrative storyline, it’s also a polemical tract on how urbanisation and climate change have wreaked havoc on this tiger and snake-infested marshland, prompting large-scale human migration in search of sustainable livelihoods. It recounts Tipu acting as an enabler who helps illegal emigrants to find new lives in Europe/Italy/Venice. Far-fetched though it may seem, a Venetian lagoon becomes a haven for Bangladeshis, a mirror image of the Sunderbans where Rafi, the grandson of a Capt. Ilyas who maintained the shrine that Deen visits, is a construction worker. While recounting the legend of the Bonduki Sadagar, Ghosh takes readers back to folk stories featuring Manasa, the snake goddess of the Sunderbans who protects her followers and harms sceptical unbelievers like the gun merchant. The journey of the 17th century merchant is fraught with risks and adventures but recreates the cosmopolitan trade links that existed between Asia and Europe. Deen’s Venetian friend Cinta, professor Emerita at the University of Padova, unravels the puzzles that had intrigued him when he saw symbols and pictorial representations on the friezes in the shrine of Bonduki Sadagar. Although the answers to the riddles appear somewhat contrived, it traces the etymology of the word bundook (gun) to banadiq, the Byzantine name for Venice and is also associated with guns, hazelnuts and bullets in Arabic. The old ghetto frequented by Jews like Ilyas, formerly a foundry for armaments, turns into a refuge of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in more contemporary times. The journey of Captain Ilyas and Bonduki Sadagar is routed through Egypt and Turkey to Venice as almost like a magician, Cinta is able to establish…
