Revisiting Popular Bengali Folklores to Re-imagine the Past and Engage with the Present: Gun Island and the Tribulations of Climate Change

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh, in his 2019 novel Gun Island chooses to discourse on the antipathetic relation of human progress and the environment manifested as climate change. In this remarkable novel Ghosh visits two popular Bengali folklores: Manasa Devi – a snake goddess, and Chand Sawdagor – a merchant who was cursed by the snake goddess, and utilizes the stories to re-imagine a past in which certain events take place that eerily parallels the present, especially the issue of climate change. Ghosh’s appropriation of ideas from the epic Manasa Mangal Kabyo – from the canon of Bengali folklore – and shaping them to include pressing contemporary climate issues that oppress individuals, environs, animal habitats, and global major cities around the world, invest the thesis of the novel with global significance. Ghosh transmutes the folklores by reimagining the past, so they come to inform a global scene: dictating and vindicating outcomes all over the world. Ghosh concludes that absence of a globally accepted authority that would negotiate the human-environment interaction for the betterment of both is a dangerous gap.