Friday, January 28, 2022

Gun Island

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  "Gun Island" by Amitav Ghosh. This book is part of our syllabus. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Contemporary Literatures in English. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Here is the link of the professor's blog CLICK HERE

📌Brief Sketch of Amitav Ghosh & Novel :
The Indian author, Amitav Ghosh, is the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, India's highest literary award, and most known for his fiction written in English. Amitav Ghosh's novels explore the nature of national and personal identity, particularly the identity of people in India and Southeast Asia, using complex narrative strategies. The Indian President awarded him the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honors, in 2007. He and Margaret Atwood were jointly awarded the Dan David Prize in 2010.In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine listed him among the top global thinkers of the previous decade as the first English-language writer to obtain the award. Amitav Ghosh writes The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His most recent book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016.'Gun Island' is the ninth book by author Amitav Ghosh, set in the same Sundarbans as his 2006 novel The Hungry Tide, featuring the same untamed and complex ecosystem of canals and flat wetlands in his birthplace of West Bengal that supports a rapidly disappearing wildlife.This nation of flood- and cyclone-ravaged people is always on the lookout for storms on the horizon, always one disaster away from ruin. On Gun Island, we return to the Sundarbans, where we see a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, as if we cannot salvage a landscape ravaged by environmental damage.

Here is the Official Website of the Author : http://www.amitavghosh.com/

📌Critics Review on Novel :
"Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ is fiction for a new 
world. It cannot be judged by old standards "
This, perhaps, is the backdrop against which Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, can be read. On the face of it, this work offers a continuity of many of Ghosh’s concerns in his fiction, among them memory (The Shadow Lines), history (The Ibis Trilogy, The Glass Palace), ecology (The Hungry Tide), and the inexplicable (The Calcutta Chromosome). It would not be wrong to say that all these elements make Gun Island what it is, the intersection of individual trajectories with larger forces affecting the world. As Ghosh told Scroll.in an interview, “It’s kind of disturbing really because reality is outrunning fiction in the weirdest of ways.” And by adding history, legend, and other intelligent life forms to this reality, the novel arrives at what you and I may call uncanny, but the writer prefers to term “preternatural”. “It’s clear,” he added, “that whatever it is, we don’t live in a world guided by reason. If we did, we would be doing something about what’s happening around us. So we have to look for some other explanation.” (Arunava Sinha, Scroll. In)

"Gun Island’ by Amitav Ghosh: 
The Bengali merchant in Venice"
The environmental devastation that the world is in the middle of today is possibly irreversible, and Ghosh is clearly conscious of it. In the face of such inevitability, Ghosh seems to have decided to throw himself at the windmills with all the urgency of a committed Quixote. Gun Island has bits of everything — magic, myth, history, science, zoology, etymology. It’s about climate change, but suddenly it’s also about migration and trafficking, and with the feeblest linkages. The result is not so much a Persian carpet as a patchwork quilt.He had his story right there — in the mysterious Sundarbans, in the sucking mud, the green waters. When Tipu is in the throes of his first vision, you are gripped by foreboding. Tipu and Rafi’s connect is uncanny and moving. The tracing of an ancient legend to its mysterious modern manifestations is as mesmerising as any account of the Illuminati. Ghosh should have simply let Manasa Devi lead him on. (Vaishna Roy, The Hindu)

"Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh review – climate and culture in crisis"
If Gun Island can at times feel a touch breathless – a detailed description of the habits of Irrawaddy dolphins, for example, giving way to an emergency dash in search of a rare anti-venom treatment, with mysterious symbols scrawled on the side of a shrine thrown in – then its underpinning is solid. Amid the freak cyclones and oxygen-starved waters comes the story – or stories – of migration across the ages; tales of escapology, of deprivation and persecution, of impossible yearnings for a new world that bring us, inexorably, to the terrified refugees on the Mediterranean. Which is, perhaps, Ghosh’s essential point; a shaggy dog story can take a very roundabout path towards reality, but it will get there in the end. It has to, or we’re all doomed. (Alex Clark, The Gaurdian)

📌Points To Ponder :

1) How does Amitav Ghosh use the myth of Gun Merchant 'Bonduki Sadagar' and Manasa Devi to initiate discussion on the issue of Climate Change and Migration/Refugee crisis / Human Trafficking? 
Amitav Ghosh wants to convey about the major situation we are experiencing today: climate change and migration, in Gun Island, by using myth. This tale of The Gun Merchant and Manasa Devi was cleverly exploited by Amitav Ghosh. The entire drama revolves on the pilgrimage of both Gun merchant and Dinanath. Both the people and the events are interconnected. So first we talk about Climate Change....

🔍Climate Change :
We observe a lot of instances on Gun Island that are related to climate change. Sundarban's floods and Venice's tides are two examples. We can see that Nilima mentioned the hurricane that hit Sundarban. Because of pollution and human interference, animals and other species are shifting their habitats. Fertilizer and other pollutants create a dead zone in the water, forcing dolphins to alter their location and movement frequently. 

"Eight days earlier – on November 12, 1970, to be precise – a Category 4 cyclone had torn through the Bengal delta, hitting both the Indian province of West Bengal and the state that was then called East Pakistan (a year later it would become a new nation, Bangladesh). Storms had no names in this region back then but the 1970 cyclone would later come to be known as the Bhola cyclone."
(p.19,Gun Island)

We can also connect the wildfire in Los Angeles today.Sir offered the recent example of flames that occurred in California, which may be linked to the blaze in Los Angeles, while discussing the issue of climate change.

‘Surreal’ California Wildfire: Why Expecting The Unexpected Is A Crisis Management Best Practice (Forbes)
Although most crisis situations cannot be foreseen, some crises turn out to be even more of a surprise than others. The Colorado Fire that is now raging on California’s Central Coast is a good example.

In the Second Part : Venice, when Deen and the other characters go to visit the blue boat, they encounter a variety of difficulties, including a tornado, strong winds, hailstorm, and rain. This is the ebb and flow of the season's cycle. We may also make a connection to today.

"Within minutes of leaving the airport we were hit by whirling squalls. At times the rain was so heavy that our pace slowed to a crawl. From our windows we could barely see the edge of the road. Even when the rain abated there was a strange menace in the sky, with eddies of inky cloud standing out against fields of deep grey."
(p.254, Gun Island)

"Climate change: Key crops face major shifts as world warms"(BBC)
The parts of the world suitable for growing coffee, cashews and avocados will change dramatically as the world heats up, according to a new study. 




🔍Migration/Refugee Crisis :
Gun Island is a story of travel and migrations, overlaid with myth and folktales, and the deepening crisis of climate change. It presents an intricately interwoven plot which connects human and animal, past and present, natural and the supernatural. Gun  Island explores  different  forms  of  migration,  starting  from  people  and  entire communities  being  uprooted  from  their  native  land  to  the  drastic  changes  recently  prevalent in the  migratory patterns  of  different  species.We take also another examples of migration and refugee crisis like..
  • Syria Refugee
  • Rohingya Refugee
  • Climate Refugee
If we see the reasons of migration in the novel, we find four main reasons: 
  • Calamities :
In the novel we see that because of the flood, Lubna Khala and her family had to relocate. In her community, everything had been destroyed. As a result, they will have to relocate. Many more people are fleeing the country due to drought, cyclones, floods, and other natural disasters.

‘A few months after this picture was taken there came a cyclone, really fearsome tufaan. The winds were so strong that they carried off the roof of our house. Then the water began to rise. It kept rising till it was halfway up the walls. We had no choice but to take shelter in a tree. Somehow my brothers managed to get all of us into the branches. But then we discovered that the tree was full of snakes; they had climbed up to get away from the water, just as we had. My brothers drove some of them off, with sticks, but
one of them was bitten. He fell into the floodwaters and we never saw him again. One of my nieces was bitten too – she died later that night.’(p.165,Gun Island)
  • Communal Violence :
In the novel we can find Bilal was a generous individual who aided his friend's family. He and Kabir are acquaintances. His uncle seized Kabir's property.

‘A few years ago there was a dispute in my family, over land. One of my uncles is mixed up in politics and his sons are the local musclemen for the ruling party. For a long time they had been using their political clout to tryto grab a part of what was rightfully my father’s property. Every time there was a flood – which was happening more and more – they would try to move the boundaries. If we protested they would threaten us.'(p.196,Gun Island)
  • Poverty :
In the novel there were Tipu and Rafi are forced to relocate due to poverty. Rafi is unable to repay the loan due to a lack of funds.

‘Yes. Tipu already knew some dalals in Bangladesh and he made
arrangements with them over the phone. One night we crossed the
Raimangal River and went over to Dhaka. The money that we had put
together – most of it was Tipu’s – was just about enough to pay for the cheapest kind of journey, overland, with a little left over, to see us through on the way. We spent two weeks in Dhaka and then the dalal put us on a minibus, along with a group of other men. I was carrying only a backpack, and so was Tipu. We had some clothes, a bit of food, and around 250 US dollars each, that’s all.(p.241,Gun Island)

  • Socio-Economic Condition :
Palash is a figure who is in high financial standing and is not subjected to violence or natural disasters. He does, however, have a fantasy or a desire of moving to Finland, and he is doing so. However, he was unable to fulfil his ambition.

‘I came to Italy as a student, you see, which sets me apart from most
Bengali migrants. Back in Bangladesh, my circumstances were completely different from theirs. Most of them are from villages and small towns, while my father is a banker, in Dhaka. My older brother is a civil servant, quite high up. I studied at Dhaka University and even have a degree inmanagement. For some years I worked as a manager in a multinational corporation. I used to go to work in a car every day, wearing a suit and tie.’(p.270, Gun Island)

  • Some Sort of restlessness drive people :
Some of the people are migrate because of the sorts of the restlessness and here in the novel we found example of Dinanath or Deen...

"Back in those days there were very few bookshops in Calcutta and their wares were far beyond my reach: instead, I had frequented libraries and second-hand bookshops. Reading was my means, I thought, of escaping the narrowness of the world I lived in. But was it possible that my world had seemed narrow precisely because I was a voracious reader? After all, how can any reality match the worlds that exist only in books? Either way, the fact was that novels had done for me exactly what critics had anticipated when ‘romances’ first began to circulate widely, in the eighteenth century: they had created dreams and desires that were unsettling in the exact sense that they were the instruments of my uprooting."(p.273, Gun Island)

Sir offered one piece of news related to migration in the classroom while discussing it.
"Deaths at Canada border: 'Cold' reality hits Gujarat village in pursuit of 'American dream'."
Dingucha village in Gandhinagar district is under international spotlight after a family of four - a couple and their two children - froze to death in Canada while allegedly attempting to cross over.(The new Indian express)

2) How does Amitav Ghosh make use of the 'etymology' of common words to sustain mystery and suspense in the narrative?
Etymology means the history of a linguistic form (such as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language.In this novel Ghosh uses many words with it’s etymology.

1) Gun Island:
Armaments, including bullets, were cast at a single foundry. In Venetian dialect, the term for foundry is "getto." The term "ghetto" is derived from the word "getto" and is associated with Jews.The alternative vocabulary for Venice is comprised of three seemingly unconnected items: hazelnuts, bullets, and weapons! The form of hazelnuts is comparable to that of bullets, which are required for firearms! The Arabic word for Venice is "Banadiq," which is the parent of the German and Swedish words "Venedig." "Banadiq" became "al-Bunduqeyya" in Arabic. As a result, this gun is known to as Venice rather than gun! So the title's ultimate meaning is a trader who visited Venice and discovered a ghetto-foundry.

2) Bhut - Ghost :
There is an email communication between Dinanath Datta and Tipu in part one of the storey, in one of the chapters titled Brooklyn. "What does "Bhuta" imply," Tipu inquired of Deen. Is it supposed to signify "ghost" or anything else? According to Deen, the Bangla word bhoot/bhuta means "to be" or "to manifest" since the Sanskrit root "bhu" signifies "to be" or "to manifest." As a result, "bhuta" simply means "being" or "presence." In the sense of "a former state of being," the term "bhuta" also refers to the past. We say "bhuta-kala" or "times past" in the same way. So this "bhuta" is "memory" rather than "ghost." As a result, it may be present in the form of memory.

"Look, I’m no expert on this,’ I wrote. ‘All I can tell you is that the Bangla word “bhoot” or “bhuta” comes from a basic but very complicated Sanskrit root, “bhu”, meaning “to be”, or “to manifest”. So in that sense “bhuta” simply means “a being” or “an existing presence”(p.110, Gun Island)

3) Possession :
The term "possession" is mentioned throughout the work. When a demon takes control of someone, this is known as possession. And the devil is nothing more than a metaphor for greed, a made-up creature. So possession isn't the same as when someone's soul enters our body and everything! We have seized control of that greed because of our own greed. It's also a type of awakening; you're becoming aware of things you've never thought or felt before. To put it another way, ownership is the awareness of things.
Demon.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s nothing. Just a metaphor for greed. An imaginary thing.’
‘Y’think greed’s imaginary?’ He chuckled. ‘Hey, Pops, I got news for
you: greed’s real, it’s big. You got greed, I got greed, we all got greed. Youwant to sell more books. I want more phones, more headphones, more everything. Fuck man, it’s not parasites we got inside of us, it’s greed! If that’s what a demon is, there’s no way it’s imaginary. Shit no! We’re all demons.’(p.116-117, Gun Island)

4)Land of Palm Sugar Candy :
"Taal-misrir-dish" is the Bengali term for it. Desh denotes a country, taal is a type of palm tree that produces sugar syrup, and misri denotes sugar sweet in Bengali. According to Cinta, the Arabic word "Misr" is used to refer to Egypt. As a result, Egypt is the name given to this location.

5) Island of Chains :
"Shikol-dwip" is the Bengali term for this. This is a reference to Sikelia, which is now known as Sicily. As a result, Sicily is referred to as the "Island of Chains."

6) Land of Kerchieves  :
Cinta inquired about the Bengali equivalent of this term. Rumaali-desh was the name Deen gave her. Rumaal is a handkerchief in Bengali. It's about Rumelia, according to Chinta, and Rumeli-Hisari is in Turkey.

3) What are your views on the use of myth and history in the novel Gun Island to draw the attention of the reader towards contemporary issues like climate change and migration?
The author's primary goal is to attract readers' attention to current concerns such as climate change and human trafficking. Ghosh exploited the Manasa Devi tale to do this. However, the way he tells the narrative, that procedure appears to be based on true occurrences from the past. To establish the items, you must tell a tale about them so that they remain in people's thoughts. That is why Ghosh employed the Manasa Devi myth, which was delivered in such a way that it appeared the storey was not myth but fact. What matters is that Ghosh wants to bring attention to the grave issues of climate change and migration.

4) Is there any connection between 'The Great Derangement' and 'Gun Island'? 
Yes, this novel "Gun Island" is a response to Ghosh's previous work "The Great Derangement." Because this book asks, "What function does literature play in the context of climate change?" Why aren't authors addressing it in their writings? And how can they communicate via literature? It contended that not enough modern literature addressed climate change as a major current concern. As a result, Gun Island serves as an illustration or explanation for those issues. We can grasp major issues like climate change and migration with the assistance of literature.
On the surface, Gun Island may seem like a fun, fast-paced adventure story, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that’s easy to miss on a first read. To really get the most out of this novel, it’s helpful to read it critically using Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book The Great Derangement as a guiding framework.Published in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press, The Great Derangement is based on a series of four lectures Amitav Ghosh gave at the University of Chicago for the Berlin Family Lectures. In the book, Ghosh explores the hesitancy of literary fiction to address climate change and questions why books that do address climate change are often disregarded or looked down upon by the literati as pulp or science fiction.(“Gun Island” as a response to “The Great Derangement”)

5) There are many Italian words in the novel. Have you tried to translate these words into English or Hindi with the help of google translate app ? If so, how is machine translation helping in proper translation of Italian words into English or Hindi ?
With the aid of Google Translate, I attempted to translate these terms into English or Hindi. Italian words are simple to translate into English or Hindi. CLICK HERE to get the spreadsheet with these words.


📝Additional Resources :

Amitav Ghosh on Gun Island

This group presentation done by sem 4 students from Department of English.MKBU......

📝Work Cited :
  • Ghosh, Amitav. The Gun Island. 2019.
THANK YOU

No comments: