Ecological Imbalance and Climate Crisis: An Eco-critical Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Crisis representation within the field of literary studies increasingly recognizes climate change as a defining global emergency, whose pervasive and multidimensional impact profoundly shapes both the material conditions of the contemporary world and its cultural imaginaries. Literary texts have increasingly become significant sites for examining how societies imagine, narrate, and respond to ecological catastrophes and environmental transformations. Climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has emerged as a critical literary genre in the 21st century, addressing the ecological anxieties of the Anthropocene by merging scientific realities with imaginative storytelling. This article provides an eco-critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), a novel that deftly intertwines myth, migration, and human-nonhuman interactions to map the contours of a planet in flux. The research hypothesizes that Ghosh’s integration of the “Bonduki Sadagar” (Gun Merchant) myth functions as a deliberate narrative strategy to historicize the current climate crisis. By embedding modern ecological collapse within ancient folklore, Ghosh reframes climate change not merely as a scientific phenomenon but as a cultural and existential catastrophe that disrupts the boundaries between the past and present, the human and the non-human. This paper analyses how Gun Island foregrounds the agency of nature manifested through the “uncanny” and investigates the novel’s depiction of climate-induced migration, arguing that Ghosh presents a world where environmental degradation and human displacement are inextricably linked.