BACK in 2016, Amitav Ghosh, who has written books like The Shadow Lines, The Hungry Tide and others, found himself in his study in Brooklyn pondering about an article on Venice he had promised to write for a friend. Then out of nowhere, various ideas came to him and these became what is today his latest offering to the world, Gun Island.
The protagonist is an antique book dealer called Dinanath Dutta from Calcutta who lives in the US. Due to circumstances, the global nomad finds himself on a quest across the Sundarbans, Venice and Los Angeles chasing the legend of the ‘Bonduki Sadagar.’
At the launch of the book last week at the India Habitat Centre hosted by Raghu Karnad, Ghosh said, “For the many years, I have been thinking about various issues in different ways. I spent a lot of time reading pre-modern Bengali epics and editions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Apart from that, I also spent a few months in Italy where I heard everyone speaking Bengali and not just any dialect, rather the dialect I used to speak with my grandparents. It was an uncanny thing that I found myself reverting to. That jolted me and made me think about these connections and the ways in which things reach around the world.”
Like many others, Karnad also believes The Great Derangement (Ghosh’s non-fiction before) and Gun Island are companion volumes. The Great Derangement talks about a wide range of topics but the central question that links them all is ‘how is it that we live in this derangement which is our denial to what we are doing to the planet and specifically to the largest global issue – climate. The concern of the book – why is climate change absent in our fiction and why is it so difficult to do so? Elaborating further, Ghosh said, “Well it’s certainly my attempt to an answer. When I finally finished The Great Derangement, I sat back and said to myself what have I done? I have written a book questioning how fiction approaches these subjects and now I have to think of an answer. The thing about writing a novel is that you can’t write to a prescription as such, you go where your mind takes you. At the end of the day, these questions were on my mind, they did weigh heavily on me and I suppose I was working on finding a way. Also, it’s not just climate change, it’s something much more complicated. It’s the reality that we live in. Unfortunately, the reality that we live in is so fractured. I just wanted to present a picture of the world as I see it today.”
Ghosh uses couple of ways to draw out nature in his book as something that deserves an identity. Right at the beginning, when Dutta begins to glean the power of the folk story that he discovers at a temple in the Sundarbans. It’s of a gun merchant and the goddess Manisha Devi, a goddess becomes a personification of nature. “This figure of the merchant is a recurrent theme in Bengali literature, and in a sense it conceptualises the conflict between a profit motive and the world. In the end, Manisha Devi is giving voice to her kingdom, which is the world of snakes and poisonous things,” shares Ghosh, who recently won Jnanpith, the highest literary honour in India.But Manisha Devi is not the sole formidable character that drives Dutta around. There’s the great historian and an academic, Cinta. “The more I wrote about her, the more interesting she became.”