Synopsis
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, Chicago Review of Books and Amazon
From the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage
Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta's world upside down.
A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen's eyes to the realities of growing up in today's world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him.
Amitav Ghosh"s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.
Review
Amitav Ghosh is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire, all published by FSG. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix M�dicis �tranger, and The Glass Palace. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He lives in India.
"Gun Island deals with two of the biggest issues of the current moment: climate change and human migration. But it's not homework. Ghosh is mindful of his task as a novelist - to entertain. The confidence with which he shapes a good, old-fashioned diversion around these particular poles is instructive. . . . That Ghosh is able to sustain the book's momentum when its primary inquiry is so cerebral is no mean feat. The novel made me think of A.S. Byatt's Possession, or Tom Stoppard's best plays . . . The truth is stranger than fiction, and Gun Island is a novel for our times." --Rumaan Alam, The Washington Post
"How can novelists address climate change without turning their books into seminars? Mr. Ghosh's neat trick is to fold the subject into a juicy (if somewhat breathless) academic mystery of the sort popularized by Umberto Eco . . . The more puzzle pieces [Deen] fits together, the more chaos he reveals-which makes for an accurate depiction of the world as we know it." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A brave experiment in bringing climate change to action-adventure readers . . . Ghosh challenges the writers among us to remember that throughout history we have dealt with crises by telling ourselves stories." --Melanie Finn, The New York Times Book Review
"[Gun Island] is an intellectual romp that traces Bengali folklore, modern human trafficking, and the devastating effects of climate change across generations and countries . . . Ghosh writes with deep intelligence and illuminating clarity about complex issues. This ambitious novel memorably draws connections among history, politics, and mythology." --Publishers Weekly
"Ghosh seductively combines old-fashioned storytelling with keen research and a socially conscious sensibility to enthralling and piquantly enlightening affect." --Booklist
"In the face of apocalyptic climate change, an Indian immigrant searches for the truth behind a Bengali legend . . . [Ghosh] blends elements of journalism, folklore, science, and history to describe a world on the verge of catastrophe . . . Involving and intricate, [Gun Island] speaks urgently to a time growing ever more perilous." --Kirkus
"A tender, attentive and engaging account of the ways in which an individual sensibility might be altered by ironies of history, chance alliances and climatological mutations . . . Gun Island is a rich and rewarding novel that reaffirms the transformative power of topographical and human connection, and registers the rhythms of the quiet and the unquiet life." --Matthew Adams, The Spectator (London)
"Flitting across continents, Ghosh deftly summons up a pungent sense of place, whether in the mangrove swamps of Bengal or the misty, cobbled streets of Venice. The past lurks convincingly in the present." --Siobhan Murphy, The Times (London)
"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 Guardian (Book of the Day)
"A Bengali Da Vinci Code . . . Gun Island is a book of reckless and persuasive scope, a huge, rambunctious reckoning with our environmental declension. Ghosh draws strong parallels between human and animal displacement, as refugee boats and migrating whales meet in the ocean." --Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times (London)
"A novel that is as contemporary and compelling as can be . . . Ghosh has emerged in rude writing health from the 19th century world of opium trade. Taut and gripping, Gun Island is a parable for our times." --Soumya Bhattacharya, Hindustan Times
"In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh, an important international writer, asked why writers avoid the foremost subject in our lives-climate change. In Gun Island it is unmistakably the central issue. With sweeping exuberant style and extraordinary linguistic facility, Ghosh takes us into a world where desperate refugees trickle through borders like water from melting ice, but where massing animals find no escapes. Old legends and ancient myths take on new meaning. The difficulties of characters in the Sundarbans begin to appear the world over as the climate becomes a forcing element. Our ordinary lives with air travel, cell phones, friends in distant places, smart-mouth teenagers, life insurance, money and investment concerns intersect with forest fire, flooding, storms. This important novel is an account of our current world, the one few writers have had the courage to face." -Annie Proulx, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
"Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island is an extraordinary reading experience from one of our greatest living storytellers. Ghosh masterfully collocates disparate worlds to create a story of family, self, history, and destiny. I'm in awe." -Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom
Gun Island
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, Chicago Review of Books and Amazon From the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta’s world upside down. A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him. Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.
Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition."
The Hungry Tide
Three lives collide on an island off India: “An engrossing tale of caste and culture… introduces readers to a little-known world.”—Entertainment Weekly Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is extremely precarious. Attacks by tigers are common. Unrest and eviction are constant threats. At any moment, tidal floods may rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people collide. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, they are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea. Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three launch into the elaborate backwaters, they are drawn unawares into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll as powerful as the ravaging tide. From the national bestselling author of Gun Island, The Hungry Tide was a winner of the Crossword Book Prize and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. “A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story that’s full of romance, suspense, and poetry.”—The Washington Post “Masterful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the national bestselling author of Gun Island, The Hungry Tide was a winner of the Crossword Book Prize and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. “A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story ..."
The Great Derangement
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres."
Jungle Nama
Jungle Nama is Amitav Ghosh's verse adaptation of an episode from the legend of Bon Bibi, a tale popular in the villages of the Sundarban, which also lies at the heart of the novel The Hungry Tide. It is the story of the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey, and his mother; it is also the story of Dokkhin Rai, a mighty spirit who appears to humans as a tiger, of Bon Bibi, the benign goddess of the forest, and her warrior brother Shah Jongoli. The original print version of this legend, dating back to the nineteenth century, is composed in a Bengali verse meter known as dwipodi poyar. Jungle Nama is a free adaptation of the legend, told entirely in a poyar-like meter of twenty-four syllable couplets that replicate the cadence of the original. The first-ever book in verse by Amitav Ghosh, Jungle Nama evokes the wonder of the Sundarban through its poetry, accompanied by stunning artwork by the renowned artist Salman Toor. This is an illuminated edition of a fabulous folk tale that every book lover will want to possess.
Jungle Nama is Amitav Ghosh's verse adaptation of an episode from the legend of Bon Bibi, a tale popular in the villages of the Sundarban, which also lies at the heart of the novel The Hungry Tide."
The Nutmeg's Curse
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.
"The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis frames climate change and the Anthropocene as the culmination of a history that begins with the discovery of the New World and of the sea route to the Indian Ocean."
The Living Mountain
A new story from internationally renowned author Amitav Ghosh, The Living Mountain is a cautionary tale of how we have systematically exploited nature, leading to an environmental collapse. Recounted as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous valley dwellers who live and prosper in its shelter; the assault on the mountain for commercial benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole aim is to reap the bounty of nature; and the disaster that unfolds as a result. The Living Mountain is especially relevant today when we have been battling a pandemic and are facing a climate catastrophe: both of which are products of our insufficient understanding of mankind's relationship with nature, and our sustained appropriation and abuse of natural resources. This is a book of our times, for our times, and it will resonate strongly with readers of all ages.
Recounted as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous valley dwellers who live and prosper in its shelter; the assault on the mountain for commercial benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole aim is ..."
Citizenship, Law and Literature
This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.
In this book , Ghosh writes that posterity might say that “ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight.”22 Gun Island ..."
Mahaparbat
A new story from internationally renowned author Amitav Ghosh, Mahaparbat is a cautionary tale of how we have systematically exploited nature, leading to an environmental collapse. Recounted as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous valley dwellers who live and prosper in its shelter; the assault on the mountain for commercial benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole aim is to reap the bounty of nature; and the disaster that unfolds as a result. Mahaparbat is especially relevant today when we have been battling a pandemic and are facing a climate catastrophe: both of which are products of our insufficient understanding of mankind's relationship with nature, and our sustained appropriation and abuse of natural resources. This is a book of our times, for our times, and it will resonate strongly with readers of all ages.
Recounted as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous valley dwellers who live and prosper in its shelter; the assault on the mountain for commercial benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole aim is ..."
Climate Changes Global Perspectives
“The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World.” Humanities, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, p. 25. Gaines, Elliot. ... “ Amitav Ghosh on Myth, Magic and His New Novel , ' Gun Island '.” mint, 25 June 2019, ..."
Smoke and Ashes
** A THE SUNDAY TIMES BEST 100 BEST CRIME NOVELS SINCE 1945** 'Smoke and Ashes is Abir Mukherjee's best book yet; a brilliantly conceived murder mystery set amidst political and social turmoil - beautifully crafted' C.J. Sansom India, 1921. Captain Sam Wyndham is battling a serious addiction to opium that he must keep secret from his superiors in the Calcutta police force. But Wyndham finds himself in a tight spot when he stumbles across a corpse in an opium den. When he then comes across a second body bearing the same injuries, Wyndham is convinced that there's a deranged killer on the loose. However, revealing his presence in the opium den could cost him his career. As Wyndham and Sergeant 'Surrender-not' Banerjee set out to solve the two murders, Wyndham must tread carefully, keeping his personal demons secret, before someone else turns up dead... SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 CWA SAPERE HISTORICAL DAGGER SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 HWA GOLD CROWN LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 CWA GOLD DAGGER Praise for the Wyndham and Banerjee series: 'It is the flamboyant evocation of Calcutta that makes this such a mesmerising read' Guardian 'A thought-provoking rollercoaster' Ian Rankin 'Cracking... A journey into the dark underbelly of the British Raj' Daily Express If you enjoyed Smoke and Ashes further books in the Wyndham and Banerjee series are available now: A Rising Man A Necessary Evil Death in the East The Shadows of Men
** A THE SUNDAY TIMES BEST 100 BEST CRIME NOVELS SINCE 1945** 'Smoke and Ashes is Abir Mukherjee's best book yet; a brilliantly conceived murder mystery set amidst political and social turmoil - beautifully crafted' C.J. Sansom India, 1921."
Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature
This volume studies the representation of religion in South Asian Anglophone literature of the 20th and 21st century. It traces the contours of South Asian writing through the consequences of the complex contesting forces of blasphemy and secularization. Employing a cross disciplinary approach, it discusses various key issues such as religious fundamentalism, Islamophobia, religious majoritarianism, nationalism, and secularism. It also provides an account of the reception of this writing within the changing conceptions of racial ‘Others’ and cultural difference, particularly with respect to minority writers, in terms of ethnic background and lack of access to social mobility. The volume features essays on key texts including The Hungry Tide, The Enchantress of Florence, In Times of Seige, One Part Woman, Anil’s Ghost, The Book of Gold Leaves, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, The Black Coat and Swarnalata, among others. An important contribution to the study of South Asian literature, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of literary studies, religious studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, and South Asian studies.
authority” (Banerjee 2017: 186) defines their appeal for Amitav Ghosh . ... Gun Island , furthermore, is a novel about climate change and climate justice, which “resists literary fiction ” because of “its resistance to language itself” ..."
Global Literary Studies
While the very existence of global literary studies as an institutionalised field is not yet fully established, the global turn in various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences has been gaining traction in recent years. This book aims to contribute to the field of global literary studies with a more inclusive and decentralising approach. Specifically, it responds to a double demand: the need for expanding openness to other ways of seeing the global literary space by including multiple literary and cultural traditions and other interdisciplinary perspectives in the discussion, and the need for conceptual models and different case studies that will help develop a global approach in four key avenues of research: global translation flows and translation policies, the post-1989 novel as a global form, global literary environments, and a global perspective on film and cinema history. Gathering contributions from international scholars with expertise in various areas of research, the volume is structured around five target concepts: space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. We also take gender and LGBTQ+ perspectives, as well as a digital approach.
... features in Amitav Ghosh's novel , The Hungry Tide (2004) and his latest work, Gun Island (2019). Both novels blend natural, historical, and planetary time in their narratives, and are formally shaped by the ferocity of tides and ..."
Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy
Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-José Martín-González draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today’s most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martín-González explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.
islands.”14 Ghosh's appeal for these maritime topographies—which also applies to Gun Island (2019), his latest novel to date—makes his literary production an apt object of study from the viewpoint of maritime criticism."
Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence
Disease, pestilence and contagion have been an integral component of human lives and stories. This book explores the articulations and representations of the vulnerability of life or the trauma of death in literature about epidemics both from India and around the world. This book critically engages with stories and narratives that have dealt with pandemics or epidemics in the past and in contemporary times to see how these texts present human life coming to terms with upheaval, fear and uncertainty. Set in various places and times, the literature examined in this book explores the themes of human suffering and resilience, inequality, corruption, the ruin of civilizations and the rituals of grief and remembrance. The chapters in this volume cover a wide spatio-temporal trajectory analysing the writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Jack London, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Sarat Chand, Pandita Ramabai and Christina Sweeney-Baird, among others. It gives readers a glimpse into both grounded and fantastical realities where disease and death clash with human psychology and where philosophy, politics and social values are critiqued and problematized. This book will be of interest to students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy. General readers too will find this exciting as it covers authors from across the world.
Edited by Paula R. Backscheider. W.W. Norton and Co., 1992. Duffy, Enda. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Duke UP, 2009. Ghosh , Amitav . Gun Island: A Novel . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hobbes, Thomas. Cive."
Postsecular Poetics
This book is the first full-length study of the postsecular in African literatures. Religion, secularism, and the intricate negotiations between the two, codified in recent criticism as postsecularism, are fundamental conditions of globalized modernity. These concerns have been addressed in social science disciplines, but they have largely been neglected in postcolonial and literary studies. To remedy this oversight, this monograph draws together four areas of study: it brings debates in religious and postsecular studies to bear on African literatures and postcolonial studies. The focus of this interdisciplinary study is to understand how postsecular negotiations manifest in postcolonial African settings and how they are represented and registered in fiction. Through this focus, this book reveals how African and African-diasporic authors radically disrupt the epistemological and ontological modalities of globalized literary production, often characterized as secular, and imagine alternatives which incorporate the sacred into a postsecular world.
Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction Rebekah Cumpsty ... A similarly emplaced iteration of the sublime is evident in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and its follow-up Gun Island . Both novels are set ..."
Symbolism 2020
This special anniversary volume of Symbolism explores the nexus between symbolic signification and the future from an interdisciplinary perspective. How, contributors ask, has the future been variously rendered in symbolic terms? How do symbols and symbolic reference shape our ideas of the future? To what extent are symbols constitutive of futures, and to what extent do they restrain communication about what is possible and the imagination of fundamental change? Moreover, how have symbolic practices shaped not only artistic representations of the future, but also scientific attempts at forecasting and modelling it? What, then, is the relevance of symbolism for negotiations of the future in cultural and academic production? In essays ranging from literary and film studies to the philosophy of art and ecological modelling, the volume seeks to lay groundwork in theorizing and historicising ‘symbols of the future’ as much as ‘the future of symbolism’.
Nilufer E. Bharucha Abstract Amitav Ghosh has in his fiction and prose engaged with the apocalyptic impact of an ... The impact of the Anthropocene is as evident in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) 2 and Gun Island (2019), ..."
Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction
With the increasing interest of pop culture and academia towards environmental issues, which has simultaneously given rise to fiction and artworks dealing with interdisciplinary issues, climate change is an undeniable reality of our time. In accordance with the severe environmental degradation and health crises today, including the COVID-19 pandemic, human beings are awakening to this reality through climate fiction (cli-fi), which depicts ways to deal with the anthropogenic transformations on Earth through apocalyptic worlds as displayed in works of literature, media and art. Appealing to a wide range of readers, from NGOs to students, this book fills a gap in the fields of literature, media and art, and sheds light on the inevitable interconnection of humankind with the nonhuman environment through effective descriptions of associable conditions in the works of climate fiction.
novel itself has been banished to what Amitav Ghosh has described as “the outhouses [of] science fiction and fantasy. ... and aquatic language in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Gun Island ,” Green Letters – Studies in Ecocriticism; ..."
India before Europe
Second edition of the leading textbook on India's art, architecture, literature, religions, political and economic history, c. 1200 to 1750.
In the first edition of this book , published in 2006, we noted that people of all ages in any big South Asian city were chatting on cell ... says in Amitav Ghosh's 2019 novel Gun Island , “We need phones even more than city people do."
Ocean as Method
Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future. The volume: • Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; • Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of “native travel”; •Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement; •Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far. As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.
Amitav Ghosh , in his recent novel Gun Island (2019), creates su an ar ipelago of connections between the Sundarbans mangrove swamps in the Bay of Bengal and the sinking city of Venice. Bangladeshi migrants move across the waters to ..."
Bengal and Italy
The ten chapters collected in this book manifest the current global interest in trans-border dialogues and trace the origins and development of Italian and Bengali internationalisms in the period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Despite having differing political statuses and lacking a shared geographical or historical space, Bengal and Italy remained uniquely connected and, at times, actively sought to transcend different kinds of constraints in their search for a significant dialogue and mutual enrichment in the fields of literature, music, architecture, art, cinema, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, travels, education and intellectual engagement. In this context, the volume confronts strategies of evaluation adopted by prominent representatives of the Bengali and Italian cultural environments with particular emphasis on readings embedded in the moment of contact. Both regions benefitted from this ‘elective affinity’ as they advanced along their respective paths towards a fuller awareness of their specific identity, and thus set a positive example of transcultural understanding which may inspire today’s world.
( Ghosh 2019, 137) In this paragraph from Amitav Ghosh's 2019 novel The Gun Island , the Bengali protagonist, Deenanath, is shocked into a momentous discovery of the historic, philological, cultural and trade connections between ..."
Mobilizing Narratives
Edward Said’s summation that “we live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globe” is an apt description of the riveting and pervasive nature of (im)mobility in contemporary times. Wars, climate change, economic recessions, and social and cultural inequalities all contribute to coercing both individuals and communities into forced movement or imposed immobility. This volume investigates the injustices related to free circulation as represented in various literary texts.
... tied into at least thin networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place and mean that nowhere can be an 'island'”, ... in Indian fiction through an analysis of Amitav Ghosh's recently published novel Gun Island (2019)."
Euphemisms of Existence. Gender, Ecology and History in Fiction
Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, , language: English, abstract: This is an anthology of essays compiled under the general title Euphemisms of Existence: Gender, Ecology and History in Fiction. This collection consists of several essays concerning gender, ecology and history in the works of selected writers including Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Shashi Deshpande and J.M Coetzee. The fictional corpus of Amitav Ghosh has always been concerned with issues like gender, memories, history and ecology. If we closely analyze the patterns of Ghosh’s early and recent works of fiction, we can clearly trace a shift from history and memory to environmental problems and ecology. "The Shadow Lines" (1988) and "The Gun Island" (2019) will serve as a testimony for this statement. The works of Githa Hariharan and Shashi Deshpande, to a great extent, deals with the issues of gender in patriarchal societies. Most of their characters are drawn from an Indian background and assimilate the plight shared by Indian women. Hariharan’s "The Thousand Faces of Night" and Deshpande’s "The Dark Holds No Terrors" are discussed here. J.M Coetzee, a South African Nobel Laureate, in his works deals with the issues of gender in particular and discrimination based on caste, religion, race etc...in general. The essays in this book is an attempt to trace and locate how gender, ecology and history are explored in the works if this selected writers.
Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, , language: English, abstract: This is an anthology of essays compiled under the general title Euphemisms of Existence: Gender, Ecology and ..."
Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English
This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.
... Neel Mukherjee's A State of Freedom (2017), Tabish Khair's Night of Happiness (2018) and Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) are among the novels which offer precarious accounts of the damages rendered by neoliberal capitalism."
River of Smoke
'As hypnotic as an opium dream and pretty unputdownable' Daily Mail In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces? On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Among them are Bahram Modi, a wealthy Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, his estranged half-Chinese son Ah Fatt, the orphaned Paulette and a motley collection of others whose pursuit of romance, riches and a legendary rare flower have thrown together. All struggle to cope with their losses - and for some, unimaginable freedoms - in the alleys and crowded waterways of 19th century Canton. As transporting and mesmerizing as an opiate induced dream, River of Smoke will soon be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literature.
Ibis Trilogy Book 2 Amitav Ghosh . A spellbinding, globe-trotting novel by the bestselling author of the Ibis trilogy Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the ..."
Flood of Fire
The thrilling climax to the Ibis trilogy that began with the phenomenal Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war. One of the vessels requisitioned for the attack, the Hind, travels eastwards from Bengal to China, sailing into the midst of the First Opium War. The turbulent voyage brings together a diverse group of travellers, each with their own agenda to pursue. Among them is Kesri Singh, a sepoy in the East India Company who leads a company of Indian sepoys; Zachary Reid, an impoverished young sailor searching for his lost love, and Shireen Modi, a determined widow en route to China to reclaim her opium-trader husband's wealth and reputation. Flood of Fire follows a varied cast of characters from India to China, through the outbreak of the First Opium War and China's devastating defeat, to Britain's seizure of Hong Kong. Flood of Fire is a thrillingly realised and richly populated novel, imbued with a wealth of historical detail, suffused with the magic of place and plotted with verve. It is a beautiful novel in its own right, and a compelling conclusion to an epic and sweeping story - it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Ibis Trilogy Book 3 Amitav Ghosh . A spellbinding, globe-trotting novel by the bestselling author of the Ibis trilogy Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the ..."
Sea of Poppies
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008 'Sea of Poppies boasts a varied collection of characters to love and hate, and provides wonderfully detailed descriptions . . . utterly involving and piles on tension until the very last page' Sunday Times At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists. To find out what happens next make sure to read River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.
Ibis Trilogy Book 1 Amitav Ghosh . A spellbinding, globe-trotting novel by the bestselling author of the Ibis trilogy Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the ..."
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The novel Midnight's Children is written by the renowned author Salman Rushdie. 63. ... a g the Author Name of the books Amitav Ghosh Ibis Trilogy, Gun Island , Flood of Fire Vikram Seth A Suitable Girl Port of Kandla are petrole um, ..."
Throwing the Moral Dice
More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life. The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like? The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws. From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek
Cosmopolitan Ethics as an Ethics of Contingency Toward a Metonymic Community Thomas Claviez INTRODUCTION At a pivotal point in Amitav Ghosh's most recent novel , Gun Island (2019), the author has his main protagonist—a rare- books dealer ..."
Climate and the Making of Worlds
Introduction : stratigraphic criticism -- "Earth trembled" : Paradise lost, the little Ice Age, and the climate of allegory -- "The works of nature" : descriptive poetry and the history of the earth in Thomson's The seasons -- Mine, factory, and plantation : the industrial georgic and the crisis of description -- Uncertain atmospheres : romantic lyricism in the time of the Anthropocene.
dream time in Alexis Wright's The Swan Book , and the retelling of the Manasa Devi legend in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island . New novels , searching for imaginative resources with which to take the measure of accelerating geohistorical change, ..."
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