Volume V Special Issue VI December 2025

Name of Author : Dr. Neethu Varghese

Title of the paper : Narratives of Ecological Rupture and Climate Migration in Amitav Ghoshs Gun Island Mythic Memory as an Archive of Justice and Interspecies Solidarity

Abstract: This paper examines Amitav Ghoshs 2019 novel Gun Island as a pioneering work of climate fiction that weaves ancient Bengali folklore with contemporary narratives of environmental displacement. Through close textual analysis integrated with ecocritical, postcolonial, and migration studies frameworks, this study argues that the novel employs three primary strategies to resist dominant climate narratives deploying myth as an archive of ecological memory that challenges linear temporalities collapsing the false binary between climate refugees and economic migrants and extending solidarity beyond the human to include non human species migrations. The analysis demonstrates how Ghoshs mythic realism reveals climate change as inseparable from colonial histories, global inequalities, and the violent displacement of both human and non human populations. By examining the novels treatment of the Manasa Devi legend, its portrayal of Sundarbans migrants in Venice, and its climactic multispecies convergence, this paper illuminates how Gun Island offers a radical reimagining of climate fiction that centers marginalized voices, Indigenous epistemologies, and more than human relationality.

Keywords : Climate fiction, ecocriticism, migration studies, myth, Anthropocene

DOI :

Page Number : 34-41