Paper 207: Contemporary Literatures in English

 The Convergence of Precarity and Multispecies Justice: Deconstructing the ‘Eco-Refugee’ through Planetary Environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

• Assignment Details

Paper : 207- Contemporary Literatures in English 

Topic : The Convergence of Precarity and Multispecies Justice: Deconstructing the ‘Eco-Refugee’ through Planetary Environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Submitted to - Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.B.U.

• Personal Information

Name: Nikita Vala 

Batch: M.A. Sem - 4 (2024-2026)

Enrollment Number: 5108240089 

Roll No: 17

• Table of contents

• Abstract

• Introduction

• The Conceptualization of the Eco-Refugee

• Precarity and Neoliberal Capitalism

• Planetary Environmentalism and Multispecies Justice

• The Uncanny as a Narrative Mode

• Conclusion

• References

Abstract

As the Anthropocene accelerates with increasing urgency, the traditional boundaries that have long defined postcolonial literature are being fundamentally reshaped by the lived and literary exigencies of climate change. This paper examines Amitav Ghosh's 2019 novel, Gun Island, as a pivotal and timely text that actively bridges the widening gap between human displacement and ecological collapse. By synthesizing current scholarship across multiple disciplines, the study explores the emergence of the "eco-refugee"  , a new and deeply unsettling figure whose mobility is driven not by traditional geopolitical conflict or economic desperation alone, but by the progressive degradation of the very environment that once sustained life. Through the lens of "planetary environmentalism," the paper argues that Ghosh systematically deconstructs the human-centric narrative of migration to encompass what scholars have begun calling "multispecies justice" a framework in which the movement of animals and humans alike is understood as a singular, interconnected response to a shared global crisis. The paper further analyzes how the novel deploys the literary mode of the "uncanny" alongside a sustained meditation on "precarity" under neoliberal capitalism, and how these strategies together challenge the "crisis of imagination" that Ghosh himself has identified as one of the defining intellectual failures of contemporary climate discourse.

Keywords: Anthropocene, Eco-refugees, Multispecies Justice, Precarity, Planetary Environmentalism, Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island.

Introduction

In his widely influential non-fiction work The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh mounted a bold and uncomfortable critique of the modern realist novel, arguing that the form had proven itself fundamentally incapable of grasping the "unthinkable" scale of climate change. The conventions of bourgeois realism  with their emphasis on individual human agency, domestic interiors, recognizable social settings, and the steady unfolding of cause and effect  were, Ghosh contended, structurally ill-equipped to represent the erratic, non-human, and often catastrophically slow-moving forces that define life in the Anthropocene. The realist novel, shaped over centuries to illuminate the private lives of individuals navigating a stable and largely predictable social world, simply did not possess the narrative architecture required to make ecological collapse feel real, urgent, and emotionally legible to readers.

His 2019 novel, Gun Island, represents Ghosh's own sustained and ambitious creative response to precisely this challenge. It is an experimental work in the fullest sense, one that deliberately blurs the inherited borders between folklore, history, and contemporary climate science to depict a world teetering on the edge of terminal flux. The novel follows Deen Datta, a dealer of rare books based in Brooklyn, as he is gradually and almost reluctantly pulled out of his comfortable, intellectually detached existence and drawn into a world of mythic legends, human catastrophe, and ecological emergency. His journey takes him across a carefully chosen set of geographically and symbolically resonant locations: the sinking delta of the Sundarbans in West Bengal, the wildfire-ravaged hills of Los Angeles, and the flooding piazzas of Venice. In mapping this trajectory, Ghosh traces a world in which the "local"  , the particular place, the individual story, the bounded community  has been irrevocably subsumed by the forces of the "planetary."

This paper seeks to expand on and deepen the existing academic discourse surrounding Gun Island, focusing specifically on how Ghosh redefines the migrant experience through the intersecting lenses of multispecies justice and precarity. By weaving together the strands of a 17th-century Bengali folkloric tradition with the cutting edge of 21st-century climate science, Ghosh does something more than simply update the migrant novel for the era of global warming. He proposes, both formally and thematically, that the current environmental crisis is not merely a technical or political problem awaiting a technological or legislative solution. It is, rather, a fundamental and potentially irreversible upheaval of the centuries-old project of Western modernity itself, a project built on the twin assumptions of human mastery over nature and the right of capital to move freely across borders that remain closed to the people displaced by its consequences .

1. The Conceptualization of the Eco-Refugee

The figure of the migrant has occupied a central and recurring position in postcolonial literature for decades, most commonly defined by the search for economic opportunity abroad or the desperate need to escape political persecution at home. These are the migrants of the 20th-century imagination  driven by war, dictatorship, poverty, and the asymmetries of a world divided between former colonizers and the colonized. Gun Island, however, introduces alongside these familiar figures a new and urgently contemporary category of human mobility: the "eco-refugee." This is a person  or more accurately, an entire community of people who flees not from a human enemy or a failing economy in any conventional sense, but because the land itself is vanishing beneath their feet.

In the Sundarbans, the mangrove-covered delta shared between India and Bangladesh that serves as one of the novel's key settings, characters like Tipu and Rafi find themselves in precisely this position. Their displacement is driven not primarily by poverty or political violence, though these forces are present too, but by the concrete, daily, and accelerating reality of ecological collapse: salt-water incursions destroying agricultural land, the increasing frequency and ferocity of cyclones, and the slow but unstoppable erosion of the coastline that has sustained their communities for generations. Traditional ways of life, already fragile, have been rendered impossible by changes in the environment that no individual or community has the power to reverse or even adequately resist.

What makes this form of displacement particularly difficult to address, both legally and imaginatively, is its lack of a singular, identifiable perpetrator. Climate-induced displacement differs fundamentally from development-induced displacement caused by dam construction, for example, or large-scale industrial projects  because there is no single decision, no specific corporation, no particular government that can be pointed to as unambiguously responsible. Instead, it is driven by an accumulated and largely invisible process of environmental degradation: the product of centuries of industrialization, fossil fuel consumption, and colonial resource extraction, dispersed across time and geography in ways that make accountability nearly impossible to assign (Maity). The "eco-refugee" consequently occupies a deeply uncomfortable liminal space in international law, a category of person whose suffering is real and urgent but who often lacks the formal legal protections afforded to political refugees fleeing war or persecution. Ghosh highlights this structural vulnerability with great precision, tracing the perilous journey of his young male characters from the Sundarbans through the dangerous and exploitative networks of the global migration industry, exposing both the human cost of their displacement and the systemic indifference with which the international community receives them.

What is crucial to Ghosh's framing, however, is that he does not present this migration as mere victimhood or as an undifferentiated tragedy. The migration in Gun Island is presented, above all, as a form of climate resilience  a desperate, imperfect, but fundamentally adaptive attempt on the part of the poor and vulnerable to survive in a world where the ecological niche that once sustained them has been destroyed by processes far beyond their control or comprehension (Maity). By centering the narrative on these individuals rather than on the scientists, politicians, or wealthy observers who typically populate climate discourse, Ghosh forces the reader into a far more intimate and uncomfortable confrontation with the human cost of the Anthropocene. Abstract statistics about rising sea levels and increasing storm intensity are transformed, through the particularity of individual stories, into something visceral, morally urgent, and impossible to look away from. The eco-refugee, in Ghosh's rendering, is not simply a victim of an unfortunate natural process. He or she is a harbinger of a figure from the near future in which displacement becomes the global norm rather than the tragic exception, and in which the question of who bears the cost of centuries of environmental destruction can no longer be deferred.

2. Precarity and Neoliberal Capitalism

The precarious state in which the characters of Gun Island find themselves is not, Ghosh insists, an accidental byproduct of natural forces acting upon an otherwise stable and just world. It is, rather, the deeply systemic and entirely predictable result of the political-economic order known as neoliberal capitalism  an order that has progressively dismantled the social and legal protections that once offered some degree of security to the world's most vulnerable people, while simultaneously accelerating the environmental destruction that renders their original homes uninhabitable. Precarity, in this context, is not an unfortunate accident or a temporary disruption. It is identified in the novel, and in the scholarship surrounding it, as a new and pervasive form of social regulation, a global norm that increasingly defines the texture of life in the Anthropocene for a growing proportion of the world's population (Bhowmick).

Ghosh draws a particularly provocative and historically resonant parallel between the condition of the novel's contemporary migrants and the indentured workers of the 19th century who were transported across the globe  from India to the Caribbean, from China to the plantations of Southeast Asia  to serve the insatiable labor needs of colonial capital. This historical comparison is not made casually or for mere rhetorical effect. It carries a serious analytical weight, suggesting that the displacement of the poor in the name of economic necessity is not a new phenomenon produced by the climate crisis but rather a continuation, in a different register, of the same fundamental logic that has governed the relationship between the wealthy and the dispossessed for several centuries (Maity). The current climate crisis, on this reading, is not an external shock visited upon an otherwise functional and equitable global system. It is the long-term consequence of the very processes of neocolonial resource extraction, industrial capitalism, the systematic subordination of ecological limits to the demands of profit  that created the system in the first place (Bhowmick).

In the specific world of Gun Island, precarity takes on a range of concrete and recognizable forms. Among the most telling is the characters' heavy reliance on smartphones and digital networks to navigate their dangerous journeys and maintain fragile connections with those they have left behind. These technologies are presented with deliberate ambivalence: they provide a genuine, if limited, semblance of human connection across vast distances, but they also serve as the primary tools through which human traffickers coordinate the exploitation of desperate migrants. The same networks that allow a mother to speak with her son on the other side of the world also allow criminal networks to commodify and endanger him.

The "fragile and uncertain social status" that defines the lives of Ghosh's characters is not, the novel insists, a condition confined to the global South or to the world's most economically marginalized regions. It reflects, rather, a broader and accelerating planetary instability in which hardship, insecurity, and vulnerability are ceasing to be the distinguishing marks of the world's poor and are instead becoming an increasingly universal condition of life in the 21st century (Bhowmick). Neoliberalism's simultaneous insistence on the free movement of capital and goods across national borders and the strict enforcement of those same borders against the movement of people stands exposed, in the context of climate change, as a profound and ultimately unsustainable contradiction. The fluid, borderless nature of climate change  indifferent to national sovereignty, legal categories, and economic status  is simply incommensurable with a political order built on the logic of containment and exclusion. Ghosh suggests, with something approaching grim clarity, that the systems designed to manage the global flow of capital and labor are wholly unprepared for the "angry young men" produced by ecological collapse, or for the rising tides that will, sooner or later, overturn the established order regardless of what borders have been drawn to contain them.

3. Planetary Environmentalism and Multispecies Justice

Of all the intellectual and imaginative moves that Gun Island makes, perhaps the most radical and philosophically challenging is its insistence on what can be called multispecies justice. Traditional environmentalism, even in its most progressive forms, has tended to maintain a conceptual separation between human concerns and animal welfare, treating these as parallel but ultimately distinct spheres of ethical consideration. Even when environmentalists argue for the intrinsic value of non-human nature, they typically do so in terms that implicitly maintain the human observer as the subject who grants or withholds that value. Ghosh, however, refuses this separation. He adopts and enacts a framework of "planetary environmentalism" that insists on viewing the Earth as a single, deeply interconnected organism in which the fate of any one species is fundamentally tied to the fates of all others.

The novel is populated, with striking consistency and deliberateness, by displaced animals. A venomous spider appears in Venice, far outside its native range. A King Cobra makes a disturbing appearance in the Sundarbans in circumstances that defy ordinary explanation. A pod of whales beaches itself in the Mediterranean in a scene of collective, inexplicable distress. These animals are not deployed by Ghosh as mere symbols or convenient metaphors for human suffering. They are presented as something far more significant: "co-migrants" in the planetary crisis, beings whose disorientation and displacement mirror and illuminate the disorientation and displacement of the human characters with whom they share the novel's world (Hoydis). The parallel is not incidental. It is structural and philosophical.

Multispecies justice, as a framework for thinking about the Anthropocene, demands that we move beyond the comfortable assumption that the rights and agency of non-human beings are considerations that can be set aside until human suffering has been adequately addressed. By demonstrating, with insistent narrative detail, how the displacement of humans is mirrored by the anomalous appearance of animal species in habitats and locations where they do not belong, Ghosh makes the case that survival in the Anthropocene is not achievable through any form of human solidarity alone, however broad and inclusive that solidarity might be. What is required is something more difficult and more radical: a multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, and ultimately cross-species cooperation that recognizes the shared vulnerability of all living beings in a world transformed by human-induced climate change (Khan).

This perspective demands a fundamental shift in how we think about borders not only the national and legal borders that regulate human movement, but what might be called the "planetary borders" that have historically separated human civilization from the non-human world (Kaur). The climate crisis is blurring these boundaries in ways that are simultaneously terrifying and revelatory, forcing a confrontation with the realization that the categories through which modernity has organized the world  human and animal, culture and nature, the domestic and the wild  are neither stable nor adequate to the world that the Anthropocene is producing. The final scene of the novel, in which a diverse assembly of humans and animals converge in a moment of shared and trembling vulnerability, crystallizes this vision with remarkable emotional power. It is an image not of triumph or resolution, but of a kinship that has been forced into being by catastrophe  a kinship that transcends not only national and ethnic lines, but the species boundary itself.

4. The Uncanny as a Narrative Mode

One of the most persistent formal challenges that climate fiction faces is the problem of representation: how does a novel make emotionally and imaginatively real something that operates on scales of time, space, and causality that exceed the ordinary boundaries of human experience and perception? Ghosh's solution in Gun Island is to employ the literary mode of the uncanny, that particular quality of experience, theorized by Freud and widely explored in literature, in which something simultaneously familiar and alien intrudes upon the ordinary world, or in which what was supposed to remain hidden or buried unexpectedly returns. The uncanny, in Ghosh's hands, becomes a way of bridging the gap between the rational, orderly world that modernity has promised us and the increasingly irrational, unpredictable, and overwhelming forces of nature that the Anthropocene is unleashing.

At the structural center of the novel's uncanny logic stands the 17th-century Bengali legend of the Bonduki Sadagar  the Gun Merchant  a figure from folk tradition who flees across the known world in an attempt to escape the wrath of the goddess Manasa Devi, the deity of snakes and, by extension, of the untameable forces of nature (Hoydis). This legend, which Deen encounters at the novel's beginning and which shadows him throughout his travels, functions as a parable for planetary crisis  a story from the deep past that turns out to illuminate the predicament of the present with uncomfortable precision. The structural device of the legend running parallel to Deen's contemporary journey allows Ghosh to make a pointed and unsettling argument: that what we are experiencing now, in the age of climate change, is not something entirely unprecedented, but rather a failure  catastrophic in its consequences  to remember and honor the lessons encoded in our historical and mythic relationships with the natural world. The crisis is not only ecological; it is also a "crisis of culture," a profound forgetting of what previous generations understood about the limits of human power and the necessity of coexistence with forces larger than ourselves.

The return of the uncanny is experienced throughout the novel in the form of freak weather events that Deen, the rationalist, the man of books and reason, initially attempts to dismiss as coincidence or as the kind of anomaly that can be explained away without fundamentally revising one's understanding of how the world works. The acqua alta flooding the piazzas of Venice, the wildfires consuming the California hills  these are presented through Deen's consciousness as disturbing but ultimately containable disruptions, exceptions that prove a still-legible rule (Kaur). The novel's slowly accumulating power comes precisely from the steady erosion of this position, as the sheer frequency and intensity of such events force Deen  and, by extension, the reader  to confront the possibility that there is no longer a stable norm from which these events represent a deviation.

By employing the uncanny as its central narrative mode, Gun Island accomplishes something that straightforwardly realist climate fiction often fails to achieve: it creates a genuine and sustained sense of disquiet, a feeling that the ground beneath one's feet  both literal and figurative  can no longer be entirely trusted. It disrupts the "bourgeois silence" regarding climate change that Ghosh has elsewhere criticized  the tendency of educated, comfortable people to acknowledge the crisis abstractly while continuing to live as though it does not fundamentally alter the terms of existence (Kaur). More than this, it challenges the Enlightenment ideal of a world that is, in principle, predictable, controllable, and fully available to human understanding and management. In its place, the novel offers a reality that is haunted  not by ghosts in any supernatural sense, but by the accumulated and returning consequences of centuries of human decisions made in confident ignorance of their long-term effects.

Conclusion

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island earns its place as a foundational text for the emerging literature of the Anthropocene because of its profound and sustained refusal to treat climate change as a backdrop to a dramatic weather system against which a fundamentally human-centered story is played out. Instead, Ghosh positions the environment itself as a central and active force in the narrative, one that drives the movement of both people and animals across a landscape of mounting precarity and shared vulnerability. The novel does not simply describe the climate crisis; it attempts to think through it, to find narrative and imaginative forms adequate to its scale and complexity.

Through the twin conceptual frameworks of the "eco-refugee" and "multispecies justice," Ghosh methodically dismantles the anthropocentric hierarchies that have governed Western thought since the Enlightenment  the assumption that the human stands at the center of the moral and political universe, and that the fate of the non-human world is, at best, a secondary concern. He demonstrates, with accumulating force, that the precarity of the migrant and the precarity of the planet are not parallel crises to be addressed by separate policy frameworks. They are expressions of the same underlying condition, and both are relentlessly exacerbated by the logic of neoliberal capitalism, which continues to externalize the environmental costs of profit while insisting that the movement of displaced people be treated as a threat to be managed rather than a consequence of injustice to be addressed.

By reaching for the uncanny and the mythic  by allowing a 17th-century legend to resonate with and illuminate a 21st-century crisis  the novel offers a new and genuinely challenging way of envisioning solidarity. It is a solidarity that is planetary in its geographic scope and multispecies in its ethical reach, one that requires not merely policy reform or technological innovation but a fundamental transformation of how we understand the relationship between human civilization and the living world from which it emerged and on which it continues to depend.

Ultimately, Gun Island suggests that the centuries-old project of human dominance over nature is not simply failing in a practical sense  it is being actively and visibly overturned by the consequences of its own logic. What Ghosh offers in its place is not a program or a solution, but something perhaps more valuable in the long run: a transformation of perspective. The novel ends not with answers but with a profound reorientation  an invitation to move away from the "derangement" of the present, with its false confidence and its failures of imagination, toward a future defined by radical kinship, ecological justice, and the difficult, necessary recognition that we are not the only species whose survival is at stake.

References : 

Bhowmick, Kankana. "Precarity, Catastrophe and the Anthropocene: Reading Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island." Transcript: An e-Journal of Literary & Cultural Studies 5.1 (2025). 

Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. John Murray, 2019.

Hoydis, J. (2025). Parables for Planetary Crisis: Storytelling and Multispecies Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. Interventions, 27(3), 390–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2024.2365155 

Kaur, Rajender. "Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island." The Global South 16.2 (2023): 114-134. 

Khan, R. H. (2025). Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 66(3), 423–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2024.2314094 

Maity, Joydev. "Examining Eco-refugees, Multispecies Justice and Climate."  

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