Climate Change and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: An Ecocritical Study

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) is an important piece of writing about climate change and human migration. Ghosh uses myth, narrative craft and folklore to portray this grave environmental degradation. The novel presents Deen Datta, a Bengali Indian living in Brooklyn, as a rare book dealer. His journey from the Sundarbans to Venice demonstrates the global dimensions of the climate crisis and human displacement. Using the legend of the Gun Merchant, Ghosh connects the past and the present to show how climate change shapes human lives and migration. He expresses his sensitivity towards environmental destruction. He creates an effective combination of culture, history, myth and fiction to bring out the environmental themes in the novel. The novel presents a grim picture of environmental collapse that leads to problems such as global warming and the climate crisis, which consequently give rise to migration and the displacement of humans and other species across the world.This study embraces an ecocritical framework to explore the complex relationship between environmental degradation and human precarity in the novel.Further, it assesses the climate-induced displacement with full emphasis on how this climate-induced displacement reshapes identities, alters cultural traditions and enhances social and economic inequality across borders.The paper argues that Gun Island not only points out the urgency of the climate crisis but also redefines migration as an ecological and cultural event.Ultimately, this paper delves into deep reflection about human-nature relationships as well as a reconsideration of human attitudes towards natural resources in the face of the increasing environmental crisis.