A Turbulent World

~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~

This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the novel, and on the other hand, to just say to any reader out there, read it. Just read it! 

Gun Island is almost a sequel to The Hungry Tide, but perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a successor. The memorable Piya is the cross-over character, but as in all the best sequels, this does not rehash the same characters and plotlines for a 2^nd take; this novel has a fresh cast, a very memorable cast at that, focusing on the connection between environmental issues and migration issues. Our unlikely hero, our almost reluctant protagonist, is Dinu/Deen (or properly, Dinanath Datta), an antiquarian bookseller in his 60s, originally from Bangladesh but who lives in Brooklyn, New York. We meet Cinta, Deen’s charistmaric Venetian mentor, and Rafi and Tipu, two wonderful teenaged Bangladeshi boys who are each difficult and delightful in equal measures. (Tipu is Moyna’s and Fokir’s son; Fokir of The Hungry Tide who saved Piya’s life.) There are many other thrilling secondary characters also, in this beguiling tale where coincidences and connections seem to abound and arise in most unexpected but most credulous of ways, spun by a master storyteller. The very land comes alive in Ghosh’s telling, and everything seems to link up with everything else, like one huge eco-system.

This is a novel which illustrates, exercises, and captures the enduring power of stories, of storytelling, spanning from Lusibari to Venice in its geographical scope, but endless in the imaginative terrain. Connections via linguistics and tales echo and resound across centuries and across oceans and cultures. As always, Ghosh’s canvas is vast, and he handles it so beautifully it leaves one nearly breathless with admiration. 

This novel functions on so many planes – the natural world of mangroves and rivers and oceans; the urbane sophistication of academics conferences in 21^st century cities and problems; the supernatural world of dreams, visitations, memories; the frightening world of freak extreme weather events and natural disasters; the underworld of human smuggling and the subterranean world inhabited by illegal immigrants, etc. It blends all of these, as it blends English, Bangla, Italian, Latin, and other languages, into one harmonious symphony.

This is a gem of a novel.

It cannot be too highly recommended. 

Now I am off to reread The Hungry Tide, before promising myself the pleasure of rereading Gun Island too. 

Long excerpt, just to give readers a flavour of the novel: 

Deen boards the Lucania, joining others who are seeking to advocate for the acceptance of the Blue Boat into Italy. The Blue Boat departed from the Sinai Peninsular and was trying to approach Sicily. The interior minister of the newly formed government in Rome was a right-wing hardliner who campaigned on an anti-immigration platform and declared he would not allow refugees to land in Italy at any cost, and even deployed the navy to ensure this. The refugees are Eritrians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Ethopians, Bangladeshis. Deen muses about coolie boats and the refugees on the Blue Boat:

“… in some ways the plight of these refugees was indeed similar to that of the indentured workers who had been transported from the Indian subcontinent to distant corners of the globe in order to work in plantations. Coolies too had been mainly young, and overwhelmingly male; then too, dalals and other middlemen (duffadars and mahajans – recruiters and contractors) had been essential cogs in the machinery of transportation; and then too debt and moneylending had been vital to the oiling of the machine. Then as now, trafficking in human beings had been an immensely lucrative form of commerce.

                There were similarities also in the circumstances under which they had travelled; like refugees, coolies too had been crammed into confined spaces and had had to subsist on meagre rations. Beatings and whippings; seeing their own die before their eyes – all of this would have been familiar to the passengers of a coolie ship.

                Yet there was a vital difference – the system of indentured labour, like chattel slavery before it, had always been managed and controlled by European imperial powers. The coolies often had no idea of where they were going or of the conditions that awaited them there; nor did they know much about the laws and regulations that governed their destiny. 

                The coolies’ colonial mater, on the other hand, knew [303] everything about them. They recorded in obsessive detail where the coolies had come from and which castes and tries they belonged to. Even their bodies were studied with close attention, special notice being taken of scars and other marks of identification. It was the colonial state that decided where they would go and when; on their arrival it was the state, again, that allotted them to owners of plantations.

                But all of that was now completely reversed.

                Rafi, Tipu and their fellow migrants had launched their own journeys […] their travels had been enabled by their own networks, and they […] were completely conversant with the laws and regulations of the countries they were heading to. Instead, it was the countries of the West that now knew very little about the people who were flocking towards them.

                Nor had I, or any of the young migrants I had met, been transported across continents in order to become cogs in some giant plantation-like machine that existed in order to serve the desires of others. Slaves and coolies had worked to produce goods like sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, cotton, tea, rubber, all of which were intended for the colonizers’ home countries. It was the desires and appetites of the metropolis that moved people between continents in order to churn out ever-growing floods of saleable merchandise. In this dispensation slaves and coolies were producers, not consumers; they could never aspire to the desires of their masters.

                But now, just as much as anyone else, young men like Rafi, Tipu and Bilal wanted those very things – smart phones, computers, cars. And how could they not? Since childhood the most attractive images that they had beheld were not of rivers and fields that surrounded them but of things like these, flashing across the screens of their phones.

I saw now why the angry young men on the boast around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had [304] been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history gas ever known: in the service of commerce that had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale. ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.

                This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made these massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control.

                This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them.   The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any  human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons” [305].