Interrogating Folklore and Transculturalism in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island remains an exceptional tale where the global and the local continually interact with each other. The writer projects cultural globality with the help of a Bengali myth. The novel examines the contemporary transcultural, transcontinental issues at the backdrop of a grand folktale of Manasa Devi. It rotates around the fourteenth century tale of the Gun Merchant. The transcultural and trans-local pattern of journey is palpable in the legend of the Gun Merchant. I want to examine the discourses of myth and reality proceeding together in Gun Island. The novel represents how today’s world confronting the challenges of human trafficking, climate change, migration of human and non-human beings gets connected to the world of myth, folklore and Bengali belief of the past century. What the narrator experiences is the repetition of the folktale of the by-gone days in the present age. The novelist encapsulates the lives in Calcutta, Sundarbans, New York, and Venice. The narrator Dinanath Datta becomes a globetrotter discovering and solving the mysteries of the Bengali folklore of Bondugi Sadagar and the snake Goddess in a vast transcultural context of immigration. Under the theoretical frameworks of folk and transculturalism, I propose to analyse how Ghosh’s protagonists live in a culturally hybrid world where folktale can pursue one to discover the postmodern realities and global issues on a transcultural and transcontinental space.