ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Rivers, Myths, and Climate: An Ecocritical Study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island

Amitav Ghosh’s fiction has increasingly foregrounded the intersections between human life and the natural world, placing ecological concerns at the heart of his narratives. The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), though separated by fifteen years, share a common thread in their engagement with the environment, myth, migration, and the destabilizing effects of ecological crises. The Hungry Tide situates its narrative in the fragile ecosystem of the Sundarbans, dramatizing the precarious balance between human survival and the tidal mangrove landscape, while Gun Island expands Ghosh’s ecological canvas to a global scale, where climate change and forced migration emerge as dominant concerns. Read together, these novels trace Ghosh’s evolution from localized explorations of ecological identity to broader meditations on global climate crisis and its human consequences. This paper undertakes a comparative ecocritical study of the two works, examining their treatment of landscape, myth, memory, and environmental degradation. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Cheryll Glotfelty, Lawrence Buell, and recent scholarship in postcolonial ecocriticism, the study argues that Ghosh not only reimagines the novel as a form capable of articulating ecological anxieties but also situates literature as a crucial site for rethinking humanity’s relationship with nature in an era of climate catastrophe.