Myth as Epistemology and Historical Memory in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: A Comparative Literary Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores how Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island reclaims myth as an epistemological tool and historical archive in the context of climate change, migration, and colonial memory. By examining the legend of Bonduki Sadagar, the novel reinvents myth not as fantasy but as a vital mode of understanding ecological and historical crises. Drawing on Ernesto de Martino’s ethnographic theories, Ghosh challenges Enlightenment rationalism, validating myth as a lived, phenomenological reality, particularly for marginalised and colonised communities. Using comparative literary analysis, the chapter situates Gun Island alongside works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, and W.B. Yeats, showing how Ghosh’s mythopoetic method departs from Eurocentric traditions. Unlike modernist uses of myth to critique spiritual or cultural decay, Ghosh deploys myth for ethical urgency and planetary survival. Through philological decoding and cross-cultural narrative mapping, the Gun Merchant’s story is revealed as a record of climate migration and historical trauma during the Little Ice Age. Ultimately, the paper argues that Ghosh restores the mythic imagination as a cosmopolitan grammar of survival, turning myth into a medium of historical recovery and ecological consciousness in the Anthropocene.