Myth, Multilingualism, and Nonhuman Agency in Amitav Ghosh's Climate Fiction: Gun Island and The Living Mountain

Abstract

Climate change, as a defining crisis of the twenty-first century, challenges ecosystems, displaces communities, and unsettles established human-nature hierarchies. Literature has responded through climate fiction, where Amitav Ghosh holds a central position with works such as Gun Island and The Living Mountain. This paper explores how these novels resist Western realist conventions by foregrounding indigenous myths, ritual practices, and multilingual traditions as modes of ecological resistance. Drawing on ecocritical frameworks (Buell, Glotfelty, Garrard, and Plumwood), dialogic theory (Bakhtin), and contemporary scholarship, the study employs a qualitative comparative method to examine Ghosh’s integration of regional myths, such as Manasa Devi and Marang Buru, ritual forms like Bhut Kola, and linguistic plurality across Bengali, Himalayan, Italian, and English. The analysis shows that Ghosh reconfigures myth and language as repositories of ecological memory and cultural resilience, while attributing agency to nonhuman forces such as rivers, storms, serpents, and mountains as active participants in shaping human futures rather than mere symbols. Both novels underscore survival as contingent on ecological reciprocity, vernacular wisdom, and recognition of interspecies interdependence. How does Ghosh’s rejection of extractivist paradigms and privileging of indigenous epistemologies advance a decolonial ecopoetic in which nature emerges as co-creator and language as an ethical practice? In what ways does Ghosh’s fiction expand postcolonial and environmental discourse by affirming myth and multilingualism as cultural technologies for imagining alternative futures in the climate crisis? This paper shall seek answers to these questions.