Environmental Crisis and Forced Mobility: Human and Non-Human Displacement in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) as a captivating literary intervention into contemporary discourse on environmental crisis and forced mobility. Though the existing scholarship on climate-induced migration has largely focused on human displacement, the novel largely expands this framework by foregrounding the forced movement and habitat loss of non-human species. The paper argues that Ghosh challenges anthropocentric narratives of migration by situating human refugeehood within a broader multispecies ecology of displacement. Through myth, folklore, and contemporary realism, the novel expose how environmental crises destabilise traditional livelihoods, disrupt migratory routes of animals, and blur the boundaries between natural and political causes of mobility. By reading human and non-human displacements as intertwined, the study highlights Ghosh’s vision of planetary environmentalism, which calls for an ethical rethinking of responsibility, coexistence, and survival in the Anthropocene.