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Paper short abstract

Myths do not simply travel; they transform. In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh traces how folklores from the Sundarbans in Bengal resurface in Venice and the Mediterranean. The paper presents myth as a hydromorphic form shaped by water's material form and sustained through wet labour.

Paper long abstract

Water does not just transform itself into multiple mediums, but also transforms everything it touches, including people, places and the cosmology of folktales. In Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), myths transform and evolve according to their hydrological environments. This paper argues that the folk narrative of Bonbibi, Bonduki Saudagar, and Manasa, originating from the Sundarbans in Bengal, transforms itself by traversing through different waterways from the Sundarbans to the lagoons of Venice and finally to the Mediterranean.

The argument draws on the concept of liquid cartography to emphasise that myths and legends are not only displaced but are reshaped by the ecological and political conditions of the waters they navigate. Meaning, ethics and identity change depending upon whether a myth is situated in silt, lagoon or ocean. These transformations show that myth is a hydromorphic narrative form that absorbs and adapts to each watery space it moves through.

Parallel to water’s morphic ability in myths, ‘wet labour’ also helps make myths portable across regions. The amphibious labourers, from the boatmen of the Sundarbans to warehouse labourers, to activists on the boat Lucaina, reproduce the entanglement of myth, labour and ecoprecarity. This paper employs myth, ecology, blue economy and blue humanities to read Gun Island not simply as a novel on ecological crisis but to establish that folk narratives are not fixed but are constantly created and destroyed in the respective medium through which they travel.