This document provides information about a student's seminar topic on Amitav Ghosh's novel Gun Island. It summarizes the student's paper, which argues that Ghosh rewrites religion as "dharma" in the novel by connecting the Bengali snake goddess Manasa to the Madonna through characters' journeys. The paper examines how Ghosh blurs boundaries between mythology and reality to create a new ecological, story-based religion. It concludes that Ghosh shows how belief in universal human compassion must emerge to sustain both humanity and nature.

1. Name : Asari Bhavayang .M
Roll no :- 3
Enrollment No:-3069206420200002
Course:-M.A (English)Sem4
Subject:- Contemporary Literatures in English
Topic:- From ‘Manasa’ to ‘Madonna’: Reading Religion
and Mythology in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
Teacher Name :- Dilip Barad sir
Batch :- 2020-2022
Email :- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com
Department:- Department of English

2. Amitav Ghosh :-
➔ He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He received the Jnanpith Award in
2018.
➔ His first novel, The Circle of Reason, set in India and Africa and winner of the
1990 Prix Médicis Étranger, was published in 1986. Further novels are The
Shadow Lines (1988); The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), about the search for a
genetic strain which guarantees immortality and winner of the 1997 Arthur C
Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction; The Glass Palace (2000), and The
Hungry Tide (2004), a saga set in Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal.
➔
➔ Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in
1956. He grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka
and India. He studied at the universities of
Delhi and Oxford and published the first of
eight novels, The Circle of Reason, in
1986.

3. Gun Island
➔ A dealer of rare books, Deen once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is
forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from
India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the
memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.
➔ There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in
motion; Tipu, who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in
today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in
need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the
story they are all a part of.

4. ➔ It is a journey which will depend everything he thought
he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his
childhood and about the world around him.
➔ Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which
effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world
on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable
transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose
faith in the world and the future is restored by two
remarkable women.

5. From ‘Manasa’ to ‘Madonna’: Reading Religion
and Mythology in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
➔ Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island rewrites religion as the “dharma”
➔ The narrative that moves from Sundarbans to Venice constantly
interrogates the borders between real and imaginary as Ghosh
employs the myth of the snake goddess Manasha and connects it
to Santa Maria , also known as the Madonna of Good health and as
the savior from the plague of 1630s who traces her origins.
➔ The Goddess of Snakes, through two presences- the first one by
the Banduki Saudagar and the second one of Deen.
➔ The Gun Island thus emerges as a text that explores spaces of
mythology and alternative religiosities .

6. ➔ Gun Island redraws the borders between science and religion,
myth and religion, dreams and reality and between faith and
practice and returns to the basic Vedantic idea of ‘ekam’ or
oneness of all creatures.
➔ The new religion is mythological, ‘dharmic’ and ecological.
Making use of the upanishadiya doctrine of Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam (the world as a family) .
➔ Ghosh creates a mythical concept of religion that survives on
memories, dreams and stories. This religion is more about
‘dharma’ or the path of the just and thrives on the idea that
every creature on this earth must perform their own duty -
swadharma - in order to maintain the balance of the eco-system
and to co-survive the climatic exigencies.

7. ➔ The journey undertaken by the mythical Banduki Saudagar is evidentially
proven by Deen who witnesses the movement of the illegal immigrants to
Italy who follow the same route Ghosh posits the hypothesis that myths and
memories are equally important for the re-construction of the history of the
period in which the relic had been constructed.
➔ Speaking of presences, Ghosh relies on the Indian philosophical concept of
the ’bhuta’-“which simultaneously means ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ and much
else as well”. (Ghosh 156) Thus the past and the present co-exist in the idea
of the bhuta. The religious myth finds life in the happenings of the present
day when Deen has a hallucination of the snake from the plane and sees
spiders in the apartment of Cinta. After having heard the tale of the boatman
Deen had been disturbed and could not sleep. After having returned to
Brooklyn after his visit he had the strange feeling of “some living thing” had
entered his body. He had the feel of carrying the burden of someone else’s
memory.(Chatterjee)

8. ➔ In Gun Island he speaks of other kinds of presences that are
not to be judged by rationality or science but can only be
felt and experienced.
➔ To Cinta the past is a presence as she did not believe in the
temporal boundaries or in the idea of time as modernity
knows it. Cinta tells Deen that myths have the ability to
“reach out to the future” (Ghosh 127).
➔ Drawing the example of seventeenth century belief system,
the era of the Banduki Saudagar, Cinta speaks about the
importance of stories/myths/legends that are the portals to
enter a premise of belief that is not bound by the religious
mechanism.(Chatterjee)

9. ➔ Myths and religion are entwined in the Indian cultural
system.
➔ Myths grow with religion and can even be trans-
religious.
➔ This myth of the Bonduki Saudagar that is related to
the temple of Manasa Devi connects three religions.
➔ The Muslim caretaker had informed Nilima about the
shrine being worshipped by the Hindus and Muslims
both- with the Muslims connecting it to the “Muslim
pir or saint named Ilyas”. (Ghosh 15).

10. Conclusion:-
➔ However in Gun Island the wrath of nature is seen in all its
variants-forest fires, tornadoes, floods and the presence of
the venomous spiders and snakes at unusual places. From
displaced stories to symbols, from displaced humans to
migrating dolphins, Gun Island is a storehouse of unrest.
This unrest culminates in the grand show at the end of the
novel where rationality needs to fail and belief in the
universalism of human compassion must emerge as the new
mythical and religious premise of sustenance of the human
nature and the nature around us.

11. References :-
➔ Amitav, Ghosh. "Amitav Ghosh : Home". Amitavghosh.Com, 2022,
https://amitavghosh.com/.
➔ Chatterjee, Dr. Sanjukta . "From ‘Manasa’ to ‘Madonna’: Reading
Religion and Mythology in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island." PROTEUS
JOURNAL 11.10 (2020). web. 3 March 2022.
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_e1OAvRu5uegtE3gsSNsy54W_HF1
7SRL/view>.
➔ Ghosh, Amitav. 2022, https://penguin.co.in/book/gun-island/.
Accessed 2 Mar 2022.
➔ Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. Penguin Random House India, 2019.
Book. 2 January 2022.