Eco-Spiritual Threads: Karma, Dharma, and Ecosystem in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island through a Hindu eco-spiritual framework to explore how ancient cosmological concepts illuminate contemporary environmental crises. Building upon the legend of Bonduki Sadagar and Manasa Devi, Ghosh narrates the rupture of sacred human–nature relationships in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. This study employs a tripartite conceptual lens of karma, dharma, and ecosystem drawn from Hindu philosophy to analyze how the novel frames environmental degradation, human moral failure, and ecological interconnectedness. Karma, as the law of cause and effect, is used to depict the consequences of human exploitation through natural disasters, climate migration, and the collapse of ecosystems. Dharma emerges as a principle advocating ecological responsibility and symbiosis between humans and nonhuman life. This paper argues that Ghosh tactfully intertwines Hindu metaphysics with contemporary ecological science to critique capitalist modernity’s environmental violence. The novel’s depiction of floods, the sinking of Venice, and the global refugee crisis dramatizes karmic consequences, while its evocation of myth–science convergence offers a vision of sacred interdependence. Ultimately, this paper concludes that Gun Island provides an urgent eco-spiritual model for reimagining planetary ethics and responding to the Anthropocene through humility, relationality, and spiritual responsibility.

1. Introduction

In Gun Island (Ghosh 2019), Amitav Ghosh crafts an eco-narrative that traverses the geographies of the Sundarbans, Venice, and Los Angeles, weaving together myth, migration, and environmental collapse. Ghosh’s novel is anchored in the retelling of the Bengali legend of Bonduki Sadagar and Manasa Devi, where the merchant’s confrontation with the goddess of snakes becomes a parable for contemporary human estrangement from nature. As Ghosh himself argues in The Great Derangement (2016), modern literature has often failed to grapple adequately with the scale of the environmental crisis, precisely because of the Enlightenment’s privileging of human exceptionalism over nonhuman agency (Ghosh 2016, pp. 30–32). In continuity with The Great Derangement, Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse extends this critique by linking the climate crisis to the curse of colonial extractivism, showing how imperial powers rewrote cosmologies and devastated ecologies through narratives of domination and control. This insight provides a crucial historical dimension to Gun Island’s mythopoetic re-enchantment of ecological relationship. Gun Island seeks to undo this erasure by re-enchanting the natural world and situating ecological devastation within older cosmologies of responsibility and reciprocity.

This paper proposes that Ghosh’s novel mobilizes a tripartite conceptual frame—karma, dharma, and ecosystem—to diagnose and respond to global environmental collapse. Karma, the Hindu law of cause and effect, underpins the novel’s depiction of climate breakdown as the inevitable result of centuries of exploitative human action. As Harold Coward notes, “From the perspective of karma theory, I am totally responsible for both my impulses toward the environment and the way I choose to act or not act on those impulses. And the way I choose to act today creates the karmic impulses I will experience tomorrow and in future lives in my interaction with the environment” (Coward 1998, p. 45), a framework that Ghosh deftly translates into a planetary register where environmental degradation, refugee crises, and pandemics are karmic reverberations of human excess. Building on this karmic framework, Coward emphasizes that Indian thought views embodied human existence as intimately interconnected with nature, such that “to harm any aspect of nature—be it air, water, plants, or animals—is tantamount to harming oneself” (p. 39). Meanwhile, the novel also invokes Hindu concepts of moral duty to emphasize human–nonhuman relationality and ecological care—a theme developed more fully later through the concept of dharma.

Finally, the ecosystem in Gun Island is not merely a scientific construct but a sacred network of interdependence, resonant with both Hindu metaphysics and contemporary ecological thought. As Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim emphasize, many Indigenous and Asian traditions—including Hinduism—recognize the Earth as “a living cosmos” in which humans are integral participants in a dynamic interdependent community of life (Tucker and Grim 2001, p. 13). For Tucker and Grim, religious worldviews have long oriented humans within “the matrix of mystery in which life arises, unfolds, and flourishes” (p. 14), and they argue that recovering this sense of sacred interconnectedness is essential for responding to the planetary crises of the present. In this spirit, Ghosh’s narrative reframes contemporary environmental disasters—such as the floods in the Bengal Delta, the erosion of Venice, and the mass displacement of climate refugees—not as isolated events, but as symptoms of a systemic karmic disorder rooted in the severance of humans from this sacred ecological web. Thus, this paper argues that Gun Island tactfully deploys Hindu eco-spiritual concepts to frame capitalist environmental destruction as karmic consequence and proposes dharma-based ecological ethics as a remedy. In doing so, Ghosh challenges secular, anthropocentric frameworks of climate crisis and calls for a renewed spiritual imagination grounded in interdependence, responsibility, and reverence for the nonhuman world.

In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh crafts a spiritually resonant eco-narrative that maps the karmic repercussions of humanity’s severance from the natural world while offering a dharmic vision of relational repair through Indic cosmology. Centered on Dinanath “Deen” Datta, a rare book dealer whose rationalist detachment is unsettled by the Bengali legend of Bonduki Sadagar—a merchant cursed by the snake goddess Manasa Devi for defying the sacred—the novel charts his philosophical transformation from secular skepticism to eco-spiritual awakening. Deen’s journey begins in the Sundarbans, where rising seas and poisoned land echo the karmic consequences of ecological neglect, and where his encounters with Moyna and her migrant-bound son Tipu reveal how colonial, capitalist, and environmental violence accumulates across generations and geographies. Tipu’s haunting declaration, “Even the animals are moving,” captures this karmic unraveling, as human and nonhuman lives alike are displaced by the aftershocks of past excess (Ghosh 2019, p. 65). Deen’s search for meaning carries him to Venice, a city slowly devoured by shipworms—silent agents of decay that metaphorically mirror karmic retribution—and into conversation with Bilal, a Bangladeshi refugee whose flight from disaster parallels Tipu’s, highlighting migration as a symptom of planetary moral imbalance. In Los Angeles, Deen’s encounter with wildfire and a venomous snake—emissary of Manasa Devi—further blurs the boundary between myth and ecology, calling forth a dharmic sensibility rooted in reverence, humility, and obligation toward the more-than-human world. The climax unfolds in the Mediterranean, where dolphins encircle the stranded vessel carrying Tipu—while Rafi follows in a support boat—an act that embodies karmic reciprocity, signaling nature’s sacred response to human suffering within a web of cosmic interdependence. Deen’s eventual return to Brooklyn marks not a conclusion but a spiritual reckoning, as he comes to read the Gun Merchant’s legend not as folklore but as a karmic parable for the Anthropocene, a myth encoded with sacred knowledge about relational balance and ecological justice. Thus, Gun Island becomes more than a novel about climate crisis—it becomes a call to reimagine the Earth not as resource but as deity, relation, and dharmic kin.

Recent scholarship on Ghosh’s Gun Island has recognized the novel’s intricate weaving of ecological crisis, myth, and nonhuman agency. While valuable, much of this work remains conceptually fragmented, focusing on isolated themes such as spirituality, posthumanism, or cultural memory. This paper offers a unified and philosophically grounded intervention by introducing a tripartite Hindu ecological framework—karma, dharma, and ecosystem—to systematically interpret the novel’s vision of planetary ethics. Unlike prior readings, this framework fuses ethical causality (karma), moral responsibility (dharma), and sacred interdependence (ecosystem) into a cohesive analytic lens rooted in classical Hindu metaphysics and ecological philosophy. It reveals Gun Island not just as a cultural or environmental narrative, but as a profound literary articulation of Hindu eco-spiritual ethics urgently relevant to the Anthropocene.

Among recent scholarship on Gun Island, Chatterjee (2020) offers a compelling reading of Gun Island as a transreligious narrative that collapses the divide between myth and environmental consciousness through the Indic concept of dharma. Drawing on Vedantic principles and the doctrine of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, she interprets swadharma—one’s sacred duty—as the narrative’s ethical center, particularly through the presence of bhutas (nonhuman beings), folk goddess worship, and sacred geography. However, her reading largely remains within a cultural–symbolic orbit, leaving the philosophical depth and ethical precision of dharma underexamined. This paper builds on Chatterjee’s insight by grounding dharma not just in lived ritual but in classical Hindu ecological ethics as articulated by scholars such as Vasudha Narayanan, Christopher Chapple, and Harold Coward. Rather than treating dharma as mythopoetic alone, I propose it as a normative, metaphysical principle that regulates human and nonhuman interdependence.

Mahendru (2025) brings a different lens to Gun Island through posthumanist theory, arguing that the novel dissolves the human–nature binary by highlighting the agency of nonhuman lifeforms—such as the spider, the snake, and the dolphin. Drawing on theorists like Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, Mahendru frames Ghosh’s project as one of “relational ontology,” where the Anthropocene demands a redefinition of ethics that is decentered, affective, and interspecies. Her reading powerfully captures Ghosh’s challenge to anthropocentrism and the novel’s vision of ecological entanglement. While my paper shares Mahendru’s emphasis on interspecies responsibility, it approaches that responsibility from a different ontological foundation—one rooted in Indic cosmology rather than posthumanist materialism. I argue that Ghosh invokes dharma as a sacred ecology that binds humans and nonhumans in karmic reciprocity and ethical obligation.

This paper reinterprets Gun Island not simply as climate fiction, but as a postcolonial cosmology that reclaims suppressed spiritual and metaphysical worldviews marginalized by secular postcolonial critique. Drawing on a tripartite Hindu ecological model described earlier, it positions Indic metaphysics as a form of anti-colonial resistance to extractive modernity. The novel’s mythic elements, especially the return of Manasa Devi, are read as disruptions of colonial temporalities and affirmations of non-Western ecological knowledge, a theme further elaborated later in the section on the legend of Bonduki Sadagar.

2. Karma, Dharma, and the Sacred Web of Life: Ghosh’s Eco-Spiritual Framework

In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh structures his eco-narrative around three interconnected Hindu philosophical concepts—karma, dharma, and the eco-spiritual ecosystem—each offering a lens to interpret the planetary environmental crisis. These concepts, deeply embedded in Hindu metaphysics, allow Ghosh to transcend secular discourses of climate change and reimagine ecological collapse as a moral and spiritual consequence of human action.

2.1. Karma: The Moral Law of Cause and Effect

The doctrine of karma—the inexorable law of cause and effect—is central to Hindu cosmology. Harold Coward elaborates that karma theory, at its core, insists on a profound moral interconnection between human action and the environment. Unlike Western views that separate humans from nature, karma sees no such division; rather, humans, animals, plants, water, and even air are part of an interconnected moral web. According to Coward, karma operates almost like “an ecological law” where the “disruption of the natural world brings inevitable repercussions to the human community” (Coward 2003, p. 53). He emphasizes that every action—whether physical or mental—plants karmic “memory traces” (samskaras) in the unconscious, predisposing individuals to repeat similar actions unless consciously negated. Thus, environmental destruction arises not merely from external forces but from “freely chosen actions” and impulses that individuals have cultivated over lifetimes. Karma theory, therefore, demands an active, ethical responsibility: by choosing reverence and restraint toward nature today, individuals sow karmic seeds for a healthier Earth tomorrow. Coward concludes that karmic responsibility is not merely individual but “cosmic,” affecting not just the actor but the entire network of beings to which humans are inseparably bound (Coward 2003, p. 45).

In Gun Island, Ghosh dramatizes these karmic repercussions through escalating environmental catastrophes—cyclones ravaging the Sundarbans, the slow sinking of Venice, and the global refugee crises—all presented as cumulative results of exploitative industrial practices and colonial extractions. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh argues that the colonial project functioned as a violent reordering of both land and meaning—a form of “terraforming” that imposed extractive systems upon living landscapes (Ghosh 2021, p. 54). He explains that “the science fictional concept of terraforming is thus an extrapolation from colonial history, except that it extends the project of creating neo-Europes into one of creating neo-Earths,” and that such narratives “draw heavily on the rhetoric and imagery of empire, envisioning space as ‘frontier’ to be ‘conquered’ and ‘colonized’” (p. 54). This imperial logic of domination and transformation resonates with the karmic paradigm in Gun Island, where the consequences of such historical transgressions manifest in ecological collapse and migratory suffering. Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”—the “gradual environmental degradation that is dispersed across time and space” (Nixon 2011, p. 2)—parallels the karmic logic in Ghosh’s narrative, where the violence inflicted upon ecosystems returns to haunt human civilization in insidious, seemingly disconnected ways. Thus, Ghosh’s depiction of ecological collapse is not merely accidental or incidental; it is a karmic unfolding of humanity’s historic failure to honor its responsibilities toward the Earth.

2.2. Dharma: Righteous Duty and Ecological Ethics

Counterbalancing the deterministic force of karma is dharma, often translated as “righteous duty” or “ethical obligation.” The Bhagavad Gita defines dharma as the moral law sustaining the universe, urging individuals to act in accordance with their rightful place in the cosmic order: “Better is one’s own duty though destitute of merits or incomplete than the duty of another well performed; the man who performs action ordained by his own nature does not incur sin” (Easwaran 1985). In the context of environmental ethics, dharma extends beyond human-to-human relations, encompassing duties toward nonhuman life forms and ecosystems.

Christopher Chapple and Mary E. Tucker assert that within Hinduism, “dharma enjoins humans to maintain the integrity of the natural world, recognizing rivers, forests, and mountains as sacred presences” (Chapple and Tucker 2000, p. 132). K.L. Seshagiri Rao deepens this understanding by grounding dharma within the ontological structure of the cosmos itself. He writes the following:

The concept of dharma provides a model of cosmic and social equilibrium; it represents the principle of preservation. Dharma sustains and is to be sustained in turn through human efforts; following dharma leads to worldly development and spiritual fulfillment (moksa). Prosperity (abhyudaya) is the result of proper care and management of natural and human resources.

(Rao 2000)

In this framework, dharma becomes not only a personal ethical guide but also a civilizational principle that structures human interactions with the environment. Vasudha Narayanan further reinforces this ecological vision of dharma, noting that “There is a close correlation between dharma (righteousness, duty, and justice) and the ravaging of Earth. When dharma declines, human beings despoil nature” (Narayanan 2001, p. 181). This framing accentuates the idea that environmental degradation is not merely a technical failure but a moral collapse—a decline in the collective fulfillment of sacred duty. Ghosh embeds this understanding in his characters’ evolving relationships with animals, myths, and the environments, where ecological respect becomes central to ethical transformation.

In Gun Island, characters like Deen undergo a gradual dharmic awakening, recognizing their responsibilities not only to fellow humans but to the broader ecological community—manifested in acts of reverence toward snakes, dolphins, and the mythic landscapes that Ghosh animates with sacred vitality. This repositioning of the human subject as a custodian rather than a conqueror of nature exemplifies the dharmic imperative to sustain the delicate web of life. Vasudha Narayanan similarly emphasizes that dharma is rooted in restraint, frugality, and deep respect for the earth, proposing a model of “nonviolence toward all creatures” (Narayanan 2001, p. 183). Ghosh’s narrative, by drawing on these ethical dimensions, critiques capitalist paradigms that commodify nature and offers instead an alternative grounded in ancient ecological wisdom.

2.3. Eco-Spiritual Ecosystem: Interconnectedness in Hindu Cosmology

The third strand of Ghosh’s eco-spiritual framework is the vision of the ecosystem as a sacred, interconnected web, a notion profoundly resonant with Hindu cosmology. The Chandogya Upanishad proclaims, “Tat Tvam Asi”—“Thou art that” (Radhakrishnan 1953)—affirming the fundamental unity of all existence. This metaphysical assertion collapses the binaries between human and nonhuman, subject and environment, and instead posits a continuum of being where divinity permeates all forms of life.

As Christopher Key Chapple explains, ancient Indian cosmology, as articulated in the Rgveda, perceives the human being as deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe: “the person or purusa was regarded as a reflection of the world itself in its great immensity: eyes were said to correspond to the sun; the mind was correlated with the moon; breath with the wind; feet with the earth” (Chapple 2001, pp. 208–9). This vision affirms a profound interconnectedness between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the universe. In Gun Island, Ghosh animates this interconnectedness by entwining the fate of humans with the migrations of animals, the shifts in ocean currents, and the ancient prophecies encoded in myths. Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes, is not merely a folkloric figure but a symbolic representation of nature’s sentient agency, responding to human transgressions with ecological upheavals.

Furthermore, contemporary ecological thinkers like Joanna Macy affirm the necessity of reawakening such spiritual perceptions: “The Buddha called our interconnectedness paticca samuppada, dependent co-arising. It is equated with the Dharma in both meanings of that term” (Macy 2007, p. 31). Ghosh’s integration of Hindu eco-spiritual principles serves precisely this function, dissolving anthropocentric worldviews and re-situating humanity within a broader living cosmos.

By deploying the conceptual triad of karma, dharma, and eco-spiritual ecosystem, Ghosh crafts a powerful philosophical framework that critiques capitalist destructiveness while affirming ancient Hindu visions of relationality, accountability, and sacred ecological belonging.

3. Reading the Legend of Bonduki Sadagar

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island revitalizes the legend of Bonduki Sadagar—the Gun Merchant—and his encounter with Manasa Devi, reinterpreting this ancient tale through an eco-spiritual lens that critiques modernity’s alienation from the natural and divine worlds. As narrated by Deen, the novel’s protagonist, the legend recounts how Bonduki Sadagar, a wealthy merchant, refuses to honor Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes and fertility. Enraged by this affront, the goddess unleashes storms, poisonous creatures, and natural calamities to pursue and punish him, forcing the merchant into desperate flight across perilous waters and unknown lands.

Ghosh reintroduces this traditional Bengali myth early in the novel when Deen visits a crumbling shrine dedicated to Manasa Devi deep within the Sundarbans, a landscape already imperiled by rising seas and ecological degradation. The story resurfaces repeatedly throughout the narrative, providing both a symbolic and literal framework for Deen’s journey—a journey that leads from the wetlands of Bengal to the flooded canals of Venice. In each setting, the legend is echoed in contemporary disasters: climate change, species displacement, human trafficking, and the dissolution of traditional ways of life. As Gabrielle Giannone notes, Ghosh “superimposes” the traditional story of Bonduki Sadagar upon contemporary crises such as “extractive capitalism, native displacement, and climate migration” (Giannone 2025). The wrath of Manasa Devi, once interpreted narrowly as divine vengeance, is reimagined as an ecological warning system—a sacred expression of the planet’s own suffering in response to human exploitation. Tipu’s encounter with a mysterious snakebite, leading to prophetic visions, and the strange manifestations of spiders and snakes throughout Deen’s travels, suggest that the goddess’s influence remains active and urgent in the modern world.

Ghosh thus uses the myth not merely as background but as a living narrative thread binding together three major storylines: the threatened Sundarban shrine, the perilous migration journeys of characters like Tipu and Rafi, and the scholarly investigations of Deen and Cinta. These threads converge around the recognition that the disruption of natural balances—whether through colonial capitalism, environmental degradation, or cultural dislocation—invokes consequences as inevitable and far-reaching as the goddess’s fabled curses.

The divine–human-natural world relationship articulated in the legend is one of intimate entanglement and fragile balance. Manasa Devi, representing the forces of nature, demands reverence; Bonduki Sadagar’s hubristic denial of her authority results in his downfall. This narrative of cosmic retribution finds a contemporary echo in the novel, where Deen, initially skeptical of myth and spirituality, gradually comes to recognize the deep disorder underlying modern life. Reflecting on the escalating ecological and social crises, he observes: “That the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession” (Ghosh 2019, p. 88). This haunting articulation draws attention to the unraveling of the moral and natural order, suggesting that contemporary disasters are not merely accidental, but symptomatic of a deeper metaphysical disarray. Ghosh’s portrayal resonates with the cosmology articulated in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna declares, “Those who do not offer sacrifices to the gods cause the gods to vanish; and when the gods vanish, so does dharma” (Easwaran 1985). Ghosh thus reanimates a worldview where disrupting the sacred order—whether through spiritual arrogance or environmental exploitation—has tangible, catastrophic consequences.

The legend also functions as an early warning against violating ecological dharma. Bonduki Sadagar’s relentless pursuit of wealth mirrors modern capitalism’s extractionist ethos, wherein natural resources are commodified without regard for ecological balance. His refusal to acknowledge Manasa Devi can be read as a metaphor for humanity’s dismissal of environmental limits—a hubris that leads not only to personal ruin but to collective suffering. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey emphasizes, “Turning to Indigenous and postcolonial island writers and artists, we can see that catastrophic ruptures to social and ecological systems have already been experienced through the violent processes of empire… the apocalypse has already happened; it continues because empire is a process” (DeLoughrey 2019, p. 7). This framing urges a rethinking of climate crises not as unprecedented futures but as extensions of historical systems of exploitation—linking ecological precarity to the enduring legacies of colonial violence.

Moreover, the spatial trajectories in the novel—moving from the Sundarbans to Venice—reinforce the universality of the warning encoded in the myth. Both regions are endangered by rising seas and environmental degradation, accentuating that no corner of the globe is immune to the karmic backlash of ecological irresponsibility. This dynamic extends the logic of slow violence introduced earlier, vividly dramatized in the gradual collapse of Venice and the periodic submergence of the Bengal Delta.

Ghosh’s interweaving of myth and contemporary reality mirrors Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim that climate change “compels us to think human history and natural history together” (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 207). Swati Moitra expands this epistemological role of myth in Gun Island by conceptualizing the return of Manasa Devi as a “re-turning” of sacred cosmology—an intervention that resists secular, colonial, and linear conceptions of time. Moitra argues, “the goddess reappears as a cosmopolitical figure whose agency exceeds narrative closure and intervenes in both ecological time and political crisis” (Moitra 2022, p. 227). Her re-emergence is not a folkloric recovery but what Moitra calls “a cosmological return with ethical implications” (p. 230). Ghosh, in this reading, mobilizes myth as a living infrastructure of resistance—capable of unsettling Enlightenment rationality, modern technocracy, and the extractive logics of empire. Manasa Devi’s presence thus operates not only as symbolic vengeance but as an ontological force that reactivates dharma and sacred responsibility in the midst of planetary disorder. Building on Swati Moitra’s reading and Ghosh’s own reflections in The Nutmeg’s Curse, the revival of the Bonduki Sadagar legend emerges as a form of counter-hegemonic storytelling that reclaims myth as a mode of cosmological resistance. As Ghosh notes, colonialism not only dispossessed lands but also suppressed Indigenous cosmologies and sacred narratives that challenged extractive rationalities. Moitra’s concept of “re-turning” deepens this insight by framing myth as an active epistemology that disrupts secular historical linearity and restores spiritual sovereignty. In Gun Island, the reanimation of Manasa Devi and the karmic consequences that unfold reaffirm the epistemic and ontological value of myth in an age of planetary crisis. Echoing Christopher Chapple’s assertion that Hindu narratives urge ecological restraint and balance, Ghosh situates the goddess not merely as a symbol but as a sacred force whose presence reactivates dharma across time and space. The legend thus operates as both cosmological parable and political allegory, exposing the entwined fates of divine, human, and nonhuman life. Echoing Christopher Chapple’s assertion that Hindu narratives urge the maintenance of ecological balance through restraint and respect, Ghosh warns that violation of ecological dharma inevitably invites karmic retribution. The legend in Gun Island operates simultaneously as a cosmological parable and a political allegory, exposing the entwined fates of divine, human, and natural worlds.

4. Karma and the Environmental Crisis

The workings of karma unfold vividly in Gun Island through Amitav Ghosh’s portrayal of environmental catastrophe. The plight of climate refugees—particularly Tipu and Rafi—stands as a potent illustration of karmic consequence. Ghosh underscores that their migration is part of a systemic karmic chain: “Hamlets obliterated by the storm surge,… corpses floating in the water, half eaten by animals; villages that had lost most of their inhabitants” (Ghosh 2019, p. 21). Here, the submergence of the Sundarbans materializes humanity’s accumulated negative karma, generated through industrial exploitation and ecological negligence over centuries.

Similarly, natural disasters, such as the Bengal Delta floods and the sinking of Venice, are presented as karmic retributions for historical patterns of ecological disregard. Ghosh’s apocalyptic imagery—“it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sundarbans. When people tried to dig well, an arsenic laced brew gushed out of the soil” (Ghosh 2019, p. 66)—depicts collapse not as isolated events but as systemic responses to prolonged human transgressions. Venice’s decay furthers this motif: its foundations, once deemed indestructible, are now “riddled with holes” (p. 210). Cinta ominously declares, “I will show you a different kind of monster, much more dangerous” (p. 289), before introducing Deen to shipworms—wood-eating creatures thriving in the lagoon’s warming waters. “They eat up the wood from the inside, in huge quantities… They are literally eating the foundations of the city” (p. 290). The image of invisible rot undermining the city’s very ground becomes a powerful metaphor for ecological karma: damage that is internal, cumulative, and ultimately inescapable.

The novel’s final scenes extend this karmic logic into the spiritual realm. Neelofer Qadir draws a parallel between the legend of Manasa Devi and the final tableau of a migrant vessel adrift in the Mediterranean, interpreting it as a moment of cosmic retribution: “Manasa Devi called upon the unnamed Ethiopian woman to rise up against the systems of violence—‘inequality, climate change, capitalism, corruption, the arms trade, the oil industry’—responsible for rendering disposable once more the dispossessed of the world” (Qadir 2020, p. 9). Here, ecological and political crises merge within a mythic register, underscoring a framework of karmic accountability. In this way, Ghosh’s narrative strategy aligns closely with the Hindu philosophical conception of ecological karma, wherein disruptive human actions generate repercussions across time and space. Tipu and Rafi’s journey, then, is not merely personal misfortune but a karmic symptom of systemic violence. Mary Robinson reinforces this ethical dimension, emphasizing the global injustice at the heart of climate breakdown. She asserts that those “least responsible for the pollution warming, yet are the most affected” (Robinson 2018, p. 5). Her framing parallels the karmic structure Ghosh evokes that marginalized communities suffer the gravest consequences of a crisis they did not cause.

This karmic vision of displacement finds explicit articulation in Ghosh’s nonfiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse, where he frames climate migration as the inevitable outcome of centuries of colonial exploitation and ecological violence. The trajectories of Gun Island’s migrants—Tipu, Rafi, and Bilal—mirror the real-life accounts Ghosh documents, particularly that of Khokon, a Bangladeshi refugee whose story echoes Bilal’s. Khokon’s testimony: “The conditions in the district are lethal now… Before it was just oppression; now on top of the oppression there’s disaster after disaster” (Ghosh 2021, p. 156)—resonates with Tipu’s despair, exposing how colonial histories and neoliberal extractivism compound ecological collapse. Ghosh’s critique of systemic injustice reaches its zenith in the following passage, that could serve as a thesis for both texts:

What migrants like Khokon know, on the other hand, is that every aspect of their plight is rooted in unyielding, intractable, and historically rooted forms of class and racial injustice. They know that if they were wealthy or White they would not have to risk their lives on rickety boats. They know that the processes that have displaced them are embedded in very old and deeply entrenched social relationships of power, national and international. From that point of view, forms of governance, national and international, exist not to promote justice or welfare but precisely to protect the systematic inequalities and historic injustices that produce the displacement of refugees.

(p. 158)

This indictment of structural violence aligns with Gun Island’s portrayal of Tipu and Rafi’s perilous journey to Venice—a city itself crumbling under the weight of ecological karma. Just as Khokon’s displacement is tied to prolonged dry spells, violent hail-storms, and unseasonal downpours in Bangladesh, Bilal’s fate in Gun Island reflects Ghosh’s argument that migrants are climate migrants, whether they know it or not. The quote’s emphasis on “protection” of inequality accentuates how karmic retribution is embedded in the very structures that uphold global injustice, turning governance itself into a vehicle for ecological and moral reckoning.

Gun Island portrays climate refugees and environmental disasters as karmic echoes—manifestations of humanity’s cumulative moral debts. In reasserting the spiritual causal logic of karma, Ghosh subverts secular narratives that treat disasters as value-neutral. He critiques the Enlightenment division between human and natural histories, instead offering an integrated vision in which environmental collapse becomes the inevitable outcome of human ethical failure.

5. Dharma and Eco-Responsibility

While Gun Island diagnoses ecological collapse as a karmic consequence of human arrogance, it simultaneously offers dharma as an ethical antidote, proposing a renewed sense of responsibility toward the more-than-human world. In Hindu cosmology, dharma—the principle of righteous action—is not limited to interpersonal ethics but extends to human duties toward the environment, sustaining the sacred order of life. As Christopher Chapple notes, “the destruction of life forms through violence (himsa) results in direct injury to one’s own soul, increasing the accretion of deleterious karma” (Chapple 1998, p. 28).

At the beginning of the novel, Deen is depicted as a figure of skepticism and detachment, an academic whose engagement with the world is largely intellectual and disembodied. His early dismissal of the legend of Bonduki Sadagar as mere superstition exemplifies his alienation from the sacred dimensions of nature. However, as he journeys through the Sundarbans, Venice, and Los Angeles, Deen encounters increasingly vivid manifestations of nonhuman agency—snakes that seem to guide human destinies, dolphins whose behaviors carry mythic significance, and collapsing cities that testify to environmental distress.

These encounters catalyze Deen’s profound transformation. Reflecting on his visit to the Sundarbans, he remarks, “it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sunderbans” (Ghosh 2019, p. 107). Through this realization, Deen shifts from anthropocentric mastery to ecological humility, recognizing the agency and vitality of the nonhuman world. This transformation is further underscored in a moment of deep introspection when Deen admits the following:

As this started to come back to me I had an uncanny feeling that I too had lost myself in this dream; it wasn’t so much that I was dreaming, but that I was being dreamed by whose very existence was fantastical to me—spiders, cobras, sea snakes—and yet they and I had somehow become a part of each other’s dreams.

(Ghosh 2019, p. 264)

Here, the boundary between self and environment dissolves; Deen no longer sees nature as external or inert but recognizes it as an intimate, dreaming presence that includes him within its sphere of consciousness.

Deen’s growing awareness is further sharpened during his time in Venice, where he witnesses environmental decay not only in mythical or metaphorical terms, but in physical, infrastructural collapse. In a conversation with Cinta, the shipworms that threaten Venice become symbolic of a deeper ecological unraveling. This imagery of unseen natural forces eroding the very supports of civilization mirrors Deen’s inner recognition that environmental degradation is both literal and moral—an indictment of a humanity out of sync with its planetary obligations.

This evolution mirrors Vasudha Narayanan’s assertion that Hindu environmental ethics invites us to look at the world with wonder and respect. Deen’s growing reverence is most visibly reflected in his encounters with snakes and dolphins—animals traditionally venerated in Hindu culture. Manasa Devi, the snake goddess, represents not only divine retribution but also the possibility of reconciliation if humans fulfill their ecological dharma. In one pivotal scene, Deen realizes, “The snake was not just watching me; it was waiting, communicating something beyond language” (Ghosh 2019, p. 159), collapsing the perceived boundary between human and animal consciousness and echoing the Upanishadic vision of a unified, sentient cosmos (Radhakrishnan 1953).

Similarly, Deen’s awe toward dolphins—who guide lost migrants across the Mediterranean—reflects another stage in his ecological awakening. Ghosh writes: “in the water a chakra of dolphins and whales whirled around the boat” (Ghosh 2019, p. 353). In Hindu traditions, aquatic animals like dolphins are sacred, symbolizing divine intervention and cosmic compassion (Chapple and Tucker 2000, p. 140).

Deen’s journey toward eco-dharma aligns with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna emphasizes that “living beings sustain each other” (Easwaran 1985), affirming the mutual dependence and ethical reciprocity between humans and the rest of nature. By the end of Gun Island, Deen no longer perceives nature as a passive background but as an active, moral participant in human life.

Moreover, Ghosh’s ethical vision challenges dominant narratives of environmentalism that prioritize technological fixes over spiritual transformation. As Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim argue, “Technological solutions are insufficient without a change in consciousness that includes a renewed sense of reverence for the Earth community” (Tucker and Grim 2001, p. 12). Ghosh dramatizes precisely this shift, suggesting that the ecological crisis demands not merely policy reforms but a profound reorientation of human consciousness toward humility, restraint, and reverence.

Crucially, this transformation is also framed as an ethical imperative—a burden of knowledge that carries with it an obligation. When Cinta reflects on their shared journey with the Gun Merchant’s story, she tells Deen, “You have brought the Gun Merchant into my life as well. I think that imposes an obligation on us, don’t you?” (Ghosh 2019, p. 274). Her statement crystallizes the moral demand that awakening to ecological realities places on individuals—not merely to know, but to act. This call to action—“to retrace his footsteps”—links historical memory, environmental awareness, and ethical duty into a singular framework of planetary responsibility.

Gun Island positions dharma not merely as a religious obligation but as a planetary ethic, urgently needed to repair the fractured relationships between humans and the natural world. In reviving ancient Hindu insights about ecological interconnectedness and moral duty, Ghosh offers a visionary alternative to the alienated, exploitative paradigms that have fueled environmental catastrophe.

6. Ecosystem as Spiritual Fabric

In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh envisions the Earth not as a passive stage for human action but as a dynamic, sentient network in which human and nonhuman destinies are intimately entwined. This conceptualization draws upon both modern ecological science, which emphasizes systemic interdependence, and Hindu cosmology, which imagines the world as an expression of Prakriti (nature) and Brahman (universal spirit). Scientific ecology increasingly recognizes the Earth as a web of intricate interdependencies, a principle succinctly articulated in Barry Commoner’s First Law of Ecology: “Everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner 1971, p. 29). Ghosh echoes this scientific insight when Cinta explains to Deen the emergence of spiders, worms and other poisonous creatures. She states the following:

“So, you can say that this spider’s presence is natural or scientific. It is here because of our history; because of things human beings have done. It is linked to you already-you have a prior connection with that spider, whether you like it or not”.

(Ghosh 2019, p. 271)

This illustrates that the breakdown of environmental systems is not a series of isolated accidents but the unraveling of a cohesive fabric that sustained life across species and geographies. Ghosh’s narrative insists that such entanglements are not merely biological or material, but also moral and spiritual. The spider, an emissary of ecological imbalance, becomes a symbol of karmic consequence—its presence in Deen’s life a result of actions taken across space and time, implicating even the most distant observers in the violence done to the Earth. In this framework, human responsibility is inescapable; there is no “outside” to which one can retreat, no untouched wilderness or separate realm of innocence.

By rooting this vision in both scientific interdependence and Hindu metaphysics, Ghosh blurs the boundaries between empirical causality and spiritual accountability. In Hindu cosmology, Prakriti is not inert matter but a generative, conscious force, and Brahman is the immanent principle that binds all existence. Thus, ecological destruction is not merely the collapse of ecosystems, but a rupture in the sacred order—a breach of dharma. The reappearance of mythic and nonhuman figures such as Manasa Devi, the dolphins, and even the shipworms suggests that nature is no longer a passive object of human action but a subject, capable of response, retribution, and even communication.

Ghosh’s nonfiction The Great Derangement (2016) reinforces this vision, criticizing Western modernity’s “Cartesian divide between Man and Nature” (Ghosh 2016, p. 31) and calling for a literary re-engagement with nonhuman agency. Gun Island answers this call by blending scientific and mythic understandings of the Earth as an animate, interconnected being. Scholars of eco-mysticism affirm this integrative approach. Jeffrey D. Long argues that “a sustainable environmental ethic must be rooted not only in empirical observations but also in a metaphysical recognition of the sacredness of all existence” (Long 2011a, p. 212). Ghosh enacts this by showing that floods, migrations, and ecological shifts are not merely physical phenomena but also moral events charged with mythic meaning. Elizabeth DeLoughrey similarly notes that Ghosh’s climate fiction “erases the false distinction between the mythological and the material, showing that both are integral to understanding the Anthropocene” (DeLoughrey 2019, p. 11). In Gun Island, myth does not oppose science but supplements it, offering ethical and emotional grammars for human reorientation. Ghosh’s eco-spiritual vision weaves together scientific ecology and ancient Hindu cosmology, portraying the Earth as a vibrant, sentient fabric in urgent need of reverence, protection, and renewal.

7. Conclusions

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island stands as a profound literary intervention into the discourses of environmental crisis, synthesizing Hindu eco-spiritual frameworks with global environmental concerns. By revitalizing the tripartite concepts of karma, dharma, and ecosystemic interdependence, Ghosh reanimates ancient Hindu cosmologies within the contemporary context of climate collapse. He proposes that ecological degradation is not merely a technical failure but a profound ethical and spiritual crisis.

Through the legend of Bonduki Sadagar and Manasa Devi, Ghosh illustrates that human hubris against divine and natural forces invites karmic retribution—manifested in floods, migrations, and the disintegration of ecosystems, vividly reflected in the lived realities of the Sundarbans, Venice, and beyond. His recovery of dharma as an ecological ethic demonstrates that true environmental responsibility demands not only scientific understanding but also spiritual humility and reverence toward nonhuman beings. This dharmic sensibility, deeply rooted in Hindu traditions that view all life as manifestations of the divine (Easwaran 1985; Radhakrishnan 1953), offers an urgent corrective to anthropocentric paradigms that, as Ghosh critiques in The Great Derangement (Ghosh 2016, pp. 30–31), have left humanity uniquely vulnerable to environmental catastrophe.

Moreover, Gun Island models a vital myth–science convergence, demonstrating that ancient spiritual narratives are not obsolete relics but living epistemologies capable of informing and enriching ecological thought today. As scholars such as DeLoughrey (2019) and Long (2011b) contend, sustainable climate action requires the reintegration of mythic and spiritual ways of knowing alongside empirical ecological science. By refusing the Enlightenment dichotomy between rationality and spirituality, Ghosh gestures toward a future where eco-mysticism and scientific ecology jointly sustain a planetary ethic of care, humility, and responsibility.

The relevance of non-Western spiritual ecologies, such as the Hindu environmental worldview Ghosh foregrounds, cannot be overstated in an era where secular, technocratic solutions to climate change have often failed to address the deeper cultural and spiritual roots of the crisis. As Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim emphasize, transformative environmental movements must be undergirded by “a change in consciousness,” rooted in traditions that recognize the Earth as “a community of life” (Tucker and Grim 2001, pp. 13–14).

By engaging recent scholarship from Chatterjee and Mahendru, this paper delineates a distinct interpretive path. While prior analyses have highlighted Gun Island’s spiritual or posthumanist dimensions separately, this study integrates these strands within a cohesive Hindu philosophical framework. The triadic lens of karma, dharma, and ecosystem not only offers ethical clarity but reorients the reading of the novel toward a spiritually charged, decolonial environmental critique.

Future research may build upon Ghosh’s insights by further exploring the intersections between postcolonial ecospiritualities and climate fiction. There is rich potential in examining how Indigenous, African, Islamic, Buddhist, and other non-Western cosmologies conceptualize ecological belonging, karmic causality, and ethical relationality. Similarly, the field of eco-mythology—the study of how ancient myths encode environmental ethics—deserves deeper critical attention, particularly as contemporary climate crises demand imaginative frameworks that transcend purely technological paradigms. Ghosh’s Gun Island offers a compelling blueprint for such explorations, affirming that the spiritual fabrics of the past are indispensable resources for crafting a just, sustainable planetary future.

Ultimately, Gun Island reminds us that survival in the Anthropocene will not be secured by domination over nature, but by relearning how to live within it—in humility, reciprocity, and reverence, as dharma demands.