Narrating Eco Precarity: Plural Voices of the Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri

Abstract

Climate change/crisis have become one of the defining realities of the twenty-first century. Its effects are slow, uneven, dispersed, and often difficult to represent through familiar literary forms. In response to this challenge, contemporary Indian writing has developed new ways of telling environmental stories. This paper offers a comparative reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri to show that climate crisis is not only a matter of theme but a problem of form. Applying Pramod K. Nayar’s concept of Ecoprecarity, Rob Nixon’s Slow violence, and Amitav Ghosh’s the Crisis of Imagination, the paper shows that different narrative forms produce multiple ecological meanings. It argues that Ghosh and Banerjee respond to Eco precarity through two different but equally powerful narrative strategies: mythopoesis in the case of Gun Island, and graphic satire in the case of All Quiet in Vikaspuri. The paper argues that multiple narratives unveil a nuanced understanding of the gravity of the Crisis, contributing to the plurality of climate crisis narrative  in contemporary India.