Hydrocolonial currents: Water, migration, and climate allegory in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

This article reads Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island through Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s hydrocolonial framework to argue that the novel reorients climate fiction from humanitarian spectacle to the ethics of passages. Treating water as both archive and infrastructure, this article traces an itinerary, deltaic edges in Bengal, littoral transits at sea, and lagoonal arrivals in Venice, showing how colonial sea lanes, port bureaucracies, and contemporary rescue regimes sediment into present mobilities. Allegory, here, is not evasive; it scales the Anthropocene through thick, local hydrohistories: Cyclone memory and salinization in the Sundarbans, vessel checkpoints and registries across the Mediterranean, and MOSE’s flood barriers as technopolitical palimpsest. Bringing DeLoughrey into dialogue with wet ontologies (Steinberg & Peters), tidalectics (via Ritson), slow violence (Nixon), and wake work (Sharpe), this paper models a teachable “Hydrocolonial Itinerary” method for literary analysis. It reframes care from rescuing bodies to safeguarding passages as commons, aligning blue urbanism with postcolonial oceanic ethics. Attending migrant narratives, cetacean signals, and digitized maritime surveillance, this paper shows how Gun Island reworks mobility from crisis-event to relational maintenance across waters, infrastructures, and species, suggesting a pedagogy that couples close reading with cartographic, archival, and policy literacies. This supports classroom and community-engaged blue humanities research today.