"The World Is Falling Apart": Climate Anxiety and Solastalgia in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Gun Island

Abstract

“Climate anxiety” is the term for the common worry caused by unpredictable weather patterns resulting from climate change occurring at an unprecedented scale and speed, jeopardizing all forms of life worldwide. In this paper, I argue that Amitav Ghosh, in The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, depicts climate anxiety by focusing on the emotional responses of the main characters to saltwater intrusion into the Sunderbans delta, which leads to their different attitudes towards the environment. While some characters, guided by their ancestral connection to the region, try to adapt to the changing environment, others become committed to preserving this environment.

Solastalgia as applied to Ghosh’s literary protagonists is interpreted as “the feeling of loss and homesickness,” combined with “ecological grief.” In both novels, the characters’ connection to the environment is formed either through their living arrangements in the Sunderbans delta area or through emotional engagement with nature. Hence, climate anxiety is presented as the grief that is directed both inward, affecting individuals, and outward,

affecting entire communities and societies. In support of my argument, I offer the following points: first and foremost, individual solastalgia is evident when the characters experience anxiety, sadness, and grief related to the loss of a particular landscape and its biodiversity (Ghosh’s characters respond to the changes in Sundarbans with climate grief). The second one is that collective solastalgia takes place when the members of one group experience grief related to the loss of something dear to them (in Ghosh’s novel, such a phenomenon is manifested in the characters’ grief over the destroyed natural landscape and their way of life). And the last is how Literary fiction helps raise awareness about climate change, because it conveys the urgency of the situation more effectively than scientific reports and data.