Precarity, Resilience, and Climate Refugees: Shifting “Borders” of Vulnerability and Agency in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Using the lens of precarity, the paper reads Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), which chronicles the precarious lives of the “dirt-poor” of Sundarbans, a climate-ravaged archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. The paper attempts to configure the shifting borders of vulnerability and agency that determine the conditions of life of climate refugees in Gun Island, paying special attention to the politics of representation of the character Tipu. According to Judith Butler, precarity as a life condition emerges when life falls outside the “epistemological frames” that recognise lives as liveable and grievable. Since they are clearly operations of power, Butler adds that these frames of recognition are not fixed and, therefore, susceptible to reversal and critical instrumentalisation. Thus, although precarity entails vulnerability, it is also a creative and emergent positionality, enabling marginal voices to contest the prevailing ontologies of existence. Butler also recognises that literature representing precarious lives provides “conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of ungrievability”, impelling empathy, understanding, and justice. The paper contends that Tipu’s journey of resilience exposes the inegalitarian nature of the global political geography while reimagining climate precarity as a positionality for creative resistance and a forum for renewed political solidarities.