“History Repeats in Altered Forms: A Hegelian Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island”

Abstract

Ghosh, as both an anthropologist and novelist, explores the reccurence of historical pattern by connecting the past with the contemporary incidents in his novel Gun Island. He projects the repetitive occurences of past history across different periods. He presents those incidents not as identitical but as the transformed version of earlier events and examines the present crises as prolonged issues of the society in an altered form. The novel weaves the story with the threads of past and present incidents. Meanwhile, it intertwines the historical contradictions of gun merchant legend with the present crises. This paper entitled “History Repeats in Altered Forms: A Hegelian Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island” analyses Ghosh’s Gun Island through the lens of Hegel’s idea of history repeats. Thus Gun Island presents the dynamic notion of history and interprets the unresolved pattern of connection between past and present. The novel suggests that the present-day crises are not unprecedented phenomena but the altered manifestations of historical reccurences.