This paper undertakes a hauntological reading of time and existence, in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). Hauntology, Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau coinage (haunt-plus-ontology, or haunted-ontology, Spectres of Marx, 1994), is a concept that avers that “this instant…is not docile to time, at least to what we call time.” Therefore positing existence as something of “doubtful contemporaneity,” simultaneously contemporaneous and intergenerational, making the present non-contemporaneous, detecting in the present both past and future. Unlike Heidegger’s “care” where the individual is finitely contained within death’s horizon, hauntology ideates a collective global existence beyond the “living present,” enfolding “the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” Not to be confused with cliched ghosts, hauntology, holds time and existence as “spectral” because “effective presence” (norm, law, hegemonic discourse) and its “other” (disarticulated, invisibilised, spectralised presence- as-non-present) both constitute our existence. Gun Island, often called the “Bengali Da Vinci Code,” foregrounds 21^st century’s human and eco-displacements inside a detective story. Its central query, “Desh Koi” (where’s home?), problematises our current existence into one of identitylessness, most evident in current refugee/migrant crises as-well-as ecological disasters. Ghosh avers that these are fuelled by disavowed criminal nexus between corporates, smuggling syndicates, and governments/regimes, whose closest analogues are archaic systemic oppressions, thus gridlocking us into a perennially violently unequal world. This paper asks why Ghosh theorises our contemporary constitutedness thus. It argues that Ghosh, in seeing our post-fordist contemporaneity as continuums of archaic habits of systemic injustices, considers our 21^st century temporality as a cancellation of future, thus liquifying the concept of a homogeneous, empty, calendar, or teleologically linear time. Detective fiction, with its meta-reading detective figure and analeptic closure of the narratorial logico-temporal gap provides a structural shorthand for Gun Island’s braiding of past, present, and future, where medieval Bengal, and Venice, contemporary India, America, and Italy, coalesce, to detect our existences as globally interconnected continuums of transhistoric, transcultural processes, which manifest as temporal bleeds, indexing hegemonic injustices, despite their systemic disarticulations. Like Giorgio Agamben, Ghosh too believes that the hidden foundation of all regimes lies in the prestidigitated inner solidarity between imperii arcana (archaic sovereignty), democracy and totalitarianism (Agamben, Homo Sacer). Gun Island, limns these disavowed processes and avers that our conventional empirical sense-making systems remain short-sighted in noticing these connections. Ghosh asserts that until the spectral, that-is, spectres and spectre-making (spectragenic) processes, are visibilised, our identities and politics will remain congealed in unequal, violent relatedness, and time will bring forth nothing new. Gun Island imagines a just world fuelled by a collective awareness of equality without leaving anyone out. This entails transitioning from the tyranny of presences to an awareness of the spectral third, beyond the present/absent, seen/unseen totalising binaries. This third, a clarifying agent for the ineffable failure of our future, requires a spectral historiography wherein time and being is placed outside commonplace tempero-spatial fixities. This paper therefore studies Gun Island’s treatment of existence and temporality as attempts towards historicising those no-longer- here, and those yet-to-be.

Keywords- Spectres, Hauntology, Detective Fiction, Temporality, Absent presences.