Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide: Political Ecology in Historical Fiction (original) (raw)

TRANS CULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE

In The Hungry Tide (2004), Amitav Ghosh brings in the debate about human settlement in forested lands through Piya and Kanai. Ghosh's power of visualization of Sunderban forest contributes in large measure to the characteristic of the novel. He delivered the exact fluctuation of alienation and adventure throughout the story. Piya Roy is an American scientist of Indian descent. She is a marine biologist so; she visits to Sundabarans for her research on the rare Irrawaddy Dolphin. The story starts with Kanai Dutt, he is a wealthy translator and businessman on the way to his aunt's house, he meets a young girl Piya Roy. He wishes to investigate a journal of his uncle. It has created a space for a Dialogic discourse on the conflict between environmentalists and the refuse settlers, who fight against eviction. Ghosh's fictions open up new and unexpected perspectives. Especially in this modern world, the people are facing several problems of migration and diasporas.

"Life in the Translated World of Amitav Ghosh": A Study of The Hungry Tide

Literary Transactions in a Globalized Context: Multi-Ethnicity, Gender and the Market Place, 2010

One comment made by a character in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, like a leit motif, keeps surfacing in the narrative stream of the novel: “…words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water’s surface. The river itself flows beneath, unseen and unheard.” In my article I shall attempt to explore the nature of the narrative strategies adopted by Ghosh in order to explore the mysteries surrounding the use of the word, of the act of representation; the ‘unseen and unheard’ sides of it in these ‘troubled’ times. By setting his novel in ‘the tide country’ of the Sundarbans, by selecting characters in an ‘across the board’ fashion, by incorporating both the temporality of ‘state history’ and the longue duree of the world of nature, by intermixing the scientistic discourse of ecology of a region and the mythical perceptions of the nature of the man-animal relationship by a group of people-- Ghosh, in this novel, takes the reader to the unfathomable mohona of ‘representations’, beyond the ‘limits’ of ‘ordinary’ experience. Since all representations are, in a way, acts of translations, I would like to look at the novel as Ghosh’s attempt to translate the ontology of a culture in a language which is not its own. I shall try to show how Ghosh’s search for what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘pure language’ to capture the marvel called ‘life’ becomes poignant through an intricate crisscrossing of myriad discursive formations and narrative modes.

Amitav Ghosh's entwining of threads from History, Facts and Myths in The Hungry Tide

Owing to the outcry of the eco-critical literary movements, the issues of deterioration of environment at the hands of modernization gained momentum. Many writers and poets became eco-conscious, expressing about environment and its importance to human life, and further how it is being disturbed by the man himself for his selfish needs. This paper aims to outline ecocritical examination of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. He has shown the alienation of man from his environment by bringing together the characters, history and myths prevalent in the area of Sundarbans.

ECOCRITICISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE

Trans Stellar Journals, 2021

Ecocriticism is a vast opportunity for literary and cultural researchers to explore the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. It looks at the links between literature and the environment. Postcolonialism studies the effects of imperialism prior to, during and after colonialism. These two themes are apparent throughout The Hungry Tide in its characters, frame and culture thus making it a complex example of ecocritical postcolonial literature. Novels like The Hungry Tide depict how the lives of peoples of formerly colonized nations were directly and indirectly impacted by Western practices. This then generates discussions around the world, and contributes to the generation of articles and reviews of novels and subjects. The present paper seeks to explore the Eco critical Postcolonial perspectives as envisaged in The Hungry Tide.

The Home, the Tide, and the World: Eco-Cosmopolitan Encounters in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies , 2006

Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is a story about the Sundarbans, the sort that helps us understand the fascinating and sensitive ecology of what in the novel is called “the tide country,” as well as the crucial importance of this region’s continued existence. The novel is also, however, a story about environmental and social injustice in a postcolonial space, about people massacred or forcefully evicted from what they consider their homes on the grounds of a dubious environmental policy. On all levels of the story, the forces of the global interact powerfully with the local, be that in ecological, economic, or cultural terms. The paper argues that in contrast to state dependency on global capital and disconnection from the local, the development of what ecocritic Ursula Heise describes as an eco-cosmopolitan consciousness allows those characters in the novel who evince it a deeper understanding of and connectedness with one other and with their natural environments. The Hungry Tide reminds us that cosmopolitanism can, in the last instance, not be meaningful without also being eco; and while an eco-cosmopolitan awareness cannot necessarily guarantee survival in the face of natural forces or unscrupulous governments, it does help fostering a deeper sense of meaning and solidarity.

'Recasting the Usual Order of Things': Competing Knowledges in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

According to Hans N. Weiler, "[t]he more recent debate on the impact of globalization on development and under-development in the world deals prominently with the role of knowledge and research both in sustaining a new globalized order, and in subverting it" (6). A central concern of these debates focuses on knowledge produced in Western universities. Critical assessments often start with the premise that "[p] erhaps no narrative has a tighter hold over our historical thinking than the one that charts the spread and superiority of Western science throughout the world" (Ratté 17). Amitav Ghosh challenges this master narrative in his 2004 novel The Hungry Tide 1 , by dramatizing the impact of Western Science in general and American Biology and Environmental Studies in particular on the living conditions of the indigenous population in the Indian Sundarbans. The text thus resists "the imperialistic pretensions of global idealism and global scientism alike, both of which wrongly seek to encompass everything within their own theoretical constructions" (Shaviro 94). The Sundarbans are situated on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers in the Bay of Bengal and form one of the largest salt-tolerant mangrove forests in the world. The Indian area-the novel's setting-holds the Sundarban National Park and a Biosphere Reserve, inhabited by 260 bird species and threatened species like the Bengal tiger and saltwater crocodiles. The Sundarbans are also considered one of the world's areas most endangered by changing water levels in the wake of climate change. As the central character Nirmal Bose, an acute observer of historical changes, notes: "What would it take, to submerge the tide country? Not much-a minuscule change in the level of the sea would be enough" (215). The novel presents two readings of the relationship between the Sundarban people and the epistemological, economic and political hegemony of knowledge formations produced at US universities. My essay shall at first outline the harmonizing version of a knowledge landscape, as the title of the GAAS conference "Knowledge Landscapes North America", where this contribution took its start, suggests. The landscape metaphor harks back to that decisive moment in occidental epistemology 2 , when in 1336 Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux for no other reason but to enjoy the view and afterwards produced the first account in occidental literature of nature perceived as a landscape, namely as a succession of singular sights converging and united in one subjective point of view for aesthetic pleasure. Such a complementary model, where the assembly of differences suggests a mutually enhancing whole, seem to inform the dominant storyline of the novel at first sight. Yet this is only the frame-and perhaps only the exterior coating-for devastating knowledge wars (Kincheloe) that surface in the 1979 Morichjhãpi Incident, so-called in Western historiography, or the Morichjhãpi Massacre, from the Indian perspective. In a second step, I shall focus on this knowledge war, which discloses the environmental racism inherent

Myth and Ecology: An Ecocritical Study of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Isara solutions, 2022

The paper attempts an ecocritical analysis of myths and tales that are incorporated in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide. By exploring into the ecological potential of ancient Hindu myths and the legend of Bonbibi, it tends to propose that certain myths and legends can be approached as a significant source of environmental ethics and sustainable lifeways. When placed within an ecocultural framework, the myth of Bon Bibi appears to inhere the possibility of being read as a 'green text' which has fostered connections between the people and the place. The continual reproduction of the myth through stage performances and songs across the islands of the tide country has enabled intergenerational transfer of the environmental culture specific to the region. The story of Bonbibi has ecopedagogical value as it tends to encourage environmentalists to frame a place-based conservation policy. The myth is one among many other sub-texts that the novel consists of.

From The Sundarbans to Italy: Ecocritical Concerns in The Hungry Tide and Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

Kanpur Philosophers: International Journal of Humanities, Law and Sciences , 2021

The present paper tries to explore the ecocritical concerns represented in the select novels of Amitav Ghosh, namely, The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019). It discusses the recurring themes of environmental conservation, man-animal conflict and coexistence of humans with nature by alluding to both the novels. The paper also focuses on how Gun Island is a continuation of ecocritical awareness debated in The Hungry Tide.The two novels under discussion present a vast span of geographical locations to present the ecocritical sensibility. While the Sundarbans in West Bengal serve as an example of conflict zone as well as coexistence, Italian waters present a zenith of harmony between humans and natural life. A Glossary of Literary Terms (Eleventh Edition) states: Ecocriticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining-criticism‖ with a shortened form of-ecology‖-the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats.-Ecocriticism‖ (or by alternative names , environmental criticism, and green studies) designates the critical writings that explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities.

Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

2008

Water is the central characteristic of the coastal region between India and Bangladesh known as the Sundarbans. Here water swallows and regurgitates land with every turn of the tide. The tiger conservation project in the Sundarbans in the 1970s prompted the state-led violent eviction of Bangladeshi refugees from the islands, and in 2000 the government handed over large tracts of the islands to a private company for an ecotourism project. These events form the backdrop of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. The first incident is narrativized in the novel, presenting a political indictment of the second development. This paper explores the role of water as both a metaphor and a material presence in the text in order to examine how the novelist articulates the rupture of social hierarchies and voices dissent over the violation of human rights in the name of conservation.

Fixity Amid Flux: Aesthetics and Environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Ariel: A Review of International English Literature

This essay explores the formal means by which Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide , a novel set in the Sundarbans islands, articulates an environmental politics that reconciles social justice and ecological concerns. However, the novel's internal contradictions surface in its treatment of South Asian fisherman Fokir as an idealized peasant whose fixity is in marked contrast with the fluid subjectivities of the metropolitan characters. I argue that Fokir's idealization is a problematic way in which the novel mourns the loss of peasant culture in the context of neoliberalism's destruction of rural ecologies.