SUBALTERN VOICES IN AMITAV GHOSH’STHE HUNGRY TIDE (original) (raw)
Related papers
Subalternity a different perspective in the novels of Amitav Ghosh
International Journal of English Language and Literature, 2015
Amitav Ghosh is widely acclaimed for his major novels in which he has expressed his concerns for the downtrodden people of Indian society. In his major novels Amitav Ghosh’s sympathetic attitude towards the subaltern can be perceived. The problems of alienation, migration and existential crisis in life of unprivileged class of the society are explored through his fiction. The voice of the subalterns, their struggle and sacrifices which went unnoticed in the annals of the history began to get a prominent voice in the fiction of Amitav Ghosh in a different way. Through his writings he provided subalterns center stage by making them as the pivotal character of his fiction so that they can raise voice against the oppressive forces of their society. My aim in this paper is to analyze Amitav Ghosh’s selected novels and to highlight his perspective on subalternity. The selected novels for this paper are – The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosomes, The Hungry Tide, The Glass Palace, and The Sea of Poppies. In these novels Amitav Ghosh has realistically delineated the pathetic and difficult condition of the subaltern. The evil faces of poverty, homelessness, exploitation and subjugation have also been exposed in Amitav Ghosh’s novels.
Struggle for Survival: A Study in Amitabh Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Ars Artium, Vol. 1 , 2013
Amitabh Ghosh is a well-known writer of the Indian English fiction. His important works include-The Circle Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Island (1992), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). As a novelist, he skillfully blends scholarship, history, sociology and anthropology in his narrative for more serious purposes. His novels both Indian and global in perception and treatment represent, fresh trends in today's postcolonial literature.
Life And Struggles Of Subaltern In Ghosh'S Novel The Hungry Tide
2018
Subaltern denotes someone who has been marginalized or oppressed. The term subaltern derived its origin from Marxism, describes a person who is of lower rank in military or class or caste. They do not have political or economic power, and they live under dictatorship. The term subaltern in literature is related with the terms like masses, Dalit, deprived, oppressed, marginalized and neglected sections of society. It concerns about sociological, political, historical aspects of society.
“Who are we? We are the dispossessed”: the Refugees in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Consortium Journal, 2023
The Independence of India was accompanied by the bloody massacre of partition of the country on the basis of religion. Suddenly the land in which one is born and brought up was dubbed by the state as not his own ignoring all sorts of attachments between the individual and the land. The individual identity was replaced with the collective identity of becoming “refugee”. There is a fundamental difference between the Punjab partition and the partition between India and West Pakistan. While the first one had a devastating effect and mostly stopped in the subsequent years following the partition, the letter continued for many years after Independence. The first influx of refugees that came from West Pakistan immediately after the Independence was wealthy and upper caste people who easily found their foothold in West Bengal. With the independence of West Pakistan and the emergence of the state of Bangladesh there was another wave of migration where the poor and people belonging to Namashudra castes were compelled to leave Bangladesh. But in many cases they were no longer accommodated within West Bengal which has a close proximity with the life they lived in their “old” country. Many of them were shifted to different parts of India without considering their language and cultural identity. Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in Sundarban, recounts in its backdrop the tragic events of Marichjhapi massacre. The present paper, besides tracing the traumas of the partition to the refugees, aims to explore how they are constantly searching for their “home” in newly found land. The role of the State in dealing with the refugees is also discussed.
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide successfully captures the agony of the dispossessed and marginalized people. The novel gives vivid picture of the suffering of dalit refugees in the islands of Sundarban is an archipelago which offers home for a number of endangered and threatened species. Due to partition of India and later the independence of Bangladesh large number of people were displaced. They had to leave their own territory and turned into refugees. Unlike upper caste refugees, who were able to get support to settle down, the low caste Dalit refugees had to struggle hard. Large number of refugees from East Bengal, tried to establish habitats in ecologically sensitive Sundarbans fighting against the devouring tides and dangerous predators. The refugee settlers struggled hard to make a niche in Sundarbans which is otherwise a hostile environment. Later the refugee settlers of Morichjhapi Island had to undergo severe assault under the name of ecoconservation. But this painful event of history is not recorded appropriately as this is the history of marginalized people. Ghosh takes this part of history as source for The Hungry Tide thus giving shelter to this marginalized history in his fiction. This paper also focuses on how the fear of revival of the forgotten namashudra movement, became one of the hidden factors that led to the forcible eviction of dalit refugees.
International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences , 2023
This research paper delves into the post-colonial narrative presented in Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Hungry Tide, published in 2004. Through a post-colonial lens, the paper examines how Ghosh's narration captures the intricate interplay between identity, representation, and power dynamics in the Sundarbans region shared by India and Bangladesh. The novel portrays the 'Subalternised Other', individuals and communities which are marginalised and silenced by dominant forces; it sheds light on their struggles for agency, voice, and recognition. Drawing upon the works of M.H. Abrams, Antonio Gramsci, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the paper explores the significance of the terms "Subaltern" and "Other" in the context of postcolonial studies through this text. It analyses how Ghosh's characters, including Piya, Kanai, Nirmal, Fokir, Kusum, Moyna, and the Morichjhapi refugees, represent the diverse manifestations of subordination based on class, caste, age, gender, and ethnicity. Overall, this article is a vivid academic demonstration of how The Hungry Tide offers a compelling exploration of the 'Subalternised Other', inviting readers to critically reflect on representation, identity, and the urgency of embracing diversity and harmonious coexistence within societies in a post-colonial context.
Issues of Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Abstract In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh offers a brilliant treatment of highly complex and historically loaded problem, reflecting light from each of the various facets. Ghosh introduces the Sundarbans not only as a location, but as a living entity, endowed with human and animal qualities, and rooted in myth – connecting in this way to an elemental side of our human psyche which extends beyond mere rational understanding. Humans, since time immemorial, have attributed larger-than-life, mythical human and animal characteristics to inanimate nature in order to deal with what for them was a world of incomprehensible vagaries – such attributes then making possible a link between humanity and a natural word The Hungry Tide explores is not just the historical partition of Bengal but also the subsequent partition of Bengal's psyche. In line with the title, the story has a rhythm, a tide flowing between events, perspectives and impeccably drawn moments in the lives of the characters. The Hungry Tide is a novel full of ideas, none of them found to have an easy answer. In Kanai's and Piya's world, they prefer the structure of science or business where they can view everything as black or white. In the Sundarbans where the tide changes the environment daily, nothing is certain and everything in life is a shade of gray. It's a place where tigers kill hundreds of people a year, but since they're a protected species, killing a tiger that has been preying on a village brings in the government authorities to mete out punishment. In an environment where life is fragile, the essence of any person is broken down to its core. Amitav Ghosh lets the tide country break down the barriers of both society and his characters.
Amitav Ghosh Perspective on Subalternity & His Novels
Amitav Ghosh is widely acclaimed for his major novels in which he has expressed his concerns for the downtrodden people of Indian society. In his major novels Amitav Ghosh's sympathetic attitude towards the subaltern can be perceived. The problems of alienation, migration and existential crisis in life of unprivileged class of the society are explored through his fiction. The voice of the subalterns, their struggle and sacrifices which went unnoticed in the annals of the history began to get a prominent voice in the fiction of Amitav Ghosh in a different way. Through his writings he provided subalterns center stage by making them as the pivotal character of his fiction so that they can raise voice against the oppressive forces of their society. My aim in this paper is to analyze Amitav Ghosh's selected novels and to highlight his perspective on subalternity. The selected novels for this paper are -The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosomes, The Hungry Tide, The Glass Palace, and The Sea of Poppies. In these novels Amitav Ghosh has realistically delineated the pathetic and difficult condition of the subaltern. The evil faces of poverty, homelessness, exploitation and subjugation have also been exposed in Amitav Ghosh's novels.
"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.
2016
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide addresses multiple socio-political issues: development is one of them. Development is a much-debated concept in the context of the third world. It becomes more crucial when it is posed against the issue of the sustenance of ecosystem. The Hungry Tide introduces the question of the subalterns' agency into the discursive purview of development already fraught with contradictory nuances. Instead of remaining a mere rhetoric, the question of subaltern agency becomes a central problem which unravels the correlations between the other above-mentioned issues e.g. nature, development, etc. To delineate this complex network, the writings of Hardt and