Volume-II, Issue-IV, May 2026
Novel Insights A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Multidisciplinary Research Journal |
Volume-II, Issue-IV , May 2026 |
Eco Subalternity in the Tide Country: Environmental Justice and Marginal Voices in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Dr. Poonam Nigam Sahay, Former Head & Associate Professor, University Department of English, Ranchi University, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India Parvez Hasan, Research Scholar, University Department of English, Ranchi University, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India Email: ranjanhandique108@gmail.com |
Received: 22.05.2026 | Accepted: 29.05.2026 | Published Online: 31.05.2026 |
Page No: | DOI: 10.69655/novelinsights.vol.2.issue.04W.0 | |
Abstract | ||
This paper examines the novel The Hungry Tide (2004) by Amitav Ghosh from the perspectives of eco-subalternity and environmental justice and posits that the novel brings to the foreground, marginal lives of human and nonhuman actors generated by overlapping regimes of conservation, development and climate risk at Sundarbans. The study demonstrates that Ghosh takes up the multiple discourses of postcolonial ecocriticism, subaltern studies and environmental justice to reframe the history of Morichjhapi, the refugee resettlement and everyday precarious labour as examples of environmental injustice faced by the Dalit refugees, fisherfolk and the dwellers of tidal forests. It explores characters like Kusum, Fokir and other marginalised characters as exemplifications of "subaltern ecologies" that embody and represent knowledge and vulnerability that disrupt technocratic, statist and elitist environmental imaginaries. This research paper also examines the way in which other nonhuman entities – Irrawaddy dolphins, Royal Bengal tigers, and the tidal rivers – are caught up in the same risky, necropolitical, governmental, and spatial dispossessive structures. The analysis of the novel through a close reading and contextualisation with historical and sociological narration of the Sundarbans suggests that The Hungry Tide expresses an eco-subaltern standpoint as an appropriate counter epistemology of environmental justice in the South Asian coastal ecologies. Keywords: subaltern, vulnerability, conservation, ecology, solidarity. | ||