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

Abstract

This essay explores the formal means by which Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), 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.