Persecution vs. Protection: Examining the Pernicious Politics of Environmental Conservation in The Hungry Tide

Abstract

There has been a shift in the mode of environmental appropriation within the global South; colonial policies of resource exploitation have now become substituted by Western environmental conservation programs that generate human crises at the cost of preventing ecological ones, thereby highlighting the need to examine the harmful consequences of environmental preservation. Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) draws attention to the detrimental impact of environmental protectionist policies in the Sundarban islands where indigenous people are socioeconomically marginalized and violently expelled from their land following its designation as a reserve for tigers, which have been declared as the region's endangered species. The destructive outcome of ecological conservation in this case points to the limitations of broad brush Western policies which do not take into account the context of a region and are predicated on the assumption that a region is knowable or predictable. This essay argues that The Hungry Tide addresses the issue of decontextualized (Western) knowledge production by offering a de-essentialized representation of the Sundarban islands to emphasize the mutability, complexity, and diversity of the region and to subvert the idea that the islands are easily knowable places. Furthermore, the textual representation is used to critique the premise of Western environmental protectionist programs that are guided by neo-colonialist objectives of co-opting land and resources for vested interests. Keeping this concern in view, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) draws attention to the detrimental impact of environmental protectionist policies, especially as seen in the context of Sundarban islands, where indigenous people were subjected to physical violence and enforced displacement, to vacate the land for tigers which were determined to be a species in need of protection.