Subaltern Geoaesthetics in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

This article, on Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide, examines the development of a postcolonial aesthetic that draws on India’s experience with internal and external borders, on the specific border country of the Sundarbans and its ambivalent land-water space, and on a subaltern approach that has developed from being a historiographic method to an aesthetic choice in Amitav Ghosh’s work. It argues that this subaltern geoaesthetic structures this novel and is characterized by an understanding of human and nature relationships that might be described by what Luce Irigaray has described as “approaching the other as other.”