Slow Violence in The Hungry Tide: An Eco-Critical Analysis

Abstract

An eco-critical analysis of the novel The Hungry Tide aligns with an important trend in the present literature, where the writers are playing a significant role in examining the interconnection between the environment and human beings.  This emerging attention particularly focuses on the ecological crisis and encourages eco-critical readings, emphasizing the significance of environmental concerns in literary studies.  In that way, the present paper tries to examine the critical crisis of slow violence in the time of climate crisis in the novel The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh through an eco-critical perspective. The setting of the novel is the Sundarbans, a large grandeur forest area, filled with the multifaceted difficulties of the ecosystem.  With the intention to illustrate the refugees of Morichjhapi as a foreshadowing of the climate displacement indulging the people's lives of the tidal region called Sundarbans in South Asia, this paper tries to provide a historical account of the massacre of the Morichjhapi island and tries to unfold the forced eviction depicted in the novel through the diary of Nirmal.  Within the novel, destabilization and environmentalism stand as dominant themes.  Ghosh’s depiction of the physical environment in the tidal region called Sundarbans serves as a depiction of an active force that is interconnecting the flora, fauna and the life of human beings either indirectly or directly.  This connection underscores the dangers of each component to the changes and the actions existed within the ecosystem. Through an eco-critical analysis, this paper tries to examine how Ghosh intricately weaves together the threads of human life, ecology, and the environmental activism within the novel, by focusing on the impacts of human actions on the environment.