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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.
Keywords: rural, neoliberalism, dispossession, environmentalism, network narrative, fixity
I do think that writers of my generation have a duty to address issues of the environment. When we look at writers of the Thirties and Forties, we ask "where did you stand on fascism?" In the future they will look at us and say "where did you stand on the environment?" I think this is absolutely the fundamental question of our time.
Amitav Ghosh ("Amitav Ghosh in Conversation" 137)
In his October 2004 essay "Folly in the Sundarbans," novelist Amitav Ghosh opposes a corporate plan to make a beach resort and "eco-village" on the Sundarbans archipelago off the northeast coast of India.1 The plan, proposed by the Sahara India Pariwar, was under review by the West Bengal state government at the time. Ghosh criticizes the government's and capitalists' "folly" in thinking the Sundarbans could become a site for beach tourism. The region, he argues, is made up of "mud flats and mangrove islands," home to sharks and crocodiles, and particularly vulnerable to cyclones and tidal waves. It is therefore not only unfit for a beach resort but also extremely dangerous.2 Ghosh also considers the potential ecological costs of the project: "The floating hotel and its satellite structures will . . . disgorge a large quantity of sewage and waste into the surrounding waters," which will in turn affect the population of crabs and fish as well as endangered species such as the Irrawaddy dolphin. Moreover, he suggests, while "[t]he Sahara Parivar3 claims that it will open 'virgin' areas to tourists . . . the islands of the Sundarbans are not 'virgin' in any sense." The Indian part of the Sundarbans alone "supports...