Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Water is the central characteristic of the coastal region between India and Bangladesh known as the Sundarbans. Here water swallows and regurgitates land with every turn of the tide. The tiger conservation project in the Sundarbans in the 1970s prompted the state-led violent eviction of Bangladeshi refugees from the islands, and in 2000 the government handed over large tracts of the islands to a private company for an ecotourism project. These events form the backdrop of Amitav Ghosh's 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. The first incident is narrativized in the novel, presenting a political indictment of the second development. This paper explores the role of water as both a metaphor and a material presence in the text in order to examine how the novelist articulates the rupture of social hierarchies and voices dissent over the violation of human rights in the name of conservation.