The Hungry Tide as Anthropocene Fiction

What are the novels of the Anthropocene? This is a question literary and cultural critics of many stripes have been asking quite explicitly, and a preliminary consensus seems to be that the fictions of the Anthropocene can be characterized by a temporal framework whereby the figure of the geological—or, relatedly, the climatological—illuminates multiple intersecting human and nonhuman timelines that reach far into the past and long into the future. This fictional figuration of the geological may manifest formally or thematically. In her essay that puts the question front and center—“What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene?”—Kate Marshall argues for formal criteria, claiming that what marks an Anthropocene fiction is its self-reflexive awareness that it is being produced during a moment in which an epochal shift is taking place. She writes that an Anthropocene fiction is one that “understands itself within epochal, geologic time and includes that form of time within its larger formal operations” (524). On the other hand, Adam Trexler argues in his book-length treatment of the question, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, for a rather narrow thematic categorization of Anthropocene fiction as constituting those works that are quite explicitly about anthropogenic climate change, including plots and settings centered on “melting ice caps, global climate models, rising sea levels, and tipping points” (13), rather than those treating global warming “as an afterthought or a symptom of wider environmental collapse” (6).

The Hungry Tide may not appear to be an obvious candidate for consideration as a work of Anthropocene fiction according to either of these formal or thematic criteria, apparently more concerned with zoology, tidal ecology, mythology, and linguistic anthropology than with geology or climatology. However, despite the fact that the geological appears only briefly in the novel, it does so in such a way that informs and haunts the intersecting timelines that are more central to the plot. Namely, Ghosh uses a pedagogical narrative style that models for the reader how the perspective of the geological can be used to understand more familiar historical events and environmental phenomena. In one of Nirmal’s journal entries, he details how he would teach potential students about the history of the Indian subcontinent and its waterways. He writes, [End Page 643]

I would take them back to the deep, deep time of geology and I would show them that where the Ganga now runs there was once a coastline—a shore that marked the southern extremity of the Asian landmass. India was far, far away then, in another hemisphere. It was attached to Australia and Antarctica. . . .

I would show them how it happened that India broke away 140 million years ago and began its journey north from Antarctica. They would see how their subcontinent had moved, at a speed no other landmass had ever attained before; they would see how its weight forced the rise of the Himalayas; they would see the Ganga emerging as a brook on a rising hill.

(151)

Note here how Nirmal not only invokes the lens of the Anthropocene through his terminology of geological deep time but also instills the information about the subcontinent with pedagogical regularity. His style of speaking is repetitive, recycling visual verbs like “show” and “see” to describe the digestion of information, thereby enabling the reader to participate in the intake of geological knowledge as a routine practice of observation. The passage’s stylistic regularity alerts the reader to a temporal order that inheres in the geological past of the subcontinent and that informs present encounters with the Ganga River, rendering it not the permanent geographical landmark it might appear but rather a historically changeable feature of the planet’s profile.⁸

When combined with the more recent colonial and postcolonial histories documented in the novel—for instance, the story of the storm that caused the Matla River to rise and destroy the extravagant port of Canning in 1867, the story of how the Irrawaddy river dolphin in South Asia confounded the taxonomy of British naturalists in the nineteenth century, and the story of the Morichjhãpi massacre—this learned frame of the geological engenders a crisis of human consciousness and agency. How are these fleeting and local conflicts between human and nonhuman forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries related to the slow, global-scale changes of tectonic plate movements? Do we have the cognitive capacities to identify what events in human history contributed to or were affected by changes in geology? What can we voluntarily do now at the scale of the human to influence the scale of the geological? Mark McGurl writes that the Anthropocene as geological present “exacerbates and magnifies the dilemma of human agency, locating the blowback of the waste products of modernization on the blurry line between intention and accident” (383). What this means in the case of The Hungry Tide is that through the lens of geological deep time, one of the novel’s central conflicts becomes how consciously to reconcile modern colonialist responsibility for human violence and environmental [End Page 644] exploitation in South Asia with the accidental consequences of stratigraphic encroachment and global climate change.

Ghosh tackles this dilemma through Nirmal’s first-person journal, which functions to bridge the gap between deep time and the human scale conflict of the Morichjhãpi incident. The task of mediation in this case is no small feat. As many ecocritics have noted, the problem of confronting planetary phenomena like climate change that have been centuries in the making is fundamentally a problem of mediation. That is, because of the limited scale of human sensory experience, we require an array of what Robert Markley refers to as “proxy data” (56), such as measurements of “ice cores from Greenland, tree rings, sediment layers in mud and swamps, patterns of coral growth,” to make possible any understanding of climatological time. “You can’t visualize the climate,” Timothy Morton corroborates, because “mapping it requires a processing speed in terabytes per second” (28), which is beyond the capacity of direct human cognition. But the proxy data of scientific instruments is not the only representational medium that can compensate for the cognitive limitations of the human. Fiction, too, can function as a representational device that mediates our knowledge of phenomena that exceed the scale of immediate experience. As a form of fictional autobiography, Nirmal’s journal, in his own words, functions as just such a device through which “vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story” (150). Nirmal’s lyrical memoir condenses together biographical experience, colonial history, geological shifts, biodiversity loss, and tidal ecology in a mode of perception that looks both far into the past and into the future. Such condensation is particularly necessary to grasp the volatility of the Sundarbans. In recent years, the number and severity of cyclones in the Sundarbans has increased, tidal surges have become more extreme, and the erosion of island embankments has noticeably increased due to sea levels that are rising faster than anywhere else on earth. It is hard to imagine how such changes will impact the diverse inhabitants of the region, which include dense mangrove forests, dolphins, “500 Bengali tigers, countless crocodiles and around 4.3 million people” (Caton).

Nirmal’s journal is thus a critical tool for rendering the unimaginable scale of time that is nevertheless an exceedingly felt presence for the human and nonhuman residents of the Sundarbans. For instance, at one point Nirmal describes how it used to be the case that signs of death and decay for the humans and nonhumans of the Sundarbans emerged slowly and were few and far between. However, “now,” he says, [End Page 645]

it was as if I could see those signs everywhere, not just in myself but in this place that I had lived in for almost thirty years. The birds were vanishing, the fish were dwindling and from day to day the land was being reclaimed by the sea. What would it take to submerge the tide country? Not much—a miniscule change in the level of the sea would be enough.

(179)

The threats of climate-induced sea level rise and species extinction—processes with long pasts and unknown futures in the Sundarbans—pass through the lifetime experience of one human. Furthermore, these phenomena’s questionable status as intentionally versus accidentally caused runs up against the need to take responsibility for social justice and habitat preservation in the case of the Morichjhãpi incident. Immediately following this passage, Nirmal contemplates the fate of the Morichjhãpi refugees (the massacre has not yet occurred) and wonders whether he can do justice to their hopes and dreams through his writing. The Morichjhãpi incident thus comes to encapsulate the way in which the urge to support refugee agency not only clashes with the interests of environmentalism—as postcolonial ecocritics discussing the novel have analyzed extensively—but also with the deep temporal perspective of the Anthropocene that blurs the line between then and now, cause and effect, determined and accidental.

While this uncertainty about human agency and responsibility that the perspective of geological deep time engenders may appear to be detrimental for any unilateral movement for social justice, it is Nirmal’s revised postcolonial utopianism that redeems this perspective as a resource for confronting conflicts of environmental displacement in a climate changed future in South Asia. From the start, Nirmal promotes a revolutionary idealism that repeatedly conjures the utopian impulse, as he attempts to look beyond the imperial history and treacherous landscape of the tide country to its potential as a haven for equality and justice. Lusibari, the fictional island on which Nirmal and his wife, Nilima, settle in 1950, serves as Nirmal’s utopian inspiration. In particular, the intentions of the island’s founder, the Scottish “monopolikapitalist” Sir Daniel Hamilton (42), are, ironically, particularly appealing to Nirmal’s Marxism. Sir Daniel apparently sought to found a cosmopolitan society on Lusibari in the early twentieth century where residents of India could settle freely on the condition that they would not let their cultural differences get in the way of their freedom to live and work together without the threat [End Page 646] of exploitation or coercion. As Nirmal tells Kanai in 1970, “What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening” (46). This dream fell apart after Sir Daniel’s death in 1939, as the infrastructure to support his vision was never put into place and the island continued to exist in a state of rural poverty. The undeterred Nirmal, however, continues to find hope in the utopian not-yet of Sir Daniel’s vision, reassuring Kanai that “it was just that the tide country wasn’t ready yet. Someday, who knows? It may yet come to be.”⁹

Nirmal hopes that Morichjhãpi and its refugees might come to realize Sir Daniel’s utopian vision. But in encountering the makeshift community in 1979, he is forced to reevaluate the parameters of what utopia might look like in a postcolonial context. When Nirmal first arrives in Morichjhãpi, he expects to see conditions of destitution typical of refugee camp iconographies that portray migrants as helpless victims and mobile elites like him as agents of benevolent hospitality.¹⁰ Instead, he finds an overwhelming display of migrant agency:

What had I expected? A mere jumble perhaps, untidy heaps of people piled high upon each other? That is, after all, what the word rifugi has come to mean. But what I saw was quite different from the picture in my mind’s eye. Paths had been laid; the bãdh—that guarantor of island life—had been augmented; little plots of land had been enclosed with fences; fishing nets had been hung up to dry.

(141)

Nirmal realizes that if what he witnesses here is indeed the foundations of a new society, then it is at odds with Sir Daniel’s imperially inspired utopian vision that he holds so dear. He says, “But between what was happening at Morichjhãpi and what Hamilton had done there was one vital aspect of difference: this was not one man’s vision. This dream had been dreamt by the very people who were trying to make it real.” Whereas Sir Daniel’s utopia required the erasure of cultural agency and difference, the one Nirmal finds the residents of Morichjhãpi building sheds this imperial requirement. Or, as Pablo Mukherjee puts it, the Morichjhãpi community is working toward “a universality that accommodates, rather than obliterates differences” (153).

Included in this accommodation of difference is the refugees’ freedom to use the land and defend against its dangers; they refuse to discard that freedom in the interest of adhering to the environmentalist [End Page 647] agenda that commissioned the island as a reserve for endangered wildlife. In doing so, the refugees force Nirmal to confront the discrepancy between the political and environmental priorities of Sir Daniel, the Left Front government, Bengal tigers, and West Bengal migrants. He responds not by completely abandoning his utopian impulse but by revising it to prioritize refugee agency over his own. Even though things turn out poorly for the refugees—and the novel does not pretend otherwise—the potential of Nirmal’s emancipatory vision for shaping future history in the Sundarbans lives on in Kanai’s memory thanks to the journal.

Nirmal’s revised utopianism thereby extends into the future as an idea of what-may-yet-come-to-be for ecological refugees in South Asia, not as a realized alternative space. This utopian attitude may not have been viable in the case of the Morichjhãpi refugees due to the repressive postcolonial state and international interests in preserving the island, but it may have more potential in cases related to climate change where the forces of nature are more clearly adversarial. And given the geological lens of deep time that leads to Nirmal’s prognostication about the future impact of sea level rise on the Sundarbans as well as the unexpected cyclone that wreaks havoc at the end of the novel, foreshadowing the climate-induced extreme weather events that are sure to become more frequent in the region, it can be said that The Hungry Tide evokes the contemporary crisis of climate refugees in South Asia as a situation in urgent need of precisely this kind of utopian vision.

The term “climate refugees” refers to people forced from their homes due to events related to climate change in the twenty-first century. The majority of climate refugees are members of poor and/or indigenous communities who have been displaced from rural, coastal areas in the global South, such as the Sundarbans. Since the start of the twenty-first century, there have been numerous film and photography documentaries covering these at-risk populations, effectively dubbing them “the human face of climate change.”¹¹ The burgeoning scholarship on climate refugees in the field of forced migration studies has identified two dominant liberal discourses surrounding the phenomenon of climate-induced migration: a humanitarian discourse and an environmental justice discourse. The first discourse, based on the good intention of sheltering those who have been displaced by forces beyond their control, focuses on how developed countries in the global North can offer hospitality to climate refugees from the global South. [End Page 648]

Yet the iconography and narratives composing this humanitarian discourse tend to adopt the benevolent, neoimperial attitude Nirmal displays early on in The Hungry Tide. Moreover, they draw on the dystopian mechanism of using helpless victims to evoke sympathy and disgust—similar to Nirmal’s expectations about finding an apocalyptic level of destitution on Morichjhãpi. Giovanni Bettini epitomizes the apocalyptic iconography of the humanitarian discourse with the following list:

Millions of desperate victims of climate change abandoning their homes sinking under rising seas. . . . Children and women walking in lines, with waters up to their chest, carrying on their shoulders the few belongings saved from the storm’s fury. . . . Tsunamis of peoples displaced from the global south pushing at the gates screening affluent countries. Climate refugee camps installed in the symbolic epicenters of global capital in the post-climate change apocalypse.

(63)

Within this list we find two subiconographies: the first depicts climate refugee victims facing, for example, rising seas and melting glaciers that threaten to swallow their homes. And the second depicts climate refugee settlers from the global South swarming metropolitan areas in the global North.

These two iconographies reveal the victimization tendencies of apocalyptic narratives that rob refugees of agency and subjectivity. As Bettini points out, they “make the climate migrant/refugee into a destitute victim rather than a political subject—regardless of whether they are to be feared (as in conservative discourses) or to be protected (as in a humanitarian discourse)” (70). While the iconographies I have pointed to attempt to raise awareness about the realities of climate refugees, they also strip climate refugees of their own priorities and interests. Furthermore, the second subiconography, which depicts “climate barbarians at the gate” (to evoke the title of Bettini’s essay), incites Malthusian and xenophobic anxieties of being overrun by people of color and the poor.

A number of dystopian novels about climate change, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), reinforce these apocalyptic climate refugee iconographies. Bacigalupi’s drought-ridden storyworld in The Water Knife, for instance, performs precisely the victimization of climate refugees Bettini critiques. The following passage epitomizes the novel’s treatment of those displaced by drought conditions: “Refugees emerged as shambling ghosts in the brown haze, illuminated by the truck’s storm lights. Bizarre hunched forms stumbling away from the destruction [End Page 649] of Carver City and toward the dubious refuge of Phoenix, a steady stream of destitution that slowed their progress to a crawl” (352). These refugee figures are depicted as faceless silhouettes devoid of embodiment, subjectivity, and agency—ghosts swarming the spaces of those privileged enough to still have water. Even if the point of representing climate refugees in this way is to evoke sympathy and critical awareness about the risk of drought in the twenty-first century, the novel only presents an opportunity to imagine responses by those in a position of offering hospitality, not by those actually vulnerable to climate-induced migration.

The second dominant liberal discourse surrounding climate-induced migration aims to correct the politically unsavory elements of the humanitarian approach. It is an environmental justice discourse that highlights the inequality of socioeconomic structures rendering certain populations more vulnerable to climate change disasters than others. This discourse has the benefit of targeting the causes of disparities in vulnerability between different communities rather than simply trying to mitigate the effects of displacement after a natural disaster has already occurred. It also rightly critiques the humanitarian approach for its benevolent imperialism and neglect of structural and infrastructural conditions of injustice and inequality. However, the environmental justice approach nevertheless tends to pathologize migration, perpetuating what Oliver Bakewell has called a “sedentary bias” that classifies all forms of migration as bad (1345). By attempting to prevent environmental displacement before it occurs, the targeting of root causes of forced migration assumes that leaving home is inherently less desirable than staying put. It thus implicitly reproduces the same issues that arose in the case of the humanitarian discourse regarding the stripping of agency and inadvertent xenophobia. The sedentary bias elides the ability of at-risk populations to choose whether to move and feeds into conservative arguments for why ethnic minorities should not relocate.

What forced migration studies scholars have been calling for as an alternative to these two discourses on climate-induced migration is an approach that outlines how processes of relocation can prioritize displaced populations’ interests. That is, they are calling for precisely the revisionary utopian approach to migrant agency that we find Nirmal articulating in his first encounter with the Morichjhãpi refugees. This imaginative approach endorses the capacity of forced migrants to determine, as much as they can, the terms of their displacement and relocation. It suggests that they should be free to determine whether to move or stay as well as which aspects of their culture and identity [End Page 650] they want to change and which they want to keep. Of course, there is the practical consideration that in many cases, rising sea levels will necessitate migration: staying put will not be an option. However, even when migration is inevitable, measures should be taken to ensure that refugees can use their own knowledge practices to negotiate where, when, and how they are relocated. This utopian attitude upends the sedentary bias, as those who face the risk of future displacement are not being told that their impending nomadism is symptomatic of social and ecological ills. But, conversely, in rejecting the sedentary bias, this attitude does not adopt a nomadic bias that romanticizes deterritorialization and condemns as provincial those who remain sedentary. What Nirmal realizes and promotes is a way for those in the position of offering hospitality not to ascribe value preemptively to nomadic or sedentary lifestyles. What they can do is help equip vulnerable populations with the means to assess and respond to what the future holds.

Almost immediately after the publication of The Hungry Tide there was a disaster in South Asia that lent itself to the application of Ghosh’s utopian vision to the threat of climate-induced migration and which he subsequently commented on in an essay entitled “The Town by the Sea.” In December 2004, a devastating tsunami hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located south of the Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal. Ghosh explains how the majority of the island inhabitants who were affected by the tsunami were poor settlers from the Indian mainland who had relocated to the islands with aspirational hopes for climbing the social ladder. He writes, “here, in this far-flung chain of islands, tens of thousands of settlers were able to make their way out of poverty, into the ranks of the country’s expanding middle class” (“Town” 2). However, as soon as the tsunami hit, this utopian narrative was replaced by an apocalyptic one emphasizing the victimization and vulnerability of the settlers at the hands of rising sea levels and extreme weather. This was a vulnerability made possible by the Indian state’s development of coastal homes exposed to the natural hazards of the ocean and climate, a misguided infrastructural venture based on the neoimperial desire to model “the French Riviera or the coastline of Italy” (Ghosh, “Town” 6). As important as it is to criticize such developmental policies and understand the injustice perpetrated on the settlers by the postcolonial Indian state—this was not just a natural disaster—it is also important to remember the hopes and dreams that brought the settlers to the islands in the first place. They made a choice to settle here, and in the wake of disaster they should also be allowed to let these aspirations guide their resettlement or relocation. [End Page 651]

This reminder of the utopian aspirations of the displaced gains new significance in the case of climate-induced migration because of the way the Anthropocene presents a dilemma of human agency per se. Like the Morichjhãpi refugees, the settlers of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands migrated according to the social dream of a better life, only to be further displaced by Western-inspired environmental policies. Unlike the Morichjhãpi refugees, however, their adversary was not just the postcolonial state but also the inhuman forces of geology and climate exacerbating natural hazards in South Asia. As Ghosh puts it, “it is as if the deep time of geology had collided here with the hurried history of an emergent nation” (“Town” 2). Nirmal’s utopian approach to refugee agency, then, is almost more apropos in the case of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, based as it is on the peculiar dilemma of accident versus intention inherent in the encounter between the disproportionate temporal scales of geology and postcolonial state policies. The clash between Western environ-mentalist principles and subaltern refugee agency, which both function on the same human scale, is evident in the Morichjhãpi incident but gains a new dimension in the case of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands tsunami as the deeper temporal scale of the Anthropocene enters the scene. Such a situation calls not for a utopianism that pits one set of social values against another—the subaltern against the postcolonial state—but for one that seeks to extend social dreaming to the scale of deep time. As constituting the latter, Nirmal’s utopianism seems to not quite fit in the case of the Morichjhãpi refugees and might be a better primer for addressing the threats of climate-induced migration currently emerging in South Asia.

If contemporary novelists like Ghosh have begun extending social dreaming to the scale of deep time, it may mean that utopia looks quite a bit different from what it used to. A longer temporal frame makes room for more dynamic spatial changes as well; no longer beholden to the static utopian loci represented in utopian texts like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), or Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), utopian fiction since the end of the twentieth century—coinciding with the emergence of public discourses on global warming and the Anthropocene—has taken on a more stylistically variable appearance that registers a protracted temporality and more complex geography. By employing deep time in this manner, utopian authors not only foreground and model solutions to the longstanding conflicts between human and environmental interests encapsulated in the concept of the Anthropocene. They also change the very style of imagining associated with [End Page 652] utopia, making it less rigid and static, more uncertain and dynamic, thereby opening utopia to revision through transhistorical and transnational applications without eliding factors of cultural difference. The result is, for example, a novel about South Asian refugees and animal conservation efforts in the 1970s that teaches us how we might address the future of climate-induced migration amid a variety of ever-changing coastal landscapes.

I intend the above reading of The Hungry Tide and the application of its utopianism to the case of climate-induced migration to endorse reading Anthropocene fiction as form rather than as genre, for seeing, following Kate Marshall, the literary styles of self-reflexivity regarding our complicity in the most recent epochal shift of geology as portable across different genres and national literatures. In Forms, Caroline Levine makes a useful distinction between form and genre based on whether a particularly arranged set of narrative elements (style, theme, plot, character, setting) is portable across different historical-material contexts of production and reception. Forms typically “migrate across contexts in a way that genres cannot” (13). While genres like science fiction may be legible as such to different cultures in different centuries, two readers from different cultures and time periods may not agree that what one labels science fiction counts as science fiction to the other. Genre is highly dependent on marketing conventions and audience expectations, which are both quite contextually constrained. Forms, on the other hand, are iterable and transferrable across time and space, achieving a translatable degree of abstraction that enables them to become embedded in a variety of story and publication types.

Science fiction has, perhaps predictably, risen to the forefront of conversations about literary representations of climate change. This is certainly justifiable, given that most of the novels currently published that explicitly evoke global warming are considered science fiction, as evidenced by Trexler’s rather exhaustive archive of mostly science fiction in Anthropocene Fictions. And it may indeed be the case that science fiction is the genre best equipped to handle the crisis of future imagining that is the Anthropocene. As Adeline Johns-Putra notes, because the central concern of the climate crisis is how a rapidly changing climate will alter the future profile of humanity and the planet, many “writers are compelled to draw on the strategies of one of the primary genres of futuristic imagining: science fiction” (749).

And yet, focusing solely on science fiction in a search for Anthropocene fiction seems restrictive not only in that it selects only one genre but also in that it selects genre per se as the unit of analysis for [End Page 653] composing an archive. By considering the self-reflexive figuration of our geological present as a formal rather than a generic investment, we open up our literary methodologies to consider texts that may not otherwise have fallen under our radar, that may adopt such a formal investment fleetingly rather than comprehensively. Bringing a non-science fiction novel like The Hungry Tide, with its indirect formal gestures to geological time and the effects of climate change, under the purview of Anthropocene fiction not only expands our sense of what a literary engagement with the Anthropocene might look like but also offers us new narrative resources for thinking through and combatting different dimensions of the climate crisis, such as climate-induced migration.

Brandon Jones

BRANDON JONES <[email protected]> teaches environmental and general humanities at Kettering University. He has published articles on ecocriticism, posthumanism, science studies, animal studies, and new materialism in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, and The Posthuman Glossary. He is currently working on a manuscript on the relationship between environmentalism and utopianism in late twentieth-century American fiction.

Notes

1. The introductions of multiple edited collections and books published in the last decade have sought to come to a consensus definition for the hybrid field of postcolonial ecocriticism by acknowledging and attempting to rectify the apparent divisions between postcolonialism and ecocriticism. DeLoughrey and Handley, for instance, write that postcolonial ecocriticism “must be more than a simple extension of postcolonial methodologies into the realm of the human material world; it must reckon with the ways in which ecology does not always work within the frames of human time and political interest. As such, our definition of postcolonial ecology reflects a complex epistemology that recuperates the alterity of both history and nature, without reducing either to the other” (4). Huggan and Tiffin likewise assert the twofold goal of the field to acknowledge and reconcile disciplinary differences with rhetorical questions such as, “Is there any way of reconciling the Northern environmentalisms of the rich (always potentially vainglorious and hypocritical) with the Southern environmentalisms of the poor (often genuinely heroic and authentic)? Is there any way of narrowing the ecological gap between coloniser and colonised, each of them locked into their seemingly incommensurable worlds? The opposing terms seem at once necessary and overblown, starkly distinct yet hopelessly entangled” (2).

2. Piya’s conservationist sensibility, which inspired her career, is challenged when she witnesses local residents killing a tiger that has attacked their village—an act the novel represents as a justifiable suspension of animal care ethics. And Nirmal questions his ivory tower elitism and revolutionary Marxism in the aftermath of the Morichjhãpi massacre, which serves as an allegorical critique of the communist Left Front that prioritized the lives of tigers over those of human refugees. Critics extolling The Hungry Tide’s virtuous manner of using these characters’ transformations as a means of reconciling the clash between, on the one hand, the ecocentric values of environmentalism and ecocriticism, and, on the other, the contrasting anthropocentric values of postcolonialism include Fletcher, who discusses how Piya and Nirmal are forced to open their minds beyond the confines of biology and Marxism, respectively, in order to understand the island ecology and residents of the Sundarbans; Kaur, who examines Piya’s “enlightened environmentalism” (128) as a gateway to transnational and transcultural forms of ecological belonging; Kumar, who considers how the central characters undergo an “uncanny awakening of self” (14) during their time in the Sundarbans that results in them adopting a new “transnational ethics of place”; Prabhu, who assesses how Piya must revise her tendency to romanticize the local residents of the Sundarbans and their knowledge of the region, and how Nirmal must confront his European bias; and Weik, who argues that Piya and Nirmal transition from cosmopolitan attitudes to eco-cosmopolitan ones, in that they learn to couple a sense of the local and global through environmental connection.

3. Ghosh has discussed climate change quite often in his essays and interviews, particularly emphasizing that the topic needs to be in the forefront of our minds. In an interview with the UN Chronicle shortly after the publication of The Hungry Tide, Ghosh states, “Climate change is a matter of particular urgency when you are from a certain part of the world. . . . The Bengal delta is so heavily populated. . . . If a ten-foot rise or even a five-foot rise in the seas were to happen. . . . Millions of people would lose their livelihoods. This is something we have to think about; it has to be at the forefront of our minds. It is not something that we can postpone or think about elsewhere; it is absolutely present within the conditions of our lives, here and now” (51). See also The Great Derangement, in which Ghosh devotes a series of essays to the representational, political, and historical roadblocks that prevent us from giving the climate crisis the full attention and response it deserves.

4. For more on the terminology and dating of the Anthropocene from the perspective of geology and climatology, see Crutzen, who popularized the term in writing intended for a broader audience. See also Lewis and Maslin, whose recent essay takes a closer look at the competing rationales for marking the start of the Anthropocene.

5. Following Chakrabarty, I understand deep time or “deep history” (212) as referring to the history of the planet that exceeds the time of human record. The origins of the term can be traced to the study of geology in the works of James Hutton and Charles Lyell in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. Rajender Kaur analyzes parts of The Hungry Tide in terms of deep time, which leads to an astute analysis of how the term provides an appropriate humbling of the human and threatens to erase histories of colonial oppression but stops short of connecting this analysis to the discourse of the Anthropocene and its attendant crises of agency and futurity.

6. Forter has most recently analyzed postcolonial utopias, and Ghosh’s work in particular, by drawing on Moylan’s “critical utopia” terminology and Benjamin’s messianism, both of which are inappropriate in the context of Ghosh’s deep temporal perspective, I claim, because they describe a relatively rapid unfolding of utopian space in opposition to social formations of modern human history.

7. Nixon coins this influential term to refer generally to “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). The term is particularly relevant, Nixon claims, to the range of environmental catastrophes associated with climate change and the Anthropocene.

8. Relevant to and corroborating my analysis of this passage is Shewry’s reading of fictional and poetic representations of Gondwana, “a southern hemispheric supercontinent that disintegrated millions of years ago” (253). Like Nirmal’s history lesson on the subcontinent’s movements and the formation of the Ganga River, representations of Gondwana, Shewry claims, introduce the figure of the geological to “stories about ecological crisis and social injustice in the present-day places that took form partly through the emergence and disintegration of the super-continent millions of years ago” (254).

9. Nirmal’s language here evokes Ernst Bloch’s discussion of utopian dreaming as manifest in the “Not-Yet-Conscious” (116) domain of the imagination, which functions to anticipate a future still to come, a future that has not yet been decided. For more on this, see Bloch 142–50.

10. These instances of differently privileged conditions of mobility can be read as fictional examples of what Clifford refers to as “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (36). This term, Clifford writes, captures how “cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific . . . histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” and thus “the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives) appears as the ideology of one (very powerful) traveling culture.”

11. Fictional and documentary photography series, such as those of Graves and Madoc-Jones depicting a future London overrun by refugees and rising seas, as well as those of Collectif Argos depicting the pained faces of actual climate refugees, coupled with film documentaries like Nash’s, have come to define a visual iconography of climate refugees with an affective range between heightened humanitarian sentimentality and xenophobic fear.

Works Cited

---

Copyright © 2018 Purdue Research Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press