Reading the postcolonial island in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide.

This paper argues that literature has much to contribute to the theoretical work of island studies, and not just because literary texts provide evidence of the ways islands are conceptualized in different historical and cultural contexts. To this end, it discusses Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004), a novel which actively theorizes key concepts in island studies. The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans, an immense archipelago‚ÄövÑvp in the Ganges delta, and tells the largely forgotten history of the forced evacuation of refugees from the island of Morichjh‚àö¬£pi in 1979. The liminal space of the Sundarbans, the tide country‚ÄövÑvp, is an extraordinary setting for a literary exploration of the relationship between postcolonial island geographies and identities. Ghosh's depiction of the watery labyrinth‚ÄövÑvp (Ghosh, 2004: 72) and storm-tossed islands‚ÄövÑvp (Ghosh, 2004: 164) of the Sundarbans raises and addresses questions, which should be at the heart of the critical meta-discourse of island studies.