Aquatic Absence and the Biopolitics of Water in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

This article examines how aquatic absence, defined here as the gradual withdrawal, contamination, or politicization of freshwater, functions as a narrative, ecological, and political structure in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (۲۰۱۵). While environmental literary scholarship has frequently emphasized spectacular ecological disasters, comparatively less attention has been paid to gradual hydrological deprivation and the political management of water scarcity in fragile coastal environments. To address this gap, the study draws on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, Michel Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and heterotopia, and Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, and Elizabeth DeLoughre’s postcolonial ecocriticism to conceptualize aquatic absence as a structurally produced condition that exposes the entanglement of environmental degradation with postcolonial governance in the Sundarbans. The analysis demonstrates how hydrological infrastructures such as embankments, conservation zones, and freshwater distribution systems function as mechanisms that differentially organize survival, vulnerability, and political visibility. The novel’s representations of salinity intrusion, embankment decay, and freshwater scarcity reveal environmental harm as incremental, attritional, and often obscured, while the spatial organization of the delta produces heterotopic crisis zones where communities inhabit permanently unstable terrain. The study finds that water’s simultaneous abundance and scarcity in the Sundarbans illuminates how hydrological regimes become tools of governance that regulate life by determining access to protection, habitability, and mobility. The Hungry Tide thus unmasks the otherwise obscured violence of water management in deltaic environments, and in so doing shows that aquatic absence is neither natural nor accidental but a politically produced condition that structures ecological precarity and postcolonial inequality.

کلیدواژه ها:

hydropolitics ، slow violence ، Heterotopia ، ecological precarity ، postcolonial ecocriticism ، Amitav Ghosh ، The Hungry Tide