Silenced worlds: Language and experience in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide is a story about the people of the Sundarbans, the tidal islands at the mouth of the Ganges and how they have survived the continual onslaughts of natural disasters and the equally violent shifting tides of postindependence politics in an area where such forces have had an ongoing and often destructive effect as peoples have been forced to move from their ancestral lands. The novel seeks to link the human stories with the broader story of the ecological and environmental forces that have acted on the region. Throughout Ghosh’s novel language, speech, writing, translation and interpretation are confronted by forms of experience that resist the mediation of language.