From Ecological to Planetary Necropolitics in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019)

Dipesh Chakraborty argued in his famous essay “The Climate of History” that human history can no longer be distinguished from natural history. I argue that Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) foreshadows Chakraborty’s argument by intertwining questions of political sovereignty with the ecological. The novel foregrounds the contested lives of both Bengali refugees and the Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans delta who are subjected to sovereign management and violence by the postcolonial state as well as western interests. While the tigers are governed as vulnerable populations warranting protection, the refugees are reduced to bare life and eventually marked for death. I read the conditions of the Sundarbans refugees using the concept of planetary subalternity developed at the intersection of the discursive fields of subaltern studies and the Anthropocene. I argue that the situation of the planetary subaltern is best described by what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics, wherein the sovereign decides not just who can live but also who must die. The latter is most certainly racialized people, condemned to live in death-worlds constructed by the interests of colonialism and capital. Ghosh’s novel also shows that not only is the ecological crisis caused in large part by colonialism and capitalism, but that ecological conservation efforts continue to be marked by these same power relations that produced the crises in the first place. Furthermore, through a comparative analysis of The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), I show how Ghosh moves from a localized analysis of ecological politics to a planetary critique; Gun Island is as much about the dying dolphins in the Sundarbans as the California forest fires. I therefore argue that Gun Island can be read using the theoretical framework of planetary necropolitics, which sees the entire planet slowly being made into an ecological death-world by capital and colonial interests.