Ecocritical analysis of the environmental crisis and colonialism in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The present study is on Amitav Ghosh’s novels Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide, in which the novels are analyzed using an ecocritical approach in order to reveal how literature portrays severe environmental problems emerging from the influence of colonialism, displacement, and migration along with identity crisis. However, the novels also show that nature can be helpful to people in most situations. The novel carefully presents how people and nature in some ways are dependent on each other for their own needs. There is no doubt that people take advantage of the environment’s resources for their own benefits quite often. In Sea of Poppies, the vulnerable Indian people were being dominated by the British colonial powers forcibly. The British colonial powers requested the Indian farmers to stop growing food crops and replace them with opium as a means to make a profit by selling opium. In The Hungry Tide, it portrays how delicate the condition of the Sundarbans is currently because that place is open to many dangerous natural disasters, which will rapidly ruin the Sundarbans and the people taking shelter. The theory of ecocriticism will support these novels as a means to analyze how Ghosh portrayed colonialism only had the ability to leave behind permanent damages in the lives of people and the environment. The environment was used to demonstrate how people represented the significance of power, survival, and recognition through analyzing both of the novels.