A Postcolonial Utopia for the Anthropocene: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Climate-Induced Migration

Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide has garnered attention from postcolonial ecocritics for its representation of the ways Western environmentalism clashes with social justice concerns for subaltern subjects. Missing from criticism on the novel, however, is an analysis of the subtle ways that it registers the impact of climate change and the Anthropocene in South Asia. In this essay, I argue that by attending to the presence of the Anthropocene in the novel through the figure of geological deep time, we can understand the character Nirmal’s postcolonial utopianism as providing a framework for confronting the emerging crisis of climate-induced migration.