LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 26:1 January 2026
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The Silent Language of Nature: Slow Violence, Vibrant Matter, and Ecological Silence in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace

Amjad Khan and
Dr. P. Sasi Ratnaker

Abstract

This paper will discuss the ways in which The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh and The Glass Palace conceptualize what this paper is conceptualizing as the 'silent language of nature', a method by which the natural world speaks agency, memory and resistance through material processes, time and ecological impact not through human language. As an active and interactive object, foregrounding nature is a subject that questions the readings which objectify the environment as a background or symbolic asset. The paper is based on the work of Rob Nixon on the issue of slow violence, Jane Bennett on the theory of vibrant matter, and Christopher Manes on the silencing of nature in the discourse of the West, and to explain why the landscapes of Ghosh, tides, mangrove forest, unstable islands, and exploited teak plantations, can be viewed as an instance of environmental resistance. In The Hungry Tide, the expression of resistance is vivid as tides and storms disturb human dominance in order to overcome it whereas in The Glass Palace it is seen in a sense of environmental depletion and material residues of colonial removal. The paper develops more-than-human conceptions of voice, agency, and resistance through close reading, which is part of postcolonial ecocriticism.

Keywords:Ecocriticism; Postcolonial Ecocriticism; Slow Violence; Vibrant Matter; Nature's Agency; Material Ecocriticism; Amitav Ghosh; Environmental Justice

Introduction

The late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century have seen an unparalleled combination of ecological destruction and human culture experiencing anxiety over the connection between man and the non-human world. Climate change and biodiversity loss, the build-up of toxic waste, and desertification of previously fertile areas have been some of the most basic challenges to the intellectual foundations of modernity especially the idea that nature presents itself as a passive resource that can be extracted and used indefinitely. Ecocriticism, in turn, has developed as a crucial form of literary and cultural criticism, which acknowledges the ability of literature to communicate ecological affiliations and thus to reveal the ideological presuppositions of environmental degradation and to envision other ways of being-in-the-world. According to Cheryle Glotfelty, in The Ecocriticism Reader, ecocriticism introduces the earth-centredness of literary studies where the question is not how nature is represented in writing, but how narratives are formed to inform us about the wilderness, agency and responsibility to the environment.

However, the ecocriticism cannot be enough in the situation when it comes to the specific snarl of the environmental annihilation with the histories of imperialism, colonialism, and developmental violence. The field of postcolonial ecocriticism that introduces ecocritical understanding to the discussion with postcolonial theory has developed as a way to fill this very gap. It is quite evident that colonialism, just like Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin illustrate, was an environmental project besides being a political and cultural project. European conquest and settlement were based not solely on the dispossession of the aboriginal population but also on the ecological imperialism of the colonized territories through the introduction of the alien species, exploitation of natural resources, and the dictation of Western economic principles according to which nature is pure commodity. More importantly, this kind of environmental imperialism did not end with formal decolonization: modern development discourses, as Arturo Escobar suggests, are still recreating postcolonial landscapes and societies according to the model of extraction and dispossession under different titles. This is a major political and ethical challenge to understand how literature documents this intersection of ecological and imperial violence.

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most important modern voices, which express the entanglement of the environmental crisis, imperialism legacies, and postcolonial consciousness. His fiction consistently revisits the issue of how landscapes and ecosystems witness the histories of violence, uprooting, and extraction how, in other words, non-human nature is implicated in, opposes to, and is ultimately haunted by human histories of power. The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Glass Palace (2000) are two related studies of this theme, in which each of them is framed by geography that is both historically related and geographically precarious, and which is marked by remnants of imperial control.

The Hungry Tide plunges the readers into the world of Sundarbans, the large mangrove tidal delta which covers the border of India and Bangladesh. The tidal rhythms, influenced by cyclonic storms, and inhabited by tigers whose predatory existence is not symbolic or peripheral but central to the ecology of the novel get the novel moving. The Sundarbans provides Ghosh with a landscape in which the agency of nature is too evident: tides rise and fall, twice per day, transforming the land; storms bring destruction upon it; the tiger preys on people just as much as it preys on deer, putting human beings in the structural position of prey, not of sovereign objects. Piya Roy, the protagonist of the novel, is an American cetologist who goes to the Sundarbans with the aim of observing Irrawaddy dolphins scientifically and employing a scientific approach to the research. But the landscape as such with its tidal power, its animal caprice, its irreplicability in the hands of human beings, slowly tells of the inadequacy of such constructs, of how knowledge is developed not by looking out at the landscape but by the living experience of the land itself, which has a logic of its own.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Amjad Khan
Research Scholar,
Department of English and Other Indian & Foreign Languages,
School of Applied Sciences and Humanities,
Vignan's Foundation for Science, Technology and Research Deemed to be University,
Vadlamudi, Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh, Pin: 522213, India.
&
Dr. P. Sasi Ratnaker
Associate Professor,
Department of English and Other Indian & Foreign Languages,
School of Applied Sciences and Humanities,
Vignan's Foundation for Science, Technology and Research Deemed to be University,
Vadlamudi, Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh, Pin: 522213, India.
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