Human life versus Wild life in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Ms. M. Elakkiya, Avinashilingam University for Women, Coimbatore
Harmony with nature is like being in harmony with a friend. Nature cannot be valued only by its usefulness to human beings but its values are farfetched and of great concern. Amitav Ghosh is a writer with a concern towards ecological issues. He deals with nature and environment in “The Hungry Tide”. This paper presents the conflict of ‘Wild life’ versus ‘Human life and destruction of ecosystem’ versus ‘Human survival’. How human share complex ecosystem with animals? With reference to “The Hungry Tide”. Ghosh’s concern nature and the animals (dolphin, Prawn and other sea animals) are made prominent in this novel.
Amitav
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For every living creature it’s a common thing to struggle with nature and at the same time with other beings as well. As Piya and Kanai in Ghosh’s text make deliberate decision to conserve the people and the environment of the Sundarbans with commitment and relocating themselves in the place environmental values need to be inculcated in their mind along with the idea of compulsory human responsibility to save plant earth. The rich variety of the characters in the novel The Hungry Tide, as they form intertwined historical and mythical tales, enable Ghosh to create novel which, with much empathy, forces the reader to immense difficulties inherent in sharing the humaneness in humanity, and myth and descriptions of the landscape to highlight the elemental and beautiful in nature. The Hungry Tide does not pose a solution to this conflict; it only request awareness, empathy, for both humans and animals, by the environmentalists and humanist respectively. Existence is at the end not possible without