THE HUNGRY TIDE AS A NEO-COLONIAL MACHINE

Jai Singh

THE HUNGRY TIDE AS A NEO-COLONIAL MACHINE

Jai Singh

Abstract

The study of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide’ as a neo-colonial machine locates the text in the world and the world in the text by using Barthes’s idea that the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. However, it improves upon Barthes hypothesis by bringing in the concept of machines developed by Deleuze and Guattari’s and develops it further through the study of development of machines from cosmic to earthly, from non-living to living and from biological genes to linguistic genes. ‘The Hungry Tide’ by Amitav Ghosh is a product of so many machines and is plugged into many other machines. The novel is a complicit machine of neo-colonialism because it questions the validity of India as a nation state and then finding a solution to the problems of subaltern through the establishment of NGO, a neo-colonial institution. Very ironically, the social institutions shown benevolent in the novel have always been major force behind the exploitation of subaltern in past as well in present.

Keywords

Amitav Ghosh, Colonialism, Linguistic Engineering, Neo-colonialism, Social Machines, Socio-linguistic Genes, The Hungry Tide.

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