ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representation of gender and environment in the Indian context through a close examination of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide. The novel can be read as a contribution to ongoing debates on ecofeminism and the non-human turn because it deconstructs binary constructions of gender through an environmental narrative. The novel clearly highlights the harmonious connection of human beings with nature as well as the conflicts among humans and contested understandings of ecology in the tigers versus refugees’ episode in Marichjhapi, where people scrape a living from the scanty resources of the forest and from fishing. The novel also historicizes the polemic narratives of the relationship between gender and nature, and answers the questions raised by gender-oriented discourses. To address environmental problems, we need men and women to join together, and so ecofeminism needs to take a back seat and has to be rethought as ecohumanism – as a connectedness and reciprocal understanding between humans and non-humans.
