Amitav Ghosh’s Dolphins: Extinction, Figuration and Redemption in The Hungry Tide and Gun Island

This chapter tracks Amitav Ghosh’s shifting representations of endangered cetaceans in The Hungry Tide (2004) and its loose sequel, Gun Island (2019). We begin by outlining how Ghosh’s dolphins are figured as postcolonial animals whose representation registers the planetary inequalities of extinction while also decolonizing dominant dolphin aesthetics. Then, we suggest that Ghosh’s writing of dolphins exemplifies his project’s self-conscious stylistic movement from a mimetic realism towards a more self-consciously animist form. What’s at stake in The Hungry Tide’s and Gun Island’s plotting of human–dolphin relations, then, is a desire to reanimate the novel as a cultural form for making sense of climate crisis. This opens up novel ways of writing ecological relations. Yet it also risks reproducing the longstanding historical tendency to find resolution and salvation in the redemptive figure of the dolphin.