The “Hungry Tide,” The “Erotic Sea”: Neo-Colonial Ecoprecarity in Ghosh’s Sundarbans and Gunesekera’s Sri Lanka

Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide proleptically catalog the multiple jeopardies facing the climatological refugees in the eco-precarious margins of the Global South. These novels foreground the emerging voices of the marginalized, displaced by border shifts caused by the Partition of India, or its socio-political and climatological ripples. I demonstrate, using the transferred epithets of the “hungry” tide and the “erotic” sea, how the colonial structures of systemic and epistemic violence, as genetic inheritance of the Empire, are replicated within policies implemented by the postcolonial governments of India and Sri Lanka. These policies’ inherent imperial logic of disposability reinforces a First World neo-Orientalist gaze, which materializes into neo-colonial ventures. This literary study deploys an eco-postcolonial lens and an archipelagic methodology to analyze the impact of the neo-colonial tourism industry and first-world conservationist research projects in Sri Lanka and the Sundarbans. I extrapolate from Anne McClintock’s idea of the “pornotropics” to theorize the neo-imperial eroticization of the postcolonial exotic, and the subsequent commodification of indigenous inhabitants of crumbling oceanic ecosystems into erotic objects of textual and sexual consumption, thus raising questions about their futures and available avenues of resistance.