Redefining ‘Diaspora’: A Postcolonial Reading of The Hungry Tide

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh focuses on the modes of conceptualizing nation and nationality in his writings. In his novel The Hungry Tide he reveals how ‘nation’ in the Indian context may be interpreted as a collection of linguistic identities or a composite religious and Socio-Political identity. Ghosh emphasizes upon the possibility of creating a ‘deep communication’ in his novel, The Hungry Tide. Probably, in the novel’s setting, the mangroves of the Sundarbans, a deep communication is plausible and pragmatic between its inhabitants and nature. National identity, an abstract concept that subsumes the collective expression of a subjective individual sense of belonging to a socio-political unit called the nation state.