In Whose Voice Should a Subaltern Speak? Reading the Problem of Agency in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide addresses multiple socio-political issues: development is one of them. Development is a much-debated concept in the context of the third world. It becomes more crucial when it is posed against the issue of the sustenance of eco-system. The Hungry Tide introduces the question of the subalterns' agency into the discursive purview of development already fraught with contradictory nuances. Instead of remaining a mere rhetoric, the question of subaltern agency becomes a central problem which unravels the correlations between the other above-mentioned issues e.g. nature, development, etc. To delineate this complex network, the writings of Hardt and Negri, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Arturo Escober provide the necessary theoretical scaffolding.