Between Land and Water: Wetland Imaginaries and Terraqueous Relations in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island

Abstract

The emergence of the blue humanities has encouraged a shift from predominantly terrestrial approaches to the study of human and nonhuman relations by foregrounding the cultural, material, and ecological significance of water. Within this field, wetlands demand particular attention as dynamic interfaces between land and water, human and nonhuman life, and ecological processes and socio-political histories. This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019) through the lens of blue humanities and wetland studies. It argues that Ghosh represents wetlands not as passive geographical settings but as active and storied environments that shape human histories, identities, knowledge systems, and experiences of ecological vulnerability.

Focusing primarily on the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide, the paper explores the wetland as a terraqueous and liminal space whose shifting tides, rivers, islands, and mangrove ecologies destabilize conventional distinctions between land and water. Drawing on Steve Mentz’s aquatic turn, Serpil Oppermann’s concept of storied waterscapes, and scholarship on wetland imaginaries, the analysis considers how the Sundarbans becomes a contested space of habitation, conservation, displacement, and environmental justice. Particular attention is given to, Fokir’s embodied knowledge of the watery landscape, the cultural imagination surrounding Bon Bibi, and the history of Marichjhapi, demonstrating how ecological spaces are simultaneously shaped by cultural memory, political power, and postcolonial histories.

The paper then turns to Gun Island to trace the movement from the local wetland ecology of the Sundarbans toward interconnected planetary waterscapes marked by flooding, climate disruption, migration, and displacement. By reading the two novels together, the paper questions how Amitav Ghosh does employ wetland imaginaries in The Hungry Tide and Gun Island to articulate terraqueous relations and rethink human–nonhuman interconnectedness within the framework of the Blue Humanities. It proposes that Ghosh’s wetland imaginaries challenge the separation of terrestrial and aquatic worlds and foreground the relationality of human and nonhuman life. Thus, the paper argues that Ghosh transforms wetlands from marginal spaces into crucial sites for rethinking ecological crisis, cultural histories, and the interconnectedness of contemporary planetary life.