Queering
the Capitalocene: Sympoiesis, Assemblage, and Radical Kinship in Amitav
Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Dr. Sabir Ahmed,
Independent
Researcher,
West
Bengal, India.
Abstract: This article reads
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as a narrative of queer ecological
resistance to the Capitalocene. It argues that the novel stages radical kinship
as a world-making practice through which human and more-than-human actors
form sympoietic assemblages—forged in scenes of
necropolitical violence, mythic ritual, and collaborative tracking—that refuse
asset logic. Synthesizing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory with queer
ecologies, the analysis shows how these partnerships enact a “becoming-with” that deterritorializes extractive
control, embraces a queer temporality, and models an immanent politics of
multispecies justice. Ghosh thus offers a speculative ontology where kinship
functions as an ethical alternative to the disposability of nature-as-asset.
Keywords: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Capitalocene, Assemblage, Sympoiesis, Queer Ecology.
Introduction
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide unfolds in the liminal world of
the Sundarbans, where mangrove forests swallow islands overnight, tigers stalk
tidal corridors, and human communities cling to precarious existences between
state neglect and ecological violence. This fluid, unstable landscape is more
than a setting—it is a dynamic assemblage, a visceral microcosm of the global environmental crises that compel
the urgent, interdisciplinary work of the environmental humanities.
In the novel, the Sundarbans transcends its role as mere backdrop to
become a co-protagonist, presenting a living argument against a world where
everything is rendered a resource for profit—a process Jason W. Moore terms
the “Capitalocene” (Moore 145). Ghosh’s novel maps
a line of flight from this extractive logic. It reveals
that resistance emerges not from the molar plans of institutions, but from
the molecular, risky, and
intimate sympoietic
assemblages that
form in the muddy, tidal zones of crisis itself.
This article argues that The Hungry Tide performs a queer intervention into the Capitalocene by
staging radical
kinship as
a practiced alternative. Through quiet partnerships between human and more-than-human characters, the novel deterritorializes the
dominant logics of assetization and reproductive futurism. To trace this
intervention, the analysis brings together the assemblage logic of Deleuze and Guattari, Donna
Haraway’s sympoiesis and “becoming-with,” and Lee Edelman’s critique
of “reproductive
futurism.”
Together, these frameworks illuminate how Ghosh’s narrative forges an ethics of obligation that actively dismantles the machinery of extraction and
cultivates a fragile, potent justice in its place.
To understand the project in the
novel, we must first understand the enemy it confronts: the logic of the
Capitalocene. This system operates as a global axiomatic that turns every
entity—human, animal, or ecosystem—into an abstract, convertible value within
its calculus of profit. Under this logic, a tiger is stripped of its expressive
singularity and recast as a trophy, a pest, or a unit of “endangered” biomass.
A fisherman is reduced to a source of labor, a dolphin to data, and a mangrove
forest to either a development obstacle or a financialized carbon sink. As
Deleuze and Guattari argue, capitalism is defined by a radical
deterritorialization: it decouples value from concrete territories and forms of
life, reterritorializing them within a “worldwide axiomatic” where the only
markers are “convertible abstract rights” and quantitative data (454-55). The
Capitalocene is this axiomatic machine at planetary scale, seeking to code
every flow of life—every desire, resource, and relationship—into the binary
logics of production/waste and asset/liability.
Its politics are, at
their core, necropolitical—following Achille
Mbembe’s formulation, they enact the power to decide which lives may be
fostered and which may be exposed to death in the service of an economic order
(Mbembe 66). This spatial logic of sacrifice is sustained and justified by a dominant
temporal ideology: what Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurism,” a framework
that “impose[s] an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving
in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering
unthinkable (…) the possibility of a queer” resistance to its future-oriented
telos (Edelman 2). In the Sundarbans, these twin logics converge: present lives (of
poor fishermen, of ‘problem’ tigers) are necropolitically expended as the
necessary cost for an imagined future of economic growth, national stability,
or even species survival, rendering their sacrifice not only permissible but
seemingly rational.
Against this
necropolitical and futurist axiomatic, Ghosh sets the Sundarbans themselves.
This is a landscape written in water and root, where river channels form a
shifting mesh and peninsulas are unmade and remade by the tide. It is a world
of mangrove and mud, where the very roots that grip the silt define a territory
of perpetual flux (Ghosh 6-8). This is no static backdrop, but a
Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage in ceaseless motion—a dynamic confluence of tidal
pulse, labyrinthine roots, prowling animals like tigers, snakes and crocodiles,
human boats, and layered myths. The landscape performs a persistent, creative
territorialization: the daily retreat and surge of the tide, the dense,
impassable patterns of the mangroves—these are its expressive rhythms and
signatures. They generate a territory that exists
only through constant adaptation (Deleuze and Guattari 314-16). Here, no single
element holds sway. By staging his revolution in this assemblage, Ghosh locates
resistance within a form of life whose very material logic—fluid, relational,
and endlessly reconfiguring itself—actively deterritorializes the rigid,
extractive grids of the Capitalocene.
Ghosh stages this revolution
narratively, through specific constellations of radical kinship. These are
moments where human and more-than-human characters form alliances that actively
undo—or deterritorialize—the Capitalocene’s axiomatic. This
article examines three such pivotal assemblages, each modeling a different
facet of a queer ecological praxis: the necropolitical capture of a tiger, which lays bare the
system’s violent logic; the mythic community of the Bon Bibi ritual, which
performs a pre-existing ethics of coexistence; and the collaborative tracking
of the Gangetic dolphin, which forges a new, intimate becoming-with. Together, these scenes map a line of flight from asset-based logic to an
ethics of mutual, risky care.
Ghosh’s narrative revolution begins in
the heart of failure and fire. The killing of the tiger in Lusibari is not a
contained incident but a symptomatic eruption of the Capitalocene’s deepest
contradictions. It stages a violent impasse where the logic of assetization
crashes against the raw imperatives of survival, revealing the necropolitical
foundations of both extractive capital and, problematically, certain forms of
global conservation. The tiger is reterritorialized in the most direct sense: removed from its ecological assemblage,
it is recoded as a “man-eater,” a negative
asset whose death is demanded to balance the ledgers of a community living on
the sacrificial frontier. The villagers’ mob violence—chanting “Maar! Maar!”
(Ghosh 294) as they sharpen bamboo spears and set the pen alight—is a grim,
immanent micropolitics of death, a direct outcome of
the state of abandonment produced by the Capitalocene’s axiomatic. This reveals
a core mechanism of the system: it does not merely suppress chaos but
actively produces chaotic, sacrificial violence in
the margins it creates and neglects.
The subsequent debate between Kanai
and Piya critically expands this critique, exposing global conservation as a
contested field within the Capitalocene’s axiomatic,
not an exterior to it. Kanai’s accusation is scalding: “It was people like you…
who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human
costs” (Ghosh 301). He identifies a global hierarchy of grievable life where
the survival of charismatic megafauna is underwritten by the invisible
suffering of the local poor. In this light, Piya’s initial, individualistic
intervention is revealed as structurally limited. While ethically sincere, her
stance risks a Universalist
abstraction. Her
appeal to “nature’s plan” and the “imaginary line” that protects other species
(Ibid.) operates as a transcendent principle—another abstract code—that fails to engage with the
historical, economic, and embodied precarity of the villagers’ situated assemblage.
Thus, her conservation ethic, though
aimed at deterritorializing the tiger from its status as
pest, constitutes a reterritorialization onto the abstract plane of global biodiversity value. It cannot
comprehend or transform the immanent, micropolitical logic of
the crisis. The tiger’s death thus becomes a grotesque spectacle of a triple
failure: of the absent state, of a conservation model that externalizes its
costs, and of an abstract ethics lacking the tools for relational engagement. This horrific impasse is the very
‘trouble’ one must stay with. As Haraway argues, the task of ‘multispecies recuperation’
involves ‘somehow, “getting on together” with less denial and more experimental
justice,’ acknowledging that ‘Response-ability is about both absence and
presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and
who dies and how’ (Haraway 27-28). The villagers, Piya, and Kanai are all
caught in this impossible calculus, a string figure of naturalcultural history where
the threads of human precarity and tiger predation are fatally knotted. Within
this specific captured logic, Fokir’s act of saving Piya
emerges as the only experimental justice immediately possible—a minimal, vital commitment to one vulnerable
life amidst collective collapse, enacting a line of flight from abstract calculation toward
concrete, risky care.
Within this landscape
of catastrophic failure, however, the novel locates the fragile genesis of its
central ethical practice: a radical kinship born not from ideological
agreement, but from shared precarity and a commitment to protective care.
Piya’s attempt represents a kinship of transcendent principle—a deterritorializing gesture
(snapping the spear) that is instantly overwhelmed by the molar violence of the
mob. The more significant and complex kinship is performed by Fokir. His
actions model a pragmatic, embodied becoming-with that operates within the immanent constraints of
the event. Initially appearing complicit, his allegiance undergoes a micropolitical shift the
moment Piya is in danger. His physical intervention—pinning her to his body and
carrying her away as “she kicked his knees and clawed at his hands” (Ghosh
294)—is not an act of shared ideology but of radical, protective care. He reads
the affective assemblage of the mob (“maddened bloodlust”)
correctly and forms a swift, new alliance with Piya, a molecular coupling for
the singular purpose of preserving her life. This is kinship as immanent response-ability, a commitment forged
not by code but within the singularity of the crisis. It is a line of flight away from
the necropolitical spectacle, acknowledging that
within that specific captured logic, the only justice possible
is the minimal, vital act of saving one vulnerable being from the frenzy.
The tiger-killing scene thus ends in a
profound impasse, staging the horrific outcome of the Capitalocene’s axiomatic and the insufficiency of
all transcendent or molar responses. This catastrophic deadlock creates the
narrative and ethical imperative for the novel’s decisive turn toward myth.
Having shown the brutal cost of a captured and deterritorialized existence, Ghosh must now
activate a framework capable of sustaining relation. The burning tiger casts a long
shadow, demanding an alternative to the cycle of fear and retribution.
This alternative is located in
the mythic
assemblage of
the Bon Bibi cult, which the novel presents not as a quaint tradition but as a
vital, pre-existing cultural technology for territorialization. If the tiger
scene exposes the logic of the Capitalocene in its raw, necropolitical form, the Bon Bibi ritual
constitutes a counter-assemblage. It provides a communal, narrative,
and spiritual milieu that actively codes a different set of relations between human and
more-than-human worlds. This framework does not impose an abstract law but
cultivates an immanent
ethics from
within the landscape itself, establishing the symbolic and practical ground
from which a more intimate, cross-species becoming-with can later emerge.
The tiger-killing scene does not
introduce the myth of Bon Bibi; it violently demonstrates the void that opens
in its absence. The myth is not the novel’s subsequent answer but its
persistent, underlying counter-assemblage. It recurs throughout the narrative as a deep cultural stratum, introduced long before the
conflagration in Lusibari. Its presence establishes that the characters are not
navigating a neutral space but one already coded by a counter-territorializing narrative.
The myth’s foundational bargain—where
the wild (Dokkhin Rai’s domain) and the human (Bon Bibi’s realm) exist in a
negotiated, sacred balance (Ghosh 103)—and its stark warning that “human greed
intruded to upset this order” (Ibid.), form an expressive territory, an ethical milieu against which the events of the Capitalocene
are judged. The burning corpse of the tiger, then, is not a problem for which
the myth is belatedly sought as a solution. It is the horrifying spectacle of
what happens when this expressive territory is abandoned—when the abstract axiomatic of the asset and the politics of abandonment override a relational ecology of limits and respect. The novel
holds these two forces in constant tension: the ever-present potentiality of
the mythic assemblage and the all-too-real eruptions of
its deterritorialization by capitalist capture.
Following the horrific impasse of the
tiger’s death—a spectacle of relation reduced to asset and revenge—the novel turns decisively toward the
foundational assemblage of Bon Bibi. This is not a
retreat into folklore but an activation of a counter-assemblage. The myth, performed on the Lusibari
maidan, establishes an expressive territory for the tide country that directly subverts the
Capitalocene’s axiomatic
of homogeneous, extractive space.
In its constitutive moment, Bon Bibi
does not eradicate the demon-king Dokkhin Rai but negotiates a partition: “one half of the tide country would
remain a wilderness (…) the rest she claimed for herself (…) Thus order was
brought to the land of eighteen tides, with its two halves, the wild and the
sown, being held in careful balance” (Ghosh 103). This primal scene territorializes the landscape into a relational dyad, a sympoietic system where value derives from
maintained distinction and negotiated coexistence, not from decoding and accumulation.
Crucially, the myth’s own critical
turn is its very next clause: “All was well until human greed intruded to upset
this order” (Ghosh 103). The parable of the merchant Dhona, who trades a human
life for a cargo of honey and wax, is the myth’s immanent diagnosis of
the Capitalocene’s
deterritorializing impulse: the violent overthrow of a qualitative compact by quantitative capture. Thus, before any character
interprets it, the myth itself presents a world structured by an ethics of limits and constitutes a sustained critique of the extractive axiomatic.
This expressive territory is actualized through the
polyvocal, lived practices of the community, each character manifesting a facet
of its sustaining
power. For
Horen, the myth materializes as a stringent, embodied code of conduct. His rule—“you can leave nothing of
yourself behind” in the forest (Ghosh 246)—transforms the abstract compact into
a daily practice of non-extractive presence, a corporeal rebuke to the logic of waste and
appropriation. This is a minor practice that territorializes movement within the forest as respectful passage,
not extraction.
For Kusum, whose faith is forged in
the crucible of loss, the myth provides a refrain—a stabilizing rhythm—to transmute
trauma into sacred kinship. Her prayer during her father’s stalking and her
naming of dolphins as “Bon Bibi’s messengers” (Ghosh 234-235) reterritorializes a world of mortal hazard into
one of shared
precariousness and enchanted alliance. She constructs a bloc of becoming with the more-than-human,
anchored in the mythic assemblage.
The intellectual Nirmal is captivated
not by content but by the myth’s form-as-assemblage. He discovers it is a linguistic and spiritual mohona, a confluence where
“Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese” (Ghosh 247) meet and mix. He
recognizes it as a rhizomatic and living system that inherently escapes
the arborescent, fixed categories upon which colonial
and capitalist governance rely. Through these diverse trajectories—the
embodied, the devotional, and the intellectual—the myth functions not as a
monolithic doctrine but as a generative milieu for a people to come, each drawing from its expressive territory a line of practice against the axiomatic of capital.
Fokir stands as the purest embodiment
of this symbiosis between myth and life. His practice is neither exegesis nor
dogma, but a ritualized
becoming-with the
mythic assemblage. Piya observes him at a shrine, performing a puja that is less a supplication than a sustained,
attentive gift (Ghosh 152). Illiterate, he carries the myth not as text but
as somatic
knowledge—“all
in his head” (Ghosh 249)—and his every action in the forest is an iteration of its compact. His is a radical kinship of enacted
respect, a quiet, continuous performance that reterritorializes the forest from a space of
potential resource extraction into a sacred milieu of negotiated passage.
Collectively, these engagements
manifest a queer
temporality,
oriented not toward the productive, child-centric futurity that Edelman
critiques but toward the cyclical, ritual maintenance of the conditions for coexistence. The myth’s value
lies not in a promise of future profit or progeny, but in its immediate, recursive enactment of a relational compact. This
constructs a lived
rhythm—a refrain—that stands against the linear, accumulative time of the Capitalocene, deterritorializing lived experience
from its homogenizing trajectory.
It is precisely this
culturally encoded expressive territory that makes the
novel’s final, intimate revolution conceivable. The myth of Bon Bibi, with its
balance and its warning, provides the symbolic and ethical grammar. The collaborative
tracking of the Gangetic dolphin will actualize this grammar on
a molecular scale, translating mythic structure into a
silent, cross-species sympoiesis. The ritual framework generates the conditions of
possibility for this intimate alliance, completing the
novel’s trajectory from catastrophic breakdown through cultural resource to a lived,
radical becoming-with.
The novel’s ultimate, quiet revolution
occurs not in the realm of mythic structure or molar catastrophe, but in the
fluid, silent assemblage formed by Piya, Fokir, and the
Gangetic dolphin. This final constellation enacts the most intimate line of flight from the Capitalocene’s
axiomatic—a sympoietic
partnership initiated
by the deliberate deterritorialization of speech. Piya reflects on the profound honesty of this wordless
connection, realizing that “If you compared it to the ways in which dolphins’
echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into
believing that you could see through the eyes of another being” (Ghosh 159).
This radical skepticism toward linguistic coding clears the ground for a different, haptic mode of knowing.
Their communication becomes a non-discursive multiplicity: a convergence of gestures, glances,
the tracing of handprints in mud (Ghosh 152), and the shared interpretation of
hydrophone clicks. Piya’s scientific instruments and Fokir’s embodied lore
cease to be tools of solitary extraction; they are reterritorialized as components within a shared sensory assemblage. Together, they become-attuned not to abstract data points, but
to the agential
presence of
the dolphin and to each other, forging a rhizomatic perception that operates beneath and beyond
the representational
grids of
capital.
This wordless becoming-with is fundamentally scaffolded by Fokir’s enaction of the
mythic compact, a practice rooted in ritual respect and performative taboo. His
devotion is lived through stringent prohibitions that actively guard the relational balance. He physically
stops Piya from miming a tiger, “vehemently shaking his head, as if to forbid
her” (Ghosh 98), and later raises a finger to silence her utterance of the word
itself at Garjontola (Ghosh 153). These acts are not superstition but the micropolitical maintenance of the mythic boundary—an embodied coding that protects the expressive territory. To name or mimic carelessly is to
risk summoning a predatory presence outside the negotiated order, violating the sympoietic compact.
This embodied discipline operationalizes the myth’s warning against
intrusion as a daily, corporeal ethics. It exemplifies what Haraway terms “response-ability”—the practice of “staying with the
trouble in serious multispecies worlds.” As Haraway argues, “Becoming-with, not
becoming, is the name of the game (…) Ontologically heterogeneous partners
become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding” (Haraway
12). Fokir’s practice is precisely this relational worlding: a deterritorialization of arrogant anthropocentric
discourse, replaced by a mindful silence that acknowledges the agential presence of the more-than-human. His gestures create a minor language of caution and reverence,
a line of
flight from
the extractive grammar of the Capitalocene into a shared, attentive quiet.
The radical kinship of the dolphin
hunt is a trilateral, non-verbal sympoiesis,
built upon the prepared
ground of
ritual respect. Fokir does not enter this collaboration as a blank slate but as
a subject
constituted by the
Bon Bibi assemblage—his perception already disciplined by its codes and attuned to the forest’s non-human
signals. When he reads the water’s texture or a bird’s flight, he employs
a literacy born from this symbiotic worldview.
Together, he and Piya form a sympoietic partnership in which value is produced in
the affective
and collaborative process itself—the silent, shared pursuit—rather than in extractive output. This queers the temporality of capitalist productivity,
embracing instead a durational time of mutual attunement. It represents the molecular enactment of the myth’s molar compact, proving that relationality is
a practiced
silence and
a coordinated
movement before
it is ever a spoken agreement.
This scene is the culmination of the
novel’s ethical epitome, made conceivable only by passing through the prior
assemblages: the tiger scene’s necropolitical void, which reveals the cost of relational collapse, and the Bon Bibi
myth’s expressive
territory, which
provides the grammar of respect and limit. Fokir is the vital conduit, carrying the myth’s silent
discipline into the boat.
Thus, the dolphin-tracking assemblage
is the synthesis: a radical kinship that is quiet,
risky, and woven from attentive gesture, ritual silence, and cross-species
response. It charts the most concrete line of flight from the Capitalocene’s calculative noise into the shared, sympoietic quiet of
becoming-with.
In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh maps an immanent
politics of resistance that begins not with a manifesto but with a silent,
collaborative looking. Through three pivotal assemblages, the novel stages a
progressive deepening of what it means to forge kinship against the grain of
the Capitalocene. The tiger-killing scene exposes the necropolitical void of a world ruled by asset logic, finding only a fleeting, protective
kinship in the act of rescue. The Bon Bibi myth and its lived rituals provide
the enduring cultural
counter-assemblage,
a system of negotiated sovereignty that territorializes the landscape as a space of
relation rather than extraction. Finally, the collaborative tracking of the
dolphin realizes this ethic in a quiet, cross-species sympoiesis, a becoming-with that operates through gesture
and shared attention, deliberately abandoning the “bag of tricks” (Ghosh 159)
of instrumental language.
The novel’s most profound argument for
this radical kinship, however, lies in its narrative resolution, where practice
crystallizes into irreversible sacrifice. Fokir’s death—his choice to shield
Piya with his own body—is the ultimate, logical culmination of his mode of being. His protective care, first seen in
his removal of Piya from the mob, finds its final expression. His life, lived
in a state of attentive
becoming-with,
ends in a literal embodiment of that commitment. This is the absolute deterritorialization of the self: his body escapes all prior
codifications to become the very physical ground of another’s survival. In this act, abstract “response-ability” becomes fatal and complete.
Piya’s subsequent choices constitute
the necessary second movement, demonstrating how such kinship reterritorializes identity and community. Her
decision to adopt Tutul and remain in Lusibari represents a fundamental break
from her life as a rootless observer. She does not merely study the assemblage;
she becomes
a constitutive part of it, weaving herself permanently into its fabric. This is a queer futurity in action: pointedly not the reproductive futurism that sanctifies The Child, but
a chosen, ethical
futurism built
on care, memory, and the nurturing of a specific, wounded world. She becomes,
in Haraway’s terms, truly response-able to the relations that transformed her.
Ghosh thus offers the environmental
humanities more than a critique; he offers a speculative ontology of practice. Through Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblages, queer
ecologies, and Harawayan sympoiesis, we see how resistance to the Capitalocene is embodied in the quiet
discipline of a taboo, the silent coordination of a hunt, the fatal arc of
sheltering a body, and the patient commitment to stay and mend. Radical
kinship, in this vision, is the active, world-making practice of forging obligational ties
that refuse calculation. It is an ethics that accepts the ultimate cost and, in
doing so, reclaims life from the hollow calculus of profit. The Hungry Tide ultimately suggests that in the
swirling, precarious tides of our current age, our only possible line of flight is to become,
irreversibly, with and
for each other.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide.
HarperCollins, 2004.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics.
Translated by Steven Corcoran,Duke UP, 2019.
Moore, Jason W.,
editor. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis
of Capitalism. PM Press, 2016.