Necropolitics of Hunger: Somatic Sovereignty
and Alimentary Resistance in The Hungry Tide
Darakhshan
Hashmi,
Ph.D. Research Scholar,
Department of English,
Aligarh Muslim University,
Aligarh,
Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract:
While the study of
migration and displacement often delineates themes of identity, violence, and
atrocity, this paper examines the weaponisation of hunger as a tool of
political subjugation through a close reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. It focuses on how
the denial of sustenance and the regulation of the body operate as mechanisms
of power and social erasure. This novel provides a powerful framework for this
analysis by reconstructing the historical realities of the Marichjhapi
Massacre. Hunger in this narrative is not incidental but political, shaped by
structures of power that determine the conditions of life and death for marginalised
populations.
Viewed through a
necropolitical lens, hunger emerges as a mechanism of state power through which
authority manages populations by exposing them to prolonged deprivation rather
than direct violence. Such conditions enforce silence, normalise suffering, and
exclude displaced communities from official histories. The body becomes the
primary site where political decisions are experienced, registering loss and
abandonment long before they are articulated in language or record.
Furthermore, the paper traces forms of
alimentary resistance embedded within everyday acts of survival. Practices such
as rationing, scavenging, and the preservation of food function as a quiet
refusal to disappear. These embodied responses give rise to what may be understood
as somatic sovereignty, where the suffering body asserts presence, continuity,
and memory despite enforced deprivation. By narrating hunger as lived
experience, this novel challenges dominant political and historical archives,
revealing how agency and remembrance persist even within regimes structured by
necropolitical control.
Keywords: Necropolitics, Hunger, Alimentary resistance, Somatic
sovereignty, Food, Displacement, State power, Marginalised bodies
Introduction
The world has been a witness
to exile and displacement since the inception of human civilisation.
Displacement is a daunting experience that is not only limited to a loss of
geographical territory further escalating to the loss of security, identity and
everyday survival. None of these absences is negotiable; however, hunger
remains one of the most persistent experiences of displacement. The notion of
exile is usually viewed as the act of crossing borders and leaving behind home
voluntarily or involuntarily within political discourse; it often overlooks how
power invades the body and regulates survival at its most basic level.
This paper argues that
within the narrative of migration and displacement, hunger functions not merely
as a symptom of crisis but as a calculated move of control. Starvation is
shrewdly installed as a weapon of slow violence. The denial of food, limitation
of access to sustenance, and the normalisation of malnourishment reveal that
the governing authority dictates life unscrupulously. Hence, in this brutal,
inhumane process, the stomach becomes a site of political conspiracy, bearing
witness to how an entire population is silenced through forced deprivation.
Centring on The Hungry
Tide, this paper examines how hunger is narrated as a form of historical
testimony within the literary representation of state violence. Amitav Ghosh
has very evocatively articulated the disturbing episodes of Sunderbans by
giving a brief overview of how the regime has unleashed violence overtly and
through starvation, and also how these oppressed fought back for their basic
survival. The Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979, depicted in Ghosh’s The Hungry
Tide, narrates the rift between ecological preservation and human
civilization. Through a fictional reconstruction of real historical events,
this novel explores how hunger functions as an instrument of silencing
communities and gradual erasure.
This paper draws upon
Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which identifies the power of a state
to dictate who may live and who must die (Mbembe 24). Unlike conventional
warfare, the necropolitical state often functions through the elimination of
the life support system. Within the aforementioned framework, hunger becomes a
form of governance that allows death to occur slowly, gradually, and, most
importantly, without any accountability. By analyzing the Marichjhapi blockade,
we see the state exercising the ‘right to let die’. In these death-worlds, as
Mbembe calls them, the settlers or the inhabitants are robbed off of their
political status and reduced to ‘bare-life’.
Nonetheless, the hungry
body is not just reduced to a site of passive suffering, but also the enforced
starvation produces a counteract of bodily agency, defined here as somatic
sovereignty. The famished body negotiates and reclaims meaningful autonomy
through acts of resistance, endurance, and the consumption of marginal food
sources.
The historical background
of The Hungry Tide provides a powerful setting that is
inseparable from the real historical events that occurred back then. To delve
deeper into the trauma faced by the characters in this novel, it is important
to investigate the archival realities of 1979, the Marichjhapi Massacre in the
Sunderbans.
Marichjhapi or Morichjhãpi
is a small island, located in the mangrove forest of the Sunderbans of West
Bengal, India. It is primarily infamous for its post-colonial state violence.
The Marichjhapi Massacre took place in 1979 when Bengali Hindu Dalit refugees migrated
from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) after the partition of India and had
settled in the Marichjhapi Island in search of land, livelihood and survival.
The Left Front government refused to accept those refugees and declared their
settlement illegal, thus forcibly removing them through a violent police
operation. It all started during and after the division of Bengal. In order to
escape the communal violence in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), many fled to West
Bengal. Primarily, upper and middle-caste Hindus resettled easily, but later
there was a surge in poor Bengali settlers, and it reached to such a great
extent that it became both difficult and inevitable to settle them. Unlike
upper-caste Hindu refugees who were more readily absorbed into urban centres of
West Bengal, Dalit refugees were pushed to the margins. Initially, many settled
in refugee camps across West Bengal, Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha under
harsh conditions and inhospitable regions. The situation was so difficult there
that more than 40,000 refugees chose to return to Bengal on their own and
settled on Marichjhapi Island. The mangroves were cleared, lands were
cultivated, and gradually the island became home to these settlers.
The state recognised these
refugees as encroachers on the forest reserve, so they left no stone unturned
to uproot them by a total economic and resource blockade that lasted for
months. There was a complete cut off of food, water, and medical supplies.
Police boats patrolled the waterways, preventing any passage to the food, fresh
water, or medical supplies. Denied clean water, the settlers were decimated by
cholera, and denied food, they were hollowed out by starvation. Further, this
was followed by a violent eviction that resulted in deaths, displacement, and destruction
of the settlement.
The history of the
Marichjhapi settlers also narrates the standing of post-colonial citizenship in
India. It reveals how caste, class, and politics affect the refugees’ lives and
how they were repeatedly denied belonging. Eyewitness accounts and viewers'
testimonies indicate that the starvation and disease spread rapidly. Without
access to food or medicine, the refugees weakened. The children and elderly
were first to die, and the bodies were disposed of in rivers and forests.
Violence did occur in the form of police action, but it was the slow and silent
hunger that ultimately forced them to evacuate the settlement.
The historical event from
the rich geographical area unveils a disturbing mechanism by which the state
functions to achieve political ends. The land of the Sunderbans is fertile
enough to support human civilisation. There is no dearth of ecological
abundance, yet people had suffered gravely with no food to eat. This incident
exemplifies that hunger is the most efficient tool of the necropolitical state,
and the most evident consequence of starvation is the silence that follows.
‘Necropolitics’ was
introduced by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe in his seminal work of the
same title in 2003. Mbembe defines Necropolitics as “subjugation of life to the
power of death" (Mbembe 39). He believed that the governing body has the
power to decide who should live and who must die. He further explicates that
‘to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define
life as the deployment and manifestation of power’ (12).
Mbembe has built his theory
on Foucault’s ‘Biopolitics’, introduced in his work The History of Sexuality.
Foucault elaborates the shift in the way power deals with bodies, where
individuals are first regulated separately and subsequently turn towards their
massification.
Foucault writes, “[A]fter a
first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a
second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if we have a second
seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that
is directed not at man-as-body but at man- as-species” (Foucault 242). He
explains biopower as the emergence of multiple strategies through which power
is used to subjugate bodies while regulating the population. Through this
mechanism, the state gradually begins to intervene and dictate people’s lives.
According to Foucault,
Wars are no longer waged on
behalf of a sovereign who must be defended, they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire population are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.
It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many
regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed.
(137)
Mbembe felt that the concept of biopower doesn't suffice to
explain the current political scenario, and that's how the notion of
necropolitics came into play in 2003. While biopolitics deals with the
administration of life, necropolitics extends to the sovereign power's control
over death. Mbembe draws attention towards the operations of biopower deployed
“through dividing into those who must live and those who must die” (16). This
demarcation “operates on the basis of a split between living and dead” and
“such a power defines itself in a relation to a biological field – which takes
control of and vests itself” (17).
Mbembe believed that the
governing body has the power to decide who should live and who must die. And it
is decided on the grounds of ‘relation of enmity’ and the ‘state of exception’
(16). Mbembe views that death occupies a central position in global politics
and is closely tied to sovereignty. He is concerned with the type of
‘sovereignty’ whose purpose is the ‘instrumentalisation’ and ‘destruction’ of
human bodies (14).
According to Giorgio
Agamben, the state of exception refers to the peculiar condition in which the
legal order is temporarily set aside because of an emergency or crisis that
threatens the state. In such situations, sovereign authority assumes a dominant
role, allowing the state to override established laws in order to deal with the
crisis. Drawing on this idea, Achille Mbembe examines how the state of exception,
together with regulated enmity, has come to justify the right to kill in many
colonial and postcolonial contexts. Under such circumstances, power invokes
emergency and exception to legitimise extraordinary measures of control and
violence, along with a fictionalised notion of the enemy. Mbembe also observes
that the colony is considered a site where ‘judicial orders can be suspended’
(24). According to him, the colonised are often perceived as non-human, whose
deaths are easily normalised at any time and in any manner, with zero
accountability. Closely related to this idea is Giorgio Agamben’s concept of
‘bare life’, which describes individuals who are reduced to mere biological
existence without meaningful political recognition.
Taken together, these
theoretical perspectives provide an important framework for understanding how
power operates in The Hungry Tide. In such contexts, the
politics of survival is often tied to access to food, resources, and
environmental stability. Hunger is not merely a biological phenomenon; rather,
it is shaped by political decisions and neglect.
In The Hungry Tide,
Amitav Ghosh explores the Sunderbans not only as a major biodiversity-rich
region but also as a primary site of necropolitical experimentation. Through
the diary of Nirmal, the 1979 Marichjhapi incident is unveiled in the novel.
Kanai, being completely unknown even from the existence of Marichjhapi Island,
comes to know through Nirmal’s dairy addressed to him. He writes: “I am writing
those words in a place that you will probably never heard of: an island on the
southern edge of the tide country, a place called Morichjhãpi …” (Ghosh, 67).
This wasn’t merely the
introduction of the island. This was an attempt to reject political amnesia by
making him aware of the massacre conveniently schemed against the marginalised
section. Also, it highlights that the atrocities faced by the settlers are
brushed under the carpet, making them least known to the world.
By analysing the experience
of a character named Kusum, who is the prime spokesperson of the settlers in
the novel, the discrimination and atrocities faced by them are exposed. The
Sunderbans, as the name suggests, ‘beautiful forest’, possess an attractive
archipelago where the natural resources are in abundance. However, in this tide
region, the land itself is unstable, and the further political instability
caused a great ruckus. Ghosh illustrates how the state weaponised this region
by imposing a naval blockade. Even before the blockade, this fact can’t be ignored
that these refugees were treated as subaltern. The subalternity of the
Marichjhapi settlers was established well before the massacre. Kusum, when
questioned, the group of refugees was covered in dust and deteriorated state.
She got to know that:
Once we lived in
Bangladesh, in Khulna jila: we’re tide country people, from the Sundarbans’
edge. When the war broke out, our village was burned to ash; we crossed the
border, and there was nowhere else to go. We were met by the police and taken
away; in buses, they drove us to a settlement camp. We’d never seen such a
place, such a dry emptiness; the earth was so red it seemed to be stained with
blood. For those who lived there, that dust was as good as gold; they loved it
just as we love our tide country mud. But no matter how we tried, we couldn’t
settle there: rivers ran in our heads, the tides were in our blood. […] We sent
some people ahead, and they found the right place; it’s a large empty island
called Morichjhãpi. For months we prepared, we sold everything we owned. But
the police fell on us the moment we moved. They swarmed on the trains, they put
blocks on the road – but we still would not go back; we began to walk. (149)
As
historian Ross Mallick asserts, the refugees who fled to Marichjhapi were primarily
‘low caste Namasudras’ who were denied the urban social capital afforded to
their upper-caste counterparts (Mallick, 105). This socio-economic divide
rendered the Marichjhapi settlers illegal, and by forced relocation to the
inhospitable camps, these refugees were stripped of their status as citizens
and renamed as encroachers. The refugees’ inability to negotiate with the state
reflects Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern can’t speak within the framework
of elite institutional power. Ghosh portrays this through the character of
Kusum, who is barely surviving on the extreme margins of postcolonial state.
When the refugees tried to speak and stand for themselves, their voices were
intercepted and labelled as ‘criminals’ and ‘anti- environmentalists’. This is
what Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’. It doesn’t merely kill the subaltern;
it robs their ability to represent themselves. As a result, the starvation at
Marichjhapi Island becomes an unrecorded and very lesser known event in the
official history.
Nirmal describes the early settlement of refugees on
Marichjhapi Island, where they try to establish a resilient, self-sustaining
community. Nirmal “saw little more dwellings, scattered over clear fields.
These were huts, shacks and shanties built…” (154). It was not just a
description of settlement but a collectively organised effort of the displaced
inhabitants to construct life and a social structure from scratch. Nirmal is
astonished to see the rapid development of the settlement. He further notes,
“salt pans had been created, and tube wells had been planted” (171). It
represents the collective assertion of somatic sovereignty, with the settlers
taking control over the means of sustenance and basic needs. By producing their
own food, tools, and commodities, the settlers ensure that their bodies are no
longer defined by absence but by the presence of sustenance. The settlers
resist the state's attempts to starve them. The physical and social labour
invested in creating a civilisation out of mud reflects an embodied form of
resistance.
Later, the feast organised in Morichjhãpi reflects a
profound act of resistance. On an island defined by state-imposed scarcity, the
settlers’ ability to organise a ‘show of plenty’ depicts a defiant reclamation
of their own survival. When Kusum explains, “not much to buy, as the rest came
from the river,” (172), it highlights the reliance on natural resources
obtained directly from water bodies. Nirmal’s refusal to consume the food at
the feast, stating that this is precious food, accentuates the
transition of food from a basic necessity to a valuable commodity. The shared
meal and the unity in such a time of crisis become a performative act of quiet
refusal. Every grain of rice and every fish from the river carries the weight
of labour. This also sheds light on the fact that when the state weaponises
hunger, the act of eating becomes a calculated risk.
The major bone of contention in The Hungry Tide
lies in the conflict between environmental protection and the rights of the
settlers. The novel highlights how efforts to conserve forests and protect
tigers tend to overlook the struggles and livelihoods of marginalised
communities whose survival solely relies on the same island. Through
conversations of educated figures like Nilima, the doctor, and the writer
Khokon, their staunch opinions on the Morichjhãpi settlers have been revealed.
They believe that the presence of settlers on the island is illegal and a
violation of environmental law, thereby legitimising the state’s decision to
uproot human habitation. The settlers are reduced to the label of squatters,
which makes their eviction appear ethically correct. Moreover, the violence
unleashed on them is justified by saying, “You can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs” (173). The use of the
metaphor of omelette exemplifies the necropolitical strategy to rationalise the
atrocities on the oppressed. The blatant normalisation of hostility justifies
the mechanism of control even at the cost of human lives.
In the later part of the diary, Nirmal pens down the
sudden appearance of wooden watchtowers on the island, erected to keep the
settlement under constant surveillance, while men patrol the shores to keep an
eye on the movement of settlers. Nirmal is struck to see the transformation of
a liberated space into a zone of exception where refugees are physically and
legally sequestered. The government gradually takes stringent measures by
invoking the Forest Preservation Act and Section 144, banning all movement in
and out of the island. The state's encirclement of the island and the use of
tear gas and rubber bullets depict the transformation of a geographical region
into a death world. They were deliberately starved as the police forcibly
prevented the delivery of rice and water, basic means of survival, turning them
into an instrument of control. The siege of Marichjhapi illustrates
necropolitics through both the threat of physical violence and the strategic
manipulation of food, making the struggle of nourishment inseparable from the
struggle over life and death. The siege
represents a shift from active killing to passive attrition.
The deaths caused by hunger, the consumption of
non-edible items, or even contaminated water was not acknowledged, as the state
does not recognise their existence. The cutting off the alimentary supply, the
state forced settlers to inhabit a zone of exception. Within this zone, the
refugees are reduced to ‘Bare Life’, which means bodies can be killed without
being legally defined as a crime. Thus, in the state of bare life, the body is
not considered worthy of protection; rather, such deaths are considered
legitimate, with zilch accountability.
Nirmal’s diary highlights the naval blockade as a form of
slow violence. The police weren’t just patrolling water bodies, but they were
also preventing the entry of grain and fresh water. Nirmal writes in his diary:
“The siege went on for many days… food had run out and the settlers had been
reduced to eating grass. The police had destroyed the tubewells…the settlers
were drinking from puddles and ponds and the epidemic of cholera had broken
out” (232).
Rather than executing settlers alone, the state enforces
a slower and more insidious form of death by systematically removing the
conditions necessary for survival. This shows that scarcity is not natural but
manufactured. Settlers had been reduced to eating grass, which signifies that
hunger here is a disciplinary force that pushes the body beyond socially
acceptable forms of nourishment. The systematic deprivation of clean water and
food doesn't merely weaken the body; it attempts to weaken the settlers'
somatic sovereignty by making the act of staying alive an agonising struggle
against an engineered hunger.
Nirmal was taken aback by the physical health of Kusum.
The physical deterioration of Kusum, whose bones protruded from
her skin (232) function as a somatic testimony of necropolitical
violence. Her inability to rise from the mat
signifies the ultimate success of the siege. The representation of Kusum
resonates with concept of necropolitics articulated by Mbembe, which explains
how systems of power determine whose lives are sustained and whose bodies are
left to die. Kusum's struggle to survive
exposes the devastating consequences of prolonged hunger and deprivation. She
was surviving on a wild green named jadu-palong, which caused severe dysentery.
The body, already weakened by chronic malnutrition, was further ravaged by this
wild leaf. The atrophied body of settlers corroborates the necropolitics of
hunger. The silence of the hunger is a physiological consequence of the state's
withdrawal of food.
Kusum questions: "Who are these people, I wondered,
who loves animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they
know what is being done in their name? Where do they live, these people?..No
one could think this is a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how
humans have always lived- by fishing, by clearing lands and by planting the
soil” (233). She is distraughtly questioning the necropolitical logic that
considers her body disposable. Her
anguished reflection exposes the dehumanising discourse of conservation, where
the lives of marginalised refugees are rendered less valuable than the animals
and forests they inhabit. The repeated announcement that the island has to be
saved for tigers by the police official thereby justifies the expulsion and
starvation of the settlers. The hunger ‘gnawing at the bellies’ of the settlers
is therefore not a natural disaster but an enforced prohibition of resources.
The settlers are turned into Homo Sacers, beings that can be killed or left to
starve with impunity in the name of globalised dehumanised ecology. Kusum's
pain suggests that the deepest anguish isn't the physical suffering of hunger,
but what disturbs more profoundly is the realisation that their very right to
exist on the land has been rendered illegitimate within this hierarchy,
relegating the refugees to the lowest rung.
The most appalling realisation of necropolitics in the
entire narrative is the transition from the politics of hunger to the literal
disposal of the body. The fate of Kusum and other women ‘being used and then
thrown into the river’ represents the terminal point of necropolitics (247). In
the horrific climax, state violence moves beyond gnawing hunger to the literal
elimination of existence. The act of casting the violated body into the river
is not just an example of physical brutality but also a symbolic mechanism of
erasure, ensuring that the violence inflicted upon marginalised women remains
unrecorded within official histories.
Kusum's narrative, shaped by hunger, dispossession, and
the struggle to exist, embodies what may be considered a claim to somatic
sovereignty; the insistence that even the most marginalised bodies possess the
right to inhabit space, sustain life, and narrate their own histories. Yet the
novel doesn't end in despair. Ghosh shifts the site of resistance from the
deceased island to the conscience of reader. It gestures toward the possibility
that this suppressed history may eventually be heard. The faith placed in
future generations acknowledges that such erased lives may find recognition
among those who are willing to listen differently, less cynically, and with a
deeper ethical commitment to justice.
The Hungry Tide narrates the state’s
capability to establish “death-worlds”. This novel articulates the absence by
re-centring bodily experiences. Hunger is not only narrated through endurance
and death, but also through survival strategies. Ghosh navigates through
settlement and ecological preservation, depicting how the state chooses to
prioritise the environment over the settlers, who are labelled as squatters.
The blockade of Morichjhãpi entails a shift towards the necropolitics of
hunger, a framework where the state deliberately manages and dictates
biological necessities. The infamous blockade was meant to cut off the food
supply chain of the region. Ghosh distinguishes how access to food signifies
privilege, and how hunger functions as a primary mechanism of operation. Ghosh
has underpinned the metaphor of hunger to explore how an authoritarian regime
weaponises hunger to maintain and subjugate the settlers. The relationship
between food and power is often abused to deliberately starve the body. The
Morichjhãpi settlers are deprived of basic survival and have no control over
food production. Mbembe refers to the living dead, in which the body is caught
between erasure and survival. This research paper examined how food acts as a
weapon of domination that shapes the life and death of marginalised
populations. By weaponising the most primary biological necessity, that is food
and water, the state attempted to dissolve the settlers' somatic sovereignty,
reducing a political movement for reclamation to a desperate struggle for
biological survival. The necropolitics of hunger exposes that the most
totalizing form of power is not the one that kills instantly, but the one that
dictates the very functions of life. Food emerges as a crucial site through
which life and death are negotiated as it moves beyond consumption to become a
primary tool of domination.
Works Cited
Agamben,
Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University
Press, 1998.
Foucault,
Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975-76. Translated by David Macey, Picador, 2003.
Ghosh,
Amitav. The Hungry Tide; Penguin Books India, 2004.
Mallick,
Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and
the Marichjhapi Massacre.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol.58, no.1.Feb.1999.
Mbembe,
Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Libby Meintjes, Duke University
Press, 2003.
Spivak,
Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg , U
of Illinois P,1988.