Ecologies of Resistance: Environmental Concerns in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

Ecological crises have been increasingly represented as cultural and ethical challenges within contemporary literature, and the fiction of Amitav Ghosh has been widely acknowledged as a significant intervention in this discourse. In the present article, environmental concerns in Ghosh’s fiction have been critically examined through the lens of ―ecologies of resistance, a framework through which narrative, history, and marginalized human–nonhuman relationships have been articulated as forms of opposition to colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric modes of domination. By analyzing selected novels including The Hungry Tide, Gun Island, and the Ibis Trilogy, ecological consciousness has been shown to be embedded in representations of rivers, oceans, forests, animals, and climate-disrupted communities. Environmental degradation has been linked with imperial histories, displacement, and epistemic violence, while alternative ecological ethics have been foregrounded through indigenous knowledge systems, subaltern voices, and multispecies coexistence. It has been argued that Ghosh’s fiction has functioned not merely as environmental representation but as narrative resistance to the cultural invisibility of climate change and ecological loss. The study has contributed to ecocritical scholarship by situating Ghosh’s work within postcolonial environmental humanities and by demonstrating how literary imagination has been mobilized as a critical tool for ecological awareness and resistance.