Eurocentrism emerges on

this conceptualisation as an untranscendable horizon governing thought –

its forms, contents, modalities, and presuppositions so deeply and insidi-

ously layered and patterned that they cannot be circumvented, only

deconstructed

Subaltern practice cannot signify

‘as itself’ across the divide that separates social elites from those who are

not elite. It is, indeed, precisely the irreducible gap between popular

practice and its (misrecognising) construal in elite discourse that the term

‘subalternity’ designates on Spivak’s usage of it. The subaltern is the object

of discourse, never the subject. Whatever is represented as ‘subaltern’ has

always-already been made over: not only translated, but traduced; not

only appropriated, but expropriated

It is noteworthy that Ghosh does not provide us unmediated access, in

The Hungry Tide, to Fokir’s own thoughts. This obviously allows us to

dwell a little longer on the idea that there is an incommensurability –

radical alterity – between elite and subaltern cultures, value systems and

ways of seeing. Subaltern consciousness is figured consistently as inscrut-

able; irrecoverable by and inaccessible to any of the novel’s elite characters,

it is also left unrecovered and unaccessed by the novel itself.

But I wonder whether the narrative, formal, and affective dimensions

of The Hungry Tide do not cut against and in the end undermine this idea

of incommensurability, and of the theoretical anti-humanism that under-

lies it. Ghosh’s self-conscious use here, as elsewhere in his work, of

sentimentality and sensationalism (the novel’s very title is significant in

this respect), of romance and narrative suspense, all point us in a quite

different direction, towards the idea not of ‘fundamental alienness’ but

of deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the social

division of labour.59