Reframing Climate Crisis and Resilience: Local Ecologies and Global Inaction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement

This article investigates how Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) reconfigure the discourse on climate change and resilience by grounding ecological crisis in culturally and historically situated narratives. Using a qualitative textual analysis, the study draws on ecocriticism (Buell, Glotfelty), postcolonial environmentalism, and resilience theory (Walker and Salt) to analyze Ghosh’s cross-genre engagement with ecological precarity. The Hungry Tide portrays the Sundarbans as a site of fluid geographies and human–nonhuman entanglements, emphasizing the role of local knowledge and lived experience in navigating environmental threats. In parallel, The Great Derangement critiques the silences of modern realist fiction in the face of climate catastrophe and calls for a reimagined literary form attuned to nonhuman agency and planetary scale. By synthesizing insights from both texts, this study argues that Ghosh’s narrative strategies relocate climate discourse from abstract science to embodied experience, thereby contributing a critical South Asian perspective to global environmental thought. The article advocates for interdisciplinary environmental literacy within literary studies and proposes future research trajectories that include comparative analysis with postcolonial writers such as Arundhati Roy and Ben Okri. In doing so, it underscores the ethical role of literature in fostering ecological imagination and cultural resilience in the Anthropocene.