Retrieving agency beyond bare life: narratives of migration in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart

Abstract

This thesis aims to give an insight into different ways in which refugees and illegal migrants can exercise agency in a context where power and hegemonic narratives attempt to silence and obliterate their stories. To do so, I analyse the novels The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh and A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee, where migrants either collectively or individually struggle to build a life for themselves. The literary analysis of the two novels integrates a philosophical reflection widely used in migration studies that identifies migrants with bare life, i.e. life without rights over which power is exercised. This concept alone is insufficient to describe the migration experience in its various facets and it tends to see migrants as a uniform and powerless mass over which power is cast, erasing their ability to react, their voices, experiences and desires. However, there are various ways in which migrants can evade the realm of bare life that confines them to passive and invisible spaces, entering the world of agency where they strive to construct their own reality. Both of the realities analysed in The Hungry Tide and A Life Apart, offer a glimpse into this agentic and multifaceted world, portraying an imagery rarely narrated by hegemonic discourse.