When Things Remember: Material Archives, Thing Theory, and Cultural Memory in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

Anuja

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85223

When Things Remember: Material Archives, Thing Theory, and Cultural Memory in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

Author(s)	Ms. Anuja
Country	India
Abstract	The renewed interest in materiality has transformed literary studies by questioning the assumption that objects merely reflect human experience. While Bill Brown's Thing Theory explains how ordinary objects acquire "thingness," comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which literary objects function as enduring archives of cultural memory. This paper addresses that gap by bringing Thing Theory into dialogue with Cultural Memory Studies to examine how material objects preserve histories that remain vulnerable to erasure in contemporary Indian fiction. Focusing on Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), the study argues that notebooks, boats, rivers, houses, letters, and domestic artefacts do more than support narrative action; they remember. These material forms preserve ecological knowledge, colonial inheritances, migration histories, and affective experiences that escape institutional archives and official historiography. Drawing upon Bill Brown's concept of thingness together with the cultural memory theories of Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, and Pierre Nora, the paper develops the concept of material archives to demonstrate that memory in these novels is dispersed across relationships between people, places, and things. Rather than treating objects as symbolic motifs, the study foregrounds their narrative agency and archival function.
Keywords	Thing Theory, Cultural Memory, Material Culture, Contemporary Indian Fiction, Narrative Agency.
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-09
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85223

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When Things Remember: Material Archives, Thing Theory, and Cultural Memory in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

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