The Hungry Tide

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C resswell , Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Just like any other Ghosh's book, The Hungry Tide takes you to an unknown territory, The Sundarbans. For Indians, we associate Sundarbans with Tigers. But Amitav Ghosh through The Hungry Tide will make you read a totally different side of Sundarbans. A deep history of marshy swamplands, crocodiles, rebellion during Bangladesh war. The last book that I read by Amitav Ghosh was the Glass Palace, which took me to Burma, a place which was alien to me, but not anymore. And that is the beauty of Ghosh's books, you are enchanted and mesmerized whenever you read any one of his books. Antoinette Burton takes this sentence from the novel as the epigraph for her article ‘Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History’, to which I am indebted for aspects of my discussion of competing epistemologies in Anil’s Ghost . Meanwhile, Piya begins her survey alongside a forest guard, who's required to accompany her, and a boater named Mej-da. Both of them are rude to her and offer no help. They approach a fisherman in the water, and the forest guard fines him for supposedly poaching. Trying to surreptitiously give the fisherman some money in return, Piya falls off her boat, and the fisherman rescues her. She decides to ask him to take her to Lusibari, and he turns out to be kind and respectful, though they do not speak the same language. He introduces himself as Fokir, accompanied by Tutul. The next day, the group observes dolphins behaving differently than usual, which intrigues Piya. As they travel, Piya and Fokir get along extremely well and find that their work styles are very complementary despite their apparent differences. So…Talking about the book, Piyali Roy(Piya) is an Indian origin American cetologist. She studies marine mammals. She comes to India near her ancestral place in the hope to get a permit to do a survey of marine mammals of Sunderbans.

The Sundarbans is a constantly mutating location, a region where space is reconfigured by natural forces on a daily basis as a consequence of tidal flows, and this provides Ghosh with a paradigmatic setting for a novel about the shifting dynamics of place. Like the English Fens of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) 6 and the Venice of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), the Sundarbans of The Hungry Tide is an amphibious location, an environment whose physical geography can be seen as a trope for the fact that the identities of places are not fixed and unitary. Unlike The Passion and unlike Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), where the Sundarbans is seen as a phantasmagoric ‘historyless’ (Rushdie 360) location, The Hungry Tide ’s meticulously documented details of physical and human geography make a consideration of the various ways in which the region has been and is being shaped by policy-makers and its various other stakeholders inescapable. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Criticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. I have never been to the Sunderbans even though I have lived in India all my life. Of course, I have read about it in school but this book took me there. I walked among the mangroves, saw the pugmarks of the maneaters - the Royal Bengal Tiger - up close, gasped as the crocodiles swiftly and stealthily swam up to my boat, and smiled when the dolphins sounded. It was a physical experience I went through right in my living room. Quadri Ismail takes the view that this conclusion reinforces the Buddhist Sinhala nationalism that (...)

Beyond the Book

Piya makes arrangements for her studies, hiring the required forest guides and a boat, and heads out. However, almost immediately she begins to have misgivings, and after falling into the water and being rescued by a fisherman named Fokir, she decides to stay with him on his small boat rather than return to the guides, who seem excessively interested in her money and her equipment. Her decision proves to be a wise one. Although Fokir speaks no English and cannot read or write, he is so intelligent that Piya has no difficulty communicating with him. She has only to show him her equipment and several pictures of dolphins for him to grasp her reason for being in the Sundarbans and to understand that she wishes to hire him and his boat. Fokir and his young son Tutul make room for Piya on their boat, and they proceed. G hosh , Amitav . ‘The Chronicle Interview’, UN Chronicle, Online Edition, 4 (2005). http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2005/issue4/0405p48.html . Accessed 16 September 2008. The Hungry Tide seems to give fictional representation to Luce Irigaray’s sense of community. In an essay titled “Approaching the Other as Other,” Irigaray evokes an alternative sense of community through sustaining of a sense of estrangement or mystery in the relationship of Self to Other. She writes of our usual tendency to grasp, know, seize and dominate and “transform[s] the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us” (Irigaray 122). This becomes clearer when she says that “if we precisely grasped all that makes the springtime, we would without doubt lose the wondrous contemplation in the face of the mystery of springtime growth” (122). This is the state that Kusum describes of Fokir when she says: “the river is in his veins” (245), and we see it illustrated in his blending of himself into the spirit of the water and his easy acceptance of the magical appearance of the dolphins which so enthuse and excite Piya. The point of this is made apparent when we see that Piya, despite partaking of this “wondrous contemplation” with Fokir, is trained to get behind the mystery. Fokir on the other hand is at ease with the mystery. As Piya draws his attention to the exhalations of the dolphins: “He nodded, but without showing any surprise; it was as though there were nothing unexpected about this encounter and he had known all along that they would be there” (113). If preserving a sense of the mysterious is part of an ethical acceptance of the other, this calm of Fokir’s is part of his constant, unchanging consciousness of the mysterious in which he exists. B rown , Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe , London/ New York: Routledge, 2000.

The story moves in time and space both. Characters of the present time are Kanai, Fokir, and Piya and the main character of the past is Nirmal. Intricacy and suspense in the plot are kept in the old diary of Nirmal, which is read by Kanai to connect the dots of events. Amitav has touched many issues like refugee, freedom, war, government, and tribal conflict, ecology, marine life and lives in seaside habitats in this book. See, e.g., ‘Piya remembered a study that had shown there were more species of fish in the Sundarbans than could be found in the whole continent of Europe. […] [The] proliferation of environments was responsible for creating and sustaining a dazzling variety of aquatic life forms—from gargantuan crocodiles to microscopic fish’ (125). Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer… I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast' The Times Impressed with Fokir, Piya hires him for a week to help her survey the dolphins in the region. Kanai comes along to serve as a translator, and they bring Nilima and Nirmal's friend Horen, who owns a large boat. When the boat's engine dies, they float to a nearby village. That night, they hear loud voices and find a tiger captured in a building surrounded by angry people. Wanting to protect the tiger, Piya tries to break up the mob, but Kanai stops her. Later, he admonishes her for wanting to protect the tiger at the cost of the local people. Story revolves around American born Bengali descent, Piyali Roy a.ka. Piya, a cetologist who comes to India to study the river dolphins; Foker a reticent illiterate boatman with impeccable knowledge of the tide country; Kanai the middle aged translator who thinks oThe novel also delves into the complexities of cultural exploration and the clash of different identities. Piya, a woman of Indian origin raised in the United States, grapples with her dual heritage and her place within Indian society. Kanai, on the other hand, is a product of the urban elite, disconnected from his ancestral roots until his visit to the Sundarbans awakens his interest in his family’s past. Fokir’s presence brings a sense of grounding to the story, representing the local inhabitants of the Sundarbans and the timeless wisdom they carry.