The Hungry Tide

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When Kanai meets his aunt, Nilima, he finds that she is still deeply impacted by his uncle's death decades ago and that the natural landscape of the Sundarbans has already changed since his visit as a child. Furthermore, he learns that his childhood friend Kusum was killed in a 1979 massacre. Her son, Fokir, is now a fisherman with a wife, Moyna, and son of his own, Tutul. One of Amitav Ghosh's best books, I would say. The setting of the book is in the 'Sundarbans' in Eastern India– a vast forest in the coastal region of the Bay of Bengal and considered one of the natural wonders of the world. There is not much of a story as such in the novel, but there are excellent characters and visual depictions of the Sundarbans. The landscape plays a prominent role in the book. One could almost breathe 'Sundarbans'. However, unlike forests in Himalayan ranges in the North, 'Sunderbans' display a certain kind of calm and beauty, but also leave a trail of heavy suffocation especially during the monsoon; they are dark, humid, uninviting and there is always a sense of danger lurking in the air.

In other chapters, Kanai relives an earlier period when, having been suspended from school, he was sent to Lusibari to contemplate his misdeeds and prepare himself for reentry into the educational system. He remembers his first meeting with a strong-willed teenager named Kusum, with whom he was halfway in love. At a performance honoring Bon Bibi, the legendary protectress of the island people, Kusum had told Kanai about watching her father being dragged off by a tiger and her own sense of betrayal when Bon Bibi ignored her calls for help. After the play, Kanai saw Kusum being spirited away so that she would be safe from the villainous man who sold her mother into prostitution and had been pursuing the daughter ever since. Kanai never saw Kusum again. However, during this visit he learns about her later life, which ended in martyrdom at Morichjhapi. Kusum, as it turns out, is Fokir’s mother. D as, Veena. “Subaltern as Perspective.” Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Delhi: OUP, 1994. 310-24. call this a “subaltern geoaesthetic” because it is founded on some of the elements of the subaltern studies historiographic project but, influenced by the terrain, is also a critique of this project. 1 In this novel, Ghosh repeats elements of this historiographic mode in using a subaltern uprising and subaltern characters, but instead of only demonstrating failure, he also presents the world these people inhabit as transforming and ennobling, even as the easy acceptance of the mysterious and the mystical evokes respect for the other and creates an intuitive understanding of the limits and sanctity of spaces. Barras, Arnaud. “The Aesthetics of the Tide: The Ecosystem as Matrix for Transculturation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Transculturation and Aesthetics: Ambivalence, Power, and Literature. Ed. Joel Kuortti . Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2015. 171-86.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. I smail , Quadri. ‘A Flippant Gesture Towards Sri Lanka: A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’, Pravada, 6, 9 (2000), 24-9.

Set amidst the lush foliage of mangrove forests, The Hungry Tide tells us about the history and lives of people who inhabit the numerous islands of Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal, the river dolphins, the man eater tigers of the tide country, the sea and the legends that float in these waters and forests. It reminds us of the fragility of human life and the helplessness that comes with it. Cf. ‘Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.’ [56]: Nirmal’s notebook also underscores the novel’s emphasis on the multiplicity of ways in which places can be read. In a metafictive comment, he writes: Nirmal Dutt, a scholar and historian, had been passionately involved in recording the history and culture of the Sundarbans. Upon his death, Kanai is tasked with going through his uncle’s possessions and dealing with his estate in the Sundarbans. In the process, Kanai discovers Nirmal’s diary, a treasure trove of knowledge that becomes a window into the past. The diary is not just a collection of historical facts but also a personal account of Nirmal’s experiences, emotions, and inner conflicts during his time in the Sundarbans. It serves as a narrative within the narrative, offering glimpses into the region’s rich heritage and the interactions between different communities.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 .

The other sad thing about the novel is its degeneration into chapters containing one-to-one conversations. There are just two many of these chapters. Each character gets to talk to the other. Sometimes they narrate stories of the kind I have mentioned before. At other times, they bore even more. One gets the irritating feeling that this could have been a super-taut novella and that it would have done better then. At other times, you find yourself bemoaning the superficiality it loads the characters with...suddenly the characters lose their inner lives and are just talking. Talking , talking, and talking. A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story that’s full of romance, suspense, and poetry.”— The Washington Post In my sailing through this beautiful story, I also encountered some well researched scientific facts about mammal creatures and about the history of those small islands in the Bay of Bengal. The mixing of faith and mythical belief in the story made it more interesting for the reader. Ghosh has tried his best to keep the story equally relevant for both the native readers and for the general English readers and he has done it quite successfully. The Hungry Tide follows Piyali Roy, an Indian-American cetologist, who comes to India on the trail of the Gangetic dolphin and, more importantly, the Irrawaddy dolphin. Her search leads her to the eastern edge of the country - a group of archipelagos that go by the name 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.

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While Piya explores the present, Kanai ventures into the area’s past. First his aunt, Nilima Bose, delivers a lecture about the early history of the Sundarbans, and then Kanai begins reading the notebook of Nirmal, his late uncle. From that point on, the narrator will periodically insert into the story a separate, italicized chapter representing a section of the notebook. Kanai will not read the final entry until about two-thirds of the way through the novel. Another reason for concern is the expanding tourism industry in India. Sahara India Parivar's mega tourism project proposes to take over large areas of the Sundarbans to construct floatels, restaurants, shops, business centres, cinemas, and theatres which would disturb the fragile ecosystem and further threaten the already endangered biodiversity of the region. Ghosh vehemently oppose this gigantic hotel project in the name of conservation. In the first few chapters Ghosh takes ample time with his two main characters. Their histories and inner lives intermingle well. The plot too advances with a decent pace. But then two things overpower his novel The Hungry Tide” serves as a mirror to Amitav Ghosh’s literary brilliance, captivating readers with its lyrical prose and masterful storytelling. The novel transcends the boundaries of geography and time, inviting readers to embark on a poignant and thought-provoking journey of self-discovery, cultural exploration, and ecological awareness within the embrace of the Sundarbans. The story begins with the meeting of Piyali (Piya) and Kanai (rhymes with Hawaii) Dutt, a translator and interpreter based out of Delhi. Kanai is heading to Canning from where he will proceed to Lusibari that is the last populated area before the forests begin. He is headed to his aunt's home in the remote village.