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Chapter -V Multicultural Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's the Hungry Tide

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Chapter -V Multicultural Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's the Hungry Tide Chapter -V Multicultural Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies Multicultural perspectives in The Hungry Tide: The Hiiiii^rv Tide deals with the lite of people from the Sundarbans. Their li\ing reflects a Darwinian struggle tor survival against vagaries of nature. Different groups of people settled on the land of Sundarbans. These people were rejected in their native places because of their class, religion and nationality. Cruelty of nature rather than the treatment given to them by the privileged groups elsewhere is bearable to these refugees. Some people were uprooted from their own land for various reasons. They took shelter in the region of tide countries called Sundarbans. They survived themselves in the Sundarbans and evolved a large pan of humanity. Class, religion, culture were melted away in the process to create a Utopian society of love, cooperation, respect and recognition. The novel delineates the importance of cultural compromises rather than cultural conflicts and controversies in human life. The refugees who were deprived of their native places felt equal and similar in the strange region of Sundarbans. The Hungry Tide deals with the socio cultural life of Sundarbans region. It is a fusion of various social and cultural conventions, which overcomes the barriers of language, religion, socio-economic class and culture. It is a fusion of traditional and cosmopolitan life, urban and rural life, global and local life. This cultural fusion sets all the major perspectives of multiculturalism such as living together differently, respect and recognition of one another, love and cooperation between each other and a sense of justice. The novel deals with all these multicultural perspectives in the Indian socio-cultural context. 144 According to Christopher Roilason: Ghosh"s novel takes as its task the exploration of a vast field of human communication, testing both its possibilities and its limits as the characters seek to cross multiple bamers - the barrier of language, religion, and social class, those between human beings and nature, between traditional and cosmopolitan India, between urban and rural, between India and the wider world. The tension between global and local is articulated through the characters, with, for most of the novel, globalization embodied by the Americanized Piya with her hi-tech GPS device, local identity symbolized by Fokir, and Kanai, the Delhi - resident, part-globalized modern entrepreneur, shifting uncertainly somewhere in between.' Sense humanity is set in the beginning of the narrative by introducing the visit of two characters to the tide countries. One of them is Kanai, a businessperson of Delhi. He came to meet his aunt, Nilima who has been running NGO in Lusibari. She invited Kanai after the death of her husband, Nirmal who was a headmaster in the school of Lusibari. Nirmal wrote a diary, which he wanted to hand over only to Kanai. It is about the socio cultural life of the country. Kanai's reading of the diary brings back the history of the place. The past is revived through the device of gossiping between Kanai and Nilima. The second character is Piyali Roy, an American born in Calcutta, who meets Kanai in the train journey to Canning, which is the first and major station of the Sundarbans. She comes there for her research on dolphins. Eventually Kanai invited Piya to Lusibari. 145 Kanai reached l.iisibari to the house of his aunt. Nilima. Lusibari is one of the major islands of the tide country, f he name Lusibari was given in the colonial period after Lucy Hamilton. Kanai came to know that most of the houses are made of wood and straw. Saturday is the weekly market day of the village. Hamilton house and school building constructed by Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton are the two major buildings. Kanai spurts the subject of Hamilton while gossiping with his Aunt, Nilima. She told Kanai that Sir Daniel Hamilton was a Scotsman. He completed his education in Scotland. His father taught him the important lesson that labor conquers everything. In the colonial time, he came to Calcutta and joined the MacKinnon & MacKenzie, a company that sold tickets for P&O shipping line. Soon he became the head of the company. He became the richest man in India through his allegiance to the Government. During his visits to Sundarbans, he had been pondering over the past and present situations of the land. He studied the past of the land. He understood the present of the Sundarbans region. In 1903, he bought ten thousand acres of the tide country from the British government. He bought Gosaba, Rangabelia, Satjelia and later on added Lusibari to these areas. Hamilton had visualized setting of an ideal locale for people. Hamilton welcomed everyone who was willing to work in the region. The only condition was nobody could come with divisions and differences based on caste, class, religion, economy and culture. By the thousand. Everyone who was willing to work was welcome, S'Daniel said, but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no Brahmins or 146 Untouchables, no Bengalis and no Oriyas. lAeryone would ha\e to live and work together." People from various class, caste and regions in Hindustan responded to the appeal of Hamilton. When the news spread in the main land, people came pouring in. They came from northern Orissa. eastern Bengal, and Santhal Parganas. They had to fight with the uncertainties of nature in the Sundarbans in the beginning. Tiger, crocodiles and snakes killed many people. They had to protect themselves from tide, cyclone, and wild animals. The struggle for existence was encouraged by Hamilton declaring a reward to those people who would kill wild animals. Hamilton's order to kill wild animals created doubts in the mind of Kanai. He thought that Hamilton intended to earn money but he was wrong. His idea was to create a society of people based on cooperation and construction. His aim was to preach the philosophy of non-attachment through Gandhi and Thakur's life. Kanai as a practical postmodern fellow did not agree with her explanation. He was doubtful about the intention of Hamilton. He thought that it was only idealism of Sir Hamilton. Kanai doubted that it could be an ideal country without necessary amenities. There was no electricity, telephone or road in the region. Hamilton had brought electricity and telephone facilities. She further explained about the plans of Sir Hamilton to create a Utopian society on the islands. Hamilton tried to provide every facility to the people of the land. He started a school in Lusibari and bank in Gosaba. Sir Hamilton set a plan to create an ideal society with all modern comforts. His efforts were directed towards common humanity without caste, class, religion, language, culture, gender discriminations. He visualized implementation of all the 147 principles of diversity, recognition, love, respect, cooperation and humane concerns there. Nihnia lamented that nobody cherished the dream of Sir Hamilton after his death of The government of India worked against Hamilton's ideas. Nilima and the ideal thinking of Nirmal partially fulfilled the dream of Sir Hamilton. Nilima worked for people through her NGO. Nirmal always supported the will of the inhabitants irrespective of the policy of the Indian government. After Sir Hamilton's death, Nirmal and Nilima worked for the immigrants on the land of tide country. They came and settled in the region on the different phases of history. The setting of the region is multicultural in both normative and descriptive senses. Sir Hamilton set all the maxims of normative multiculturalism in the colonial period. Nirmal and Nilima followed all the maxims while working at the place. They tried to work for the welfare of the inhabitants of the land. The settlement of immigrants on the various phases of history composes cultural diversity of the land. Some of the inhabitants were descendants of the first batch of settlers who had arrived in 1920s. Some of the inhabitants have the background of subcontinent partition. Thousands of people were divided between two groups on the name of religion. Pakistan was allotted to Muslims and India to the Hindu. Some of the people who were disgusted with the cruelty of partition believed that religion was the real threat to their existence. They took shelter in Sundarbans far away from the religious fanatics. Some settlers came there to take refuge after the Bangladesh war of 1971. Many had come in the region of Sundarbans for various purposes and interaction. These groups brought their conventions and customs along 148 with them from time to time. These customs and conventions were merged together on the land. It created new Hfe style of the people of the tide countries. Multicultural nature of the land is revealed through historical perspective by Kanai's reading of Nirmal's journal. The journal like diary was written in 1979. the year of Nirmal's death. Nirmal had requested to hand over the diary only to Kanai after his death. The core part of this journal deals with the settlers of one of the tide country islands called Morichjhapi, a couple of miles from Lusibari. It is about the immigrants from Bangladesh. Morichjhapi was reserved for the conservation of tigers. It was easily accessible from the mainland. There had been no inhabitants there up to 1979, but thousands of immigrants settled overnight on the land of Morichjhapi. They cleared the dense mangroves to build their huts. Nobody knew about the new people in the beginning. Later on, it came to be known that they were refugees from Bangladesh. These refugees had come to India after partition.
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