Imagined Topographies of the Sundarbans in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

SABINE LAURET–TAFT

O THE BENGALI-BORN WRITER AMITAV GHOSH, the novel as a form is paradoxical, for, while it relies on a “definite location,” a setting that T “plays a part almost as important as those of the characters themselves,” yet writing “begin[s] with an act of dislocation.”1 It is natural that in his fiction a “sense of place” prevails, as his writing comes with a lot of research and great attention to detail.2 In The Hungry Tide (2004), he recounts the life of people living in, or passing through, the Sundarbans – the “beautiful forest” – also known as the Ganga delta. Choosing this liminal location as the backdrop of his novel, Ghosh also adopts a form of narrative that mimics the tidal movement, oscillating between past and present, but also between points of view. He juxta- poses time-frames and brings to life the sedimentations at work in a place ruled by ebbs and tides. The anthropomorphizing title of the novel lays emphasis on the fact that a central ‘character’ plays a shaping role. Tides devour and con- stantly reshape the land but also the lives of its inhabitants. The tidal move- ments stand for the fuel to the narrative, bringing people together and forcing them apart. With the Sundarbans at the foreground of the narrative, the novel seems to voice “the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of en- vironmental limits.”3 The Hungry Tide, “preoccupied with the conservation chal- lenges to megafauna, specifically Royal tigers and Irrawaddy dolphins,”4 epito- mizes the intersection of the postcolonial and ecocriticism. In the introduction

1 Amitav Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005): 110. 2 Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, 119. 3 Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm, “Introduction” to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Glotfelty & Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996): xx. 4 Adam Trexler, “Mediating Climate Change: Ecocriticism, Science Studies and The Hungry Tide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford UP, 2014): 210. 196 SABINE L AURET–TAFT # to Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Huggan and Tiffin highlight how a North/South dichotomy colours environmental practices, and they draw attention to the “Southern environmentalisms of the poor.”5 In Ghosh’s novel, the poor struggle to live in places visited by predatory forces, threatened by storms and conse- quences of climate change. The ecocritical scope of the novel has been ac- claimed and analysed by many critics, such as Rajender Kaur, Divya Anand, and Alexa Weik. While Ghosh questions the way people, both outsiders and locals, relate to a hostile environment, at the heart of the novel lies another narrative, the legend of Bon Bibi, which brings to the fore the role of folktale in the appro- priation of space and in communities. The legend, which re-enacts the primeval battle between Good and Evil, is echoed throughout the narrative by allusions to creation mythology. Drawing on the ecocritical premises mentioned above, this essay will analyse how the tide country, depicted as a mythic labyrinth, re- enacts the essential tensions between man and nature to expose other conflicts that oppressed communities endure to become legitimate. The Hungry Tide is the story of Piya’s journey in the Sundarbans. Piya is a Bengali-born, American-raised scientist studying the river dolphin. Her trajec- tory is intertwined with Kanai’s own journey to the village of Lusibari. Kanai is the archetypal urban businessman, a successful, overworked entrepreneur. As a child, Kanai was sent to Lusibari to his aunt and uncle to be “rusticated.”6 Going back there, he retraces the steps of that earlier visit to accept a manuscript his late uncle, Nirmal, left him. Most critics concur that the novel is about home, and more specifically about homecoming.7 Yet, as it is, home defies traditional definitions. It appears as an ever-shifting notion, which correlates with the un- stable ground on which it is built. For, in fact, the Sundarbans, this beautiful in- between space, is forever being reshaped by the tides. As Saswat Das underlines,

5 Graham Huggan & Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literarure, Animals, Environment (2009; New York: Routledge, 2010): 1. 6 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005): 14. Further page refer- ences are in the main text. 7 See, for example, the analysis of the diasporic predicament in Shanthini Pillai, “The Tides of Diaspora in the Works of Amitav Ghosh,” in Asian Migrations: Sojourning, Displacement, Home- coming & Other Travels, ed. Beatriz P. Lorente et al. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2005): 11–24, and the interpretation of the motif of home in Saswat S. Das, “Home and Homelessness in The Hungry Tide: A Discourse Unmade,” Indian Literature 50.5/235 (September– October 2006): 179–85.