The Hungry Tide

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I will not forget Fokir for a long time to come. I will be less judgemental of people whom I encounter in my day to day life. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a circular roundabout people can use to pass in many directions – from country to country and even between faiths and religions ( The Hungry Tide, 247) 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. 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). Cf. ‘Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.’ [56]:

If you enjoy books by Katie Flynn and Dilly Court, you'll love Val's heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity. Read more Details India is a country with variety of ecosystems which ranges from Himalayas in the north to plateaus of south and from the dynamic Sunderbans in the east to dry Thar of the west. With time, however, these ecosystems have been adversely affected due to increasing population and avarice of mankind. Literature could not remain unaffected from this depletion and my paper focuses on how concern for nature changes in Indian literature from reverence to destruction. 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: The other thing I liked about the book is the character portrayal of Fokir, a fisherman, a native of the place– he acts like a guide to Piya Roy, an Indo-American biologist who comes to Sundarbans to study the rare varieties of river dolphins in the region. Fokir's character is wonderfully written; he has the same qualities and a certain uniqueness about him which are similar to the landscape that sustains and nurtures him. Fokir knows the region the way a lover knows the body of his beloved– deeply, intimately and with an acute sense of love, concern, and ownership. He has rivers in him, the swish of a running stream, the virility of fertile landscape, and the agility of a wildcat. His body is as smooth and supple as that for a fish, the sheer force of these sensual descriptions of Fokir can easily be assigned to the landscape, at least to certain aspects of it.Ghosh paints a mesmerising picture of the Sunderbans, a part of the country that you don't hear or read about all that often. He doesn't sugar-coat things much, hence you see it in its true light; the description of natural beauty, along with the perils and dangers. My only issue was that he sometimes overdoes the whole ''tide country'' bit, and it sometimes felt a bit forced. The characters could have been a bit more fleshed out, and the book needed a few more of them to be more coherent. There were times when things seemed to happen and some situations seemed convenient in the interest of story-telling. Every person has something which I don't have, every person has a higher education than their counterpart in one way or other.

The novel is historically important. It refers to a historical event, the 1978-79 massacre. Also, it raises environmental concerns and poses paradoxical questions about the delicate balance between humanity and the environment. The storytelling that the author adopts in this novel is the same that he uses in many other novels – multiple timelines exploring different sequences of events. Ghosh pursues a dignified use of language in his works and the present novel is not an exception. It is remarkable to note that Ghosh can produce better, more compelling, and even more serious narratives compared to his senior and junior colleagues like Aravind Adiga and Arundhati Roy, and all this while maintaining the rhythmic flow of language that keeps serious readers lured in the tale that he tells.

FROM REVERENCE TO DESTRUCTION: AN ECO-CRITICAL APPROACH TO AMITAV GHOSH'S 'THE HUNGRY TIDE'

The novel culminates in a gripping and poignant climax, leaving the reader emotionally invested in the characters’ fates. The conclusion is open-ended, allowing readers to reflect on the profound impact of the Sundarbans on the lives of its inhabitants and the timeless dance of life and death that plays out amidst the tidal ebb and flow.

The Hungry Tide follows the story of Sundarbans, an immense archipelago of islands. Some of the Islands have lived to tell the tale of history, some have been washed away by the hungry tide which comes and goes away, either creating an Island or washing away one. A place where there is no difference between fresh water and salt water, hungry crocodiles and tigers who can swim like fish, it's inhabitants believe that anyone with a pure heart who wishes to venture in this water labyrinth, will never return. A balance which is disturbed by two people who met by chance, Piyali and Kanai.

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The novel commences with Piya Roy‘s arrival in the Sundarbans to study the rare and elusive Irrawaddy dolphins. As an American scientist of Indian origin, she is an outsider in the region, setting foot on its shores with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. As she embarks on her academic pursuit, she encounters Kanai Dutt, a successful translator who has come to the Sundarbans to settle a family estate. Their lives intersect during a boat journey, and the novel weaves their paths together, entangled in the mystical waters of the Sundarbans. Piyali Roy, also called Piya, starts living as a tenant in Kanai Dutt’s uncle’s house. Kanai’s aunty develops a liking for Piya (as a daughter). Moreover, Nirmal’s diary acts as a catalyst for Kanai’s personal journey of self-discovery. Kanai, initially detached from his ancestral roots, finds himself drawn into the history and culture of the Sundarbans through the diary. The stories and accounts in Nirmal’s writings resonate with Kanai, awakening a sense of belonging and curiosity about his own family’s past. As he reads through the diary, Kanai undergoes a transformative process, becoming more emotionally connected to the region and its people. This is what happens when you have not written for years: every moment takes on a startling clarity; small things become the world in microcosm." 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.

See, e.g., ‘Piya remembered a study that had shown there were more species of fish in the Sundarban (...) 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.

In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland, and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from Hamilton’s point of view, it is only a little less barren than a desert. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France's top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy. Amitav Ghosh has written for many publications, including the Hindu, The New Yorker and Granta, and he has served on the juries of several international film festivals, including Locarno and Venice. He has taught at many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, the City University of New York and Harvard. He no longer teaches and is currently writing the next volume of the Ibis Trilogy. 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 o See Ghosh’s comments in his UN Chronicle interview: ‘Whenever I have been in the Sundarbans, one of the things that really sensitizes someone to the nature of the moral dilemmas that we face is when people come and say, “Oh, for you, we are just pet food, aren’t we? The tigers are your pets and we are just their food”. In fact, the scale of debt in the Sundarbans is not trivial. According to the Forest Department in the Indian Sundarbans, tigers kill several dozens of people each year. Anthropologists there think that the figure is massively underreported, that as many as 200 people are killed there each year. If you include the Bangladeshi Sundarbans, that number may well be 300, perhaps even 500, killed every year. In any other part of the world, this would be considered a major national problem. So this is just an index of the fact that the impoverished people dying are extremely poor and don’t have a voice. They can’t make themselves heard and understood, and that is why we pay no attention to their plight. Incredible.’ G uha, Ranajit. “Preface.” Subaltern Studies 1: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: OUP, 1982. vii-viii.