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Journalism of Courage
If there is a distinctive genre known as Indian Writing in English, then Amitav Ghosh is perhaps its most scholarly practitioner. Ghosh8217;s concerns are highly cerebral, whether they are focused on unraveling the mysterious process by which human beings acquire the ability to influence their environment as in discovering a cure for malaria in The Calcutta Chromosome, or in illuminating forgotten histories as in The Glass Palace, or indeed in chronicling the imprint of an invisible past on the contemporary landscape as In An Antique Land.
The linkages that Ghosh is able to draw between seemingly disparate elements makes him a proponent, in a sense, of the Gaia Hypothesis which proposed that the earth is a single living organism, a cell, which maintains conditions necessary for its own survival. As the earth evolves towards greater complexity, the human being plays as much of a role as fish, oceans and forests, memory, spirits and hidden knowledge. In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh8217;s latest extraordinary novel located in the Sundarbans, he creates a sustainable ecology for love. Yet at the same time he is fairly impatient with individual emotion and the chief protagonist in the book is not a person, but the ocean tide. The book is located in bhatir desh, or the tide country, a country 8220;midwived by the moon8221;. And human life here is as changeable as the ebb bhata and flood jowar of water.
The book is divided into two sections, jowar and bhata. In the first section, the characters gather in and around Lusibari, an island in the Sundarbans. The area was settled by a Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton. To it, comes Piyali Roy, Indian by skin colour but American at heart, Kanai Dutt, a translator from New Delhi, his aunt and uncle Nilima, the committed social worker, and Nirmal now dead, the effete revolutionary, who have been living here for decades. There is Fokir, the untamed fisherman, his upwardly mobile wife Moyna and Fokir8217;s mother, the strong willed Kusum.
Piya researches marine mammals and has arrived in the Sundarbans to study the Orcaella brevirostris, or the Irrawaddy Dolphin. Kanai is a city slicker, the wild at heart Fokir shies away from civilisation, his mother Kusum struggles to find shelter for herself and her son. As the humans drift about on their boats or on foot through the 8220;mohona8221;, or network of rivers surrounding the islands, as their lives are uncovered and their pasts explored, there is a growing sense of coming menace. Waiting beyond their lives, in a place beyond received notions of language, beyond stereotypical notions of spoken romance and beyond data on dolphins, is the jowar, or the flood.
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, a tide of emotion, a tide of rediscovery and an ancient tide of love that overwhelms the conventions of the human world |
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In the second section leading to the denouement, the tide eats up long held notions of love and sweeps away the flimsy bulwarks of order. Piya learns to love without language. Kanai, the translator of cultures, finds himself stripped down of all urban defences facing a tiger in a swamp. Fokir, the unlettered fisherman, falls in love with a woman who is an embodiment of science. A massive storm brings death and terminates a potentially rich love. Nirmal falls in love with Kusum and finally breaks with his armchair past. Ghosh8217;s musings on language, on translatability, on the forgotten massacre of Morichjhapi, in which dominant cultures forcibly wiped out movements from below, are deftly woven into the interactions between the characters. Yet the most dominant theme is of a great sweep away by water, the flood on land, the revolution in the mind. As the reigning deity of the tide country Bon Bibi, in Ghosh8217;s vision a plural syncretic local cult, presides over this flood; she is a goddess of hope but also of vengeance.
One complaint one can make of The Hungry Tide is that details of dolphin behaviour or tracking equipment or the various nomenclature of topographical features threaten to swamp its philosophical undertow. The author is clearly delighted by the sheer sound of words like mohona, creeks, bilges and gunwales. Yet his purpose remains clear throughout. And this is not only to describe the terrible beauty of the tide country, but also to suggest how fragile the human project is compared to the primordial power of the earth and how in every human life, as in the water, the process of ebb is always followed by the process of flood. The Hungry Tide is a masterfully conceived and admirable book.
