Acknowledgements
I am glad to take this opportunity of recalling with thankfulness all the help and co-operation that the Principal, Mr Bhubaneswar Bora and other office bearers of Pandu College so generously bestowed on this work. I owe my heartfelt thanks to Prof Madan Sarma, Dept of English and Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, Assam, and Prof Sivasis Biswas, HoD, English, Diphu Campus, Assam University, Silchar, Assam for their help and generosity in this venture.
Introduction
Amitav Ghosh, one of the few Indian writers in English in the post colonial era, constructs nature in his fictional works by using interweaving legends, experience, myth and history. In some of his works the setting shows a pen picture of physical environment and human interaction with it. But examining the critical outputs on his works we realize that we have yet to investigate his works from eco-critical point of view to establish his intrinsic concerns about environmental calamity and man-nature interface.
The present study is, therefore, intended to find out how Ghosh, especially in The Hungry Tide, constructs nature by using interweaving legends, experience, myths and history to reveal human interaction with the non-human world. It also makes an attempt to find out his conscious engagement with the natural world that draws our attention to impending calamity of the global environment.
Chapter I
Eco-criticism and Amitav Ghosh
Man’s observation on physical environment, both in art and literature, has been a continuous practice since long back. The mode of depiction of natural phenomena passes through several changes in style and exposure with the shifting perceptions of human mind. However, this perception of nature or wilderness was not earlier viewed and examined with any recognized critical, interdisciplinary lances till 60s and 70s. The inquiry, about what nature actually stands for in a literary text or whether place has link to human culture and entity or authors do really engage with ecological or environmental consequences, gradually begins after the explosion of a social movement—environmentalism in the 60s and 70s. But till 90s, writings on nature were viewed in accordance with a number of sprinkled critical frameworks—such as American studies, pastoral(ism), regionalism, human ecology etc. However, these studies did seriously incorporate no deep investigation in literature towards author’s representation of environmental decline or calamity of the day-to-day world. Although William Rueckert1 first coined the word eco-criticism in his much celebrated essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism, 1978, with an intention to apply ecological concepts to assess literature, it did not turn out to be a rational movement for the purpose. Finally, the two historic seminal publications in the mid 90s such as-The Eco-criticism Reader edited by Cheryll Glotfelty2 and Harold Fromm3 and The Environmental Imagination by Lawrence Buell4 marked the authorized recognition of the concept—eco-criticism.
Eco-criticism is a critical literary approach for studying basically two things: representation of nature in literature and relationship between literature and environment. The former had been exercised in the previous centuries almost in all ranges and disciplines; but the later gains ground owing to the rapid and precarious changes in the physical environment. Lawrence Buell maintains that the study should be conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis. Eco-critical approaches make inquiries into the connections between nature and human culture and it also views at what instant the authors represent its effects. The whole of the ecosphere where energy, matter and ideas come to an interaction is the basis of eco-criticism not alone the social world. Nevertheless, the fictional works of Indian writer in English, Amitav Ghosh, can be viewed through eco-critical perspective.
Amitav Ghosh, born in 1956 in Calcutta, India, emerges as a writer in Indian Writings in English in the 80s. He has published a number of fictions such as The Circle of Reason (1986),The Shadow Lines (1988), In An Antique Land(1992), The Calcutta Chromosome, (1995)The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2005), Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke(2011) to his credit. His non-fictional works include-Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community(1981), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, (1998),Countdown(1999), The Imran and the Indian(2002) Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronocle of the Turmoils of Our Time(2005). Besides these, he has published a number of short stories, essays and articles in various national and international magazines and journals. The Glass Palace is an international bestseller and more than a half-million copies were sold in Britain. The Hungry Tide is also a best seller abroad and it has been translated into several languages. The author has won several prizes like Prix Medicis Estrangere in Paris for The Circle of Reason, Annual prize of the Sahitya Academi for The Shadow Lines (both in 1990), Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome in 1996, Grand Prize for fiction at the Frankfurt eBook awards in 2001 etc. He now divides his time between. He proves that he has more than fictionalizing history as popularly believed; rather he has some concerns and a sense of responsibility towards the world he has set out to discover. A well-built tinge of environmental and ecological alarm pervades, although not in blatant measure, through his phrases and actions, setting and choice of places in his fictional works especially in The Hungry Tide (2004). Hence, an attempt has been made here in this Minor research Project to see Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide from eco-critical point of view highlighting on the following aspects:
(i) the interface between humans and physical environment
(ii) the text’s symbolic implications
(iii) imaginative text and environment
(iv) portrayal of historical episode (Morichjhapi incident, 1979) and politics
(v) a co-operative view of place
Chapter II
Humans and physical environment: An interaction
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004,) set in the Sunderbans (the lower region of the Ganges delta, which extends over 250 km from the Hugli River in West Bengal, India, to the banks of the Meghna River in Bangladesh), is a saga of Indo-American marine biologist Piya Roy. She has been to the Tide country of Sunderbans in Bengal with a view to studying river dolphins. Two characters—Fokir, a local fisherman who helps her to locate dolphins in Garjontola pool and Kanai Dutta, a Delhi-based business man who meets her on his way to visit his aunt Nilima—come closer to Piya’s heart in course of time. Nilima’s husband Nirmal once had a mission for helping the displaced refugees who settled on the Sunderbans island of Morichjhapi. He has this commitment to work for and help the refuges as he falls in love with a refugee, Kusum, mother of infant Fokir. The novelist informs that Kanai visits the ‘tide country’ to gather the lost journal written by his dead uncle Nirmal. The journal is an account of the lives of the Morichjhapi Island which is later ruthlessly evicted by military troops which claims the life of Kusum. A sudden cyclone kills Fokir when he is assisting Piya on a journey on waterways. Finally Piya determines to establish a research trust in memory of Fokir and seeks help from Nilima and Kanai to translate her dream into reality.
Nonetheless, it is an environmentally oriented book getting its physical environment set to suggest that human history is caught up in natural history. It also presents the pen picture of wildlife versus human suffering. The novel explores the plight of displaced people, the struggle for land and survival in an endangered ecosystem. While drawing our attention to an episode from Indian history such as Morichjhapi incident, 1979, Ghosh discovers simultaneously two provinces--- an endangered ecosystem where men live and fight with animals and tides; and a region in human heart. The form of the novel is memorable for its interfusion of two brilliant aspects—place and histories.
The novel tells a very present day story of adventure, identity and history and love. Ghosh here presents nature not as a setting of picturesque beauty alone it also appears as hungry of human blood. The tide and its surges stand for all the devastating aspects of nature. We may spot the following expression about mangrove forest from the Bengali script that Kanai reads in the novel:
“A mangrove forest is a universe into itself…Mangrove leaves are tough and leathery, the branches gnarled and the foliage often impassable dense. Visibility is short and the air still and fetid. At no moments can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s utter hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy and expel them. Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles.” (Ghosh 7—8)
The above quoted passage unfolds the tremendously unreceptive approach of nature towards man. In the section “Canning”, Kanai remains dumb-struck on seeing the plight of the passengers in the boat due to the vast expanse of the bellowing mud:
“On stepping off the plank, there was a long drawn out moment when its passanger sank slowly into the mud, like a spoon disappearing into a very thick daal; only when they were in up to their hips did their descend end and their forward movement begins. With their legs hidden from sight, all that was visible of their struggles was the twisting of their upper bodies.” (Ibid 24—25)
Ghosh has presented, in the section entitled “S” Daniel”, a discussion between Nirmal and Kanai about “S” Daniel’s efforts in bringing people to the tidal region, which was weighed down with numberless hazards and risks to their lives. It is a matter of pity that the tidal surroundings bring not only the sudden danger to the inhabitants but a constant fear-psychosis:
“Think of what it was like: think of the tigers, crocodiles and snakes that lived in the creeks and nalas that covered the islands. This was a feast for them. They killed hundreds of people.” (Ibid 52)
The work is purely of both natural and human environment. The Tide country i.e Sunderbans to which the whole of the work is devoted is not only a far-flung land of intimidating physical environment but also a place of dealings among an assortment of communities—ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural etc. These are islands where inhabitants live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating animals. Kanai’s words to Piya go in this way:
“This is, after all no remote and lonely frontier—this is India’s doormat, the threshold of a teeming subcontinent. Everyone who has ever taken the eastern route into the Gangetic heartland has had to pass through it—the Arakanese, the Khmer, the Japanese, the Dutch, the Malays, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the English.”(Ibid: 50)
The novelist meticulously offers the nexus: the man-nature complex interactions. Like manifest threats posed by human settlement to the unique diversity of aquatic and terrestrial life in the mangrove swamps and the constant depletion of aquatic species by fishing and trawling, the human settlers too fall victim to constant erosion of dykes and embankments, the silting up of channels, the flooding by storm waters.
The author’s nuanced descriptions of the moods and microenvironments of the island serve a lush backdrop for an intricate narrative that moves fluidly between past and present. The climatic ending, in which a cyclone threatens the inhabitants of the Sunderbans, underscores Nirmal’s observation that “nothing escapes the maw of the tides.” (Ibid 225)
This is an enticing tale where Ghosh accurately orchestrates the marvels—tigers, river dolphins, crocodiles, lunar rainbows and the tides—which go against the settlers. The work is an ineradicable mark bearing a conflict between wilderness and human civilization. It may also be considered, for all time to come for its artistic accuracy, as a drama of love and endurance and a wonder about man’s place in physical environment—the environment or the landscape which appears itself as a dynamic character in the novel.
Ghosh himself said:
“The Hungry Tide is at bottom a story about a relationship between a girl and two men…..one of the major characters in the book, actually, is the landscape in which it’s set.” (Ghosh says in Brisbane Writers’ festival, 2004, Australia. Source: readersvoice.com. Nov 7, 2007).)
Ghosh’s text meticulously demonstrates, without releasing his conclusion, injury of the western philosophy of environmentalism on local ethical understanding. Introducing a rediscovered diary as primary source, the novelist refers to the historic tragedy in 1970 of refugee settlers on the island of Morichjhapi in the Sunderbans and skillfully brings in a post-colonial political conflict between demands of wildlife conservation and needs of the Sunderban inhabitants. The author shows that the inhabitants of the tide country are part of the local ecology having instilled with its malevolent and benevolent calls every day. They are well-acquainted with smell and pulse of its soil since long back. But the model the westerners pursue to conserve wildlife i.e tiger in the land in accordance with their political activism brings dissatisfaction and untold miseries to the settlers. They wonder if it is a protection for wildlife conservation and beautification or ironically a systemization to put the local people daily into the mouth of death. The tear-jerking words despondently coming out through Kusum’s lips record the undying cry in history:
….”the worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their announcements, hearing them say that our lives, our existence, was worth less than dirt or dust. ‘This island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people from all around the world.’ Every day, sitting here, with hunger gnawing at our bellies, we would listen to these words, over and over again. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their names? Where do they live, these people, do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers?....our fault, our crime was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil.”(Ibid 262—263)
Anshuman A. Mondal2 has rightly observed that The Hungry Tide outlines western environmentalists’ motif to separate humanity from nature ‘perhaps as a result of binary western thinking that posits an opposition between culture and nature’.(A Mondal:176—77)
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Chapter III
Symbolic implications
The Hungry Tide is not only a work of fiction with a well-knitted story but also it is rich in its symbolical implications. While treating an endangered ecosystem in the Bay of Bengal as its setting, Ghosh pinpoints various significant things through a number of nature symbols. Even the title of the work cannot be ignored as going simply as a title since it indicates several coats of meaning. The whole of the tidal region is represented as a place where ferocious animals pursue the human beings day and night. Besides, the frequent and sudden rise in tides brings danger to its inhabitants. Hence, the title immediately leads readers to an understanding of a situation where humans share with animals as tides bear all the devastating aspects of nature.
Ghosh is a writer who never makes use of symbols directly or his narrative does not allow us to realize it. But he tries to capture reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. What is more attention drabbing is the fact that his symbolical or suggestive twirl has the extraordinary power of bridging between imagination and reality.
In the novel, the incident regarding Priya’s fall in the sea indicates an aesthetic experience. The expression like “the muddy brown water was rushing up to meet her face” (P 48) evokes in the reader’s heart the Bibhatsa rasa or the rasa of indignation. Here it must be stated that rasa for the reader is the aesthetic experience in literature. A genuine reader experiences this aesthetic feeling, when he reads truly imaginative pieces of literature. This expression or the like in the novel turns up the whole situation to an epic feeling.
Ghosh has done another noticeable thing in the novel. The relationship among the focal characters is proved to be a complex tie having ambiguities in understanding and sharing. Kanai, for example, who “liked to think that he had the true connoisseur’s ability to both praise and appraise women (Ghosh 3).” While worshipping this notion to be his own and an ideal stand to enter into female’s heart he assays to establish relationship with Piya. But it bears no fruit in reality. Piya’s obsession for her duty and the bewilderment she feels keeping in touch with this ecosystem divert her mood of living and attitude towards man she comes into contact. But finally Kanai appears to be a notorious womanizer. He is envious of Fokir, who is able to establish emotional contact with Piya despite the communication barrier between the two. Kanai, about whom the novelist had said—“Language was both his livelihood and his addiction (4)”, is unable to communicate with the heart of Piya, while the illiterate fisherman is able to enter the emotional tide of her heart. The tidal surges that get rhythmic in flow with the thematic concerns of the writer seem to be suggestive of the hard-hitting human relationship in the novel. Piya’s emotional attachment for Fokir and the envy of Kanai for the fisherman are patent in the following conversation between Piya and Kanai:
‘…Very few people can adapt themselves to that kind of rhythm—one in a million, I’d say. That is why it was so amazing to come across someone lie Fokir.’
‘Amazing? Why?’
‘You saw how he spotted that dolphin there, didn’t you? ’, said Piya. ‘It’s like he’s always watching the water—even without being aware of it. I have worked with many experienced fishermen before but I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible instinct: it’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart ‘(Ghosh:267).
It is clearly understood that the tidal waves of jealousy make Kanai more apprehensive and violent in motion when the moment to Piya arrives to speak in favour of Fokir. The following dialogue between Kanai and Piya again proves that Fokir possesses a sort of intellect and wisdom which makes him a boy of special fascination for the opposite sexes:
‘Is there anyone else you could work with?’
‘It wouldn’t be the same, Kanai,’ Piya said. ‘Fokir’s abilities as an observer are really extraordinary. I wish I could tell you what it was like to be with him these last few days—it was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.’
A sudden stab of envy provoked Kanai to make a mocking aside. ‘And all that while, you couldn’t understand a word he was saying, could you?’
‘No,’ she said, with a nod of acknowledgment. ‘But you know what? There was so much common between us it didn’t matter.’
‘Listen,’ said Kanai, in a flat, harsh voice. ‘You shouldn’t deceive yourself, Piya: there wasn’t anything common between you then and there isn’t now. Nothing. He’s a fisherman and you’re a scientist…(268).’
Fokir’s incorruptibility and virtuousness thus create affection in Piya’s heart and she finally discovers that Fokir is a man of her own choice.
While arresting these flashes of contacts among the characters in the novel, Ghosh exposes the unwanted complexities existing in human relationships. The constriction of understanding among men is a dangerous symptom which can spoil a rationality of a relationship.
The noisy rise in tides, the dreadful movements of the tigers, the picture of the all encircling mud in the expressions like ‘a shroud closing in on her’ (Ghosh 47) and ‘folding her in its cloudy wrappings’(Ghosh 47) along with its comparison with ‘the slippery walls of a placental sac’ (Ghosh 47) are some of the evidences emblematic implications in the novel.
The silent passion prevailing between Piya and Fokir appears as a symbolic indication of the tension between the-environmental position of the Sunderbans and the needs of the human beings who seek to survive in that hostile environment.
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Chapter IV
Environmental imagination
The works of most of the post colonial writers represent place and it is targeted either as a lost glory or a threatened region. From Indian Territory, Ghosh, like Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Crown (2005), makes use of a language and a setting that mediate a sense of place. In The Hungry Tide, the story is based on an eco-setting, an immense archipelago of islands, Sunderbans. The cyclone has snapped the fragile balance between man and nature in the delicate ecosystem of the islands. The following shimmering expression in the novel captures the very tone of this environment:
“At low tide, when the embankment was riding high on the water, Lusibari (island) located like some gigantic earthen ark, floating serenely above its surroundings. Only at high tide was it evident that the interior of the island lay well below the level of the water. At such times the unsinkable ship of a few hours before took on the appearances of a flimsy saucer that could tip over at any moment.”(Ghosh 37)
Ghosh has imprisoned the essence of the precarious existence of the Sunderban’s inhabited islands with remarkable imaginative accuracy. He only changes the real name of his island. To a reader not familiar with the tide country, it would be difficult to imagine what the daily onslaught of tidal water mean for the lives of the island population. The low-lying, half-formed, mangrove dominated mud-flats had been reclaimed for cultivation from about 100 years ago. The existence of human settlements over them was made possible only by earthen embankments all around them. In short, it is the kaleidoscopic view through which one could see watery labyrinth.
The novelist has the absolute ingenuity to keep analogy between the imaginative pictures of the tide country situation with the ecosystem. It is really true that this dichotomy, wild life versus human suffering or destruction of the ecosystem versus human survival could not have been put in better words than Ghosh. The following passage proves:
“Saar, this island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people from all around the world. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their name? Where do they live, these people? Do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers? As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and soil.” (Ibid 216)
It is language that helps the imaginative text to merge with ecosystem. The language used in the text has a specific dimension to anyhow stop limiting about the wilderness. Here imagination with accuracy plays a pivotal role to accelerate the process of reflecting the reality. In an interview with Shampa Chatterjee the author himself boldly admits: “there’s nothing limiting about a vast wilderness like the Sunderbans.”(curledup.com)
The settlers of the Sundersbans believe that anyone who dares venture into the vast water labyrinth without a pure heart will never return. It is the arrival of Piyali Roy of Indian parentage but stubbornly American, and Kanai Dutta, a sophisticated Delhi Business man, that disturbs the delicate balance of the settlement life and sets in motion a fateful cataclysm. Kanai has come to visit his widowed aunt and to review some writings left behind her husband, a political radical who died mysteriously in the aftermath of a local uprising. He meets Piya on the train from Calcutta and learns she has come to the Sunderbans in search of a rare species of river dolphin. When he hires Fokir, an illiterate, yet proud local fisherman to guide her through the mazelike backwaters, Kanai becomes her translator.
Ghosh has here discovered a far darker and more unknowable jungle—the human heart. Summoning a singular place from history he brings its myth and gives a life to it by making use of a kind of language that enthralls the situation in deep exploration.
A work of imagination, the novel appears in every speck as epic in scope and ambition as his another superb work, The Glass Palace. The mingling of imagination and reality in the presentation of nature exhibits Ghosh’s extreme devotion to his art. His picture of nature appears to be complete and it does not smack of any false sentimentalism or illusory romanticization of the subject. With a perfect perception of things and events he arranges a strong combination of minute and inexhaustible realism and curiosity which keeps our mind on the stretch to the very end.
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Chapter V
Portrayal of history and politics
Ghosh is greatly fascinated the way Anthony Trollope and C.P.Snow described political machinations. Like them he is very much concerned with illustrating the uses of political power of his day. The Hungry Tide probably reserves an indelible impression on India’s power strata because of its tactful comment on the historic partition event. Partition of Indian Subcontinent in 1947 has been the single most important determining factor of India’s destiny. The novel chronicles the saga of just such a group of refugees who were sent by the West Bengal government to Dandakaranya in Madhya Pradesh in 1961 but they left the place and returned to West Bengal in 1978 only to be massacred and evicted again. Ghosh’s writing has never had a strict demarcation between fiction and non-fiction. He has always combined roles –that of novelist, journalist, scholar and historian. This novel arrests the novel intertwining accounts of the Morisjhapi Massacre of 1979 in the Sunderbans and the history of river dolphins which are an integral part of history and ecology. Ghosh dramatizes the last phase of the refugee struggle in the Sunderbans.
In the novel, the Morichjhapi Massacre is traced through a witness, Nirmal, and his diary to his nephew (Kanai). In Chapter 19 of the novel, we come to know the facts of the incident from Nirmal’s widow. Nilima runs a hospital and a trust in Lucibari and is known as “Mashima”(or aunt) to all. She tells her nephew Kanai of the events leading up to the massacre and of her husband’s involvement in it:
“In this place where there had been no inhabitants before there were now thousands, almost overnight. Within a matter of weeks they had cleared the mangroves, built badhs and put up huts. It happened so quickly that in the beginning no one even knows who these people were. But in time it came to be learnt that they were refugees, originally from Bangladesh. Some had to come to India after partition, while others had trickled over later. In Bangladesh, they had been among the poorest of rural people, oppressed and exploited both by Muslim communalists and by Hindus of the upper castes” (Ghosh 118)
Ghosh eloquently summarizes the events at Morichjhapi in 1979 through Nilima’s narrative. His fictional representation of the event keeps very close to what actually happened, and he has successfully shown the various ways in which Morichjhapi was markedly different from other refugee settlements. The refugees there were displaced people-they had moved from East Pakistan to West Bengal, from west Bengal to Madhya Pradesh and then again from Madhya Pradesh to the Sunderbans. Yet, in Morichjhapi they had found a place where they no longer at the mercy of the local people or even the government, initially. They found vast tracks of free land in the Sunderbans and created a world of their own. However, the refugees coming to the tide country were premised on a false assumption—they chose this place because they thought that the new Left government in West Bengal would sympathize with their cause. Actually, the government falling short of the expectation of the refugees—not being able to meet their needs or not being sympathetic to their problems—was not a new story in West Bengal. But what happened in 1979, the way they were forcible evicted from the island, was a gross betrayal by the Left government. There was a symbiotic relationship between the refugee movement and Left politics in West Bengal in the early years of independence. The refugees at Morichjhapi showed initiative and organization in their attempt to build a new life. Nirmal, the protagonist of the novel, writes of the refugee initiatives in his diary:
“Saltpans had been created, tube wells had been had been planted, water had been damned for the rearing of fish, a bakery had started up, boat builders had set up workshops, a pottery had been founded as well as an ironsmith’s shop; there were people making boats while others were fashioning nets and crab lines; little market places, where all kinds of goods were being sold, had sprung up.” (Ibid 192)
The novel shows the evidence of Morichjhapi settler and victim, Kusum—as told to Nirmal during the final phase of the islanders’ clash with the police—to articulate the peculiar predicament of the Morichjhapi refugees:
“The worst part was.. to sit here, helpless, with hunger gnawing at our bellies and listen to the police man say…’this island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals….it is a part of a reserved forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers…’ Who are these people, who loved animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them?”(Ibid 262—263)
In his earlier novels, Ghosh deals with some of the major phases of refugee influx into west Bengal and their immediate and long term consequences for the state. In a way all of them come together in this present novel. The history of Morichjhapi incident can be traced back to all of these phases: Staring with the original refugee from Bangladesh(1947) who were resettled in West Bengal(1947—late 50s) then moved to Dandakarayana(in 1961), from where they escaped and came to the Sunderbans(1978) only to become the victims of state sponsored violence year later(1979).
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Chapter VI
Findings and its importance
This minor research project unfurls the fact that Amitav Ghosh, as an important personality in the domain of Indian writings in English, has undertaken, among a variety of themes, his literary mission with two significant commitments—fictionalization of historical facts and figures; and expression of a concern over physical environment.
After investigation, it is learnt that his literary angling marks several power networks such as economic, ideological, military, political embarking on a journey to his own native past with its colonial historical context to restore the lost identity and roots.
He also represents postcolonial realities---the holocaust of communal riots, partition of India etc. His creative urge reveals a tendency for deconstructing the models and assumptions of Western civilizations; he judges the cultural source and the cross-fertilization of art, society and politics in the modern world as normally observed by the New Historicists.5
However, Ghosh, especially in The Hungry Tide, constructs nature by using interweaving legends, experience, myths and history to reveal human interaction with the non-human world. The settlers in the Sunderbans have to face a constant hardship since their advent from West Bengal.
His conscious engagement with the natural world draws our attention to impending calamity of the global environment. The eco-critical investigation figures out that the novel The Hungry Tide penetrates a picture of man’s complex interaction with nature. The Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal are some islands where people share with animals. The condition of their living is much inferior to animals. The predicament the inhabitants suffer due to unwanted, unexpected tidal surges and tiger attack shows a serious ecological calamity on earth.
The novelist indicates deteriorating condition of both the place and the people living in the Sunderbans by making use of several symbols, though indirectly, such as title of the work, waves, tidal surges, mud, religious stories etc. The tidal waves also imply the intricate position of human relationship.
His approach to fictionalizing history is heavily dependent upon research. The Hungry Tide is a survey on an endangered eco system—the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal.
He constantly explores and responds to the issues of migration and collapse in cultures and human relationships in the historical past. He juxtaposes history sometimes using primary sources like note books, diaries etc. as found in The Hungry Tide. Ghosh has imprisoned the essence of the precarious existence of the Sunderban’s inhabited islands with remarkable imaginative accuracy. The ecosystem used as setting in the novel gives a co-operative view of place. It is a location where local and outsider meet together, share and feel that the ecological degradation is the global concern.
Global issues such as environmental decline, partition, lost and marginal histories swivel in abundance in Ghosh writings. Consciously or unconsciously it occurs probably due to his constant round up in various countries including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the UK, Algeria, Egypt, Italy and the US.
The contention that Ghosh, as an anthropologist turned writer, shows an engagement with the environmental decline in the Sunderbans might create an awareness to help prepare action plans for the safety of the settlers. In an interview for Brisbane Festival, Australia, 2004, Amitav Ghosh himself said that he was more interested in characters than issues when he went to write a story. This is exactly true what he maintained in the interview. The Hungry Tide is not only a tale of settlers and their physical surroundings in the Sunderbans but also an exploration into the hearts of the characters. This fact that the present study detects mental agony of the inhabitants living in a fragile ecosystem is information about the condition of the people; and the present generation can take up fruitful steps to help improve the Tide country situation.
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Bibliography
Primary sources
· Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide,, London, Harper Collins, 2004
Secondary Sources
· 1, 2, 3 Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (Eds). The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1996.
· 4 Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
· 5 New Historicists aim to understand the works through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature.
· Mondol, Anshuman. A, Amitav Ghosh, Manchester University Press, Uk, Indian Edition, 2010.
· Gopal, Priyamvada, The Indian English Novel, New York, Oxford University Press, reprinted 2010.
· Ravi, P. S. Modern Indian Fiction: History, Politics and Individual in the novels of Salmam Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Upamannuya Chatterjee, New Delhi, Prestige,2003
· Hawley, John C, Amitav Ghosh, New Delhi, Foundation Books, 2005
· Gupta, Santosh, Looking into History: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace in Indian Writings in English: The last decade, ed. Rajul Bhargava, New Delhi, Rawat, 2002.
· Bose, Brinda, Amitav Ghosh: critical perspective ed. Pencraft International, Delhi, 2005
· Dhawan, R.K. ed. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh, Prestige Books, New Delhi, 1999
· Bhatt, Indira and Indira Nityanandan, eds The fiction of Amitav Ghosh, New Delhi, Creative, 2003
· Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
