The Hungry Tide is about the Sunderban islands in the Bay of Bengal, and perhaps by extension Bengal. Besides the various intertwining character plots, it has only two conceptual plots. First, it explores the plight of displaced people, specifically a group of refugees from Bangladesh who found themselves in confrontation with the Indian state in 1979. The other conceptual question is how humans share a complex and dangerous ecosystem with animals.
Dhira Bhowmick, English Professor at Shillong College, currently reading the book says, “I bought the novel quite some time back but haven’t had time to read. Now I just finished it.”
“The book is entirely sweeping in its range, experience and feel! The most predominant theme is one of ephemerality — the tides drown and recreate the islands. Water is an agent of change that shapes the geology and history of the island dissolving and recreating man made boundaries,” she explains.
The multiplicity of names for the Sundarbans is a metaphor for that ephemerality. Another metaphor for ephemerality, albeit one which has a great deal of material heft behind it, is the fact that the land itself is inconstant –- subject to sometimes radical alterations as a result of late summer storms. Whole islands are washed away by the cyclones that sweep in with huge tidal surges. Thousands of human beings and animals routinely die in these storms.
Piyali Roy, a marine biologist of Bengali descent, discovers some strange behavioral quirks amongst Irawaddy Dolphins in a tide pool while visiting the islands on a grant. And the Bay of Bengal is one of the only habitats where Bengal Tigers continue to live in the wild. They are zealously protected by various international environmental groups.
But in the name of tiger preservation, human lives are threatened — the tigers routinely maul and often kill islanders. Though there are the obvious modern devices that might be used to protect the islanders, the state allows the deaths to continue. In the Sunderbans, Ghosh argues, human lives are valued somewhat lower than those of tigers.
Ghosh has an anthropologist’s fascination for the stories people tell — the local mythologies that subvert the official religious and national versions of history.
In several of his books there is a perspicacious investigation into the ‘local reality’, and with it, critiques of the official version of history. Here the local reality is that of the Sunderbans, a densely populated archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, which straddles West Bengal and Bangladesh.
The people there have an epic narrative of origins that they pass on orally. They have a kind of local religion – they worship a Goddess called Bon Bibi – but the epic of Bon Bibi is strongly inflected by Islamic influences.
Alongside natural catastrophes are the man-made ones — the storms of history. In Ghosh’s historically-engaged fiction, the two are effectively metaphors for each other. The beauty of the metaphor is the way it allows Ghosh to give shape and texture to (often forgotten) historical events that otherwise might seem inexplicable. But there is a danger in it too: the specific political actors and discourses that lead to events such as the massacre at Morichjhapi are downplayed.
Piyali’s aunt and her husband witnessed the atrocities that the state unleashed on the landless refugees trying to find life in the difficult terrain. It was the darkest hour in Bengal and a blotch on the newly elected Communist government in the state.
However, The Hungry Tide is not
about the dark past but the struggles of present day.
“The Hungry Tide made for a very interesting read! You could feel the overwhelming presence of the river and the forest,the tempests and the tide, the tigers,the crocodiles and the dolphins. Like other works of Ghosh, this is also a very well researched book,” says Bhowmick.
“The Hungry Tide is a must-read book! I would like to recommend this to everyone,” adds Bhowmick.
Reading suggestions for the week:
1. The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
2. Rabbit is Rich by John Updike
