The Hungry Tide and Ecocosmopolitanism...

The Hungry Tide

• The Hungry Tide and Eco-cosmopolitanism

The Hungry Tide is by common consensus considered to be one of the important fictions of post-Independence literary enterprise and by extension the best of Ghosh’s creative manoeuvre. The various thematic aspects assimilated in the novel is an indicator of Ghosh’s unregulated attention towards diverse and multitude perspectives which automatically included the scope of postcolonial study and also permitted other tropes as related to ecocriticism, migration, diaspora, myths, and more recurrent issues as of class discrimination, geo-political questions, and not least the inclusion of postmodern techniques of eco-narrative, decentralisation, the question of time, space, and identity and so on. The Hungry Tide is a novel about settlers in the precarious tide country of the Sundarbans who have to contend with the government’s wildlife project, with the tides that erase and create land with alarming frequency, with the tigers and spirits who seem to have equally palpable presences, and with outsiders like Nirmal, Nilima, Kanai and Piya who come with alien ideas about improvement or about saving the environment and its endangered species. Presenting as it does several kinds of borders – between human and animal, land and water, human and human, outsider and inhabitant, and educated and illiterate – the novel also shows contest and conflict which are however subverted by the way the tides erase divisions and compel coexistence.

    Lawrence Buell in his brilliant work The Environmental Imagination  suggested the following ‘checklist’ of four criteria that characterize an “environmentally oriented work”: 

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. 

2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. 

3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. 

4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

The reading of the novel quickly projects that Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide fulfils all of these criteria. Covering about 2,300 square miles in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, the lush groves of the Sundarbans are troubled today by rising sea levels and the extinction of various species, and were in 1979 the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Indian government—ostensibly for ecological reasons. Perhaps in part to help protect against just such conlicts, this region was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984 and a Biosphere Reserve in 2001, selected also for the multitude of plant and animal species—among them the man-eating Royal Bengal Tiger—that make their homes there. 

Ghosh’s novel is set in the Sundarbans, the vast delta at the estuary of the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra in the coastal region between India and Bangladesh. The novel introduces its readers to its topographical singularity at the onset of the story:

“. . . Interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands. […] The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. […] The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to re-emerge hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily […]. And to the inhabitants of these islands this land is known as bhatir desh – the tide country”. 

The Sundarbans function as an important and irreplaceable barrier against the destructive force of the cyclones that regularly batter this coast, sheltering most especially the Indian metropole of Kolkata, and they have been the site of a range of both colonial and postcolonial projects—some humanitarian and others decidedly antihumanitarian — as Ghosh goes to pains to demonstrate. In The Hungry Tide, the spatial proximity of the Sundarbans with Kolkata is as important as the temporal proximity of and cultural interconnection between India’s colonial past and the novel’s postcolonial present.

The Hungry Tide complicates the dialectic between the cosmopolitan and indigenous by exploring, in a self-reflexive, interrogative mode, the physical and psychic spaces that connect contemporary global networks of power and knowledge production to the atavistic responses of the individual that lay bare millennia-old privileges of class, caste, and metropolitan location sedimented under the veneer of cosmopolitan urbaneness and geniality. The text connects language, history, family, and vocation in an intricate transcultural network undergirded as much by contemporary realities of the global marketplace as by indigenous folklore and myth that connect faith to science. It is with such an understanding that Piyali Roy, an American cetologist of Indian origin, on a research trip to study the marine mammals of the Sundarbans in India, asserts that "Home is where the Oracella are" (400). In proclaiming kinship with the Oracella dolphins (a fast disappearing species of freshwater dolphin that inhabits the river systems of the Far East) rather than the expected emotional kinship with her ethnic Bengali heritage, Piya declares, in effect, a new paradigm for transcultural ecocritical engagement that stems from professional commitment and her impassioned interest in environmental issues.

The region upholds a fascinating and sensitive ecology of what in the novel is called “the tide country”. All are ethnically Indian, but some consider themselves more Indian than others; in a way, the split here is between global and local subjects. From the cosmopolitan Indian-American scientist Piya—who is far enough removed from the culture of her parents and grandparents to not even speak the language—to the illiterate is her man Fokir—who possesses intimate knowledge of the Sundarbans but knows little else— Ghosh’s protagonists represent a brief mapping of the late postcolonial dispersal of ethnic-national identity, and its subsequent crystallization into global and local subjectivities. The simple slogan, “Amrakara? Bastuara.’Who are we? We are the dispossessed” impresses Nirmal deeply. The link that is drawn here between the settlers, himself, and all of humankind points toward the spirit of eco-cosmopolitanism that pervades Ghosh’s novel: “It seemed at the moment . . . a question being addressed to the very heavens, not just for themselves but on behalf of a bewildered humankind. Who, indeed, are we? Where do we belong? . . . Who was I? Where did I belong? In Calcutta or in the tide country? In India or across the border?”.

Such a complex collision of human and nonhuman interests requires an interpretive lens drawing on ecocriticism’s place-based concern for animal habitats, environmental justice’s concern for the unequal distribution of environmental burdens and resources, and postcolonialism’s concern for the colonial origins and neoimperial effects of globalized culture and capital. It is this confluence of methodologies that defines the field of postcolonial ecocriticism, which critically assesses representations of conflicts and reconciliations between environmentalism and subaltern agency. The payoff of reading The Hungry Tide through a postcolonial ecocritical lens is that it reveals how Piya and Nirmal eventually come to revise their Western ideologies of environmentalism and Marxism, respectively, thereby serving as models of a self-critical ecological politics that does not allow its concerns for nonhuman life or its neoimperial largesse to excuse social injustice.

As such, eco-cosmopolitanism seems to include and at the same time go beyond what Lawrence Buell has called ecoglobalist affects in The Environmental Imagination: “. . . A whole-earth way of thinking and feeling about environmentality”. In contrast to state dependency on global capital and disconnection from the local, the development of what literary ecocritic Ursula Heise describes as an eco-cosmopolitan consciousness allows those characters who evince it a deeper understanding of and connectedness with one other and with theirnatural environments. Not only does eco-cosmopolitanism, embraced in Ghosh’s novel, entail a global expansion of one’s topophilic attachments, it also relates the realms of the human and the more-than human in its realization of their utter interdependence. Cosmopolitanism can, in the last instance, not be meaningful without also being eco; and while an eco-cosmopolitan awareness cannot necessarily guarantee survival in the face of natural forces or unscrupulous governments, it does help fostering a deeper sense of meaning and solidarity.