The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

The Ganges flows from the Himalayas through India and Bangladesh before falling into the Bay of Bengal. 'Interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands... stretching for almost three hundred kilometers, from the Hooghly River in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh,' where salt waters and fresh water meet and create the mangrove forests known as the Sundarbans. Here during high tide the sea waters can surge thirty kilometers inland, then draw back, in a restless cycle of veiling and unveiling matter, constantly reshaping or devouring land. It is in this home of man-eating tigers, sharks, crocodiles and dolphins, of an shifting reality, endlessly disappearing and appearing, that is the setting for Amitav Ghosh's latest novel, The Hungry Tide.

This book, unlike its predecessor, The Glass Palace, is both geographically and conceptually circumscribed. While The Glass Palace sweepingly encompassed Southeast Asia, The Hungry Tide locates itself strictly within the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and West Bengal. The Glass Palace told us various stories all the way from Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose to Indian migrant workers in Malaysia, whereas The Hungry Tide has two basic plots. One addresses the displacement (a perennial theme with Ghosh) of a group of refugees from Bangladesh to West Bengal in 1979. The second constitutes new ground for him, although it is faithful to Ghosh's anthropological roots, about the co-existence of humans and man-eating tigers and dolphins in a volatile and dangerous eco-system.

The story of the dispossessed begins when a century back, when in this tide country a visionary Scotsman, Sir Hamilton, built a utopian settlement so that people could live together irrespective of their caste and creed. The story of the eco-system also starts from there, but gathers force when in modern times two of the principal characters of the novel--Kanai Dutt and Piyali ('Piya') Roy--make their appearance. Kanai is a successful, cosmopolitan Bengali businessman who runs a translating firm in New Delhi. Piya, an American of Bengali descent, is a scientist who has come to the Sundarbans to study the extremely rare, endangered Irrawaddy dolphins. Kanai and Piya meet in the opening pages of the book. Kanai invites Piya to visit Lusibari, where he is going to visit his aunt, Nilima. This is Kanai's second visit to Lusibari. His parents sent him there once before, as a child, to 'trim down' his overweening pride. Little seems to have changed as Nilima describes him to Piya as 'one of those men who likes to think of himself as irresistible to the other sex.' Kanai is going to Lusibari again, this time at the request of Nilima. Her late husband Nirmal has left a notebook for Kanai that was recently discovered, twenty years after the former's death.

In their youth, Nilima and Nirmal (teacher and 'leftist intellectual') had fled from Kolkata to the Sundarbans because of their revolutionary ideals. They had stayed on, with Nilima founding a self-help co-operative and Nirmal becoming the headmaster of the local school. There is also Kusum and her son Fokir. Kanai had met Kusum on his first trip and she became, and remains, his childhood sweetheart. The notes give the impression that Nirmal (also known as 'Saar'),' too probably fell in love with her in his old age. It is Nirmal's notebook that provides an anthropological account of displaced people attempting to form a new society in the island of Morichijhapi, provides the link between the past and the present, presents the shifting yet constant ecological picture of tide country.

The two central plots of the novel are woven together with a novelist's imagination and an anthropologist's training. Although the Scotsman Sir Hamilton dreamed of an equal society, it is not his ideas, but rather the relentlessly hostile environment of the Sundarbans that forces everybody to be on an equal footing. Kanai, Piya and Fokir set sail into the waters of the Sundarbans in search of the Oracella, the freshwater dolphins, with Fokir as guide and Kanai as translator. It is a transfixing tale, as Piya falls not for the polished Kanai but for Fokir, the man of the Sundarbans, learning to appreciate the 'mutability and mysteries of (the) language' of the outwardly uneducated, rustic Fokir.

In the end, however, the waters win. The climax comes with the beginning of a cyclone that sweeps the archipelago and takes away the life of one of the principal characters. Weaving fiction with history and myths, Amitav Ghosh--along with Vikram Seth arguably one of the two best Bengali writers in English today-- unforgettably brings to life the whole tapestry of the Sundarbans.

Asrar Chowdhury teaches Economics at Jahangirnagar University.

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In the clear waters of the open sea the light of the sun wells downwards from the surface in an inverted cone that ends in the beholder's eye. The base of this cone is a transparent disk that hangs above the observer's head like a floating halo. It is through this prism, known as Snell's window, that the oceanic dolphin perceives the world beyond the water; in submersion, this circular portal follows it everywhere, creating a single clear opening in the unbroken expanse of shimmering silver that forms the water's surface as seen from below.

Rivers like the Ganga and the Brahmaputra shroud this window with a direct curtain of silt: in their occluded waters light loses its directionality within a few centimeters of the surface. Beneath this lies a flowing stream of suspended matter in which visibility does not extend beyond an arm's length. With no lighted portal to point the way, top and bottom and up and down become very quickly confused. As if to address this the Gangetic dolphin habitually swims on its side, parallel to the surface, with one of its lateral fins trailing the bottom, as though to anchor itself in its darkened world by keeping a hold upon its floor.