http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?224432
Ghosh's new novel - The Hungry Tide - has a sharp, "modern" opening. One of the two "outsiders" on the Dhakuria commuter platform, Kanai Dutt, media executive with "the true connoisseur's ability to both praise and appraise women" and only intermittently single, is somewhat reluctantly on his way to see his aunt Nilima, who lives somewhere in the middle of the Sunderbans. He notices the other "outsider", Piya, the once-Bengali researcher, she of the "neatly composed androgyny", who is on her way to the Sunderbans in order to pursue her research into the habits and habitats of the river dolphin, the Orcaella.
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The threat of this opening is, mercifully, soon belied - the two take off in their separate directions, and while we get a curiously staccato narration - cut to one, cut to the other - of what they do, and inevitably, of the pasts that play through their present doings, they do not actually meet again until the middle of the book. By which time, of course, our readerly plate is piled high with themes and resonances and the threat of casual romance looms small indeed.
It is a pleasure to see Ghosh getting into the spacious narrative style that is his forte. It enables him to deploy his gift for leisurely, thoughtful exposition. Once in a while, I must confess, the narrative device of having one character say to another - "since you asked, let me tell you" - did seem a little overused, but on the whole, it seemed an acceptable concession to the narrative pretext that enables Ghosh to get so many different themes and people to inhabit the same mind-space.
Perhaps the most important of these is worked, ironically, through the figure of a character who has died several years before the novel opens - Nilima's husband, Nirmal. It is the discovery of his papers - sealed, to be delivered to his nephew Kanai - which is the immediate cause for Kanai to be making this visit at all.
Nirmal's notebook, spliced in bite-sized instalments in between the alternate glimpses of Kanai's and Piya's separate but converging trajectories, is being written against an embattled and encroaching present in which it will be too late for words anyway, on the eve of the Marichjhapi massacre; it concerns people and themes that are not only there in the present of the narration, in which Kanai reads it, but haemorrhage also, as in the "argument" between utopias and liberalism, or that between human needs and environmental concerns, into the present in which we are reading the work.
In writing about "the tide country", Ghosh seems to have found the perfect landscape, one that "says" almost everything that he has been writing about for so long and with such eloquence. Thus, a translated fragment from Nirmal's Bangla notebook-letter reads:
"... interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands ... the trailing threads of India's fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the anchal that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. ... The rivers' channels are spread cross the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, others are no more than two or three kilometres long and only a few hundred metres across. Yet, each of these channels is a 'river' in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name.... There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. ..
The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily - some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks where there were none before...."
Dreams come easy in this magic land. And part of what is at play in Nirmal's notebook is the contrast between the original utopian impulse that prompted the initial "colonial" settlements of the Sunderbans by Daniel Hamilton in the 1920s, and the subaltern-utopian motivation that underlay the appropriation of Marichjhapi island by doubly displaced Bangladeshis in 1979. Hamilton's is a sort of "Nehruvian" ambition, to make a place where people would shed their atavistic baggage of custom and prejudice and avail of the blessings of modernity.
Nature and bureaucracy - also a kind of Nature? - grind that into the mud, because of course there is little dust in the Sunderbans. Marichjhapi island was settled, briefly, by desperate refugees from the resettlement colony of Dandakaranya. The heroic and ineluctable community of these doubly-distressed Dalits was of little avail against the guns of the "leftist" government of Kolkata, deployed in defence of the "environment" but also, it is strongly implied, against subaltern presumption. Dreams are soon dead, too - in this nightmare land. Nirmal's quondam-leftist yearning for heroic, revolutionary transformation is contrasted with Nilima's modest "liberal" ambition to "make a few little things a little better in one small place... after all these years, it has amounted to something: it's helped people; it's made a few people's lives a little better. But that was never enough for Nirmal..."
The abstract contrast between utopia and liberalism is enacted, naturally, at the level of the their fraught domestic lives. Similarly, the tension between the ecological-environmental position as against the needs of the human beings who must, just as naturally, seek to survive in that hostile environment is dramatised in the wordless and doomed passion of Piya and her illiterate boatman Fokir.
Piya's final return to Nilima's hospital and to Lusibari with another research grant to study her beloved river-dolphins does not - indeed, cannot - represent a resolution of the fundamental existential and ideological tensions that the novel embodies. It merely signifies her mature recognition of the smudged provisionality in which we must live. Meanwhile.
It is interesting to ask whether and in what ways Ghosh addresses (or eludes) the problems of audience and register that are an inescapable part of writing the Indian English novel. Thus, the question of "audience" is central to the kind of "explanation " that is deemed necessary by the writer. One wonders, for instance, what is the function of the italicised "native" items - chhata, sarkar? To the Indian reader, these will appear merely gratuitous, exotic spice inserted to reassure Western readers that what they are encountering is a safe blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I am not sure that there is any really satisfactory solution to the problem, other than the "arrogant" self-confidence of the American writer, who eschews all explanation.He addresses a sufficient audience at home, and people who find American realities unfamiliar can walk that extra mile.I wonder if this cultural process is in turn affected by the larger econo-military enterprise whereby American "realities" are themselves, mutatis mutandi and even as we speak, being converted into the facts of globalized life.
The problem of register is, if anything, even trickier. Although Ghosh endows his protagonist Kanai with a particular talent for languages, none of this interest - neither his, nor Ghosh's - is in evidence in the language of The Hungry Tide. After all, English is spoken in a great variety of ways in India, and at least some of these have become culturally framed as absurd and parodic, even though they may not be intended as such by the language users themselves. Thus, the timid rural lad who struggles to express himself in broken English doesn't intend to be comic. He might even, from another perspective, be perceived as the embodiment of a colossal human tragedy, but the writer will have to struggle against the conventional undertow towards caricature.
Then again, there is a whole range of people - millions, hundreds of millions - who use no English at all. Their adequate lives are lived in a bewildering variety of languages and dialects that have - and perhaps can have - no equivalent English registers, except the "Indian English" caricature. The main characters in Ghosh's novel are all English-educated, and can use the language fluently and transparently. All except Fokir, who is tongue-tied and uses the wordless language of sign and gesture. However, the solution of making all one's major characters fluent in English, and reducing minor characters to degrees of silence, is really no solution at all.
Ghosh bypasses this problem altogether by resorting, uniformly, to a neutral, level register of sophistication and nuance that is maintained through the range of characters and through the diverse situations in which they find themselves. Thus, even as Kanai is practically drowning in the slime of the Sunderbans, his thoughts are meticulously grammatical, inflected with relative clauses and poised parentheses. This,. too, is a kind of convention, I suppose. And I am sufficiently fond of Ghosh's authorial voice to not mind the fact that it resonates, Godlike, throughout his fictional universe.
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Palash Biswas
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