Ghosh's new novel - The Hungry Tide - has a sharp, "modern" opening. One ofthe two "outsiders" on the Dhakuria commuter platform, Kanai Dutt, mediaexecutive with "the true connoisseur's ability to both praise and appraisewomen" and only intermittently single, is somewhat reluctantly on his wayto see his aunt Nilima, who lives somewhere in the middle of theSunderbans. He notices the other "outsider", Piya, the once-Bengaliresearcher, she of the "neatly composed androgyny", who is on her way tothe Sunderbans in order to pursue her research into the habits and habitatsof the river dolphin, the Orcaella. Ghosh efficiently conspires to get thetwo chatting, explaining to each other their purposes for being in what is,on the face of it, an unlikely place for both of them. Ah well, Love in theDelta, so to speak!
The threat of this opening is, mercifully, soon belied- the two take off in their separate directions, and while we get acuriously staccato narration - cut to one, cut to the other - of what theydo, and inevitably, of the pasts that play through their present doings,they do not actually meet again until the middle of the book. By whichtime, of course, our readerly plate is piled high with themes andresonances and the threat of casual romance looms small indeed.
It is a pleasure to see Ghosh getting into the spacious narrative stylethat is his forte. It enables him to deploy his gift for leisurely,thoughtful exposition. Once in a while, I must confess, the narrativedevice of having one character say to another - "since you asked, let metell you" - did seem a little overused, but on the whole, it seemed anacceptable concession to the narrative pretext that enables Ghosh to get somany different themes and people to inhabit the same mind-space.
Perhaps the most important of these is worked, ironically, through thefigure 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 bedelivered to his nephew Kanai - which is the immediate cause for Kanai tobe making this visit at all.
Nirmal's notebook, spliced in bite-sized instalments in between thealternate glimpses of Kanai's and Piya's separate but convergingtrajectories, is being written against an embattled and encroaching presentin which it will be too late for words anyway, on the eve of theMarichjhapi massacre; it concerns people and themes that are not only therein the present of the narration, in which Kanai reads it, but haemorrhagealso, as in the "argument" between utopias and liberalism, or that betweenhuman needs and environmental concerns, into the present in which we arereading the work.
In writing about "the tide country", Ghosh seems to have found the perfectlandscape, one that "says" almost everything that he has been writing aboutfor so long and with such eloquence. Thus, a translated fragment fromNirmal's Bangla notebook-letter reads:
"... interposed between the sea andthe plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands ... thetrailing threads of India's fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, theanchal that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. ... The rivers' channelsare spread cross the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where theboundaries between land and water are always mutating, alwaysunpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, others are nomore than two or three kilometres long and only a few hundred metresacross. Yet, each of these channels is a 'river' in its own right, eachpossessed of its own strangely evocative name.... There are no borders hereto divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. ..
The currents are sopowerful as to reshape the islands almost daily - some days the water tearsaway entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up newshelves and sandbanks where there were none before...."
Dreams come easy in this magic land. And part of what is at play inNirmal's notebook is the contrast between the original utopian impulse thatprompted the initial "colonial" settlements of the Sunderbans by DanielHamilton in the 1920s, and the subaltern-utopian motivation that underlaythe appropriation of Marichjhapi island by doubly displaced Bangladeshis in1979. Hamilton's is a sort of "Nehruvian" ambition, to make a place wherepeople would shed their atavistic baggage of custom and prejudice and availof the blessings of modernity.
Nature and bureaucracy - also a kind ofNature? - grind that into the mud, because of course there is little dustin the Sunderbans. Marichjhapi island was settled, briefly, by desperaterefugees from the resettlement colony of Dandakaranya. The heroic andineluctable community of these doubly-distressed Dalits was of littleavail against the guns of the "leftist" government of Kolkata, deployed indefence of the "environment" but also, it is strongly implied, againstsubaltern 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 fewlittle 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'slives a little better. But that was never enough for Nirmal..."
Theabstract contrast between utopia and liberalism is enacted, naturally, atthe level of the their fraught domestic lives. Similarly, the tensionbetween the ecological-environmental position as against the needs of thehuman beings who must, just as naturally, seek to survive in that hostileenvironment is dramatised in the wordless and doomed passion of Piya andher illiterate boatman Fokir.
Piya's final return to Nilima's hospital and to Lusibari with anotherresearch grant to study her beloved river-dolphins does not - indeed,cannot - represent a resolution of the fundamental existential andideological tensions that the novel embodies. It merely signifies hermature recognition of the smudged provisionality in which we must live.Meanwhile.
It is interesting to ask whether and in what ways Ghosh addresses (oreludes) the problems of audience and register that are an inescapable partof writing the Indian English novel. Thus, the question of "audience" iscentral to the kind of "explanation " that is deemed necessary by thewriter. One wonders, for instance, what is the function of the italicised"native" items - chhata, sarkar? To the Indian reader, these will appearmerely gratuitous, exotic spice inserted to reassure Western readers thatwhat they are encountering is a safe blend of the familiar and theunfamiliar. I am not sure that there is any really satisfactory solution tothe problem, other than the "arrogant" self-confidence of the Americanwriter, who eschews all explanation.He addresses a sufficient audience athome, and people who find American realities unfamiliar can walk that extramile.I wonder if this cultural process is in turn affected by the largerecono-military enterprise whereby American "realities" are themselves,mutatis mutandi and even as we speak, being converted into the facts ofglobalized life.
The problem of register is, if anything, even trickier. Although Ghoshendows his protagonist Kanai with a particular talent for languages, noneof this interest - neither his, nor Ghosh's - is in evidence in thelanguage of The Hungry Tide. After all, English is spoken in a greatvariety of ways in India, and at least some of these have become culturallyframed as absurd and parodic, even though they may not be intended as suchby the language users themselves. Thus, the timid rural lad who strugglesto express himself in broken English doesn't intend to be comic. He mighteven, from another perspective, be perceived as the embodiment of acolossal human tragedy, but the writer will have to struggle against theconventional undertow towards caricature.
Then again, there is a whole range of people - millions, hundreds ofmillions - who use no English at all. Their adequate lives are lived in abewildering variety of languages and dialects that have - and perhaps canhave - 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, whois tongue-tied and uses the wordless language of sign and gesture. However,the solution of making all one's major characters fluent in English, andreducing minor characters to degrees of silence, is really no solution atall.
Ghosh bypasses this problem altogether by resorting, uniformly, to aneutral, level register of sophistication and nuance that is maintainedthrough the range of characters and through the diverse situations in whichthey find themselves. Thus, even as Kanai is practically drowning in theslime of the Sunderbans, his thoughts are meticulously grammatical,inflected with relative clauses and poised parentheses. This,. too, is akind of convention, I suppose. And I am sufficiently fond of Ghosh'sauthorial voice to not mind the fact that it resonates, Godlike, throughouthis fictional universe.
© Alok Rai. A shorter version of this review appears in the print magazine.
