Tigers and/or People?

Amitav Ghosh's sixth book, The Hungry Tide, offers an armchair safari into the Sundarbans, an archipelago of islands formed where the Brahmaputra and Ganges meet and flow into the Bay of Bengal. This Bhatir desh or tide country is “the trailing thread of India's fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the achōl that follows her, half wetted by the sea.” Its mangrove forests “do not merely recolonize land; they erase time” and harbor man-eating tigers, snakes, crocodiles – and government authorities accountable to no one.

Delhi-based entrepreneur Kanai Dutt and marine biologist Piyali (Piya) Roy widen the stage and connect us to this terrain. In the capital city, a translator like Kanai would be a powerful urban phenomenon, mediating between cultures, assisting monolinguals in transnational companies to tap the wallets of a burgeoning Indian middle class. But in the tide country where he ventures dutifully but reluctantly to read his late uncle's papers at the behest his seventy-two year old aunty Mashima, Kanai is out of his element. So is Piya, a second-generation Indo-American marine biologist studying the ways of the Irrawady Dolphin.

They meet at the train station and Kanai invites Piya to his mashima’s home and hospital in Lusibari if she ever needs help. Bengali in origin but not Bengali-speaking, Indian-looking but American, Piya’s way is paved by powerful uncles but complicated by her gender. Saved from a couple of lascivious louts by an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, she heads for Lusibari.

Fokir, silent because he speaks Bengali, blends Islam and Hinduism as fresh and salt water mix in this region, praying to Allah while building idols to a female diety, Bon Bibi. Piya has near-intuitive communication with Fokir, but agrees to let Kanai interpret as she collects data on dolphin migrations. They venture into the mohona areas where rivers combine and shift and tides reveal or conceal islands. Here history reaches into their present, history in the form of a 1978 massacre of low-caste refugees by the Indian Forestry Department – in the name of tiger conservation.

By the end of the novel, events force Kania and Piya to do without texts or data and reinterpret their time in the tide country. Each must make a greater effort to communicate between English and non-English-speakers, oral and written traditions, and across class and religious divides. And Piya discovers, “where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.”

Amitav Ghosh is in full command as he tells this prophetic and disturbing tale. The narrator’s voice is calm in tone, proceeding at 19^th-century pace, administering exposition as required, without the magical realism or symbolism of his earlier work. Every chapter develops slowly as a wave, then ebbs, leaving a nugget that compels you further into this powerful, moving novel.

The Hungry Tide demonstrates the limits of language and translation even as it reduces our multilingual world to English. Amitav Ghosh doesn’t shy from adverbs or indulge in linguistic gymnastics as he enlarges our understanding of the region and people with bilingual sensibility. Copyeditors have intervened, however, so a few Bengali word-sounds — mohona, jhor, jilipi –– are permitted to flow through your mind, but others are inexplicably presented in italics that scream, “Beware! Foreign word!”

Women readers may have to work harder to suspend disbelief -- Piya never menstruates, never thinks about having/not having children, is unaware of having breasts or uterus, nor exhibits sexual desire. Unlike other 28-year old Indo-American women she is under zero familial pressure to meet eligible bachelors in Kolkata. Her mother died of cervical cancer, but she is singularly worry-free about her father in Seattle. But at least here's a woman who loves her work and believes in understanding rather than hunting animals. Offering old “Mashima” – NGO-founder, quiet builder of a hospital – Ghosh pays tribute to legions of dedicated women whose social work has crossed class boundaries throughout South-East Asia and supported poor women in changing their own lives.

In a recent essay, Amitav Ghosh spelled out dire consequences for the Sundarbans if a huge resort project planned for the Sundarbans is permitted. We must hope he can persuade the Indian government to refuse permission for business developers to invade the area and hold the authorities accountable. Longer term, his wise novel suggests that donors hoping to save the 4500-8000 remaining tigers in the world modify our priorities to also demand the survival rights of the poorest and truly voiceless. We are left wishing for a world with as much unity and integrity as this work of art.

Shauna Singh Baldwin