The Hungry Tide.

AMITAV GHOSH is one of the most important Indian authors writing in English today. Born in Calcutta in 1956, he has published five internationally acclaimed novels, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace, as well as In an Antique Land, a non-fiction book that weaves social and historical research with travel memoir. A widely travelled journalist, Mr. Ghosh reported on the devastation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands following the tsunami of 26 December 2004. A collection of his essays was recently published under the title Incendiary Circumstances.

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Mr. Ghosh spoke with Hasan Ferdous and Horst Rutsch of the UN Chronicle on the occasion of the publication of his most recent novel, The Hungry Tide.

On literature in a globalized world

I think the world has been globalizing for a long time. It is not a new phenomenon, but one that has achieved a new kind of intensity in recent years. The only real barrier to a complete uniformity around the world is not the image but language. Images can be exchanged between cultures, but the domain where globalization has truly been resisted is that of language. We can send e-mails, which can be instantly translated, but that is shallow communication. For any kind of deeper, resonant communication, language is essential. All such communication is always deeply embedded in language.

As a writer, thinking back to the birth of the novel, it really coincides with the development of monolingual cultures in Europe, which is also a fairly new phenomenon. It is only since about the beginning of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries that you have people who only spoke German, as opposed to Latin and German, or similarly, French, English or whatever. The decline of dialects happened at exactly the same time. So the novel coincides with the rise of monolingualism. I remember when I first started writing, the comments I would get in Europe were, "what you are doing is very peculiar because you are writing in languages other than those you spoke at home". I think that is true. It is also true that writers like me have been pioneers. Everybody is going to have to deal with multilinguality and interlingual communication. The old monolingual worlds are in some way not the same as they used to be; that is why translation is such an important part of this book. I feel that this is the crucial sense in which writers are figures in the emergent culture we see ahead. In a text like mine [The Hungry Tide], you see the possibility of deep communication, which you would not see in films or in any kind of image-based representation.

On exploring cultural gaps

I find history completely absorbing and fascinating. I'm always interested to discover aspects of history; it adds a kind of richness to one's experience of a place. Speaking about history, one of the very important things in a text is that it becomes a place where those cultural interactions are performed in the most difficult possible ways. The two central characters in my book can't speak to each other. Yet I feel it is exactly that form of cultural gap that you have to explore. Someone who has experienced non-communication must try to represent it in some sort of truthful or interesting way.

The novel is such that it is impossible to have formulae about it. Look at Herman Melville: we have certain autobiographical elements in his writing, but when he decided to write Moby-Dick, he picked a historical incident--the sinking of the whale ship The Globe, which had been attacked and sunk by a whale. On that he built his story. Similarly, he did that with many of his works. His novella Benito Cereno was actually founded upon a fragment that he took from someone else's autobiography. I find this very interesting. I think the imaginative procedures of novelists are neither easily exhausted nor sufficiently accounted for. There can be remarkable novels that come out of journalistic experiences. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, was a journalist for many years, and a number of his stories are written as a journalist. These are just wonderful, wonderful stories. I just don't think there are any rules about this.

On discovering histories

Part of the idea behind The Hungry Tide was to shine light on this area that is little known within India. But even within Bengal, the Sundarbans is really a kind of area of darkness. People don't think of it, they don't write about it, they don't look at it. This is such a strange thing. For the ordinary tourist, the Sundarbans doesn't offer much. You will never see the tigers; there is no wildlife to be seen. Sometimes you may see a crocodile, a few birds, but it is not like going to the Serengeti or some resort; it offers nothing to tourists as such. But, at the same time, it is a place of incredible beauty and presence. To appreciate it, tourists would have to be there for quite a long time--for three or four days at least--because the beauty of it reveals itself very slowly. Although the book has deep personal links, it's all fiction. Certainly nothing like this happened to me, but in a way a lot of real experiences get invested even in a fiction of this kind. Many encounters, many people that I've met, experiences that I've had, have become invested in the book.

The Sundarbans is a wilderness--it's like a forest. In some sense, you don't expect to encounter history in a place like that. The strange thing is that when you look at any place closely, you discover that a place that seems empty of history is actually deeply layered. It is like an onion; you can just keep peeling layers upon layers and never come to a core; there is always more. This proved to be exactly the case with the Sundarbans: there was layer upon layer of things to be seen and heard. This is not surprising. The Sundarbans was the approach route to the Gangetic lands; for millennia people have been coming through there. We know, for example, that the great Chinese traveller Fa-hien stayed in the region for two years. Similarly, there are reports about European travellers in the Sundarbans, among them Marco Polo, who also visited the Andaman Islands. The more closely you look, the more you discover. This is precisely the sort of depth and layering that you will find there.

On weaving fiction, autobiography and history

My previous novel, The Glass Palace, was very much about my father's history. The Hungry Tide is again closely related to my family. This is my first book that is completely located and situated in Bengal and it was very important to me for exactly that reason. It was also very exciting to explore the deep layering of Bengal. I feel in some mental and emotional way I'm in a process of returning--which will take me a long, long time--and it is currently underway. Typically, it takes me between three and four years--but sometimes more--to conceive the idea of a novel and actually execute it. The Glass Palace took me five years; The Hungry Tide took four. I spent a long time in the Sundarbans--living in a village, meeting people, learning how to catch crabs.

I also spent a long time working with a dolphin specialist in Cambodia; we travelled up the Mekong together surveying the dolphins. It is striking that in Hindu culture so many animals--cows, cats, dogs, monkeys--figure in different ways within the civilization. Yet, Hindu culture has nothing to say about dolphins or whales. It is completely silent on this issue. Even though the Gangetic dolphin has always been there, it doesn't seem to have been of interest to the culture. I don't know why that should be the case, for India has a very rich and diverse population of marine mammals. It was a very long and very interesting process of research. I loved that--I find great pleasure in investigating these things.

My entire relationship with the Sundarbans began with my family. I had an uncle who went there in 1947 as the headmaster of a school in a small town called Gasaba, which had been founded by Sir Daniel Hamilton. It is because of my uncle's presence there that I forged this long connection. I would often go and visit him. That experience planted the seed of this book; it was just those connections, the sense in which you see a landscape growing within your mind. It began in 2000 when I had finished The Glass Palace, set in Burma, which is not far from the Sundarbans. There were many passages in the book that actually dealt with mangroves, forests and so on. At that point, I suddenly realized that I had become so deeply interested in forests and animals that I wanted to write a book that explored these subjects. The book was almost a natural outgrowth.

On writing a Bengali novel in English

When The Hungry Tide came out, someone said to me that it very much belonged to the Bengali tradition of the river novel. And I think that is true. What is interesting to me is that Bengal is such a land of rivers; it is surprising that every Bengali novel is not a river novel. But the book not only portrays Bengali life, it also uses Bengali words like gamchha [checkered towel or cloth]. The reason gamchha occurs at that point in the text is because Piya, who grew up in America, looks at it and suddenly remembers that there is such a word. It is at this point that she suddenly realizes that the word has a personal resonance that she herself can't understand. She is trying to understand the resonance because, in some way, she associates the word with her father. And I think that is necessarily the case. It is exactly what I was saying before: if there is to be that kind of deep communication between languages and experiences, it has to be through those kinds of issues, resonances and meanings that words have. To non-Bengali readers, this book might pose problems initially, challenging them to make an effort to go deeper into it. However, it varies greatly: for some readers, it poses a difficulty; for others, it does not. I actually use very few Bengali words, and some people are just drawn into the text straight away. In a general sense, when people find it a problem, it is just a question of not being used to a situation.

On environmental decline in the Sundarbans

Going back to the Sundarbans over the years, there are some things that have changed so dramatically that they just hit you in the face. For example, if you go there today--and I should specify the Indian side because I haven't visited the Bangladeshi Sundarbans--one of the things that strikes you so much is the real paucity of bird life. You hardly see any birds at all. I remember there was a time when you could see great flights of birds, but that entire mass of bird life has just completely vanished. In years past, when you went to the mudflats, they would be covered with crabs. Now, the crabs have just vanished. Similarly, the Sundarbans was named after a kind of tree called the sundari tree. These trees have become incredibly rare; you hardly ever see them these days.

One of the most striking examples of this change is with marine mammals. In the nineteenth century, the Sundarbans was said to have been teeming with marine mammals. Zoologists say that there were dolphins, whales, dugongs--and not just one or two of these species, but many different ones. Now you hardly ever see any of them. The last few times that I've been there, I've seen maybe two Gangetic dolphins; I haven't seen any Orcaellae or Irrawaddy dolphins. So I think a real catastrophe is making itself known.

Another thing that is very, very troubling is the prawn culture. Prawns don't breed inside ponds; they need the open water. What the fishermen do is go out with microscopically fine mesh nets and sieve the water. They take out everything that they get, then they go through all the debris and pick out the prawn spawn. They pick out only the lucrative little bits of prawn spawn for which they get paid a fair amount. However, in the process, they completely clear the water of the spawn of every other fish species as well, and this creates a complete ecological disaster, whereby the entire fish life of the Sundarbans will soon be decimated. There is an incredible urgency about what is happening here and around people's lives.

Climate change is a matter of particular urgency when you are from a certain part of the world. In the event of global warming, the parts that would be most affected, really, are the rivers and deltas: the delta of the Nile, of the Ganges, of the Brahmaputra. The Bengal delta is so heavily populated; we're talking about 200 million people. If a ten-foot rise or even a five-foot rise in the seas were to happen, tens of thousands of acres of land would just vanish. Millions of people would lose their livelihoods. This is something we have to think about; it has to be at the forefront of our minds. It is not something that we can postpone or think about elsewhere; it is absolutely present within the conditions of our lives, here and now.

In the Sundarbans, drinking water is a huge problem. There was a German biologist who went there and decided the reason why the tigers were killing human beings was because they didn't have fresh water. At enormous cost, fresh water wells were dug for the tigers and water was plentiful, while human beings there had no fresh water. They were looking on these wells being dug for the tigers while they themselves and their children were dying because they didn't have access to fresh water. We can't elude the issue. If you care for the environment, does that mean you don't care about the plight of human beings, especially impoverished people?

On indigenous people

I think the way that the whole forest issue has evolved in India is on a dangerous trajectory. In a democratic nation, you can't completely exclude a huge class of people from any use of the forest; if you do that, they will, sooner or later, elect leaders who will overturn that legislation. That is exactly what is happening in India. There is a new bill which is being introduced into the Indian Parliament that would reinstate to indigenous tribal groups those rights that were taken away from them when the British first took control of the forests in the 1860s. It would restore to them the rights of grazing, collecting firewood and so on. Of course, all the tribal people are very keen for this to happen. For years, if you were a tribal person, the forests would be there, but when you picked up some firewood, the Forest Department guy would come and say, "Sir, either you give me a bribe or else I'll give you a fine". The indigenous people have been completely victimized. They are not responsible for the denudation of the forest; more often than not, it is the timber merchants from the cities who do that in collusion with the Forest Department.

There were only two groups in India who traditionally had an interest in the forest: the indigenous tribal people and the ruling classes--the old princely families who controlled the forests and would go and shoot scores of tigers in one day or that kind of thing. They are now trying to prevent the passage of this bill. Maybe they'll succeed today, but they are not going to succeed forever. So if the Government cannot be flexible or creative, this entire legislation will be overturned. This is a problem that is not tied to India alone. Take the United States, for example. If they shut down a certain highway in Florida, they could save the Florida panther, but of course they can't shut down the highway because too many people use it. When you actually have a democratic political system, it is very hard to enact legislation that takes away people's rights in that way.

On cultural and digitial divides

Nowadays, you read so much about how India is the rising power in information technology (IT). All of that is true, I think, but like America and so many other places, India is increasingly like two countries: there is one part that is very much plugged into the modern world, and this is mainly the urban centres that work to a certain rhythm; and there are the other parts--the rural areas--which are almost on another continent. If you go to the Sundarbans today, life there is often like something you would expect from a hundred years ago. So there is this incredible divide between these two parts of the country, and I think it is misleading--that one thinks of a place like India and identifies it immediately with call-centres and so on. Actually, people in the cities have forgotten how distant the life of the Indian villages is from theirs. Perhaps this is especially true of Eastern India, the more underdeveloped part of the country. Certainly, the parts excluded from the rapid movement that is taking place in urban India are very much on my mind.

I don't want to sound as if I'm decrying the rapid movement that is occurring in other parts of India. I think it is a wonderful thing that something is moving, and yet the distance does appear to be growing. Within these circumstances, when I go to the Sundarbans now, I am in some very important way a representative of the urban, fast-moving India. My relationship with the Sundarbans is true of people who have lived and built up their lives there, and who spent thirty, forty years there doing things for local people. In part, I felt that I had to reconcile the divided nature of my own experience. That aspect of the rural and this aspect of the urban, they are both part of my experience. I felt that to write truthfully about it, I had to include both.

On making the poor heard

In The Hungry Tide, Kanai is someone from modern India. His world is moving so quickly. He is rich and making money. Yet, Kanai can't forget that there is this other India, represented by Fokir. It is always at the back of his mind. I think that is true of most Indians; even the Indians who drive fast cars and go to nightclubs remember and know that there is this other world out there. This often has a very good effect. One remarkable example is the Indian IT company Infosys; its founders have been exemplary in putting money into river development projects, among others. There is an awareness of this other world. Just as Indians are quick to embrace the fast-moving contemporary world, I think there is often a lingering sense that in all that we have gained, we are also losing something. Some part of us, some aspect of our lives, have also been lost. I think this is a regret, a nostalgia, that runs through many minds, not just my own. For myself, even though I'm very much a part of urban India, indeed the urban world, my mind has always been drawn to the marginal, the remote and the rural. So it came as almost a natural thing for me to want to write about these aspects, to see in what ways I could reconcile them. Kanai is a part of that experience, Piya is part of that experience (though completely separate from that world) and Fokir is part of that experience. I know many people who live there and who in some sense are content with the life that the Sundarbans offers them.

In the novel, Fokir never forgets that Kanai is a representative of the world that destroyed his world. Whenever I have been in the Sundarbans, one of the things that really sensitizes someone to the nature of the moral dilemmas that we face is when people come and say, "Oh, for you, we are just pet food, aren't we? The tigers are your pets and we are just their food". In fact, the scale of debt in the Sundarbans is not trivial. According to the Forest Department in the Indian Sundarbans, tigers kill several dozens of people each year. Anthropologists there think that the figure is massively underreported, that as many as 200 people are killed there each year. If you include the Bangladeshi Sundarbans, that number may well be 300, perhaps even 500, killed every year. In any other part of the world, this would be considered a major national problem. So this is just an index of the fact that the impoverished people dying are extremely poor and don't have a voice. They can't make themselves heard and understood, and that is why we pay no attention to their plight. Incredible.

The Hungry Tide is set in the extensive archipelago of tiny islands and labyrinthian waterways known as the Sundarbans. Stretching from India to Bangladesh, this little-known tide country offers no visible borders between the river and the sea, and sometimes not even between land and water. In this desolate and mysterious place of mangroves and mudflats, the poor villagers lead a precarious existence. The Hungry Tide involves Piya, a young Indian-American cetologist, who has come to the Sundarbans to study a rare species of the river dolphin. There, she meets Kanai, a Bengali businessman living in Delhi, who acts as her translator, and Fokir, an illiterate fisherman, who guides her through the dangerous waters. The novel dynamically weaves their stories together with the environmental and political history of this isolated region.

RELATED ARTICLE: Book Excerpt

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Houghton Mifflin, Boston/New York, 2005).

Nirmal and Nilima Bose first came to Lusibari in search of a safe haven. This was in 1950 and they had been married less than a year....

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For their first few months on the island they were in a state akin to shock. Nothing was familiar; everything was new. What little they knew of rural life was derived from the villages of the plains: the realities of the tide country were of a strangeness beyond reckoning. How was it possible that these islands were a mere sixty miles from home and yet so little was known about them? How was it possible that people spoke so much about the immemorial traditions of village India and yet no one knew about this other world, where it was impossible to tell who was who, and what the inhabitants' castes and religions and beliefs were?...

The destitution of the tide country was such as to remind them of the terrible famine that had devastated Bengal in 1942--except that in Lusibari hunger and catastrophe were a way of life. They learned that after decades of settlement, the land had still not been wholly leached of its salt. The soil bore poor crops and could not be farmed all year round. Most families subsisted on a single daily meal. Despite all the labor that had been invested in the embankments, there were still periodic breaches because of floods and storms: each such inundation rendered the land infertile for several years at a time. The settlers were mainly of farming stock who had been drawn to Lusibari by the promise of free farmland. Hunger drove them to hunting and fishing, and the results were often disastrous. Many died of drowning, and many more were picked off by crocodiles and estuarine sharks. Nor did the mangroves offer much of immediate value to human beings--yet thousands risked death in order to collect meager quantities of honey, wax, firewood and the sour fruit of the kewra tree. No day seemed to pass without news of someone being killed by a tiger, a snake or a crocodile.

As for the school, it had little to offer other than its roof and walls. The estate was almost bankrupt. Although funds were said to have been earmarked for clinics, education and public works, very little evidence was ever seen of these. The rumor was that this money went to the estate's managers, and the overseers' henchmen savagely beat settlers who protested or attempted to resist. The methods were those of a penal colony and the atmosphere that of a prison camp.

They had not expected a utopia, but neither had they expected such destitution. Paced with this situation they saw what it really meant to ask a question such as "What is to be done?"

Nirmal, overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin's pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers. Nilima, ever practical, began to talk to the women who gathered at the wells and the ponds.

Within a few weeks of her arrival in Lusibari, Nilima noticed that a startlingly large proportion of the island's women were dressed as widows. These women were easily identified because of their borderless white saris and their lack of adornment: no bangles or vermilion. At the wells and by the ghats there often seemed to be no one who was not a widow. Making inquiries, she learned that in the tide country girls were brought up on the assumption that if they married, they would be widowed in their twenties--their thirties if they were lucky. This assumption was woven, like a skein of dark wool, into the fabric of their lives: when the menfolk went fishing it was the custom for their wives to change into the garments of widowhood. They would put away their marital reds and dress in white saris; they would take off their bangles and wash the vermilion from their heads. It was as though they were trying to hold misfortune at bay by living through it over and over again. Or was it merely a way of preparing themselves for that which they knew to be inevitable?...