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The Hungry Tide

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Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986.

Piya and Kanai negotiate with Fokir and Moyna to go out for a week to survey the dolphins at Garjontola. Fokir helps Piya engage Horen to take them in his bhotbhoti, the Megha. Piya is annoyed to discover that Moyna seems to think little of her husband. As Piya makes preparations to leave, Kanai asks to go with her as a translator; Piya accepts. When Kanai tells Nilima he's going with Piya, she's concerned and feels he doesn't understand the risks. She explains that tigers kill multiple people every week. When she realizes he's romantically interested in Piya, she insists he's a predator too and tells him to be careful. Later that night, Moyna confides in Kanai that she's worried about a romantic relationship between Piya and Fokir, and she asks Kanai to intervene. Kanai tries to convince Moyna that he'd be a better partner than Fokir, which angers her. The next day, the survey party leaves Lusibari. Kanai becomes very jealous when Piya mentions that she loves working with Fokir despite the language barrier. That afternoon, the Megha's engine dies, though Horen is able to float the bhotbhoti to a village where a relative can help fix the boat. If you enjoy books by Katie Flynn and Dilly Court, you'll love Val's heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity. Read more Details Tiny Man-Eaters. Though the Bengal tigers of the Sundarbans are considered to be the same species as the Bengal tigers that populate the rest of India, they tend to be much smaller—while Bengal tigers can weigh upwards of 700 pounds, tigers from the Sundarbans have weighed in at a petite 160-330 pounds. Scientists speculate that their small size has to do with the smaller prey available in the Sundarbans, and might also suggest that they've adapted to the specifics of their mangrove forest habitat. D as, Veena. “Subaltern as Perspective.” Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Delhi: OUP, 1994. 310-24.Towards the end of his book Place: A Short Introduction (2004), the geographer Tim Cresswell focuses on two ways in which people can be deemed to be out of place. Both have to do with transgression, ways in which people cross lines—the literal meaning of transgression— and such lines, Cresswell points out, are as much socio-cultural as physical (Cresswell, Place 103). 4 Cresswell’s first focus is on out-of-place sexuality, and he cites a passage from another geographer, Michael Brown, whose book Closet Space (2000) examines the way in which gay sexuality is marginalized, but sometimes offers resistance through claiming particular spaces as its own. Brown describes a scene on a bus in Seattle, in which the heteronormative notion that all space is straight space is challenged by a gay man, who insists that a heterosexual couple who are kissing in public are out of place, while he is not. The scene takes place in a particular part of Seattle: Everyone on the bus began to grow visibly uncomfortable. After all, this was Seattle. ‘I did,’ the woman stated loud and clear, but without turning to face him. Then she whispered something inaudible to her boyfriend and they both laughed. ‘Well if you don’t like it girlfriend what the hell you doin’ up on Capitol Hill in the first place!’ (Brown 27; qtd. in Cresswell, Place 104-5). Story revolves around American born Bengali descent, Piyali Roy a.ka. Piya, a cetologist who comes to India to study the river dolphins; Foker a reticent illiterate boatman with impeccable knowledge of the tide country; Kanai the middle aged translator who thinks o Anand, Divya. “Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34.1 (March 2008): 21-44.

Quadri Ismail takes the view that this conclusion reinforces the Buddhist Sinhala nationalism that (...) Cf. Ghosh’s comments in his UN Chronicle interview: ‘In The Hungry Tide , Kanai is someone from mode (...) People are people. They make mistakes, they take the wrong decisions, they are weak. But these attributes are what makes a person unique. A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story that’s full of romance, suspense, and poetry.”— The Washington PostI'm sorry to say I could not finish this. I got about a third of the way through. I greatly enjoyed The Calcutta Chromosome and Sea of Poppies and have liked other books by this author, more or less, but this was unbearable. The setting is squalid and hellish, an island half-drowned in the mud of the Ganges delta. The characters did not interest me, and a developing romance between an Indian-American marine biologist and a Bengali fisherman seemed preposterously unlikely, although in fairness I didn't read far enough to see whether they actually got together. The author keeps harping on Bengali grievances, which are now becoming something of a pedal point in all his writing; frankly, I think it's time he took his foot off that particular pedal. It is when we do not know the other, or when we accept that the other remains unknowable to us, that the other illuminates us in some way, but with a light that enlightens us without our being able to comprehend it, to analyze it, to make it ours. The totality of the other, like that of springtime, [...] touches us beyond all knowledge, all judgement, all reduction to ourselves, [...] the other as other, remains beyond all that we can predicate of him or her. The other is never this or that that we attribute to him or her. It is in so far as the other escapes all judgement on our part that he or she emerges as you, always other and nonappropriable by I. (123-4)

When Kanai begins reading his uncle's notebook, he discovers it was written in a very short amount of time as his uncle, Nirmal, tried to fight to protect the refugees who had settled on a local island from the government's aggression. In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people collide. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, they are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea.In the novel, Fokir never forgets that Kanai is a representative of the world that destroyed his world.’ This is what happens when you have not written for years: every moment takes on a startling clarity; small things become the world in microcosm." The Sundarbans is a constantly mutating location, a region where space is reconfigured by natural forces on a daily basis as a consequence of tidal flows, and this provides Ghosh with a paradigmatic setting for a novel about the shifting dynamics of place. Like the English Fens of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) 6 and the Venice of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), the Sundarbans of The Hungry Tide is an amphibious location, an environment whose physical geography can be seen as a trope for the fact that the identities of places are not fixed and unitary. Unlike The Passion and unlike Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), where the Sundarbans is seen as a phantasmagoric ‘historyless’ (Rushdie 360) location, The Hungry Tide ’s meticulously documented details of physical and human geography make a consideration of the various ways in which the region has been and is being shaped by policy-makers and its various other stakeholders inescapable. When Kanai meets his aunt, Nilima, he finds that she is still deeply impacted by his uncle's death decades ago and that the natural landscape of the Sundarbans has already changed since his visit as a child. Furthermore, he learns that his childhood friend Kusum was killed in a 1979 massacre. Her son, Fokir, is now a fisherman with a wife, Moyna, and son of his own, Tutul. Nirmal’s notebook also underscores the novel’s emphasis on the multiplicity of ways in which places can be read. In a metafictive comment, he writes:

Roy, Anjali Gera. “Ordinary People on the Move: Subaltern Cosmopolitanisms in Amitav Ghosh’s Writings.” Asiatic 6.1 (June 2012): 32-46. One of Amitav Ghosh's best books, I would say. The setting of the book is in the 'Sundarbans' in Eastern India– a vast forest in the coastal region of the Bay of Bengal and considered one of the natural wonders of the world. There is not much of a story as such in the novel, but there are excellent characters and visual depictions of the Sundarbans. The landscape plays a prominent role in the book. One could almost breathe 'Sundarbans'. However, unlike forests in Himalayan ranges in the North, 'Sunderbans' display a certain kind of calm and beauty, but also leave a trail of heavy suffocation especially during the monsoon; they are dark, humid, uninviting and there is always a sense of danger lurking in the air. Barras, Arnaud. “The Aesthetics of the Tide: The Ecosystem as Matrix for Transculturation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Transculturation and Aesthetics: Ambivalence, Power, and Literature. Ed. Joel Kuortti . Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2015. 171-86.

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The book is definitely well-written, with interesting characters, and some pretty splendid imagery, and asks some really thought-provoking questions. Where does one draw the line between conservation and development? At what point do we prioritise about the condition that people are living in over nature. Aren't the people part of nature too, and doesn't survival of the people take precedence? The book presents a quite balanced view, with arguments from either side that make you think, and realise that the answer isn't as easy and obvious as one may think. Cf. an almost identical reference to visiting journalists [27] and a similar reference to international academics [79]. B akhtin , M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

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