Portrait of the author as an activist

Published in Today (India Today group) on August 3, 2004

The activist with a known cause is a predictable and pretentious species. But the fiction writer as a chance activist digging out a long-buried past? Deconstructing a series of events that led to one of the grossest human rights violations in the history of independent India? Sounds engaging? Well, that’s what Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is.
Ghosh, though, is not an Arundhati Roy, voicing protest against Big People subjugating Little People. He is a keen historian and anthropologist recounting, without any philosophizing whatsoever, through the private journals of his character Nirmal, a schoolteacher and a dreamy communist, the dispossession of the already dispossessed. Something that was quickly executed and quietly forgotten. Maybe because the perpetrator of the ‘crime’ was the State itself. Maybe because the victims were lower-caste Hindus (namashudras), refugees from Bangladesh who had taken refuge in Morichjhapi, located in the archipelago of islands called the Sunderbans, where their voices could be easily drowned in ‘the hungry tide’. Ghosh offers no answers.
But in the novel, the voices of the doomed come back to haunt: “The people….joined together their voices and began to shout, in unison, ‘Amra kara? Bastuhara. Who are we? We are the dispossessed…. Morichjhapi chharbona. We’ll not leave Morichjhapi, do what you may?”
The Hungry Tide is also about journeys undertaken. Not just spatial and temporal, but journeys within, like in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Journeys undertaken by Riya, a Bengali cetologist from America, to study the behaviour of rare dolphins. It is also the journey of Kanai, a Delhi-based translator, who come to visit his aunt in Lusibari in the Sunderbans. And of Nirmal, Kanai’s uncle, long dead, who was a witness to all the atrocities that took place in the name of preserving ecology in the island. The Hungry Tide is about how their lives get entwined, to be changed forever. Vintage Ghosh at his best. Read it.