RAJENDER KAUR

"Home Is Where the Oracella Are":

Toward a New Paradigm of Transcultural

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Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh's
The Hungry Tide

Among recent fiction to have emerged from South Asia, perhaps none is
more charged with a keener environmental awareness, and none more
self-consciously suffused with ecological terms that complement the
over-determined debate over "development" in the postcolonial Indian
context, than Amitav Ghosh's remarkable novel The Hungry Tide (2004).
An uncannily prescient text, its very title can be seen to portend the
calamitous Tsunami of December 2004, which devastated thousands
of lives and decimated the homes and properties of millions of others
living in the coastal communities of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. It
is no surprise that Ghosh should have been amongst the earliest media
personalities to reach the scene of the disaster in the Andaman and
Nicobar Islands, amongst the worst afflicted Tsunami sites in India,
from where he dispatched the journalistic essay, "The Town by the
Sea." Originally published in The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, and
then widely disseminated across the internet, this report has now been
compiled in the collection of occasional non-fiction pieces by Ghosh,
Incendiary Circumstances (2005).
Ghosh's "The Town by the Sea" remains one of the more incisive
and ecologically sensitive overviews of the Tsunami disaster. The essay
situates the Tsunami within the larger backdrop of the colonial history
of the region and its conflicted legacy of exploitative environmental
policies. Aside from the compassionate reporting that characterizes
the essay, what is especially notable is its sharp critique of the environ-
mentally blind policies of habitation and development followed by the
postcolonial Indian state. Oblivious to the treacherous nature of the
stormy seas of this region, the Indian government allocated beach-front

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14.1 (Summer 2007)

Copyright © 2007 by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
126 ISLE

property to mainlanders following the European model, ironically re-

calling, as Ghosh caustically notes, "the smiling cornices of the French
Riviera and the coastline of Italy" ("Town" 6). Ghosh begins his report
on the impact of the Tsunami with a historically layered perspective,
a discursive mode that is a hallmark of all his work, highlighting the
"political and geological fault lines" along which the Andaman and
Nicobar islands are located ("Town" 2). Politically, the islands are
administered by the Indian mainland (as a "Union Territory" they
have less democratic representation than other states in India), though

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geologically, they lie just beyond the Indian tectonic plate, being closer
to Burma at their northernmost point and to Aceh in Indonesia at their
southernmost tip. In noting the authoritarian colonialist relationship of
the Indian state to its peripheries, such as the Andaman and Nicobar
Islands, home, at one time, to some of the world's most insulated tribal
populations, Ghosh underscores an important insight into the conflict
between "the hurried history of the emergent nation [that has] collided
here with the deep time of geology" ("Town" 2).
Ghosh's language draws strategic attention to the contrast between
the often short-sighted, hurly burly of postcolonial politics and the more
unhurried "deep time of geology." Conceptualized by James Hutton in
Theory of the Earth (1795) and by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geol-
ogy (1830-33), "deep time" is an evocative concept in geology that can
provide productive insights into re-visioning the ecological turf wars
between the North and the Global South that result from globaliza-
tion and the troubled legacy of colonialism.1 By foregrounding the
unimaginably vast vistas of the earth's history, both in terms of time
and space, "deep time" provides a salutary distancing perspective
on contemporary political conflicts and hostilities. But on the other
hand, "deep time," with its metaphorical opacity, can also prove to be,
as Paul Gillen in "Traveling in Deep Time: La Langue Duree in Aus-
tralian History" so passionately argues, yet another totalizing master
narrative that suppresses material histories of oppression wreaked by
colonialism in favor of the "long view" that emphasizes human folly.
It has the effect of humbling human aspirations, including resistance
against exploitation.2 Even so, the insights of "deep time" highlight the
authoritarian excesses of postcolonial states like India, as in the case
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where the Tsunami helped to
underline the essential geological contiguity of South and South East
Asia, despite the region being parceled across so many different politi-
cal regimes.3
I argue that The Hungry Tide evokes at once both the trans-historical
vistas of "deep time" and the mutability of nature through its inspired
choice of the Sundarbans as the locale of the novel. The distinctive
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 127

topography of the Sundarbans, an immense archipelago of islands,

some of which are large and have lasted for millennia, while other,
smaller ones, are daily destroyed and washed into being, effectively
embodies the duality of nature in its transhistoricity and mutability.
The indigenous fisher folk of the islands bridge the transcendent and
poetic aspects of this ecosystem. These are people like Fokir, who live
in intimate contact with the rhythms of the tide country, alert to the
man-eating Royal Bengal Tiger, native to the region, and the devastat-
ing tidal storms that can strike with little warning.

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Deep time necessarily foregrounds a broader, overarching, biotic
horizon that is rarely if ever mentioned in colonial discourse and
against which postcolonial politics should be viewed. In gesturing to
the ecological and the environmental, Ghosh foregrounds their increas-
ing global importance as "geogreen" is soon becoming the new mantra
of environmental responsibility that is sensitive to the diverse politi-
cal, economic, and cultural histories of nations across the world.4 It is
precisely this enlightened perspective—at once exquisitely historical
in outlook and yet attentive to the nuanced complexities of contempo-
rary global capitalism, and a world increasingly bridged by extensive
transnational networks—that animates The Hungry Tide.
In this respect, Ghosh's choice of the Sundarbans—a vast salt-re-
sistant mangrove forest in the Indo-Gangetic delta situated in the Bay
of Bengal that lies between the borders of India and Bangladesh—as
the locale of The Hungry Tide is brilliantly apt.5 The Sundarbans are a
unique biotic space, a chain of islands that are constantly transformed
by the daily ebb and flow of tides that create and decimate, at aber-
rant intervals, whole islands and eco-niches that struggle to adapt to
the shifting levels of salinity in the water. The Sundarbans' unique
microculture and ecosystem situated across the borders of India and
Bangladesh accentuates the violent history of contested national bound-
aries in the Indian subcontinent. The Hungry Tide gestures to a new
kind of postcolonial ethics, one that has transcended the Manichean
perspective that defined earlier colonialist thinking. The novel moves
us beyond narrow nationalistic, ethnic, and racial binaries to embrace
an ecological perspective that is compelled by the understanding that
we live, not in many, but in one world.6
It is with such an understanding that Piyali Roy, an American cetolo-
gist of Indian origin, on a research trip to study the marine mammals
of the Sundarbans in India, asserts that "Home is where the Oracella
are" (400). In proclaiming kinship with the Oracella dolphins (a fast
disappearing species of freshwater dolphin that inhabits the river sys-
tems of the Far East) rather than the expected emotional kinship with
her ethnic Bengali heritage, Piya declares, in effect, a new paradigm
128 ISLE

for transcultural ecocritical engagement that stems from professional

commitment and her impassioned interest in environmental issues.
Although she starts out by being exclusively interested in her research
project alone, her gradual involvement with Fokir, the boatman who
guides her to the tidal pools which the Oracella visit, and the fisher folk
of Lusibari leads her to make an ethical commitment to the underclasses
of the tide country. Piya comes to see the Oracella not in isolation as
a particular marine sub-species to be saved at any cost but as a vital
part of the larger ecosphere of the Sundarbans where the impoverished

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indigenous human community live equally threatened lives. Through
her, the text seems to advocate a broader ecological agenda that is sen-
sitive to the symbiotic codependency of the human and non-human
creatures that inhabit the particular bio-space of the Sundarbans.
The Hungry Tide, structured by the narratives of Kanai, a New
Delhi-based linguistic entrepreneur who runs an accent-training work-
shop for Call Center interns; Piya; and the journal entries of Nirmal,
Kanai's idealistic uncle, is intertextual in its deployment of the tropes
of travel literature, scientific and ethnographic quests, and the cetologi-
cal framework of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In doing so, the novel
acknowledges its narrative precursors that exemplify not just the long
history of colonial conquest but also its own entrenchment in, and
examination of, a far more insidious neocolonial globalization as seen
in the phenomenon of linguistic entrepreneurs like Kanai. But it must
also be said that Kanai's business operations include translation and
interpretation services, and, as such, they help bridge communication
and cultural gaps created by transcultural networks. In such a scenario,
the limited assertion of kinship with the Oracella articulated by Piya
and the urgent task of transliterating the journal of a family idealist,
even if it is a temporary break from the money-making business of ac-
cent modification for the global market place, are small but sure steps
in a cautious optimism that binds the ecological, familial, and global
capitalist worlds together.
Piya's is an enlightened environmentalism that is sensitive to the
material and cultural interests of the local, and it pays respect to the
intimate local knowledge of the fishermen in accomplishing her ceto-
logical project:
"And for myself I know that I don't want to do the kind of work that
places the burden of conservation on those who can least afford it. If I
was to take on a project here I'd want it to be done in consultation with
the fishermen who live in these parts." (397)

Piya's collaborative vision echoes the most recent trends in ecological

discourse toward "community based conservation" where the local
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 129

community is "reimagined as culturally marked, and naturally wise"

(Tsing 163)7 Further, in emphasizing the critical importance of class
and economic status in conservation programs, Piya articulates one of
the key conflicts of the environmental debate between wealthy Western
nations and postcolonial states like India where conservation projects
are seen, by the peasants and Adivasi populations they affect the most,
as elitist and blind to the livelihoods and living habitats of the most
vulnerable citizens of the state.
The competing claims of ethical ecological commitment versus so-

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cial justice and human welfare have a checkered history in the Indian
subcontinent. The Hungry Tide tackles this conflict directly through
its problematization of one such marquee project of the Indian state
that won it laurels in the international environmentalist arena: Proj-
ect Tiger. A conservation project spearheaded by Indira Gandhi, the
longest ruling Prime Minister of the country, Project Tiger was also a
means of winning international approval and raising India's profile and
diplomatic strength as an enlightened nation. But, as Paul Greenough
astutely observes in "Pathogens, Pugmarks, and Political 'Emergency':
the 1970s South Asian Debate on Nature," a provocative article that
lumps small pox, repressive family planning policies, and wildlife
conservation projects together, Indira Gandhi was equally aware of
the patronizing attitude of those advocating conservation to the third
world.8 In her 1972 keynote address to a UN conference, entitled "Man
and Environment," Gandhi lambasted the West for its pious lecturing
to the underdeveloped world on environment issues:

The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty [...]. It

is an oversimplification to blame all the world's problems on increas-
ing population. Countries with but a small fraction of the world's
population consume bulk of the world's production of minerals, fossil
fuels and so on [...]. There are grave misgivings that the discussion of
ecology may be designed to distract attention from the problems of war
and poverty, (qtd. in Greenough 224)

The mangrove forests of the Sundarbans that Ghosh animates

with such scientific detail in The Hungry Tide also happen to be one
of the most populous habitats of the Royal Bengal Tiger and are thus
a key showpiece in Project Tiger's conservation efforts to save the
animal from extinction in India.9 One bloody but little known histori-
cal incident that foregrounds the conflict between the environmental
agenda of the state and the right to social justice that The Hungry Tide
dramatizes is the 1977 siege of Morichjhapi, located in the heart of
the Sundarbans. Morichjhapi encapsulates the bloody history of the
Indian subcontinent that relates directly to its colonial past: the Parti-
130 ISLE

tion of India in 1947 and the political unviability of the hastily patched
together nation of Pakistan that was carved out from India. Separated
as its Eastern and Western wings were by the vast expanse of India in
the middle, East Pakistan, culturally and geographically contiguous
with West Bengal, broke away from Pakistan to form the new state of
Bangladesh in 1971.
Morichjhapi is the site of a bloody conflict between refugees from
East Pakistan who, unhappy with their forcible settlement in Madhya
Pradesh, a landlocked (and hence culturally and ecologically alien)

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state in Central India, by the Indian government, chose to march back
and resettle in an unoccupied island in the Sundarbans. Nirmal, the
visionary Marxist uncle of Kanai, sees the collaborative community
efforts of the refugees to organize themselves and work towards a bet-
ter life for themselves as Utopian:
Saltpans had been created, tube wells had been planned, water had
been dammed for rearing fish [...]. It was an astonishing spectacle—
as though an entire civilization had sprouted suddenly in the mud.

Was it possible, even, that in Morichjhapi had been planted the seeds
of what might become if not a Dalit nation, then at least a safe haven,
a true freedom for the country's most oppressed? (190-191)

However, the resettlement project of the refugees is doomed since the

islands, serving as the habitat of the tiger, are protected conservation
lands of the state. The Indian state retaliated against the open defi-
ance of the prohibition against human habitation of these islands by
brutally repressing the refugees' revolt. The government laid siege to
Morichjhapi and eventually evicted the refugees after a bloody show-
down by the armed forest reserve guards. Nirmal's diary records the
despairing musings of Kusum, Fokir's mother, and one of the leaders
of the revolt, on the siege of the island:
"the worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit there help-
less, listening to the policemen making their announcements, hearing
them say that our lives, our existence, was worth less than dirt or dust.
This island has got to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its
animals, it is part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save ti-
gers, which is paid for by people from all around the world.' [...]. Who
are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are
willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their
names? Where do they live, these people, do they have children [...]?
As I thought of these things it seemed to me that this whole world has
become a place for animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 131

just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from
the water and soil." (261-262)
Kusum articulates, forcefully and poignantly, the voice of the marginal-
ized underclasses who ultimately bear the unjust burden of the state's
environmental agenda at the cost of their very lives and livelihoods.
She indicts the irrational logic of an environmental program, largely
funded by the West, in which human beings living on the edge of
survival, like these refugees of Morichjhapi, become the expendable

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species in favor of the treasured tiger.10
While the ecological project to save the tiger from extinction is laud-
able, it is compromised, or at least complicated, in the context of the
Sundarbans by the grave danger to human life posed by its man-eating
tendencies. The Hungry Tide cites studies that speculate over how "the
peculiar conditions of tidal ecology in which large parts of the forests
were subjected to daily submersions [...] raised the animals' threshold
of aggression by washing away their scent markings and confusing
their territorial instincts"; this erasure resulted in the tigers' propensity
to attack human beings (140). Nilima, Kanai's pragmatic aunt, cites
both current and historical statistics to underscore the colossal toll of
human life taken by the tigers at the rate of at least two people each
day killed over the course of the last hundred years.11
The debate over the sanctity of human life versus the struggle to
save the tiger from extinction is dramatized in a climactic moment of
self-discovery that illuminates the gap between the indigenous Fokir
and Piya, the cosmopolitan marine biologist, despite their apparent
comradeship in the quest of the Oracella. It comes in a nightmarish
scene where they stumble upon a violent mob in a village that has just
trapped a man-eating tiger and is bent on killing it with staves and
sharpened bamboo poles. While Piya is aghast at the bloodthirstiness
of the villagers and the plight of the trapped animal, Fokir joins the
murderous fray, aligning himself, in an atavistic response, with the
hapless fishermen who have lost many lives and precious livestock to
the tiger. When Piya confides her bewilderment at Fokir's actions to
Kanai, he counters, "'But what did you expect? [...] Did you expect he
was some kind of grass root ecologist? He's just a fisherman who kills
animals for a living'" (297). This is not just the sour-faced response
of man who perceives Fokir as his rival in love but also a sharp jibe
at Western scientists like Piya, who romanticize the subaltern native
and thus are ignorant of the lived realities of their lives. For Fokir, a
spiritual relationship with the environment goes hand in hand with
the battle to survive, even if it means killing an animal which might
be on the endangered species list of the World Wildlife Fund. In reit-
erating a variation of the point that Kusum had made earlier, Kanai
132 ISLE

intimates the text's wider definition of the environment or bio-space

as one in which the human is part of the ecological and not outside or
opposed to it.
The Hungry Tide seems to embrace an approach where it presents
the livelihood versus ecology debate from different angles while at
once laying bare the process of knowledge-making and, in effect, the
discursive framework of the environmental debate.12 To this end the
novel presents the perspectives of the committed Western environmen-
talist Piya, the pragmatic vanguard intellectual and grassroots activist

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Nilima, the unsentimental local fisherman in tune with the rhythms
of nature Fokir, and the angry villagers impacted by the predatory
man-eating tiger. What is remarkable about the novel's narrative power
is its empathy that animates not just these different viewpoints but
also the unique biotic space that is the Sundarbans in all its complex
verisimilitude and beauty, including the playful Oracella dolphins and
the majestic tiger. In "The Killing" section of the text that depicts the
episode mentioned in the preceding paragraph, we are educated about
all points of view, including the villagers' perspective that the tiger
is invading the human turf, making repeated forays into the village,
because it wishes to die.13
In their introductory essay to Nature in the Global South: Environ-
mental Projects in South And South East Asia, Paul Greenough and Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing argue that we need to move beyond a
blinkered conservation biology that views each nonhuman species in its
own autonomous evolutionary space outside human histories; in other
cases, it requires moving beyond a narrow development sociology that
imagines only the welfare of human beings, using nonhuman species
as their always available and willing servants. (14)

They make a passionate argument "that commitments to justice, di-

versity, and well being are historically specific and must be regularly
stretched, transformed, and challenged if they are to be of any use in
making a livable world" (14). It is precisely such a broad definition of
ecological responsiveness that The Hungry Tide amplifies through the
example of Piya, who matures from being a blinkered conservation
biologist focused only on studying the Oracella to a more progressive
environmentalist. Her environmental responsiveness now goes hand
in hand with her humaneness as she comes to both respect and em-
brace the locals of the Sundarbans as knowledgeable partners in her
ecological agenda.
In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh investigates not just the material as-
pects of postcolonial conceptions of ecology in the subcontinent but
also the discursive makings of ecology as a discipline in the efforts
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 133

of sundry British officers' to study the flora and fauna of the region.
In this effort, the text traces the little known history of nineteenth-
century Calcutta as a centre of cetacean zoology, locating its famed
Botanical Gardens as the place where the Gangetic Dolphin was first
identified in 1801 by William Roxburgh (226-32). It also recounts the
foolhardy attempts by another British colonialist, Lord Canning, to
create an alternative port city to Calcutta deep in the heart of the Sun-
darbans. In locating the port on the banks of the river Matla, Canning
paid little heed to the wisdom of local lore that spoke ominously of

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the destructive nature of the river. "Matla" means "mad" in Bengali,
and soon the port was laid waste in just one giant tidal wave that
decimated its well-planned buildings and lamp-lit streets (285-87).
Postcolonial nations, most of them hampered by their colonial his-
tory of environmental decimation, have been especially troubled in
negotiating equitably between the competing demands of economic
development and environmental responsiveness. The ongoing saga of
the controversy surrounding the World Bank-funded massive Sardar
Sarovar Dam bears eloquent testimony to the competing claims of de-
velopment, on the one hand, and the claims of conservation policy and
environmental justice on the other.14 It is only with irony that one can
now refer to dams as the "temples of modern India" as Nehru, India's
first Prime Minister, was apt to do in the heady fervor that proceeded
from the successful harnessing of the Sutlej river in the Bhakra Nan-
gal dam in the Punjab in the 1960s. There has been just suspicion of
the Western environmental lobby in the wake of such disasters as the
Bhopal Gas leak in the multinational Union Carbide's facility in the mid
1980s. But, equally, there have been environmental movements rooted
in indigenous customs and rituals, such as the Chipko movement, to
save the forest cover in the lower Himalayan belt.15
Most postcolonial nations in the fifties and sixties adopted develop-
ment to transform themselves economically in an effort to leave behind
their colonial pasts. Unfortunately, while they rejected their colonial
histories, they unreflexively embraced models of economic development
that marginalized the local and subaltern in favor of the metropolitan, a
top down perspective on development that was patronizing at best and
ruthlessly exploitative at worst. In the 1990s, the discourse shifted to
sustainable development, and tribal and peasant movements resisting
the destruction of their livelihoods and habitats became more com-
mon.16 The Hungry Tide reflects the current discourse in international
ecological projects that are based on dialogue and collaboration with
indigenous populations. These populations are seen neither as impedi-
ments to environmental responsibility nor as exoticized mystics, but
134 ISLE

as knowledgeable equals in the struggle to preserve the biodiversity

of the earth as a materially and ethically urgent task.
While recent discourse on the environment in India has been
marked by the familiar trope of romanticizing a pre-colonial past of
supposed harmony with the environment versus skepticism against
this thinking, a recent proposal by Ramachandra Guha and Madhav
Gadgil attempts to move the discourse forward by positing an alterna-
tive development paradigm that suggests, among other things, "a fruit-
ful utilization of the traditional knowledge and wisdom possessed by

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ecosystem people" (125). This alternative paradigm consists of a series
of pragmatic measures that include implementation of information
flow and checks to ensure social equality. In such a context there is a
growing sense that issues of environmental justice can only be better
understood in relation to larger social and socio-discursive concerns.
The anti-colonial fervor that animated postcolonial texts of an ear-
lier generation has shifted to self-reflexive soul searching that turns
the focus inwards. The Hungry Tide foregrounds the predicaments of
postcolonial modernity. It recounts the violence perpetrated by the
Indian state in its disastrous handling of the issue of environmental
responsibility versus the rights of the local populations to land and
economic freedom in Morichjhapi, the ill-fated site of the evacuation of
thousands of fisherman, in favor of ecological preservation. It sketches
with a resigned hopefulness the contemporary scenario of NGOS, like
the one led by Nilima, sharing the burden of the state in providing
basic health care and education, even as it details the corruption of
petty government functionaries. But most of all, the text holds up the
Sunderbans as a model of the syncretic sensibility, exemplified in the
legend of Bon Bibi, woven out of living in the special economic and cul-
tural biosystem situated between the borders of India and Bangladesh.
According to local legend, Bon Bibi herself is a deity of Middle- Eastern
Islamic origins, but over time her worshippers have come to embrace
Hindu ritual practice as well. Thus, for instance, Piya is surprised to find
Fokir, a Hindu, singing out an Arabic prayer at the shrine of Bon Bibi.
The local population's devout belief in Bon Bibi is a case of the cultural
syncreticism reflecting the ecological syncreticism of the Sunderbans
itself. In this context, the text's idealization of Nirmal, Kanai's uncle,
comes closest to an inclusive visionary ecological perspective that is
aligned with social justice. It is Kanai who offers us a new definition
of the kind of historical materialism exemplified by Nirmal as one in
which "everything which existed was inter-connected: the trees, the
sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature" (283).
Fifty years after the Bandung Conference helped forge the modern
postcolonial politics of race, religion, and nationalism, a prescient novel
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 135

like Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide underscores the need for a rethink-
ing of the idealized internationalism of that era. It urges, instead, an
embrace of a new kind of transcultural engagement that bridges the
local and global, past and present, the scientific and mythic, and that
transcends the caste, class, and religious divides that have hitherto
hampered visions of global solidarity. And it does so by interrogating
with an open-minded rigorousness, naive idealism, cynical disengage-
ment, and a pragmatic activism, exemplified in the characters of Piya
and Nirmal, Kanai, and Moyna and Nilima in the text. The only person

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who seems to exist in dialogic relation with all these different sensi-
bilities at once is the illiterate boatman, Fokir, who lives in idealized
harmony with the rhythms of the tide country. He, also, to my mind,
exposes the limitations of this Utopian global vision in dramatizing
the vulnerability of the underclasses on whose sacrifice is built this
vision of global solidarity.
The Hungry Tide complicates the dialectic between the cosmopolitan
and indigenous by exploring, in a self-reflexive, interrogative mode, the
physical and psychic spaces that connect contemporary global networks
of power and knowledge production to the atavistic responses of the
individual that lay bare millennia-old privileges of class, caste, and
metropolitan location sedimented under the veneer of cosmopolitan
urbaneness and geniality.17 The text connects language, history, fam-
ily, and vocation in an intricate transcultural network undergirded
as much by contemporary realities of the global marketplace as by
indigenous folklore and myth that connect faith to science. Thus the
tide people's belief in Bon Bibi, a syncretic deity that brings Islamic
and Hindu religious practices together, is connected to the Oracella
that Piya is researching. The Oracella, or "Shushuk," are the messen-
gers of Bon Bibi that only the faithful can espy. The dolphins are also,
in an alternative legend, the gift of Tethys, the Greek Goddess of the
Sea, to her twin children Ganga and Sindhu, as reminders of the vast
ocean that used to cover the region before the Himalayas rose up as
the Indian Subcontinent fused with Asia in a vast movement of tec-
tonic plates. The narrative's complex interweaving of these myths and
legends from different cultures into one common heritage of human-
ity to mirror the distant geological era before the different continents
were configured gestures, in effect, to the "deep time" of geology. But
because The Hungry Tide is able to invest each of these different myths
with their own distinctiveness, while contextualizing them within a
socio-cultural and ecological story, as it were, of the Sunderbans, the
"deep time" perspective reconfigures the relationship between the
cosmopolitan and indigenous. In this way the text is able to situate
136 ISLE

Piya, Kanai, and Fokir alongside a less oppositional scale of cosmopoli-

tanism and indigeneity.18
But this is not the only way The Hungry Tide connects geology and
myth to the present vocations of both the indigenous and the cosmo-
politan as Fokir and Piya, in their different ways, are connected to
the Oracella. It also foregrounds complex issues of conservation and
development and exposes the way in which cosmopolitan notions of
conservation conflict with the concerns of indigenous peoples hounded
out of their homes by repressive state agencies that are, in turn, moti-

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vated by the national image in the international community that funds
conservation organizations. However, the narrative goes beyond tak-
ing sides in the conservation debate over the Bengal tiger. Instead, the
tiger becomes a Blakean archetype of an awesome natural force that
is amoral as much as the people who are pitted against it in an eternal
battle of survival that expands our understanding of the indigenous
and cosmopolitan beyond socialized spaces to hint at the elemental.
The Hungry Tide connects an array of cosmopolitan characters, a global
entrepreneur, an American marine biologist, a failed Marxist vision-
ary, and a pragmatic social worker to indigenous diehards who cling
to an age-old way of life in a tangled narrative of lives that are framed
within the text's vastly ecological concerns.
Fokir and his people continue to reflect the suffering underside of
global collaborative networks that capitalize on local knowledge and
labor for their own ends without appreciably improving the lives of
those on whom they profit. While he is an idealized presence in the
text, Fokir functions, ultimately, also as the symbolic sacrifice that en-
ables the transformation of Kanai and Piya. He leads them to reconnect
with their lost heritages and lost ethical and human moorings. Kanai
reestablishes the family connection with his Uncle through translating
his journal, and commits himself to aiding his Aunt Nilima actively
in her NGO work running a hospital in Lusibari. Piya decides to stay
back to complete her work on the Sunderbans' dolphin, despite the
setback of the lost data, and in the process commits herself to raising
funds for the poor fishermen, whose lives have been decimated by the
tidal storm.
The Hungry Tide offers different possibilities of relating to nature,
through a pursuit of knowledge of nature's creatures, as Piya does, or
more elementally, through living with its rhythms through the body,
as Fokir does. It also offers different views of nature, ranging from the
pastoral and idyllic—as when Piya sees the OcaceJJa playing gently with
each other in the shallow tidal pools—to the violent (in the Tennysonian
sense of being "red in tooth and claw")—as when the tidal storm claims
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 137

Fokir's life and destroys many villages. But more abiding than all these
is the sense of nature as ever changing and mutable.19
In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh seems to offer a way of thinking beyond
the East and West divide and between the subject-object duality of
western philosophy which is presented most strikingly in the tidal
storm scene where Fokir saves Piya's life in a sacrificial embrace. In
Nature: Course Notes from the College of France, Merleau-Ponty empha-
sizes the body as the focus of world experience and the "flesh" as the
pre-reflective site at which body and world blend.20 In one of his last

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lectures, "Nature and Logos: The Human Body," Merleau-Ponty argues,
"[O]ur embodiment is not just a contingent fact accompanying our
consciousness, nor is a living body the dumb mechanism Cartesian
science would have us believe: human being is not animality (in the
sense of mechanism) + reason.—And this is why we are concerned
with the body: before being reason, humanity is another corporeity"
(208). For Merleau-Ponty, our encounter with other entities rests on a
grasp of the milieu in which things manifest themselves in our world.
In short, "the concept of Nature is always the expression of an ontol-
ogy—and its privileged expression" (Merleau-Ponty 204). This offers
ecocriticism a model that combines experiential depth with a sense of
the irreducible inter-relatedness of body and world. The deadly, yet
life-preserving embrace of Fokir and Piya, where Piya is protected
from the fury of the tidal storm by Fokir's body, embodies some of this
elemental sense of interrelatedness not just with the ecological world
but with each other. Fokir's gesture of supreme self-sacrifice crystal-
lizes Piya's commitment to the tide country people as the larger and
necessary component of her cetological project. In the end, when Piya
and Kanai commit themselves to helping the tide country people, and
to strengthening Nilima's NGO efforts to provide basic health care in
the region, social justice and ethical ecological commitment coincide
in a new ecocritical paradigm where global entrepreneurs and cetolo-
gists can become conscientious collaborators with local underclasses
towards mutually beneficial goals.
In keeping with its historically-layered perspective, The Hungry Tide
is cautious about the homogenizing possibilities of such a vision. Subtly,
it negotiates between the Utopian and the totalitarian by asserting the
limits of translation and hence the many possibilities of misunderstand-
ing the abuse of trust and power that exist in transcultural endeavors
of the ecological sort. In fact, it foregrounds Project Tiger as just one
such debacle of ecological do-goodism gone wrong. Nevertheless, The
Hungry Tide posits a cautiously Utopian or ecotopian vision of ecological
responsiveness supported by transcultural collaborative networks in
which local communities and global institutions work together towards
138 ISLE

mutually compatible goals. It suggests that a life of dignity, for even the
most marginalized citizens of the world, alongside socially responsible
environmental policies that further preserve the unique biodiversity
of our planet, need not be mutually exclusive goals.

NOTES

1. Although the concept of deep time can be traced back to Hutton and Lyell,

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Tom Griffiths in "Traveling in Deep Time: La Langue Duree in Australian His-
tory" credits the coining of the phrase "probably to the American writer, John
McPhee, who in 1981 in his remarkable study of geological thought entitled
Basin and Range used the term to discuss its suggestive parallel is with 'deep
space', which was being probed in the same generation. It is a phrase that is
very evocative of the exponentially different time scale within which we now
have to imagine life on Earth" (Griffiths).
2. In his "Response to Tom Griffiths," Paul Gillen argues that

deep time has a darker side. The nineteenth century's discovery of the
immense age of the earth and living creatures, along with the even more
unsettling discovery of relativity, is surely linked to what Lyotard long
ago (well, 20 years) called incredulity about 'the grand narratives'. And
while, as Lyotard argued, we can surely ditch the grand narratives and
keep our humanity, I am not so sure that we can ditch them and keep
the redemptive history to which many of us are attached - including
Griffiths himself, when he claims that 'deep time' provides a 'deep per-
spective on contemporary debates over population, ecological purity,
environmental limits, multiculturalism, and the legitimacy of modern
Australian settlement.

3. The ambivalence evoked by the concept of deep time can be gauged by

its discussion in the works of Tom Griffiths and Stephen Jay Gould. While
Griffiths acknowledges the apparent contrast of deep time with "dreamtime"
of the aborigines of Australia, in that the former is a linear master narrative
while the latter is cyclical and horizontal, he also argues that, ultimately, as
deep time is so impossible to comprehend, it negates the very things it seeks
to represent and hence becomes dreamlike, gesturing to the poetic and mythic
that indigenous imaginations divine as essential in their understanding of
the earth (Griffiths).
4. The word is borrowed from Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Pu-
litzer Prize winning columnist. He issues a call for a government "geo-green"
strategy to preserve the environment and natural resources. See the NYT
website for articles by Friedman on this issue.
5. The Sundarbans delta is the largest mangrove forest in the world. It lies
at the mouth of the Ganges and is spread across areas of Bangladesh and West
Bengal, India. "Sundarbans" is believed to mean "beautiful forests," taking
its name from the proliferating "sundari" or "sundry" tree (Heritiera fores).
Covering 10,000 square kilometers of the southern Ganges River Delta, this
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 139

marshy region stretches across both India and Bangladesh down to the Bay
of Bengal. The area is known for its wide range of fauna. The most famous
among these are the man-eating Bengal Tigers, but numerous species of birds,
spotted deer, crocodiles and snakes also inhabit it. It is estimated that there are
now 400 Bengal tigers and about 30,000 spotted deer in the area ("Sundarbans
National Park").
6.1 should hasten to add that Ghosh's ecotopian vision, suggested in Piya's
assertion "Home is where the Oracella are," is wisely and cautiously alert to
the homogenizing potential of such a belief, and this is borne out in his subtle
demonstration of the limits of translation. Piya may intuit Fokir's feelings, but

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the songs he sings are ultimately untranslatable. This is further underscored
by the text later when Piya cannot comprehend Fokir's aggression toward
the trapped man-eating tiger. I am thankful to the editors, Cara Cilano and
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, for tempering my optimistic reading of the novel with
its more sophisticated stance.
7. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's essay "Agrarian Allegory and Global
Futures," where she proposes a new model of hybridized conservation policy
that melds the divergent perspectives on peasants and tribals in environmental
circles. She sees CBC, or community based conservation projects advocated
now by international agencies, as hybrids between peasantist and tribalist
thinking. I argue that Piya, in The Hungry Tide, is proposing just such a syn-
cretic vision of CBC collaboration. (Tsing 124-169).
8. Greenough also points out that in a United Nations Conference entitled
"Man and Environment" held in Stockholm in 1972, Indira Gandhi proposed
a special "principle of wildlife conservation" that was eventually incorporated
into the Declaration of Human Environment. Greenough traces the enlightened
environmental sensibility of Gandhi but also states that she fell prey to the
pessimistic thinking that there was an unbridgeable contradiction between
conservation and development and that the "extinction of species, and pol-
lution were inevitable. Given these assumptions she took it for granted, like
colonial rulers before her that the choicest parts of nature needed protection
from tribal and land poor wretches" (Greenough 225).
9. India is custodian of more than 60 percent of the world's tigers; the total
would be lower but for Project Tiger, a chain of 25 reserves that encompass
3,000 square kilometers of closed forest, savanna, and mangrove swamp. The
Project Tiger reserves are directly administered by the states under the central
direction of the government of India and are major components in a system
of 75 national parks and 425 wildlife sanctuaries—many of which are now
part of larger "biodiversity reserves" that cover 140, 000 square kilometers or
about 4 percent of India's surface area (Greenough 209).
10. The Indian government's efforts in Project Tiger were funded by many
high profile international agencies such as the World Wild Life Fund (WWF),
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other
bilateral donors.
11. It is estimated that the tigers kill between 20-80 people every year in
the Sundarbans region (Barlow).
140 ISLE

12.1 borrow the term from Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's
introduction to their book, Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in
South and South East Asia (12).
13. Fokir and the villagers believe that "when a tiger comes into a human
settlement, it's because it wants to die" (295). Fokir's rationalization of the forays
of the tiger into the human world as a death wish functions to establish a more
mystical and personal connection between the villagers and the animal world
and thus effectively differentiates it from a scientific environmentalist view.
14. The impressive grassroots agitation, Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by
Medha Patkar, and the international publicity garnered by the involvement of

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Arundhati Roy, one of the Narmada Dam's most vocal critics, is notable in this
regard. See Dinesh d'Souza's The Narmada Damned: An Inquiry into the Politics of
Development, Roy's The Cost of Living, and Vandana Shiva's Water Wars: Privatiza-
tion, Pollution, and Profit, among the more notable voices on this issue.
15. The work of Vandana Shiva in effectively questioning the success of
the Green Revolution of the 1970s and of Arundhati Roy in problematizing
the environmental culpability of the World Bank in collusion with wrong
headed state policies, is worth reading in this regards. See The Violence of the
Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, Stolen Harvest: The
Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, and Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and
Profit. Also see Arundhati Roy's The Algebra of Infinite Injustice.
16. See the Preface and Introduction to Greenough and Tsing, eds., Nature
in the Global South for a more detailed summary of this three-part chronology
of environmental engagement (x, 5-7).
17. See the passage where Kanai's cosmopolitan mask slips when he falls
into the marshy mud lands of the islands and he finds himself shouting ob-
scenities at Fokir with all the venom of a high caste provincial: "'Shala, banchod,
Shourer bachcha.' His anger came welling up with an atavistic explosiveness,
rising from sources whose existence he would have denied: the master's sus-
picion of the menial the pride of caste, the townsmen's mistrust of the rustic;
the city's antagonism to the village. He had thought he had cleansed himself
of these sediments of the past, but the violence with which they came spewing
out of him suggested that they had only been compacted into an explosive and
highly volatile reserve" (326).
18. After all, who could be more cosmopolitan than the Bon Bibi worship-
ping fisher folks of the Sundarbans, both Muslim and Hindu alike, whose
devotion to a religious deity, whose origins are located in the Islamic Middle
East that disavows deity worship, exemplify a secularism that only the most
sophisticated can attain? They revere the Oracella, much as Piya does, not as
an endangered species, perhaps, but as messengers of the deity.
19. Dana Phillips in his article, "Ecocriticism, Literary Theory and the
Truth of Ecology," cites Donald Worster who notes that the earlier ideal of the
ecosystem as a model of unity has been replaced in recent ecological theory
by a model that emphasizes "indeterminism, instability, and constant change"
(Phillips 580). The Sundarbans exemplify change and mutability as few other
ecosystems do.
20. See Phillips for more on this connection with Merleau-Ponty's theories
and its insights into our relation with the environment.
 "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" 141

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