History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

7. Amitav Ghosh’s“ Imagined Communities”: The Hungry Tide as a Possible “Other” World

95 7 Amitav Ghosh’s “Imagined Communities” The Hungry Tide as a Possible “Other” World FEDERICA ZULLO I’ th’ Commonwealth I would (by contraries) Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit: no name of magistrate: Letters should not be known: riches, poverty, And use of service, none: contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none: No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: No occupation, all men idle, all: And women too, but innocent and pure: No sovereignty. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest ARCADIA, OR THE utopian Paradise dreamed by Gonzalo in The Tempest, does not exactly reflect the reality of the island on which Prospero, Caliban, Miranda, and all the other characters happen to live in the well-known Shakespearian play. Gonzalo, the loyal and ingenuous king’s counselor, seems to quote from Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, especially regarding the “noble savages” and the cannibals. As we can read from the epigraph, an ideal community of human beings should not know anything about original sin, wars, violence, work, enemies, masters, and servants; nature has to be good, as well as its inhabitants. However, Shakespeare did not believe in this happy, antifeudal island, since the world he created was in perfect correspondence with the reality around him at that time. The playwright did not agree 96 FEDERICA ZULLO with the myth of the noble savage, nor with the idea of the great and honorable king. Folly, betrayal, and lies characterize the events narrated in The Tempest, a work that reflects a specific historical period, the early seventeenth century, an epoch dominated by the terror of the Church, the failure of Renaissance Humanism, and the new order imposed by money and trade. Prospero ’s island mirrors the complexity of the real world; it is very close to the inland and, in a way, it is also its direct expression. Thus, I take this literary example, that is the idea of a “suspended” place which seems so detached from the ordinary world but in the end is, on the contrary, deeply inscribed in the social structures of its times, in order to introduce the analysis of some fictional strategies concerned with the imagining of communities of individuals that belong to our present time. Therefore , I wish to investigate one of the most recent works by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, published in 2004, since it appears as a valid and profound examination of the complex relations between man and nature, man and community, the nation and its boundaries and fractures. All of Amitav Ghosh’s work, since late 1980s up to now, has been concentrating on the questions of identity, frontiers, the crossing of national boundaries, and the lives of displaced families and communities throughout different countries in the world. He has always tried to overcome the East/West dichotomy and has focused on the critical examination of an increasingly connected but not homogeneous world. As an Indian author, he can be associated with the so-called writers of the eighties, the group of young authors writing in English that followed the great impulse given by Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre and reinterpreted India’s history and past(s) using innovative and original fictional devices. Their literary productions have immerged into India’s cultures and traditions, placing them in the globalism of our times, and have found interconnections between past and present, colonialism, imperialism, and the post-independence years. Ghosh has always been critical toward fixed categories of belonging and rigid interpretations of historical events; his personal search for “locatedness ” is continuously displaced by the experiences of migration and hybridity that have marked his own life and also his characters’ adventures in the novels. Thanks to his work as an anthropologist, journalist, and fiction writer, the reader is able to enter either the diasporic world of Indian intellectuals suspended between Eastern and Western cultures, the social conditions of subaltern workers in South Asia and the Middle East, as well as the transnational communities of mixed ethnic and religious groups that have encountered each other in the course of history. These communities are usually constructed by the author outside the boundaries of official nations and disturb, in different ways, the arbitrary borders that have been imposed by political and governmental strategies, Amitav Ghosh’s “Imagined Communities” 97 especially in the aftermath of Independence in the former colonies of the Empires. One of the...