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9. Language and Ethics in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
- State University of New York Press
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121 9 Language and Ethics in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh TUOMAS HUTTUNEN AS IS USUAL IN narratives by Amitav Ghosh, the three main characters of The Hungry Tide, his sixth novel, stem from varying social and linguistic backgrounds. Piya is an Indian expatriate cetologist brought up in America with practically no knowledge of Bangla or any other language spoken in India. Kanai is an upper-middle-class translator who runs his own business in Kolkata and is fluent in several languages. And Fokir is an illiterate fisherman with no knowledge of English. He comes from the Sundarbans, a large labyrinth of mangrove islands on the Bay of Bengal, which form the setting for the novel. Piya needs Fokir’s help in tracing the dolphins living in the area and Kanai, who has actually arrived to the area to collect a parcel his uncle has left for him, joins the two to work as a translator between them. Their threefold relationship gradually develops into an intricate network of need and desire. Their journey along the rivers of the Sundarbans develops into an exploration of the human mind and the functions of language as the filter through which the world is realized. Life in the area is led in the rhythm of the cycles of the moon: the tide both swallows land and creates it anew, every day. Cyclic rhythm is also applied to the narrative structure of the novel, where similar events (like for instance a visit to Garjontola, or the occurrence of a socialist enterprise in the area) seem to recur. In this novel, the human activity of weaving, an image previously used by Ghosh for the bringing together of people of different languages, religions, and social classes is replaced by natural imagery, especially by that of the mixture of fresh and salt water and their confluences , which create new kinds of life organisms. Kanai’s late uncle, Nirmal, 122 TUOMAS HUTTUNEN describes the archipelago and its beginning from the river in his diary as follows: The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, . . . others are no more than two or three kilometres long and only a few hundred meters across. Yet, each of these channels is a “river” in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in clusters of four, five or even six. . . . In the language of the place, such a confluence is spoken of as a mohona—a strangely seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement. There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. (7) The analogy between nature and the human societies living in the Sundarban area becomes even more evident in the scene where Nirmal is taken to the island of Garjontola to witness a religious ceremony. The recited mantra appears to be the story of a local deity, Bon Bibi, but the language appears to be a strange mixture of Bangla, Arabic, and Persian. Also the religious invocations turn out be a mixture. Nirmal is reminded of a Hindu puja, albeit one conducted in Allah’s name: How could it be otherwise? For this I have seen confirmed many times, that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into each other they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting of not just many rivers, but a circular roundabout people can use to pass in many directions—from country to country and even between faiths and religions. (247) In addition to varying themes introduced in the previous novels and adapting them to the new scenario, this latest narrative also continues the development of themes that have been central through all the novels by Ghosh. For instance, the quest for connections in this narrative covers the relationship of human beings to nature and animals. Another strong theme linked with that of nature and animals is the examination of the linguistic and epistemological alienation of humans from their circumstances and from one another. The capability of language to represent emotions...