Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) explores human vulnerability before the power of nature, especially that of the marginalized underclasses, raising essential questions about the tensions between traditional land use and government plans, about identity and social justice.Footnote 1 The novel is set in the Sundarban mangrove forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to a dazzling panoply of animal life. This immense area occupies approximately ten thousand square kilometers across the Indo-Gangetic Delta, transgressing the boundaries between India and Bangladesh. Here tigers kill dozens of people per year, and violent cyclones often leave hundreds of thousands dead in their wake, as occurred in 1970, 1991, and 2004.Footnote 2 In mapping out the conflict between the rights of local people and the Bengal tiger, a protected species under the Project Tiger conservation project begun in 1973,Footnote 3 which established a substantial part of the Sundarbans as a refuge, Ghosh’s novel seeks a postcolonial ethics and aesthetics that transcends the ideologies of the past, even as it cautiously evaluates the extent to which such a utopian ideal is possible.
Because it is set in a vast and biotically complex environment resistant to human mastery, The Hungry Tide may be read as elaborating the theory of the differend of Jean-François Lyotard, providing a compelling context for exploring a postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected to ethics and politics.
The novel traces the narratives of Kanai Dutt, a footloose New Delhi translator and businessman; Piyali Roy (Piya), a Bengali-American cetologist in search of the Irrawaddy, or Orcaella, dolphin native to the region; and the journal of Kanai’s uncle Nirmal, who became involved in the cause of the Morichjhapi refugees in 1979. Each is profoundly influenced by Fokir, the illiterate fisherman whose intimate knowledge of the Sundarbans informs their journeys. Through their stories, The Hungry Tide chronicles the difficulties of transitioning from the colonial past to a future that does not merely reinscribe the binary ideologies of history in a globalized neocolonial present. As Rajender Kaur argues, the novel advocates “a broader ecological agenda that is sensitive to the symbiotic codependency of the human and nonhuman creatures that inhabit the particular biospace of the Sundarbans.”Footnote 4 If, however, postcolonialism can be understood as “a code for the state of undecidability in which the culture of colonialism continues to resonate in what was supposed to be its negation,”Footnote 5 it requires that our understanding of the relationships between aesthetics and ethics, politics and nature, should evolve to provide appropriate frameworks for negotiating rapidly changing communities under pressure from both global market forces and increased environmental stressors.
Those stressors include the urgent crisis of global climate change. The Sundarbans are especially exposed to the projected threat of sea rise,Footnote 6 and the poverty of a significant percentage of Bangladesh’s population means that they, like the nonhuman residents of the region, may become climate refugees or suffer large-scale demise.Footnote 7The Hungry Tide, although not explicitly about climate change, nevertheless illustrates the profound vulnerability of the region and the conflicts that emerge when seeking solutions for problems that are at once political and environmental.
The challenges of understanding ourselves as simultaneously individual/subject and species/object in the age of the Anthropocene, when humans act as a nonhuman geological force on the planet,Footnote 8 has caused scholars to comment that this quandary presents “a version of the contemporary sublime.”Footnote 9 We feel awed by the incalculable cost of global resources,Footnote 10 causing the formlessness of nature to be transferred to the mind itself as we confront “an infinity that precisely resists computation,”Footnote 11 contra Immanuel Kant’s transcendent mastery of pure reason. If, on the one hand, we try to imagine a sustainable future, then this can only be fictional, a representation of a Kantian freedom of the other as an end rather than a means.Footnote 12 On the other hand, these implications could lead to a post-humanist, post-metaphysical understanding of nature as indifferent to humanity,Footnote 13 as described by Lyotard.Footnote 14 Now that the illusion of infinite resources characteristic of the expansion of industrialism, capitalism, and empire has passed, “Why would the human be superior to any other species, given that all species are subject to the same environmental and energetic constraints.”Footnote 15 A post-humanist sustainability realizes that the ecosystem is sustainable, with and without us.Footnote 16 Timothy Morton identifies climate change as a “hyperobject,” which, like evolution and capital, constitutes something of which one can measure the effects but not directly experience.Footnote 17 These hyperobjects are sublime signs of the Kantian gap between phenomena and noumena. Chakrabarty’s concept of the human species needed for thinking at the scale of climate change also constitutes an example of this gap.
Presently, how to harmonize the conflict between postcolonialism (the politics of freedom) and environmentalism (the determinism of nature, or of the Anthropocene, or both) appears to be at an impasse. As Aravamudan remarks, “These idealizations concerning an endless future of secular human history came from Hegel and Marx describing the human being as Gattungswegen, a speciesbeing thoroughly in itself and for itself, misread against the environment as a passive and inert backdrop.”Footnote 18 Hence Chakrabarty laments ours is now a “negative universal history.”Footnote 19 Ghosh’s novel, while throwing down the gauntlet to postcolonialists and environmentalists alike without providing determinate solutions, nevertheless illustrates that postcolonial ecocritical literature and criticism make the work of the imagination central to the mediating process of social and environmental advocacy and activism even if the advocacy it proposes may not serve a particular constituency or be consistent.Footnote 20
The sublime is an aesthetic experience in which the subject encounters an object that appears too vast to be comprehended by the sensory imagination or too powerful to be mastered by human efforts, yet does not pose an immediate threat to the observing subject. For Kant, the sublime therefore involves the feeling of terror in confronting a world apparently inhospitable to humans.Footnote 21 Kant’s goal was to bridge the gap between nature and freedom and discover the universal a priori conditions for thought in general. Therefore, he argues that the supersensible, or metaphysical, human freedom of the will is the only nonarbitrary purpose that is an end in itself because nature is contingent. Believing he had proved this in his Critique of Practical Reason, a belief contested by many commentators,Footnote 22 he concluded that “pure aesthetic judgments” cannot involve sensory feeling or emotion.Footnote 23 In the final version of his Critique of Judgement, although the empirical imagination fails to apprehend the totality of the sublime object in a single intuition, it is subsequently rescued from this failure by our ability to reason beyond our physical limitations, thus proving that we have a supersensible moral being.Footnote 24 In the sublime, therefore, we paradoxically experience pain resulting from the failure of the imagination and pleasure arising from reason’s ability to supersede the world of sense.Footnote 25 In the case of the mathematical sublime, which involves encountering something that appears infinitely large, we can conceptualize the idea of the infinitely large even if we can’t physically intuit the object; in the dynamical sublime, an encounter with something that appears infinitely powerful, we think—or imagine—that we might be a match for the sublime object’s seeming omnipotence. Whether the object is infinitely large or powerful is not objectively known; for Kant, therefore, the sublime exists in the individual’s perception rather than being an essential attribute of the fear object itself.Footnote 26 As a subjective aesthetic experience that involves the emotion of fear, therefore, the sublime easily lends itself to political agendas.
Despite his efforts to establish an a priori universal aesthetics, however, Kant’s sublime is far from ideologically neutral. In fact, he states that the sublime requires “proper” education for the appreciation of moral ideas,Footnote 27 introducing an element of a posteriori contingency. Kant’s ethnocentric assumptions have been detected by Gayatri Spivak, among others, who argues that this education is disallowed to the “other” of hegemonic Western culture, making the Kantian sublime an experience only available to the white Western male in what he perceives to be an encounter with “raw” nature, though “nature” has frequently been conflated with the “other.”Footnote 28
Consequently, the sublime was co-opted for political purposes during the rise of British colonialism, which coincided with the height of eighteenth-century interest in the sublime. Pramod K. Nayar observes that during the eighteenth century, the sublime Indian landscape “characterized by emptiness, vastness, ruins, and excessive natural phenomena, is one that threatens.”Footnote 29 English travelers responded to this sublimity with, first, a state of uncertainty; second, the desire to attribute meaning to such inscrutability;Footnote 30 and third, by recasting the landscape as a site of heroic endeavor that justified the “improvement” of India.Footnote 31 Ghosh references this colonial history in The Hungry Tide in the tale of Sir Daniel Hamilton, one of India’s richest monokapitalists, who bought ten thousand acres of the mangrove forest with the aim of creating a new utopian society.Footnote 32 His idealism is countered by the story of Piddington: in the late nineteenth century, when the English were planning to build Port Canning on the banks of the River Matla, Piddington, a shipping inspector, warned that the mangroves were Bengal’s defense against the onslaught of storms. The word matla means “mad” in Bangla, a fact lost on the planners who did not appreciate how the wide and deep river on a flat plain lacked any physical obstacle to diminish the impact of typhoons. Dismissed as a madman, Piddington was vindicated when a mere five years later Canning was leveled by a cyclone in 1867.Footnote 33 European colonizers who sought to understand the local ecology, like Piddington, were regularly ignored by those who forced the land and the people to submit to their agendas. Ghosh counsels us not to repeat the same mistakes in a postcolonial context.
Although the colonizers in Ghosh’s novel follow the pattern delineated by Nayar, his contemporary protagonists are transformed by their Lyotardian encounter with the Sundarbans. Their experiences, as I will discuss, demonstrate how The Hungry Tide undoes the traditional metaphysical ideology of the sublime, revealing it as an aesthetic that may challenge our preconceived assumptions and open us to our human and nonhuman others, promoting an ecological perspective based on mutuality rather than dominance.
Despite the sublime having received considerable attention from poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist critics, only recently has the focus turned to its theorization in a postcolonial milieu.Footnote 34 I find that Lyotard’s postmodern version offers the most philosophically rigorous and appropriate paradigm for revisioning the aesthetics of the sublime as inciting the possibility of mutual respect in a postcolonial context. The Kantian sublime’s reliance on supersensible reason reduces nature to a conduit for man’s teleology rather than being for itself. Lyotard instead locates the sublime in the simultaneous pain and pleasure of the inevitable failure to erase sensory experience.Footnote 35 In other words, the sublime is the nondiscursive feeling of the differend, the incommensurability between experience and idea.Footnote 36 Although the traditional discourse of the sublime implied the negation of the natural world before the negative pleasure of supersensible reason,Footnote 37 Lyotard argues that this is impossible: “One cannot get rid of the Thing.”Footnote 38 Against the anthropocentric subject he posits an “inhuman” discursive subject.Footnote 39 He thus aims “to maintain the shock of the sublime so as to prevent the ascendancy of the rational over the real.”Footnote 40 By redeeming the value of embodied experience, Lyotard’s sublime recovers nature from its Kantian exile, reintroducing it into aesthetics. Although it is not a given that the reintroduction of nature into aesthetics must harmonize with ecocentrism, nevertheless such a move is essential for an ecocentric aesthetics, which considers nonhuman entities, including the biosphere, as having inherent value, rather than anthropocentrically regarding the nonhuman as serving human ends.Footnote 41
Furthermore, Lyotard argued that art, as material aesthetic, offers a promising realm for witnessing those who have been silenced by hegemony by instigating feelings not always discursively available:
When we have been abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to bear witness that there is, to respond to the order to be. [...] Being announces itself in the imperative. Art [...] accomplishes an ontological task [...]. It must constantly begin to testify anew to the occurrence by letting the occurrence be.Footnote 42
What he calls postmodern or avant-garde art astonishes readers by opening them up to the unfamiliar and violating accepted norms.Footnote 43 Art enables us to feel more alive, and in so doing testifies to our radical individuality, our formlessness. Yet what the reader takes away from art is never predetermined because it is subject to what he and Kant call reflective judgment, an inductive rather than a deductive form of reason. Art thus can offer the opportunity for self-determination and ethics by nonprescriptively inviting the freedom of the other.
Lyotard’s recasting of the sublime enables the following potentialities in Ghosh’s postcolonial novel. First, an ecocentric view of nature reintroduces nature as an agent in its own right. Second, if a sublime freed from metaphysical and ethnocentric ideologies can shock us into new understandings of the radically other, then a “universal” aesthetics seems viable, though at the same time less likely to produce consistent results from one subject to another. Third, Lyotard moves from an aesthetic to a political understanding of the differend, which he further defines as a conflict that cannot be resolved for lack of a common discourse.Footnote 44 A differend cannot be heard without a universal tribunal,Footnote 45 but it can be witnessed by others who seek justice by attempting to represent its unrepresentability.Footnote 46 Although these differends cannot be resolved through litigation, nevertheless Lyotard holds out the hope that “reflective responsibility today also consists in discerning, respecting, and making respected the differends,” which would “be faithful to the Kantian Idea of ‘culture’ understood as the trace of freedom within reality.”Footnote 47 Fourth, freedom from metaphysical monotheism enables the sublime potentially to engage non-Western immanent belief systems in a way that the Kantian sublime does not. And finally, literature can shock the reader into new understandings that erode barriers.
The Hungry Tide, as I will elaborate, manifests each of these potentialities in turn. It presents a range of relationships to nature, from the subaltern fisherman Fokir, possessed of what Nayar terms an “indigenous canny,”Footnote 48 to Piya’s scientific expertise, to Kanai’s urban distaste. As the novel unfolds, nature emerges as a central agent, exemplifying how the nonhuman environment is a presence that suggests that human history is implicated in natural history.Footnote 49 Moreover, each person experiences the sublime according to his or her prior ideological formation and experience, suggesting that although the sublime may be a potentially universal experience, its particular formation varies among individuals and even within them over time. The political differend is exemplified not only by Fokir, but also by the Morichjhapi refugees, and the tigers and dolphins, threatened by development forces. In the syncretic myth of Bon Bibi, tiger goddess of the region, the postcolonial sublime’s liberation from metaphysical monotheism enables engagement with non-Western, immanent belief systems. And finally, as art Ghosh’s novel demands that the reader witness those differends in a call to action. In all of these contexts, transformation paradoxically emerges as a constant, generated by epistemological shocks brought about by the sublime. Though the novel may not articulate determinate solutions, it sets out the conditions for seeking equitable ones.
The illiterate Fokir can read the waterFootnote 50 like a book after a lifetime of hard-won practical experience, not as a result of a quasi-mystical natural ability. Meanwhile, the literate metropolitan elite find the environment baffling at first. Although Sundarban means “the beautiful forest,” there is no inviting “prettiness” for the outsider.Footnote 51 Instead, the beauty of the islands is more akin to the sublime as described by Nirmal’s favorite poet, Rilke:
beauty’s nothing
But the start of terror we can hardly bear,
And we adore it because of the serene scorn
It could kill us with....Footnote 52
The Sundarbans refuse human categories, constituting a liminal space between river and sea,Footnote 53 which “seemed to trick the human gaze in the manner of a cleverly drawn optical illusion.”Footnote 54 As in the desert where boundlessness evokes the sublime, the superabundance of flora misleads the viewer with mirages.Footnote 55 Even the Bengali word for mangrove, Badabon, crosses boundaries, derived from both Arabic (bada: desert) and Sanskrit (bon: forest), “just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra.”Footnote 56 Culturally and environmentally, the Sundarbans constitute a sublime syncretic space that defies human categories, including the division between postcolonialism and ecocriticism, where flux is the only constant.
Nirmal, Kanai’s idealistic uncle who aspired to be a poet, is the character most articulate about the vulnerability of humanity before the sublime power of nature. Telling stories to the child Fokir about past cyclones as they listen to crabs burrow in the levee, Nirmal describes the feeling of being dwarfed by the dynamical sublime: “‘Now ask yourself how long can this frail fence last against these monstrous appetites—the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms? And, if it falls, who shall we turn to then, comrade? [...] Neither angels nor men will hear us, and as for the animals, they won’t hear us either.’”Footnote 57 Here, Nirmal’s encounter with the sublime suggests omnipotent nature’s indifference to humanity.
Nirmal’s transformation from outsider to insider ends with his death following the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre. Kanai, his nephew, returns to Lusibari to read Nirmal’s lost journal recounting his changing understanding. When Nirmal and Nilima first arrive on the island in 1950, they are “in a state akin to shock. Nothing was familiar; everything was new.”Footnote 58 Although Nilima soon finds her niche, Nirmal, “overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers.”Footnote 59 Nirmal’s adherence to an idealistic Marxism eventually results in his failure to reconcile his ideals with the Marxist government’s violent repression on Morichjhapi.Footnote 60 Yet through the disappointment of his ideals and involvement with the refugees, Nirmal is transformed. His poetic ambitions materialize as his journal, which brings the plight of the refugees to the outer world and guides Kanai through his own transformations.
Piya and Kanai similarly find themselves at a loss upon arriving on the islands. Kanai, especially, embodies “a postcoloniality that is confident, predominantly metropolitan, clever and ruthless, one that constructs itself and thrives on dispossessing others.”Footnote 61 Piya’s and Kanai’s ethical merit, however, lies in their eventual willingness to embrace change and become invested insiders as a result of their interacting directly with the Sundarbans in response to others’ ethical demands (Kanai and Nirmal come to Lusibari at Nilima’s request; Piya comes at the dolphins’). This removal of an extreme version of Kant’s aesthetic distance forces ethical and practical demands that none of the three would otherwise confront.
On the island Kanai watches Piya labor to understand the Sundarban ecosystem, reading the waters for signs:
[I]t was as though she were puzzling over a codex that had been authored by the earth itself. He had almost forgotten what it meant to look at something so ardently—an immaterial thing, not a commodity nor a convenience nor an object of erotic interest. [...] [H]e too had peered into the unknown as if through an eyeglass—but the vistas he had been looking at lay deep in the interior of other languages. Those horizons had filled him with the desire to learn of the ways in which other realities were conjugated. It was pure desire that had quickened his mind then and he could feel the thrill of it even now [...].Footnote 62
Evoking the sublime in the terms unknown, vistas, and horizons, Kanai expresses exhilaration at the prospect of linguistic adventure that arises from a similar source as Piya’s drive to decipher the dolphin habitat. The thrilling encounter with the sublimity of the unknown stimulates the urge for exploration and mastery, a setting of boundaries that is continually being reconfigured. Kanai, however, has been roused by marketing his control of linguistic communication, and by womanizing, much like the English colonizers who turned the sublime into a motive for domestication. Piya’s efforts to “read” the earth, on the other hand, indicate her desire to bridge the gap between nature and reason.
Kanai’s transformation in the Sundarbans therefore takes on a darker tone that he does not anticipate and cannot control, for if desire is the positive valence of the sublime, fear is the negative. On the island of Garjontola, Fokir teaches Kanai a lesson in fear and respect. Until then, Kanai had been dismissive of the local people’s deep knowledge of the place. When Fokir points out animal tracks in the mud that he claims belong to a stalking tiger, Kanai assumes the fisherman shares his own instrumentalist view of knowledge as a commodity.Footnote 63 But it is Fokir’s fear that identifies the tiger tracks, a fear Kanai knows he cannot yet feel because fear is not transcendental but acquired through experience.Footnote 64 When Kanai rejects his wisdom, Fokir leaves him alone on the island; only then does Kanai see himself as the ignorant outsider: “Fokir had brought him here not because he wanted him to die, but because he wanted him to be judged.”Footnote 65 The tiger appears to Kanai, but Horen and Fokir claim they saw nothing; whether it was a vision or reality the novel never makes clear.
Kanai’s experience on Garjontola comprises a critique of the Kantian sublime and an expression of the Lyotardian. Kant excluded feeling from cognition and therefore outside a priori philosophy; this claim eventually led to his defining moral feeling as an intellectual, disembodied respect for our humanistic vocation as ends in ourselves,Footnote 66 leading to the denatured aesthetic. Lyotard argues against Kant that thinking is always accompanied by feeling,Footnote 67 and therefore feeling is central to cognition. In the novel, Kanai’s encounter with the tiger is never empirically validated; the only claim that can be made is that Kanai feels fear. Panic empties his mind of language: “The words he had been searching for, the euphemisms that were the source of his panic, had been replaced by the thing itself, except that without words it could not be apprehended or understood. It was an artifact of pure intuition, so real that the thing itself could not have dreamed of existing so intensely.”Footnote 68 Kanai’s feeling of the sublime differend resulting from the disjunction between experience and idea is not recuperated by pure reason but is transformed into respect for both the tiger and Fokir’s wisdom.
Appreciating the radically other—tigers, subalterns—entails an embodied epistemological shock that destroys Kanai’s condescension, eroding the political differend. Fear is a learned survival skill: “[I]t’s the fear that protects you [...]; it’s what keeps you alive. Without it the danger doubles.”Footnote 69 In Lyotardian terms, the feeling of the sublime differend springs up in the gap between Kanai’s experience and his ability to rationalize it, transforming him into someone who sees the islands in his future, not only relegated to the past.Footnote 70 Having unconsciously treated Fokir as the political differend, his being forced to witness Fokir’s agency and wisdom in turn facilitates his appreciation of the plight of the Morichjhapi refugees and his desire to bring Nirmal’s story to a broader public. Although the differend may be thought to be a permanent condition because it reflects incommensurability, in fact Lyotard denotes that it is malleable:
The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be put into phrases cannot be. [...] This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling. [...] What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. [...] In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, [...] that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.Footnote 71
The postcolonial sublime thus generates new ethical understandings that may alter the status of the political differend by inciting new forms of communication.
Piya, having the advantages of her ecological expertise and Fokir’s mentorship, more quickly absorbs her lessons. She begins the novel as a globe-trekking scientist who avoids close relationshipsFootnote 72 and who has a distant relationship with her Bengali heritage.Footnote 73 In parallel with Nirmal’s idealism and Kanai’s discursivity, she regards science as a rational tool free of the weight of the past,Footnote 74 embodying “the panoptical knowledge-machine of colonialism.”Footnote 75 Yet choosing the Orcaella as a research subject necessarily draws her to her ancestral home, where she realizes she has “no more idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things.”Footnote 76
Through her experiences with Fokir, Piya’s ecological understanding and sense of belonging are transformed. Although at first she finds him unsettling,Footnote 77 their collaboration evolves into an “almost miraculous” wordless communicationFootnote 78 that validates each other’s ability to read the water like a book.Footnote 79 Their nondiscursive “language” evokes Lyotard’s concept of the phrase as not only human interjections like Aië, but also “A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder [...] can be phrases. –And the wagging of a dog’s tail, the perked ears of a cat? [...] Silence as a phrase. The expectant wait of the Is it happening? as silence. Feelings as a phrase for what cannot now be phrased.”Footnote 80 The implications of the phrase are further developed in Piya’s reflection on how dolphin echolocation equates existence with communication, their conversations serving as both sight and speech.
In contrast, there was the immeasurable distance that separated her from Fokir. [...] [N]ot just because they had no language in common, but because that was how it was with human beings, who came equipped, as a species, with the means of shutting each other out. [...] For if you compared it to the ways in which dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.Footnote 81
Language, far from being the conduit to pure reason, instead impedes understanding and must be supplemented through other means. For Nirmal, too, language is both his passion and his enslaver, as he acknowledges by reciting Rilke’s lines: “Because the animals ‘already know by instinct/we’re not comfortably at home/in our translated world.’”Footnote 82 All three metropolitan protagonists must temporarily suspend their reliance on language in order to hear the “phrasing” in the Sundarbans.
As Piya develops an embodied cognition with Fokir’s guidance, her previously distanced stance is replaced with a feeling of intimacy and recognition of the transformative nature of subjectivity: “Looking at these discarded odds and ends in the light of another day, she saw it was not the boat but her own eyes that had infused them with that element of enchantment. Now they looked as plain and as reassuringly familiar as anything she had ever thought of as belonging in a home.”Footnote 83 As she watches Fokir crab-catching, she realizes that the crabs, which keep the forest alive by cleaning the debris, are “the keystone species of the entire ecosystem,” a concept she had previously “applied to things other than herself,” but which she now sees as interconnected with her own, human life. Envisioning the crab as the anchor of the Sundarbans, and reminded that as her zodiacal sign, Cancer, the crab “ruled the tides of her destiny,”Footnote 84 Piya sheds some of her bias against cultural formations as she moves beyond rational instrumentalism toward an ecocentric vision that affirms the intrinsic value of all life. The zodiacal myth is contextualized not only within a socio-cultural context, but an ecological one, mirroring, as Rajender Kaur describes it, geological “deep time.”Footnote 85
When Fokir sides with a group of villagers that burn a man-eating tiger to death, however, Piya is devastated and their blissful communion is broken.Footnote 86 Because the Sundarbans are the only home to the endangered Bengal tiger, their protected status competes with the needs of the more than 4 million human inhabitants, whose presence puts further pressure on the ecosystem. The Morichjhapi refugees, fleeing Indian camps where they had been displaced after Partition and again following the founding of Bangladesh, suffered when the Marxist government besieged and removed the people for the sake of the tiger’s habitat.Footnote 87 Kusum, Fokir’s mother who dies in the massacre, identifies privileged cosmopolitans as complicit in ignoring the frequent killings of villagers by tigers because they are too poor to matter.Footnote 88 She tragically observes that the police who treat the refugees as worthless are indirectly following the wishes of global supporters of the tiger preserve who fail to realize what is being done in their name:
As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world has become a place of animals, and our own fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived—by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil.Footnote 89
Although the local people encounter the tiger as a deadly predator, distant urbanites can regard tigers as sublime and criminalize human subsistence living for the sake of preserving a token remnant of the tiger’s once vast territory. Ironically, those whose lives are closest to the animals, the poor, are sacrificed, while the animals are romanticized to assuage the guilt of the global capitalist economy, in a repeat scenario of colonialist ideology.
Because the problem of how tigers and humans can coexist in the Sundarbans is not resolved in the novel, some argue that Piya’s decision to become a “‘rooted cosmopolitan’ rather than a ‘footloose expert’ is only possible because the local people have no particular issue with dolphins. The much more intractable problem of tiger sanctuary is thus displaced by the relatively easy ‘dolphin solution,’ and neither a practical nor a philosophical answer to the situation of the tiger is offered in its place.”Footnote 90 Yet the novel complicates such a reading. If dolphins do not kill humans and are not as endangered as the tiger, their population is in decline due to bycatch activities, and there is little evidence that the solution to their disappearance will be any simpler than that of the tiger.Footnote 91 The conflict between human and ecological interests is more accessible to the human imagination when we are confronted with death, as Piya learns. Much harder, as the sublime conundrum of the Anthropocene reveals, is understanding, much less resolving, the ecological confrontations between humans and the billions of other planetary species when they are not readily self-evident.
The dehumanization of the refugees is enabled, Piya implies, by an anthropocentric attitude toward the nonhuman: “Just suppose we cross that imaginary line that prevents us from seeing that no other species matters except ourselves. [...] Once we decide we can kill off other species, it’ll be people next—just the kind of people you’re thinking of, people who’re poor and unnoticed.”Footnote 92 Piya identifies anthropocentrism as foundational to the sexist, racist, and classist ideologies of colonialism and the postcolonial Indian state. Our survival instead entails understanding that “Human nature is an interspecies relationship,”Footnote 93 requiring both the postcolonial critique of globalization and the overturning of what Carey Wolfe calls “the institution of speciesism.”Footnote 94 To presume that our political and ecological problems can simply be resolved by the erasure of one problematic race or species, or a one-dimensional approach, overlooks the symbiotic nature of the Anthropocene, and ignores the inconvenient complexities of Ghosh’s novel. A truly postcolonial world must be compelled to find new ways to cohabit peacefully with the other, whether human or nonhuman.
Although the novel leaves these tensions unresolved, Piya and Kanai are changed by their experiences, determined to disseminate their new understanding of both the local ecology and the legacy of Morichjhapi to a broader audience. Effectively, they represent the implied goal for the reader as a result of witnessing the novel’s representation of these differends: a willingness to be open to understanding the problematics of our biosphere that necessarily include issues of human justice, and not only to understand but to change one’s life accordingly.
The failure of Nirmal, Kanai, and Piya to master life in the Sundarbans highlights the failure of their discursive Enlightenment learning to mediate adequately their understanding of the other. Fokir, the refugees, and the animals represent the sublime as political and natural differends, who cannot be heard on the national or international stage not because they do not speak but because they lack the power to demand that the privileged listen. Lyotard linked the differend as aesthetic feeling to the differend in a political context in which the incommensurability is constituted by the disjuncture between the experience of the victim of oppression and the lack of a discourse through which the victim may demand recognition.Footnote 95 Unlike in a litigation, the victim as differend lacks the power to be heard by the perpetrator and is effectively silenced; without a universal tribunal, the universalization of the particular can be accomplished only through violence.Footnote 96 Material and emotional events will always exceed discursive hegemony, but they can be repressed by political hegemony. The differend, however, can liberate by demanding that spectators witness alterityFootnote 97 and strive to represent the unrepresentable of the victim’s silence, even if justice cannot be guaranteed.Footnote 98 Yet Lyotard sees the sublime differend as also offering the hope of political resistance because the feeling of frustration and even despair it produces may testify to the critical idea “of a culture in which the Idea of a heterogeneous humanity has not been destroyed.”Footnote 99
Lyotard’s move from the aesthetic to the political is not merely a co-optation. Rather, it is often the aesthetic feeling of the differend that alerts one to a political differend. Because the latter is deprived of speech, its status as differend must make itself known through some other kind of phrasing (tiger tracks, dolphin gaze, silence, ….), otherwise there could be no knowledge of its status as differend. With the witnessing of the political differend through the aesthetic differend comes the opportunity, if for no one else than the witness privileged with speech, to “institute idioms which do not yet exist.”Footnote 100
The act of witnessing thus emerges in The Hungry Tide as a necessary step in seeking justice. It does not fulfill justice, but sets conditions necessary for that fulfillment. Nirmal is transformed by his experience of the massacre, sacrificing his own life in the process. He records, “There is nothing I can do to stop what lies ahead. But [...] perhaps I can make sure at least that what happened here leaves some trace,”Footnote 101 the trace of a new idiom. Long seeking a sense of purpose and belonging, Nirmal learns that home is an embodied rather than imagined relationship: “Where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.”Footnote 102 Having sought the certainties of Marxist idealism, he emerges from the shelter of the text to reinscribe himself as other, embracing transformation as “his very notion of history is expanded, universalised—one might say, naturalized.”Footnote 103 No longer the detached observer, he remains with the refugees to share their suffering, learning that the risk of involvement may be pain and death, and putting into practice the ethical demands of his historical materialism that “everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature.”Footnote 104 Although this may seem to conflate the human and natural, Ghosh insists that these problems must be solved holistically and simultaneously, as the notion that everything is interconnected suggests.
Although the journal is lost in the cyclone at the end of the novel, underscoring the ephemerality of humanity before the power of nature, by reconstructing Nirmal’s text Kanai achieves a closeness with his family and community he lacked. Thus, despite the fact that language frequently serves as a barrier to understanding the other in the novel, it is nevertheless essential for moving a broader audience distanced from actual events to action for the sake of justice. As Terri Tomsky observes, “Ghosh demonstrates how advantageously the cosmopolitan class is placed to utilize the resources within capitalist globalization to contest the subjugation of communities.”Footnote 105 Although the transmission of the experience of suffering must necessarily be mediated, even at third-hand Nirmal’s eyewitness account is indispensable in bringing to light the tragedy of Morichjhapi.
The death of Fokir, however, raises problematic issues that have not escaped scrutiny. Although some like Nayar argue that Fokir’s indigenous canny is transferred to Piya through her GPS device,Footnote 106 Victor Li finds that the “necroidealism” suggested by Fokir’s death enables the myth of “authentic subalterns” to “remain heterogeneous to hegemonic modernity, [dying] so that their stories can be recounted and memorialized by literate, modern characters like Nirmal, Kanai and Piya.”Footnote 107 Although the romanticization of a lost indigeneity remains a danger, nevertheless transformation implies that idealizing a particular way of living is neither possible nor desirable. Even if Fokir, for instance, had lived to partner with Piya’s dolphin project and leave Moyna, his wife who yearns for a more urban existence, and Kanai to their implied romantic interest, his livelihood is threatened by commercial fishermen.Footnote 108 Simply put, Ghosh chose not to write a novel in which the “authentic subaltern” lives on to fight political, economic, and environmental forces. Piya, combining Fokir’s folkways with her academic knowledge and global connections, is better positioned to advocate for change. As a potentiality for future resolution, the transformed Piya closes the Kantian gap between Fokir’s nature and scientific reason, signifying a hybridization that is both and neither at once. Thus, any optimism comes with the death of two extremes: Fokir, the indigenous subaltern, and Nirmal, the Western idealist, together exemplifying the binary opposition that underpinned colonial ideology.Footnote 109 Those reified extremes cannot adequately address the complexities of ecological and human justice in a globalizing environment. Through the sublime demand that those who speak the discourse of power witness the differend, the novel implies that postcolonial situations that do not simply reinscribe colonial binaries may be created by those willing to undertake a more nuanced engagement with the planet and its people.
Symbiosis enabled by mutual understanding brought about by sympathetic witnessing and cognition that draws on both rational science and embodied understanding thus seems to be the novel’s proposed solution to these interlaced political and environmental problems. On the Mekong River in Cambodia some years before, Piya had observed with amazement Irrawaddy dolphins herding catch into fishermen’s nets in exchange for their share of the loot: “Did there exist any more remarkable instance of symbiosis between human beings and a population of wild animals?”Footnote 110 In the end, Piya decides that home is where the dolphins areFootnote 111 and Kanai says he will be back to the islands, their having become part of his own personal history, much as Nirmal had decided that home was where the refugees were, all fully investing themselves in their local communities.
Symbiosis between cultures also has the potential for healing the wounds of Partition. The myth of Bon Bibi, the jungle tiger goddess, is also syncretic, originating in the Arab culture but reflecting Hindu puja worship.Footnote 112 Bon Bibi and her twin, Shah Jongoli, make the tide country hospitable to humans, defend the poor from predators, and maintain the balance between nature and civilization.Footnote 113 The island of Garjontola, where her shrine is located, embodies the nexus of transformation for the four protagonists. Nirmal’s reeducation begins with an initiation into the Bon Bibi cult during the annual puja. On their boat journey to Garjontola, Horen and Kusum genuflect to the invisible borderline that marks the mythological division between the human realm, protected by Bon Bibi, and the domain of Dokkhin Rai, demon king.Footnote 114 Nirmal, who had not only regarded such beliefs as false consciousness but “seen at first hand the horrors that religion had visited upon us at the time of Partition,”Footnote 115 is uncomfortable. When he realizes that this boundary is as real to them as a barbed wire fence is to him, “everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises.”Footnote 116 Comparing the landscape to the book he holds, Nirmal perceives understanding to be in flux, like the forest itself:
People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires: for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still another for a ship’s pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.
To me, a townsman, the tide country’s jungle was an emptiness, a place where time stood still. I saw now that this was an illusion, that exactly the opposite was true. [...] [H]ere in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life.Footnote 117
Nirmal recognizes that it is both inevitable and lamentable that people regard their surroundings in a limited, often institutionalized, way, but that it remains possible for our perception to change.
Kusum recounts how her father was saved by Bon Bibi during a storm on the island; her messengers, she tells him, can be seen by anyone who cares to look. Nirmal observes no “divine manifestation,”Footnote 118 but when dolphins join their boat, he is confounded:
What held them there? What made them linger? I could not imagine. Then there came a moment when one of them broke the surface with its head and looked right at me. Now I saw why Kusum found it so easy to believe that these animals were something other than what they were. For where she had seen a sign of Bon Bibi, I saw instead the gaze of the Poet. It was as if he were saying to me:
some mute animal
raising its calm eyes and seeing through us,
and through us. This is destiny...Footnote 119
The dolphin’s “phrasing” prompts an ethical response from Nirmal that expands his sympathetic imagination. Now seeing his previous understanding as incomplete, he learns to respect the political differend of Kusum’s faith and adopt a species consciousness of the dolphin’s incommensurability. Jettisoning his received idealist wisdom about the separation of nature and culture, he concludes that the tide country is formed not only by rivers of mud but also rivers of language: “Flowing into one another 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 not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions—from country to country and even between faiths and religions.”Footnote 120 The immanent myth of Bon Bibi represents the tide country where biota of many different origins meet and, like the novel itself, constitutes an aesthetic cultural production that testifies to the multiplicity, singularity, and interdependence of the Sundarban inhabitants.
Indeed, this is why Ghosh has emphasized the interdependence of not only political and ecological but cultural and spiritual conflicts. As Timothy Clark writes, ecocriticism, regarded by some postcolonial critics as “the professionalized hobby of a western leisure class,”Footnote 121 must adapt “to be able to engage in any culture across the world in relation to such already difficult issues as the ethics of relating to the non-human, environmental justice, the nature and limits of anthropocentrism, duties towards future generations and so on.”Footnote 122 Yet when ecocritics have endorsed traditional religious practices, “it is invariably modern secular environmentalism that acts as the decisive if inconspicuous frame within which the values of indigenous beliefs and their modes of presentation are being celebrated. The cultural authority accorded indigenous practices is actually second-hand.”Footnote 123 By endorsing the Bon Bibi cult as real to the inhabitants, Ghosh puts pressure on Western ecocritical and metropolitan postcolonial assumptions to transform themselves through ideological hybridization.
Piya, too, discovers that the ecology of the river delta is a combination of saltwater and fresh, in which float micro-environmental balloons supporting an immense array of aquatic life forms.Footnote 124 This dazzlingly infinite microscopic universe sends her thoughts spinning toward a future dedicated to learning a wide range of interrelated scientific fields, a sublime proliferation of natural study that mirrors the hybridization of languages and religions, all meeting together in a vast interpenetration that generates immense fecundity.
In another example of a Lyotardian art form that both enables self-determination and challenges the listener to become open to the unfamiliar, Kanai translates Fokir’s song of the Bon Bibi myth for Piya. At first Kanai had said a translation would be too difficult because “in those words there was a history that is not just his own but also of this place, the tide country.”Footnote 125 For Fokir, the song was more than a legend, “it was the story that gave this land its life,” and singing it as an adult “still plays a part in making him the person he is.”Footnote 126 As if to address the readership of the novel as much as Piya, Kanai quotes Rilke providing a Western representation of the same idea: “inside us we haven’t loved just someone/in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one/child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins/of mountains, the dry riverbed/of former mothers, yes, and all that/soundless landscape under its clouded/or clear destiny—girl, all this came before you.”Footnote 127 The myth of Bon Bibi, as with all myths, is central to the self-understanding of the people of the tide country; newcomers cannot dismiss it as superstition. For an outsider like Piya, however, who initially found Fokir’s singing unsettling, only hearing the song in combination with reading the translation does she find that “she understood it all. Although the sound of the voice was Fokir’s, the meaning was Kanai’s, and in the depths of her heart she knew she would always be torn between the one and the other.”Footnote 128 Blending the embodied and the discursive, nature and freedom, and serving as a bridge between past and future, Fokir’s translated song represents the new syncretic cognition advocated by the novel.
Yet when it comes to love, Piya chooses Fokir, who could give her nothing but his presence, over Kanai, who wooed her with stories.Footnote 129 Fokir in fact saves her life three times: once from drowning, once from a crocodile, and the third time when he sacrifices his life for hers during the cyclone.Footnote 130 Fokir expresses his care in the storm by protecting her from flying debris with his body: “it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one.”Footnote 131 As Fokir lay dying, “she had tried to find the words to remind him of how richly he was loved—and once again, as so often before, he had seemed to understand her, even without words.”Footnote 132 Offering another example of nondiscursive phrasing, the love between Fokir and Piya briefly challenges the claim that cosmopolitan and subaltern cannot understand each other, only to have such optimism foreclosed by his death.
Fokir ties them to a tree during the storm as his grandfather had done before him, but he is not saved. The messenger that appears on Garjontola moments before Fokir dies in the storm is not a dolphin, but a tiger also seeking to escape the swelling waters.Footnote 133 If global warming will cause rising sea levels and increased cyclonic activity in the region, then the migration and death of both humans and nonhumans are to be expected.Footnote 134
Bon Bibi as savior of the poor is realized not as a guarantee of divine intervention or political rescue—they are manifestly killed by cyclones, tigers, authorities, and the indifference of the privileged—but as “the story that gave the land its life.” in The Hungry Tide, the differends achieve agency by exercising their knowledge of the symbiotic ecosystem. In this view, Fokir is not merely a tragic victim, but a subject who makes an active choice to sacrifice himself to save Piya, which she fails to resist: “She tried to break free of his grasp, tried to pull him around so that for once she could be the one who was sheltering him. But his body was unyielding and she could not break free of it, especially now that it had the wind’s weight behind it.”Footnote 135 Similarly, the refugees chose to migrate to Morichjhapi rather than stay in the Indian internment camps, and Nirmal with them. Only if the privileged deliberately ignore their agonizing choices are these differends relegated to oblivion. The subaltern phrases: are we listening?
For Nirmal, legend and landscape merge in the linked stories of the goddess Ganga and Lord Shiva as well as Bon Bibi and Greek mythology, geology, and history, illustrating the vast span of the earth itself, what Kaur identifies as a complex interweaving of “legends from different cultures into one common heritage of humanity to mirror the distant geological era before the different continents were configured.”Footnote 136 Nirmal fantasizes about teaching the refugee children about what the old myths have in common with geology:
Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us. Then there is the way in which the plots go round and round in both kinds of story, so that every episode is both a beginning and an end and every outcome leads to others. And then, of course, there is the scale of time [...]. And yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story.Footnote 137
The Hungry Tide exemplifies Allan Stoekl’s claim that the imagining of a sustainable future can only be fictional, a representation of the freedom of the other as an end rather than a means. If the Anthropocene yokes together clashing intellectual formations, then the novel, as an artwork that provokes a Lyotardian sublime in its audience in the gap between postcolonialism and environmentalism also incites its readers to institute new formations and idioms that have yet to exist. Ghosh sets forth a utopian hope for change that cannot be predetermined but must be evaluated “in every single instance, in such a way as to maintain the Idea of a society of free beings,”Footnote 138 which are the conditions for any possible justice. The postcolonial sublime refutes the ideologies of the past and spurs us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.
