Thinking
with the Tide: A Posthuman Reading of the River in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Md Sahinur Rahaman,
Assistant
Professor,
Department of
English,
Saheed Nurul Islam
Mahavidyalaya,
North 24 Parganas,
West Bengal, India.
Abstract: The article offers a posthumanist interpretation of
the river in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry
Tide, arguing that the Sundarbans' tidal hydrology does not function as
a mere background but rather acts as an active force that shapes the course of
the novel. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti's concept of non-anthropocentric vitality,
Jane Bennett's idea of “vibrant matter”, Donna Haraway's relational ontology,
and Cary Wolfe's critique of liberal humanism, the analysis demonstrates how
Ghosh's depiction of the river removes the distinctions between land and water,
between human and animal, and between scientific and embodied knowledge.
Through an in-depth examination of Nirmal's notebook, Piya Roy's fieldwork, the
Bon Bibi legend, and the novel's dramatic cyclone, the essay states that the
de-centring of the human is closely connected to postcolonial history, since it
is those who are most affected by the river's power who also suffer the most
from displacement and conservation policies. The essay finally concludes that
Ghosh's representation of the tide country is an example of a historically
grounded and ethically significant form of posthuman relationship.
Keywords: posthumanism; ecocriticism; Amitav Ghosh; The
Hungry Tide; river agency; postcolonial ecology
Amitav
Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide (2004) is usually interpreted as one that
focuses on human characters—namely a cetologist from Seattle, a businessman
from Delhi, a fisherman from the Sundarbans, and a deceased uncle whose
notebook connects their stories. Yet the most significant element in the book
is not Piya, Kanai, or Fokir, but the river itself, more precisely the dynamic,
tidal and boundary-blurring hydrology of the Sundarbans. This hydrology has the
power to flood, silence, drown, nourish and in the end kill, all without any
intention on the part of humans. The present essay contends that Ghosh's
portrayal of the tide country goes beyond that of a setting described with
ecological accuracy; rather, it acts as an active force which is continually
presented as a co-author of the narrative. This undermines the humanist
idea—originating in Enlightenment thinking and maintained in realist
fiction—that landscapes can have no role other than to serve as a background to
human actions. When viewed through the framework of posthumanist theory,
especially in terms of Rosi Braidotti's "zoe" as generative,
non-anthropocentric vitality, Jane Bennett's "vibrant matter", and
Donna Haraway's claim that species are defined by their relations rather than
by fixed essences, it becomes clear that the novel is deeply committed to
placing the human aspect in a position of lesser importance. At the same time,
Ghosh's posthumanism takes into account historical facts: the river's agency is
always linked to the postcolonial and ecological histories of dispossession, so
that the river functions both as an actant and as a record of those who have
been sacrificed in the effort to establish human control over nature.
The
ecocritical and postcolonial scholars have for a long time acknowledged that
the Sundarbans in Ghosh's novel play a role that goes beyond that of simply
serving as a background. Madhab Prasad Bhattarai and Nabin Bahadur Khatri claim
that the delta is shown 'as an active agent' whose tidal cycles influence the
lives, migrations, and vulnerabilities of all the characters (Bhattarai and
Khatri 116). Meg Samuelson does likewise by describing the Sundarbans as a
'littoral' area in which the blending of land and water disrupts the existing
geopolitical and species boundaries, leading to a cosmopolitanism that includes
both human and more-than-human beings (Samuelson 190). This view is in
agreement with and goes further than the wider trend in the environmental
humanities towards what Bennett calls 'vibrant matter'—the notion that nonhuman
entities, such as rivers, mudbanks and storms, have a kind of thing-power that
cannot be reduced to simply being a resource or a scenic feature (Bennett
viii). A posthumanist approach builds on these ecocritical insights by directly
questioning the ontological primacy of the human subject. It maintains that it
is not enough to say that nature matters; rather, the categories which
distinguish human from animal, organism from environment, and agent from
setting are unstable constructions that Ghosh’s river actively undermines.
The
best example of this breakdown occurs at the start of the novel, in the pages
of Nirmal’s notebook that Kanai takes with him to the islands. Rather than
beginning with a human genealogy, Nirmal starts with a hydrological one,
retelling the myth of the goddess Ganga’s descent to earth and describing the
moment when “the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds,
maybe thousands, of tangled strands” (Ghosh 6). In this cosmology the river
exists before the human settlements which will later establish themselves along
its banks; it comes before and goes beyond the people who will name it. Nirmal
then describes the resulting archipelago in a way that denies the usual
distinction between a solid piece of land and the water which merely touches it;
he states that “there are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt,
river from sea” (Ghosh 7), and it is said that the tides themselves alter the
islands so completely that “the currents are so powerful as to reshape the
islands almost daily” (Ghosh 7). This is a landscape lacking the stability that
gives most realist fiction a sense of place: the ground itself is unreliable
and is subject to a temporality that operates on a scale of hours and tides
rather than years and human plans. Even the forest that grows on this
constantly changing land is described as being extremely unfriendly to the
humanist idea that nature exists for human use; according to Nirmal the
mangrove is “a universe unto itself, utterly unlike other woodlands or
jungles”, a place where “at no moment can human beings have any doubt of the
terrain’s utter hostility to their presence” (Ghosh 7). The passage ends with
the land being called bhatirdesh, “the tide country”, a name that
identifies the place not by its human inhabitants or by its political
jurisdiction but by the rhythm of the ebb-tide, “midwived by the moon” (Ghosh
8). To name a country after a tide rather than after its people or its ruler is
already a posthumanist gesture: it places sovereignty in a nonhuman, cyclical,
lunar process rather than in any human polity.
The
fact that the human element has been removed is also clear when looking at the
narrative technique and the way in which things are described. Piya Roy, the
cetologist whose search for the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) is a
key element in the novel's plot, goes to the Sundarbans as a representative of
Western scientific rationality, taking with her GPS devices, waterproof
notebooks, and a background which assumes that the natural world can be made
understandable through data. Yet the novel constantly shows how this approach
of viewing things instrumentally is overwhelmed by the great relational
complexity of the tide country's hydrology. While sitting in Fokir’s boat and
thinking about the ecological connections between the different
micro-environments in the delta, Piya realizes that in order to understand the
dolphins she will need much more than just a survey; she will have to obtain
"a working knowledge of a whole range of subjects — hydraulics,
sedimentation geology, water-chemistry, climatology" before she can even
begin "seasonal censuses of the Orcaella population" (Ghosh 125). In
other words, the river cannot be understood from the point of view of a single
discipline; it requires what Haraway would call a practice of "becoming
with", an epistemology based on response and relationship rather than on
detached observation (Haraway 4). Even though Piya is very competent in her
field, her scientific expertise on its own is not sufficient without Fokir’s
quiet, embodied understanding of the water’s moods — a kind of knowledge which
the novel treats as just as valid, even if it is in a completely different way,
from Piya’s data collection. The partnership between the two characters, who do
not share a common language, is an example of the kind of interspecies and
cross-epistemic "companion" relationship that posthumanist thought
associates with genuine non-anthropocentric knowing: neither Piya’s science nor
Fokir’s long-standing intimacy with the river is sufficient by itself, and the
novel does not elevate one above the other.
The way
the river is portrayed is most clearly seen in the novel's descriptions of the
light and heat on the surface of the water, where Ghosh's writing gives the
river a kind of organic life. When Piya is looking at the delta at midday, she
notices a moment when "the river seemed to give birth to a second sun, so
that there was almost as much heat radiating from the water's surface as from
the cloudless sky above" (Ghosh 114). The use of the verb "to give
birth" is no accident; it associates the river with biological processes
of generation rather than with inanimate matter, endowing it with a sort of
maternal agency that causes it to produce heat and light, and — as shown in the
subsequent account of the crabs and the life on the mudbank — an entire
ecosystem of "subterranean currents of life" which rise to the
surface with the tide (Ghosh 114). In a later passage, Nirmal's notebook makes
this vitalist interpretation explicit by comparing the accelerated geological
time in the tide country with the slow passage of time in other parts of the
world. Seeing a fragment of history disappear into the delta's mud, he reflects
that "in other places it took decades, even centuries for a river to
change course", but that in the tide country "transformation is the
rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade
in days" (Ghosh 224). He remembers the wreck of an eighteenth-century
English ship, the Royal James and Mary, and is amazed that "the tide
country digested the great galleon within a few years", leaving no trace
of the wreck which in calmer waters might have been preserved for centuries
(Ghosh 224). To say that a river "digests" a ship is to picture the delta
as a kind of stomach, an organism that breaks down the artefacts of human
ambition and turns them into its own substance. Nirmal's earlier analogy of the
landscape as "a book — a compilation of pages that overlap without any two
ever being the same" (Ghosh 224) also implies that meaning in the tide
country is not fixed by any one human "reading" of the land; the
geologist, the boatman, and the pilot each open the book to a different page,
and none of them has special access to the entire book.
The fact
that the river's material vitality casts doubt on the distinction between
organism and environment is just like the way the novel's account of the Bon
Bibi legend challenges the boundary between human and animal in more
fundamental cosmological terms. According to Nirmal's version of the myth, the
tidal area was originally the undivided "realm of Dokkhin Rai", a
demon king who "held sway over every being that lived in the forest —
every animal as well as every ghoul, ghost and malevolent spirit" (Ghosh
103). Bon Bibi's action does not eliminate this nonhuman sovereignty but rather
splits it, leaving "one half of the tide country" as wild land still
under the rule of Dokkhin Rai and taking the other half for human settlement
(Ghosh 103). When Kanai later looks through his uncle's notebook, he reflects
on the effect of this division, which the islanders do not regard as a metaphor
but as a real ontological fact: for Kusum and for the boatman Horen, the line
separating "the realm of human beings from the domain of Dokkhin Rai and
his demons" is "as real as a barbed-wire fence" would be to a
more sceptical outsider (Ghosh 224). What the Bon Bibi cosmology thus offers is
a pre-Enlightenment alternative to the humanist view that separates culture from
nature; rather than seeing the human as entirely distinct from the animal
world, the myth considers both to have a claim on the same territory, with the
tiger — Dokkhin Rai's most visible form — acting as a legitimate co-sovereign
rather than simply as a threat to be eliminated. This is not really sentimental
animism but a practical cosmology that determines how the islanders actually
behave: the villagers make offerings, respect the boundaries, and accept death
at the mouths of the tigers as the price of entering a territory which was
never completely given over to human use. If we refer to Cary Wolfe's
description of posthumanism as a critique of the "specific, historically
instantiated" boundary between human and nonhuman which lies at the heart
of liberal humanism (Wolfe xv), then the Bon Bibi legend seems less like simple
local colour and more like an indigenous theory of multispecies cohabitation
that, in mythical form, anticipates the very decentering which contemporary
posthumanist philosophy is trying to achieve through other means.
Above
all, Ghosh does not let this posthumanist interpretation of the river serve as
a romantic escape from history. The novel makes it clear that the people who
suffer most from the river's nonhuman powers—such as drowning, being attacked
by tigers, or facing cyclones—are also the ones who are most disadvantaged by
the postcolonial and developmental states: refugees, the landless, and the
residents of Morichjhapi who are violently driven away in the name of
conservation. Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence", which holds
that environmental damage to the poor is usually gradual, invisible, and
cumulative rather than dramatic, helps to explain why the novel does not
separate its ecological vision from its portrayal of displacement (Nixon 2).
Likewise, Stacy Alaimo's idea of "trans-corporeality", which
maintains that human bodies can never be separated from the material
environments that pass through them, similarly shows why Ghosh's characters
cannot just admire the vitality of the tide country from a safe distance:
Fokir's body, Kusum's body, and the bodies of the Morichjhapi settlers are all
in a real sense at the mercy of the river in a way that Piya's or Kanai's are
not (Alaimo 2). Bhattarai and Khatri advance a similar point, observing that
the novel "critiques conservation practices that justify
displacement" even while it presents the delta's ecology with obvious
wonder, so that the reader is required to combine ecological reverence with
social critique rather than permitting one to override the other (Bhattarai and
Khatri 118). Thus, a posthumanist reading of the river cannot merely point out
that the water has agency; it also has to consider whose agency is reduced when
the water's agency is given official status in a conservation system that
treats the human inhabitants of the delta as disposable but does not regard the
river itself as such.
The
final cyclone in the novel brings all these elements into sharp focus. As the
storm builds up, Ghosh shows the surface of the river displaying a sort of
almost living hostility: the wind is "blowing so hard that it seemed to be
holding the surface of the river at an incline", which causes "it to
have been mounded into a sloping ramp" extending beyond the island's banks
(Ghosh 377). On a small scale this scene serves as a reflection of the novel's
main argument about the tide country's refusal to submit to human control—no
matter how much local knowledge there is or how advanced the technological
instruments or bureaucratic plans may be, the human body can never be protected
against a hydrology that operates according to its own violent principles. The
fact that Fokir dies in the storm—his body, in his final action, being used to
shield Piya from the wind—is generally regarded as a narrative instance of
sacrifice that allows the more socially mobile Piya to survive and to carry on
the project of dolphin conservation. When this situation is looked at from a
posthumanist point of view, this interpretation is not rejected but rather made
more complicated: Fokir does not die merely for Piya but is killed by and is in
close contact with the river, the very one that has shaped his whole life and
manner of livelihood; his death is in fact the very last and most literal case
of a body that had never been separable from its watery environment being
returned to it.
Someone
who is skeptical might say that all of this is just an example of
anthropomorphism disguised as theoretical language, since rivers do not in any
real sense 'give birth' or 'digest', and when Ghosh gives agency to the water
this is no more than an acknowledgment of a well-known device in fiction—that
is, personification—and not actually an illustration of a posthumanist
argument. This kind of criticism should be taken seriously, since it highlights
the need for a posthumanist interpretation to be clear about what it is
claiming. It is not true that Ghosh believes rivers have intention in the same
way that humans do, nor is it asserted that the novel is asking its readers to
abandon the idea of agency altogether. The point rather is that the novel's use
of figurative language serves to shift agency away from the usual human centre,
so that the generative, destructive, and world-making powers which realist
fiction normally attributes to human characters are instead given to
hydrological and geological processes. This is precisely the step that Bennett
takes when she states that attributing 'thing-power' to nonhuman matter is not
naive animism but rather a deliberate way of breaking the habit of seeing
matter as passive material waiting to be put to human use (Bennett viii). In
this respect, personification is not a weakness of the posthumanist argument
but one of its key literary techniques: it is the means by which a novel
written in a human language for human readers can point to forms of agency that
go beyond the human without asserting direct and unmediated access to the
interior experience of a river. Ghosh's description of the mangroves even
includes part of European lyric poetry as part of this effort, expressing the
falling tide in terms of Rilke's image of 'a happy thing' that falls rather
than rises (Ghosh 8), as if to show that even the aesthetic language available
for expressing joy must be altered once the reader accepts the ebbing tide, and
not the human observer, as the passage's true subject.
Yet in
the novel’s final chapters it does not end simply on a note of loss, and it is
in this respect that Ghosh’s posthumanism shows its most positive aspect.
Piya’s decision to carry on with her research is based not just on the data she
has collected herself but on Fokir’s accumulated, embodied knowledge of the
delta, which has been almost by chance preserved in the memory of her GPS
device: “All the routes that Fokir showed me are stored here,” she tells
Nilima, and she goes on to say that “one map represents decades of work and
vast amounts of knowledge” which she plans to make “the foundation of my own
project” by naming it after him (Ghosh 398). Here, the human instruments and
the nonhuman waterways, satellite technology and the traditional fishing
routes, are combined into a single archive that belongs not to Piya alone nor
to Fokir but to their intertwined, cross-species, cross-epistemic
collaboration. The final exchange in the novel takes this entanglement to its
logical and slightly surprising conclusion. When Nilima asks if Piya intends to
make the tide country her home, Piya replies without hesitation: “Home is where
the Orcaella are: so there’s no reason why this couldn’t be it” (Ghosh 400). To
define one’s idea of home not in terms of national or family ties but in terms
of the migratory behaviour of a nonhuman species is to carry out, in the very
last lines of the novel, the decentring of the human subject which the river
has been carrying out all along. In this final statement, home is relational
and involves other species rather than being something that is privately and
exclusively human — exactly the kind of shift that Haraway, Braidotti and other
posthumanist thinkers urge their readers to imagine.
If one
looks at the novel in this light, Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide appears to be
one in which its formal and thematic strengths are not directed towards its
human characters but instead towards the river that both brings them into being
and destroys them. The tide country's refusal to accept distinct
boundaries—between land and water, the past and the present, humans and
animals, scientific knowledge and knowledge acquired through
experience—achieves what posthumanist theory expresses in more abstract terms:
it demonstrates that humans are merely one of many active forces in a closely
interconnected material world, rather than presenting humans as the central
organising force of the narrative. Yet Ghosh insists, in contrast to any form
of purely celebratory ecological aestheticism, that this decentring involves a
cost in human lives, and that it is the poor and the displaced who are most
often sacrificed to the river's uncontrollable impact. The river in The
Hungry Tide is therefore not a kind-hearted Gaia nor a simple enemy; it is
a powerful and historically complex force which the novel encourages its
readers to come to terms with on its own indifferent terms—terms which, as
Piya's final words show, might yet lead to a new and wider understanding of
what home is.
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