The trip of a lifetime

A riot in Bangladesh; a straggling line of people marching out of Burma; mosquitoes in Calcutta; the arc of a compass connecting places on the map in strange and sublime ways; a brutal struggle for existence in the mangrove forests of Bengal.

If you want to understand Amitav Ghosh's fiction, look for the forgotten pages of history, the news items that never make it to the headlines, the barely remembered rebellions.

The margins matter as much as the centre, his fiction reminds us; if we choose to dump history into the footnotes, we are turning our backs on humanity, erasing parts of the past we cannot deny without losing an essential part of ourselves.

Ghosh is an anthropologist by training, and more than any of his contemporaries, part of his allotted task as a writer appears to be to dredge up lost stories in the way an archaeologist would, to analyse them in the way an anthropologist might, and to illuminate them in a way only a deeply sensitive writer can.

The Sunderbans are known to most Indians, indeed most Bengalis, in the most peripheral of ways: a few battered tourist boats ply the waters of this archipelago, offering the temptation of "seeing a tiger", a risk-free proposition for tourists, though not for the island inhabitants.

Rusty government motorboats patrol the waters, ostensibly to guard the mangrove forests, often carrying officials who are far more predatory than any four-footed counterpart.

The legend of Bon Bibi, the goddess of the forest, animates the lives of the people who live here in a way more conventional religions cannot expect to do.

The Sunderbans are no island paradise; the rivers are treacherous, islands may emerge or be submerged in the flicker of a storm, the big cats who threaten the lives of the settlers here face tremendous threats themselves and the terrible hardships the inhabitants face are taken for granted.

In 1979, a band of doubly displaced settlers sought refuge in the island of Morichjhapi, only to be told to go back""but "back" in their case was a place that no longer existed. Their struggle to find a home turned into an uprising that was brutally put down by the government.

It's against the background of the "tide country" that Ghosh charts the ebbs and flows that emerge from an unlikely convergence of characters. But the tide country is more than just a backdrop: "This is after all no remote and lonely frontier""this is India's doormat, the threshold of a teeming subcontinent. Everyone who has ever taken the eastern route into the Gangetic heartland has had to pass through it""the Arakanese, the Khmer, the Javanese, the Dutch, the Malays, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the English. It is common knowledge that almost every island in the tide country has been inhabited at some time or another. But to look at them you would never know: the speciality of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts."

And the people who come here stir up their own ghosts. Piya is a cetologist, a scientist who studies marine mammals, here in pursuit of dolphins.

She's been all over the world, but it's here in the Sunderbans that she grapples with a personal displacement, the loss of a tongue that should have been her own to claim. Bengali is, for her, the language of anger, the language her parents fought in while she grew up in America: Piya rejects it, seeking instead words that are "empty of pain and memory and inwardness".

Kanai, sleekly overconfident, travelling to the Sunderbans to collect his late uncle's diaries when he bumps into Piya, will find the lost history of Morichjhapi""but the tide country's silence, its unsophisticated but powerful legends, will erode his confidence and submerge many of his certainties.

Piya's quest laps at the edges of the world inhabited by Fokir, the boatman who shares little enough with her""they have in common neither language nor history nor experience, but their wordless bond is strong enough to threaten both Kanai and Fokir's wife.

It's in "Jowar" (The Flood), the second part of The Hungry Tide, that their saga reaches a predictable climax as storms, tigers and history make implacable demands on the separate but intersecting lives of these three humans.

The narrower canvas of The Hungry Tide allows Ghosh to develop his characters in a manner he hasn't been able to replicate in any of his novels bar The Shadow Lines.

But unlike J M Coetzee, he is unable to extend his compassion for the humans in the tide country to the animals who also inhabit it. He makes a tremendous effort to convey the idea that the ones who suffer most under a system indifferent to the needs of the environment and humanity alike are mutually voiceless, be they animal or human.

But the tiger of the Sunderbans remains a symbol to him, the dolphins are just a goal""he can follow Piya's passionate interest in the fate and the lives of other species, but he and his readers cannot empathise with that passion or with Piya's ability to see another species as being just as necessary to the world as humans are.

The relatively limited circumference he's chosen seems to have freed him in unexpected ways. History was the real protagonist of his previous novel, The Glass Palace, and geography is the silent presence that towers over this book.

Even the form of The Hungry Tide echoes the landscape of the Sunderbans, as though the tide country had entered the novel's pages: its narrative flow replicates the flow of the rivers, often slow-moving but always possessed of hidden depths; the snarled and tangled connections among the characters is as closely linked as the roots of the mangrove forests itself.

The novel can be hard going, with its movements from the sluggish to the stormy, its slightly histrionic ending, its frequent and jarring stops on the sandbanks of explanatory passages.

But every time you're bogged down, the tide turns; and it takes you into the silent waterways and secret shoals of a land's memory, it asks you to explore languages and their limitations, their essences and their silences. The journey has its fair share of irritations and setbacks, but it's still the trip of a lifetime.

THE HUNGRY TIDE

Amitav Ghosh
Ravi Dayal Publisher
Price: Rs 350,
Pages: 403