Animalities by Lundblad Michael;

Author:Lundblad, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Chapter 7

Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai

In the contemporary Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which is inspired by the German Romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, a character named Nirmal keeps a personal notebook in the hope that his cousin Kanai can redeem his past.1 In this novel, Nirmal quotes Rilke’s poetry extensively, and this type of mutually implicated and cross-fertilized intertext not only points to a historical sense of place forgotten in the present, but also puts both authors into dialogue with each other.2 Among the twelve major quotes from Poulin’s translation of Rilke’s poetry, such thematics as the poetic heir, the historical massacre, Umwelt, and the animal question are brought to bear on each other.

Hailed as a “green postcolonial novel,”3 The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans – the tide country – which covers “2,300 square miles in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal” with lush mangroves,4 representing “the intersection of vernacular culture, place-based behavior, and community.”5 Etymologically, the word “Sundarbans” is associated with “a common species of mangrove,” meaning “the beautiful forest.”6 In “Folly in the Sundarbans,” Ghosh points out that due to global warming, this region is devastated by “storm surges,” and “The mangrove forests have historically absorbed the first shock of incoming cyclones,” thus functioning as “the barrier that protects the hinterland.”7 As a tide country, this (bio)region does not have a fixed entity; rather, it is like a palimpsest ready for metamorphosis. Albeit an area of “mud flats and mangrove islands” – “no ‘pristine beaches’” and “coral gardens”8 – the Sundarbans is anything but a land of “emptiness” or “illusion”:

the tide country’s jungle was an emptiness, a place where time stood still. I [Nirmal] saw now that this was an illusion, that exactly the opposite was true. What was happening here, I realized, was that the wheel of time was spinning too fast to be seen. In other places it took decades, even centuries, for a river to change course; it took an epoch for an island to appear. But here in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days.9

Nirmal’s notebook betrays the fact that people living here are the dispossessed, and their lives are left untouched by time and devoid of history. His negative epiphany avers that “the opposite was true”: “What was happening here […] was that the wheel of time was spinning too fast to be seen.” Here, Nirmal’s observation of time is similar to that of Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill,” meaning that history should be understood both as the being of becoming and the becoming of being. Historically, the Sundarbans was regarded as a Conradian “area of darkness” and “wilderness.” However, the region became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, and in 2001, it was designated a “Biosphere Reserve for the Royal Bengal Tiger.” Ghosh’s novel ironically digs deep into the

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