COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS NO. 2.3 JUL ‘13
QUARTERLY OF TRAVELOGY ISSN 2278-9650
climate change into his novel, The Hungry Tide details the various natural and human disasters from which the Sundarbans has suffered, both historically and in the recent past. The novel includes numerous quotations from the Duino Elegies and Rilke’s belief that ‘life is lived in transformation’23 is central to Ghosh’s representation of the region. He accentuates the extent to which the Sundarbans undergoes constant metamorphoses, both because of daily tidal flows, with sections of land being temporarily submerged and with seawater and freshwater intermingling, and because of the periodic devastation wrought by extreme monsoon and cyclonic weather. Like the English Fens of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) 24 and the Venice of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), the Sundarbans of The Hungry Tide is an amphibious location, an environment whose physical geography can be seen as a trope for the fact that the identities of places are not fixed and unitary. Unlike The Passion and unlike Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where the Sundarbans is seen as a phantasmagoric ‘historyless’25 location, The Hungry Tide’s meticulously documented details of physical and human geography make a consideration of the various ways in which the region has been and is being shaped, by policy-makers and its various other stakeholders, inescapable. The Hungry Tide depicts the tide country as the ever-mutating product of its human as well as its physical geography, a contested site that has variously been seen as uninhabitable and as fertile territory for social projects. In addition to telling a very particular human story in a realist mode that draws heavily on researched detail,26 the novel includes
23 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy 7, line 51; Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin Jr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 51; qtd. HT, 225 and 282. 24 Waterland is a novel that Ghosh particularly admires, personal conversation, Turin, April 2006. 25 Midnight’s Children, 360.
Reading Places: The Geography of Literature| JOHN THIEME | PG. 111 FIRST PUBLISHED IN WWW.coldnoon.com