COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS NO. 2.3 JUL ‘13
QUARTERLY OF TRAVELOGY ISSN 2278-9650
details of a number of heterotopias, which suggest alternative ways in which the Sundarbans has been and can be read, and more importantly utilized. These take the form of projects that bring together utopian thinking and pragmatic action. In the past such initiatives have included a cooperative founded by an idealistic Scottish colonist who attempted to create a community that would transcend the caste and regional divisions of Indian society and a post-independence settlement by Bengali refugees, who established squatters’ rights on an uninhabited Sundarbans island, named Morichjhãpi, from which they were forcibly removed by the local authorities in 1979. In the present these projects are paralleled by a Development Trust, centred on the work of a hospital, which is seen as a model for NGOs working in rural India. The Morichjhãpi incident raises particular issues relating to the politically contested nature of space.27 The Hungry Tide gives an oblique account of how the Morichjhãpi settlers were evicted from the island, with many being killed by the state authorities, because they had established themselves on land designated as a wildlife conservation site for endangered species such as the Royal Bengal Tiger. Originally from Bengal, but removed to a so-called ‘resettlement’ camp in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, said to be ‘more like a concentration camp, or a prison’ (118), the refugees28 have returned to the tide country and, at least as far
26 Ghosh characteristically acknowledges numerous sources in his concluding ‘Author’s Note’ (HT, 401-3). 27 See Ross Mallick’s article, “Refugee Recruitment in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Morichjhãpi Massacre” in The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 1 (1999), 103-25, which Ghosh acknowledges in his ‘Author’s Note’ (HT, 402). Mallick explicitly raises the issue of the competing perspectives of the conservationists and the refugees. 28 Tim Cresswell’s comments on refugees as people who are customarily considered to be ‘out-of-place’ are very pertinent to this aspect of Ghosh’s novel. See Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 117-22. See too Zygmunt Bauman’s view that the perceived challenge posed by newly mobile strangers, after modernity ruptured the links between
Reading Places: The Geography of Literature| JOHN THIEME | PG. 112 FIRST PUBLISHED IN WWW.coldnoon.com