Inadequacy of craft
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`Ghosh's scholarship is, as usual, impeccable ... but [he] is unable to write with the true depth of feeling of a master.'
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AMITAV GHOSH'S new novel, like his previous ones, is a curious mixture of scientific treatise, travelogue and folklore. It is also about homelessness. Quite naturally, it is not a "classical" novel with well-developed characters who grow out of the challenges posed by their surroundings. There are however, challenges of another kind.
Unlike his other colleagues, namely Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, he is not quite at ease with his role of the Western-educated literary observer. Though, like them, he lives abroad, he does more than merely collect material for his novels when he comes home. He tries in this work, perhaps without conscious intention, to capture the flavour of the Bengali language including the dialects of the Sunderbans where it unfolds.
Kanai Datta, a libertine linguist, who runs a successful translation bureau in Delhi, and Piyali Roy, an American cetologist of Indian origin, meet by chance on a crowded train taking them to Canning, a ghastly port-town once abandoned by the British. They are both heading towards the Sunderbans; he in response to his aunt Nilima's summons, and she, in search of river dolphins which are to be found in places where salt and fresh water are in close proximity.
Piyali jumps off the motorboat she has hired into swirling, muddy waters to save herself from two potential rapists; one a guard foisted on her by the forest department and the other, owner-pilot of the boat she has hired. She is saved by Fokir (Bengali version of Faqir), a lonely, sensitive, illiterate boatman married to Moyna, a poor woman who wants to be a nurse.
Kanai goes off to the Hamilton Estates in Lusibari, where his aunt Nilima runs a hospital as a part of her NGO activities. She asks him to read a journal which may be the last will and testament of his late Uncle Nirmal, an idealist school master, would-be-poet and failed revolutionary.
Piyali needs a translator to connect with the local folk who will help her locate the dolphins she needs to study. Kanai is fortuitously available. It is inevitable that they team up.
The adventures of Kanai, Piya, Fokir, Nilima, Moyana and others are intercut, to use a cinematic term, with the secret peregrinations of Nirmal, as narrated in his journal. There is tragedy during a typhoon, and then, after nature has wrought its havoc, the proverbial calm.
Ghosh's scholarship is, as usual impeccable. His ability to collate huge amounts of data on a variety of subjects is astonishing as is his skill to make all this material a part of his story. He is an excellent yarn spinner but is unable to write with the true depth of feeling of a master. Why is it so?
To digress for a moment, the 20th Century produced two kinds of fiction; one born out of experience and the other of the imagination. Hemingway was the star practitioner in the first category and Kafka and Camus, in the second. Orwell, on occasion, did stride confidently across both worlds. Here in India, most writers including Tagore, wrote out of their personal experience of life. That is what enriched his writings as it did that of the others like Sharat Chandra Chatterjee, Satinath Bhaduri, Manik Bandopadhyay, Prem Chand, Manto and Phanishwar Nath Renu.
The writer of the novel under review is a product of Doon School and is, therefore, Western-educated. But he has taken the pains to learn his mother tongue and savour her literature. There are indeed echoes of Manik Bandhopadhyay and Amiya Bhushan Majumdar here. They are like aural memories that an adept jazz pianist evokes of other masters in the course of his playing.
The Rilke-loving Nirmal, in search of a new, more humane world is oddly reminiscent of Manik Babu's Hosian Miyan from Padma Nadir Majhi. Moyna's retort to Kanai's claim that he knows what it is to be pregnant, brings to mind a similar exchange between Malati and Heramba in Dibaratrir Kavya, also by the same author. In his evocation of people and places Ghosh conjures up memories of Amiya Bhushan Majumdar. But in the end the Hungry Tide owes most to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Columbian master has been through hell and high water in his life, coming as he does from a highly volatile society. He has managed to marry his myriad experiences to his matchless gift of story telling, bringing thus to his writing an unassailable, truthful quality that can be felt but not quite articulated. Others with wider access to information and greater linguistic skills somehow have never been able to achieve the same gravity of expression. Ghosh's book is a case in point, the undeniable brilliance of its parts do not add up to a satisfactory whole.
The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh, Ravi Dayal, hardback, p. 400, Rs.350.
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
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