Instruction
Our reading so far in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide has introduced us to the inhabitants of the Sunderban islands, and Piya, an Indian-American outsider who arrives to learn about the dolphins who live in this region. Like many of the climate novels we’ve encountered in this course, Ghosh’s novel highlights the natural world and the precarious balance between its ecologies and human activity. Life in the Sunderbans is difficult. “The destitution of the tide country was such as to remind them of the terrible famine that had devastated Bengal in 1942 — except that in Lusibari hunger and catastrophe were a way of life. […] Despite all the labor that had been invested int he embankments, there were still periodic breaches because of floods and storms: each such inundation rendered the land infertile for several years at a time” (Ghosh 66-67).
Ghosh’s novel shares certain traits with the fiction we’ve been reading in recent weeks. But, in other ways, it is very different. It is set in South Asia, on the other side of the world from us and many of the authors we’ve read so far. But, more than that, The Hungry Tide does not focus quite so heavily on climate disaster. The people of the Sunderban islands live close to the land and are at risk from tigers on the one side, and the tides on the other. But their struggle is long established and has been going on for quite a long time. It is interesting, and helpful, for us to see that narratives about climate change don’t always have to resemble disaster movies. They can also be like Ghosh’s — slower, more careful examinations of humans and their relationship to the environment.