Ghosh

The beauty of creative literature lies in its suggestiveness. It may open several meanings, when a Sahridaya Reader (connoisseur of art and literature) goes through it. Beneath the text, several layers of sub-text lie hidden. Imaginative literature or poetry has at least two meanings -- manifest meaning and latent meaning. Manifest or literal meaning is the meaning at the primary or external level of understanding. If we use the terminology of Chomsky, this literal, primary, manifest or external meaning refers to ‘competence’. Here, it must be stated that Chomsky had made a linguistic distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’. While ‘competence’ is the standard version of the language, ‘performance’ refers to the deviation from the standard conventions and norms of language. A creative artist of literature is concerned with this deviation from the orthodox meaning of a word. This deviation or metaphorical twist to language is the very basis of all symbolism or indirect communication in literature. When Eliot began The Waste Land by pointing out ‘April is the cruellest month’, he was indicating at the sterility of the modern man. On the surface Eliot appears to be talking about April, but in reality it is the signifier of the contemporary degraded and apathetic society. This month has become ‘the cruellest month’ for us, which is generally considered a month of fertility, vegetation, fun and ecstasy. In a way, through this symbol of April, Eliot signifies that the values have gone haywire in the modern Europe, filled with eerie ennui. Thus, literature does consist of two types of meanings -- literal and figurative. This distinction between two kinds of meanings has parallels in Saussure’s classification of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. ‘Langue’ is the ordinary and everyday use of language, while ‘parole’ is the creative deviation from the traditional language. R.S.Sharma in his discussion about I.A.Richards’ book The Philosophy of Rhetoric explains tenor as “the general drift (62).” This general drift in the meaning of a particular expression opens several layers of aesthetic pleasure for the reader. Literature, to be very honest, is pseudo or curved statement. That is, literature hides within itself more than it reveals to the naked eye. Only the microscopic eye of a Sahridaya Reader can unearth the latent meaning. R.S. Pathak, in his book Vakrokti and Stylistics Concepts, explains this poetic/ literary deviation or innovation thus, “…the language of poetry allows him licences for making unprecedented innovations by exploiting grammatical possibilities of the language (73).” Kunjunni Raja, while discussing Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, holds almost the similar view: In the Dhvanyaloka, Anandavardhana establishes his theory that suggestion is the soul of poetry. He says that beautiful ideas in poetry are of two kinds: literal and implied. The latter is something like charm in girls which is distinct from the beauty of the various parts of the body; this implied sense is something more than the literal meaning… This suggested sense is not understood by those who merely know grammar and lexicon; it is understood only by men of taste who know the essence of poetry. This suggested sense is the most important element in poetry; in fact it is the soul of poetry (287-288). Thus, every great literary piece has several layers of meanings. In the present paper, I propose to discuss a number of interpretations, applicable to the title of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which according to Partha Chatterjee is “a curious mixture of scientific treatise, travelogue and folklore.” The title of this titanic work of imagination from the pen of Ghosh is highly symbolic. In this paper, I shall exhibit that like all imaginative literature, the title of The Hungry Tide also has a suggestive meaning. G.B.Mohan has analysed this concept of implied/ suggestive meaning in poetry (imaginative literature) thus: Beauty in poetry consists in the predominance of the suggested tertiary meaning over the primary referential and the secondary contextual meanings…. the essence of poetry is not what is directly expressed but what is indirectly suggested. All poets find out directions by indirections. They resort to metaphor, paradox, hyperbole and other figures of speech because the direct and straight way of expression is not adequate to objectify their experience (19). What G.B.Mohan has commented about poetry is applicable to all imaginative literature in general and The Hungry Tide in particular. In a way, the title of this novel has several layers of meaning. On the external, primary or manifest level, it is indicative of voracious and carnivorous tidal region of the Sunderbans. This novel deals with “the archipelago called the Sunderbans off the easternmost coast off India, between the sea and plains of India (Hawley 14).” The treatment of natural and geographical surroundings in the novel is quite unlike Wordsworth’s adoration of the same. The great romantic poet worshipped nature for its ‘beauteous forms’. His idealization of nature was marked by imaginative romantic illusions. He just saw the rosy side of the nature, which is far removed from reality. There is other side of the coin too. Sometimes nature may be as disastrous, chaotic and havoc- friendly as Gorgon’s head. Nature is not just the representative of ‘the stars of midnight’ and ‘the floating clouds’. The other side of the nature is very heinous. Will the Tsunami victims be able to sing of nature in ‘full-throated ease’' How can the millions of people living in the regions of Greater Himalayas find Wordsworth’s idealization of nature comfortable, when there are continuous threats to their lives from the killers like earthquakes and landslides' Every year, there are natural disasters of famine, drought and flood, claiming numberless lives. So, in my view Wordsworth’s glorification of nature is illusory and he closed his eyes to the cruel aspects of nature. He did not see that some times, nature may become a rough beast, hungry of human blood. If we compare Wordsworth with one of Shavian characters, it is Raina of Arms And The Man, who comes quite close to Wordsworth’s imaginative idealization of nature. Raina in the just-mentioned play [which is called “an amusing satire on military heroes (609)” by W.J. Long] has illusory notions about love and war. She idealizes both of them; similarly Wordsworth adores the mother nature without the slight whiff of realism. Later on, coming in contact with Bluntschli, the chocolate-cream soldier, she realizes her mistake. A genuine reader of good literature experiences the inadequacy of Wordsworth’s treatment of nature, when he encounters the life-threatening dangers, posed by nature in real life. At this juncture, it will be proper to say that a better, fuller and a more realistic approach is adopted by Amitav Ghosh in The Hungry Tide, which was called “a compelling book” by W.R.Greer. The mingling of realism and imagination in the presentation of nature exhibits Ghosh’s extreme devotion to his art. His picture of nature appears to be complete and it does not smack of any false sentimentalism or illusory romanticization of the subject. Earlier, I had mentioned that the purpose of the paper is to discuss several interpretations of the title -- The Hungry Tide. In his realistic handling of the subject, Ghosh presents nature as hungry of human blood. Hungry tide stands for all the disastrous aspects of nature. For this unfriendly approach of nature, we may mark the following expression about mangrove forest from the script, which was being read by Kanai in the novel: A mangrove forest is a universe into itself,… Mangrove leaves are tough and leathery, the branches gnarled and the foliage often impassably dense. Visibility is short and the air still and fetid. At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s utter hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles (7-8). The aforesaid extract from the novel shows the extremely hostile approach of the nature towards the man. In the section “Canning”, Kanai froze in disbelief on seeing the plight of the passengers in the boat due to ‘the vast expanse of the billowing mud’: On stepping off the plank, there was a long-drawn out moment when each passenger sank slowly into the mud, like a spoon disappearing into a very thick daal; only when they were in up to their hips did their descent end and their forward movement begin. With their legs hidden from sight, all that was visible of their struggles was the twisting of their upper bodies (24-25). In the section entitled “S’ Daniel”, Nirmal and Kanai are discussing S.Daniel’s efforts in bringing people to the tidal region, which was fraught with numberless risks to their lives. The furious picture of the tidal surroundings is highly pathetic: Think of what it was like: think of the tigers, crocodiles and snakes that lived in the creeks and nalas that covered the islands. This was a feast for them. They killed hundreds of people (52). In the same vein, when Piya falls in the sea, ‘the muddy brown water was rushing up to meet her face.’ This incident of Piya’s fall provokes in the reader’s heart the Bibhatsa rasa or the rasa of indignation. Here, it must be stated that rasa for the reader is the aesthetic experience in literature. A genuine reader experiences this aesthetic feeling, when he reads a truly imaginative piece of literature. There are certain Sthayibhavas or permanent emotions of the reader, which lie dormant in his heart. When the reader encounters a genuinely imaginative literature, that creative work awakens the lasting/ permanent emotion and the result is the origin of rasa or aesthetic experience. About this process of aesthetic experience, G.B.Mohan writes thus: Every human being is born with a set of instinctual propensities inherited from earlier generations, and deposited on the bed of his consciousness….They are called sthayi (permanent), because they always remain embedded in human organism. It is generally agreed that there are nine such emotions possessed by all human beings…. In poetic experience the latent emotional traces are aroused (14-15). In the sudden fall of this cetologist, our latent emotion of disgust is aroused, when she is covered with dirty mud. This cetologist on a mission “to study the habits and habitats of the Gangetic dolphins (Ray 41)” falls in the muddy tidal water and this picture of ugly nature arouses our latent emotion of disgust (jugupsa) and the result is the release of Bibhatsa rasa (rasa of indignation): With her breath running out, she felt herself to be enveloped inside a cocoon of eerie glowing murk and could not tell whether she was looking up or down. In her head there was a smell, or rather a metallic savour she knew to be, not blood, but inhaled mud. It had entered her mouth, her nose, her throat, her eyes—it had become a shroud closing in on her, folding her in its cloudy wrappings. She threw her hands at it, scratching, lunging, pummeling, but its edges seemed always to recede, like the slippery walls of a placental sac. Then she felt something brush against her back and at that moment there was no touch that would not have made her respond as if to the probing of a reptilian snout (54-55). The picture of the all encompassing mud in the expressions like ‘a shroud closing in on her’ and ‘folding her in its cloudy wrappings’ along with its comparison with ‘the slippery walls of a placental sac’ can definitely evoke the feelings of disgust and repugnance in the reader’s heart. The plight of Piya is sure to create in the readers a weird feeling of distaste for nature. Nature is seen in its worst form here. At the outset of the paper I had mentioned that every good piece of literature has manifest and latent meanings. While the literal meaning of The Hungry Tide refers to the fury of wild nature in the tidal country, the metaphorical or symbolic connotation of the same carries a lot of psychological and philosophical weight. Metaphorically, the title of the novel refers to the emotional tide, in which the characters of the novel are caught and which is devouring whole of their personality. The experiences and relations of the characters with other persons are highly tempestuous and tumultuous, reminding the readers of the furious sea-waves of the tidal country. If we judge some of the major characters of the novel, we find the tempest/ tide of psychological and social problems pervading them from top to bottom. Take for instance the character of Piyali Roy, whose parents are of Bengali origin and who is not well-versed in Bengali language, as she was born and brought up in Seattle, U.S.A. She is in the tidal country to make a study of the dolphins. During her stay in India, she experiences a sort of alienation/ mental torture because of her exotic appearance. The one important problem, which she encounters, is the problem of communication. At the railway station, she was enquiring about the train to Canning. Her plight is described thus: One of the onlookers began to explain, gesticulating with an upraised arm. But the explanation was in Bengali and it was lost on her. She stopped the man with a raised hand and said, in apology, that she knew no Bengali (4). Then, the approach of the guide and the guard on the ship was clearly marked by animosity for a person of another culture. Here, Ghosh is indicating that in contemporary society, people are suffering from jingoistic and ethnocentric prejudices, which are creating hurdles in the promotion of a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural world ethos. Due to certain cultural and racial prejudices, there is very little interaction or dialogue among the citizen of the world. The actions of Mej-da (the guide) towards Piya are obviously objectionable. The situation is described thus by Ghosh: Then, to her surprise, Mej-da ordered all the helpers to leave the launch. Evidently the crew was to consist of no one other than himself and the guard. Why just these two and no one else' There was something about this that was not quite right. She watched in concern as the boys filed off the launch and her misgivings only deepened when Mej-da proceeded to enact a curious little pantomime, as if to welcome her on his vessel….But the performance ended with a gesture both puzzling and peculiarly obscene. Bursting into laughter, he gesticulated in the direction of his tongue and his crotch. She looked away quickly, frowning, puzzled as to the meaning of this bizarre coda (33-34). This clash of the civilizations and cultures, which Piyali Roy experiences, is also seen in the plight of the settlers at Morichjhapi. In the depiction of the precarious situation, faced by Piyali Roy and the settlers at Morichjhapi, Ghosh is speaking against the narrowness of the human heart. The world is ‘a melting pot’ or ‘a salad bowl’ on account of the simultaneous presence of numberless communities and groups, belonging to different religions, castes and nationalities. But the contemporary man, with his apathetic approach towards ‘the significant other’, has made the world a sterile wasteland. The Britain based Guyanese author David Dabydeen uses the image of a ‘beehive’ to describe the cultural diversity of a city like London. G.Rai has elaborated this concept of Dabydeen thus: A number of different cultural groups are present in one place with little communication between them taking place. Each is confined to its own cell. Britons do not spend long enough in the West Indian cells nor do they invite West Indians to their cells either (16). This alienation/ depression of ‘the significant other’ in the novel on account of the narrow cultural prejudices of the people clearly indicates that the hungry tide of cultural clash is excessively harmful and disturbing for the world. Another major issue, significantly touched by Ghosh in the novel, is the man-woman relationship. There are several shades of the relationship between the two sexes in the novel. Almost all the major characters of the novel are submerged by the tidal waves of this relationship. Take for example, Kanai, who “liked to think that he had the true connoisseur’s ability to both praise and appraise women (Ghosh 3).” On account of this illusory notion about himself, he makes attempts to establish relationship with Piya; but fails. He appears to be a notorious womanizer. His comment about Moyna--“I’d say Moyna is the kind of woman who would be good for a brief but exciting dalliance (220)”– rectifies the just-mentioned assumption. The women sense I, hence his love exploits end in failure. He is envious of Fokir, who is able to establish emotional contact with Piya despite the communication barrier between the two. Kanai, about whom the novelist had said—“Language was both his livelihood and his addiction (4)”, is unable to communicate with the heart of Piya, while the illiterate fisherman is able to enter the emotional tide of her heart. The complex of Piya’s emotional attachment for Fokir and the simultaneous envy of Kanai for the fisherman is conspicuous in the following conversation between Piya and Kanai: ‘…Very few people can adapt themselves to that kind of rhythm—one in a million, I’d say. That is why it was so amazing to come across someone lie Fokir.’ ‘Amazing' Why'’ ‘You saw how he spotted that dolphin there, didn’t you' ’, said Piya. ‘It’s like he’s always watching the water—even without being aware of it. I have worked with many experienced fishermen before but I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible instinct: it’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart (267)’. When Piya admires Fokir, the tidal onslaught of envy raids Kanai. While the turbulent waves of jealousy are dashing against the shores of Kanai’s heart, the tranquil waves of soft love for Fokir are touching the innermost chords of Piya’s heart. Mark the following dialogue between Kanai and Piya again: ‘Is there anyone else you could work with'’ ‘It wouldn’t be the same, Kanai,’ Piya said. ‘Fokir’s abilities as an observer are really extraordinary. I wish I could tell you what it was like to be with him these last few days—it was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.’ A sudden stab of envy provoked Kanai to make a mocking aside. ‘And all that while, you couldn’t understand a word he was saying, could you'’ ‘No,’ she said, with a nod of acknowledgment. ‘But you know what' There was so much common between us it didn’t matter.’ ‘Listen,’ said Kanai, in a flat, harsh voice. ‘You shouldn’t deceive yourself, Piya: there wasn’t anything common between you then and there isn’t now. Nothing. He’s a fisherman and you’re a scientist…(268).’ Here, it must be stated that there is in Fokir this instinctive warmth and child like naïve simplicity, which bind him spontaneously to the women. That is why, Piya falls in love with him. Moyna, his wife, grows anxious, when she finds the proximity of Piya towards Fokir. Moyna knows well that Fokir’s spontaneous innocence is sure to create emotional ripples in Piya. The concern of Moyna due to the relationship between Piya and Fokir is clearly visible in her following conversation with Kanai: ‘…And I’m glad you’re going, Kanai-babu.’ ‘Why'’ said Kanai. ‘Are you tired of bringing me my meals'’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not that.’ ‘Then'’ ‘I’m just glad that you’ll be there, Kanai-babu; that they won’t be alone.’ ‘Who'’ ‘The two of them.’ Her voice was suddenly serious. ‘You mean Fokir and Piya'’ Besides these issues pertaining to man-woman relationship, the novel deals with several other themes, related to human society. A number of tangling problems of contemporary social order are surveyed in the novel. In a way, the title of the novel is suggestive of plethora of human and social issues; the hungry tide is nothing but the hungry human tide. It throws light on the tidal waves of universal emotions, present in every human heart. Thus, the title of the novel is highly suggestive and symbolic. It has at least two layers of meaning—manifest and latent. The excellence of Ghosh, “a champion of post-modern cultural weightlessness (John Mee 325)”, lies in the fact that beneath the explicitly revealed primary meaning, there is sufficient hidden or metaphorical meaning in the title of the novel. That is why, the novel has been extensively admired by the scholars. For instance, Amardeep Singh calls it “ the work of a novelist at the peak of his powers.” R.K.Dhawan too remarks about the novel, “Epical in scope, the novel has captured readers’ imagination the world over (10).”