Sukanta Das
Assistant Professor,
Department of English, P.D.Women’s College, Club Road, Dist.- Jalpaiguri, West Bengal,
India, Pin- 735101
The trajectory of development of the discipline of history underlines shift and changes in its orientation. No strict difference between history and literature was made in earlier times. Such a conception of history meant that there was as much fiction in it as a literary text contains. As Georg G. Iggers comments: “The history was conceived of as a form of literature, governed by standards of rhetoric and at the same time concerned about the truthful reconstruction of the past on the basis of the critical examination of evidence” (1) But with the institutionalization of history in the University departments it started discarding the fictive elements so as to acquire its ‘scientific’ status. No wonder history therefore emphasized more on the acquisition and interpretation of objective, empirical data, and thus intended to scrupulously avoid the affective, subjective elements. The traditional approach to history holds that by sifting through the evidence at hand (texts, artifacts, etc.); we may arrive at a more or less accurate understanding of past events and their significance. This means that not all descriptions of history are equally valid. Some accounts may be more ‘true’ to the actual events than others. As new information comes to light, any narrative of history could be revised or supplemented. But the emergence of postmodern philosophy problematizes the disciplinary status of history and questioned the basic presumption of history in presenting a valid version of the past. The postmodernists believe that there is no accurate past to write about, for they find the difference between fact and fiction porous. Michel Foucault gives us a great perspective of Postmodern history:
“I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.”1
Foucault considers history as a discourse and theorizes on the acquisition of knowledge as motivated by the desire to overpower others. In other words history like any discourse is always employed as a tool to justify, strengthen, and sustain the ideological operation of a group in a given time-frame. Evidently the promotion of an ideology has become the motivating force behind the writing of historiography. Therefore the historiography can offer agency to the oppressed group which will assert its own (hi)story through an act of writing back.
Another important development of historiography could be found in the way intellectual energy was directed towards giving voice to the subaltern people. Therefore the emergent fields like the history from the below or Subaltern history2 gained wide prominence and attracted serious critical attention to the newer aspects of writing history. Instead of exploiting conventional methods of writing history, the non-conventional history emphasizes more on the subjective experiences, literary texts, memoir etc. as the
sources for writing history. Such change in orientation may be traced in the divergence from the rigid ‘scientific’ outlook that is thought in the western rationality to be indispensable in the historical project. In an important article Ashis Nandy3, for example, contested the lack of sense of history in the so-called non-modern world by suggesting that the seemingly backward nations depended upon myths, legends, epics without considering these as merely fictive. These nations are urged to adopt, Nandy alleges, the sense of history imported from the West that advocates the strict separation of scientific and rational outlook from what is (in the West) ordinarily considered fictive and mythological. Therefore the writing of history has now become a contested field of enquiry and involves multi-dimensional approaches to make sense of the past. It is in this changed scenario of intellectual multivalence that literary artists have today responded to the challenging task of addressing the past. In the present article I shall explore how Amitav Ghosh treads in the problematic terrain of excavating as well as reconstructing the history of the struggle of the poor, unprivileged people in a place excluded from the metropolis.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) begins with the arrival of two outsiders—Piyali Roy, an American scientist of Indian origin researching on the Gangetic dolphins (Oracella Brevirostris) and Kanai Dutta, a Delhi-based businessman running a translation company—in the Sunderban, an archipelago at Bay of Bengal. Kanai has come on the request of his aunt Nilima to read a notebook left for him by his deceased uncle Nirmal. Nilima runs Bodabon Trust, an NGO that offers medical facilities and other services to the people of the island. The novel progresses through the complex yet interesting interaction at various levels between the outsiders and the people of the island. The first major point of interaction and contact takes place when Nirmal, a dreamy idealist revolutionary and his wife Nilima come to settle on the tide country. Nirmal makes his way towards the island in order to remain aloof from the political turmoil at Kolkata. He subsequently joins a local school as the Headmaster while Nilima founds a welfare organization to help the poor hapless people, particularly women. The interaction and contact of these city-bred people with the people on the island produce transformative effect upon the outsiders. Unlike her dreamy idealist husband, Nilima takes recourse to more pragmatic path of doing something tangible and meaningful to the people by founding Bodabon Trust. Nirlmal however is engaged in routine activity of teaching children at school with the ideal of revolution and poetry at heart. He undergoes possible transformation through his encounter with the poignant struggle of the dispossessed people against the hegemonic rule of the postcolonial nation. Another important event occurs when the outsiders like Piyali and Kanai get involved in the life and daily struggle of the islanders like Fokir, Moyna etc. The connection between two phases of interaction and communication with the poor people is kept alive by Nirmal’s notebook which Kanai reads. The notebook records Nirmal’s sensitive and empathetic version of the struggle of the refugees relocating at Sunderban. The refugees coming in exodus from East Bengal, because of the communal violence during the post Partition phase of the Indian Subcontinent, pose trouble for the state. They have been relocated in Dandyakarnya in Madhya Pradesh, an arid land culturally alien to the refugees. They make the last effort to come back to Sunderban and settle there through the cooperative system of working together disregarding the smaller divisions of caste, religion etc. The emergence of a bristling community against every hardship points to the phenomenal will power of the poor people:
Saltpans had been created, tubewells had been planted, water had been dammed for the rearing of fish, a bakery had started up, boat-builders had set up workshops, a pottery had been founded as well as ironsmith’s shop; there were people making boats while others were fashioning nets and crablines; little marketplaces, where all kinds of goods were being sold, had sprung up. All this in the space of a few months! It was an astounding spectacle—as though an entire civilization had sprouted suddenly in the mud.” (190-191). However this brisk society living in harmony among themselves in close proximity with nature and away from the mainstream community in Kolkata is disrupted when a tussle between the settlers and the government takes place. Nirmal who has always tried to enthuse himself with the revolutionary spirit and movement seems to have been resuscitated even when his retirement from service is nearing. Kanai who has always been concerned with himself and his own position in the society learns the sad story of Morichjhapi massacre through his reading Nirmnal’s notebook.
Ghosh’s excavation of the Morichjhapi incident compels our considered opinion as to the justification of implementing the forest conservation policy without taking into account huge human cost involved. In fact Ghosh raises not just certain ethical questions, but foregrounds the heart-rending struggle of the hapless, dispossessed people against the forces of the government. The unearthing of the buried history has always fascinated Amitav Ghosh who fictionalizes the joys and sufferings of ordinary, marginalized people against a historical background. In this present fiction Ghosh sets his story in the peculiar geographical locale—at Sunderban, an archipelago close to the metropolitan Kolkata, yet remains so distant from this cultural capital of India. Ghosh’s choice of the geographical locale as the setting of his fiction is itself an act inspired by the desire to bring to the fore the story of a place strangely excluded from the metropolitan space. Nirmal records the struggle of the islanders in his notebook which he wants Kanai to read it and thereby thinks of the possibility of ensuring its circulation to the wider audience: “I can make sure at least that what happened here leaves some trace, some hold upon the memory of the world” (69) The same could be said of Amitav Ghosh who makes a similar attempt in the book to let the (hi)story remain alive for the world. Interestingly Sunderban had always been conceived as a subaltern place, a place of no importance—Kolkatar jhi (Kolkata’s servant) as a large number of women from the island work as maid-servants in the affluent houses in the city. The notion of Sunderban as merely a land of jungle, ingrained in the boyish mind of Kanai, gets jerked by Nilima’s explanation: “t’s only in films, you know, that jungles are empty of people. Here there are as crowded as any Kolkata bazaar. And on some of the rivers you’ll find more boats than there are trucks on the Grand Trunk Road”. (17). Even when Kania revisists the island to comply to Nilima’s request, he still considers the place as culturally uninhabitable, culturally inhospitable. He solicits Piya’s company at the island so as to lighten his burden of staying in a culturally marginalized place: “Come, I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile”. (13) Thus Sunderban remains a secluded place because of its geographical location and the insignificance of the so-called lower caste people in the political structure of the nation. No wonder therefore Sunderban has always been looked upon as a land of jungle and animals with some low caste people of little importance. Nilimal’s clarification to Kanai highlights the callousness of the metropolis and unsettles the smug attitude that enjoys its unrivalled privileged position at the cost of remaining blind to what happens beyond outside. The sudden rise in the importance of the island in the
national scale is the result of the wholesale import of (readymade) forest conservation policy touted in the West and the launching of the national Project Tiger programme accordingly. Ironically the government and the elites of the metropolitan Kolkata became all on a sudden so concerned with Sunderban and its natural environment that the settlers hardly mattered to them.
Amitav Ghosh interrogates the environmental initiative undertaken by the government which is more interested in projecting its environment-friendly image in the global arena rather than taking a historically nuanced view of the place before undertaking the conservation project. This history of neglect, marginalization of the settlers leads us to peep into the history of British colonialism that in fact caused the spatial and cultural displacement of the people. The British colonial machinery functioned through its operation of the policy of divide and rule that brought about the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. This major and pathetic bifurcation of the subcontinent sowed the seeds of discord and disharmony in the minds of the people of two nations. However the eastern part of India suffered another partition and the displacement of large number of people when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh was created on the basis of language in 1971. This event had a far-reaching impact upon the lives and politics of West Bengal which is linked to the nation of Bangladesh in a number of ways—cultural, linguistic, climatic etc. A large number of Hindus belonging to the lower rung of the society became the victims of violence and exploitation of both the upper class Hindus and the fundamentalist Muslims. These low caste people sneaked into the borders of west Bengal/India to escape the inhuman tortures and violence unleashed by the dominant groups in Bangladesh. Interestingly this enforced migration took place for a number of times and the refugees were first considered as the unswerving vote bank for the Communist party and later became a liability. It should be recalled here that there was major difference in the attitude and response of the Centre towards the problems of migration/ refugees/infiltration in the eastern border from the exigency in the Punjab border4. However it was decided that a resettlement camp at Dandyakarnya in Madhya Pradesh would be set up for the refugees and the governmental support would be provided to those who would comply with its directive. Amitav Ghosh relates the story of such a group of people sent by the government in the resettlement camp, who returned to the island only to be ‘massacred’. Ghosh’s novel also sheds light on the undocumented (hi)story of people who perished during their forced settlement in various camp.
In the writing of fictive history, Ghosh jettisons the traditional tools of history for, these severely handicap a revisionist historiographer who is more willing to record the effect produced on ordinary individuals, than constructing a history in line with the official version. Not surprisingly Ghosh employs an idealist revolutionary to document the painful story of the Morichjhapi islanders. In fact the history of Morichjhapi massacre is known to us as Kanai reads the journal written by Nirmal. Therefore everything we know about the incident comes only from Nirmal who, given his idealistic bent of mind, may not be trustworthy in recording the event objectively. Ghosh however discounts the notion of objectivity in the historical writing. It may be mentioned that Ghosh avoids any essentializing project in the recuperation of the subaltern history by making Nirmal as the sole authority through which the painful history is transmitted. Ghosh raises the problematics of environmental conservation in a space which is harmoniously shared by both the nature and the humans. This story of sharing is also foregrounded in the mythology of the land, where the part of nature in which animals live is dominated by
Dokkhin Rai while other part in which humans inhabit is taken care of by Bon Bibi. Pathetically this harmonious coexistence is disrupted when the government suddenly declared the Sunderban as a reserved forest for the Royal Bengal tigers. The government issued directive to the refugee settlers to evacuate the land in order to protect the national animal. The refugees started organizing themselves and attempted to garner intellectual support from the powerful and influential people from Kolkata for their cause. But the government was too determined to abandon its project leading to the forced and violent eviction of the people—the massacre of Morichjhapi. It is an irony that the people of the land had to fight for their survival against the postcolonial government. The dialectic of environmental conservation and human protection which is at the heart of the Morichjhapi incident is staged at a critical moment when Piya confronts a mob relishing at the killing of a tiger. Piya, a card-holder of western environmentalism has always been indoctrinated in its abstract ideas and has no notion of how this is experienced by people who face it. She is utterly dismayed at the fury and joy with which the islanders catch and kill a tiger which happens to prey in the village. Her rage reached to unbearable height when she witnesses Fokir, her companion and trusted guide on water joins the party. She intercepts and struggles to stop Fokir from hurting the animal. Kanai who has been with Piya struggles to reason with the latter asking her to see the incident from Fokir’s point of view. Piya fails to switch her position and argues: “This is an animal, Kanai…You can’t take revenge on an animal”. (294) Consequently Piya revises her earlier estimate of Fokir with whom, she believes, she communicates even when there is barrier of language and culture. Ghosh raises the debate of environmental conservation which must take cognizance of the local issues. In the forced evacuation of the island there was a battle not just between environmentalists and the settlers, but rather between the elites of the metropolis and the hapless poor people living culturally at the lower rung of the society. Anu Jalas, a leading critic and commentator on the environmental issues, diagnoses the governmental attitude to the poor, hapless islanders vis-a-vis environment in the subaltern identity of the people concerned. The refugees belong to the lowest rung of the caste-ridden society and are summarily rejected by the elite as people of any importance. The subaltern identity of these people (nimnobarner lok—low caste people) makes them vulnerable to any hegemony operated by the elite people. The sudden prioritizing of the animal over humans in the Sunderbans followed by the Morichjhapi incident made permanent change in the violent nature of the tigers: “Shrugging off the colonial and national drape off this bhadra image, it portrayed the animal as one whose gentle, inoffensive nature was irretrievably transformed into that of a man-eater following the bloody events of Morichjhanpi. Highlighting this transformation of their tiger was a way, for the villagers, of reclaiming the forgotten pages of a history which had relegated them to oblivion, an injustice they felt they had been done by the urbanized elite who believed tigers were more precious than them, the nimnobarner or nimnobarger lok” (Jalas 1758). In fact these low caste people were conceived merely as tiger food and thus their lives mattered little to the elites. Kusum, mother of Fokir touches at the core of the issue when she asks herself: “…Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their names? Where do they live, these people, do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers? As I thought of these things it seemed to me that this whole world has become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil” (268). Kusum however is
unaware of the hierarchy in which human beings are aligned and thus despite their status as ‘human beings trying to live as human beings’, they are just not that sort of people who need to be taken care of by the state in the social framework of caste-based politics. Ghosh’s text gestures towards the politics of exclusion that operates on the binary divide between the elite and the subaltern. The Sunderban remains an unknown and unimportant place to the urbanized elite of Kolkata until the abrupt rise in the importance of the island because of ecological concern. But this increase in its importance only brought misery to the islanders whose existence is endangered in order to protect the tigers. Thus Ghosh excavates the story of displacement, migration that is not only the effect of British colonialism, but continued even in the postcolonial nation-state. Ghosh excavates the story of the painful struggle of the islanders who resolved not to part with the land they made their ‘home’: “Amra kara? Bastuhara. Who are we? We are the dispossessed….Who, indeed, are we? Where do we belong? And as I listened to the sound of those syllables, it was as the rivers and tides. Who was I? Where did I belong? In Kolkata or in the tide country? In India or across the border? In prose or in poetry?” (254)
In the reconstruction of the history of the tide country, Amitav Ghosh rests his trust on the non-conventional sources of writing the history of the land which is intimately associated with the myths, stories, legends of the place. Ghosh constructs an alternative historiography through the exploiting of the non-coercive methods of acquiring knowledge about the past. Instead of looking for authoritative, documentary evidences, Ghosh relies more on the dialogic possibility of gaining knowledge. It is seen that in the novel the story of the wretched struggle of the islanders is transmitted through Nirmal’s recording of and involvement in the lives and struggles of the refugees. Another important source material for the fictive reconstruction of the history is the exploration of the myths of the land. In fact in Ghosh’s text there is a fusion of both history and mythology in such a symbiotic way that it resists any compartmentalization of knowledge as it happens in the western knowledge. Ashis Nandy stresses on the need for the recognition of non-western materials in the reconstruction of history. Ghosh’s novel attests to the utilization of the oriental mode of perceiving the world that defies any strict categorization of knowledge.
Notes
- Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, ed. (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1980), 193. Cited in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theories Are Murdering Our Past (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 1996), 151
- See Subaltern Studies Series. Guha, Ranajit (ed.). Writings on South Asian Historian and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982. Print.
- See Ashis Nandy’s article “History’s Forgotten Doubles”. Nandy, Ashis. “History’s Forgotten Doubles.” Vol. 34, No. 2, Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics. (May, 1995), 44-66. Print.
- See the article The hungry tide Bengali Hindu refugees in the Subcontinent by Rituparna Roy The Newsletter | No.51 | Summer 2009. For a detailed discussion of this much-neglected aspect of the administrative consequences of the Partition of 1947, see Joya Chatterjee’s ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West
Bengal, 1947-50’ in The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, edited by Suvir Kaul. (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
Works Cited:
Ghosh, Amitav (2004): The Hungry Tide (Delhi: Ravi Dayal).
Iggers, Georg G (1979): “The Transformation of Historical Studies in Historical Perspectives.” Introduction in Georg G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker (ed) International handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory (Westport,Connecticut. Greenwood Press) 1-14.
Jalas, Annu (2005):“Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became ‘Citizens’, Refugees ‘Tiger-Food.” Economic and Political Weekly 23 April:1757-1762.