The novel “The Hungry Tide” written by Amitav Ghosh expresses this mythical belief that revolves around the tide country that people have already endorsed and acknowledged to be real and why it is connected to nature and not understand that that’s how nature functions. Throughout the novel, some chapters cover these mythical ideologies such as “The Bon Bibi” which is a spirit that protects people who live on those islands from dangers such as the tiger which from my point of view seems like the tiger has to do with evil spirits based on this belief. Characters in the novels, the ones who lived in the tide areas never heard of this legend while some do but they all have their own opinion to express about it.  Kanai when he first heard about Bon Bibi didn’t know what it was until Kusum explained to him that it was a guardian spirit that would protect people navigating the forests from any evil confrontation (tigers) and they would celebrate through plays. “It was Kusum who spoke first. “ I called her too,” she said. “But she never came.” “Who?”  “Bon Bibi. The day my father died. I saw it all, it happened in front of me, and I called her again and again …”” (Pg. 89) This is some exchange dialogue between Kusum and Kanai in which Kanai went running after her after he accidentally touched her and wanted to know why she run and why she is crying, in which then Kusum open up to a tragedy event that happened in which includes the death of his father and the day that this traumatic moment happened Bon Bibi never heard her calling. “That’s what happened, then . They crossed the line by mistake and ended up on one of Dokkin Rai’s islands. Whenever you have a storm like that- one that appears so suddenly out of nowhere- you know it’s the doing of Dokkin Rai’s and his demons.” (Pg. 123) This sentence points out the belief that people carried out during this novel since in one of Nirmal writings he writes out a moment in which they had entered a territory while navigating in which people would claim that some islands are protected by malicious entities and one of them could be this expressed in this sentence in which natural disasters occurs and say that it was the bad thing that was trying to harm them. Also in the chapters where Kanai is reading Nirmal writing, he also encounters the name Bon Bibi to appear in the writing in which Nirmal expresses that he isn’t the type of person to believe in any type of religious belief because for him he sees it as the false consciousness and was confused when Horen and Kusum where doing expressions later on to find out that they crossed out the Bon Bibi line. 

Piya is unaware of these beliefs at some point in their trip a group together they sees a light in a certain village and once they arrive at the place she witnesses that the village where cheering the people who were torturing the tiger to die and she was disgusted about it and asked Kanai to help her shut this down, but he refused because there was nothing he can do. ““Fokir says you shouldn’t be so upset.” “How can I not be upset? That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen- a tiger set on fire.” “He says when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die.”” (Pg. 244) She asked Fokir to help but he also refused because he believed that things happened for a reason and if the tiger’s destiny was to die then it will die. ““This is an animal, Kanai,” Piya said. “You can’t take revenge on an animal.””(Pg.242) She was disappointed because she couldn’t help and when she tried people looked at her weirdly because it’s their thing that tigers are seen as something evil but for her, it was intervening in nature and affecting nature. So from what I can understand from this, her views are different compared to the villages as she believes that every being’s life matters and they shouldn’t kill nature nor try to get revenge. While the villagers believed in their beliefs, both Piya and the people who live on the islands have different perspectives and how they view nature. And I think the reason religion some people would believe it’s connected to nature is because of its unpredictable moments and no one can predict what can happen next but to preserve faith in what they believe in and hope for the best.

In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh portrays a relationship between nature and humans through the dynamics between Piya, Kanai, and Fokir as they guide Piya in her dolphin research. 

Piya, though devoting her career to animals and wildlife, actually seems heavily disconnected from nature, and this is evident when she first meets Fokir as well as in the different perspectives that arise between the two when it comes to killing the tiger later on in the novel. Increasingly, Piya seems to be transforming from someone invested in cetacea, nature, and connecting with it, into the kind of person we might imagine Canavan and Frazier to be speaking up against when we talk about white environmentalism. Though Piya is Indian by descent–and not to diminish Piya’s nuances by equating her to the “typical Bushwick nature-lover who uses reusable shopping bags” as we said in class–she is extremely disconnected from the language and culture in this setting, she grew up in America, and has made a point that her study of dolphins has nothing to do with her heritage. Over the course of the novel, she turns from someone who seems to us as knowledgeable about nature, with all her Western equipment, into someone who is at a loss when it comes to actually understanding life alongside these animals. 

This is why Fokir is so appealing to Piya. To her, it is “amazing to come across someone like Fokir”, who knows how to live with the rhythms of the tides (Ghosh, 221). He spots alligators in the rivers with as much perception as a tiger stalking prey, his knowledge about finding dolphins or hunting crabs is attractive to Piya for its inherent connection to nature. But doesn’t every Sunderban have to learn to adapt to the “rhythms of the tides”? The nets that surround the beds in Nilima’s home, Horen and his son’s knowledge about boats and navigation, and the people who–as Nirmal notes in Morichjhapi–had very quickly organized themselves in shelters and communities, are all reflective of people whose lifestyles have forced them into “becoming animal”, to function under a certain bare humanity where the only thing separating them as a human collective from the dangers of their world are their myths about Bon Bibi, Dokkhin Rai and the threshold between humans and the mangroves, and Ganga. The difference between Piya–and often Kanai due to his retrospective accounts of Lusibari as something “always a thing of the past” and not having a present or future of its own– compared to the rest of the Sunderbans is that the inhabitants of the tide country understand what nature is–it impacts their life everyday, twice a day at that. Piya and Kanai seem to only know about nature. It is for this reason that Piya can, with some privilege, be angry about the angry mob setting the tiger on fire. For her, it was “the most horrifying thing [she’s] ever seen,” but for everyone else, it is a necessary sacrifice as people like Piya and Kanai–who are as close to a first world character as the novel gets–contribute to these climate disasters and increasing man v. nature brawls due to the consequences that their lifestyles in their respective western and elitist worlds perpetuate. 

The culture shock between these three characters seems to be reflective of a broader idea of climate fiction, and pushes us to reevaluate what privileges or positions we might be in in the world, and what we think we might understand. Fokir and Piya show us there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing the thing for what it is.

In his book, The Hungry Tide, Ghosh sets up a nuanced view of nature versus man. The setting is Lusibari and its surrounding islands that make up the tide country. Piya, an American cetologist, is set on discovering and mapping the habits of a rare species of dolphin that used to roam the tide country. The story follows another young man named Kanai who is coming to read Nirmal’s diary of sorts that follows a settlement on an island close to Lusibari. Through this narrative Ghosh is able to convey the idea of nature versus humans.

Ghosh begins with a seemingly innocent approach with Piya’s point of view, noticing that there has been a drop in wildlife in the tide country. Piya goes to great lengths to convey that this area used to be a home to many different creatures. She admires how in tune with nature her guide, Fokir,by saying “But that’s how it is in nature, you know: for a long time nothing happens, and then there’s a burst of explosive activity and it’s over in seconds. Very few people can adapt themselves to that kind of rhythm – one in a million I’d say. That’s why it was so amazing to come across someone like Fokir,” (Ghosh, 221). This shared mindset that she believes Fokir and her have towards nature ends when Fokir and her come across a village dealing with a tiger. Piya comes away from the experience distraught as Fokir pulls her away from the angry mob setting the tiger on fire. Kanai translates what Fokir thinks about the villagers killing wildlife by saying “‘ He says that when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die,” (Ghosh, 244). After the tiger incident Piya confides in Kanai that he may have been right about her and Fokir’s communication. She felt that there was a very clear misunderstanding between them.

This conflict between man and nature comes to a head in an argument between Piya and Kanai. Piya’s point of view is informed by both her American upbringing and Kanai’s is informed by what his reading of Nirmal’s diary. Kanai begins by bringing up the fact that the tiger had killed two people from the village and that there was horror beyond the tiger being killed. “If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goe almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. We all know it, but we choose not to see it. Isn’t that a horror too- that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings?” (Ghosh, 248). Not only does Kanai’s statement relate to many authors’ perspectives we have read regarding slow violence or even the “everyday Anthropocene”, but he calls Piya and himself out as “complicit” in this dynamic. Piya, and those like her studying adn attempting to preserve wildlife, have not had regard for the human costs. Kanai, and the other people of his class are complicit in “hiding the costs … to curry favor with their Western patrons,” (Ghosh, 249).It is this argument between Piya and Kanai that illustrates Ghosh’s sentiments about humans versus nature. 

Another view on the subject is loosely roped in. This point of view is from Nirmal, a poet and school teacher that became fascinated or inspired by a settlement near his island. For Nirmal nature and man both have their places in the world as he believes in a version of vital materialism: “For hum it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories-of a kind,” (Ghosh, 233). Perhaps that is the kind of story Ghosh is attempting to create as he writes this novel about climate and the humans that inhabit the world. Ghosh sets up this narrative and keeps readers at the edge of their seats as they attempt to decipher the meaning as well as the ideal outcome of this relationship between humans inhabiting land, perhaps even calling it home, and the animals, weather, tides, or simply nature itself, that inhabited the land before them.

Small group exercise on Ghosh:

• Each small group will be assigned one of the three questions: make sure you’re clear on which question is yours!
• take 15 minutes to talk over your ideas and designate one person (a “landline” if you have one) to take notes and initiate discussion with the big group
• then we’ll share your group’s thoughts with the class as a whole

1. The role of religion grows toward the end of the novel in ways that have some echoes with Earthseed: in both cases, myths or faith traditions are sites of cultural hybridity and fluidity that present an alternative to rational liberal traditions. How are the myths of Bon Bibi and Dokkhin Rai represented in the part we read for today?
2. The theme of the boundary between the animal and the human, which is an important part of the Bon Bibi myths of course, emerges many times as we approach the end of the novel. How does the notion of a firm separation between humans and animal others come up? What does the novel seem to be saying to us here?
3. Kanai impulsively decides not to leave Lusibari (and the novel!) on his original schedule. Instead, he successfully argues that he adds value to the research trip on the “bhotboti” with Horen and Fokir as a translator. What are some ways that “translation” in the broadest sense looms large in the novel? What are some moments where Kanai’s role as translator seems especially prominent? How does his translation work change how you read his character?

In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, water is a physical element of the landscape and symbolizes identity, memory, and survival. The chapters from “Memory” to “Kratie” use metaphors to show how the tides and rivers of the Sundarbans represent the constantly shifting environment, personal history, relationships, and struggles of human life living in an unpredictable environment. The motif of water is essential to how the novel portrays identity. Kanai, Piya, and Fokir find their sense of self shaped/reshaped by their encounters with the Sundarbans, where the boundaries between land and water are constantly changing. Kanai arrives in the region as an outsider and gradually confronts the fragility of his identity in the face of the vast, untamable waters of the Sundarbans. In the chapter “Memory,” Kanai begins to feel the weight of his outsider status as he witnesses the locals’ intimate connection with the land and water. Kanai starts to realize this when he observes Fokir, who navigates the treacherous waters with a skill that Kanai, despite his education, can never hope to match. When Kanai sees Fokir jump into the water to push their boat, even though the water reaches his neck, he is astonished at how easily Fokir acted in the water. Despite his intellectual prowess, Kanai felt powerless against the forces of nature that dominate the tide country. His identity –rooted in urban privilege and education– forces him to accept that he is inadequate in this environment where survival depends not on intellect but intuition and survival-based knowledge that, in this case, Fokir holds, but not Kanai.

Water also serves as a metaphor to show how unstable memories can be. Just as the tides constantly shift the landscape of the Sundarbans, so too do memories shift and change in the characters’ minds. Kanai’s reading of Nirmal’s notebook in “Words” and “Crimes” reveals how the forces of history and personal bias often shape memory. His political ideals color Nirmal’s recollections of the Morichjhãpi massacre and his desire to frame the events within a narrative of resistance and defiance. Nirmal’s idealized vision of the settlers’ struggle blurs between reality and his passion for a revolutionary narrative, making Nirmal’s memory of Morichjhãpi both a tribute and distortion, much like the shifting currents of the Sundarbans that reveal and conceal the land in unpredictable ways. “Saar, the worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their announcements, hearing them say that our lives, our existence, were worth less than dirt or dust.” (Ghosh 215) Kusum’s words are preserved from Nirmal’s point of view, but their desire to live and historical context are filtered through his interpretation of the suffering and oppression they experienced.

Moyna describes the river similarly to the reality of life in the Sundarbans, where survival depends on understanding the waters, which often hold invisible dangers. For the people of the Tide country, survival means knowing how to navigate these hidden forces, much like understanding the currents that guide the tides. The notion that survival, memory, and identity are intertwined with the forces of nature is further explored in the dialogue between Kanai and Moyna. Moyna tells Kanai, “Because words are just air, Kanai-babu. When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard.” (Ghosh 213) Moyna suggests that social and emotional survival depends on navigating relationships and situations that may not always be clear on the surface. Just as the Sundarbans’ waters conceal their most powerful currents beneath calm surfaces, the characters must navigate complex, often hidden, emotional landscapes to survive. Fokir, for instance, moves through life with an intuitive understanding of the rivers. Yet, simultaneously, Kanai, an outsider, doesn’t have these deeper connections that tie the community to the land and water.