The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, the author of the Ibis trilogy, features characters, ideas and relationships struggling to find their footing in the ebbing, rising, shifting, flowing backdrop of the enigmatic Sunderbans. Rich in historical, ecological and geographical facts, the story reads like an enthralling fantasy.
Book Details
Genre: Historical Fiction, Environment, War, Social, Politics
Ages: 13+
Publisher: Viking
Price: Rs 296.80 for the ebook and Rs 325.00 for the paperback.
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Plot Synopsis
Piya, a cetalogist from Seattle, arrives in the Sunderbans to study the behavior of Dolphins inhabiting the Gangetic delta. Kanai, a linguist with a thriving business in New Delhi, reluctantly agrees to visit his aunt Nilima, who runs a trust that has undertaken various welfare projects in the Sunderbans. The book explores the evolving relationship between Piya and Kanai as they are both transformed by their unusual surroundings.
The book also reveals how certain traumatic historical events not only affected the relationship between Kanai’s uncle and aunt, but, through the ripples of time, are also reaching out to shape the relationship between Kanai and Piya.
Highlights
The fictional characters and their relationships are etched upon a very real, yet fantastic landscape of the Sunderbans, where the tide blurs the lines between good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, old and young, method and magic.
At the edge of civilization, where nature still thrives, widely accepted human ethics, laws and knowledge begin to fumble and flail. The story explores this idea on two vastly different scales in tandem. While the characters are constantly forced to re-examine their personal beliefs in the unfamiliar and disconcerting environment of the Gangetic delta, they acquire an insider perspective on the historic Marichjhapi massacre, where the ruthless implementation of noble intentions resulted in a tragedy.
The story explores the rivers of knowledge that pour into the oceans of information, each river forgoing its identity as it blends into a homogeneous global culture. But hidden in the pockets, where the river tussles with the sea, is world privy to a different kind of knowledge that has little use outside its own magical realm. The dreamers who live there, are content to learn and appreciate its secrets, without looking to control or exploit them.
The fragile truce between Dokkhin Rai and Bon Bibi is the essence of this book. The tide country, like the domains of Dokkhin Rai and Bon Bibi, is a juxtaposition of contradictions, that have learned to coexist, and the underlying tension pushing apart the mosaic tiles held together by the magic of the land, has the same restless energy of the tide oscillating back and forth. For example, in this land of scarcity, teeming with life, humans and deadly animals have learned to co-exist, in spite of mutual mistrust.
Reality, vividly penned to conjure a rich fantasy, that simultaneously educates and enthralls