LEC052001 Adwaidh. S The Hungry Tide as a narrative of displacement and homelessness in literature

 Home is the place where people identify themselves. Every human being is supposed to be safe in their own home. Homeland offers the security of a home. Migrations result in an absence of a permanent home.The Hungry Tide appropriates the condition of the uncanny in order to speak of dispossession and of those who lose their sense of home.

Postcolonial literature is concerned with themes of displacement, homelessness, dislocation, disorientation, hybridity, diaspora etc.Ghosh sketches the history of the Sundarbans as a history of failed colonization by humans. But, Ghosh notes, no human settlement could flourish because of the predators and the very nature of the land. Ghosh has here foregrounded the impossibility of inhabiting the Sunderbans: the islands could never really be “home” because home implies stability, security and freedom from fear. It is in a sense of the home and homelessness in the now-land, now-water Sunderbans that the postcolonial uncanny emerges. The uncanny, is about the human “sense” of house and home. The uncanny is the name of this experience of double perception of any space which is at once familiar and strange, safe and threatening, “mine” and “not mine.” The “home” is a sensate condition, and the uncanny, being a matter of perception, is different for different people.

 The dispossessed seek a new home that resembles their old home. When the refugees arrive from Bangladesh, they encounter very different sort of land. These are as one of the refugees informs Kusum, “tide country people,” and yet the government shifts them to “a dry emptiness.” All they want to do is to “plunge their hands once again in our soft, yielding tide country mud,” to return to a place that recalls their home-land (164-65). In The Hungry Tide, Kusum, the young girl who went away from Lusibari in search of her trafficked mother, and landed in Dhanbad, gives voice to the sense of dislocation and disorientation that those encamped in Dandakaranya suffered from. Amitav Ghosh has shown that home can become a tool for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of a person‘s experiences.  At the end of the narrative, both Piya and Kanai are situated at the threshold of their respective search for home vis-a vis the tide country. Therefore, home, for both Kanai and Piya, becomes a medium to restructure and reinterpret their experiences in the Sundarbans. In order to facilitate their respective endeavors, both Kanai and Piya decide to move their base away from New Delhi and Seattle respectively.

The Hungry Tide offers a humanist critique of dispossession in the Postcolonial world. It deals with people who are “out of place” and seeking a “home.” It is in a postcolonial India, with its colonial past and continued claims for social justice from the displaced, the Dalits, the minorities and women that refugees are “created.” Morichjhapi's spectral refugee is emblematic of the inadequacy of the postcolonial state to provide a safe 

“home”. Dalits, minorities and other marginalized occupy an “unhomely” space in the postcolonial nation—in fact, many of the refugees in the Sunderbans are Dalits. They are “unhomely” not only in the sense that they are “out of place,” without a place on the land or in history, but that the land itself is “unhomely,” by virtue of being inhospitable.

While foreign, national belonging,displacement and refugee continue to be contested and heated ideas and political tools for our times, The Hungry Tide is significant for the ways in which it problematizes our common sense regarding these.One can be at home but not be at ease! If one is not at ease, one cannot possibly call it home. At the same time, one can be far away from one’s home, but stays comfortable.The uncanny of the tide country points to an unjust past and present. It generates its own mythic anthropology and geography. Such an uncanny also treats the globalised Indian with disdain. In a land that is sometimes not land at all, the colonial master (in Canning) and the global Indian are also rendered wrath-like (Piya) or deeply scared (Kanai). The characters upholding the idea of distinct homeland unsettled themselves relegating to the sense of insecurity–uncanny.

References :

Ghosh, Amitav - The Hungry Tide 

Bhabha, Homi. K- The Location of Culture 

ResearchGate foundation - Analysis of The Hungry Tide