Small Things - Big Matters
Towards Glocalization in Postcolonial India
Nandini Bedi Master Thesis
English Literature and Culture Supervisor – Dr A.A.L Bracke
Contents
Introduction ... 1Chapter 1: The Economies of the Small ... 13
Chapter 2: The Voices of the Small ... 26
Chapter 3: Unities and Communities ... 39
Conclusion: Matter has Meaning and Meaning Matters ... 49 Works Cited ... 53
Introduction
History/storyThe sandpaper was divided exactly into two halves, and the twins fell to work with an eerie concentration that excluded everything else. Boat- dust flew around the room and settled on hair and eyebrows. On Kuttapan like a clould, on Jesus like an offering (213).
These lines from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things reflect a collapse of hearts, minds and matter as the seven year old children Estha and Rahel fix the boat that will row them to safety should maternal love fail to deliver. They are ‘united in a moment of complete absorption in their common labour’ (Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments, 97). Their work is reminiscent of Gandhi’s daily spinning, an enactment of resistance to British made cloth and an expression of economic independence from them.
Gandhi’s daily spinning became a symbol of freedom. British cloth was manufactured in Manchester from the raw cotton that was taken out of India. It was then sold at a huge profit to the colonial and subjected the Indian to further impoverishment. Homespun cloth for one’s own needs as advocated by Gandhi would free Indians from having to buy British material. This model took its inspiration from the villages (where the majority of the people lived) because Gandhi saw the huge human and the non-human capital contained in them. Along with the village economy, he valorised the small and the local. His ecological ethic for the world at large has proven to be prophetic: ‘the world has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed’. In independent India, Gandhi’s vision of the small economy has been replaced by one in which the small has been appropriated for big “development” projects and low cost labour. One of the consequences is that village India is locked out of the flow of goods and capital and alienated from the hubs that are the cities. Moreover, the
small has come to be conflated with the subaltern and serves larger interests. The historian Ranajit Guha, in the manifesto to the Subaltern Studies Project 1 which he spearheaded, said that ‘the modern historiography of South Asia was dominated by two elitisms - the colonialist and the nationalist’ (Chatterjee, loc. 262) - the latter following the former in the rendering of subalterns as the objects of history. Historians would have to listen to ‘the small voice of history’.2Guha, like other intellectuals emphasized that although the colonial left, the legacy not only stayed but flourished in independent India.
If the elitist project of nation building as embedded in history has denied voice to the small, has literature captured the subjectivities of the small? In the postcolonial environments described in the realist novels The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide (Amitav
Ghosh), ‘ the small voice of history’ as embodied by its subalterns could be read as drowning in the big wave for resources, capital, markets, conservation and eco-tourism. However, as this thesis demonstrates, the authors “re-vision” history and forefront the agencies of the small. Furthermore, I argue, that there is a turning in the tide if looked at in light of the chronological order that the novels were written. Roy’s semi-autobiographical novel of 1997 is dedicated to Mary Roy, who ‘grew up’ the author and loved her enough to ‘let her go.’ The tragic deaths and/or destruction of the small protagonists and the river turned into a sewer in
The God of Small Things leave the reader with an understanding why escaping from
Ayemenem village is desirable. In contrast, in The Hungry Tide, written seventeen years later on the sub continent, Piya chooses to be a ‘rooted cosmopolitan’ in a small island village over a ‘foot loose expert’ (Randeria, 24) roaming the world in search of cetaceans to save. She
1 For Guha, subalterns were peasants – those of the lowest castes and the ‘Adivasis’, or indigenous people. The duration of project is from1982-1999, but subaltern studies has continued to generate scholarship to the present. 2 This is the title of a lecture Guha gave in 1997 and also of a collection of essays by him that were subsequently published.
does this after having gained new perspectives through her symbolic fusion with Fokir, a villager. As a result, glocalization3 of the tide country takes form.
Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism
In this thesis, I will approach the novels The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide from a materially inflected ecocritical perspective. ‘The “material self”, in fact cannot be
disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political cultural, scientific and substantial’ (Alaimo, 476) as is reflected above in the examples of the twin children and Gandhi. Within the paradigm of material ecocriticism, the “material turn” could be defined by ‘the search for new conceptual models apt to theorize the connections between matter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures and meanings on the other side’ (Iovino, 450). The agency of all matter - human and non-human, without necessarily attributing intentionality to either, is central to the “material turn”. “Agentic” matter thus has an historical and narrative dimension and as Iovino states: ‘all forms of existence nature, society, knowledge, humans, non-humans’ …. are …‘ taken back to their very condition of possibility: embodiment’ (450). The Subaltern Studies Project and the scholarship generated by it, likewise place the agency of subalterns at the centre so as to free them from the chains of the role of objects that they have come to occupy in historical narration. Furthermore, post colonialism with its emphasis on the effects of colonizing practices and their on-going articulations is relevant to the analysis of the novels.
Huggan and Tiffin say that the fields of postcolonialism and ecocriticism are
‘notoriously difficult to define’ (2). Taking the cue from them, theoretical aspects of both are adopted in this thesis as ‘a way of reading rather than a specific corpus of literary and other cultural texts’ (emphasis original, 13). They add that although both fields share
3 The term glocalization is used here as defined by Randeria: ‘an entanglement of global and local processes rather than to a contrast between them’(4)
commonalities, since colonization included people, land, flora and fauna, they tend wrongly to be perceived as opposed to each other. Broadly speaking, this is because ecocriticism is seen to foreground the human relationship to the “environment” (though not only) and postcolonialism tends towards anthropocentricism and the focus on the artificial boundaries that prescribe the human and “dehumanized” others. However, a steadily growing scholarship does combine the two frameworks - especially in connecting material practices with ideas and the effects of uneven development.
These theoretical frameworks have not explored the place of dirt, especially relevant to the Indian context because of the Hindu view of ritual pollution. Material ecocritics and especially Heather Sullivan thorough her “Dirt Theory”, argue that the human, like all matter must be placed squarely along side and in dirt/nature. In the Indian context, this provides a particularly interesting challenge. In Hinduism, the higher castes must resist the
transformation to dirt and are threatened by those considered “untouchables” who are considered pollutants. The former are also the ones in positions of power over the
“untouchables” despite the constitutional right to equality. An exploration of dirt for readings focussed on India could offer fresh insights especially in light of the recent rise in the
articulation of a “pure” Hinduism that resists what is perceived as “pollutants” such as loose Western morals, “Islamicization” through impregnation of Hindu women and inter-caste marriage. Parallel to this development is the practice of rapid and highly polluting
industrialization by the very caste Hindus in search of the “purity” mentioned above. Taking the material and the semiotic and their entanglements as central concerns of both ecocriticism and postcolonialism, dirt in its many manifestations is extremely relevant to the Indian
context, but has not received much attention. This thesis seeks to fill in that gap by
incorporating some of Sullivan’s ideas with respect to the agency of dirt in determining the fate of the major characters in Roy’s novel and departing from her ideas in other respects.
The thesis is furthermore designed firstly as a conversation between the scholarship generated by the Subaltern Studies Project and the “material turn” and secondly as a reflection on the advocacy role the authors perform, which is seen as embedded in ecocriticism and postcolonialism.
The Subaltern Subject
Chatterjee, a subaltern scholar says that Guha ‘invoking Heidegger, proposed the concept of historicality that could recall the past in the phenomenology of every day life’ (Small Voice of
History, loc. 333). Such a practice is challenging for the historian who is ‘entwined with the
rationality of the state’ (loc.333). However, this does not apply to the novelist. Bose says about the The Hungry Tide that ‘Ghosh’s fiction reveals a keen interest in history … it takes upon itself the responsibility of re-assessing its troubled antecedents, using history as a tool by which we can begin to make sense of - or at least come to terms with - our troubling present (as quoted in Volkman, Grimm, Demeters and Thomson 235-245). Of The God of
Small Things, Needham says that it:
presents history (most often, although inconsistently with a capital H) as a
dominating, oppressive force … however, the epigraph to Small Things4 from John
Berger (‘Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one’) and the novel’s privileging of the ‘small drama and fine detail of social existence’ lived ‘at its lower depths’ (Guha, 1997 (1987) : 36) that constitute the life and times of Ammu, her twins, and Velutha disclose an alternative perspective’ (both emphases mine, 372). This perspective that both novels propose, shows the way for “re-visioning” history, in which the small play an important part, as will be discussed in the forthcoming chapters.
In order to provide an alternative perspective, Guha says it is important ‘to listen’ which ‘is already to be open to and existentially disposed towards: one inclines a little on one side to listen’ (loc.5510). However, he goes on to say that the voices of the small cannot be heard in the din of a history that focuses on the state that is moreover not interested in engaging in a multiplicity of voices. Subaltern scholars vary in their articulation of the form of resistance that the small resort to in the absence of being heard. However, they are, unlike the state mechanism that they critique able to include a multiplicity of viewpoints when articulating the subaltern expression of resistance. Whilemuch subaltern scholarship
emphasizes opposition and open revolt as acts of resistance, Sarkar, another subaltern scholar focusses on silence, collusion and daily acts of resistance. In its drawing attention to different forms of resistance, The Subaltern Studies Project underlined the agency of the subaltern to address the forces of oppression.
For Guha, the ineffectiveness of the subaltern to be heard is attributed to the gap in the ability of the hearer to listen. Spivak turned this around when she asked: ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’5 For Spivak, discourses cannot take the perspectives of the subaltern into account because most scholarship speaks for the subaltern instead of giving them voice. This is especially true because they are often embedded in Western academic practice and tend to be conversations between two dominant parties. As far as the attempt by Guha and his colleagues, she says is it is ‘interventionist, subalternist work’ by which ‘they are not
speaking for the subaltern but they are working for the subaltern’ (qtd. in De Kock, 47). The Guyanse poet and activist Martin Carter extended the subaltern’s inability to be heard to include the land through his poem, ‘Listening to the Land’ in which the ‘narrator repeatedly describes how he ‘bent’ and ‘kneeled’ down in anticipation of listening but confesses that ‘all
5 This is the name of an essay originally published in 1988 in Nelson and Grossberg’s Marxism and the
(he) heard was tongueless whispering / as if some buried slave wanted to speak again’ (Carter, 1985: 89 as quoted in DeLoughrey and Handley, 5).
Finding a way around History with a capital H
The challenges of representing a postcolonial ecology of the subaltern seem insurmountable if looked at in the light of the inability of the hearer to listen and the ravages of History with a capital H on the colonized subaltern subject - both human and non-human. It is precisely here that the imagination is seen as central in recalling ‘the past in the phenomenology of every day life’ (Chatterjee, loc.333). For Edward Said, ‘this imagination must be a poetic, world-making one, in which the human relationship to the more than human world and to a buried past must be reached for and conceived even if this nationalist recovery risks being romantic’ (Said, as quoted in DeLoughrey and Handley, 5). In The God of Small Things, Roy’s
narration in the last chapter reflects Said’s view. It could be convincingly argued that Roy chooses a ‘fairy tale’ ending for what is actually a ‘tragedy’ (Nair as quoted in Needham, 386). In the case of The Hungry Tide reviewers have pointed to its ‘awkward’ and ‘somewhat slick and happy ending’ (Gurr in Volkman, Grimm, Demeters and Thomson, 75). It closes by imagining the collapse of antagonist binaries and suggests that in future, the fate of man and beast, nature and culture, forest and village, global and local are all at stake. Both imagine these worlds by creating the space for a multiplicity of voices - human and non-human.
In these endings especially, the subaltern as subject of his/her own history, however small, is an acknowledgement of agency, desire and of potential. The subaltern here ‘indexes a modality of desire many theorists consider “a fundamental dimension of utopia” ’ (Knight as quoted in Needham, 387). Likewise, Henry Schwarz writing about The Subaltern Studies
Project points to its ‘utopian impulse … for a fully decolonized historiography’ which will
rewrite the past from a perspective never before considered and in the process revolutionize that story’ (Schwarz as quoted in Needham, 387). Gandhi’s enactment and advocacy of daily spinning could be seen as another such ‘utopian impulse’ for a ‘fully decolonized
historiography’. When he practised and advocated spinning to others, what got “materialized” was not only the cloth but also the agency of the subaltern that such an act of resistance articulated. The “material turn” may explain such a doing of history in the following way:
If knowledge is an embodied practice, the knower and the known are mutually transformed in the process of knowing, and new levels of reality emerge. Whether it involves cells or social practices, knowing is a material discursive becoming. It transforms both the individual and the world. This performative image of science and of practice as a ‘mangled’ doing of ‘material’ and ‘social’ actors implies a map of agency in which the boundaries of human and nonhuman agency are continuously stretched and redefined (Iovino, 455).
The divisions between subject and object is questioned, if looked at in the light of the potential inherent in all matter to act and be acted on that leads to ever-new
realities/meanings. Knowledge is embedded in a practice in which emergence and re-emergence is the result of a constant interplay of the material and the discursive.
Beyond Dualisms
Seen in this light, the happy endings of both novels project a world in which boundaries are negotiable. When they are not perceived as negotiable and furthermore expressed as dualisms, they serve the project of colonialism well. As Huggan and Tiffin point out, drawing on Val Plumwood’s work, ‘Plumwood argues that the Western definition of humanity depended and still depends - on the presence of the non-human’ (5). Inherent in this definition are racism and “speciesm”. What racism and “speciesm” share in common is the rationalization of ‘the
exploitation of animal (and animalized human) “others” in the name of a human – and reason centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia old’ (Plumwood, as quoted in Huggan and Tiffin, 5). Likewise the caste system as practised in India justifies the exploitation of the “outcast(es)” and tribals by placing them in a “not human” category. The “untouchables” and tribals did not spring from the body of the god Brahma, as the caste Hindus did and therefore they are considered as less than human.
Eurocentricism, anthropocentricism and the caste system use the human/non-human dualism to spur colonizing missions. Roy’s essay “The Greater Common Good” in describes the resistance to ‘Big Dams, The World Bank and The State’ and shows that development models that originated in the “developed” world and were proven disastrous there are subsequently exported to the “developing” world in the name of civilizing missions but are really colonizing ones based on these same dualisms. Postcolonialists and ecocritics agree that this model has not served the world well because of the many crimes committed by humans in the name of humanity. Yet ‘the problem of humanism remains an inescapable horizon within which all attempts to think about the ways in which human beings have, do, might live together in and on the world are contained’ (Davies as quoted in Huggan and Tiffin, 206).
Again, the role of literature in the politics of representation is crucial. Ghosh recalls the Morichjhapi resistance and subsequent massacre of island refugees in the 1970s in The
Hungry Tide. He gives voice to Kusum the subaltern rebel in a way that raises important
questions about our present day reality. The very dualisms advanced by the colonial project are used to ask questions about those willing to use violence to evict the refugees living on land earmarked for a national park to protect the tiger:
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 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 have always lived - by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil (261-262). Dualisms are used by Ghosh to subvert the colonial vision. Likewise, taking Opperman’s ‘integral way of thinking language and reality, discourse and matter together’ (462) as a framework, in The God of Small Things, the representation of the small, Velutha is dirt-6 or that which is nature/non human if seen in the light of the caste system. Locating dirt in the viewpoint Sullivan shows that ‘we are enmeshed within dirt in its many forms’ (515). Through the sexual union of Ammu (embodying the world of culture) and “outcast(e)” Velutha, the agency of dirt/the small/the subaltern is recognized in the possibility of the creation of a new family. To quote Ambedkar,7 himself an “outcast(e)”, ‘fusion of blood alone can create the feeling of being kith and kin. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of
caste’ (original emphasis, Rao as quoted in Needham 385). From a materially inflected
ecocritical perspective the fusion could be explained thus: ‘every “emergence” is seen as the concretization of material and semiotic discursive dynamics, and therefore bequeathed with the possibility of carrying meanings and with a historical (namely narrative) dimension’ (Iovino, 451). Similarly, in The Hungry Tide Fokir, the fisherman, through his symbolic fusion with Piya’s body and soul, passes on knowledge to her. This occurs, despite the language gap that “literally” exists between the two, who share no words common to them both. Such a perspective is not reason/human centred. As a result of this fusion, the North American educated and funded scientist Piya gains fresh perspectives and funding with which to continue her “(re) search” in the tide country. History is enacted, and in no small
6 Outcastes are considered as pollutants to caste Hindus.
measure, due to the “agentic” force of the small setting off a process of glocalization. In that sense, the ending of the novel is also a beginning.
This beginning could be seen as reflecting ‘a broadly materialist understanding of the changing relationship between people, animals and the environment - one that requires attention, in turn to the cultural politics of representation as well as to those more specific “processes of mediation … that can be recuperated for anti colonial critique ” ’(Cilano and DeLoughrey in Huggan and Tiffin, 12). These works of imaginative literature feed and are fed by actors and agents committed to such a critique. The advocacy role that Roy and Ghosh perform is evident in their engagement in recognizing the voices of the small through their writing as well as in their public appearances. They are both known to actively participate in public debate and, it could be convincingly argued, as such contribute to policies that are compelled to take these voices into account.
Small Things - Big Matters
Despite the annihilation of the small protagonists in the novels by the those actors, ideas and things that dominate in the narrative of colonization, the civilizing mission and/or the state, Roy and Ghosh are committed to the agency of the “small”. In the first chapter of this thesis, entitled “The Economies of the Small”, I will focus on how the small is defined in the novels through representations of the tiny (places, animals, insects, things, gods, children) and also through the framework of the subalternists. The place occupied by the subaltern in the
dualisms propounded by colonialism/nationalism will be spelled out and contrasted with what are considered the big projects of History with a capital H. Roy’s essay, “The Greater
Common Good”8 will be used to highlight the contrast between the small and the big. The second chapter, entitled “Voices of the Small”, will look at the subaltern subject, both human
8 The novel The God of Small Things was written in the same year (1997) that Guha gave the lecture “The Small Voice of History” and the essay “The Greater Common Good” followed two years later in 1999.
and non-human and also draw the connection to agency with a focus on resistance. In the third chapter, “Unities and Communities”, I will foreground how the agency of the small subaltern subject is central to The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide. I conclude by summarizing the evidence from the novels that highlight the agencies of the small and why the theoretical frameworks of the “material turn” and post colonialism are suited to
Chapter One
The Economies of the Small
‘Estha and Rahel pushed open the door and went in. Small as they were, they had to stoop a little to go in. The wasp waited outside on the lamp’ (207). Estha, Rahel and the wasp are three of several small beings in The God of Small Things. Two of them are made smaller by the entrance they go through. Five pages before this, Roy writes: ‘jewelled dragonflies hovered like shrill children’s voices in the sun’ (202). She continues with a poetic vision of the insect world:
White termites on their way to work White ladybirds on their way home
White beetles burrowing away from the light White grasshoppers with whitewood violins. (202)
Her book teems with the performances of the small: the twin children referred to as ‘A Mobile Republic’ (202, 335), ‘hurrying scurrying’ insects (202) ‘high-stepping chickens in the yard’ (201), laughing fish, ants carrying a dead cockroach, the twins’ grandfather’s dead moth who spreads its wings in Rahel’s throat, stuffed staring birds, bats in Ammu’s
collarbones, an aeroplane reduced to a screaming steel bird in the sky, active spiders at sea, the ever alert Ousa The Bar Nowl watching every move and a myriad other images of busy, small matter in acts of creating, carrying, building, watching, expressing, threatening, exchanging. In contrast, the big elephant is asleep next to her own steaming dung, the
concrete kangaroos in Cochin airport are inert and Velutha floating in the river is likened to a crocodile and a log. As for grown up (big) people, most of them are a menace and their performances are burdened by their past - ‘history’s henchmen’ mired in tradition - troubled, disturbed, violent and sometimes, plain cruel.
In The Hungry Tide, it is not the small that at first glance captures attention. It appears as if the lives and deaths of bigger creatures - tigers, dolphins, and adult people are entangled in the heat for survival in the Sunderbans. However, by looking more closely at Ghosh’s manifestations of the small, another picture is evident. In this chapter, I will look at representations of the small in both novels and contrast these with those of the big. In the delineation of the subaltern person as small I will confine myself to the “outcast(es)” and the Adivasis.9
Small Places, Small People
Both novels begin by taking their readers through a journey as adult protagonists visit a place from their childhood that, for one or another reason, has impacted them in some way. The
God of Small Things begins with Rahel’s and her twin brother Estha’s return to Ayemenem
village. Estha is there - not of his own volition but because he has been ‘re-Returned’ (9). Rahel is there because Estha is there. Neither returns to Ayemenem out of attachment to it. When Rahel was in architecture school in Delhi, Roy writes of her that ‘she occasionally wrote to Chacko and Mammachi but never returned to Ayemenem. Not when Mammachi died. Not when Chacko emigrated to Canada’ (18). The first time that their uncle Chacko left the village, several years prior to the twins’ return, he did not even keep in touch with his parents who still lived in Ayemenem at that time: ‘The truth is that in his years at Oxford, Chacko rarely thought of them. Too much was happening in his life and Ayemenem seemed far away. The river too small. The fish too few’ (246). That Ayemenem is no place for a person with ambition is strongly felt in these lines. In The Hungry Tide, Kanai returns after several years to the village of Lusibari,10 in the Sunderbans, the tide country.11 He does so
9 See footnote 2 in the introduction for how this this term is used. 10 Lusibari translates as ‘Lucy’s House’ in Bengali
because his aunt Nilima persuades him as he has inherited a package from Nirmal, his uncle and her husband. Kanai had lived with Nilima and Nirmal in Lusibari as a child when he was sent there for a few weeks on being rusticated from school for misbehaviour. Ghosh describes Lusibari thus: ‘Lusibari was about two kilometres long, from end to end’ (36). Years later when Kanai returns, Lusibari is described as ‘a small island with a population of several thousand’ (59). Thus both villages, where much of the action of the novels take place, are small - the one for its inability to “think big” and the other as a physically enclosed space albeit with several thousand inhabitants. Thus the choice of place or setting is crucial to the foregrounding of the small in the novels. Fleeting references are made to the relatively bigger places that the protagonists are living in or have lived in - Delhi, Calcutta, London, Oxford, Seattle or Washington DC and other locations - but it is the sense of place that includes the island village of Lusibari and its surroundings and Ayemenem that the authors focus on.
The village as place is also central to Roy’s essay, “The Greater Common Good”. At the very beginning of it she says: ‘I’ve done my time in a village. I’ve had first hand
experience of the isolation, the inequity and the potential savagery of it’ (par. 4). Furthermore, as noted in the introduction chapter of this thesis, she dedicates her semi-autobiographical novel The God of Small Things to Mary Roy, her mother, and thanks her for ‘letting her go.’ Roy’s Ayemenem matches her description of villages as the places where ‘India dies’ (par. 44) - the same sites that so inspired Gandhi. The writer in Roy is driven to look for a story in the villages about to be submerged by the Narmada Valley Development Project, which according to her, ‘whichever way you look at it … is Big. It will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India’s biggest rivers … will affect the lives of twenty five million people’ (par. 56). Besides, ‘India now boasts of being the world’s third largest dam builder’
11 In this thesis, the word Sunderbans (which translates as ‘beautiful forest’) and tide country are used inter-changeably for the great archipelago situated between the Indian Ocean and Bengal. They cover about 10,000 square kilometres of mangrove-forested islands.
(par. 21) of which this is one, strongly supported by the World Bank and the Indian government at the centre for the greater common good. The water will be diverted to the cities and to areas of intensive sugarcane plantations that are owned by rich (big) farmers. The dam will displace almost three times the population of Australia and is an environmental disaster of gigantic scale. Most of the ecological refugees that the project will create come from the lowest castes as well as the Adivasis. They are resisting the dam and so Roy refers to them in her essay, as ‘small heroes’ (par. 16) in India’s villages:
India lives in her villages we’re told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That’s bullshit. Its just another fig leaf from the government’s bulging wardrobe. India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just (par. 46).
Echoing Roy’s words quoted above, the anthropologist Annu Jalais says: ‘The Sunderbans region is also referred to as “Kolkota’s servant” (Kolkotar jhi), due to the large number of its inhabitants working as servants in the houses of Kolkota’s affluent’ (169). Through her
research in the tide country, Jalais also shows that most of the rustic inhabitants, or subalterns, are from the lowest castes and Adivasis and are referred to as nimnobarno (signifying them as low caste or untouchable) or as chottolok, which in Bengali means “small people”.12On the
other end of the social scale are those, like Kanai, the bhadralok, which translates from Bengali as “gentle people.” ‘ “Bhadralok” carries connotations not only of landed wealth but also of education, culture and anglicisation and of upper-caste exclusiveness’. (Chatterjee as quoted in Jalais, 28). Jalais adds that in the perception of the islanders and the city folk alike, the rusticity of the people of the Sunderbans region, with its several islands, increases with
their distance from the city of Kolkota.13Those who live in the ‘up’ islands, closer to Kolkota are considered higher in the social scale because of their proximity to the bhadralok than those who live in the ‘down’ islands, of which Lusibari is one in Ghosh’s novel: ‘it was the most southerly of the inhabited islands of the tide country - in the fifty kilometres of
mangrove that separated it from the open sea, there was no other settlement to be found’ (36). In other words, the smallest of people are the residents of the ‘down’ islands like Lusibari.
Kanai, a fortunate citizen from the city of Kolkota, the tenth largest metropolis in the world, says of his childhood visit to Lusibari that he was ‘sent off to suffer the company of rustics’ (15). Like the bathtub left behind by a Scotsman, the word “rusticate” resonates with a colonial past. Kanai, brought up in postcolonial India asks Piya, brought up in America, if she is familiar with it to which she replies that she isn’t. The Oxford English dictionary defines the verb “rusticate” in the following ways: ‘suspend (a student) from university as a punishment (used chiefly at Oxford and Cambridge)’ and also as a dated reference to ‘go to, live in or spend time in the country.’ Both novels are written in English and it can be assumed that their audience comes from the predominantly anglicised urban environments in India and from abroad. Much like the child Kanai, the non-rustic readers too, are rusticated, since they are transported to small, rural places in the countryside of India through these realist novels. However, unlike the Oxford dictionary in which rustication is the suspension of a student by asking him/her to leave a place of learning as punishment, the rustication that the reader is subjected to has a different connotation. As Mukherjee says, with reference to these novels:
Time after time, we will encounter our novels thus performing (or exhibiting) their own novelistic and literary nature to us. This ensures that the story we are reading - about the necessarily interlinked devastation of the humans, non-humans, soil, water, air and crops of postcolonial India - is experienced as a performance of a story; a
13 Kolkota refers to Calcutta after the latter, a colonial name was shed in preference for the pre-colonial one in January 2001.
disturbing experience that prevents any easy consumption of the story as merely another simple pleasure, a supping of the more exotic pleasures of the world (Postcolonial Environments, 11).
In Mukherjee’s view, the novels can be seen as active agents, drawing the reader into the performance of the stories of devastation in small places to experience life ‘lived at its lower depths’ (Guha, loc.4816) without enjoyment. Needham refers to Spivak who argued ‘that literature performs its ideological work in an almost clandestine way’ (380) and this is especially so with reference to the realist novel. Ghosh and Roy direct the readers’ gaze to those places and people who have missed the boat of History with a capital H, while the reader most likely has not. Furthermore, the pressing questions of the day as expressed by the subaltern voice of Kusum (considered less than dirt) as well as through the brutal murder of a human, Velutha (considered dirt) and the end of childhood of the two innocent twins Estha and Rahel are confronting in that they arouse the kinds of dilemmas forged out of dualisms such as human/culture and non-human /nature. How does contact with city and “anglicization” make one more “cultured” than the connection to the countryside? What determines how the lines between culture/civilized and nature/uncivilized are drawn? Through arousing such dilemmas, the authors’ role in advocacy is evident. In the Indian context, such questions are particularly stark, in the light of the caste system that degrades sections of the population who are “like dirt” even today.14
Moreover, if habitats of the small continue to be devastated and laid waste by the “civilizing” colonial projects of the day, will it be possible to engage with them? Ghosh
14 The performance of work involving carcasses, human waste, filth and pollution of all kinds are still the purview of the ‘untouchable’ caste in India in the year 2014. ‘In fact caste and related discriminations have become so common and ingrained in our psyche that the media … decided not to talk about this unique system of hierarchy - legitimised by the wider society and sanctified by religion - http://kafila.org/2014/10/09/swachh-bharat-abhiyan-too-many-erasures/ Accessed on 8 Oct. 2014.
shows in The Hungry Tide that Nilima and Nirmal do engage with Lusibari, (albeit in very different ways) which, on their arrival from Kolkotha resembles a desolate, hopeless place:
The destitution of the tide country was such as to remind them of the terrible famine that had devastated Bengal in 1942 - except that in Lusibari, hunger and catastrophe were a way of life. They learnt that after decades of settlement the land had still not been wholly leached of its salt. The soil bore poor crops and could not be farmed all year round. Most families subsisted on a single daily meal (79).
Ghosh goes on to describe the deaths and destruction caused by storms, tigers, estuarine sharks, poisonous snakes and crocodiles on the small people eking out a living by fishing, like Fokir, and those like Horen, collecting meagre amounts of honey and wax from the mangrove forests around. Most of the women dress in white in anticipation of widowhood, since they expect their husbands to be mauled and killed by animals or to die in storms. There is no school and although there is money for health, education and public infrastructure, the corruption of officials ensures that none of it reaches the inhabitants. Besides, the narrative refers to the still unresolved puzzle of what makes the Royal Bengal tiger a man-eater even when not wounded or distressed. The conflict between this species of tiger and the subalterns and between the ‘henchmen of history’ (forest officers, government officials and politicians) and the most destitute of subalterns is powerfully conveyed and creates yet another dilemma. Are tigers to be saved at the expense of people? Like the ravaged land in the poem by Martin Carter referred to in my introduction, this tiger too bears the deep scars of the colonial: firstly since they symbolically represented the “royal” and took the place of local kings in the minds of Englishmen and were hunted down in the thousands, and secondly in more recent history, as the pet project of the global cosmopolitan elite’s engagement with conservation. With respect to the latter, the Royal Bengal tiger receives more worldly attention and support than the subaltern human subjects with whom they share the forests. This has earned them the
wrath of the latter, as is evident through the spearing to death of the tiger in The Hungry Tide. These environments in which the poor are pitted against the poorest and man against beast are not inviting places that one would like to be in, just as Roy and the protagonists of the novels mentioned earlier convey. Yet they are the ones that the authors choose to take their readers to, and with the power of their imaginations to engage their readers in.
The Small of the Child
Once transported into the small Ayemenem by Rahel, at the very beginning of The God of
Small Things, the reader is immediately drawn into her child’s world as a seven-year-old.
Rahel’s viewpoint are the eyes through which some of the most intense moments of the narrative are revealed - beginning with how she telepathically experienced what her twin Estha went through at particularly defining, lonely moments in his life and the funeral of her cousin Sophie Mol. It can be convincingly argued that there are shifts in viewpoint in course of the narrative - Ammu’s, or at times the writer herself, or a voice that seems to know everything. However, the small Rahel is the one whose perceptions dominate and with whom the reader’s identification finds place is with its ‘quirky, funny, child’s view of the world (French, as quoted in Needham, 381).
Very early into the novel, Roy refers to the child Rahel, bereft of father, mother and twin brother, in the following ways: ‘in matters related to the raising of Rahel, Chacko and Mammachi tried but couldn’t. They provided the care (food, clothes, fees) but withdrew the concern’ (15). After three expulsions from the boarding schools that she went to, each of the teachers noted that Rahel ‘(a) was an extremely polite child (b) had no friends’ (17), that ‘Rahel grows up without a brief’ (17) and, ‘as long as she wasn’t noisy about it, she was free to make her own enquiries … into life and how it ought to be lived’ (17). Of Rahel as a young adult, Roy writes: ‘the other boys were intimidated by Rahel’s waywardness ... they
left her alone (18), ‘even her professors were wary of her’ (18), ‘her wild hair was tied back to look straight though it wasn’t’ (18). When her husband Larry touches the corner of her mouth, he feels her ‘tiny pulse’ like ‘an expectant father feeling his unborn baby kick inside its mother’s womb. He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious’ (19). Through most of these references to Rahel, she is depicted as a different, disturbing, unsocial, lonely child/person but also one who is
vulnerable, small and deserving of love and empathy. Needham suggests that Roy sets up Rahel’s perspective at the beginning of the novel ‘to create sympathetic access to the subaltern who dominant society excludes in the interests of its own self-definition and ideological ascendancy’ (381). This is why the reader is able to have empathy for Velutha, the “outcaste(e)”. Furthermore, she argues, in keeping with Spivak’s research into how the realist novel draws the reader into its ideology (albeit in a clandestine manner), Rahel’s is the perspective that readers accept.
The child who symbolizes the subaltern in the most profound sense is Dukhey in The
Hungry Tide in the myth of Bon Bibi. In Ghosh’s novel, this myth receives particular
attention. It is rendered entirely in verse and stands out. Ghosh uses the same myth in an essay entitled “Wild Fictions” published in Outlook magazine to rally support against a proposed project to build a mega tourist site for the wealthy in the already threatened ecology of the tide country. In this essay, Ghosh describes how the myth pervades the villages of the tide country: ‘this story, almost unknown outside the Sunderbans saturates the lived
experience of those who inhabit the mangrove forests. Travelling theatre companies go from village to village, staging Ramlila-like15 re-enactments of the legend’ (par. 21). Indeed the children Kusum and Kanai watch such an enactment. Later in the novel, Ghosh writes about
15 Ramlila refer to performances that are a hybrid of drama, song, dance and narration of a major Indian myth on the god king Rama.
the boy Dukhey 16 while he is at the mercy of the demon king Dokkhin Rai who is disguised as a tiger:
Raising its head, the tiger reared his immense back; its jowls filled like sails and it sprang to attack.
The boy’s life took wing, on seeing this fearsome sight: ‘Oh Ma Bon Bibi deliver me from this plight.
Where are you mother? Why are you keeping away?
If you don’t come now, it will be the end for Dukhey’ (359).
Even as Dukhey falls unconscious with fright to the ground, calling out to the goddess, Bon Bibi hears him from a great distance and travels from afar to save him. She then punishes Dokkhin Rai and rewards Dukhey.
Dukhey, the “sorrowful” as poor, small but most significantly as one pure of heart and deserving of Bon Bibi’s protection refers not only to the child, but to all subalterns of the tide country who depend on the forest, which includes both the human and the non-human. Jalais found that in the ‘down’ island where she conducted her field work, (not unlike the
fictionalized Lusibari), apart from blood relationships, people also forged ties as close as those of blood relations through befriending - a system she calls ‘elected’ kin. Referring to the goddess Bon Bibi, in the world-view of the subaltern, she says:
Animals are Bonbibi’s ‘elected’ kin. Because a deer saved her life by suckling her, Bonbibi is believed to consider the deer of the forest as mother. Similarly, as she adopted Dokkhin Rai - the sage cum tiger as her ‘son’ both directly by becoming his mother and by becoming his mother Narayani’s ‘friend’, she is related to tigers too. But Bonbibi is not only connected to non-humans. She also adopted Dukhe, a poor
Sunderbans islander. Through the adoption of Dukhe she has adopted all those who depend on the forest (85).
The role of Dukhey as the small, embodied through characters like Fokir, Kusum and Horen is quite significant considering the centrality of the Bon Bibi legend to the novel, to the strong advocacy role it occupies in Ghosh’s stand against the tourist project planned for the Sunderbans, and to the lives of the people of the tide country as Jalais reveals.
But what of Kusum, the child who saw the tiger go for the kill for her own father and called out to Bon Bibi for help and did not receive it? Of this Ghosh says: ‘Bon Bibi’s indulgence is not easily granted, it must be earned by the observance of certain rules that derive from the parables contained in the legend’ (par. 21). These parables and why Bon Bibi did not hear Kusum’s cry for help, and how this relates to Gandhi’s ecological ethic for the world at large will be explored in the next two chapters.
The ‘(Impossible) Possibility’ - Big versus Small Gods
Through her kinship with animals and humans, Bob Bibi’s role is one of protection. For the
bhadralok from the cities, like the child Kanai, to entertain such an idea is ridiculous - as is
evident in this excerpt.
‘And what are you doing in Canning, Horen?’, Nilima said.
‘Jongol korte geslam. I went to “do jungle” yesterday Mashima.’ Horen replied, and
Bon Bibi granted me enough honey to fill two bottles. I came here to sell them.’ At this point Kanai had whispered into Nilima’s ear, ‘Who is Bon Bibi?’
‘The goddess of the forest’, Nilima had whispered back. ‘In these parts people believe she rules over all the animals of the jungle’.
‘O’ Kanai had been astonished to think that a grown-up, a big, strong man at that, could entertain such an idea. He had been unable to suppress the snort of laughter that
rose to his lips.
‘Kanai!’ Nilima had been quick to scold. Don’t act like you know everything. You are not in Calcutta now’ (original emphasis 27-28).
Like the child Kanai, his uncle Nirmal, a resident of the ‘down’ island of Lusibari makes his connection to the bhadralok ethos quite evident when the former asks him to tell him the story of Bon Bibi:
It’s just a tale they tell around here. Don’t bother yourself about it. Its just false consciousness; that’s all it is … you would think in a place like this people would pay attention to the true wonders of the reality around them. But no, they prefer the imaginary miracles of gods and saints’ (101-102).
Much later, Nirmal changes his stand on Bon Bibi when his associations and bonds with Kusum, Horen and other subalterns grows.
As mentioned earlier, Ghosh writes that Bon Bibi is unknown outside the region of the tide country. However, there is a strong echo of her in Roy’s essay “The Greater Common Good” in a distant and very different part of India:
We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams. Big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps, right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself up for us. Could it be? Could it possible be (par. 16)? What resonates in this passage is the ‘(impossible) possibility’ (Needham, 385) in that real change in the narrative of History with a capita H call for transformations that seem
impossible. However, in the passage above, ‘small god’ seems to be preparing for action. In Roy’s deployment of the ‘small god’ who is ‘readying herself up’, one could see the
similarity to Bon Bibi as the protector of the embodied Dukhey. She is preparing to support the many ‘small heroes’. On the other hand, Roy’s expression of doubt voiced repeatedly through ‘could it’ resonates with the god in her novel, The God of Small Things when she refers to Rahel’s husband Larry’s inability to comprehend Rahel:
He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal triumph dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy, contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. (original emphasis, 19).
The nation is India and in it ‘Small God’ is the one who oversees one individual and her private hell, and is an indifferent one. Furthermore, ‘Small God’ in another avatar seems to invade Ammu’s dreams and play cat and mouse games with her:
If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her, he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought, he couldn’t win.
Who was he, the one armed man? Who could he have been? The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? (original emphasis, 217).
However, ‘Small God’ is not as indifferent or evasive as the passages above convey. As will be evident in the forthcoming chapters, it is Bon Bibi who oversees the balance between the human and the non human world and ‘Small God’ reigns in a country in which a more than human world blossoms.
Chapter Two
The Voices of the Small
In the introduction of this thesis, I pointed out Guha’s emphasis on the historians’ opening themselves in order to listen to the subaltern. In doing so, theagency of the subaltern would be heard by the historian. Agency, according to him is manifest through insurgency.On the other hand Sarkar (a colleague of Guha’s) gave priority to other forms of resistance - silence, daily acts of resistance and/or periods of collusion with the forces of oppression. For Gandhi, resistance was daily spinning. The idea that it is in resistance, albeit expressed differently, that signs of agency are present is also resonated in the framework of the “material turn” - ‘the world kicks back’ says Karen Barad (188). Whatever form resistance takes in the scholarship of subaltern studies, the vision that pervades is that the subaltern is no passive object for the (subject) historian, but an active agent with a voice in the making of his/her history. Echoing this vision, the theoreticians of the material turn discard the view of nature as an object waiting to be discovered or represented through the human subject. In “Meeting the Universe Halfway”, quantum physicist Barad who shares the vision of material ecocritics says:
Nature has agency, but it does not speak itself to the patient unobtrusive observer listening for its cries - there is an important asymmetry with respect to agency: we do the representing and yet … nature is not a blank slate awaiting our inscriptions … to privilege the material or the descriptive is to forget the inseparability that
characterizes phenomena (181).
Here, Barad underlines nature as invested with inherently vibrant matter and interconnected through the agencies of human and non-human subjects. In the context of the “material turn”, agency is not seen as necessarily synchronous with intentionality. Moreover, boundaries are
questioned in order to reveal matter’s inherent creativity. It is in these respects that I will look at the agency of the small with a focus on the subalterns Fokir and Velutha in this chapter.
Mud, Silt and Unshaped Clay
In The Hungry Tide, one of the ways by which the wealth of the village-island of Lusibari is measured is by its silt. For the Scotsman Daniel Hamilton, this is a resource to be exploited as he notices it from the ship, while the rest of his companions are ‘laughing and drinking, shouting and dancing’ (50). Hamilton, on the other hand is described thus by Nirmal: ‘standing on the deck, his eyes drink in these vast rivers, these mud flats, these mangrove covered islands, and it occurs to him to ask, “Why does no one live here? Why are these islands empty of people? Why is this valuable soil allowed to lie fallow?” ’ (emphasis mine, 50). The anthropologist Jalais refers to the paucity of information about the people of the Sunderbans in colonial history, especially when contrasted with flora and fauna - ‘when people were finally written about, they were catalogued directly after similar - but longer - lists of snakes, birds and fish’ (185). Hamilton too, in Nirmal’s narrative appears blind to the people who lived in the Sunderbans from his view on the ship’s deck. What he sees are non-human resources to be exploited and he appears to wonder at why people have not yet availed of these.
Like Hamilton, the people who he invites into his estate and the refugees who flock to the southern island of Morichjhapi, Ghosh too sees gold in the tide country. For Hamilton, it holds the promise of Utopia once the danger from tigers and other wild animals is met by ridding the islands of them and the forests cleared. He offers rewards of land to those who kill tigers. For the immigrants and refugees, the promise is of land ownership and survival. For Ghosh, the tide country, though small, is rich in the composition of its human and non-human subjects. He uses them to stretch boundaries and to subvert the dualisms that
anthropocentrism and colonization draw their strength from. Drawing on the agency of all matter, he shows that if stories can be passed on through people, they can also be passed on through the land; if humans can look at animals, they can also be looked at by them; if people can be seen as less than dirt, they too can see animals in the place of humans; if the
bhadralok (“gentle people”) are condescending to the small, the latter too judge the them; if
animals are uncomfortable in a translated world, so are humans; if mercy is a quality of the human, so is it of the man- eating tiger whose roar leads to its human victim’s loss of
consciousness before the fatal blow and the snap of the neck. Through these examples, what is evident is that although boundaries exist, hierarchies do not. Furthermore, as Barad says: ‘the shifting of boundaries often helps bring to the surface questions of power which the powerful often try to submerge’ (187). What these examples also show is that in recognizing agency in the non-human, matter is freed from ‘its long history of attachment to automatism and mechanism’ (Bennet as quoted in Iovino, 453). This further paves the way to
acknowledging the creative force of matter, which is an idea central to the “material turn”. Hamilton, at least according to Nirmal does not appear to see matter as vibrant so ‘all that was there’ was ‘mud and mangrove’ (51) and the soil was fallow. In addition to matter’s inert quality, this presumption is based on the premise of a place devoid of its inhabitants. However the soil is not as fallow as Hamilton believed it to be, as the conflation of Fokir with the mud of the tide country shows. For, just as ‘the river is in his veins’ (245) so is the river’s mud, since the two are inseparable. When Piya falls into the river, what she inhales is 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’ (55). Dolphins cannot see in the occluded waters of these rivers and swim sideways with one fin touching the riverbed to guide them. Time and again, Ghosh makes references to mud - be it in the form of embankments, bunds, mud huts, mud and mildew in buildings, muddy Canning, clay on Horen and Kusum’s feet,
reclaimed land from the river, the love of the refugees for the tide country mud, the mud of the Matla river, the mud on which crocodiles slide, the rich fields of mud, the refugees’ longing for the ‘touch of mud’ (164), or in the form of land for the landless or islands or dust as good as gold. Even the mangrove forests find their identity as ‘land/country’ through silt and mud as is evident in this passage:
And to the inhabitants of the islands, this land is known as bhatir desh - the tide country - except that bhati is not just the “tide” but one tide in particular, the ebb tide, the bhata. This is a land half-submerged at high tide: it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forest’ (original emphasis, 8).
Mud and silt give the tide country its unique character, for through them the mangrove-forested islands are shaped and re-shaped as the rivers shift course or overflow, or storms and tidal waves change the topography. In their resistance to taking definite forms and their changing composition, the southern islands of the tide country exhibit their agency, as Jalais also found through her research: ‘the geography of these southern islands is literally “on the move” with the relatively frequent breaking of bunds and disappearance of land on the one hand, and the deposition of silt and appearance of mud sandbars on the other’ (7).
Much like the land that resists formation, Fokir too appears to resist form. At a particularly insightful moment for Kanai, he sees why Fokir’s upwardly mobile wife Moyna is attracted to him. Alone on Fokir’s boat with him, Kanai asks:
‘And your mother? Do you remember her.’ ‘How could I forget her? Her face is everywhere’.
He said this in such a plain matter-of-fact way that Kanai was puzzled: ‘What are you saying, Fokir? Where do you see her face?’
He smiled again and began to point in every direction, to the ends of the compass as well as to his head and feet: ‘Here, here, here, here. Everywhere.’
The phrasing of this was simple to the point of being childlike and it seemed to Kanai that he finally understood why Moyna felt so deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: she craved it in the same way that a potter’s hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay’ (319).
Besides the metaphor of unshaped clay in this passage above, Fokir is more often seen as a child, and a rebellious one at that in the eyes of his wife Moyna and her mentor Nilima. The latter had said that he was trouble for his wife. Repeatedly in the narrative, Fokir maintains a silence in the presence of most people and this could be read as a sign of childishness and/or resistance. Moyna had told Kanai that Fokir would do ‘just the opposite’ (155) of what other fisherman did by docking their boats together for their own safety when spending the night on the river. To Kanai’s query as to why Fokir was like that, Moyna had replied, ‘That’s just as he is … he can’t help himself. He’s like a child’ (155). Children, unlike adults are not considered formed and in this way too, Fokir resembles the unformed southern islands of the tide country.
Furthermore, in the previous chapter, I argued that all those subalterns who depend on the forest are embodiments of the child Dukhey, who cried out to Bon Bibi to save him from the tiger and received her protection. Fokir too is one such child, as without the firewood he collects from the forest, he cannot cook on his boat. According to Jalais, Bon Bibi extends her protection to her children subject to conditions:
… that they were to enter the forest only with a “pure heart/mind”… and “empty hands”. The islanders explained that they had to identify completely with Dukhe, whose unfailing belief in Bonbibi saved him, and consider the forest as being only for
those who are poor and for those who have no intention of taking more than they need to survive (72-73).17
The child Kusum who had cried out to Bon Bibi for help did not receive her protection when the tiger attacked her father because the latter was not in absolute need: ‘there was money in the house and food as well, because her father had just come back the day before from a long and successful fishing trip’ (107). A meal was already cooked with the exception of the fish, so he had got into a rage and ventured into the forest for firewood. Ghosh says in his essay “Wild Fictions” that the ethos of taking from the forest only when it is absolutely needed is all - pervasive amongst the embodiments of the child Dukhey in the tide country:
… to go into the forest while there is still food in the larder, is to invite one’s own death. The force of this prohibition is such as to extend backwards and forwards in time, so that of a man who has been killed it will often be said, “there was a pot of rice still to be cooked in his house: he had no need to go when he did”. And conversely, a man who goes a foresting in the full knowledge of having left food behind at home, will be haunted by the guilty awareness of his transgression so that his steps will be slowed and his sense dulled, and in the event that an attack does take place, he will be vulnerable (par. 22).
Jalais, who shares Ghosh’s view, adds that ‘this is the agreement between non-humans and humans that permits them both to depend on the forest and yet to respect the others’ needs’ (73). It is moreover strongly indicative of the agency of humans as well of the narratives in circulation that underline the agency of the non-human world.
Fokir demonstrates the same ethos when Piya hands him what she considers is a modest sum of money as a compensation for the money that the forest guards of the launch had taken from him:
17Jalais also adds that she was dissuaded by her hostess islander, Maloti to venture into the forest for more photographs and data than were strictly needed for her research. ‘Don’t tempt the tiger,’ she was told (89).
A loud exclamation followed as Fokir retrieved the money … he examined them as if in disbelief … he peeled a single note from the bundle and held it aloft. She
understood that he would accept that one note as a compensation of the money that had been taken from him (65).
The same ethos resonates very strongly with Gandhi’s, when he said, ‘there is enough in the world for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed’. Furthermore, it was precisely this that drew him to the small in the villages of India. For it is not only in the tide country that such an ethos is to be seen. In their book on the ecological history of India, This Fissured
Land, Guha and Gadgil show that even in villages that strictly prescribe to the non-egalitarian,
but religiously sanctioned caste system, through the veneration of local deities linked to certain species and social conventions, a prudent use of resources results.18 Myriads of small, localized deities, like the goddess Bon Bibi, hold sway and exert their agencies in these villages. Therefore Roy alludes to a ‘small god’ ‘readying herself up in heaven’ to protect the small folk of the Narmada valley in her essay. Ghosh says that since it is only through stories that nature is represented, narratives like that of Bon Bibi are vital in retaining the balance between the human and non-human world. He adds in “Wild Fictions”: ‘while it is no means the case that indigenous people are always good custodians of the environment … today it is widely accepted that many such groups have indeed played an important part in the
preservation and conservation of forests and ecosystems’ (par. 24). Such a relationship between the human and the non-human is, in the words of Iovino a way ‘to redraw the maps of ecological interactions, restructuring ethics and politics in the complex, nonlinear, co-evolutionary interplay of human and non-human agency’ (451).
18 The authors argue that the roots of the caste-system with its organization of people through their (natural) occupations has links to natural resource use and narratives that have been proven to be particularly ‘ecological’ and sustainable in the long run. Pg. 104-105
