In his latest novel Amitav Ghosh continues his characteristic dismantling of totalities and categories, this time using the imagery of nature to emphasize the heterogeneous and constantly changing character of human societies on the one hand, and the eternally unchangeable cycles of history on the other.
The Sundarban area, the setting of the novel, is seen as an intermediate border zone between land and sea, where river water mixes with sea water producing peculiar life environments. The environment also leads to animal behaviour not found elsewhere and consequently not predictable through previous findings of science. The relationship between man and nature is also altered. Where nature is usually moulded, utilized and exploited by humans, in the Sundarbans there is very little to mould and the accomplishments of people are every now and then washed away by huge tidal waves. Animals too are hostile to man, especially the tigers, which are strongly thematized in the narrative. But animals are also described as ‘working’ together with people, as in the case of dolphins helping fishermen to round up fish for mutual benefit, or represented as equally migrant or equally massacred by wars as human beings.
In the novel humans are presented as alienated from one another, animals and nature, through their possessing a separate communicative apparatus: language. For dolphins, seeing, communicating and existing are represented as parts of a single action. The paper examines how the narrative draws parallels between people and animals, to form a contact between them and the nature.