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Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics,

and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Jana María Giles

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry / Volume 1 / Issue 02 / September 2014, pp 223 - 242
DOI: 10.1017/pli.2014.18, Published online: 01 July 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S205226141400018X

How to cite this article:

Jana María Giles (2014). Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and
Environment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial
Literary Inquiry, 1, pp 223-242 doi:10.1017/pli.2014.18

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 223

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1(2), pp 223–242 September 2014.

© Cambridge University Press, 2014 doi:10.1017/pli.2014.18

Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics,

and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Jana María Giles
University of Louisiana–Monroe

Set in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the
colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre, The Hungry Tide traces the
transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested
insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard,
whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides
a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways
of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the fail-
ure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as
interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer
reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of
our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in
partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

Keywords: Sublime, Jean-François Lyotard, Postcolonial theory, Environmentalism,

Ecocriticism, Anthropocene, Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) explores human vulnerability before the
power of nature, especially that of the marginalized underclasses, raising essential
questions about the tensions between traditional land use and government plans,
about identity and social justice.1 The novel is set in the Sundarban mangrove forest, a
UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to a dazzling panoply of animal life. This
immense area occupies approximately ten thousand square kilometers across the
Indo-Gangetic Delta, transgressing the boundaries between India and Bangladesh.
Here tigers kill dozens of people per year, and violent cyclones often leave hundreds of
thousands dead in their wake, as occurred in 1970, 1991, and 2004.2 In mapping out
the conflict between the rights of local people and the Bengal tiger, a protected species

Jana M. Giles is Assistant Professor and McKneely Professor in English at the University of Louisiana at
Monroe. Her publications on aesthetics, post/modernism, post/colonialism, and environmentalism have
appeared in The Sublime Today, Samuel Beckett Today/Au’jourdhui, Ma’Comére, and The New York
Times Book Review. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.
1 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 120.
2 “Researcher’s Warning Helps Save Lives in Bangladesh,” Coastal Clips, Louisiana Sea Grant College
Program, Louisiana State University. Winter 2007. http://www.laseagrant.org/pdfs/CC_No9_Winter07.
pdf. Accessed June, 2014.
224 JANA MARÍA GILES

under the Project Tiger conservation project begun in 1973,3 which established a
substantial part of the Sundarbans as a refuge, Ghosh’s novel seeks a postcolonial
ethics and aesthetics that transcends the ideologies of the past, even as it cautiously
evaluates the extent to which such a utopian ideal is possible.
Because it is set in a vast and biotically complex environment resistant to
human mastery, The Hungry Tide may be read as elaborating the theory of the
differend of Jean-François Lyotard, providing a compelling context for exploring a
postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen
the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and
the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected to ethics and
politics.
The novel traces the narratives of Kanai Dutt, a footloose New Delhi translator
and businessman; Piyali Roy (Piya), a Bengali-American cetologist in search of the
Irrawaddy, or Orcaella, dolphin native to the region; and the journal of Kanai’s uncle
Nirmal, who became involved in the cause of the Morichjhapi refugees in 1979. Each
is profoundly influenced by Fokir, the illiterate fisherman whose intimate knowledge
of the Sundarbans informs their journeys. Through their stories, The Hungry Tide
chronicles the difficulties of transitioning from the colonial past to a future that does
not merely reinscribe the binary ideologies of history in a globalized neocolonial
present. As Rajender Kaur argues, the novel advocates “a broader ecological agenda
that is sensitive to the symbiotic codependency of the human and nonhuman
creatures that inhabit the particular biospace of the Sundarbans.”4 If, however, post-
colonialism can be understood as “a code for the state of undecidability in which the
culture of colonialism continues to resonate in what was supposed to be its negation,”5
it requires that our understanding of the relationships between aesthetics and ethics,
politics and nature, should evolve to provide appropriate frameworks for negotiating
rapidly changing communities under pressure from both global market forces and
increased environmental stressors.
Those stressors include the urgent crisis of global climate change. The Sundarbans
are especially exposed to the projected threat of sea rise,6 and the poverty of a sig-
nificant percentage of Bangladesh’s population means that they, like the nonhuman
residents of the region, may become climate refugees or suffer large-scale demise.7

3 “Background,” Project Tiger, Ministry of Environment, Government of India. June 6, 2014. http://
projecttiger.nic.in/content/107_1_Background.aspx. Accessed June 7, 2014.
4 Rajender Kaur, “ ‘Home Is Where the Orcaella Are’: Toward a New Paradigm of Transcultural
Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 14.1 (2007): 128.
5 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 14.
6 Susmita Dasgupta, Mainul Huq, Zahirul Huq Khan, Manjur Murshed Zahid Ahmed, Nandan
Mukherjee, Malik Fida Khan, and Kiran Pandey, “Vulnerability of Bangladesh to Cyclones in a Changing
Climate: Potential Damages and Adaptation Cost,” Policy Research Working Paper 5280, The World
Bank. April 2010. http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5280. Accessed April 6,
2013.
7 Estimates of the number of persons who will have to move by 2050 due to climate change
and environmental degradation range from 25 million to 1 billion, according to the International
Organization for Migration. “Interactive Fact Sheet.” Accessed March 29, 2014. The IOM states that
migration, climate change, and the environment form a complex nexus, which “needs to be addressed in a
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 225

The Hungry Tide, although not explicitly about climate change, nevertheless illustrates
the profound vulnerability of the region and the conflicts that emerge when seeking
solutions for problems that are at once political and environmental.
The challenges of understanding ourselves as simultaneously individual/subject
and species/object in the age of the Anthropocene, when humans act as a nonhuman
geological force on the planet,8 has caused scholars to comment that this quandary
presents “a version of the contemporary sublime.”9 We feel awed by the incalculable
cost of global resources,10 causing the formlessness of nature to be transferred to the
mind itself as we confront “an infinity that precisely resists computation,”11 contra
Immanuel Kant’s transcendent mastery of pure reason. If, on the one hand, we try to
imagine a sustainable future, then this can only be fictional, a representation of a
Kantian freedom of the other as an end rather than a means.12 On the other hand,
these implications could lead to a post-humanist, post-metaphysical understanding of
nature as indifferent to humanity,13 as described by Lyotard.14 Now that the illusion of
infinite resources characteristic of the expansion of industrialism, capitalism, and
empire has passed, “Why would the human be superior to any other species, given
that all species are subject to the same environmental and energetic constraints.”15
A post-humanist sustainability realizes that the ecosystem is sustainable, with and without
us.16 Timothy Morton identifies climate change as a “hyperobject,” which, like evolution
and capital, constitutes something of which one can measure the effects but not directly
experience.17 These hyperobjects are sublime signs of the Kantian gap between
phenomena and noumena. Chakrabarty’s concept of the human species needed for
thinking at the scale of climate change also constitutes an example of this gap.
Presently, how to harmonize the conflict between postcolonialism (the politics of
freedom) and environmentalism (the determinism of nature, or of the Anthropocene,
or both) appears to be at an impasse. As Aravamudan remarks, “These idealizations
concerning an endless future of secular human history came from Hegel and Marx
describing the human being as Gattungswegen, a speciesbeing thoroughly in itself
and for itself, misread against the environment as a passive and inert backdrop.”18

holistic manner.” “Migration and Climate Change,” International Organization for Migration. http://
www.iom.int/Template/migration-climate-change-environmental-degradation/interactive-factsheet/index.
html. Accessed March 29, 2014.
8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary
History 43.1 (2012): 2.
9 Allan Stoekl, “ ‘After the Sublime,’ After the Apocalypse: Two Versions of Sustainability in Light of
Climate Change,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 44.
10 Ibid., 44.
11 Ibid., 45.
12 Ibid., 48–49.
13 Ibid., 50–51.
14 Jean-François Lyotard, “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” The Inhuman, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 140, 142; Stoekl, 52.
15 Stoekl, 53.
16 Ibid., 53; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 213.
See also Frances Ferguson on climate change criticism presenting “a sublime ethics.” Frances Ferguson,
“Climate Change and Us,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 37.
17 Timothy Morton, “She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn: Thinking through Agrilogistics.”
Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 94.
18 Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 12.
226 JANA MARÍA GILES

Hence Chakrabarty laments ours is now a “negative universal history.”19 Ghosh’s

novel, while throwing down the gauntlet to postcolonialists and environmentalists
alike without providing determinate solutions, nevertheless illustrates that post-
colonial ecocritical literature and criticism make the work of the imagination central
to the mediating process of social and environmental advocacy and activism even if
the advocacy it proposes may not serve a particular constituency or be consistent.20
The sublime is an aesthetic experience in which the subject encounters an object
that appears too vast to be comprehended by the sensory imagination or too powerful
to be mastered by human efforts, yet does not pose an immediate threat to the
observing subject. For Kant, the sublime therefore involves the feeling of terror in
confronting a world apparently inhospitable to humans.21 Kant’s goal was to bridge
the gap between nature and freedom and discover the universal a priori conditions for
thought in general. Therefore, he argues that the supersensible, or metaphysical,
human freedom of the will is the only nonarbitrary purpose that is an end in itself
because nature is contingent. Believing he had proved this in his Critique of Practical
Reason, a belief contested by many commentators,22 he concluded that “pure aesthetic
judgments” cannot involve sensory feeling or emotion.23 In the final version of his
Critique of Judgement, although the empirical imagination fails to apprehend the
totality of the sublime object in a single intuition, it is subsequently rescued from this
failure by our ability to reason beyond our physical limitations, thus proving that we
have a supersensible moral being.24 In the sublime, therefore, we paradoxically
experience pain resulting from the failure of the imagination and pleasure arising from
reason’s ability to supersede the world of sense.25 In the case of the mathematical
sublime, which involves encountering something that appears infinitely large, we can
conceptualize the idea of the infinitely large even if we can’t physically intuit the
object; in the dynamical sublime, an encounter with something that appears infinitely
powerful, we think—or imagine—that we might be a match for the sublime object’s
seeming omnipotence. Whether the object is infinitely large or powerful is not

19 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” 222.

20 Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment
(London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 12–14.
21 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Foreword Mary J. Gregor (India-
napolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 99.
22 See, for instance: Johann Georg Hamann, “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason,” What Is
Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, trans. Kenneth Haynes,
ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996), 154–67; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 18–19, 25; Theodor W. Adorno,
Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 211–99; Lewis White Beck, A
Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 200–01;
Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, trans. Robert Black (London: NLB, 1971), 132; Jean-François Lyotard,
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 55; Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989), 139, 349; Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste 2e (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 18; James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics
(New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 57–61, 63.
23 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 69; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 3e, trans. Lewis White
Beck (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 9–10.
24 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 106.
25 Ibid., 114–15.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 227

objectively known; for Kant, therefore, the sublime exists in the individual’s perception
rather than being an essential attribute of the fear object itself.26 As a subjective
aesthetic experience that involves the emotion of fear, therefore, the sublime easily
lends itself to political agendas.
Despite his efforts to establish an a priori universal aesthetics, however, Kant’s
sublime is far from ideologically neutral. In fact, he states that the sublime requires
“proper” education for the appreciation of moral ideas,27 introducing an element of
a posteriori contingency. Kant’s ethnocentric assumptions have been detected by
Gayatri Spivak, among others, who argues that this education is disallowed to the
“other” of hegemonic Western culture, making the Kantian sublime an experience
only available to the white Western male in what he perceives to be an encounter with
“raw” nature, though “nature” has frequently been conflated with the “other.”28
Consequently, the sublime was co-opted for political purposes during the rise of
British colonialism, which coincided with the height of eighteenth-century interest
in the sublime. Pramod K. Nayar observes that during the eighteenth century, the
sublime Indian landscape “characterized by emptiness, vastness, ruins, and excessive
natural phenomena, is one that threatens.”29 English travelers responded to this
sublimity with, first, a state of uncertainty; second, the desire to attribute meaning to
such inscrutability;30 and third, by recasting the landscape as a site of heroic endeavor
that justified the “improvement” of India.31 Ghosh references this colonial history in
The Hungry Tide in the tale of Sir Daniel Hamilton, one of India’s richest mono-
kapitalists, who bought ten thousand acres of the mangrove forest with the aim of
creating a new utopian society.32 His idealism is countered by the story of Piddington:
in the late nineteenth century, when the English were planning to build Port Canning
on the banks of the River Matla, Piddington, a shipping inspector, warned that the
mangroves were Bengal’s defense against the onslaught of storms. The word matla
means “mad” in Bangla, a fact lost on the planners who did not appreciate how the
wide and deep river on a flat plain lacked any physical obstacle to diminish the impact
of typhoons. Dismissed as a madman, Piddington was vindicated when a mere five
years later Canning was leveled by a cyclone in 1867.33 European colonizers who
sought to understand the local ecology, like Piddington, were regularly ignored by
those who forced the land and the people to submit to their agendas. Ghosh counsels
us not to repeat the same mistakes in a postcolonial context.
Although the colonizers in Ghosh’s novel follow the pattern delineated by Nayar,
his contemporary protagonists are transformed by their Lyotardian encounter with the
Sundarbans. Their experiences, as I will discuss, demonstrate how The Hungry Tide undoes
the traditional metaphysical ideology of the sublime, revealing it as an aesthetic that may

26 Ibid., 113.
27 Ibid., 124.
28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999), 2–30.
29 Pramod K. Nayar, English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (London and
New York: Routledge, 2008), 30.
30 Ibid., 65.
31 Ibid., 76–77.
32 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 42–44.
33 Ibid., 235–37.
228 JANA MARÍA GILES

challenge our preconceived assumptions and open us to our human and nonhuman
others, promoting an ecological perspective based on mutuality rather than dominance.
Despite the sublime having received considerable attention from poststructuralist,
feminist, and Marxist critics, only recently has the focus turned to its theorization
in a postcolonial milieu.34 I find that Lyotard’s postmodern version offers the most
philosophically rigorous and appropriate paradigm for revisioning the aesthetics of the
sublime as inciting the possibility of mutual respect in a postcolonial context. The
Kantian sublime’s reliance on supersensible reason reduces nature to a conduit for
man’s teleology rather than being for itself. Lyotard instead locates the sublime in the
simultaneous pain and pleasure of the inevitable failure to erase sensory experience.35 In
other words, the sublime is the nondiscursive feeling of the differend, the incommen-
surability between experience and idea.36 Although the traditional discourse of the
sublime implied the negation of the natural world before the negative pleasure of
supersensible reason,37 Lyotard argues that this is impossible: “One cannot get rid of the
Thing.”38 Against the anthropocentric subject he posits an “inhuman” discursive subject.39
He thus aims “to maintain the shock of the sublime so as to prevent the ascendancy of
the rational over the real.”40 By redeeming the value of embodied experience, Lyotard’s
sublime recovers nature from its Kantian exile, reintroducing it into aesthetics. Although
it is not a given that the reintroduction of nature into aesthetics must harmonize with
ecocentrism, nevertheless such a move is essential for an ecocentric aesthetics, which
considers nonhuman entities, including the biosphere, as having inherent value, rather
than anthropocentrically regarding the nonhuman as serving human ends.41
Furthermore, Lyotard argued that art, as material aesthetic, offers a promising
realm for witnessing those who have been silenced by hegemony by instigating feelings
not always discursively available:

When we have been abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to bear
witness that there is, to respond to the order to be. [...] Being announces itself in the

34 Recent studies include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); eds. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Terror and the
Postcolonial (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010); Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics,
and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); ed. W.J.T. Mitchell,
Landscape and Power 2e (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
35 Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, 123.
36 Ibid., 233–34. For Lyotard, as for contemporary cultural theorists and cognitive neuroscientists of
embodied cognition, emotion and feeling are physical experiences, not metaphysical. Here metaphysics
means either the spiritually transcendent or the notion of pure discursive reason. Kant, in his pursuit of
pure practical reason, wanted to divorce the essence of being human from any contingencies arising from
the natural, bodily, or emotional.
37 Ibid., 188–89.
38 Lyotard, “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” 143.
39 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 137–38.
40 Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 116.
41 For the definitions of biocentrism and anthropocentrism, see J. Baird Callicott, “Environmental
Ethics: I. Overview,” Encyclopedia of Bioethics 3e, ed. Stephen Post, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan
Reference USA, 2004), 757–69. Global Issues in Context. http://find.galegroup.com/gic/infomark.do?
&idigest=fb720fd31d9036c1ed2d1f3a0500fcc2&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=GIC&docId=CX
3402500165&source=gale&userGroupName=itsbtrial&version=1.0. Accessed March 17, 2013.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 229

imperative. Art [...] accomplishes an ontological task [...]. It must constantly begin to
testify anew to the occurrence by letting the occurrence be.42

What he calls postmodern or avant-garde art astonishes readers by opening them up

to the unfamiliar and violating accepted norms.43 Art enables us to feel more alive,
and in so doing testifies to our radical individuality, our formlessness. Yet what the
reader takes away from art is never predetermined because it is subject to what he and
Kant call reflective judgment, an inductive rather than a deductive form of reason. Art
thus can offer the opportunity for self-determination and ethics by nonprescriptively
inviting the freedom of the other.
Lyotard’s recasting of the sublime enables the following potentialities in Ghosh’s
postcolonial novel. First, an ecocentric view of nature reintroduces nature as an agent
in its own right. Second, if a sublime freed from metaphysical and ethnocentric
ideologies can shock us into new understandings of the radically other, then a
“universal” aesthetics seems viable, though at the same time less likely to produce
consistent results from one subject to another. Third, Lyotard moves from an aesthetic
to a political understanding of the differend, which he further defines as a conflict that
cannot be resolved for lack of a common discourse.44 A differend cannot be heard
without a universal tribunal,45 but it can be witnessed by others who seek justice by
attempting to represent its unrepresentability.46 Although these differends cannot be
resolved through litigation, nevertheless Lyotard holds out the hope that “reflective
responsibility today also consists in discerning, respecting, and making respected the
differends,” which would “be faithful to the Kantian Idea of ‘culture’ understood as the
trace of freedom within reality.”47 Fourth, freedom from metaphysical monotheism
enables the sublime potentially to engage non-Western immanent belief systems in a
way that the Kantian sublime does not. And finally, literature can shock the reader
into new understandings that erode barriers.
The Hungry Tide, as I will elaborate, manifests each of these potentialities in turn.
It presents a range of relationships to nature, from the subaltern fisherman Fokir,
possessed of what Nayar terms an “indigenous canny,”48 to Piya’s scientific expertise,
to Kanai’s urban distaste. As the novel unfolds, nature emerges as a central agent,
exemplifying how the nonhuman environment is a presence that suggests that human
history is implicated in natural history.49 Moreover, each person experiences the
sublime according to his or her prior ideological formation and experience, suggesting
that although the sublime may be a potentially universal experience, its particular
formation varies among individuals and even within them over time. The political

42 Lyotard, “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” 88.

43 Ibid., 104.
44 Lyotard, The Differend, 8–13.
45 Ibid., 156–57.
46 Ibid., 13, 181.
47 Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 67.
48 Pramod K Nayar, “The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh’s The
Hungry Tide,” College Literature 37.4 (2010): 112.
49 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of
American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995), 7.
230 JANA MARÍA GILES

differend is exemplified not only by Fokir, but also by the Morichjhapi refugees, and
the tigers and dolphins, threatened by development forces. In the syncretic myth of
Bon Bibi, tiger goddess of the region, the postcolonial sublime’s liberation from
metaphysical monotheism enables engagement with non-Western, immanent belief
systems. And finally, as art Ghosh’s novel demands that the reader witness those
differends in a call to action. In all of these contexts, transformation paradoxically
emerges as a constant, generated by epistemological shocks brought about by the
sublime. Though the novel may not articulate determinate solutions, it sets out the
conditions for seeking equitable ones.
The illiterate Fokir can read the water50 like a book after a lifetime of hard-won
practical experience, not as a result of a quasi-mystical natural ability. Meanwhile, the
literate metropolitan elite find the environment baffling at first. Although Sundarban
means “the beautiful forest,” there is no inviting “prettiness” for the outsider.51
Instead, the beauty of the islands is more akin to the sublime as described by Nirmal’s
favorite poet, Rilke:

beauty’s nothing
But the start of terror we can hardly bear,
And we adore it because of the serene scorn
It could kill us with....52

The Sundarbans refuse human categories, constituting a liminal space between river
and sea,53 which “seemed to trick the human gaze in the manner of a cleverly drawn
optical illusion.”54 As in the desert where boundlessness evokes the sublime, the
superabundance of flora misleads the viewer with mirages.55 Even the Bengali word
for mangrove, Badabon, crosses boundaries, derived from both Arabic (bada: desert)
and Sanskrit (bon: forest), “just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union
with the Brahmaputra.”56 Culturally and environmentally, the Sundarbans constitute a
sublime syncretic space that defies human categories, including the division between
postcolonialism and ecocriticism, where flux is the only constant.
Nirmal, Kanai’s idealistic uncle who aspired to be a poet, is the character most
articulate about the vulnerability of humanity before the sublime power of nature.
Telling stories to the child Fokir about past cyclones as they listen to crabs burrow in
the levee, Nirmal describes the feeling of being dwarfed by the dynamical sublime:
“‘Now ask yourself how long can this frail fence last against these monstrous
appetites—the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms? And, if it falls, who shall
we turn to then, comrade? [...] Neither angels nor men will hear us, and as for the
animals, they won’t hear us either.’”57 Here, Nirmal’s encounter with the sublime
suggests omnipotent nature’s indifference to humanity.

50 Ghosh, 221.
51 Ibid., 7.
52 Ibid., 58.
53 Ibid., 6–7.
54 Ibid., 125.
55 Ibid., 42.
56 Ibid., 69.
57 Ibid., 172.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 231

Nirmal’s transformation from outsider to insider ends with his death following the
1979 Morichjhapi massacre. Kanai, his nephew, returns to Lusibari to read Nirmal’s lost
journal recounting his changing understanding. When Nirmal and Nilima first arrive on
the island in 1950, they are “in a state akin to shock. Nothing was familiar; everything was
new.”58 Although Nilima soon finds her niche, Nirmal, “overwhelmed, read and reread
Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers.”59 Nirmal’s adherence
to an idealistic Marxism eventually results in his failure to reconcile his ideals with the
Marxist government’s violent repression on Morichjhapi.60 Yet through the disappoint-
ment of his ideals and involvement with the refugees, Nirmal is transformed. His poetic
ambitions materialize as his journal, which brings the plight of the refugees to the outer
world and guides Kanai through his own transformations.
Piya and Kanai similarly find themselves at a loss upon arriving on the islands.
Kanai, especially, embodies “a postcoloniality that is confident, predominantly
metropolitan, clever and ruthless, one that constructs itself and thrives on dis-
possessing others.”61 Piya’s and Kanai’s ethical merit, however, lies in their eventual
willingness to embrace change and become invested insiders as a result of their
interacting directly with the Sundarbans in response to others’ ethical demands (Kanai
and Nirmal come to Lusibari at Nilima’s request; Piya comes at the dolphins’). This
removal of an extreme version of Kant’s aesthetic distance forces ethical and practical
demands that none of the three would otherwise confront.
On the island Kanai watches Piya labor to understand the Sundarban ecosystem,
reading the waters for signs:

[I]t was as though she were puzzling over a codex that had been authored by the earth
itself. He had almost forgotten what it meant to look at something so ardently—an
immaterial thing, not a commodity nor a convenience nor an object of erotic interest. [...]
[H]e too had peered into the unknown as if through an eyeglass—but the vistas he had
been looking at lay deep in the interior of other languages. Those horizons had filled him
with the desire to learn of the ways in which other realities were conjugated. It was pure
desire that had quickened his mind then and he could feel the thrill of it even now [...].62

Evoking the sublime in the terms unknown, vistas, and horizons, Kanai expresses
exhilaration at the prospect of linguistic adventure that arises from a similar source as
Piya’s drive to decipher the dolphin habitat. The thrilling encounter with the sublimity
of the unknown stimulates the urge for exploration and mastery, a setting of
boundaries that is continually being reconfigured. Kanai, however, has been roused by
marketing his control of linguistic communication, and by womanizing, much like the
English colonizers who turned the sublime into a motive for domestication. Piya’s
efforts to “read” the earth, on the other hand, indicate her desire to bridge the gap
between nature and reason.

58 Ibid., 66.
59 Ibid., 67.
60 Pablo Mukherjee, “Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide Country,” New Formations 59
(2006): 151–52.
61 Nayar, The Postcolonial Uncanny, 108.
62 Ghosh, 222–23.
232 JANA MARÍA GILES

Kanai’s transformation in the Sundarbans therefore takes on a darker tone that he

does not anticipate and cannot control, for if desire is the positive valence of the
sublime, fear is the negative. On the island of Garjontola, Fokir teaches Kanai a lesson
in fear and respect. Until then, Kanai had been dismissive of the local people’s deep
knowledge of the place. When Fokir points out animal tracks in the mud that he
claims belong to a stalking tiger, Kanai assumes the fisherman shares his own
instrumentalist view of knowledge as a commodity.63 But it is Fokir’s fear that
identifies the tiger tracks, a fear Kanai knows he cannot yet feel because fear is not
transcendental but acquired through experience.64 When Kanai rejects his wisdom,
Fokir leaves him alone on the island; only then does Kanai see himself as the ignorant
outsider: “Fokir had brought him here not because he wanted him to die, but because
he wanted him to be judged.”65 The tiger appears to Kanai, but Horen and Fokir claim
they saw nothing; whether it was a vision or reality the novel never makes clear.
Kanai’s experience on Garjontola comprises a critique of the Kantian sublime
and an expression of the Lyotardian. Kant excluded feeling from cognition and
therefore outside a priori philosophy; this claim eventually led to his defining moral
feeling as an intellectual, disembodied respect for our humanistic vocation as ends
in ourselves,66 leading to the denatured aesthetic. Lyotard argues against Kant
that thinking is always accompanied by feeling,67 and therefore feeling is central to
cognition. In the novel, Kanai’s encounter with the tiger is never empirically validated;
the only claim that can be made is that Kanai feels fear. Panic empties his mind of
language: “The words he had been searching for, the euphemisms that were the source
of his panic, had been replaced by the thing itself, except that without words it could
not be apprehended or understood. It was an artifact of pure intuition, so real that the
thing itself could not have dreamed of existing so intensely.”68 Kanai’s feeling of the
sublime differend resulting from the disjunction between experience and idea is not
recuperated by pure reason but is transformed into respect for both the tiger and
Fokir’s wisdom.
Appreciating the radically other—tigers, subalterns—entails an embodied epistemo-
logical shock that destroys Kanai’s condescension, eroding the political differend.
Fear is a learned survival skill: “[I]t’s the fear that protects you [...]; it’s what keeps
you alive. Without it the danger doubles.”69 In Lyotardian terms, the feeling of the
sublime differend springs up in the gap between Kanai’s experience and his ability to
rationalize it, transforming him into someone who sees the islands in his future,
not only relegated to the past.70 Having unconsciously treated Fokir as the political
differend, his being forced to witness Fokir’s agency and wisdom in turn facilitates
his appreciation of the plight of the Morichjhapi refugees and his desire to bring
Nirmal’s story to a broader public. Although the differend may be thought to be a

63 Ibid., 265.
64 Ibid., 266.
65 Ibid., 270.
66 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 396.
67 Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, 11.
68 Ghosh, 272.
69 Ibid., 202.
70 Ibid., 329.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 233

permanent condition because it reflects incommensurability, in fact Lyotard denotes

that it is malleable:

The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must
be put into phrases cannot be. [...] This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a
feeling. [...] What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear
witness to differends by finding idioms for them. [...] In the differend, something “asks” to
be put into phrases and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases
right away. This is when human beings who thought they could use language as an
instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence
(and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are
summoned by language, [...] that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can
presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.71

The postcolonial sublime thus generates new ethical understandings that may alter the
status of the political differend by inciting new forms of communication.
Piya, having the advantages of her ecological expertise and Fokir’s mentorship,
more quickly absorbs her lessons. She begins the novel as a globe-trekking scientist
who avoids close relationships72 and who has a distant relationship with her Bengali
heritage.73 In parallel with Nirmal’s idealism and Kanai’s discursivity, she regards
science as a rational tool free of the weight of the past,74 embodying “the panoptical
knowledge-machine of colonialism.”75 Yet choosing the Orcaella as a research subject
necessarily draws her to her ancestral home, where she realizes she has “no more idea
of what her own place was in the great scheme of things.”76
Through her experiences with Fokir, Piya’s ecological understanding and sense of
belonging are transformed. Although at first she finds him unsettling,77 their collaboration
evolves into an “almost miraculous” wordless communication78 that validates each other’s
ability to read the water like a book.79 Their nondiscursive “language” evokes Lyotard’s
concept of the phrase as not only human interjections like Aië, but also “A wink, a
shrugging of the shoulder [...] can be phrases. –And the wagging of a dog’s tail, the
perked ears of a cat? [...] Silence as a phrase. The expectant wait of the Is it happening? as
silence. Feelings as a phrase for what cannot now be phrased.”80 The implications of the
phrase are further developed in Piya’s reflection on how dolphin echolocation equates
existence with communication, their conversations serving as both sight and speech.

In contrast, there was the immeasurable distance that separated her from Fokir. [...] [N]ot
just because they had no language in common, but because that was how it was with

71 Lyotard, The Differend, 13.

72 Ghosh, 94.
73 Ibid., 78.
74 Ibid., 78.
75 Mukherjee, 152.
76 Ghosh, 31.
77 Ibid., 83.
78 Ibid., 118.
79 Ibid., 222.
80 Lyotard, The Differend, 70.
234 JANA MARÍA GILES

human beings, who came equipped, as a species, with the means of shutting each other
out. [...] For if you compared it to the ways in which dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world,
speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through
the eyes of another being.81

Language, far from being the conduit to pure reason, instead impedes understanding
and must be supplemented through other means. For Nirmal, too, language is both his
passion and his enslaver, as he acknowledges by reciting Rilke’s lines: “Because the
animals ‘already know by instinct/we’re not comfortably at home/in our translated
world.’ ”82 All three metropolitan protagonists must temporarily suspend their reliance
on language in order to hear the “phrasing” in the Sundarbans.
As Piya develops an embodied cognition with Fokir’s guidance, her previously
distanced stance is replaced with a feeling of intimacy and recognition of the trans-
formative nature of subjectivity: “Looking at these discarded odds and ends in the light
of another day, she saw it was not the boat but her own eyes that had infused them
with that element of enchantment. Now they looked as plain and as reassuringly
familiar as anything she had ever thought of as belonging in a home.”83 As she
watches Fokir crab-catching, she realizes that the crabs, which keep the forest alive by
cleaning the debris, are “the keystone species of the entire ecosystem,” a concept she
had previously “applied to things other than herself,” but which she now sees as
interconnected with her own, human life. Envisioning the crab as the anchor of the
Sundarbans, and reminded that as her zodiacal sign, Cancer, the crab “ruled the tides
of her destiny,”84 Piya sheds some of her bias against cultural formations as she moves
beyond rational instrumentalism toward an ecocentric vision that affirms the intrinsic
value of all life. The zodiacal myth is contextualized not only within a socio-cultural
context, but an ecological one, mirroring, as Rajender Kaur describes it, geological
“deep time.”85
When Fokir sides with a group of villagers that burn a man-eating tiger to death,
however, Piya is devastated and their blissful communion is broken.86 Because the
Sundarbans are the only home to the endangered Bengal tiger, their protected status
competes with the needs of the more than 4 million human inhabitants, whose pre-
sence puts further pressure on the ecosystem. The Morichjhapi refugees, fleeing Indian
camps where they had been displaced after Partition and again following the founding
of Bangladesh, suffered when the Marxist government besieged and removed the
people for the sake of the tiger’s habitat.87 Kusum, Fokir’s mother who dies in the
massacre, identifies privileged cosmopolitans as complicit in ignoring the frequent

81 Ghosh, 132.
82 Ibid., 172.
83 Ibid., 279.
84 Ibid., 118–19.
85 Kaur, 135.
86 Ghosh, 242–44.
87 Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, “Ghost of Marichjhapi returns to haunt,” Hindustan Times. HT Media.
April 25, 2011. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Kolkata/Ghost-of-Marichjhapi-returns-to-
haunt/Article1-689463.aspx. Accessed March 17, 2013; Ross Mallick, “Refugee Resettlement in Forest
Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre,” The Journal of Asian Studies 58.1
(1999): 104–25.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 235

killings of villagers by tigers because they are too poor to matter.88 She tragically
observes that the police who treat the refugees as worthless are indirectly following the
wishes of global supporters of the tiger preserve who fail to realize what is being done
in their name:

As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world has become a place of
animals, and our own fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live
as human beings, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they
have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived—by fishing, by clearing land
and by planting the soil.89

Although the local people encounter the tiger as a deadly predator, distant urbanites
can regard tigers as sublime and criminalize human subsistence living for the sake of
preserving a token remnant of the tiger’s once vast territory. Ironically, those whose
lives are closest to the animals, the poor, are sacrificed, while the animals are
romanticized to assuage the guilt of the global capitalist economy, in a repeat scenario
of colonialist ideology.
Because the problem of how tigers and humans can coexist in the Sundarbans is
not resolved in the novel, some argue that Piya’s decision to become a “ ‘rooted
cosmopolitan’ rather than a ‘footloose expert’ is only possible because the local people
have no particular issue with dolphins. The much more intractable problem of tiger
sanctuary is thus displaced by the relatively easy ‘dolphin solution,’ and neither a
practical nor a philosophical answer to the situation of the tiger is offered in its
place.”90 Yet the novel complicates such a reading. If dolphins do not kill humans and
are not as endangered as the tiger, their population is in decline due to bycatch
activities, and there is little evidence that the solution to their disappearance will be any
simpler than that of the tiger.91 The conflict between human and ecological interests is
more accessible to the human imagination when we are confronted with death, as Piya
learns. Much harder, as the sublime conundrum of the Anthropocene reveals, is under-
standing, much less resolving, the ecological confrontations between humans and the
billions of other planetary species when they are not readily self-evident.
The dehumanization of the refugees is enabled, Piya implies, by an anthropo-
centric attitude toward the nonhuman: “Just suppose we cross that imaginary line that
prevents us from seeing that no other species matters except ourselves. [...] Once we
decide we can kill off other species, it’ll be people next—just the kind of people you’re
thinking of, people who’re poor and unnoticed.”92 Piya identifies anthropocentrism as
foundational to the sexist, racist, and classist ideologies of colonialism and the post-
colonial Indian state. Our survival instead entails understanding that “Human nature is an

88 Ghosh, 248.
89 Ibid., 217.
90 Huggan and Tiffin, 188.
91 R.R. Reeves, T.A. Jefferson, L. Karczmarski, K. Laidre, G. O’Corry-Crowe, L. Rojas-Bracho,
E.R. Secchi, E. Slooten, B.D. Smith, J.Y. Wang, and K. Zhou, “Orcaellabrevirostris,” IUCN Red List of
Threatened Species, Version 2012.2, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural
Resources. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15419/0. Accessed April 6, 2013.
92 Ghosh, 249.
236 JANA MARÍA GILES

interspecies relationship,”93 requiring both the postcolonial critique of globalization and

the overturning of what Carey Wolfe calls “the institution of speciesism.”94 To presume
that our political and ecological problems can simply be resolved by the erasure of one
problematic race or species, or a one-dimensional approach, overlooks the symbiotic
nature of the Anthropocene, and ignores the inconvenient complexities of Ghosh’s novel.
A truly postcolonial world must be compelled to find new ways to cohabit peacefully with
the other, whether human or nonhuman.
Although the novel leaves these tensions unresolved, Piya and Kanai are changed
by their experiences, determined to disseminate their new understanding of both the
local ecology and the legacy of Morichjhapi to a broader audience. Effectively, they
represent the implied goal for the reader as a result of witnessing the novel’s repre-
sentation of these differends: a willingness to be open to understanding the proble-
matics of our biosphere that necessarily include issues of human justice, and not only
to understand but to change one’s life accordingly.
The failure of Nirmal, Kanai, and Piya to master life in the Sundarbans highlights
the failure of their discursive Enlightenment learning to mediate adequately their
understanding of the other. Fokir, the refugees, and the animals represent the sublime
as political and natural differends, who cannot be heard on the national or interna-
tional stage not because they do not speak but because they lack the power to demand
that the privileged listen. Lyotard linked the differend as aesthetic feeling to the
differend in a political context in which the incommensurability is constituted by the
disjuncture between the experience of the victim of oppression and the lack of a
discourse through which the victim may demand recognition.95 Unlike in a litigation,
the victim as differend lacks the power to be heard by the perpetrator and is effectively
silenced; without a universal tribunal, the universalization of the particular can be
accomplished only through violence.96 Material and emotional events will always
exceed discursive hegemony, but they can be repressed by political hegemony. The
differend, however, can liberate by demanding that spectators witness alterity97 and
strive to represent the unrepresentable of the victim’s silence, even if justice cannot be
guaranteed.98 Yet Lyotard sees the sublime differend as also offering the hope of
political resistance because the feeling of frustration and even despair it produces may
testify to the critical idea “of a culture in which the Idea of a heterogeneous humanity
has not been destroyed.”99
Lyotard’s move from the aesthetic to the political is not merely a co-optation.
Rather, it is often the aesthetic feeling of the differend that alerts one to a political
differend. Because the latter is deprived of speech, its status as differend must
make itself known through some other kind of phrasing (tiger tracks, dolphin gaze,

93 Anna Tsing, quoted in Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University Minnesota
Press, 2008), 218.
94 Carey Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 43.
95 Lyotard, The Differend, 8–13.
96 Ibid., 157.
97 Ibid., 181.
98 David Carroll, “Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments,”
Diacritics 14.3 (1984): 83.
99 Ibid., 87.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 237

silence, ….), otherwise there could be no knowledge of its status as differend. With
the witnessing of the political differend through the aesthetic differend comes the
opportunity, if for no one else than the witness privileged with speech, to “institute
idioms which do not yet exist.”100
The act of witnessing thus emerges in The Hungry Tide as a necessary step
in seeking justice. It does not fulfill justice, but sets conditions necessary for that
fulfillment. Nirmal is transformed by his experience of the massacre, sacrificing
his own life in the process. He records, “There is nothing I can do to stop what
lies ahead. But [...] perhaps I can make sure at least that what happened here leaves
some trace,”101 the trace of a new idiom. Long seeking a sense of purpose and
belonging, Nirmal learns that home is an embodied rather than imagined relationship:
“Where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.”102 Having
sought the certainties of Marxist idealism, he emerges from the shelter of the text to
reinscribe himself as other, embracing transformation as “his very notion of history is
expanded, universalised—one might say, naturalized.”103 No longer the detached
observer, he remains with the refugees to share their suffering, learning that the risk of
involvement may be pain and death, and putting into practice the ethical demands
of his historical materialism that “everything which existed was interconnected:
the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature.”104 Although this may
seem to conflate the human and natural, Ghosh insists that these problems must be
solved holistically and simultaneously, as the notion that everything is interconnected
suggests.
Although the journal is lost in the cyclone at the end of the novel, underscoring
the ephemerality of humanity before the power of nature, by reconstructing Nirmal’s
text Kanai achieves a closeness with his family and community he lacked. Thus,
despite the fact that language frequently serves as a barrier to understanding the other
in the novel, it is nevertheless essential for moving a broader audience distanced from
actual events to action for the sake of justice. As Terri Tomsky observes, “Ghosh
demonstrates how advantageously the cosmopolitan class is placed to utilize the
resources within capitalist globalization to contest the subjugation of communities.”105
Although the transmission of the experience of suffering must necessarily be mediated,
even at third-hand Nirmal’s eyewitness account is indispensable in bringing to light the
tragedy of Morichjhapi.
The death of Fokir, however, raises problematic issues that have not escaped
scrutiny. Although some like Nayar argue that Fokir’s indigenous canny is transferred
to Piya through her GPS device,106 Victor Li finds that the “necroidealism” suggested
by Fokir’s death enables the myth of “authentic subalterns” to “remain heterogeneous
to hegemonic modernity, [dying] so that their stories can be recounted and

100 Lyotard, The Differend, 13.

101 Ghosh, 59.
102 Ibid., 211.
103 Mukherjee, 153.
104 Ghosh, 233.
105 Terri Tomsky, “Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide,”
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (2009): 64.
106 Nayar, The Postcolonial Uncanny, 114.
238 JANA MARÍA GILES

memorialized by literate, modern characters like Nirmal, Kanai and Piya.”107

Although the romanticization of a lost indigeneity remains a danger, nevertheless
transformation implies that idealizing a particular way of living is neither possible nor
desirable. Even if Fokir, for instance, had lived to partner with Piya’s dolphin project
and leave Moyna, his wife who yearns for a more urban existence, and Kanai to their
implied romantic interest, his livelihood is threatened by commercial fishermen.108
Simply put, Ghosh chose not to write a novel in which the “authentic subaltern” lives
on to fight political, economic, and environmental forces. Piya, combining Fokir’s
folkways with her academic knowledge and global connections, is better positioned to
advocate for change. As a potentiality for future resolution, the transformed Piya
closes the Kantian gap between Fokir’s nature and scientific reason, signifying a
hybridization that is both and neither at once. Thus, any optimism comes with the
death of two extremes: Fokir, the indigenous subaltern, and Nirmal, the Western
idealist, together exemplifying the binary opposition that underpinned colonial
ideology.109 Those reified extremes cannot adequately address the complexities of
ecological and human justice in a globalizing environment. Through the sublime
demand that those who speak the discourse of power witness the differend, the novel
implies that postcolonial situations that do not simply reinscribe colonial binaries may
be created by those willing to undertake a more nuanced engagement with the planet
and its people.
Symbiosis enabled by mutual understanding brought about by sympathetic
witnessing and cognition that draws on both rational science and embodied
understanding thus seems to be the novel’s proposed solution to these interlaced
political and environmental problems. On the Mekong River in Cambodia some years
before, Piya had observed with amazement Irrawaddy dolphins herding catch into
fishermen’s nets in exchange for their share of the loot: “Did there exist any more
remarkable instance of symbiosis between human beings and a population of wild
animals?”110 In the end, Piya decides that home is where the dolphins are111 and
Kanai says he will be back to the islands, their having become part of his own personal
history, much as Nirmal had decided that home was where the refugees were, all fully
investing themselves in their local communities.
Symbiosis between cultures also has the potential for healing the wounds of
Partition. The myth of Bon Bibi, the jungle tiger goddess, is also syncretic, originating
in the Arab culture but reflecting Hindu puja worship.112 Bon Bibi and her twin, Shah
Jongoli, make the tide country hospitable to humans, defend the poor from predators,
and maintain the balance between nature and civilization.113 The island of Garjontola,
where her shrine is located, embodies the nexus of transformation for the four pro-
tagonists. Nirmal’s reeducation begins with an initiation into the Bon Bibi cult during
the annual puja. On their boat journey to Garjontola, Horen and Kusum genuflect to

107 Victor Li, “Necroidealism, or the Subaltern’s Sacrificial Death,” Interventions 11.3 (2009): 290.
108 Ghosh, 111–12.
109 Critics who emphasize Fokir’s death as a sacrifice tend to overlook Nirmal’s sacrifice.
110 Ghosh, 140.
111 Ibid., 329.
112 Ibid., 85, 126–27.
113 Ibid., 85–88.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 239

the invisible borderline that marks the mythological division between the human
realm, protected by Bon Bibi, and the domain of Dokkhin Rai, demon king.114 Nirmal,
who had not only regarded such beliefs as false consciousness but “seen at first hand
the horrors that religion had visited upon us at the time of Partition,”115 is uncom-
fortable. When he realizes that this boundary is as real to them as a barbed wire fence
is to him, “everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises.”116 Comparing
the landscape to the book he holds, Nirmal perceives understanding to be in flux, like
the forest itself:

People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires:
for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still
another for a ship’s pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with
lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as
volatile as high-voltage cables.

To me, a townsman, the tide country’s jungle was an emptiness, a place where time stood
still. I saw now that this was an illusion, that exactly the opposite was true. [...] [H]ere in
the tide country, transformation is the rule of life.117

Nirmal recognizes that it is both inevitable and lamentable that people regard their
surroundings in a limited, often institutionalized, way, but that it remains possible for
our perception to change.
Kusum recounts how her father was saved by Bon Bibi during a storm on the
island; her messengers, she tells him, can be seen by anyone who cares to look. Nirmal
observes no “divine manifestation,”118 but when dolphins join their boat, he is
confounded:
What held them there? What made them linger? I could not imagine. Then there came a
moment when one of them broke the surface with its head and looked right at me. Now I
saw why Kusum found it so easy to believe that these animals were something other than
what they were. For where she had seen a sign of Bon Bibi, I saw instead the gaze of the
Poet. It was as if he were saying to me:
some mute animal
raising its calm eyes and seeing through us,
and through us. This is destiny...119

The dolphin’s “phrasing” prompts an ethical response from Nirmal that expands his
sympathetic imagination. Now seeing his previous understanding as incomplete,
he learns to respect the political differend of Kusum’s faith and adopt a species
consciousness of the dolphin’s incommensurability. Jettisoning his received idealist
wisdom about the separation of nature and culture, he concludes that the tide country

114 Ibid., 185.

115 Ibid., 184.
116 Ibid., 186.
117 Ibid., 186.
118 Ibid., 194.
119 Ibid., 195.
240 JANA MARÍA GILES

is formed not only by rivers of mud but also rivers of language: “Flowing into one
another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow.
And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great
mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to
pass in many directions—from country to country and even between faiths and
religions.”120 The immanent myth of Bon Bibi represents the tide country where biota
of many different origins meet and, like the novel itself, constitutes an aesthetic
cultural production that testifies to the multiplicity, singularity, and interdependence
of the Sundarban inhabitants.
Indeed, this is why Ghosh has emphasized the interdependence of not only
political and ecological but cultural and spiritual conflicts. As Timothy Clark writes,
ecocriticism, regarded by some postcolonial critics as “the professionalized hobby of a
western leisure class,”121 must adapt “to be able to engage in any culture across
the world in relation to such already difficult issues as the ethics of relating to the
non-human, environmental justice, the nature and limits of anthropocentrism, duties
towards future generations and so on.”122 Yet when ecocritics have endorsed tradi-
tional religious practices, “it is invariably modern secular environmentalism that acts
as the decisive if inconspicuous frame within which the values of indigenous beliefs
and their modes of presentation are being celebrated. The cultural authority accorded
indigenous practices is actually second-hand.”123 By endorsing the Bon Bibi cult as
real to the inhabitants, Ghosh puts pressure on Western ecocritical and metropolitan
postcolonial assumptions to transform themselves through ideological hybridization.
Piya, too, discovers that the ecology of the river delta is a combination of saltwater
and fresh, in which float micro-environmental balloons supporting an immense array
of aquatic life forms.124 This dazzlingly infinite microscopic universe sends her
thoughts spinning toward a future dedicated to learning a wide range of interrelated
scientific fields, a sublime proliferation of natural study that mirrors the hybridization
of languages and religions, all meeting together in a vast interpenetration that gen-
erates immense fecundity.
In another example of a Lyotardian art form that both enables self-determination
and challenges the listener to become open to the unfamiliar, Kanai translates Fokir’s
song of the Bon Bibi myth for Piya. At first Kanai had said a translation would be too
difficult because “in those words there was a history that is not just his own but also of
this place, the tide country.”125 For Fokir, the song was more than a legend, “it was the
story that gave this land its life,” and singing it as an adult “still plays a part in making
him the person he is.”126 As if to address the readership of the novel as much as Piya,
Kanai quotes Rilke providing a Western representation of the same idea: “inside us we
haven’t loved just someone/in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one/child, but
fathers, cradled inside us like ruins/of mountains, the dry riverbed/of former mothers,

120 Ibid., 205–06.

121 Clark, 120.
122 Ibid., 122.
123 Ibid., 125.
124 Ghosh, 104–05.
125 Ibid., 291.
126 Ibid., 292.
CAN THE SUBLIME BE POSTCOLONIAL? 241

yes, and all that/soundless landscape under its clouded/or clear destiny—girl, all this
came before you.”127 The myth of Bon Bibi, as with all myths, is central to the self-
understanding of the people of the tide country; newcomers cannot dismiss it as
superstition. For an outsider like Piya, however, who initially found Fokir’s singing
unsettling, only hearing the song in combination with reading the translation does she
find that “she understood it all. Although the sound of the voice was Fokir’s, the
meaning was Kanai’s, and in the depths of her heart she knew she would always be
torn between the one and the other.”128 Blending the embodied and the discursive,
nature and freedom, and serving as a bridge between past and future, Fokir’s trans-
lated song represents the new syncretic cognition advocated by the novel.
Yet when it comes to love, Piya chooses Fokir, who could give her nothing but his
presence, over Kanai, who wooed her with stories.129 Fokir in fact saves her life three
times: once from drowning, once from a crocodile, and the third time when he
sacrifices his life for hers during the cyclone.130 Fokir expresses his care in the
storm by protecting her from flying debris with his body: “it was as if the storm had
given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one.”131 As
Fokir lay dying, “she had tried to find the words to remind him of how richly he was
loved—and once again, as so often before, he had seemed to understand her,
even without words.”132 Offering another example of nondiscursive phrasing, the
love between Fokir and Piya briefly challenges the claim that cosmopolitan and subaltern
cannot understand each other, only to have such optimism foreclosed by his death.
Fokir ties them to a tree during the storm as his grandfather had done before him,
but he is not saved. The messenger that appears on Garjontola moments before Fokir
dies in the storm is not a dolphin, but a tiger also seeking to escape the swelling
waters.133 If global warming will cause rising sea levels and increased cyclonic activity
in the region, then the migration and death of both humans and nonhumans are to be
expected.134
Bon Bibi as savior of the poor is realized not as a guarantee of divine intervention
or political rescue—they are manifestly killed by cyclones, tigers, authorities, and the
indifference of the privileged—but as “the story that gave the land its life.” In The
Hungry Tide, the differends achieve agency by exercising their knowledge of the
symbiotic ecosystem. In this view, Fokir is not merely a tragic victim, but a subject
who makes an active choice to sacrifice himself to save Piya, which she fails to resist:
“She tried to break free of his grasp, tried to pull him around so that for once she could
be the one who was sheltering him. But his body was unyielding and she could not
break free of it, especially now that it had the wind’s weight behind it.”135 Similarly,
the refugees chose to migrate to Morichjhapi rather than stay in the Indian internment

127 Ibid., 298.

128 Ibid., 298.
129 Ibid., 301.
130 Ibid., 48, 144, 321.
131 Ibid., 321.
132 Ibid., 324.
133 Ibid., 321.
134 Dasgupta, et al.
135 Ghosh, 321.
242 JANA MARÍA GILES

camps, and Nirmal with them. Only if the privileged deliberately ignore their ago-
nizing choices are these differends relegated to oblivion. The subaltern phrases: are we
listening?
For Nirmal, legend and landscape merge in the linked stories of the goddess
Ganga and Lord Shiva as well as Bon Bibi and Greek mythology, geology, and history,
illustrating the vast span of the earth itself, what Kaur identifies as a complex inter-
weaving of “legends from different cultures into one common heritage of humanity to
mirror the distant geological era before the different continents were configured.”136
Nirmal fantasizes about teaching the refugee children about what the old myths have
in common with geology:

Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one
hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly,
equally remote from us. Then there is the way in which the plots go round and round in
both kinds of story, so that every episode is both a beginning and an end and every
outcome leads to others. And then, of course, there is the scale of time [...]. And
yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit
the telling of a story.137

The Hungry Tide exemplifies Allan Stoekl’s claim that the imagining of a sustainable
future can only be fictional, a representation of the freedom of the other as an
end rather than a means. If the Anthropocene yokes together clashing intellectual
formations, then the novel, as an artwork that provokes a Lyotardian sublime in its
audience in the gap between postcolonialism and environmentalism also incites its
readers to institute new formations and idioms that have yet to exist. Ghosh sets
forth a utopian hope for change that cannot be predetermined but must be evaluated
“in every single instance, in such a way as to maintain the Idea of a society of free
beings,”138 which are the conditions for any possible justice. The postcolonial sublime
refutes the ideologies of the past and spurs us to witnessing and activism in
partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

136 Kaur, 135.

137 Ghosh, 150.
138 Jean-François Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985), 85.