On the other hand, Kanai supports the theory of human beings getting preference over animals. Given the vagaries of nature in this place, with its unrelenting storms, changing tides and thriving wild life, Piya believes God probably intended it that way and any human intrusion that harms it must be disallowed.

Ghosh brings in the debate about human settlements in forested lands through Piya and Kanai. Piya is not impressed with Kania’s superciliousness, and between the two men, finds herself constantly leaning towards the natural, unalloyed world that Fokir represents. Kanai, on the other hand, leaves her cold.

Piya, through her conscientious drive to unravel the hidden wonders of nature, is instantly attracted to Fokir's animal instinct and raw charm. Their paths cross and it is through their interwoven lives that Ghosh looks at the various elements of his theme. While Piya is in Sudarbans for her project, Kanai is at the islands at the behest of his aunt, Nirmala. Kanai - a smug, urbane Delhi entrepreneur and Fokir, an illiterate but a proud local man of Lusibari. During this adventure, she encounters two different men. The story follows Indian-born American marine biologist, Piyali Roy, who is in search of rare river dolphins.

However, the picture changed towards the start of the last century, when a visionary Scotsman bought a few of these fragmented islands from the British to form a utopian settlement, where people irrespective of race, caste, culture could live together.Ĭonsidering the sheer scope that this theme allows in terms of enumerating the legends, folk-lore, history and geological wonders, it's no surprise that it caught the author's interest.Īlso, it enables Ghosh to highlight the raging social debate about forest conservation vis a vis human settlement. For hundreds of years, only the truly dispossessed braved the man-eating tigers and the crocodiles who rule there, to eke a precarious existence from the mud’ Here there are no borders to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea, even land from water. The jacket of the book tells you about the setting, ‘Between the sea and the plain of Bengal, on the easternmost coast of India, lies an immense archipelago of islands. The entire action of the novel takes place in India's Sundarbans.

Author of the hungry tide