Fear and Ethics in the Sundarbans. Anthropology in Amitav Ghosh’s "The Hungry Tide"

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide has been often interpreted from the point of view of postcolonial studies and environmental studies, overlooking the anthropological implications of the narrative. This paper investigates the worship and the myth of the sylvan deity Bonbibi, and of her counterpart, the demon Dakshin Rai. The goddess, endowed with an apotropaic function, protects the people who “do the forest” from the dangers of the wilderness, epitomized by (but not limited to) tigers. According to anthropologist Annu Jalais, who accompanied Ghosh in the Sundarbans when he was collecting material for the novel, Bonbibi is associated with a kind of forest ethics, which is owned by Fokir, the fisherman. This ethics, which in the novel remains in the background due to the urban viewpoint of the protagonists, very coherently explains otherwise eccentric behaviours and elusive answers of subaltern characters such as Fokir, Moyna and Horen.