"IN OUR TRANSLATED WORLD": TRANSCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE Christopher Rollason, Ph.D. – rollason54@gmail.com Published in: The Atlantic Literary Review [New Delhi], Vol. 6, No. 1-2, Jan-Mar and Apr-Jun 2005, pp. 86-107; repr. in Jaydeep Sarangi, ed., Diasporic Fiction in English, Kolkata (India): Boooks Way, 2009, pp. 11-30; repr. in O.P. Dwivedi, ed., The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh: An Assessment, Jaipur (India): Book Enclave, 2010, pp. 159-182 I The Hungry Tide (2004) 1 is the fifth novel and sixth substantial book by Amitav Ghosh 2 . Born in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1956 and now resident in New York, Ghosh is by now established as one of the best-regarded of the "post-Rushdie" generation of expatriate Indians writing in English. If his first three novels revealed a writer experimenting with a diversity of forms and genres (magic realism and picaresque in The Circle of Reason (1986), impressionistic family history in The Shadow Lines (1988), and, in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), a mélange of detection and science fiction), The Glass Palace (2000) marked an embrace of mainstream realism of an almost nineteenth-century type, manifested in the genre of the historical novel. Ghosh's fiction has thus far exhibited a remarkable geographical spread, taking in, for The Circle of Reason, India, the Gulf region and Algeria; for The Shadow Lines, India, Bangladesh and the UK; for The Calcutta Chromosome, India and the US; and for The Glass Palace, Burma, India and Malaya 3 . Generically, The Hungry Tide continues in the realist mode of The Glass Palace, this time with a contemporary setting plus historical flashbacks; geographically, its scope is more limited than that of Ghosh's other novels, as it homes in on the human and natural ecosystems of a small and highly particular area of India, though also taking account of the wider world through characters hailing from Delhi and the US. Ghosh's narrative, rather than encompassing vast swathes of South and South-East Asia, here prefers, then, to focus a magnifying lens on what might be called a micro-culture within the region 4 - namely, the Sundarbans or "tide country," the islets of the Ganges delta that lie south of Kolkata and just east of the West Bengal/Bangladesh frontier. The Economist reviewer took the view that "it is its sense of place that dominates the novel," 5 and Ghosh himself might seem almost to vindicate such a view in his remark of 1998: "A novel … must always be set somewhere: it must have its setting, and within the evolution of the narrative this setting must, classically, play a part almost as important as those of the characters themselves." 6 That "almost" needs to be noted, however, and indeed The Hungry Tide highlights not only place but, crucially, dynamically evolving human relationships, in a context that includes - as in his other writings - the dimensions of work (he stated in 2002 that "even the most mundane forms of labour can embody an entire metaphysic" 7 ), crosscultural barriers and communication, and the relationship between past and present. History is, indeed, a recurring theme in Ghosh's writing, as acutely noted by the critic Brinda Bose (2001), who states: "Ghosh's fiction 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." 8 The story centres on two visitors to the Sundarban community, Kanai Dutt and Piyali Roy (Piya), and their interaction with that community and with each other. Kanai, a Delhi businessman in his forties, is a semi-outsider, paying a rare visit to his aunt Nilima, an NGO activist who runs a hospital on one of the islands; Piya, an Indo-American scientist from