Thieme, John. Reading Places: The Geography of Literature. Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.3 (2013): Web.

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1 Reading Places: The Geography of Literature by John Thieme Thieme, John. Reading Places: The Geography of Literature. Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.3 (2013): Web. Licensed Under: "Reading Places: The Geography of Literature" (by John Thieme) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at Reading Places John Thieme p. 108

2 Reading Places: The Geography of Literature by John Thieme Talk originally delivered as the Sir D.O. Evans Memorial Lecture. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, March When I mentioned this title to a friend, he quickly jumped to the conclusion that I was going to talk about the places where people read and how these may influence their reading. So, taking examples from within the pages of books, Jane Austen s Catherine Morland comes across a range of written ephemera (a linen inventory, a farrier s bill, etc), on a dark and stormy night at Northanger Abbey, under the spell of having read Ann Radcliffe s The Mysteries of Udolpho and believes she has chanced upon a mysterious Gothic manuscript, only to find her colourful imagination has romanticized the mundane and what she has learnt about human nature 1i from fiction doesn t apply in a real country house. Joyce s Leopold Bloom enjoys a prize story in a copy of Titbits in the jakes of his Dublin house, before his reading situation leads to his replacing romance with mundane reality in a rather different way: he finds a more utilitarian function for the story, when he uses it for toilet paper. 2 One could multiply instances My initial response to my friend was, That s not it at all. I m going to talk about how books construct places, about how they fill up what would otherwise be blank spaces between their covers. Later, I realised that what I 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1818; in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, London: Dent, 1965, James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, Oxford: OUP, 1993, Reading Places John Thieme p. 109

3 was going to talk about had more to do with the places where we read than I d originally thought. I was planning to talk about cognitive mapping, the ways in which writing imagines particular spaces onto the printed page, but just as writers invent places, readers are at the very least partners in the process of producing textual places. As Karin Littau, the author of a recent study of reading practices puts it, The reader is akin to a writer, because he or she is not the passive consumer of a finished product, but very literally a collaborator in the process of text production, and therefore also an active producer of meanings 3, and the situations, physical and mental, in which readers consume texts influence the ways in which they imagine fictional places. Catherine Morland creates a romanticized Gothic world from ephemeral scraps, because she s in a country house and has previously read Ann Radcliffe. Leopold Bloom s reading context leads to his consigning the story he has been reading to the depths as so much effluvial matter. I d like to talk about ways in which places are read in literary texts, with a particular focus on the cultural geography of the work of two Indian novelists. I ve chosen them as case-studies because, though they both write about India and from Indian backgrounds, their attitudes to place are superficially very different. The novelists are R.K. Narayan, one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English, and Amitav Ghosh, one of the finest Indian novelists writing today. Narayan appears to offer us a stable view of place; Ghosh, in contrast seems to suggest the multiplicity of ways in which particular places can be read. I ll talk about aspects of two of Narayan s novels The English Teacher (1945) and The Financial Expert (1952) and slightly more fully about a single novel by Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004). Narayan s novels have been seen as presenting their readers with a settled view of place; in apparent contrast, The Hungry Tide offers a view of place as contested rather than given. Ghosh would seem to have more in common with the view of place put forward by cultural geographers like Doreen Massey, who says The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple 4 and takes the view that space should be understood 3 Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania, Cambridge: Polity, 1996, Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, 5. Reading Places John Thieme p. 110

4 as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of co-existing heterogeneity. 5 Putting this another way, one might say that Narayan s novels appear to be built around a sedentarist view of place, while The Hungry Tide embodies a nomadic epistemology. So the two kinds of novel would seem to offer contrasted views of place, which are not untypical of the shifts in perceptions of Indian identity that have taken place in the decades that separate their publication and perhaps reflective of changes in thinking about place more generally. I d like to argue, though, that this opposition isn t nearly as sharp as may initially seem to be the case and suggest that this has implications for the ways in which we read place. And I ll conclude with some remarks on what particularly characterizes the geography of literature. Part of my argument is that an emphasis on the specificity of place often emerges most forcefully, when in fact the sense of place is insecure or threatened. I ll develop this in relation to Narayan s construction of his fictional South Indian town of Malgudi, an imagined community that he peopled for nearly six decades, from the mid- 1930s to the early 1990s. If we think of fictional locations that have become bywords for a sense of seemingly homogeneous regional specificity, they are usually being represented as such, because of a sense that they are fleeting or endangered, or in extreme cases have vanished. Hardy s Wessex is a case in point. The moments when one can see it as an idyllic version of rural Dorset are far outnumbered by those in which the forces of change are seen to be transforming older agrarian practices and the human geographies attached to them. To take a single example: in Tess of the D Urbervilles, Tess s odyssey through the Wessex countryside is undertaken against the backdrop of scenes which represent the dehumanizing consequences of the mechanization of agriculture. 6 The novel s fixation with the specifics of place borders on elegy; 5 Doreen Massey, For Space, London: Sage, 2005, 9. Reading Places John Thieme p. 111

5 and the ways in which literature brings places into being habitually involves some kind of backward glance, some dialogue with the past, in which writers and readers imagine space through the prism of their ongoing situations. But how does the reading of books relate to the reading of places, whether landscapes or the built environment? A character in The Hungry Tide sees a connection between the activities of reading books and reading landscapes: I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape too is not unlike a book a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. 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. 7 Reversing this analogy, one might say that the way in which we read landscapes is not dissimilar to the way in which we imagine locations in books; we invent places from the verbal information provided within their covers, according to our taste and training, our memories and desires. And it s in this sense that part of the way in which we read is dependent on the location in which we are reading: Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; Leopold Bloom in his Dublin jakes. Literary texts and written discourse more generally after all Catherine Morland is looking at a laundry list and a farrier s bill invite their readers into an incomplete space, populated by words, but needing their intervention for any completion of its meaning. Even the most dedicatedly naturalistic of texts can only offer word-pictures, which need readers to realize 6 E.g. the mechanical reaper, suggestive of the Grim Reaper, in Chapter 14 of the novel and the despotic threshing-machine in Chapter 46, Tess of the d Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, 1891; London: Macmillan 1963, 105-6, The Hungry Tide, London: HarperCollins, 2004, 224; italics in original. Subsequent references cite HT and are included in the text. Reading Places John Thieme p. 112

6 them. This may sound like a commonplace of a certain kind of reader response criticism, but I d like to try to develop it in relation the novels I ve mentioned. Like many of their postcolonial contemporaries, Narayan and Ghosh make place, whether it be very specifically situated or nomadic, central to their work. Narayan s Malgudi has often been seen as representing some kind of settled Indianness. In apparent contrast, Ghosh is a writer whose work has repeatedly demonstrated the porousness of borders and the extent of transactions between cultures. As Robert Dixon puts it, Ghosh does not inhabit a culture rooted in a single place, but a discursive space that flows across political and national boundaries, and even across generations in time. 8 Like Hardy s Wessex and Faulkner s Yoknapatawpha County, Narayan s Malgudi has generally been seen as central to his work, and in his case not just a byword for a specific region, but also as a microcosm of India. Narayan himself seems to have been altogether less sure about this! In a whimsical Self-Obituary, which he published in 1950, he imagined himself, On a certain day (towards the close of the twentieth century) being interrogated and charged with various offences by four grim men from the I.T.F.K.E.O.N ( INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL FOR KEEPING an [sic] EYE ON NOVELISTS ). 9 These included: writing too much (exceeding his allotted weight limit of 60 pounds of books), inventing an imaginary town, with false geography that was bad for the tourist industry, and leaving his characters in mid-air, their destinies unsolved. 10 I d like to focus on the second of these charges, suggesting that, whether or not the false geography of Malgudi has been bad for the tourist industry of South India, it has been at the centre of Narayan s appeal to armchair tourists, who reading about Malgudi have often seen it as a site that represents quintessential Indianness. His mentor and patron Graham Greene wrote, Without him I could never 8 Robert Dixon, Travelling in the West : The Writing of Amitav Ghosh, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 31, 1 (1996), 9 9 R.K. Narayan, Self-Obituary No. 5, Illustrated Weekly of India, 23 July Copy in Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, No. 737, Box 8, folder Ibid. Reading Places John Thieme p. 113

7 have known what it is like to be Indian, 11 but this is only the most famous of many testimonials to Narayan s supposed capacity for conveying supposedly authentic Indianness and it is mirrored in remarks made by numerous Indian commentators, for example C.D. Narasimhaiah, who says of Narayan, Few writers have been more truly Indian. 12 Such critics have, often nostalgically, seen Malgudi as a microcosm for the nation, sometimes tempering this by an acknowledgement of the extent to which it is representative of a particular region of India and a particular segment of Indian society, but seldom wishing to dispute Narayan s capacity for capturing Indianness on the printed page. E.M. Forster s Adela Quested wants to see the real India 13 and Forster offers three possible versions in A Passage to India (mosque, caves and temple). Salman Rushdie s Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight s Children (1981), says there are as many versions of India as Indians. 14 Narayan, if we agree with those commentators who, like Greene and Narasimhaiah, have seen him as offering access to quintessential Indianness, would seem to be offering a more grounded and, one is tempted to say, more homogeneous version of Indianness. In such responses, then, Malgudi becomes a microcosm for a traditional India, a locus that exists outside time and apart from the forces of modernity. However, to most contemporary readers such an approach frequently seems wrong-headed, an expression of a dated upper-caste Hindu-centred version of Indianness (specifically a Tamil Brahmin perspective), which is no longer acceptable as a national metanarrative, because it fails to address the multiplicity of discourses that have constituted India as it exists, both today and yesterday. Recently, though, at a time when his work would seem to be less expressive of India s rapidly changing human geography, his fiction has 11 Graham Greene, Introduction to R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts, 1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, v. 12 C.D. Narasimhaiah, The Swan and the Eagle: Essays on Indian English Literature, Simla: Indian Institute, 1968, E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, Salman Rushdie, Midnight s Children, 1981; London: Picador, 1982, 269. Reading Places John Thieme p. 114

8 seen an upsurge in popularity, but this in itself is perhaps an index of the extent to which the nation is looking nostalgically in a distorted rear-view mirror, trying to conjure up an image of an India that no longer exists, if it ever did. Paradoxically, then, at a time when Narayan s false geography has begun to seem particularly quaint, a mythologized version of the national imaginary, which runs the risk of being dismissed as fantastic by those alert to the multitude of Indias in existence, both then and now, Malgudi has been lovingly adopted as a quintessential Indian site, memorialized as an expression of an unchanging timeless India. Like Hardy s Wessex, it seems to evoke a fugitive past, which never existed in the form that finds expression on the printed page. The actual, as opposed to the perceived, Malgudi of Narayan s fiction is always a multi-faceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of authentic Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. Additionally, the small town is seen from varying angles and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan s career. Moreover, Malgudi is far more than a physical location. It is an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them which come together to make up its distinctive cultural geography. The imaginary town is a site that represents a set of beliefs rather than a supposed transcription of a physical space. In Narayan s fiction locations invariably have complex cultural associations and the range of conceptual territory covered is extensive and varied, even if his writing seems to offer a narrowly bounded view of place. As a way of trying to identify what is most distinctive about the cultural geography of Malgudi, I should like to focus particularly on Narayan s representation of other spaces, what Michel Foucault calls heterotopias. 15 Foucault identifies heterotopias as those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different from or even the opposite of others. 16 We define ourselves through contradistinction from alterity, by 15 See particularly, Michel Foucault, Of Other Places, trans. Jay Miskowiec Diacritics, 16, 1 (1986), Reading Places John Thieme p. 115

9 saying what we are not, and Narayan frequently constructs oppositions between the supposedly familiar and safe Malgudi spaces the part of the town centred on its business hub, Market Road, and its most established and conservative street, Kabir Street, and newer parts of the town. To exemplify how place is constituted and challenged in Narayan, I shall briefly examine two particular locations, which are central to the cultural geography of the particular Narayan novels in which they occur, The English Teacher and The Financial Expert. The first relates to what is arguably the most traumatic event in all of Narayan s fiction, based as it was on the tragic death of his wife Rajam at a very early age. The protagonist of The English Teacher, Krishna, and his young wife Susila explore the possibility of buying a house in Lawley Extension, a location which represents the changing face of Malgudi. The impulse to extend is itself a challenge to the world-view embodied by the centre of the old town, which in Narayan s cosmos is closely, though not exclusively associated with orthodox Brahminical Hinduism. The moving spirit behind the extension is Krishna s colleague, Sastri, a logician whom he describes as a most energetic extender. In Krishna s view Sastri is a marvellous man a strange combination of things, at one end undistributed middle [sic], definition of knowledge, syllogisms, and at the other he had the spirit of a pioneer. His was the first building in the New Extension [ ]. 17 And, as Krishna and Susila venture into this new section of the town, they do so optimistic that a similar strange combination will provide them with a home of their own and the sense of existential autonomy that comes with it. The tragic sequel frustrates this. They eventually arrive at a house, which Krishna sees as both attractive and propitious. He is impressed by its pleasant garden and its view. Suddenly he notices that Susila, who has gone to look at the backyard, has been absent for rather too long and the mood begins to darken. She has locked herself in an unclean outside lavatory, which she has entered barefoot in the expectation that its interior will be as clean as its 16 Space, Knowledge, and Power, Foucault interviewed by Paul Rabinow, trans. Christian Hubert, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, The English Teacher, 1945; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 56. Subsequent references cite ET and are included in the text. Reading Places John Thieme p. 116

10 brightly coloured door. Krishna initially views this as no more than a sad anticlimax to a very pleasing morning (62), but much more is involved here. Susila is thoroughly traumatized by her experience. She emerges from the lavatory filled with disgust and, although Krishna is slow to realize it, the auspicious promise of the house has been completely negated. It is a place that now has completely different connotations. Susila is taken ill and her subsequent decline and death from typhoid appears to stem from this moment, though with characteristic ambivalence Narayan stops short of categorically identifying the experience as responsible for her death. However, reading beyond the naturalistic surface of the novel and irrespective of whether the New Extension lavatory has been the cause of Susila s illness, this encounter with a heterotopian space is represented as deeply traumatic. A Brahmin-based fear of pollution seems to underpin it and, read as an allegory about spatial economies, both physical and mental, the novel suggests that it is the development of Lawley Extension that is responsible. While Susila has been undergoing her ordeal, Krishna has been busy debating the sanitation of the house s surroundings and the clear inference is that its strange combination the challenge represented by the coming of modernity to Malgudi is the cause of the tragedy. Narayan s technique leaves all this implicit, but later references to the psychic and spiritual properties of place establish a pattern that makes it hard to resist the conclusion that it is the transgression of codes of cleanliness that causes Susila s death. Read like this, then, The English Teacher is a far cry from the domestic novel of manners that it may initially appear to be. Krishna teaches his students Pride and Prejudice (45), but the novel s account of married life is a world away from Jane Austen s comforting conclusion, which reaffirms the conventions of her middle-class social world. The second Narayan location I d like to focus on is the street where the protagonist of his 1952 novel, The Financial Expert, Margayya, lives. Margayya comes from a less respectable Malgudi background than most of Narayan s protagonists: there is a family secret about his caste ; 18 and he also lives in a more liminal situation Vinayak Mudali Street close to the centre of 18 The Financial Expert, London: Methuen, 1952, 183. Subsequent references cite FE and are included in the text. Reading Places John Thieme p. 117

11 Malgudi, but a far less prestigious address than Kabir Street, the bastion of conservative Malgudi values. 19 Situated on the very edge of the town (34), the street is clearly a borderline environment, but although it is a world away from the Kabir Street aristocracy, it has a complex past of its own. Margayya s own house, No. 14 D, has already attained the status of a famous local landmark, for it was the earliest house to be built in that area (9) and his father has been seen as heroic for deciding to settle in what would then have been a heterotopian space. This claim to fame is, however, mitigated by the insalubrious aspects of the street: it is close to a cremation ground and a wide, unsanitary gutter runs in front of its houses. Anything that falls into this gutter sinks deeper and deeper into a black mass (40) until it is irrevocably lost. Once again such physical geography seems to be associated with waste and pollution, suggesting that the street may be a similar site to the unsanitary Lawley Extension house, where Susila appears to contract her fatal illness. Vinayak Mudali Street is, however, more complex than this suggests. At one end of the street there is a small temple with a shrine to Hanuman, supposedly built on a spot that the monkey-god s foot touched during his journey south to Lanka with Rama in the Sanskrit epic, The Ramayana. So, seen from another angle, the street is on the edge of hallowed ground. One way of reading this might be in terms of a Foucault-like view of the past as archaeologically layered rather than as a product of linear historiographical discourse. Vinayak Mudali Street, past and present, seem to be very different places and Narayan is clearly suggesting that the same physical space can be seen in very different, even opposed, ways. This said, the archaeological model of place as a set of palimpsests imposed one on top of another is inadequate to account for the ambivalence of the street in the present, where it is on the edge of town, situated between New Extension and the old centre around Kabir Street and Market Road. Compared with Lawley Extension, which again figures prominently in the novel, it seems to be in Malgudi and it has been built on ground which can be claimed as sanctified. Moreover, its temple is a 19 The choice of name represents a probable allusion to the fifteenth-century mystic and philosopher, Kabir, a bhakti saint, who is revered as one of medieval India s most important poets. Nilufer E. Bharucha, Colonial Enclosures and Autonomous Spaces: R.K. Narayan s Malgudi, South Asian Review, 23, 1 (2002), 133, notes that Kabir was a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity. Reading Places John Thieme p. 118

12 present-day reality. But viewed from another perspective it is a location that is close to being beyond the pale. It only receives any attention from the Municipal authorities when elections are looming and the gutter is the main metonym for its unsanitary, disease-ridden condition (41). 20 So the street resists unitary interpretation; it offers different hermeneutic possibilities, depending on the viewpoint from which it is seen. Most importantly, it is simultaneously both hallowed and polluted ground in the present. These two versions of its identity are coterminous and so the archaeological model which suggests that one layer has been superimposed on another simplifies the text s complex representation of space and place. No. 14 D, Margayya s house, is equally ambivalent, since it has been partitioned down the middle during a dispute between Margayya and his brother after their father s death. 21 Now they inhabit separate halves of the house, which are self-contained, apart from their having to share a well, while their wives continue to feud. So the house is both a haven for Margayya and an uncomfortable kind of home, as it is a split, contested site, in which the 20 Although it is mistaken to identify Malgudi with Mysore, Narayan s home for most of his life, his comments on sanitation and slum clearance in the city of Mysore in his officially commissioned 1939 travel book on the state provide interesting background to this. After several pages lauding Mysore as India s most beautiful city and detailing the civic improvements undertaken by the Municipality that have contributed to its high standards of cleanliness, he finally comes to speak of its dark spots, of the congested and slummy quarters that still disfigure its loveliness like so many ugly blotches, of the unsewered drains that run like tears down its beautiful face, Mysore, Mysore: Government Branch Press, 1939, 113. Narayan also talks of the continuing prevalence of malaria and the need for a great and wholehearted drive against the mosquito [ ] (ibid., 114). 21 Cf. The Man-Eater of Malgudi, where the protagonist Nataraj experiences a similar form of family partition, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, Inevitably the signifier partition used in novels published in the 1950s and 1960s invites interpretation as some form of national allegory, but Narayan makes no reference to the national Partition. Such a reading is arguably more sustainable for The Man-Eater, which is set in the post-independence era than for The Financial Expert, which is set in the early 1940s ( it was the third year of the war [ ], FE 118). Reading Places John Thieme p. 119

13 traditional values of the joint family have been negated. And, as in earlier Narayan novels, rooms also take on particular identities and are subject to transformations. So, when in the first part of the novel Margayya decides to devote himself to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, in the hope that she will favour his business enterprises, he converts a small room in the house into a shrine where he can undertake a forty-day penance to enlist the goddess s help. Later, when he becomes very prosperous financially, this room is assigned another identity: along with other parts of the house it becomes a store for the vast deposits of cash Margayya has accumulated. These spatial dynamics underpin the central conflicts of the novel, which centre on an evaluation of the relative merits of Margayya s financial entrepreneurialism and the more conservative aspects of Brahmin culture. Again, Margayya s physical situation mirrors his position in the society. He is an interstitial figure, whose business ethics distance him from the older scribal professions. In short, The Financial Expert s representations of place frustrate the binary opposition the opposition between safe and polluted space that can be seen in the section of The English Teacher that I ve discussed. These are just two instances of ways in which Narayan loads places with cultural baggage, but they are typical of two major patterns in his fiction: his early drawing of a sharp distinction between safe and polluted space and his later movement towards the view that The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple. The latter pattern provides particularly strong evidence for the case against seeing Narayan as an authentic chronicler of a settled world, but the dividing-lines drawn in the early fiction also construct Malgudi as a split site. Narayan s fiction may derive from very particular South Indian specifics, but it demonstrates how fluid, fractured and fleeting these specifics can be. Far from achieving its effects through offering its readers a transcribed version of a monolithically conceived real social world, it ministers to their nostalgic fantasies of what such a world might be like and what kinds of struggles it would need to engage in to defend its older, more orthodox side from the encroachments of omnipresent heterogeneity. Narayan s success emerges from the skill with which he persuades us to enjoy his false geography. For his readers, from Graham Greene onwards, Malgudi itself has been a heterotopia that has allowed them free rein to unleash their imaginative fantasies. Reading Places John Thieme p. 120

14 The Hungry Tide is more obviously concerned with the heterogeneity of spatial trajectories and its setting, the Sundarbans, or tide country, region of West Bengal, is both a vividly realized location and a site that serves as a trope for Ghosh s view of place as malleable. The Sundarbans is a unique landscape of mangrove-forested islands and mudflats at the mouth of Ganges Delta. As documented in Al Gore s film about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, 22 it is one of the world s most threatened regions and although Ghosh never explicitly introduces the issue of climate change into his novel, The Hungry Tide details the various natural and human disasters from which the Sundarbans has suffered, both historically and in the recent past. The novel includes numerous quotations from the Duino Elegies and Rilke s belief that life is lived in transformation 23 is central to Ghosh s representation of the region. He accentuates the extent to which the Sundarbans undergoes constant metamorphoses, both because of daily tidal flows, with sections of land being temporarily submerged and with seawater and freshwater intermingling, and because of the periodic devastation wrought by extreme monsoon and cyclonic weather. Like the English Fens of Graham Swift s Waterland (1983) 24 and the Venice of Jeanette Winterson s The Passion (1987), the Sundarbans of The Hungry Tide is an amphibious location, an environment whose physical geography can be seen as a trope for the fact that the identities of places are not fixed and unitary. Unlike The Passion and unlike Rushdie s Midnight s Children, where the Sundarbans is seen as a phantasmagoric historyless 25 location, The Hungry Tide s meticulously documented details of physical and human geography make a consideration of 22 Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006, dir. Davis Guggenheim. 23 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy 7, line 51; Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin Jr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 51; qtd. HT, 225 and Waterland is a novel that Ghosh particularly admires, personal conversation, Turin, April Midnight s Children, 360. Reading Places John Thieme p. 121

15 the various ways in which the region has been and is being shaped, by policymakers and its various other stakeholders, inescapable. The Hungry Tide depicts the tide country as the ever-mutating product of its human as well as its physical geography, a contested site that has variously been seen as uninhabitable and as fertile territory for social projects. In addition to telling a very particular human story in a realist mode that draws heavily on researched detail, 26 the novel includes details of a number of heterotopias, which suggest alternative ways in which the Sundarbans has been and can be read, and more importantly utilized. These take the form of projects that bring together utopian thinking and pragmatic action. In the past such initiatives have included a cooperative founded by an idealistic Scottish colonist who attempted to create a community that would transcend the caste and regional divisions of Indian society and a post-independence settlement by Bengali refugees, who established squatters rights on an uninhabited Sundarbans island, named Morichjhãpi, from which they were forcibly removed by the local authorities in In the present these projects are paralleled by a Development Trust, centred on the work of a hospital, which is seen as a model for NGOs working in rural India. The Morichjhãpi incident raises particular issues relating to the politically contested nature of space. 27 The Hungry Tide gives an oblique account of how the Morichjhãpi settlers were evicted from the island, with many being killed by the state authorities, because they had established themselves on land designated as a wildlife conservation site for endangered species such as the Royal Bengal Tiger. Originally from Bengal, but removed to a so-called resettlement camp in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, said to be more like a concentration camp, or a prison (118), the refugees 28 have 26 Ghosh characteristically acknowledges numerous sources in his concluding Author s Note (HT, 401-3). 27 See Ross Mallick s article, Refugee Recruitment in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Morichjhãpi Massacre in The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 1 (1999), , which Ghosh acknowledges in his Author s Note (HT, 402). Mallick explicitly raises the issue of the competing perspectives of the conservationists and the refugees. Reading Places John Thieme p. 122

16 returned to the tide country and, at least as far as the authorities are concerned, established themselves on Morichjhãpi illegally. In Zygmunt Bauman s terms, they have been criminalized by poverty. They are victims of what Bauman calls glocalization, the restratifications of the new world order, which allow [s]ome [to] inhabit the globe, while others are chained to place, 29 but in their case they have transgressed by refusing to stay put. The novel continues this debate into the present, where the suggestion is that human life continues to be cheapened by the local Forestry Department s putting internationally funded conservation work before the well-being of the region s subalterns. So segments of the Sundarbans population have to contend with both meteorological extremes and political dispossession. However, the division between the two sets of forces seems to be porous. As I ve said, Ghosh stops short of depicting climate change as responsible for the devastating storms that periodically strike the region, 30 but this seems to be implicit: the action comes to a climax when a tsunami-like wave swamps the tide country and throughout there are suggestions that the uniquely varied biodiversity 31 of its eco-system is 28 Tim Cresswell s comments on refugees as people who are customarily considered to be out-of-place are very pertinent to this aspect of Ghosh s novel. See Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, See too Zygmunt Bauman s view that the perceived challenge posed by newly mobile strangers, after modernity ruptured the links between social interaction and physical proximity, intensified the felt need to demarcate securely ordered and bounded cognitive space, Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, Zygmunt Bauman, The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, There are references to earlier disasters such as the Bengal famine of 1942 (HT, 79) and the cyclone that killed an estimated half a million people in the Ganges Delta in 1970 (HT, 203) is mentioned as one of many storms that have struck the region (HT, 201-6). 31 See, e.g., HT, 125: Piya remembered a study that had shown there were more species of fish in the Sundarbans than could be found in the whole continent of Europe. [ ] [The] proliferation of environments was responsible for creating and Reading Places John Thieme p. 123

17 imperilled. 32 When the wave strikes, an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, who has acted as a guide to one of the protagonists, Piya, an American-born cetologist of Bengali descent, with whom he has established a close non-verbal relationship that seems to bridge the gap between the mobile cosmopolitan elite and the more locally rooted poor, is killed, while saving Piya s life for the second time. At this moment the possibility of meliorative collaboration between people who would usually be seen as polar opposites seems to have been aborted; and the novel s poetics of space appears to have enacted the imbalances in the ways that geography, both physical and political, treats the haves and have-nots of a glocalized society. But The Hungry Tide does not end here and, as in all his work, Ghosh seems to be investigating possibilities for developing humanist alternatives to the present status quo. So the novel itself becomes a heterotopian site: in addition to documenting perceived material realities, it promotes an idealistic vision of a more egalitarian view of place. Ghosh consistently foregrounds the ways in which the tide country is a series of ever-changing chronotopes, formed by interconnecting flows that are now being accelerated by diasporic movement, glocalization and, it would seem, climate change. In addition to the various perspectives on the Sundarbans that I have mentioned, he also incorporates a mythic account of the origins of the region, which provides a very different angle of vision on the way undifferentiated space is shaped into place 33 when it is invested with meaning through human interpretative practices. A group of travelling actors performs the legend of the goddess Bon Bibi, the tutelary deity of the region s sustaining a dazzling variety of aquatic life forms from gargantuan crocodiles to microscopic fish. 32 An ecocritical reading is encouraged by the novel s carefully researched information concerning the region s animals behaviour. Tigers apart, Piya finds the Sundarbans dolphins are behaving in a previously unobserved manner. 33 Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes between space and place using this terminology: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value, Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977, 6. Reading Places John Thieme p. 124

18 animals (102-5). 34 According to this legend, Bon Bibi has come to the Ganges Delta from Arabia along with her twin brother, Shah Jongoli and so their identities seem to transcend the Muslim/Hindu partitioning of Bengal. Together Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli have defeated the demon-king of the region, Dokkhin Rai, who can assume the form of a tiger, subsequently granting him dominion over half of the Sundarbans. As the novel puts it, this division brings order to the land of the tides, with its two halves, the wild and the sown, being held in careful balance (103). In The Hungry Tide s account of the region s recent and contemporary situation, differences of opinion over land ownership and usage have not been so easily resolved. A similar careful balance between the wild and the sown has not been maintained: the refugees transgress, cross over the line that bifurcates the two aspects of the tide country, when they settle on Morichjhãpi, but the novel enlists our sympathy for their plight, giving voice to a suppressed history of subaltern dispossession and, through the numerous Rilke intertexts that are scattered through its pages, suggesting that their predicament relates to that of disinherited peoples 35 more generally. Ghosh s penchant for researched detail draws on technical information from the professions of its two main protagonists: Piya, the cetologist, and Kanai, a Delhi-based linguist, who now runs a translation agency. Both are engaged in forms of research themselves. Piya comes to the tide country to further her work on the river dolphin and details from the history of dolphin research inform the novel. Kanai comes on what is ostensibly a more personal mission, returning to the Sundarbans island, Lusibari, where he spent time 34 Cf. HT, 247 and 354ff. 35 The numerous Rilke intertexts in Nirmal s notebook have the effect of broadening the dispossession of the Morichjhãpi settlers into an existential predicament. See, e.g., the use of disinherited in the following passage: Each slow turn of the world carries such disinherited ones to whom neither the past not the future belongs, Duino Elegy 7, lines 63-4; Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Poulin, 51; qtd. HT, 165. Reading Places John Thieme p. 125

19 with his aunt and uncle as a young man. He does so at the request of his aunt, Nilima, who runs the hospital that is the cornerstone of the Development Trust. Nilima has asked him to come back, because his uncle, her late husband Nirmal, who died at the time of the Morichjhãpi incident, has left a notebook, which has just reappeared and which Nirmal has bequeathed to Kanai. The notebook is both the last testament of an ageing revolutionary and the medium for the novel s vivid poetic account of the struggle over Morichjhãpi. The first half of The Hungry Tide s braided narrative structure alternates between chapters in which Piya attempts to track river dolphins, with the help of Fokir, and chapters focused on Kanai, which move between accounts of his previous period in Lusibari, his recent return and his reading of Nirmal s notebook. Gradually these strands begin to converge, particularly through comparisons and contrasts between the various ways in which the characters respond to the tide country. Most of the novel s larger themes steal up on its readers, as the primary focus is on the relationships between its characters. The common denominator in most, though not all, of these relationships is that they explore varying responses to the Sundarbans and the possibility of meaningful dialogue between cosmopolitan outsiders and local subalterns. The action comes to a climax when Fokir is killed in the cyclone. Piya goes back to Lusibari and Nilima in a state of shock and when she leaves shortly afterwards, saying that she will return, Nilima assumes that, like so many other well-intentioned visitors, she will not be heard from again. The Epilogue proves Nilima wrong. Piya comes back, having secured funding for further research on the region s dolphins, but stipulating that she will only undertake this under the sponsorship of Nilima s Trust, so that local fishermen will be involved. She comments that she does not want to do the kind of work that places the burden of conservation on those who can least afford it (397), a remark that reflects the text s attempt to bridge the divide between global and local imperatives. When Piya hears that Kanai, who has gone back to Delhi, may also be returning to Lusibari, she says unthinkingly, it ll be good to have him home (399). So the novel ends on an optimistic note, typical of Ghosh s particular brand of humanism, offering the possibility of the convergence of characters both across and within class parameters, and with Piya wishing to align her research with the developmental work of Lusibari, which through the Trust is also dedicated to the eradication of class Reading Places John Thieme p. 126

20 boundaries and social injustice. Earlier, Piya s time on the remote Sundarbans waterways has been supported by the specialist tools of her trade, which include a GPS that enables her to determine her precise whereabouts, and speed and direction of movement at any given moment through the use of orbiting satellites. There is no suggestion that she will, or indeed should, relinquish such equipment and so her local work will continue to be supported by global technology. Similarly, the death of Fokir and the probable return of Kanai may seem to negate the possibility of a relationship with a local subaltern and hold out the promise of a middle-class romance for a woman who has hitherto seemed to be consigned to lead a solitary life. However, the novel stops short of this kind of neat romantic resolution; and Piya s commitment to Lusibari moves some way beyond her attraction to Fokir, not only because she reaffirms her dedication to her research on the river dolphin and seeks to involve the local fishermen, but also because she befriends Fokir s widow, Moyna, a character who is upwardly mobile in social terms. The Hungry Tide ends proposing the possibility of an ethics of cross-class work and personal relationships, which aspires to reconcile global and local concerns. I hope that it will be clear from what I ve said that The Hungry Tide is a very different novel from Narayan s The English Teacher and The Financial Expert. Like Piya, Ghosh is an American-resident of Bengali parentage, concerned with global positioning, intent on finding commonalities between the cosmopolitan elite and glocalized subalterns, and seemingly committed to developing an ethics of cross-class collaboration. Narayan, writing in an earlier period, and for the most part unaware of ecological issues, 36 seems to offer the possibility of a more sedentary poetics of place, only to show the proximity of pollution and danger in The English Teacher and the heterogeneity of a particular liminal location in The Financial Expert. Starting as it were from different poles, both novelists demonstrate the unfixed, contested and multiple nature of place. In so doing and despite the fact that Narayan has 36 Passages in Narayan s later fiction do engage with ecological concerns, though in a manner seemingly unaware of contemporary debates. See particularly the attack on anthropocentric thinking embodied in the use of a tiger narrator/protagonist in A Tiger for Malgudi, 1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 7-8 and passim; and the account of the Cannibal Herb in Talkative Man, 1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, 75 and 105. Reading Places John Thieme p. 127

21 been claimed by essentialist Hindu thinkers they both demonstrate the fluid nature of place. But more than just this, like all fiction, their novels themselves are other places, heterotopian sites, apart from the external world: other places in which their authors have developed imaginative spaces, which we as readers are invited to inhabit with them. Foucault does not mention literary spaces when he talks of heterotopias, but it seems reasonable to extend his thinking on the subject to say that fictional sites are defined in contradistinction to given social spaces, since signifying practices, the act of rendering them in language inevitably renders them other. The novels I have discussed describe heterotopias, but at the same time they themselves become heterotopias, away from the real world of given social spaces, in which their readers can build, and sometimes destroy, edifices from the raw materials provided. Catherine Morland builds a lot out of a little at Northanger Abbey; Leopold Bloom flushes the prize-winning story from Tit-Bits down his Dublin jakes. And in their very different ways, Narayan and Ghosh suggest alternative ways of reading places. Reading Places John Thieme p. 128

22 References Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. London: Dent, Bauman, Zygmunt. The Bauman Reader. Ed. Peter Beilharz. Oxford: Blackwell, Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, Bharucha, Nilufer E. Colonial Enclosures and Autonomous Spaces: R.K. Narayan s Malgudi, South Asian Review 23.1, 2002: Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, Dixon, Robert. Travelling in the West : The Writing of Amitav Ghosh, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 31.11, 996: 3-24, Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Penguin, Harmondsworth, Foucault, Michel. Of Other Places. Trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16.1, 1986: Space, Knowledge, and Power. Foucault interviewed by Paul Rabinow. Trans. Christian Hubert. The Foucault Reader, Ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991: Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins, Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d Urbervilles: A Pure Woman. London: Macmillan, Joyce, James. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity, Mallick, Ross. Refugee Recruitment in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Morichjhãpi Massacre in The Journal of Asian Studies, : Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity, Narasimhaiah, C.D. The Swan and the Eagle: Essays on Indian English Literature. Simla: Indian Institute, Narayan, R.K. The Bachelor of Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, The English Teacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, The Financial Expert. London: Methuen, The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Harmondsworth: Penguin, Mysore. Mysore: Government Branch Press, Self-Obituary No. 5, Illustrated Weekly of India, 23 July Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, No. 737, Box 8, folder 39.. Talkative Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, A Tiger for Malgudi. Harmondsworth: Penguin, Reading Places John Thieme p. 129

23 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. A. Poulin Jr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Rushdie, Salman. Midnight s Children. London: Picador, Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Reading Places John Thieme p. 130