RIGHT TO ENVIRONMENT: SENSE OF DISPLACEMENT, QUEST FOR HOMELAND AND IDENTITY IN AMITAV GHOSH’S SELECT NOVELS.
RIGHT TO
ENVIRONMENT: SENSE OF DISPLACEMENT, QUEST FOR HOMELAND AND IDENTITY IN AMITAV GHOSH’S
SELECT NOVELS.
Dr.S.Karthika,
Assistant Professor of English,
Sri
Parasakthi College for Women,
Courtallam,
Environmental human rights are considered
as the rights that are inherited by a human being, simply because they are human. Environmental
protection is first ascertained as a universal concern which warrants
consideration within a human rights context. The issue of
environmental degradation and its resultant hazards in the lives of the
community where the exploration, production and transportation of natural
resources take place has become a global concern and has been linked to the
violation of human rights. The concept of Environmental Rights is a Human Right
and should be recognized as a fundamental right. It is indivisible,
interrelated and interdependent with other human rights. Man, basically
belonging to the entire environment, seeks his space not in dualistic
separation
from
nature but in his monistic identification with the entire ecosphere.
Environmental rights can be further analyzed as the right to land and
displacement issues. The term displacement is intimately associated with
diaspora, which involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the
displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys undertaken on account of
economic compulsions. Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in
exile. The term displacement literally means a change of address but in
literature especially the non- resident Indian writers it is used to mean the
change of socio-cultural position of
the people and what gives poignancy to this theme of displacement is its global
readership and enduring appeal. Diaspora evokes the specific traumas of human
displacement- whether of the Jews or of the Africans scattered in the service
of slavery and indentured- post colonialism is concerned with idea of cultural
dislocations contained within this term. In fact, diasporic literature deals
with the haunting memory of the land and its culture to which the characters
originally belong and in doing so they create an imaginary homeland where they
try to preserve their own cultural heritage as the migrants suffer a ‘triple
disruption’, composed of the loss of roots, the linguistic and also social
dislocation. The theme of displacement, race-relations, and re-search for
re-identifications is the staple-stuff of most of Amitav Ghosh’s novels.
Amitav Ghosh, a
novelist with an extraordinary sense of history and place, is indisputably one
of the most important novelists of our time. In Ghosh’s novels, we find a sense
of historical reality in terms of time and space forming an integral part of a
work of art and are transmuted in the process of giving a creative expression
and it achieves wider dimensions of universality and at times a state of
timelessness. Amitav Ghosh, a social anthropologist came to the literary
scenario with disjointed magic realism in his apprentice novel The Circle of Reason (1986). His second novel The Shadow Lines (1988) dwells upon the divisions of land and
people and theme of displacement is very much obvious. His other novels are In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Place, The
Hungry Tide’ and Sea of Popies which is the first volume of a projected
series of novels. The trauma of an uprooted protagonist has received an unusual
treatment in his novels since he struggles hard to adjust himself to new
surroundings. His creative impulse demonstrates a propensity for deconstructing;
often overturning the models and assumptions of Western civilizations, a
typically post-colonial preoccupation. This article examines the theoretical background
of a right to environment in Amitav Ghosh’s novels. It also tries to find out
the different layers of displacement in his novels and attempts to show how the
sense of displacement taxes human mind and how it strains on human
relationship. This paper also tries to explore the theme of quest for homeland
and identity in the novels of Amitav Ghosh with special
reference to The Hungry Tide and The Shadow Lines.
Amitav
Ghosh’s novels deal with the most contemporary issues such as modern man’s
perennial problems of alienation, the quest for freedom and existential crisis.
Restless, rootless and unsettled, he is in search of peace, comfort and
shelter. His sense of belonging is shaken. The bliss of freedom has disappeared.
Life has become nothing but silence and pauses without harmony and destination.
There is a vast gap between words and the world. The disturbance caused by the
gaps and absences and seamless silences forces Ghosh to craft his novels on the
victims of history. The undocumented histories of ordinary people and the
chronologically ordered histories of historical characters are subtly dovetailed
into his novels, making explicit a confluence of history and human insights.
The strategy of subversion, a common feature of postcolonial histories is visible
in the novels of Ghosh. Amitav Ghosh has got some remarkable obsession with his
land and people. He has some profound inner urge to connect with his roots and
cultural moorings and he discusses a sense of togetherness what Donald Horowitz
calls ‘a myth of collective ancestry, which usually carries with it traits
believed to be innate. Amitav Ghosh has been committed to the issues of social
justice and thus outlines in his novels the experiences and aspiration of the
people. Close study of his novels apparently suggest his preoccupation with the
men and women who have undergone through the traumatic experiences of the
partition of Indian subcontinent.
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide the characters from different fields of life penetrate
into this kind of relationship between community and environment, come into
action and counter-action and at last are assimilated into it. On the other
hand, individual identity has been defined in the domain of ‘total
environment’, becomes its integral part though not necessarily in a peaceful
co-existence but giving proper acknowledgement to the existence of different
kinds of human beings - rich and poor, educated and illiterate, ‘insiders’ and
‘outsiders’, of their community formed by their profession, beliefs, myths and
encounter with the same Fate, of their environment consisting of forests,
rivers and ferocious animals like tiger and crocodile, and even natural
calamities like devastating storm or terrible upsurge in the sea. Ghosh also
poses some vital questions on the ethical basis of animal killing for the
survival of the human beings and man’s indulgence into activities of violence,
revenge and brutality. The reader constantly revolves like a whirlwind from the
anthropocentric inherent value to the nature centric intrinsic value and the
vice versa. Undoubtedly, the non-human environment is presented here not only
to form a structure for his narrative but also to probe into the mystery of
human existence even in the terrifying but tempting beauty of nature – the
submerged forests, the ebb and flow of the sea water in the area called mohona,
the deceiving presence of tiger as ‘ghost’. Ghosh’s novel asserts that the
physical environment is not passive, rather it exhibits a harmonious working
that binds together the vegetation, the animal and the human worlds that affect
one another directly or indirectly and are affected themselves by the environment.
The regional topography, settlement pattern, land utilization and professional practices
of the people of this tide country affect their social community formation.
Ghosh’s novel explores this interwovenness and unseparatedness between the
ecological and social organisms. This kind of harmonious relationship between
nature and society opens up another question – man’s space in the
geomorphologic pattern of a region and its connection with the culture of that
community, their creation of myths and legends such as the Bonbibi myth, or the
place of Nature in the culture of a community. This relates the very
fundamental question of the eco-evolution of a community culture and the nature
in which the community exists. In the novel, jangal is the basic correlator.
The settlers in the Sunderbans made their own place of living by hacking at the
forests with their daas (Ghosh 52), the place which would be called ‘jangala’
in the earlier sense. This ‘Jangala’ suggests a balance between society and
nature encompassing the intrinsic value of the ‘total environment’. The people
living in ‘jangal’ and treated as ‘janglees’ believe in distinct values,
develop a distinct paradigm almost opposite to that of the so-called civilized
people who with their colonial hangover are made to believe on the derogatory
meaning of ‘jungle’ extinguishing the ancient cultural tradition of India. The Sunderbans
is of no exception. But how their cultural values have been developed out of
such a concept of jangal and how it creates a distinct paradigm for them is too
mysterious a question to answer. Whatever be the reason, the people of the tide
country have been facing a cultural displacement along with their diasporic
experience. The characters like Piyali, Kanai, Nirmal, Nilima, Fokir, Kusum,
Horen and others have gone through such kind of identity crisis because of
displacement and diasporas along with ‘cultural appropriation’ based on other
values. Since the coming of the first settlers in the 1920s, the natives have
been facing the cultural appropriation either by the western people like Piya
or by the so-called ‘enlightened’ Indians like Nirmal and Nilima. But they
never detach them from their own beliefs, myths, and rituals and customs
through which they sustain their local ethnic culture that incorporates a
homogeneous population irrespective of their religious boundaries and become
cohesive in cultural traits. Rather it is unique in case of the Sunderbans that
the tide people have been able to assimilate the foreign cultures and a
counter-cultural appropriation takes place in which nobody is left unaffected.
It is in the colonial conspiracy that they attempted to tag the encountering
culture as rudely ‘savage’ or humbly ‘mystic’ considering their own culture as
paradigmatic or ‘authentic’. But Ghosh’s novel emerged as a protest suggesting
that a folk culture need not be either savage or mystical in order to create an
‘authentic’ identity for them. It is itself ‘authentic’ and its own cultural
identity survives in confrontation with the colonial cultural appropriations.
The so-called ‘enlightened’ cultural people like Nirmal with a dream of a
Utopian society in the western parameter or Piya with the eye of a
cytologist-researcher turn out to be affected by a counter-cultural
appropriation and both of them end up as gropers in the archipelago of mystic
hearts of the tide people.
The Hungry Tide displays the traumatic
effect of partition on the hungry people and how the people of the Indian
subcontinent become dispersed. He shows how political turmoil makes a people
refugee or immigrant, and the resultant diasporic, and living with a sense of
imaginary homeland. Here Priya Roy studying fresh water Dalphines is a creature
of nowhere. She is dislocated
as a second generation immigrant. In fact, in The Hungry Tide Ghosh’s principal
focus is on the ‘uprising’ of Morichjhapi. The partition is the cause of this
‘event’. The partition of the Indian subcontinent therefore causes dislocation.
Consequently, the refugees jostle along the border of India and Bangladesh. The
refugees are socially dislocated and politically marginalized. When the
refugees are sent to Dandakaranya, they feel socially, politically and culturally
alienated. The pangs of rootlessness force them to remember their homeland. Nirmalbabu’s
notebook unfolds the story once Kusum told him. The story of her “exile in Bihar and how she had dreamed
of returning to this place, of seeing once more these rich fields of mud, these
trembling tides… [with]all the others who had come with her to Morichjhapi.” To
live outside the homeland is a kind of exile which Kusum and the people
Morichjhapi feel. One’s identity and the formation of it are profoundly
influenced by family, culture, education, and the larger part of the society
where one lives. In this novel the dispersed people have developed an ethnic
identity to cope with the crisis of identity and prangs of rootlessness.
In his novel The Shadow Lines (1988), the sense of displacement is made visible
by the naming of two chapters ‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’. He depicts the
trauma of partition of Bengal and its aftermath heart-wrenching migration and
displacement in this novel. He gives a vivid picture of the life of refugees on
both sides of the border. The narrative very shockingly delineates the
condition of the refugees and juxtaposes the state of lives of people on both
sides of the border. The narrative reveals that refugee from west Bengal who
sought home and hearth in Bangladesh succeeded in having much better living
condition than the refugees of East Bengal in India. These hapless lots were
damned to the life of utter destitution and grinding starvation in the country
they sought shelter in. Migration is
caused for different reasons- it may be voluntary. The expatriate or a migrant
has to go away-away from ‘home’, a ‘mythic place’. But the mind always searches
for the root. Globalization, partition or the socio-economic disparity cause
disjunction and the people get disconnected from their ‘home’. Here Thamma is desirous
to visit to her old house in Dhaka. She tells the story of Dhaka and Burma to
the narrator. Hence the sense of ‘in-betweenness’ (Bhaba) is manifested which,
however, is the result of displacement. Thamma and Ila are physically and
culturally dislocated due to globalization and partition and they remember
their past through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth and their search for
‘cultural identity’ make them ‘as individuals without an anchor, without
horizon colourless-rootless-a
race’. In this novel, we can see the different layers of displacement-
cultural, social and psychological and how different characters are its haunting
victims.
Thus, Ghosh through his enticing narrative
dexterously delineates these conflicts in one’s identity-formation, in which
nature (geography), fate (history) and human endeavour crisis-cross in the life
of various characters having a background in the form of cultural landscape.
The local cultural landscape or the visible imprint of human activity reflects their
values, norms and the aesthetics of their culture. This also includes how they
have shaped the environment to serve their own purposes, and how they
themselves become a part of the ‘total environment’ by developing a ‘sense of
place’ of their own, grown out of the experience of displacement, diaspora and
a dream of a new society.
References:
1.
Ghosh,
Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2006. Print
2.
Ghosh,
Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2003.Print.
3.
Hawley,
C John. The Ebb and Flow of Peoples
across Continents and Generations. Amitav
Ghosh: An Introduction. Delhi:
Foundation Books, 2005. Print.
4.
Mondal,
Anshuman. Looking Glass Border. Amitav
Ghosh: Contemporary World Writers. New Delhi: Viva Books, First Indian
Publication.2010. Print.
5.
Horowitz,
Donald. Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Print.
6.
Hickling,
Alfred. Islands in the stream: Review.
The Guardian. Saturday 19 June 2004.
http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2005/issue4/0405p48.html.
Web. 18 March 2016.
7.
Coupe,
Laurence. Myth the New Critical Idiom.
New York: Routledge, 2007. Print
8.
Rickword,
Edgell. ‘The Cultural Meaning of May Day’, Left Review 3. n. p.: n.d. Print
Session, George. Deep Ecology for the 21st
Century: n.p.,
1995. Print
9.
Vattimo, Gianni.
The Transparent Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Print
10. Bhabha, Homi.K. The Location Culture.1994; rpt. London
and New York: Routledge. 2004. Print.
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