I revisit Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, not because his latest book River of Smoke (the second in the Ibis trilogy) is out on the market and therefore Ghosh is newsworthy all over again, nor because he is a preeminent Indian writing consistently in English (and these would have been good enough reasons for me to reread one of his earlier novels), but because it allows me a suitably interventionist space to engage with the overarching theme of this volume.

I begin with a fairly banal point that my choice of text is commensurate, as The Hungry Tide is written in English, as Ghosh belongs firmly to the tradition of contemporary Indian English writing (embodying its every singularity); and as the novel narrativises the travails of Muslim Dalits of the then-East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) trying to rehabilitate themselves in the Marichjhapi (also known as Morichjhapi) islands of the Sunderbans of West Bengal, India in the final phase of post-Partition migrations. The Hungry Tide is the story of a professional translator, Kanai, operating within the metropolitan centre of Delhi, on an unwilling and emotionally coerced visit to the margins of the nation (as well as the very state of West Bengal) – that is, the Sundarbans.

Kanai is invited by his aunt Nilima Bose (who runs a nongovernmental organisation in the Lusibari island of the Sundarbans) to read, interpret and hopefully re-cast her deceased husband Nirmal Bose's diaries. While Nilima suspects that the diaries contain some poetry or fiction that, if published (and publicised), could render Nirmal posthumously well-known, the diaries/notes turn out to be records of diverse tide-country histories, some human, others not quite, some recent, others not quite. The Hungry Tide is peculiarly self-referential in that it engages with language and its outsideness, with translation and its impossibilities, with the making of the text and its unmaking.

The entire question of centre/margins needs to be rearticulated for the uninitiated. Any Bengali worth his/her salt would know that the Sundarbans – a marshy, tiger/crocodile-infested mangrove terrain – is Kolkata's (Calcutta’s) backwaters and in common parlance known as ‘Kolkatar jhi’ (Kolkata's housemaid), literally because it is a poverty-stricken hinterland that provides Kolkata babus (gentry) with their supply of housemaids; and metaphorically because it is an area that has been traditionally neglected by successive governments of West Bengal.