hat does realism mean now to contemporary world or postcolonial literature? In this essay, I propose that novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide challenge the distancing and objectifying force of emerging categories like global and world literature through what Georg Lukacs calls “critical realism.” On one hand, such realism takes what seem to be detailed portraits of life “over there” in faraway places and cultures and makes them contemporaneous with our shared modernity. On the other hand, critical realism also points to a new kind of socially conscious postcolonial subjectivity, one based on professional expertise rather than revolutionary vision.

In the growing conversation about global and world literatures, proponents of globalizing literary studies suggest that, given the long history of human trade, migration, cultural dispersion and assimilation, globalization and its circuits of movement and exchange should be the optic through which we understand both contemporary and earlier periods of literature (Jay 2001, Gunn 2001). While this optic is frequently illuminating, its emphasis on transnational mobility and the material aspects of globalization may lead to a neglect of (on one hand) the abiding importance of that which is less mobile, local, or national, and (on the other hand) the ways in which globalization is worked out through symbolic and literary representations, in addition to demographic flows and economic exchanges. Those who favor world literature focus on the multiple ways in which texts are translated across linguistic or geographical borders (Damrosch 2003), circulated through networks of symbolic or cultural capital in a world republic of letters (Casanova 2005), and examined using world-systems theory to account for the occurrence of formal archetypes and generic models across cultures (Moretti 2000). But, once again, the vigor and salience of that which erects and tries to maintain national or cultural borders, however porous, tends to be neglected. To sum up, while these ideas of global and world literatures are illuminating, their emphasis on the mobile and fluid aspects of economic and cultural globalization may lead to a neglect of the abiding importance of the local and the national. Furthermore, these approaches may miss the ways in which literature itself mediates between different levels of the local, national, and global. On the other hand, postcolonialism’s critique of imperialism and global capital is relevant to novels that may otherwise be read as literary tourist traps. This idea of literature as a tour of faraway and exotic places and cultures can be seen in the use of the term “literary tourism,” coined by a Booker Prize organizer to describe Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. According to this official, prize-winning novels are a form of  literary tourism if they can “transport the reader to a remote time or place” and “give people information and feeling about something they knew very little about” (Dowd, “How Do You Win a Booker Prize?”).  In the case of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, one reviewer calls it an “armchair safari” (Baldwini 4) in the Sundarbans, the tidal country between India and Bangladesh. These terms, tourism and safari, suggest an anachronism and irreducible difference in which the people and places are depicted “over there” in some sort of premodern or even prelapsarian beauty or wildness, and they appear to be remote and cut off from “our” modernity “over here.”

How, then, does The Hungry Tide offer realism as a critical detour rather than a world tour? The novel’s plot has three major threads, stylistically combining scientific observation, ethnography, historiography, and romance. First, there is Piyali Roy, a marine biologist born in India but raised in America. As Piya researches the endangered river dolphins that live in the Sundarbans, she meets Kanai Dutt, a multilingual interpreter from New Delhi who is also traveling to the Sundarbans. Kanai’s journey leads to the second plotline. His aunt Nilima runs a local NGO and hospital in the town of Lusibari. She gives Kanai the journal of his late uncle Nirmal, a former schoolmaster, socialist, and poet. The journal, written over twenty years ago, contains descriptions of the tide country’s history, geography, and folklore, as well as a personal account of how the Indian government massacred a community of refugees living on one of the Sundarban islands in 1979. Ghosh stresses that this Morichjhapi massacre is an actual historical event neglected in India’s postcolonial history. The third plotline concerns a local fisherman named Fokir, who, although unable to communicate with Piya, helps her find some of the river dolphins she is researching. Fokir’s mother turns out to be an old friend of Kanai’s who was killed during the government massacre while Fokir was still a child. 

Reviewers of The Hungry Tide praise Ghosh’s realistic attention to details, an attention that even seems anachronistic. One reviewer remarks how Ghosh’s narrative voice is “proceeding at a 19th-century pace” (Baldwin 4), while another feels that the novel is “a Conradian expedition, a Forsterish collision between western assumptions and Indian reality” (Hickling 26). But the same reviewers find the scientific, ethnographic, and historiographical aspects of the novel unsatisfying: “Ghosh’s prose is too precise, too pedantic, to find the right gear for action adventure” (Hickling 26), and his “dialogue is frequently loaded with unmediated information sent directly from author to reader” that “turn his characters into wooden puppets” (Graham 46, 47). Another reviewer condemns the novel’s ending as “a Hollywood-style wrap-up” and laments that it “doesn't ring true to either Ghosh’s intellect or to the setting he has created” (Foran D7). In terms of the “literary tourism” I mentioned earlier, these reviewers find that Ghosh does indeed transport them to the remote time and place of the Sundarbans, but he fails to let them identify with his characters. Ghosh’s narrative tone, his characters, and his conclusion do not seem to “ring true” to his detailed landscapes. Ghosh offers us too much information but too little empathy; he gives us plenty of “outside” but not enough “inside.”

But this “outside-ness” may suggest what Georg Lukacs calls “critical realism,” which he contrasts to an ideal form of socialist realism. Socialist realism is an “‘inside’ method [that] seeks to discover an Archimedean point in the midst of social contradictions” (94). Critical realism, on the other hand, does not assume such an all-encompassing, Archimedean standpoint. Instead, it works with an “‘outside’ method” — “a writer obtains a typology based on the individual and his personal conflicts; and from this base he works towards wider social significance” (Lukacs 94). While Lukacs the Marxist philosopher holds socialist realism as an ideal, Lukacs the literary critic sees critical realism as the more productive method of writing in late capitalism, even though both forms of realism may co-exist in a literary text. In fact, Lukacs emphasizes that critical realism can “cure” the socialist realism of Stalin’s excessive economic and aesthetic doctrines (134). While most people think of Lukacs’s theory of realism as dogmatic (Adorno 154), his elaboration of realism and reality is much more nuanced: reality “is neither static nor constant,” it is “a constant flux,” “forever throwing up new material, permitting older material to disappear from view” (97). Critical realism creates “the investigating subject” who is “caught in the flux” of reality “yet able to discover tendencies whose significance had not been previously understood” (Lukacs 97).      

I suggest that The Hungry Tide enacts Lukacs’s idea of critical realism at the level of both literary form and subjectivity. First of all, the novel foregrounds the importance of narrative frames, translation, and mediation in how we perceive and understand the Sundarbans and its characters. In other words, it never allows us to fully forget the “outside” of the novel even as it gives us glimpses of the “inside” of the Sundarbans. This at once moves us away from reading the novel as a static landscape for literary tourism or an armchair safari. I want to focus in particular on one aspect of the novel that has gone unremarked by critics and reviewers – namely, Kanai’s uncle’s notebook and its importance to Kanai himself and the novel as a whole.

Most of the geographical and historical information we receive is actually given to us by Nirmal, Kanai’s dead uncle, either in the form of his notebook entries or through Kanai’s own flashbacks. Take this example from the beginning of the novel:

This is a vivid description of the shifting terrain of the tide country. The reality of the Sundarbans’ landscape, which is “always mutating,” swallowing up forests or throwing up sandbanks corresponds to Georg Lukacs sense of reality as “a constant flux,” “forever throwing up new material, permitting older material to disappear from view” (97). This older material may no longer be visible but is still crucial to our thinking. The italics mark this passage as an entry in Nirmal’s notebook which Kanai is reading, written over twenty years before the present time of the novel. The novel sets up Nirmal’s voice as an informative and framing narrative that haunts the stories of Kanai, Piya, and Fokir as well as our knowledge of the Sundarbans. This knowledge we are given does not come from a native informant like Fokir, but from Nirmal, who was a member of India’s revolutionary intelligentsia and an aspiring poet. His meticulous details are a product of his own investigative research into the folklore and the history of the Sundarbans. Thus we have another parallel with Lukacs’s sense of “the investigating subject” of critical realism who is “caught in the flux” of reality “yet able to discover tendencies whose significance had not been previously understood” (97).       

Nirmal’s notebook entries provide us with a clue about what these significant tendencies might be. Almost every entry ends with a quotation from Maria Rainer Rilke, the early twentieth-century German poet, in particular Rilke’s Duino Elegies. As well as being a committed socialist, Nirmal is passionate about Rilke, connecting his visionary lyrics to the reality of the Sundarbans. For example, after Nirmal talks about how the river crabs are slowly eroding the embankment protecting Lusibari, he ends with Rilke: “Because the animals ‘already know by instinct / we’re not comfortably at home / in our translated world’” (HT 172). And, later, “nothing escapes the maw of the tides; everything is ground to fine silt, becomes something else. It was as if the whole tide country were speaking in the voice of the Poet: ‘life is lived in transformation’” (HT 186-187). Ghosh seems to suggest that translation is not a purely linguistic affair; it is not a question of venturing into a foreign or alien language and extracting or recovering meaning back into a local or native tongue. Translation is not something we decide to do, but rather a pervasive condition of  transformation in modernity – hence Nirmal and Rilke’s sense that our world is already translated, and that the whole tide country seems to be speaking in Rilke’s voice in an eternal present tense. The Hungry Tide makes translation a process of making contemporary or coeval. It transforms what we assume to be “over there” or “in the past” and brings it uncomfortably home, “right here” and “right now” with us, demanding to be recognized and reckoned with.

To bring this formal idea of translation and transformation back to my earlier point about the investigating subject of critical realism, I will now focus on Kanai Dutt, the interpreter who inherits Nirmal’s notebook. Kanai runs a successful interpreting agency for foreigners in New Delhi. He fancies himself a cosmopolitan and a womanizer, priding himself “on the breadth and comprehensiveness of [his] experience of the world” and having “loved [...] in six languages” (HT  291). He tries to seduce Piya, but begins to realize something extraordinary about this diasporic Indian marine biologist:

Kanai’s worldliness and amorousness are closely linked to his polyglot talent. Women are “object[s] of erotic interest” he manipulates with his linguistic libido. But when it comes to Piya, his desire takes on a different form — it is no longer the lust for flesh, but “a language made flesh.” By the end of the passage it is no longer his desire for Piya’s female, sexualized body that is at stake. What Kanai experiences, and what Piya embodies, is “the desire to learn of the ways in which other realities were conjugated.” Through Piya, Kanai begins to fathom a different sense of translation: not for profit, not treating language as a commodity or a means for sexual conquest, but translation as suggested by his uncle and Rilke, as a situation “that seemed to call for a recasting of the usual order of things.” By the end of the novel, Kanai realizes that Piya “was not just his equal in mind and imagination; her spirit and heart were far larger than his own” (HT  260). Piya is no longer a diasporic Indian out of place in her homeland or a vulnerable object of his sexual appetite, but an equal, a peer, a dedicated scientist whose professionalism shapes her subjectivity, just as Kanai’s own interpretive vocation shapes his own.

This professional dedication is part of the translational and transformational framework of the novel. At the end of the novel, both Kanai and Piya return to Lusibari to live with Kanai’s aunt, Nilima. They return for both professional and personal reasons:  Kanai wants to re-write, from memory, his uncle’s journal which was lost during a storm, and which contains records of local culture and the Morichjhapi massacre; Piya wants to continue her research on dolphins by partnering with Nilima’s NGO so that international organizations can contribute funds to help them both. By pursuing their professional goals, both Piya and Kanai translate their vocational expertise into a service for the community of Lusibari. Kanai’s re-writing of Nirmal’s journal will be a written archive of the community’s memory and a testimony of the nation-state’s injustices against the Morichjhapi refugees. Piya’s foreign funding will help the local hospital and women’s trust, and she wants to name the project after Fokir, who died protecting her when they were caught in a storm. Although almost all her equipment and notes were lost in the cyclone, Piya kept her GPS monitor which recorded their movements when “Fokir took the boat into every little creek and gully where he’d ever seen a dolphin. That one map represents decades of work and volumes of knowledge,” (HT  328). Although Fokir was merely doing his job and gaining his livelihood, he was at the same time “writing a log of their journeys and locking it away in the stars” (HT  328). The local fisherman who had no ambitions beyond his hometown of Lusibari is translated, transformed into a global and celestial body of data, becoming a figure of the present rather than an echo from the past. The novel thus mediates between and relates local, national, and global levels of consciousness with each other: Piya’s research is situated between the local and the global, while Kanai’s re-writing mediates between the local and the national. In both cases, the novel emphasizes the positive contributions of professional dedication in contrast to Nirmal’s revolutionary romanticism, and this contrast is analogous to Lukacs’s distinction between the practice of critical realism and the ideal of socialist realism.

This channeling of vocational expertise into social consciousness accounts for one reviewer’s complaint that The Hungry Tide has a Hollywood-style ending which doesn’t ring true to the Sundarbans. This complaint only makes sense if we assume that the novel’s realism is meant to reproduce the Sundarbans for our viewing pleasure and armchair consumption. Instead, Ghosh presents us with the imaginative and radical power of critical realism, a realism that shades into historiography, into ethnography, into marine biology, drawing on different methodologies and writing styles outside itself, transforming them into a compelling narrative that does not allow us to lose ourselves in the story. We are left, as Rilke says, not comfortably at home in our translated world, and The Hungry Tide’s critical realism might be the postcolonial cure for the idealized but objectifying categories of global and world literature. By this, I do not mean that we should dismiss the idea or the possibility of global or world literature. My point is that these categories cannot do away with the critical questions that postcolonial literary studies raise in relation to imperialism and globalization. The Hungry Tide offers us a challenge very much like Kanai’s: we should not forget what it means “to look at something so ardently, an immaterial thing,” a thing that mediates and translates global commodities and conveniences “in a way that seem[s] to call for a recasting of the usual order of things” (HT  222,223).

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