Just finished Amitav Ghosh's fascinating novel The Hungry Tide, which tells of the Sundarbans (tide country) between Calcutta and the Ganges Delta - generally mangrove- covered islands which are shaped and reshaped by massive tides which submerge many of the islands twice daily. (Satellite pic above from Wikipedia; map below from the book.)
Mixing fresh and salt water, the Sundurbans generate an extraordinary congeries of shifting micro- climates, and allow Ghosh (for whom everything is a metaphor, and nothing is ever incidental) to seem to be operating on the level of myth even as he spins an often ripping yarn. The tide countries, where the very rhythms of the earth were quickened (186), swell with allegory. They are that part of Bengal, they are India, they are human history, they are time itself.A good example - and also a surprisingly compelling analogy for religion in much of human history - is this reflection one character (a linguist) makes on finding that a fisherman's puja song to the goddess Bon Bibi is, in fact, a prayer to Allah. (He'd assumed the man must be Hindu.) (The song is written in a strange mixture of languages and is, for good measure, a hybrid of prose and poetry mingling like sweet water and salt; if Ghosh's writing has a vice it is this hypersignification,
which can make things seem contrived.)I have seen confirmed many times, that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country's faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people cane use to pass in any directions - from country to country and even between faiths and religions. (205-6)
I'm going to try out this image of religious worlds as like roundabouts on my students this semester. (I may need to explain roundabouts, first!) It describes the cohabitation of religious traditions characteristic of much of Asia well - and perhaps also the American religious landscape of religious pluralism. (Picture source.)
