Features

The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
Boston/New York: Mariner Books, 2006, 329 pp

Not often does an author’s choice of setting play such an overpowering role as in Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”.

In this novel, the unique environment of the Sundarbans shapes the plot and characters in indelible ways, and gives rise to provocative themes.

In a very visceral way, the story reveals the tension between different kinds of knowledge, different survival strategies, different approaches to nature and different concepts of progress.

The Sundarbans is an archipelago in West Bengal, southeast of Kolkata (Calcutta), with thousands of islands demarcated by rivers and streams as they head for the sea.

It is “a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable… There are no borders here to divide fresh from salt water… The tides reach as far as two hundred miles inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to reemerge hours later.” (pp. 6-7)

The peculiar eco-system enables amazing phenomenon, like a rainbow of the moon, but also poses unfathomable dangers.

Besides facing poverty and lack of state services, the people who inhabit these islands fall prey to snakes, crocodiles and tigers hiding in the dense mangrove forests, but more devastating are the relentless tides which storms periodically whip into gigantic waves sweeping away everything in their path.

There are natural wonders and adventures galore to be found here, and Ghosh describes many fascinating and suspenseful scenes, but he is most concerned with the psychological and spiritual impact of the environment on human beings.

It is its very remoteness that draws people there, and the reader enters the Sundarbans through the eyes of “outsiders” whose presence highlights chasms in Indian society — urban vs. rural, prosperous vs. poor, educated vs. illiterate, as well as the hierarchy of class and caste.

In the 1950s, as newlyweds, Nilima and Nirmal fled Kolkata to seek refuge in the area after the latter’s leftist activities got him in trouble with the authorities.

They stayed on, she heading a women’s centre and hospital for the local population, he as school headmaster, but tension persisted between her social work and his revolutionary dreams of radical change.

As the novel opens, half a century later, Kanai, their urbane nephew who runs a successful translation agency in Kolkata, has been summoned by Nilima to read the notebook Nirmal left behind when he died, which provides a story within a story, giving the novel added historical depth and background on the geology and mythology of the area. (Interestingly, the local religion and legends reflect the area’s mixed Muslim-Hindu heritage.)

On the way, Kanai encounters Piya, an American of Indian descent coming to study river dolphins. None of them will ever be the same after their time in the Sundarbans.

Piya needs Kanai as a translator, but she is more impressed by her guide, Fokir, an illiterate fisherman who knows every inch of the seemingly infinite network of rivers, including when and where the dolphins gather.

“I’ve worked with many experienced fishermen before but I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible instinct. It’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart,” she says. (p. 221)

Though they speak no common language, they work together perfectly.

In contrast, Kanai, who knows six languages, cannot navigate this strange environment. He undergoes a humbling experience when lost in the mangrove jungle, an epiphany which teaches him that words are not everything.

His journey in the wilderness mirrors that of his uncle, as recorded in his notebook, who also discovered that words were powerless to save those he loved — a group of refugees from the Bangladesh war, who were trying to establish a new community on an island designated as a wildlife reserve.

Suddenly, the government, which had been oblivious to their dispossession for a decade, was on the scene in a massive police operation to evict them.

To the refugees, it seemed “that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil”. (p. 217)

As Ghosh unmasks injustice and human frailty, as he weaves between the historical past, the mythological past and the present, the sheer beauty of his prose takes your breath away, as do the turn of events, the human emotions, dilemmas and conflicts encompassed in this novel.

WASHINGTON — The US military is spending millions to build “vanishing” technology that self-destructs on the battlefield, like the tape recorder that goes up in smoke in the “Mission: Impossible” television show.

The Pentagon’s hi-tech research arm has awarded contracts worth more than $17 million in the past two months to prevent micro-electronic sensors and other devices from falling into enemy hands.

The companies have been tasked to develop “transient” electronics that could be destroyed remotely or crumble into tiny pieces.

In the 1960s series “Mission: Impossible”, the lead spy always receives top-secret instructions on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, before being told: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

Now, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a 21st century version of the recorder, backing experimental projects under the Vanishing Programmable Resources Programme.

The use of small, sophisticated electronics in everything from radios to weapons has increased dramatically for American forces, but it is “nearly impossible to track and recover every device”, according to a DARPA contract document released last month.

“Electronics are often found scattered across the battlefield and might be captured by the enemy and repurposed or studied,” it said, warning America is in danger of losing its technological edge.

The new programme aims to solve the problem by creating systems “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner”, rendering the devices useless to the enemy.

DARPA is known for its ambitious research, some of which has resulted in breakthroughs useful for both military and civilian use, including the creation of the Internet and GPS navigation system.

For its latest project, the agency is reinterpreting the idea of a “kill switch”, which dates back to the Cold War, when “permissive action link” devices were introduced to prevent a rogue nuclear launch.

Unlike ordinary off-the-shelf electronics that can last indefinitely, the agency “is looking for a way to make electronics that last precisely as long as they are needed”, said programme manager Alicia Jackson.

The device could be destroyed either by a signal sent by commanders or prompted by “possible environmental conditions” such as a certain temperature, she said.

The nascent technology is potentially revolutionary, with possible applications for medicine as well as combat, officials said.

In 2012, DARPA used similar technology to create a micro device — made of ultra-thin sheets of silicon and magnesium covered in silk — to be implanted harmlessly into the body to prevent infection from surgery.

Efforts to build degradable electronics have tended to rely on polymeric or biological materials, and that has resulted in poor electronic performance and “weak mechanical properties”, according to the agency.

The project is still a long away from being deployed in a real battle, and will require years of research by private industry.

In the latest contract for the programme, announced on January 31, DARPA provided $3.5 million to IBM for a proposal to use a radio frequency to shatter a glass coating on a silicon chip, reducing it to dust.

The Palo Alto Research Centre in California received $2.1 million to build devices with dummy circuits that would be triggered to “crumble into small, sand-like particles in a fraction of a second”.

Defence giant BAE Systems was awarded $4.5 million on January 22 and Honeywell Corporation won a $2.5 million contract on December 3 for more “vanishing” technology research.

And DARPA announced in December a $4.7 million contract for SRI International to develop “SPECTRE” batteries designed to self-destruct.

LONDON — They were a British family on a day out — almost a million years ago.

Archaeologists have announced that they have discovered human footprints in England that are between 800,000 and 1 million years old — the most ancient found outside Africa, and the earliest evidence of human life in northern Europe.

A team from the British Museum, London’s Natural History Museum and Queen Mary College at the University of London uncovered imprints from up to five individuals in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh on the country’s eastern coast.

British Museum archaeologist Nick Ashton said the discovery — recounted in detail in the journal PLOS ONE — was “a tangible link to our earliest human relatives”.

Preserved in layers of silt and sand for hundreds of millennia before being exposed by the tide last year, the prints give a vivid glimpse of some of our most ancient ancestors.

They were left by a group, including at least two children and one adult male. They could have been be a family foraging on the banks of a river scientists think may be the ancient Thames, beside grasslands where bison, mammoth, hippos and rhinoceros roamed.

University of Southampton archaeology professor Clive Gamble, who was not involved in the project, said the discovery was “tremendously significant”.

“It’s just so tangible,” he said. “This is the closest we’ve got to seeing the people.”

“When I heard about it, it was like hearing the first line of [William Blake’s hymn] ‘Jerusalem’ — ‘And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green?’ Well, they walked upon its muddy estuary.”

The researchers said the humans who left the footprints may have been related to Homo antecessor, or “pioneer man”, whose fossilised remains have been found in Spain. That species died out about 800,000 years ago.

Ashton said the footprints are between 800,000 — “as a conservative estimate” — and 1 million years old, at least 100,000 years older than scientists’ earlier estimate of the first human habitation in Britain.

That is significant because 700,000 years ago, Britain had a warm, Mediterranean-style climate. The earlier period was much colder, similar to modern-day Scandinavia.

Natural History Museum archaeologist Chris Stringer said that 800,000 or 900,000 years ago Britain was “the edge of the inhabited world”.

“This makes us rethink our feelings about the capacity of these early people, that they were coping with conditions somewhat colder than the present day,” he said.

“Maybe they had cultural adaptations to the cold we hadn’t even thought were possible 900,000 years ago. Did they wear clothing? Did they make shelters, windbreaks and so on? Could they have the use of fire that far back?” he asked.

Scientists dated the footprints by studying their geological position and from nearby fossils of long-extinct animals including mammoth, ancient horse and early vole.

John McNabb, director of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton — who was not part of the research team — said the use of several lines of evidence meant “the dating is pretty sound”.

Once uncovered, the perishable prints were recorded using sophisticated digital photography to create 3-D images in which it’s possible to discern arches of feet, and even toes.

Isabelle De Groote, a specialist in ancient human remains at Liverpool John Moores University who worked on the find, said that from the pattern of the prints, the group of early humans appeared to be “pottering around”, perhaps foraging for food.

She said it wasn’t too much of a stretch to call it a family.

“These individuals travelling together, it’s likely that they were somehow related,” she said.

Research at Happisburgh will continue, and scientists are hopeful of finding fossilised remains of the ancient humans, or evidence of their living quarters, to build up a fuller picture of their lives.

The footprint find will form part of an exhibition, “Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story”, opening at the Natural History Museum next week.

The footprints themselves, which survived for almost 1 million years, won’t be there. Two weeks after they were uncovered, North Sea tides had washed them away.