Exhuming the Untold Story: A Study of ‘Marichjhapi Incident through Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The incident of Marichjhapi has been shrouded in the veil of silence for over three decades. This silence is part of the violence that was perpetrated by the Communist government of West Bengal on some 25,000 destitute refugees on May 14, 1979. Within a single night 36 people were shot dead, huts were razed, women raped, thousands arrested, and fisheries were destroyed. Everything was over in a single night. What is more horrifying, is the fact, that the Communist government which is at the helm of the affairs in the state of West Bengal for more than thirty years ensured that the Bengali intelligentsia remain silent about that night of horror. Censorship was so tight that no article or academic deliverance took place on this incident of Marichjhapi since 25th July 1979 when the first part of an article about the incident of Marichjhapi got published in Jugantar (a reputed Bengali Journal); the second part of that article never came out. Thus the tales of horror were strangled in the claustrophobic ambience of silence. It was only during the Nandigram agitation where the violence was believed to be state sponsored that the spectre of Marichjhapi rose from its grave to remind us of those horrifying days of 1979. Thus it does not appear to be strange when we find even creative writers have remained tight-lipped on this Marichjhapi massacre. Amitav Ghosh explores and exhumes this unheard tale of violence from the grave of silence through his novel The Hungry Tide. He narrates those haunting days of 1979 through the personal diary of Nirmal (the Uncle of the protagonist Kanai). It is an excellent example when the personal memoirs comes into play and fill up the voids of the nationalist mainstream history. The proposed paper would thus focus and analyze the ‘fables of fear’ that surrounds the incident of Marichjhapi through Amitava Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.