The Folktale of Bon Bibi and Geopolitics of Knowledge1: A Decolonial Reading of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Abstract

Set in the labyrinthine Sunderbans, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide dramatises a confrontation between two opposing worldviews – one based on rationality and the other on the local folktale of Bon Bibi, the goddess of the jungle – to weigh their relative viability in the uncanny ambience of the tide country. Locals like Horen and Fokir navigate its intricate waters and jungles by having immense faith in Bon Bibi who, to them, is a living reality, an omnipresent protective spirit. Therefore they remain unperturbed in any situation, even in the eerie ambience of Garjontola. Both Nirmal and Kanai, two outsiders, attempt to grasp the place in a reductive way. Their traumatic experiences at Garjontola reveal the limitation of the universalist method of Western epistemology2. The paper intends to assess, from Walter D Mignolo's decolonial perspective of “geopolitics of knowledge,” how Ghosh has incorporated the folktale of Bon Bibi in the novel to critique the universalist tendency of Western epistemology. “Geopolitics of knowledge” is an approach to resist Western epistemology's propensity to do away with "the possibility of thinking about a conceptualization and distribution of knowledge emanating from other local histories (China, India, Islam)." It is a strategy to resist “egopolitics of knowledge” which dismisses knowledges produced in non-European locales and in non-scientific forms like myth, folktale as non-knowledge. However, while highlighting the limit of Western epistemology, the paper does not intend to critique Western epistemology in itself, but its method to invalidate non-Western epistemologies as mere superstition and inauthentic knowledge-system. In doing so, it seeks to analyse how the novel implies a delinking from Western system of thought and the viability of non-European, non-universalising epistemologies in specific places.