It was magnificent dream dreamed by leading capitalist of colonial India. "He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening." But, unfortunately, his dream did not come true. The tide country was not yet ready for Hamilton's progressive ideas. His memory is preserved the names of islands given by him and in the estate he had founded.
The tide country is not very far from Calcutta and the mainstream Indian society – only ninety seven kilometers away. Yet it represents another world where it is impossible to tell who is who, and what their castes and religious beliefs are for them. It is not just the legacy of Daniel Hamilton, but the hostile environment erases all societal strata, since everyone is equal in the struggle to survive in the adverse surroundings. Here people live amidst utter poverty and hunger and catastrophe are a way of life. It is a difficult life that leaves most women widowed at a young age and land barely because of the salt water of the hungry tide that cannot always be prevented from flooding the fields. As in his other novels, Amitav Ghosh shows here an anthropologist's fascination for the place and its people and the stories they tell the myths and legends that subvert the official versions of history and religion. The tide country people have an epic narrative of origins which they pass on orally from generation to generation. They have a kind of local religion, they worship a goddess named Bon Bibi, the presiding deity of the Sundarbans and the arch-enemy of Dokkhin Rai who represents evil. But the epic of Bon Bibi is strongly inflected by Islamic influences, which evince the syncretic nature archipelago's culture and religion. The Hungry Tide is a powerful evolutionary story of this region and its people.
Into the transformative sphere of the tide country, where life is lived on the margins of greater events, venture two individuals from the outside world.
