Bengali Refugees In The Hungry Tide By Amitav Ghosh

Resettlement of the refugees continues to be a burning issue in the post colonial world. Basically refugees are people who live in exile; those people who have to flee from their homeland due to the constant wars, internal conflicts and other forms of violence. It can be either a voluntary exile or a forcible one. Anyway all refugees share the same pangs- the pangs of separation from their homeland, the nostalgia and desire for the homeland and the building up of the new dreams in a Newfoundland. But the very same resettlement changes the life of the people. What awaits them there is a new culture, a new society and a new language that are completely different and new to them
In the novel The Hungry Tide Amitav Ghosh draws the picture of the victims of partition who were displaced from their homeland. The life of the Bengali Hindus was not a different one. They were considered as a burden by the West Bengal government and they developed a final solution to the problems of rehabilitation of the Bengali refugees; the Dandakaranya Project. Subsequently the government established an authority, the Dandakaranya Development Authority, in 1958. The mission instilled upon this authority was to develop an area of 78000 square miles known as Dandakaranya in the Koraput

There, they have to fight with everything only to survive their dreams of a better livelihood. The novel has got one of the beautiful landscapes, the Sundarbans, as its background. On the surface level the novel is about the life of Kanai Dutt, a middle aged linguist who runs a translation bureau in Delhi, and his acquaintance with a young cetologist from U S, Piyali Roy. But on the deeper level, the novel is a history; the history of the place and the history of the