Nobonita Rakshit1 & Rashmi Gaur2
1Doctoral Student, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. nrakshit@hs.iitr.ac.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8584-862X
2Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, rashmi.gaur@hs.iitr.ac.in
Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.31
Abstract
The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of ‘literary fieldwork’ that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo’s (2016) concept of “humanities fieldwork” and Ghosh’s (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author’s literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author’s creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.
Keywords: Sundarbans, literary fieldwork, humanities fieldwork, sensuous recognition, literary ethnography.