‘The Other’– The Sunderbans: A Land of Dangers

Abstract

The sense of ‘otherness’ in any cultural space is never created in a vacuum. It is often produced by a long history of structural oppression that gets initiated by many reasons like colonization, natural geographical obstacles, economic positioning etc.  This paper works on the premises that though the Sunder bans had been declared as a world heritage and subjected to numerous historical, ecological understandings yet the sense of ‘otherness’ is in as much as part of its geographical positioning as it is often associated even with its cultural space. The first part of the paper will look into the history of settlement. The second part will concentrate on the story of this land largely feared or non-negotiable will be looked at through the novels of Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide, Shibshankar Mitra’s Sunderbanyer Arjan Sardar, Manik Bandhyopaya’s Padma Nadir Majhi.