The story that gave this land its life: the Legend of Bon Bibi in Amitav Ghosh’s Sundarbans Trilogy

Amitav Ghosh’s environmental imagination is a staple feature of the ‘Sundarbans trilogy’, a sequence of works written in the new millennium that includes two novels, The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), and a story in verse, Jungle Nama. A Story of the Sundarban (2021). The works share the geographical setting as well as an interest in folklore that mythologizes a recurrent dialectics between human beings and nature and signals an ecological imperative to find a balance between their respective rights to inhabit this biologically fragile, richly anthropized, and profoundly taxing tidal region. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Indian postcolonial environments, as well as on a recent interview with the writer, the essay explores the rationale of Ghosh’s deployment of Bengali folklore in the Sundarbans trilogy, with specific reference to the legend of Bon Bibi, an origin myth that accounts for the natural extremity of the Sundarbans region and for its religious plurality.