JUNGLE NAMA

A Story of the Sundarban by Amitav Ghosh, illustrated by Salman Toor

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

JUNGLE NAMA

A Story of the Sundarban by Amitav Ghosh, illustrated by Salman Toor

FOURTH ESTATE ₹699; 88 pages

Amitav Ghosh has been visiting the Sundarban forest ever since he was a child. “It’s one of the places where you can see that the earth is alive, that the earth is really Gaia, a living entity. You see erosion. You see deposits being laid in front of your very eyes,” he says. This vividness that Ghosh describes is true of both the landscape and his writing of it. After two novels—The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019)—the author again returns to the mangrove forest for his new book, Jungle Nama. Written entirely in verse, it proves Ghosh’s talent, but it also signals to the forest’s abundance. If you’re looking for stories, the Sundarban has a prodigious capacity. It is the kind of gift that keeps on giving.

Reading Ghosh’s 24-syllable couplets, one is forced to ask if he has secretly dabbled in poetry all along. “I last wrote poetry as a boy,” he laughs. “But poetry, in the modern sense, helps you express your innermost feelings in verse. This is more a form of narrative. The meter carries the narrative on its own. You can say that Jungle Nama is about many things, but it’s also about the magic of meter.”