#sundarbans

The Watcher And The Wanderer

When giants and minnows coexist.

“In the Sundarbans, a massive crocodile rests near a tiny mudskipper. Despite the size difference, the fish shows no fear. Their contrasting colors create a rare, captivating moment in the wild.”

Ramprasad Dutta

Bangladesh – Rivers, Ruins & Timeless Beauty

✅ Description:

Such a separation of land and water was made possible not just by physical constructions but first and foremost by engineering a legal framework that gradually entered the popular vocabulary. [...] BADA, which stands for the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act, [was] a law passed by the colonial British rulers in 1825, following the Permanent Settlement of 1793. [...] The environment of Bengal can be described as hybrid, where the demarcation between land and water is neither well-defined nor permanent. Nature here represents a borderless world, or at best one in which borders are not fixed lines on the ground demarcating a territory, but are negotiated spaces or zones. Such “[...] spaces” comprise “not [only] lines of separation but zones of interaction…transformation, transgression, and possibility” (Howitt 2001, 240).

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Current boundaries of land and water are as much products of history as nature and the colonial rule of Bengal played a key role in changing the ideas and valuations of both. [...] The debate on what constituted productive and unproductive uses of land preceded the application of English property law not only to establish permanent zamindari (a common term for the system of landlordism) settlement of land tenure in India, but also to valorize land in what had essentially been a land-water hybrid environment. The colonial land revenue system, by seeing land as more productive (being able to yield revenue) and useful, began the long historical process of branding the rivers of Bengal as uncivil and in need of control. [...] The problem with deltaic land is its non-permanent nature, as silt is stored by rivers: rivers do not always flow along a certain route [...]. The laws that the colonial British brought to Bengal, however, were founded upon the thinking of land as being fixed in place. [...]

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Experiments to fine-tune the land-based economy began in 1760 when Bengal, and its ceded territories, came under the East India Company rule. [...] To entrench the system, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars (or landlords) “in perpetuity” - meaning for good. The system was aimed at reducing the complexities of revenue collection due to erratically shifting lands and unpredictable harvests in a monsoon-dependent area [...]. Alarmed at the possibility of dismemberment of their estates, the zamindars decided to bind tenants to the same conditions to which they themselves were bound by the colonial government, and one of their actions was to create patni tenures or perpetual leases. [...]

It also meant that the right to collect rent from the tenants, often through the use of force, devolved to the lower layers, making the upper-layer zamindars more of a juridical rather than a real social entity in the eyes of the peasants. The patnidars, finding how much trouble this arrangement took off their own back, created dar-patnis or patnis of the second degree [...]. The dar-patnis created se-patnis or patnis of the third degree. The East India Company, therefore, had to legalize, through Regulation VIII of 1819, the creation of such formations, thus giving a de jure recognition post facto [...].

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The regulation, although innocuous and simple, was of great historical potency: it became the key that unlocked the door to environmental and socio-economic changes of unparalleled magnitude. From a riverine community, within a hundred years, Bengal was transformed into a land-based community. [...]

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The meaning of property also changed as a result of this law: the cultivators began to lose the right to occupy the land that they had enjoyed since ancient times [...].

[T]he Company then began to contemplate the problematic issue of legalizing the fictional entities of chars [...]. The law that was created for this purpose - and still rules the rights of ownership of charlands - is the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Regulation Act (BADA) of 1825. [...] BADA was meant to establish a set of rules to guide the courts to determine the claims to land “gained by alluvion” or accretion, and the resurfaced land previously lost by diluvion or erosion. Even if one takes it for granted that chars are technically non-land in the sense that they exist within river banks, the difficulty remains that when a piece of land is lost to bank erosion, it may not arise in exactly the same location or arise at all within the foreseeable future. This means the owner has no certainty that they will get it back when it resurfaces or when another char rises nearby. [...] Thus, the key to establishing land rights in the court of law remained the payment of rent, even on diluviated land. [...] New accretions in large navigable rivers would be the property of the state [...].

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Folk Goddesses of Bengal

বনবিবি (rom. Bonbibi)

In the sparse region that confines the largest mangrove forest on Earth is the Sundarbans. The delta of the mighty Ganga, Brahmaputra and the sisterly Meghna is the region of co-existence between man and the wild. Bonbibi is the protectress of the forest, the wild, the bees, the birds, and the people. She represents the bounty of the forest, and her foe the tiger king Dakhin Rai, the hazards of the same. Her fierce battle with the evil Dakhin Rai has been inspirations for many. She doesn't differentiate between who pray to her, the hindu, muslim, christian. Just as the forest doesn't differentiate between who it welcomes, or who it discards. The forest, and the rivers form the livelihood for the forest dwellers, who pray to the mistress of bees, tigers and the creatures of the forest before embarking of their daily hunt for bread. However, the goddess has one condition, for she is the mother of all of the forest,

"Take what you require, not more not less. Don't harm the forest, and no harm must come to you."

A simple norm by which those who enter the delta, must abide by. A simple norm, which we all must abide by.