Surrounded by Sundarban

In Calcutta, the very mention of the Sundarban, the massive mangrove forest that straddles the India-Bangladesh frontier, ignites immediate conversations about a broad range of wildlife – the Royal Bengal Tiger, crocodiles, rare birds – as well as the ecotourism potential that the area holds. But it hardly ever motivates any discussion, or even mention, of the 4.3 million people that make the Indian side of this deltaic area alone their home. And while international concern spiked last year following the November destruction of roughly 40 percent of the Sundarban within Bangladesh by Cyclone Sidr, much of that outflow of emotion, and money, again went in the direction of the area's famed wildlife. Meanwhile, the traditional economic activities undertaken by the Sundarban's human inhabitants, such as the collection of honey and nipah-tree products, have been banned in Bangladesh this year, out of deference to the ecological damage wrought by the storm.

In the hopes of going beneath the headlines (or lack thereof), this writer recently travelled to an island in the West Bengal Sundarban, to visit a few of the villages there. After travelling by train and auto-rickshaw, we arrived at Raidighi, the headquarters for Mathurapur-II block of South 24 Parganas District. We had lunch at a small hotel, where the server continuously urged us to take more rice, daal and vegetables, all at no extra price. I wondered how long such hospitality would remain in this backwater, as yet untouched by hardcore capitalist logic.

From our lunchtime veranda, the island, locally known as Jater deep (island), was visible across the Moni River. Our eventual destination, the village of Purba Sridharpur, was located on the southeastern corner of Jater Island, home to about 50,000 people. The island is straddled on the west by the Moni and on the east by the Thakuran, both of which flow north to south, intermingling with a host other flows and giving birth to myriad estuarine channels and islands large and small. The ever-changing water levels and salinity also give rise to a complex and unique ecosystem.

From Raidighi, we took a diesel-powered launch out onto the river. The Moni is no more than 250 metres wide at Raidighi, yet it has taken 60 years of independence to bridge it, or even for an electric cable to cross it. Indeed, with the bridge having been inaugurated just days before our arrival, the locals excitedly consider good work to be in progress. As the launch began to move southward, away from the mainland, the water's breeze diluted the power of the delta sun, and the Sundarban landscape started to unfold. The loud, incessant clanging of the diesel engine provided some element of seclusion from the immediate surroundings on the boat, and allowed for an opportunity to absorb the harsh beauty of the place.

I spotted a few women walking along the river in waist-deep water – baskets in hand, the scorching sun overhead. It looked very arduous. These women were catching tiger-prawn larvae, locally known as meen, which would later be sold to farmers who grew prawn for commercial purposes. Catching meen has provided livelihood to landless communities in this part of the Sundarban for years, although doing so has become increasingly difficult. Since the Bay of Bengal was opened, during the mid-1990s, to hi-tech mechanised fishing trawlers from Thailand, the stocks of both fish and tiger prawn have been progressively depleted. Indeed, some claim that the catches of local fisherfolk have gone down by up to 70 percent over the past years. While prawn and shrimp are being hauled from the oceans and farmed in the coasts in increasing numbers to satisfy the appetites of the West – and that is exactly where nearly all of this type of seafood inevitably gets consumed – thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on low-impact hand-fishing are being pushed to the edges of starvation.

About half of the 100-odd islands in the Indian part of the Sundarban are still habitable, but are being gradually inundated by rising sea levels and the simultaneous destruction of the mangroves, which makes the sea more malevolent. The inhabited islands were marked by breaks in the continuous bands of goran and gewa trees, where the locals had formed ghats for boat launches. As the breeze came up, it exposed the underbelly of the leaves, giving the forests an eerie whitish hue. Down below, the low tide had exposed large stretches of shiny, blackish clay banks. The numerous mangrove roots lining some of the islands seemed like the limbs of a millipede – frozen in time, as though they had been running along when the water that had suddenly abandoned them.

After travelling a few more hours southwards on the Moni, there was a brief, expansive view of the Bay of Bengal – the destination of all of the water brought down by the Ganga and Bramhaputra from the glacial heights of the Himalaya, far away. Here the launch started going north on the Thakuran River, and after another hour or so, it docked at the Purba Sridharpur ghat. Off the boat, we had to walk for another hundred feet in knee-deep mud before finally reaching dry land.

Purba Sridharpur
The currents in the rivers in this area reverse their flow twice every day, in accordance with the tides. Helped by the in-flowing low tide, we had reached Purba Sridharpur in just three hours. I cannot deny my urge to romanticise my first full view of the island. At the ghat below the village, the non-native eucalyptus trees were swaying in a gentle breeze, and a pathway led away from the river flanked by neat mud houses, their thatched roofs brightened by the afternoon sun. Off in the distance were parrot-green fledgling paddy fields.

Although the walk away from the river was pleasant – seemingly therapeutic even for someone just arriving from the noise of Calcutta – it was clear that the monsoon would eventually make these kuccha roads very difficult to traverse. There was also a conspicuous white crust on many parts of the ground near the river, which hinted at greater complications. The habitable islands in the Sundarban are surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres of earthen embankments. While these have long allowed the local communities to live in this estuarine environment, breaches in these walls inevitably let in saline water during times of flood or unusual high tide. No matter how hard the people work to repair these holes, this subsequently renders the land unfit for either cultivation or fish farming for years to come. These omnipresent white crusts are layers of salt left on the land after the water had receded, and constant reminders to the people who live here of what can happen if the embankments are not kept in good shape.

Farther up the road was a concrete structure, open on all sides. On the other side of the road, up in the distance, a pile of burnt wood was also visible. This was the village crematorium. As in life, even in death the ecological footprint of the people on Jater Deep is impressively small and benign. As happens time and again around the world, however, the livelihoods of these people are being directly threatened by environmental degradation, imposed on them by peoples and processes far away. The ongoing, and increasing, commodification of natural resources here in the Sundarban is resulting in a dramatic loss of control, often over resources at the local level. Nowadays, for instance, the villagers of Purba Sridharpur are barred from gathering firewood from the forests on the neighbouring islands to burn in the local brick kiln. Instead, the clay bricks are left in an adjacent field, to bake in the sun, making them significantly less durable. This is not only detrimental for those on Jater who build with these bricks, but also makes them un-sellable elsewhere.

Later in the evening, we went to the local haat market. A few years ago, the land for the haat had been donated by a local teacher, with the intention of strengthening the local economy. (A unique phenomenon in parts of rural Bengal is that a teacher's salary in the rural areas does not differ significantly from that of a teacher in an urban area; hence, teachers can often be significant landowners.) But the veracity of this hope seemed to have floundered some time ago. A quick walk around the stalls in the haat revealed a few shops selling locally grown vegetables, potatoes and small fish. But all of the other commodities being sold – batteries, clothes, utensils – were clearly produced far away from Purba Sridharpur. In discussions with local teachers, I later found out that the village had long ago ceased to be a source of production for anything other than foodgrains and vegetables. Instead, like so many similar villages, it had slowly become just another market for manufactured goods, and a fountainhead of cheap labour to be employed far away.

Nonetheless, some things had yet to change in Purba Sridharpur. On the way back from the market we stopped by a home and enjoyed a uniquely resilient form of Bengali hospitality – where the elders touch your chin and address you as a son or daughter, before offering whatever they have in their home. On this evening, this included black tea and excellent muri, puffed rice.

Those who stay and go
Early the next morning, I boarded a motorised rickshaw van, known locally as a 'motor van', which runs on diesel and has a simple yet effective clutching mechanism. The villages on this island were relatively far-flung, and would have been difficult to move between in a single day without Jabbar, the 18-year-old driver, deftly manoeuvring the van through the island's narrow brick roads. Moving quickly like this also allowed for a somewhat broader understanding of the crops that are regularly grown on Jater, and in this area in general. Besides the tender young paddy, we came across small fields of daal, cotton and a variety of vegetables. Coming from the concrete of Calcutta, the joyful view of vast sunflower fields was a particular treat, though the increasing importance of cash crops such as these was also particularly obvious.

Such a reprioritisation in terms of agricultural practice had clearly had another impact as well. I met several groups of people who were well conversant in the long-term detrimental effects of the persistent use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. It meant, they said, decreasing soil fertility and increasing input costs. In their opinion, what was needed on Jater was training and information on how to engage in the practices of organic agriculture, particularly soil testing, crop rotation and the techniques of IPM (integrated pest management) to reduce dependency of chemicals. And yet, these heartfelt opinions notwithstanding, farmers spraying pesticide on paddy remained one of the more ubiquitous sights in the villages of Jater Deep.

Agriculture in this part of Bengal is mainly rain-fed. Groundwater available at shallow depths is mostly saline, due to the area's proximity to the Bay of Bengal. But although it varies across the island, water at a depth of 50 feet can generally be used for agricultural purposes. When I tasted some water from a 50-ft tube well, however, there was a hint of salinity in it, and there were widespread accounts of wells being sunk that had to be quickly sealed off due to the limited availability of fresh water in that locality. As such, besides the cost factor, the simple lack of predictability of the water table has kept shallow tube wells from becoming a popular mode of irrigation on the island.

Meanwhile, the number of people willing to continue working the land is dropping precipitously. In some villages, almost every able-bodied man was a seasonal migrant. Giri Para was one such village, from where the menfolk generally spend nine months every year stacking potatoes in cold storage houses across in Bardhaman District, or working as construction labourers throughout West Bengal. There is an elaborate network of sardars, or recruiters, who act as intermediaries between points of production and sources of cheap labour, such as Jater Deep. These sardars often promise to be a conduit of communication between the migrants and their families back home – a promise that is rarely, if ever, kept. Of course, these are age-old mechanisms of seeking cheap labour, which have been prevalent since early colonial times. Many of the men who had come back to the island for a month said that, after paying for travel and living expenses, they were generally left with only eight or nine thousand rupees for a year of work. Many more are quasi-permanent migrants, who pull rickshaws and carts in Calcutta and its suburbs, having largely given up hope of returning home in the foreseeable future.

The men are not the only ones who migrate. Middle- and upper-middle-class homes in southern Calcutta are almost exclusively served by housemaids from the district of South 24 Parganas. This domestic workforce has been completely feminised over the last couple of decades. There are the theeke women, who commute to urban houses and return home at night; then there are the khawa-porar meye, who stay in the homes of their employers for a salary, food and boarding. Early every morning, the commuter trains from South 24 Parganas bring contingents of these women into Calcutta. Once on board, these women – mothers, sisters, friends, wives, daughters – have but a singular identity: a jhee, or housemaid.

Although the villages on Jater Deep are too far away for the women to commute, the young daughters still end up as long-term maids in urban homes. Not only is this a major source of income – for many families, it is the only source of income. This has had a significant impact on the gender dynamics in the villages here, where it is often the women who most forcefully articulate their thoughts on issues, and offer solutions in a calm, clear, straightforward and unhesitating manner. During my time on Jater, I began to think of these women as something of an embodiment of resilience in their communities, strengthening the rest of the village's ability to cope with adversity. I particularly remember one middle-aged woman in the village of Samanta Para, who touched my chin and asked me to come back to visit. On being asked whether I could eat at her home if I were to return, she said that they were poor but that they had their dignity and their labour – and that she would certainly feed me to my fill.

~ Somnath Mukherji is a freelance writer on Southasian development and culture.