Under a Tidal Spell

Anyone who wants man to be master of his destiny should pay this archipelago a visit

WELCOME TO the weirdest place in the world. Tigers swim, drink saline water and climb trees. It’s the site of a social experiment that gave inspiration to Rabindranath Tagore as well as Mahatma Gandhi. This is where an eccentric Scotsman called Sir Daniel Hamilton carved out his own little nation-state, welcoming all and sundry to come settle, so long as they gave up all religious rituals. That was a hundred years ago. Today, Muslims here venerate idols, grown-ups gamely get gobbled up by big cats, and branches of mangrove trees serve as pillows. This is a place like none other, a place where rising water is the one great reality around which everything revolves.

Welcome to the Sundarbans. An archipelago located at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, formed by delta silt deposited by the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers, it is intersected by hundreds of small rivers, rivulets, canals and streams that change character so dramatically every six hours that it boggles the mind. Even Google Earth seems at sea. Zoom in via this Internet device and all you see is a vast watery expanse. A diurnal tidal cycle means that humans and animals who otherwise seem gleefully grounded must periodically flee to higher land or clamber up trees as part of their daily routine.

That, however, is just one curiosity among many. Public memory may be short, but if Gandhi’s rural cooperatives for a casteless society and Tagore’s rural revival project in Santiniketan found fertile ground (if you can call it ‘ground’) in the Subcontinent’s east, it was thanks in large part to the whimsical ideals of Sir Hamilton. As the Calcutta-based head of MacKinnon & McKenzie, one of British India’s largest mercantile firms, Sir Hamilton had amassed a fortune large enough by the turn of the 19th century to buy 10,000 acres of land in the Sunderbans in 1903, and do jolly well as he fancied.

Carbon emissions were far fewer, and the territory was a lot less watery in those days. To create Hamilton Estate, the Scotsman needed labour to clear the vegetation. So he invited immigrants. The only pre-condition was that they would have to leave behind their caste and creed, and consider everyone else an equal. The poor came from places as far away as Madhya Pradesh. Some 9,000 families, both Hindu and Muslim, turned up to form a classless society marked by communal amity seen till this very day. It was ahead of its time in local self-governance as well. All disputes were resolved by elected village councils, or panchayats, vested with judicial power.

This was also the site of India’s first cooperatives, forged by farmers, traders and moneylenders. Eventually, the estate grew to 22,000 acres, and some 19 villages sprung up.

Hamilton Estate had its own central bank and currency, the Gosaba, named after its first settlement. The local school, called the Rural Reconstruction Institution, offered formal education as well as training in alternative farming techniques. Intellectuals everywhere were intrigued, and more. Tagore visited the estate in December 1932 to study the movement and replicate it in Santiniketan. Gandhi sent his secretary Mahadev Desai to learn about cooperatives.

The utopian vision of Sir Hamilton is still being pursued by a trust that now runs various dispensaries, schools and livelihood-support programmes for people of the Sunderbans. But that is hardly the story.

“In our legends it is said that the Goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared lock. To hear this story is to see the river… as a heavenly braid…there is a point at which the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.” —The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

As in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, it is at this point that Man is no longer Master of his Destiny. That honour belongs to Nature. Or, as it often seems, the Royal Bengal Tiger. But then again, this is no ordinary place. It is a place where the nominal dissolves into the phenomenal all too easily. The lives of the five million-odd people who inhabit 54 of the 100 islands that form the Indian part of the Sunderbans are at the mercy of the tide as much as the fearsome tiger that devours or maims scores every year. And the tiger, long adapted to clawing up tree trunks, looks ever less majestic by the year, as the sea—ever warmer, ever rising—threatens to close in.

For all the grand efforts made by Sir Hamilton in his day, those who live here are devout folk. The Sundarbans’ Muslims, for example, are devotees of Bono Bibi, a ‘forest queen’ goddess. Their rituals resemble those traditionally offered to a Hindu deity. Local Hindus and tribals habitually join in to recite a Muslim prayer from a booklet that starts with ‘Bismillah’ and reads from right to left (a la Arabic or Urdu text).

If that’s not odd enough, there’s this inexplicable attitude towards predators. There’s no family here that hasn’t lost a loved one to them, but people bear them no hatred. In fact, the tiger is worshipped in the form of Dakshin Ray (with Bon Bibi). The lives taken by the animal are seen as its rightful due; survivors of attacks often consider themselves honoured. Let alone look the tiger in the eye, people don’t even take its name, referring to it instead as boro thakur (head of the family).

Almost in acknowledgement of their status, all the Sundarbans’ tigers are man-eaters, unlike elsewhere. There is no escaping them, given that they can swim across rivers as wide as 8 km, and seem aware of anything that moves, human or otherwise. Tiger expert Sy Montgomery, in her book Spell of the Tiger, notes that it is only in the Sunderbans that a tiger keeps fishermen on boats under vigil from behind the cover of mangrove forests, waiting to pounce.

Few survive to tell the tale. Among the few is Rupa Sardar, 40, a resident of Katamari village. “There were three of us in a boat putting out nets,” he recounts, “We were about 20 metres from the shore. All of a sudden, a tiger emerged from the water, reared itself on to the boat and headed straight for me.” His nylon net saved him, but not before the tiger swiped him with its powerful paws. Sardar spent three months in hospital, is blind in his right eye, and suffers excruciating pain even now. He is too scared to go fishing any more. Dhiren Sardar of Satjhelia wasn’t so lucky. Out fishing with his wife, son and daughter two months ago, he was taken away by a tiger. “We have just a little over a bigha of farmland and survive now by cultivating it and working on others’ farms. I won’t allow my son to go fishing again,” says Rajubala, Dhiren’s widow.

Some survivors bravely carry on fishing. “They have no choice. Agriculture is no longer a lucrative option. The rainwater can support only one crop and deep tube wells have started spouting saline water. More than 80 per cent of the people are landless. So they have to venture out to earn,” explains Tushar Kanjilal, who runs a prominent NGO here. In 2002, to keep the tigers to forest areas, the Sunderbans Tiger Project authorities started erecting a 7-ft high net fence made of nylon ropes in some critical places. “But that stopped the tigers only for a few years,” says Pradip Vyas, Chief Conservator of Forests who was the Field Director of the Sunderbans Tiger Project from 2001 to 2007. Tiger strayings are on the rise. Over the past four months alone, 15 incursions into inhabited islands have been recorded. One, incidentally, was seen loitering last November just outside the boundary wall of the small lodge we were staying in at Pakhiralay. “This is quite usual,” says Shankar Dutta, the forest department’s beat officer at Sajnekhali.

Adds Kanti Ganguly, West Bengal’s Sunderbans affairs minister: “The people of Sunderbans cannot afford to lock themselves in their homes out of fear of the tiger. They coexist with the animal and understand the need to protect it. The tiger ultimately protects the forest, and without the mangrove forests the Sunderbans will go under the sea. The forests reduce the ferocity of the winds and waves and thus protect not only the Sunderbans, but also the mainland.”

The tides also hold the vast sprawl of islands in their spell. The twice-in-24 hour cycles of high tide and ebb, advancing about 50 minutes every day, dictate daily routines. Streams that can be crossed on foot during ebb become wide rivers with powerful currents during high tides. In six hours from ebb to high tide, the landscape undergoes a complete transformation. Once the waters recede, they leave behind banks of lacquered silt. People rush to hunt for food. The womenfolk get into waist-deep water to trawl their nets for prawn seedlings. The menfolk start drawing their nets for an ever decreasing haul of small sea fish. And kids sink knee-deep into the soft silt to retrieve sea shells and bits of wood. Unsuspecting boaters, meanwhile, get stuck in sandbars.

As the tide rises again, people retreat to islands ringed by mud embankments, without which the Sundarbans would have vanished into the sea a long time ago. During high tide, all the islands go below sea level. On average, it’s a difference of 20 feet or so. “But these embankments, many as old as 150 years, aren’t scientifically constructed and often get breached,” says Kanjilal. Seawater floods render farmland fallow for six-seven years at a time, which is a major problem. To compound it all, the Sundarbans are part of an active delta, so the rivers don’t just deposit silt and form new islands, they erode existing ones as well. “The only constant here is change,” he adds. If the waters rise still higher, people must seek the safety of tree branches, alongside deer, boars, wild pigs, and less hospitably, occasional tigers.

Experts say that human interference in the islands before the completion of siltation is partly to blame for the Sunderbans’ instability. “Humans destroyed the forests on the islands, constructed embankments and started inhabiting and cultivating the islands. This interfered with the natural process of island formation through deposition of silt. The price is being paid for that now,” says oceanographer DB Pandit.

“The issue of climate refugees—people displaced due to erosion of their islands—is a serious one that needs to be addressed at once,” says Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment. There’s population pressure too. Agriculture has slumped, as have other means of employment. This has put pressure on forests from fishermen, poachers and wood and honey collectors, warns Rajarshi Banerjee, a visiting researcher with Jadavpur University’s Global Change Programme.

Sustenance is difficult. Sailing down the Gumti River, we stopped by a dingy where Khukumoni and her husband Monoranjan Mondal had been casting nets for hours in the futile hope of selling their haul for Rs 20. “All we got was about 20 seedlings; that won’t fetch us anything. From tomorrow, we won’t do this…better to go to the city and work as labourers,” Monoranjan tells us.

“The level of poverty in the Sunderbans is acute, but not very visible because of the lack of accompanying signs like starvation. That’s because catching fish and growing some vegetables is easy. But beyond that, there’s nothing much,” explains economist Indrila Guha, who has authored a book on the plight of the islanders.

There’s also this huge disconnect with the mainland. “Mainlanders won’t understand the plight of the islanders. Imagine taking a boat through shark and crocodile-infested waters, sailing by the side of forests populated by man-eaters and then (in case of ebb) taking off your footwear, rolling up your trousers and trudging through soft silt, sinking knee-deep into it, to reach another island. This is everyday travel for us,” says Jogeshwar Das, the CPM legislator from Patharpratima, a large island.

It took us more than an hour to sail from Pakhiralay in Gosaba island to Jamespur in Satjelia, a distance of some 15 km, during high tide one day. The next day, it took us an hour and a half to traverse the same distance—it was ebb then, and since the boat couldn’t dock at the jetty, we had to make our way through what’s more like sludge, braving pneumatophores (roots of mangrove trees that grow upwards) that can pierce through one’s feet, to get to Jamespur. The islanders do this every day.

Power lines don’t reach the islands; some islands have generators, but supply is for just a few hours every evening. Government healthcare facilities are virtually non-existent, and educational institutions few and far between. Thus, one would have expected the islanders to be an angry lot. Far from it—they’re resigned, accepting their lot as ordained by forces beyond their control. They smile easily and are hospitable to a fault.

Usha Mondal of Annpur village lost her husband to a crocodile a few months ago and has two minor sons to raise. Asit Mondal of Santigachi, maimed by a tiger, has to depend on the labour of his 13-year-old son. But their poverty didn’t stop them from inviting us to lunch.

Girindra Nath Mridha, our guide and owner of the motorised boat we hired, sums up the philosophy: “We share whatever little we have with everyone. Nature here is not bountiful and this tempers our needs. We’ve learnt to accept adversities, setbacks and losses stoically.”

The man in the Sunderbans realises he’s not Master of his Destiny. The weirdest place on earth? In everything, perhaps, other than this.

About The Author

Jaideep Mazumdar