Leaving Home,Coming Home: The Uncertain Lives of the Sundarban Migrants During the Global Pandemic

Introduction

The year 2020 has been particularly tumultuous for people like Rabeya Mondol, of Bandhob-pur ³ village in Satjelia island of the Sundarbans. And their losses almost have a similar poetic touch of sarcasm in them.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown imposed thereafter had ushered a future marked with complete uncertainty for people like her, migrating out of the Sundarbans in search of jobs. With city-based work drying up, most of the country’s migrant labourers from one of the world’s largest informal economy started making their ways back home.

With meagre means, some arranged for their own transportations, packed themselves up like herds, not being able to maintain the ‘social distancing norms’, while others ended up walking along the national highways and railway tracks for days and nights only with a desire to end up in their respective homelands. Some managed, some failed: dying midway without food and water.

Migrants from the Sundarbans however had no respite even after taking their home-ward journeys. Two months into the most stringent lockdown, the cyclone Amphan ravaged the region in May 2020, leaving many of these labourers homeless as no kutcha houses could withstand the fierce cyclonic storm. Returning home therefore ensured little security for these people living in the Indian Sundarban Deltas.

The Sundarbans, across the political borders of Bangladesh and India are the largest mangrove forests in the world spread over 10,200 sq. kilometres. The region has been identified as a UNESCO World heritage site for its unique ecosystem and for being the natural habitat of a vast number of exotic species of flora and fauna, many of which are considered endangered or almost extinct—the resident Royal Bengal Tiger being one of the central attractions.

Besides the ‘natural’ and the ‘wild’, the deltaic floodplains in India is also a home to nearly 4.5 million people who have been at the receiving end of extreme socio-economic marginalization historically. The effect of the pandemic and the consequent lockdown had thus been particularly cruel for the already economically vulnerable people of the Sundarbans and more so for the migrant labourers from this region working in various parts of the country.

Of Homes and Identities

Ever since the cyclone Aila in May 2009, the rate of outmigration from the Sundarbans had been particularly high and the village of Bandhob-pur was no exception. With brackish waters flooding the agricultural fields in the summers of that fateful year, many in the Sundarban villages had to migrate to far away cities, mostly in the informal labour sector, in search of alternate livelihood to make their ends meet.

Rabeya, whom I had met while conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in the village during the winters of 2017 was one such migrant labourer. At the time of my first meeting with her, she had just lost her fisherman husband in a tiger ‘accident’. ⁴

Rabeya had informed me about how she was trying to find a job in the city for there was no job left in the villages after Aila.

A few months later Rabeya left for Delhi. I did not meet her for the entire duration of my fieldwork thereafter. I had a chance encounter with her in February 2019, when I was wrapping up my own work; Rabeya was back for a few days taking leave from her job.

She seemed happy with her work in Delhi. She mentioned how she was introduced to her employers as ‘Lakshmi’ because Hindu employers had reservation employing Muslim domestic workers in the capital. She showed no qualms regarding the same, however, and appeared contended with the perks of her new employment.

I used to telephone her once in a while since then, and she seemed mostly satisfied with her work.

This year however had been rather unkind to her—beginning with the protests across the country against National Register of Citizenship ⁵ (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act ⁶ (CAA), and followed by one of the worst riots that Delhi had witnessed in decades. Even before the people could come to terms with any of this, the unforeseen effects of the global pandemic gave Indians a jolt as they witnessed one of the harshest state-imposed lockdowns in the world.

So when I called Rabeya a July morning amidst the pandemic mayhem and the lockdown induced chaos, she informed me that she was back in the village with no work and an absolute uncertain future.

Rabeya had returned home in early March right after the Delhi riots to get her ‘papers ⁷ ’ corrected. ‘My papers are all fine, but my husband’s name was printed wrongly in his death certificate’, she said.

This, she was cautioned, could mean ‘trouble’ for her children and soon after the riots in Delhi her relatives started urging her to take up the matter urgently.

So Rabeya decided to come back to her village to sort her documents. She could however not let her workplace know the real reason for her sudden decision to visit home so took a leave of 10 days citing some family emergency.

But of course such work needed multiple visits to various government offices and Rabeya invariably had to overstay her leave. ‘My employers called me a few times, but I couldn’t tell them how long it would take. So I made new excuses each time.’

This was already end of March, and the next thing they knew was a complete lockdown.

Rabeya acknowledged that the family was ‘kind enough’ to continue paying her monthly salary initially.

Rabeya said taking a heavy breath:

They’d call me sometimes, ask me about my situation. But then Amphan hit. For weeks our phone didn’t work. When the network was back, I called them. Madam was furious and said that she would fire me. I tried to explain how bad the storm was, but she didn’t believe me. I lost my job. It feels like waves of misfortunes, this year.

The Pandemic, Lockdown and Amphan

Thankfully the effects of Amphan were not as bad in Bandhob-pur village as in many other villages across the Indian Sundarban Deltas where river water entered agricultural fields through large stretches of breaches in the embankments, sealing the fate of thousands of villagers who had resumed growing crops since the salinity of the soil was finally reducing after 11 entire years following the cyclone Aila. Like Rabeya, most of these villagers with no other options remaining have now turned towards the forest as their refuge.

‘The forests are our last resort, when all other doors are closed’ said Samirul. Samirul too is a fisherman turned migrant labourer. After surviving a near fatal encounter with a tiger, for which he was forever indebted to ‘Maa Bonbibi’s grace’, Samirul decided to join the fellow villagers, working as daily wage worker at a construction site in Chennai. His family continued to live in the village.

‘After the lockdown begun, we were told that work would stop temporarily. Initially we decided to stay back. But within a few weeks, it was getting difficult’, Samirul narrated. Within a month Samirul and other villagers invested, in a bid to return home, ₹7,500 per person to rent a bus that carried them from Chennai to Kolkata.

Initially, they were instructed by their local village panchayat representative to not leave their homes, for 7 days. ‘But in our small little houses can isolation be maintained at all?’ Samirul said.

Samirul said:

When we returned, there was such chaos. No one knew what was expected of us. Some said to maintain strict distance from the children of our families. Some said not to eat with them. And then, how long can you remain at home without thinking of some alternate livelihood option.

Even before Samirul and others could cope with the confusion, cyclone Amphan hit their village within two weeks of their return adding more to their woes.

With no other income alternative, Samirul soon joined other villagers for crab collection in the forest, but without a ‘seasonal fishing pass’ with them. These passes are given to fishers of the Sundarbans for nine months and in case they are caught by the forest guards without a pass, hefty fines are levied upon them. The fishers thus try to save themselves from the surveilling eyes by entering the narrowest creeks where they end up being ‘tiger-fodder’.

Cornered to Being ‘Tiger-Fodder’

This year, such accidents have been occurring at an ever-increased rate, said Umasankar Mondol of Chargheri village in Lahiripur Gram Panchayat. Unlike Bandhob-pur, which was saved from the ferocity of the cyclone due to the sudden change in wind directions, Chargheri was not so fortunate. Umashankar has been travelling extensively across Satjelia in his personal initiative trying to help people in dire need. According to Umasankar, the effect of the lockdown coupled with the cyclone has pushed the people of the Sundarbans to a point where they now have to choose between extreme destitution or accept a fate where they can become ‘tiger-fodders’ at any moment. The lockdown meant no city-based work to migrate to; thus most erstwhile fishers-turned-migrants have started going back to the forests to fish after returning home. Some agriculturalists too, with no other options left are entering the watery labyrinth to try their luck in fishing and crab collection. ‘Since there is not much disturbance due to tourism in the Sundarbans currently, the tigers are also coming out more, and with the increase in number of fishers venturing inside the forests, they are probably finding an easy prey in men’, said Umashankar.

According to reports, 19 fatal tiger ‘accidents’ have already happened in the Sundarbans since the lockdown begun till September, the highest numbers recorded in the last few years. ⁸

Homes: Lost and Found

Rabeya has started catching tiger prawn seeds while her son has joined his uncles in their fishing trips to survive. ‘A fisher’s son cannot afford to have fear in his blood.’ Rabeya heaved a sigh.

As the tin roof of her unfinished pucca house, that she was building with the money from the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, blew away in the cyclone, Rabeya now awaits the trains to restart as she wishes to go back to Delhi.

‘I don’t know what work I’ll get in Delhi after I return, but this time I’ll take my children with me’, she said. I was intrigued and could not stop asking her about such a decision. Trying to understand what makes one feel the need to leave the security that homes provide, I asked her whether it would be wise to take her children into the uncertainties that await her in Delhi. She paused for a while and, with an exclamatory sound that sounded like a dry smile, said, ‘But where is home, for the forever homeless like us? If not today, we will be made to leave tomorrow anyway. Why not start the journey with them, right away!’

Bandhob-pur is ‘home’ for her, where she is accepted for being whoever she is, but as Relph (1976, 42) had suggested, ‘isn’t our experience of place and especially of home a dialectic one—balancing a need to stay with a desire to escape… .’