‘Bonbibi’ Could Wait Till Our Boss Decides: Looking at the Changing Face of the Indian Sundarbans

Introduction

The lower deltaic Bengal, known as the Sundarbans, has always been known for its s distinct economic, social and cultural life. Spread across 10,200 km², out of which two-thirds lie in Bangladesh and the remaining one-third in West Bengal, India, it is the largest prograding delta of this world. The Indian part of the Sundarbans, covering a vast area of about 4200 km², consists of around 100 islands, separated by a complicated network of rivers, rivulets, tidal channels, inlets and creeks. Fifty-four of these islands are habited, while the rest are covered by dense impenetrable mangrove forests with a wide variety of flora and fauna, out of which the internationally famed Royal Bengal Tiger needs a special mention.

The majority of the population residing in this region suffers from extreme social and economic deprivation as agriculture, which is the primary occupation of most islanders here, is not a profitable source of income in the region. Fickle weather conditions, increasing soil salinity and frequent changes in the courses of the rivers negatively impact agricultural yields in the Sundarbans making it an inconsistent source of earning. In such a condition, a large number of people in the Sundarbans, especially those living in the fringes of the forested areas, go inside the forest rivers to fish and collect crabs. This occupation, which has been historically associated with a great deal of mortal risk due to the high incidences of human–tiger conflict in the region, however, has slowly started losing its earlier appeal. Partly because of the state’s ‘fortress style’ conservation efforts restricting extractive activities of the locals inside certain ‘core’ areas of the forest and partly due to increasing advancement of technology and communication, a large number of people from the Indian parts of the Sundarbans today migrate to other parts of the country in search of alternate and more viable livelihood options. Such mobility has quite expectedly caused certain changes in this region, which not many decades ago stood almost untouched by urban influences due to its remote geographical positioning.

The Sundarbans today is thus changing as urban ethics enter rural territory, transforming the local ways of life and aspiration in this once virgin isolated land.

Ironically, neither the policymakers nor the academics working in this region pay much heed to such transformations as they prefer to see the region’s culture as one homogenous identity, stuck in an ahistoric time and place.

Based on my extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2019 in a village called Bandhob-pur ³ in the Satjelia Gram Panchayat of Gosaba Block, Sundarbans, this article would critically engage with this tendency of seeing the forest dependent people of the Sundarbans as an ‘exotic’ group of environmental determinists living in sync with nature, and the article would attempt to break the binary between the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in what Appadurai calls it a ‘post-electronic’ world, more so in the context of the deltaic Sundarbans, which has forever found itself stuck in the trap of ‘stagnant primitivisation’. For a change, this article would attempt to bring out the stories from those parts of the Sundarbans, that is in flux.

Into the Lands of Tigers, Crocodiles and Sundari Trees

It was a chilly winter morning in the month of December when I reached Mitra di’s house after a gap of a week. The weather had taken a toll on me and I had decided to take a break from fieldwork. Hence, on a Saturday evening, feeling a bit feverish on my way back from Bandhob-pur, I decided to return home to Kolkata. Taking the last boat from Sukumari Kheya Ghat ⁴ at 7 pm from Satjelia, which is about 45 min away from Bandhob-pur, I crossed the river Gomor in about 15 min, reached Gosaba in another 45 min by taking a paddled van and sharing it with three other fellow passengers, packed my bags from my makeshift house in Gosaba and left for Godkhali bus station. I had to take another ferry crossing the river Bidya. I was in Canning in another hour from Godkhali in a bus, through the rickety roads of Canning-Godkhali highway. From here, trains travel to Sealdah station in Kolkata frequently—one every hour—and soon, I was back home in Kolkata late evening after a hectic day from work.

That is how approachable the lands of the Royal Bengal Tiger and the Sundari trees have become these days from the city of Kolkata, as the periphery of the Kolkata metropolitan area gets extended, and now includes all regions up to Baruipur (only 90 km from Satjelia, Sundarbans). This was, however, not the case a decade ago, as bridges across turbulent rivers like the River Matla and other roads were not developed. Frequent movements of ‘locals’, from and into the Sundarbans, have, thus, become much easier today, even though weather still plays a deciding role in it. Hence, travelling in the monsoons proves to be trickier than the drier months when the ferries end up being infrequent and the roads, which otherwise take 45 min in motorised vans, can take anytime up to an hour and a half depending on the weather conditions.

But this was of course during the winter when the wind was chilly and the sun was shining strong. This was also the time when one would see thousands of tourists thronging near the ferry ghats to explore the wilderness of the mangroves, as several tourist agencies, promising a typical 2 nights and 3 day-packaged cruise into the ‘untraveled virgin’ forests, along with sumptuous meals of fish, crabs and prawns, caught fresh from the rivers, lure the city dwellers. Some such agencies also come up with certain extra innovations as they promise to arrange for a ‘Bonbibi’ jatra ⁵ or a quick trip to a traditional fishing village within the package to give the tourists a flavour of the exotic folk culture that is known to be so quintessential to this land. This is how the Sundarbans continue to be represented even today—as a vast stretch of ‘unknown’ and ‘exotic’ forests that are inhabited by the tigers and the waters by the crocodiles.

However, this picture of the Sundarbans, which is not entirely wrong, does not present an image of it in totality. Even though no one would contradict that eking out a living in the deltas most often does entail fighting with the beasts of the forests and the waters and negotiating with the fickle nature of weather conditions, the constant reification of this particular image also makes the Sundarbans look like a homogenised whole, with its people ‘rooted’ to their ‘native locale’ stuck in an ahistoric time. Such representations, both by the government and academic scholars, therefore, seem to be immensely problematic since they tend to shade the region primarily with one specific hue.

For instance, in a recent Tourism Fair held in Kolkata, the West Bengal government tourism department invited tourists by showcasing the Sundarbans (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: The author.

A fair skinned woman being ‘served’ by a dark-skinned honey collector, wearing a lungi with a typical facemask, once used to apparently fight away tigers within the lush green mangrove creeks!

Unfortunately, many academics, mostly anthropologists who have produced groundbreaking works in this rather underresearched area, have also often engaged in such kinds of exoticisation. This seems to be primarily because of their classical anthropological tendency of understanding culture as a natural property of spatially territorialised people (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 2–3). In this age, however, ‘when groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their own ethnic projects’, cultural differences are increasingly becoming deterritorialised and classical anthropological fieldwork, primarily based on the idea of ‘otherization’ where ‘anthropologists’ go to the ‘field’ in the ‘classical scheme of things’ to understand the ‘native point of view’, is starting to lose its currency (Appadurai 1996: 48). It seems to be this ‘trope of community’ that scholars have often failed to break away from in various degrees while writing their ethnographies on this region (Clifford and Marcus George 1986).

Thus, for instance, Jalais’ ethnography, which almost seems to be an entry point work in the recent history of anthropological endeavour on this region, called the ‘Forest of the Tigers: People, politics and Environment in the Sundarbans’ (2010), uses people–tiger relation to understand social ties in the deltaic Sundarbans. In her words

It is not my intention here to unpack and discuss the different approaches and theories that have been used to understand human/animal relations. Nor do I look at all the relationships people in the Sundarbans have with different kinds of ‘nonhumans’, a group which, for the Sundarbans villagers, is vast and includes crocodiles, snakes and a wide range of spirits and demons. I look at people-tiger relations more as a tool to understand social relations…. (Jalais, 2004: 34)

Even though she talks about the changes as she sees them unfolding around her during her field work, somehow, we never see her questioning the very idea of the ‘Sundarban villagers’, thereby seeming to fall into the trap of what Appadurai’s calls, ‘the spatial incarcerations of the native’ (Gupta, Ferguson 1997: 160).

Amites Mukhopadhyay too does not seem to be an exception here, as he talks about disasters being a part of the ‘everyday life’ of the Sundarban islanders in his book Living with Disasters: Communities and Development in the Indian Sundarbans (2016), thereby missing out the critical question of who the ‘islanders’ really are. His ethnography seems to be yet another account where the boundaries between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ and the ‘we’ and ‘they’ do not get blurred (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).

Ghosh (2018), however, tries to allay this problem of representation to a large extent as he himself seeks to avoid the ‘hyperbolic construction of the subaltern’ in the Sundarbans (Ghosh 2018: 24). He even writes about the changing aspirations of the ‘people of the region’ with the increased rate of mobility out and into the Sundarbans (Ghosh 2018). Ironically, however, as he critiques this very kind of exotic romanticisation of the region, he himself indulges in a similar problematic representation by using extremely value loaded adjectives like ‘indigenous’ and ‘primitive’ several times while describing his travel from Kolkata to his field—in the same Satjelia island where I situate most of my field work as well (Ghosh 2018: 59). Even though I do agree with Ghosh’s larger argument where he tries to show how the government has almost left this area out of its ‘welfare’ schemes, usage of such words once again only increases the problem of exoticisation and representation, which Ghosh himself so strongly critiques!

Today, Satjelia is no longer a quaint little island with ‘primitive’ jetty ghats, as Ghosh describes them to be, and it is this story of a ‘deterritorialized’ Sundarbans where traditional occupations are almost dying out and locals are no more ‘rooted’ to their ‘homes’ but migrate to faraway lands in search of jobs, only to come back from time to time, that I want to narrate.

The Changing Lives of the ‘Islanders’

When I finally reached Bandhob-pur that morning by taking the early morning train from Sealdah, the clock at Mitra di’s home said it was 10 past 11. That was the first thing I noticed when I reached. The wall clock in this house, which was lying nonfunctionally ever since I had first set foot into this village, was working. As I was about to express my astonishment about the clock, Mitra di got busy with a man whom I had never seen before. This man, supposedly a local technician, had come to repair the TV in the house. As he started with his work, looking inside the TV set, Mitra di explained the reason for so much of repair work being carried out in her house. Her niece is coming from the city with her family, ‘and these city people cannot live without TV, you see’, she added.

Ah! I exclaimed to myself. That must be the reason why the clock got new batteries too. ‘When will they be here’? I asked. ‘They just called, they have reached the ferry ghat’, she replied.

The next few days were extremely busy. Mitra di, who stays in her father’s house, is about 50 years old and has remained unmarried looking after the rest of her family throughout her life. She works with ICDS ⁶ and is affectionately called didi by all the villagers, Hindus, Muslims and tribal alike. She lives here with one of her sisters in law (younger brother’s wife), as the other brothers and the rest of their families live in and around Kolkata. Her younger brother’s daughters are married off and have also settled down in the city, and it is the older of the two daughters—Rennee—who had come home.

Rennee, about 30 years old, has one son and one daughter, both studying in school. They were here because of the school winter break, and Rennee’s mother, Mitra di’s sister-in-law, had not seen her grandchildren for a long time. Rennee’s husband would come later. ‘He will not get leave for so many days’, Rennee said when I asked her about him. Later, I gathered that Rennee’s husband works as a security guard in an office located at Salt Lake ‘Sector 5’—the new ‘IT hub’ of Kolkata—as they live in a nearby slum area.

‘I would not have come either’, Rennee added. ‘I have been living in the city, ever since I got married and I no longer feel like coming back to the village these days’, Rennee complained, as she walked over the freshly harvested Aman ⁷ rice grains as a part of the husking rituals.

This is the time when houses in the villages typically get their seasonal visitors from the cities, as migrant families living in faraway lands in various parts of the country come back to ‘their’ villages. Women normally come earlier and their husbands, mostly working as unskilled labourers in the unorganised sectors, join them later. Most labourers, however, prefer to keep their families behind in the villages initially, as they leave for a more uncertain life themselves. They go to distant cities such as Chennai, Kochi, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Port Blair in search of jobs. This mostly happens through a network of acquaintances as many villagers from the same village end up going to the same city. Mostly, young boys, straight out of school, join their elder brothers or relatives working in some city where once they reach, they are absorbed by agencies mostly supplying labourers to construction companies. Such jobs have no security whatsoever, as the labourers live in unliveable conditions and often end up getting a tiny percentage of what they earn as the agencies take a rather large cut of their salaries as ‘commission’. Some stay back struggling like this for their daily livelihood; some take their families along from the villages, if they manage to settle down somehow; while others come back to their villages, unsuccessful, waiting for a better luck next time.

‘Fishing is always a better way of earning a living’—Suresh—Rennee’s husband told me when I got to talk to him the following week. He had managed a short leave from his office and was there to spend time with his family in the village. Suresh, who is from the neighbouring village, married Rennee about 10 years ago. Ever since, he has been living in the city. Earlier, before his marriage, he used to accompany his father on his fishing tours. ‘It gives you much more freedom’, he explained. ‘You do not work for anyone, you do not have to give any percentage to any agency, whatever you earn is all yours’, he went on. ‘There are many in this village who had gone to the city, but had to come back almost empty-handed as the agents took away every penny of their hard earned money’, he added.

‘Then why do you go at all’, I asked.

This was when Suresh spoke about how the state’s ‘fortress conservation’ project has really worked against the traditional fishers and honey collectors of the region (Ghosh 2018: 42).

Historically, fishing in the Sundarbans has largely been a public affair. As W. W. Hunter had observed about the general experiences of fishing in the 1860s, ‘The right to fish in the navigable channels of the Sundarbans is public, and no revenue for it is now collected on behalf of Government’ (Hunter 1875). In spite of the colonial government’s initial attempts to auction and lease off the Sundarban Rivers to private owners, the plan eventually did not succeed till about the Indian Forest Act of 1878, which asserted the colonial state’s claim over the forests of India (Chackravaty 2014). It even gave the state the right to declare any piece of forest on the government’s land as ‘reserved forest’ and restricted the entry of any private persons and communities into it. This, thus, reduced the villagers and forest dwellers to a miserable state, changing their relations with their land forever.

Political sovereignty in 1947, however, did not change the scenario for the better, as The National Forest Policy Resolution of the Government of India (1952) stated that ‘the fundamental concepts underlying the existing policy as enunciated under the colonial policy of 1878 would still hold good’ (Chackravaty 2014). Increasing the complexity of the situation even further, wildlife enthusiasts from the 1960s started raising alarm about the steady decline in the population of the Royal Bengal Tigers in the forests of the Sundarbans. National and international pressure groups started lobbying for the ecological balance of the deltaic landscape, which they felt, would be hampered if the tigers were not protected. This ultimately led the government to mark off a 2585 km² of the Sundarbans as tiger reserve within the original Reserve Forest, including 1600 km² of land and over 985 km² of water area. This region was further divided into a core zone of about 1699 km² and buffer zone of about 885 km² (Ghosh 2015). No killing or removal of wildlife including fishing was to be allowed in the core area, and it could, therefore, only be permitted in the restricted ‘buffer region’ closing off almost 60% of the forested area from local fishing (Chackravaty 2014). Thus, today, fishermen enter the tidal waters of the Sundarbans and restrict themselves only to the allocated buffer region, which they can access only after paying the annual registration fees and getting the Boat License Certificate (BLC) from the Forest Department. However, the Forest Department uses this provision to regulate the number of boats that can enter the area and does not grant access to all boats with BLCs, particularly during the fishing seasons. Such rules have, thus, restricted fishing in the forests to a large extent and in turn have made the lives of fishermen even more difficult. It is a fact that the fishers cannot make their humble ends meet by fishing purely in the buffer region. This becomes evident in the rough estimate provided by Chackravaty (2014) where he shows that taking the rough approximation of the total number of fishers in the Sundarban Tiger Reserve (STR) region, the water area, available per fishermen in the buffer region, would be just a meagre 100 m². In addition, some parts of the fishing-permitted zone are substantially less productive than other areas and some parts are known to be more dangerous because of river piracy; hence, fishers try to avoid these regions (Chackravaty 2014).

Thus, fishing becomes all the more difficult, and most often than not, fishermen find out their own ways to bypass these stringent regulations. Popular stories narrating how fishers of the deltas today have to save themselves from a third eye of the forest guards, apart from the already existent tigers of the land and the crocodiles of the waters, explicitly highlights the way they exercise their ‘agency’ in such a scenario.

It was through Mitra di and Suresh that I gained access to several other households in the village of Bandhob-pur, which once used to be predominantly inhabited by traditional forest workers but not anymore. Nearly 40% of its residents today have given up their traditional occupation and almost all of them have similar tales to tell.

Ratan, Mitra di’s neighbour, used to go for fishing too. His ancestors had been traditional fishers fishing in these forests and his younger brother still continues to go to the forests to collect crabs, but Ratan travels to Port Blair with many other village kinsmen to work as daily wage labourers.

‘What took you to the city?’ I once asked Ratan.

‘Work’, Ratan had replied bluntly.

‘There is no work left here anymore, no work that pays. We do not have our own BLCs, even though we are the traditional fishers. We have to rent BLCs from the Jotdars – the Panchayat representative of this village’, Ratan had claimed.

Intrigued, I asked Suresh only to find out that ever since the BLCs were introduced in the 1980s, it is the same license that has been renewed yearly and no new BLC has been issued ever since. The State Forest department had issued around 923 BLCs in the STR region in the early 1980s ⁸ to traditional fisher folks fishing in the deltas during that time (Ghosh 2015). The ownership of these BLCs can only be reassigned to blood relatives and cannot be claimed by anyone other than legal heirs. This makes them almost a hereditary asset, which today has become one of the most sought-after possessions for those who own one. These days, many such families, who do not fish any more, have started ‘sub-renting out’ their passes to other fishermen who do not have one for a rate as high as ₹25–30 thousand per year. Thus, most fishers who fish these days have to rent BLCs from those who do not fish anymore, increasing the expense that the fishermen have to invest.

‘Yes, it’s true that in fishing whatever profit we make remains with us, we do not have to live with the constant fear of being duped by our agents like we have to now, when we work in cities, but how much profit do we really make’? Samanul complained.

Samanul, a young man of about early 20s, is yet another migrant labourer going to the city from Bandhob-pur. He, however, does not go too far.

‘I usually go to Kolkata and nearby places during the non-fishing seasons that are during April-July. I have been going there for the last three years working as day wage labourer and when the fishing season begins, I come back to join my father and brothers in fishing. We do not own a BLC neither do we own our own boat. So we pay around 30,000 to Nurul in the next village for the BLC and for the boat we pay 8,000 to our uncle, ⁹ Nepal Mondol. They being related to us charge us less. Others with boats rent them out for not less than 10 to 12 thousand rupees per year. And then, not always are you assured to get a good catch. After distributing all the shares, we only get around 40 to 45 thousand per year in our hands. Do you think that is a good enough profit to risk your life for? Wouldn’t the glitters of city life attract one more?’ He commented sarcastically.

Expecting to hear some more about the kinds of risks fishing entails these days, I nudged Samanul a little more.

‘Tigers these days have become more ferocious and we do not know how to save ourselves anymore’, Samanul said.

He explained:

The Forest Department says we harm tigers, but do they know that we consider them to be the Lord of the forests. We do not harm them till they come to harm us. Maa Bonbibi is supposed to look after us and them; we are both Maa Bonbibi’s ‘sontan’. ¹⁰ But these days because of the Forest Department’s intervention our rivalry has increased. Just as the Tigers are getting ‘pampered’ by the foresters ¹¹ and becoming more dangerous; so are we! ¹²

He added:

We too are becoming ferocious you see. The relation that our ancestors had with the land does not exist anymore. We are no more like the original people of ‘Atharo Bhatir desh’ ¹³ like our forefathers used to be.

The Myth of the ‘Exotic’

Conversations with Samanul open up a new strand of argument, which helps us to start questioning the myth of the ‘exotic’ lives that the ‘islanders’ have often been portrayed to live, one where their lives are in complete harmony with the environment because as Samanul pointed out, the very idea of the ‘Sundarban islanders’ does not remain constant. While it is absolutely true that the traditional ecological knowledge of the deltaic people is unquestionably rich, my purpose is to critically look at this massive body of knowledge, which is changing fast and modifying as people slowly move out of traditional occupations and the border between the ‘rural’–‘traditional’ and the ‘urban’–‘modern’ blurs out. Thus, while I do not contest the larger argument put forth by anthropologists like Jalais, who asserts that inhabitants of the Sundarbans are absolute ‘Environmental determinist’ (Jalais 2010: 6), what I, however, do wish to complicate is this very idea of who the inhabitants of the Sundarbans today really are.

Raffles’ (2002) book on the Amazons, talks about similar ‘fault lines’ embedded in most environmentalist narratives, which typically present history, biology, ecology and culture as ‘uncomplicated objects of knowledge and advocacy’ (Heatherington 2010: 43). Raffles describes how in the 1980s and the 1990s, the images of Kayapo Indians and Brazilian rubber tappers became the icon of traditional environmental knowledge. These images were presented in a very positive light by environmentalists who saw them as their ally in saving the rainforests from ecological havocs that were imminent with the large-scale palm oil extraction and felling of trees in the region. These images, however, were based upon ‘reification and essentialism of traditional culture’ that presumed a natural divide between the ‘industrialized, capitalist, ‘Western’ heritage’ and the ‘innocent, isolated, subsistence-oriented indigenous cultures’ (Heatherington 2010; Raffles 2002). Just like the people of the Amazon rainforests who are most often portrayed as a ‘product of their environment’, and their ‘exotic appearance of native dress’ only adds up to this idea of ‘apparent primitiveness’, the image of the Sundarban islanders portrayed by most environmental anthropologists like Jalais and Mukhopadhyay creates a similar divide, somewhat artificial in nature, between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘modern’, almost falling into the trap of the ‘Oriental exoticization’ (Said 1978).

Thus, unlike Jalais (2010), who had conducted her field work almost 15 years ago, I witnessed a marked drop in the importance of the ‘Tiger charmers’ locally known as the bauley during my fieldwork. These bauleys were extremely important individuals in the villages of the Sundarbans and were an absolutely essential part of teams of fishermen or honey collectors traveling into the watery labyrinth of the forests in the yesteryears. They were known to have ‘special abilities to control the moods of tigers’ and also to ‘prevent any mishaps’ while within the forest. They were considered to be the ‘chosen ones’ of Maa Bonbibi, and were believed to be the mediators between the ‘humans’ and ‘non humans’ in the forest. Extremely reverent towards the ‘spirit of the forest’, their vast body of traditional knowledge was the key in promoting cooperation between humans and animals in the deltas. However, Jalais’ argument where she claims that the apparent drop in the number of tiger charmers in the deltas is not because of their dwindling importance but because of their reluctance in acknowledging their profession in public is something I would like to differ from. According to Jalais, ‘To acknowledge that one is a tiger charmer is thus to invite the wrath of nonhumans, as this is seen as arrogance’, and hence, ‘…they do not want to acknowledge they are tiger charmers’ (Jalais 2004: 89) is something in contrary to what my own field experience suggests.

‘Bandhob-pur today seems to have only one surviving professional tiger charmer left, as no one these days really believe in them anymore’, said Samanul. His uncle’s father, ¹⁴ Ahmed Kaka, used to be a very famous bauley in his times. ‘But, aage gele Baaghey khaye, ¹⁵ you know’, he laughs. Ahmed Kaka had died in an accident ¹⁶ in the forest. ‘He could not even save himself’, added Samanul craftily.

I managed to have an extensive interview with Jafor Gaji—the last of the bauleys in the village—during my initial days of fieldwork.

‘There are many who claim to know the forest, but no one knows it better than Jafor Kaka in the neighbourhood’, said Suresh when I had asked him.

‘Why would I let you know our work secret’, he would say, but it required a bit more familiarity and continued interactions to make him talk about the kind of expertise he once had.

‘No one dared to enter the forest without one of us back in the days, because we are the chosen ones of Maa Bonbibi’, Kaka said. ‘She had come to me in my dreams when I was just a boy of your age’.

He explained:

I used to collect wood and go fishing with my father then, but once she came and told me that I should become a bauley, I immediately gave up all that. As a bauley, you need to remember that the forests and the waters are as much yours as much it is of the tigers and the crocodiles and the snakes and the trees. So you should not be greedy, take just as much as you need for your subsistence and leave out the rest.

I asked ‘Why is it that no one really gives importance to the bauleys anymore?’

He lamented:

The kids these days have their own ways you know. They do not stick to the ‘spirit of the forest’. They are greedy, learning from the cities. They want easy money. They want to take as much as they can in one go. They watch the TV, go away to cities, adopt city-ways.

I quizzed ‘Are city-ways bad?’

He replied:

No, but they are different. These days everyone is becoming like them. All they want is to send their children to English medium schools in the cities. No one wants to remain in the village any more. Sundarbans is no more what it used to be. It is not remaining Maa Bonbibi’s desh anymore. Or else, do you think we would be fighting with ourselves about petty issues like Hindu-Musalman?

What he probably meant by this was the rise in communal politics ¹⁷ in the region, which used to be once eulogised as the land of syncretic culture. ¹⁸

Changes that Jafor Kaka spoke of were something that almost all villagers agreed to in certain degrees.

Samanul father, who is an elderly man in his 60s, too seemed to repeat Jafor Kaka’s laments as he also felt that the ‘ethos of the deltas are fast changing’.

He explained:

When people migrate to the cities, they do not come back as the same person anymore. They come back as changed individuals with different aspirations and desires. And do you think the village remains the same either? It changes because the ones, who do not leave, change too. They are only physically here in the village but with the TV and cable they are mentally all in the cities.

I was rather intrigued with this conversation because it brought back memories of my reading Appadurai (1996: 6, 22) where he argues just the same.

Samanul’s father’s claims, however, seemed quite reasonable, for almost all households in this village own a television set with a satellite connection and multiple smart phones with Internet connections these days. Basic needs like free safe drinking water, however, are not available to these very villagers residing in this region. ¹⁹ This obviously takes us to the very idea of development and what it signifies for the people residing and moving out of the Sundarbans today.

What Does the Sundarban Aspire?

Spivak (1988) wrote ‘Does the subaltern just want to adapt? What kind of life does the subaltern aspire…?’

In a ‘post electronic world’ where ‘every day subjectivities transform through electronic mediation and work of imagination’, new sorts of individual attachments and aspirations are generated (Appadurai 1996: 10). Such transformations in a neoliberal world where ‘people almost miraculously feel the need of what is produced and offered in the market’—a market that is no longer out there but steadily enters the everyday lives of ordinary people through their TV sets and smart phones complicates the discourse of development and makes the postcolonial critique of development look a little redundant (Kapoor 2008). Hence, even though works of scholars like Escobar are extremely attractive for their rich analyses of global politics and the making and unmaking of the Third World, somewhere, they fail to understand the aspiration of the ‘global South’ and treat the ‘subaltern’s development world as a romantic idea’. Romanticising the ‘local’, its traditional knowledge and politics without problematising the very idea of what the local might mean, seem a little misplaced, for subalterns today are not ‘homogenous, bounded or generic entities’ (Ghosh 2018).

Thus, when I heard Rennee say that she does not like coming back to her village in spite of the fact that it is here that her family owns land and not in the city where she lives in a rented accommodation in a shanty and works as a domestic help in a nearby housing complex, I could see how local aspirations are indeed changing.

Rennee told me ‘Who would like to live here, once they know what cities are like’? She asked me rather sarcastically ‘You know what city life is, can you live here leaving it for the rest of your life’? She boasted ‘You see the kind of schools here? Do you think children will get jobs after studying here? We send our children to English medium’.

Rennee’s friend Pinki, a tribal by birth, lives in Chennai these days. She had also come back with her husband and her children for the Tusu ²⁰ festival.

‘Tribals like us are the Adi-vaasis of this land’, she told me.

She added

But my husband works in Chennai and so do I. We do miss our village, and hence we come here once in a while. Village life was more peaceful but city life is more attractive. Our parents think it is chaotic there in the cities, but we find the city to be full of new promises.

‘Even Maa Tusu goes to cities these days’, she joked as she hummed the tune of a Tusu song she sang last year along with her female friends.

Tusu, the festival of fertility among the tribals of Bengal, is also extremely popular among the Adivasi community in the Sundarbans. It usually has a deity of Tusu, who is considered to be the daughter of the household, as songs about her are sung by local women narrating the story of her growing up. These songs are mostly improvised by local women and often document the changing face of rural Bengal.

One such song that Pinki had finally agreed to sing to me after a lot of persuasion, since I was not going to be there in the village during the Tusu utsab ²¹ went like this

Pothh chhere de pothh chhere de

Tusu jabe Kolkata

Mayer Tusu boro hobe

Pabe sundor ghor konna

(Make way, make way/Tusu is going to Kolkata/Ma’s Tusu is growing up/She’ll get her own household)

‘Bonbibi Has to Wait till the Bosses Allow’

The winters in the Sundarbans are a season full of festivities, and while Tusu Utsab is primarily a festival of the Adivasi community residing here, the Bonbibi pujo is the primary festival of this time. Bandhobpur has 11 Bonbibi temples, and almost all of them are located along tracks and pathways and not within any homestead as Suresh had explained to me.

‘Bonbibi temples might be built by someone but that doesn’t mean that it is exclusively owned by anyone… Maa Bonbibi is no one’s private property you see, everyone belongs to her in this region’. The worshipping of Bonbibi usually entails little or no extravaganza as all that is required is someone—anyone in fact—to read out the Bonbibi Jahuranama—the booklet that recounts her story. Being a folk deity, purely local in nature, there is no day fixed for her worship either, but it is usually on the first day of the month of Maagh, ²² according to the Bengali calendar, that she is worshipped in the region.

Unfortunately, I could not stay back for the Bonbibi pujo that week. I had to travel back to Kolkata the week preceding the festival for certain emergencies back home only to come back to Bandhob-pur the following week. When I returned, Renee and Suresh had left. Obviously missing the company of her niece, grandnephew and grandniece, Mitra di took me along with her for a walk into the village. She showed me how all the Bonbibi temples had been decorated for the day, as some families enquired why I was absent for the special occasion (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Source: The author.

On the way back to Mitra di’s home, however, I noticed one Bonbibi temple not bearing the usual signs of the annual rites. The temple was not cleaned and had no new idol inside (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Source: The author.

‘Was Bonbibi not worshipped here, Mitra di’, I asked.

‘No’, Mitra di replied.

‘Why not’? I was surprised.

‘Oh, Gopal might not have got leave this year. His family lives with him in Chennai. May be they will come later and get it worshipped. How will Maa Bonbibi be worshipped if the bosses at work do not allow?’ Mitra di chuckled as we walked back to her home where her sister-in-law was waiting for us for lunch.

‘Oh didi, why did you take so long’? She asked.

‘The house feels so lonely with the two kids gone’. She added, as she served the three of us lunch.

‘When will they be back again’, I asked to lighten the mood!

‘When the bosses allow’, Mitra di’s sister-in-law smiled.