इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Sundarbans · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
The Sundarbans has almost no political history of its own, and that absence is the finding. No capital was ever built inside the mangrove, and the forest edge has moved with the rivers rather than with any dynasty, so the region's periods are set by clearance and by water. Its medieval period is anchored not to a court but to a fifteenth-century clearance on the northern rim around Khalifatabad. Its modern period begins in 1784, when a Company magistrate at Jessore turned jungle-clearing into a revenue scheme, and not in 1757 or 1857; every embanked island in the northern belt dates from the century and a half that followed. The one line that still governs the region administratively was drawn by two surveyors between 1829 and 1832.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
The delta was being built and rebuilt throughout this period, and settlement in it was episodic rather than continuous, because a channel that silted took its villages with it. What survives is found at the landward edge, where the ground is older and higher, and in a handful of brick ruins inside the tidal belt that show the forest was cleared and abandoned more than once. Nothing in the record places a court inside the mangrove itself.
| कब | क्या हुआ |
|---|---|
| c. 3rd century BCE – 3rd century CE | Chandraketugarh, at the delta's northern landward edge near Berachampa, functions as an early historic urban and trading site; its terracottas and seals are the best evidence of long-distance trade at the Ganga's mouths. |
| c. 1st century BCE – 1st century CE | Greek and Roman geographical writing names a Gangaridai people at the mouths of the Ganga. No single site has been securely identified with the name. |
| c. 10th–12th century | Jatar Deul, a tall brick temple near the Moni river in the present Mathurapur country, is built inside the tidal belt. A copper plate reported from nearby gave the year 975 CE and the name Jayantachandra, but the plate is untraceable and the dating is disputed. |
| c. 8th–12th century | The delta's landward margin lies within Pala and then Sena Bengal, but no capital, mint or major inscription is recorded from inside the forest. |
| from c. 12th century | The main discharge of the Ganga begins a long eastward shift; the western channels become moribund, the active delta migrates, and the forest and its people move with the fresh water. |
Under the Bengal Sultanate the northern rim of the forest was cleared deliberately for the first time, as a grant of jungle to be turned into rice land, tanks and settlement. That model — a grantee given forest and expected to produce revenue from it — is the one the Company later copied almost exactly. The delta was then absorbed into the Mughal subah of Bengal after the campaigns against the Baro-Bhuiyan zamindars, and for most of the seventeenth century its seaward islands were exposed to raiding from the east, which emptied stretches of the tidal country. Underneath all of it ran the one continuous industry the mangrove supported without clearance: salt, boiled from tidal brine by molunghee households in the creeks.
| कब | क्या हुआ |
|---|---|
| c. 1440s–1459 | Khan Jahan Ali, holding a forest tract on the northern rim as a grant, clears and settles the Khalifatabad country around present Bagerhat, excavating very large tanks and building the Sixty Dome Mosque; he died on 25 October 1459. |
| 1611–1612 | Islam Khan Chishti, subahdar of Bengal, campaigns against Pratapaditya of Jessore; after a river action at Salka the fort is taken in January 1612 and Pratapaditya is sent to the imperial court. The deltaic zamindaris pass into the Bengal subah. |
| 17th century | Seaborne raiding from Arakan, with Portuguese freebooters operating alongside it, depopulates stretches of the eastern and seaward delta. |
| 1666 | Mughal forces under Shaista Khan take Chittagong, removing the base from which the raiding had been mounted. |
| 17th–18th century | Salt boiled by molunghee households along the tidal creeks becomes the delta's principal revenue industry, worked under advances rather than wages. |
The modern Sundarbans is an administrative product. From 1784 the Company offered forest to anyone who would clear it, on revenue-free terms for the first years, and the northern islands were cut, embanked and settled by families brought in from Khulna, Jessore, Barisal and Faridpur. Two things followed. The first is the polder: every field in the reclaimed belt exists because an earth wall is holding the tide out of it, and a breach turns paddy land saline for years. The second is a hard administrative edge — the surveyed northern line of 1829–32, and from the 1870s the constitution of the uncleared forest as reserved forest, which turned honey-cutting, crab-collecting and fishing into licensed activities. Cyclone and surge punctuate the whole period and repeatedly undo it.
| कब | क्या हुआ |
|---|---|
| 4 April 1784 | Tilman Henckell, Judge and Magistrate at Jessore, submits a reclamation scheme granting forest to settlers on rising revenue terms; by 1787 he reports about 21,000 bighas under cultivation. |
| 1829–1832 | William Dampier, Commissioner of the Sundarbans, and Lieutenant Hodges survey the forest's northern limit. The Dampier–Hodges line they drew still defines the region's administrative edge. |
| 1862–1867 | Port Canning is opened on the Matla river as a deep-water alternative to Calcutta, against warnings from the cyclone investigator Henry Piddington that the site was exposed to storm surge. A cyclone and surge wrecked it in 1867 and the scheme was abandoned. |
| 31 October 1876 | The Backerganj cyclone drives a surge across the eastern delta, causing very heavy loss of life there and in the disease that followed. |
| from 1875 | Blocks of uncleared mangrove are constituted as reserved forest; honey, wax, fish, crab and timber become licensed extractions rather than open access. |
| from 1903 | Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton takes a lease over Gosaba, Rangabelia and Satjelia, clears and embanks them, and runs the estate on co-operative lines with its own credit and schooling arrangements. |
| 1947 | Partition places the single forest under two administrations for the first time. |
शासक और सेनापति
Held forest on the delta's northern rim as a grant and turned it into settled rice country — tanks, roads, mosques and villages. His grant is the template the Company's reclamation scheme reproduced three and a half centuries later.
राजवंश: Bengal Sultanate (administrator, not a dynasty). राजधानी: Khalifatabad (Bagerhat)
The last of the deltaic zamindars to hold the Jessore–Khulna country outside imperial control. Defeated in 1611–12 and taken to the imperial court; the tract passed into the Bengal subah.
राजवंश: Zamindars of Jessore, among the Baro-Bhuiyan. राजधानी: Dhumghat, Jessore
Commanded the riverine campaigns that brought the eastern delta's zamindaris under Mughal administration, and moved the provincial capital to Dhaka in 1610, shifting the axis of the delta's government eastward.
राजधानी: Dhaka
Author of the April 1784 reclamation scheme. He, more than any ruler, decided where the modern Sundarbans would stop being forest, by fixing the terms on which a grantee could clear it.
राजधानी: Jessore
With Lieutenant Hodges, surveyed and fixed the forest's northern boundary. The Dampier–Hodges line is the only administrative fact about the region that has outlasted every government since.
The office that actually governed the reclaimed islands. A lot of forest was leased, the lotdar raised the embankment, recruited cultivators from Khulna, Jessore, Barisal and Faridpur, and collected from them. Authority in the polder belt was contractual and local, not dynastic.
Cleared and embanked Gosaba, Rangabelia and Satjelia and organised the estate around co-operative credit, its own currency notes for internal use, schools and a dispensary — the most documented attempt to plan a Sundarbans settlement rather than merely lease it.
राजधानी: Gosaba
Sundarbans का इतिहास — प्राचीन से मध्यकाल होते हुए आधुनिक काल तक, और वे शासक, सेनापति और प्रशासक जिन्होंने इसे गढ़ा। (7)