इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Sundarbans · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
छोटी-छोटी बातें
- A deity in Muslim dress at a Hindu pujaBonbibi is modelled wearing a salwar with a covered head, is described in her own text as sent from Medina, and is worshipped at village shrines with clay images, flowers and a Hindu-style puja performed by a villager rather than by a priest of either faith. Hindu and Muslim members of the same forest party recite the same invocation at the same shrine before entering. This is the region's defining cultural fact and it is entirely ordinary here.
- The tiger is not defeated, he is negotiated withIn the Johuranama, Bonbibi beats Dakshin Rai and then divides the forest with him. He keeps his claim and continues to receive worship. The narrative sets out a conditional human right of entry — take only what you need, enter with a clean heart — and islanders discuss tiger attacks in exactly those terms, as a breach of conditions rather than as an accident.
- A Bengali book that opens like an Arabic oneThe printed Bonbibi Johuranama is in Bengali script and Bengali metre, but the cheap puthi editions are conventionally set to be opened and read from the right, in the manner of an Arabic or Urdu book. The form of the object states its affiliation before the text does.
- The honey season is a licence, not a harvestHoney collection runs for a short spring window under permits issued by the forest department to registered parties, who pay a royalty on the weight brought out. Khalisha-flower honey is the light, prized grade; garan and keora honeys are darker. The parties walk inside closed forest to cut the combs, which is when the region's tiger encounters peak.
- Prawn seed, and what else comes up in the netCollecting tiger-prawn fry for the aquaculture ponds is done by dragging a fine-mesh net through creek shallows, largely by women and children. For each fry kept, large numbers of other fish and crustacean larvae are destroyed, which is why the practice has been restricted; it persists because it needs no capital beyond a net.
- Land lower than the water beside itOn several polders the enclosed land now sits below the level of the spring tide outside the embankment, because the fields stopped receiving silt the moment the wall went up while the creek bed continued to accrete. The embankment is not a flood defence in the usual sense; it is the only thing making the island habitable.
- What a breach costs, in yearsCyclone Aila in May 2009 breached embankments across the region and put salt water onto farmland and into freshwater ponds; many fields did not crop normally for several seasons and some ponds never recovered. Cyclone Amphan in May 2020 caused comparable embankment damage. This is the mechanism by which storms here cause loss long after the wind has gone.
- Islands that are not there any moreLohachara, once inhabited, has gone. Ghoramara has lost a large share of its area within living memory, and most of the households displaced from it have been resettled on Sagar Island. Erosion and accretion happen at the same time in a delta, but on inhabited islands the two do not cancel out.
- Trees that breathe through the mudMangroves push pneumatophores — vertical root spikes — up through anoxic mud to take in air. They cover the forest floor densely enough that walking through it is close to impossible, which is a large part of why the interior is seen from a boat and why the paths a forest party uses are known individually.
- The tree the region is named after is in troubleSundari, Heritiera fomes, gives the forest its name and its best timber. It needs relatively low salinity and has been affected by top-dying disease and by rising salinity in the eastern and central forest, so its share of the canopy has fallen while more salt-tolerant species have gained.
- Tigers that swim and drink brackish waterThe Sundarbans tigers move between islands by swimming wide tidal channels and live in a landscape with almost no fresh surface water — the reason sweet-water ponds were dug at points like Sudhanyakhali. The population on the Indian side is on the order of a hundred animals by recent national estimates, and it is among the most intensively monitored in the country.
- A port town that was a mistakeCanning was laid out in the 1860s as Port Canning, an attempt to build an alternative deep-water port on the Matla when the Hooghly approach was silting. The channel silted too, a cyclone wrecked the works, and the scheme was abandoned. The town survived as a railhead and is now the gateway everyone uses to reach the forest.
Sundarbans की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (12)