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Water and Human- Nonhuman Agency in India's Sundarbans

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Water and Human- Nonhuman Agency in India's Sundarbans The Newsletter No. 85 Spring 2020 Recentering the Bay of Bengal 43 Connected spaces in an inter-Asian bordersea The Focus to contribute financially. The Ganga Pūjā had been suspended entirely in the years following cyclone Aila in 2009, but fishermen helped to reinstate the festival. One of these fishermen, Mano, explained the importance of the ritual, and told me how he calls on Ganga Devi when venturing out on the river to collect his nets. Water and human- “She can give so many fish and crabs”, he explained; “She can make you rich, give you a big house, anything”. The ritual was sponsored with these hopes in mind. nonhuman agency in For Mano and others living along the river’s edge, however, Ganga Devi is not just a goddess of plenty; she is also a protective maternal figure. The fishermen I met in the Sundarbans India’s Sundarbans call on ‘Ganga Ma’ for protection on both water and land. As Mano explained to me, the earthen embankment holding back the river is fragile. The Gram Panchayat – a local village-level Calynn Dowler elected body – is responsible for embankment maintenance, but the funds allocated for embankment repair do not always reach the intended recipients. As a result, breaches are The brackish waters formed where the Ganges- frequent. When saline river water washes in, Brahmaputra river system meets the Bay of Mano and his neighbors call on Ganga Devi: “Mā! Bān˘˙cāo!” [Mother, save us]. Bengal not only sustain the world’s largest I was struck by the complex entanglements mangrove forest, they also play a critical role of human, nonhuman, and supernatural agency that animated the Ganga Pūjā I attended. in the lives of the more than 4.5 million people With these thoughts in mind, I returned home. who call the Sundarbans home. Over the past Later that night, water began falling to earth in a manner that recalled the myth of Ganga century, the mangrove forest has been partially Devi’s thundering descent from the heavens. cleared and settled, and today, more than During the storm, a bamboo Ganga Pūjā pandal 8 alongside the river was toppled. 3,500 km of earthen embankments snake across Riding my bike through thick mud along the embankment the next day, I found a group of the 54 inhabited islands of the West Bengal fishermen repairing the pandal and delicately Sundarbans, separating low-lying villages and repainting the mūrti. They were preparing the goddess for her eventual bisarjan, which refers rice paddies from vast saline rivers. Life in the to the ritual immersion of the mūrti in the river region depends upon the constant negotiation of that concludes Bengali Hindu festivals. The moment stayed with me: the figure diverse flows of water. Survival is shaped by the of a river goddess, destroyed by rain, rhythm of tides, abundant monsoon rains, and repaired only to be submerged in water once A statue of the Hindu river goddess Ganga is transported again. Anthropocene discourses that cast the seasonal replenishment of freshwater lakes, from the home of the artisan to the riverside for pūjā. Sundarbans islanders only as victims of global Sundarbans, West Bengal, India, June 2019. Photo by ponds, and aquifers. Attention to the everyday author Calynn Dowler, all rights reserved. climate change reveal little of the everyday texture of these sorts of engagements with ways in which coastal communities engage with unruly waterscapes. It is true that those who water brings diverse forms of human, natural, that water is not just a resource flowing live in the Sundarbans are affected by forces through abstract space, but a culturally beyond their own control. However, as Ganga and supernatural agencies into a common and experientially meaningful substance Pūjā demonstrates, people in the Sundarbans analytic frame, allowing for a more nuanced that constitutes the places people inhabit.6 also engage in ritual actions that temporarily Understanding the Anthropocene in the order the uncertain waterscapes in which they discussion of human-nonhuman relationships Sundarbans involves recognition of global dwell, and in so doing exert intentions and in a context of global environmental change. forces that act on the local waterscape and agencies of their own. render it unruly and precarious, as well as an awareness of how this precarity is negotiated Calynn Dowler, Anthropology locally. Below, as a brief example, I consider Department, Boston University n 2018-19, I spent 18 months researching Sundarbans are seldom incorporated. As Arne the role of religion and ritual in a precarious shifting meanings of water in the West Harms points out, when Sundarbans islanders riverine waterscape. IBengal Sundarbans. During that time, do appear, they are usually filtered through a I collected oral histories and conducted victimization frame that casts them as the Notes participant observation and semi-structured “hapless objects of nature’s whims”. Sundarbans Ganga Pūjā in the interviews with domestic water-users, islanders’ vulnerability is offered as proof of 1 Harms, A. 2015. ‘Dwelling in Loss: Sundarbans’ unruly Environment, Displacement and Memory farmers, fishers, NGO staff, and local climate change to convince skeptical audiences 1 waterscape in the Indian Ganges Delta’. Unpublished government officials. While most academic in the global north. Little attention is paid to Dissertation, Berlin: Free University; p.90. and policy discourse on the Sundarbans islanders’ own experiences and understandings In June 2019, I joined a group of fishermen 2 DeLoughrey, E.M. 2019. Allegories of the delta approaches water as either a threat of the natural world, which might diverge from for Ganga Pūjā on a riverine char 7 next to Anthropocene. Duke University Press; p.2. to be contained or a scarce resource to hegemonic Anthropocene framings. the Bidhyadhari river in the West Bengal 3 Chakrabarty, D. 2008. Provincializing be managed, I came to focus on everyday Scholars in the social sciences and Sundarbans. It was a heavy, hot day. We Europe: Postcolonial Thought and engagements with water, including its cultural humanities increasingly call for a more sweltered under a plastic tarp and listened to Historical Difference. Reissue, with a new and religious significance. My research diverse range of perspectives in work on the recitations of the Brahmin priest. Across the preface by the author. Princeton Studies explores what the waters of the Sundarbans the Anthropocene. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey Gangetic plains, the Ganges river is venerated in Culture, Power, History. Princeton mean to those who navigate them daily, argues, “Anthropocene scholarship cannot as the goddess Ganga Devi. On Ganga University Press. 4 In her discussion of ‘tidalectics’, and how changes in the waterscape are afford to overlook narratives from the global Dussehrā, festivals are held to mark the day DeLoughrey (see note 2) draws on the experienced and understood. I argue that a south, particularly from those island regions the sacred river is said to have descended from work of Barbadian poet and scholar focus on coastal communities’ engagements that have been and continue to be at the heaven to earth via the Lord Shiva’s matted Kamau Brathwaite. The concept of with water can contribute to current efforts forefront of ecologically devastating climate locks. The temporary Ganga Devi statue ‘tidalectics’ draws on island geography to ‘provincialize the Anthropocene’. change”.2 DeLoughrey points to a need to bring [mūrti] constructed for the occasion took the and the cyclical nature of tides to critique postcolonial and indigenous perspectives into shape of a beautiful young woman with hair the linear synthesizing nature of the conversation with Anthropocene scholarship, flowing past her waist. The goddess sat atop European dialectic. ‘Provincializing’ and to ground universalizing Anthropocene her vehicle, known as a makara, represented 5 Swyngedouw, E. 1999. ‘Modernity and discourses in specific contexts. Much as in Hindu mythology as a fantastical aquatic Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, the Anthropocene postcolonial studies sought to ‘provincialize’ creature in the shape of a crocodile or dolphin 3 1890-1930’, Annals of the Association of The Anthropocene looms large in the discourse of Europe, scholars today must or a combination of both. She wore a white sari American Geographers 89(3):443–65; contemporary discussions of the Sundarbans. work to ‘provincialize’ the Anthropocene. This with golden trim, flower garlands, and a gold https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ Scientists understand the term Anthropocene demands “a multiscalar method of telescoping and fuchsia crown, evoking her status as abs/10.1111/0004-5608.00157. as the current geological age, in which human between space (planet) and place (island) in a goddess of good fortune and plentitude. 6 Orlove, B. & Caton, S.C. 2010. activity has come to shape the earth. The a dialectic or ‘tidalectic’ way to see how they For fishermen in the Sundarbans, rivers ‘Water Sustainability: Anthropological term is commonly invoked in discussions mutually inform each other”.4 are an important source of livelihood. Approaches and Prospects’, Annual of anthropogenic climate change, which Focusing on local waterscapes offers Approximately three decades ago, Ganga Review of Anthropology 39(1):401-15; scientists argue poses an existential threat to one possible way to provincialize the Pūjās became common along this stretch of https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev. low-lying coastal regions like the Sundarbans. Anthropocene. The concept of a waterscape river due to an increase in fishing for tiger anthro.012809.105045. 7 The Bengali word char refers to Such predictions should undoubtedly be taken (or water-produced landscape) can help us prawn hatchlings. In recent years, however, sandbanks/alluvium that appear and seriously, but unfortunately the Anthropocene think about how culture and power interact demand for prawn hatchlings has dropped, disappear in the shallow riverbeds of the discourses remain overwhelmingly rooted in at multiple scales over time to produce hybrid and fishing has declined.
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