Vernacular Tradition,Dalits and Connected Social History in the Littoral Bay of Bengal

Introduction

The article proposes to explore the vernacular philosophy of the Sundarban delta by examining how the local religious practices are embedded in the popular tradition that drew inspiration from both Islam and Hinduism and presents a syncretic and often heterodox worldview of Dalit societies inhabiting liminal spaces—interspersed amid land and water. The Bengal delta, unlike the rest of the Indian subcontinent (through at the margins of state formation), was connected to South and Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean world through mercantile trade, the circulation of commodities and Muslim missionaries who came to colonise the region from twelfth century onwards. The influence of Buddhism and Christianity, though insignificant in the islands, has also found a place through local initiatives taken by Scottish philanthropists like Sir Danial Mackinnon Hamilton, who established the Baptist Church in Gosaba and religious communes. Also, the migration of Rakhine and Mog bandits to Patwakhali and Chittagong in East Bengal during the eighteenth century from Arakan state in Burma further added to the heterodox worldviews and the role of mobility through the sea as a means of communication in the delta. Michael Pearson, a prominent maritime and world historian, writes in his essay on littoral societies that it had ‘poly-focal contact zones’ through tidal creeks and major estuaries that join the sea (2006, pp. 140–141). This is true of the Sundarbans: they have had a global connection established by fisher-folk, boatmen, sail-makers, sailors, seafarers, pirates and shipbuilders, who were constantly traveling within the wider littoral world around them (Mukherjee, 2010).

The article will explore the vernacular tradition of littoral Bengal – a performative form of the vernacular literature where we see the incarnation of Bonobibi, or the forest goddess. She has a significant influence on the lives of fisherman and forest-goers in the delta. There are many other genres of popular literature and art that have evolved in Bengal (e.g., jatra, pala, scroll painting and torja). These local traditions play a significant role in explaining the syncretic religious tradition of Lower Bengal, where both Sufism and the Bhakti movement have entrenched in the ordinary life of the people through popular jatra performances and the vanishing tradition of putul nach (doll-puppet performances) and potochitra (scroll painting) created by patuas (marginalised lower-caste performers and artists) of Medenipur who have dual religious and cultural identity as both Muslims and Hindus.

The article will focus on Bonbibi Johurnama, a sixteenth-century text and map the social geography of Islam and Hinduism which has seen growing interest among scholars promoting the global and intellectual history in South Asia. The vernacular literary tradition of lower Bengal can also be an interesting part of the ‘environmental humanities project’ proposed by many humanities scholars across the globe. The nature–culture dichotomy presented by ‘scientific experts’ and ‘conservation ecologists’ can be probed from the standpoint of popular philosophy that focuses around humans’ relationship with non-humans, not in binary terms of conflict and encroachment of habitat but as co-habitats, where restrained access for valuable forest resources and control over human greed and passion maintains the ethics of conservation and keeps humans from peril. The custom of worshipping Bonbibi’s before entering the forest thus serves many purposes: it provides not only psychological strength to Dalit forest goers and fishers but more centrally moral and ethnic persuasion for care and restraint among Dalit and Muslim communities inhabiting the delta.

Entry to the Field: The Lowland

To begin with, I will describe my entry to the field. One summer day in the month of March 2016, I boarded the Canning local train from Sealdah station. Roughly two hours later, after making virtually every stop on the line, I arrived at Canning, a bustling town and entry point to the Sundarbans. On my way, I witnessed paddy fields, man-made sweet water ponds and rivulets that dotted the down country landscape with eye-catching mud-walled thatch houses. It took centuries for humans to settle these lands which were once covered by mangrove swamps and inhabited by tigers and snakes. The hawkers inside the train were requesting fellow commuters to buy tidbits in the jam-packed coach. I was lucky to find a seat alongside the window, where I could breathe fresh air. In between, some people squeezed in to sell chocolates and savouries while some carried thanda (iced soda water), badam bhaja (salted peanuts) and chana bhaja (fried lentils). Once I reached Canning, a small frontier town of South 24 Parganas, I pushed myself in an overcrowded bus as I deboarded from the train for Godkhali, my final on-road journey. It took over an hour to reach Godkhali, from where I crossed over to Gosaba island in a packed country boat locally known as a bhotboti. On my arrival, I was received by Supobitro Pradhan, who was waiting for me in Gosaba ghat. He was a man in his fifties. I got his reference from Mukundu da of Dayapur village, whom I should introduce later. Soon we arrived at his house as evening set in, riding on a bicycle van quite unique and different from a rikshaw – a local innovation of the Sundarbans. He promised to introduce me to the bawle (tiger charmers) and the retired school master, Sujit Sur, who has been working on Bonbibi for many years and has been a source of inspiration for villagers in Gosaba.

Next day we decided to visit Sujit Sur’s home. He is popularly known as mastar babu. During his spare time, he does daktari (practices medicine) by treats people with homeopathic medicine, as there is great demand for such services in the delta, where hospitals are ill-equipped with medical facilities, and doctors rarely visit village health clinics on weekdays. As we approached his house, which is located beyond the Gosaba school, he could not recognise us at first sight and his face showed an expression, tumra ka, ‘who are you people? Supobitro poses and utters ‘mastar babu’ don’t you recognise me? I am Supobitro, the printing press owner.’ Sujit Sur giggles and rubs his glasses with a loin cloth and exclaims ‘what brings you to this old man’s doorstep after such a long time?’. Supobitro then introduced me and explains to master babu the purpose of our visit. After some persuasion, master babu agrees to share his experience and writings on Bonbibi, but he also cautions that to solicit his views, one must have patience and make, make regular visits, as he was old and his speech needs rest from time to time. I later discovered that he needs to be satisfied with a cup of tea and thinly grounded areca nut folded in a pan (fresh battlenut leaf) to continue his conversation. In rural Bengal, old people use this as a source of pastime and intemperance. In the coming days, as I took time off while visiting my respondents in different parts of Gosaba Bock, I spent hours’ recording Sujit babus in-depth understanding and perception of the region’s, popular history, social life and marriage customs which intertwine with the social life of Hindus and Muslims in the delta. During our discussion, he made a critical intervention that helped my understanding of Bonbibi’s popular philosophy meaningfully, and I could situate my thoughts within the historical frame of his reference of territory and control exercised by numerous local deities and their places of worship (than). According to Sujit Sur, there is a popular version of the popular history that is today performed to entertain guests and outsiders who visit the islands as tourists and are at once thrilled by the narrative of Dukhe’s dramatic rescue from the hands of Dakhin Ray. It serves the purpose of popular entertainment well. But there is another, possibly more important, part of this folklore which connects it to the wider socio-cultural and intellectual history of the region that rallies back to what Shanjay Subramanyams proposes as the ‘connected history’ of the Indian Ocean world. These connected histories will help us understand how influences from vernacular deity worship (regional gods and goddesses such as Sitala–worshipped for smallpox by Dalit households) and Islam networked the transregional history of the Bengal delta.

According to Sujit Sur, the original inhabitants of Sundarbans were mostly pagan believers (they were commonly referred to as chandals or untouchables) by the higher-born Brahmins, Poundro and Kathriyas. With the occupation of the region by Muslim prophets in the twelfth century, the region started to have sedentary forms of occupation as forests were cleared for paddy cultivation at a consistent pace. The original inhabitants of the region were semi-nomadic and were considered out-caste. The popular narrative on the other hand developed spread far and wide in and around the sixteenth century, when Bengali poets and writers start writing about the glory of local saints (fakirs) who came to proselytise to the local population through expansion of the rice frontier. The Bonbibi Joharnama was drafted during that period. It is sung like a poem (panchali) and the dramatic form are enacted in open air playhouse by local performance groups. Shama Prasad Baidya introduced me to his performance where he parlayed the role of Dhona in the Sundarban Tiger Lodge amphitheatre- a modern set up for a pala performance with musicians in the background singing the songs as the play progressed. With the growth of tourism in the Sundarbans, these recitals bring petty cash to poor village farmers who work in the tourist lodge as helpers, guards and cooks. There pressing financial hardship accompanied by uncertainties of monsoon and periodic cyclones has forced them to popularise pala performance as an avenue for entertaining guest who visit Sundarbans to see tiger.

The Cult of Bonbibi

The worship of Bonbibi, the lady of the forest, has been in practice since time immemorial. However, in the written colonial sources there is no mention of Bonbibi as highlighted by Sujit Sur during our conversation in Gosaba which is certainly correct. Rather the mystical charms of the pirs, fakirs and pioneering first settlers (gazi) such as Khan Jahan and Badar Gazi Khan among others comes up scantily in colonial accounts and treaties of officials who surveyed and administered these areas (Hunter, 1875). The origin of Bonbibi remains mystical and can only be traced back to Mecca and Madina through the text Bonbibi Joharnama. The narratives follow a pattern in these stories linked to the tradition of punishment and reward where mortals are made to become devotees and followers of particulate terrestrial deity. This trend can also be seen in the older forms of popular religious narratives such as the Mangan Kavya, which were composed during the period preceding the spread of Islam among the delta settlements. According to Tirthankar Roy, these poems were composed from oral tradition of the earlier period during the late sixteenth to eighteenth century by Bengali intellectuals and writers under the patronage of local kings such as the Gaur kingdom. Therefore, they do reflect the society of that time. The popular history of Bonbibi was also ‘localised’ by the Gazi Pir who were patron saints of the delta following the tradition of kavya that adopted a worship-reward metaphor in their ballads. In the delta seaboard, as I will show in the following paragraphs, the global became a part of the local, and outsiders joined in the competition for assets. Reflecting on this scenario, Roy (2012) notes that the East Bengal ballads are full of tales about fragility and fortune.

According to Sutapa Sarkar (2010), Bonbibi was perhaps knows as Banachandi before the arrival of the Sufi fakirs and patron prophets, who reincarnated her as a forest goddess. There are at least two stories associated with Bonbibi Joharnama composed by the poet Munshi Bayanuddin during 1877–1888 and, later, by Mohammed Munsi Sahaba and Mohammed Khater.

The authorship of these texts remain, contested and cannot be fully verified, as they were written by people who left little autobiographical traces in the archives. The Bonbibi poetry illuminates the folkloristic origins of the deity through the mystical blessings of the prophet that give rise to Bonbibi’s charisma in the forest landscape of the Sundarban delta. This narrative can also be interpreted as how Islam was accepted in the delta, not in the conformist sense, through patronage of the Mughal emperors, but through peasantization and the expansion of the agrarian frontier in lower Bengal (Eaton, 1990, 1993). Bonbibi’s rise in the delta can be credited to the spread of Islam, which was domesticated by the forest-going and peasant communities who were outside the caste system and worshipped multiple local deities such as Dakhin Rai, Narayani and Bishalakki for the real-world purposes of remaining safe from tigers, snakes, crocodiles and unforeseen calamities. This is familiar from an earlier tradition of kavya writing mastered in Monasa Mangal and Rai Mangal, scripted before the appearance of the Turkish holy fakirs in the region.

The Vernacular Narrative

In the first narrative, the origins of Bonbibi and her purpose of residing in the forest of Sundarban can be traced. Bonbibi along with his brother Shah Jangoli were sent by the Prophet from Mecca to settle in the Bengal delta. The popular narrative proceeds with the imaginary Behram Fakir who lived in Mecca and was married to Phulbibi, a wife who was unable to conceive. Saddened by this, Phulbibi insists that Behram should visit Medina for holy prayers so that God may bless them with a child. The husband follows his wife’s advice and prays to the Prophet. The Prophet becomes engrossed by his plea and after much consultation of holy scripture, suggests that he will have two children only if he remarries another woman. Behram shares this dilemma with his wife after returning back to Mecca. The wife gets awe-struck by Allah’s foretelling but grants him permission to have a second wife, with the condition that he must fulfil one wish of hers whenever she asks for it. Beharam aggresses to her condition and marries again this time to Gulalbibi, and she soon falls pregnant. As the news spreads to Phulbibi, she gets back to her husband to keep his wish and Gulalbibi is banished from his life. Gulalbibi and her two children’s Bonbibi and Saha Jangali, are left in the forest. Gulalbibi on Allah’s command leaves Bonbibi to her destiny, where she is left at the mercy of the forest animals. Later they were united, but this was short-lived. Saha Jongali continues to reside in the forest with his sister, as they took up the mission of protecting people from the tiger.

They soon made prayers at the grave of Mohammed on the instruction of Fatima to be merciful. After performing a series of prayers, they proceeded to the forest over which they would reign. At that time, the Sundarbans were ruled by Dakhin Ray. Dakhin Ray symbolises the tiger and oppressor. Soon, Bonobibi gave the azan for battle, with Dakhin Ray. At this point, when Dakhin Ray was getting ready for the battle, Narayani (his mother) intervened and declared that only a woman could fight another women and so she armed herself to face her rival. In the battle that ensued, Narayani was finally defeated and an agreement was warranted to protect the territory of Dakhin Ray who accepted the supremacy of Bonbibi.

The story of Dukhe forms the other part of the popular tale through which the power and idol worship of Bonbibi is founded in the Sundarbans. The popular narrative centres around Dukhe, the protagonist, who grazes other people’s cattle and lives with his mother, who is a widow. They eke out a poor livelihood. Dhona who is his uncle, is a rich merchant who sails the river and trades in honey. One day Dhona comes to his place and lures Dukhe to join his expedition for honey collection. At first, Dukhe’s mother cries in fear of the painful separation from her only son, but she reluctantly agrees to the proposal. As they enter the creeks of Kedhokhali, Dhona is left in the boat and the honey collectors go out in search for bee hives. At this moment, Dakhin Ray tricks the honey gatherers and they return back to the boat empty- handed. The despondent Dhona comes and sleeps at his boat, with his men disappointed of the failed journey into the forest. Dakhin Ray appears in his dream and orders Dhona to leave Dukhe in return for seven boatloads of honey. After a slight hesitation, the boatman agrees to make the sacrifice. His boat returns with piles of honey and wax.

Soon, Dakhin Ray appears before Dukhe in the body of a tiger. Dukhe cries out to Bonbibi for help, who appears immediately to rescue him. Dakhin Ray is ordered to leave Dukhe. On the call of Bonobibi, Sah Jangali joins the scene and drives Dakhin Ray away to Gazi Pir, who agrees to mediate. On the entreaty of Ghazi, Bonbibi forgives Dakhin Ray who promises not to harm any human hereafter. Dukhe was finally sent back to join his mother with enough wealth such that he no longer had to graze others’ herds.

The scene of Dukhe was again performed as a popular drama by Achinta Mridha during my second visit to Dayapur village in another tourist lodge. These popular dramatic performances have become an alternative form of livelihood for people like Achinta, who cannot meet their family needs just by tilling the land, rendered infertile through the use of fertilizers and recurrent cyclones and tidal bores that have salinized their soil. The collection of minor forest products is also restricted by the forest guards and rangers, who protect the tiger reserve from trespassers. This has further heightened the incidences of piracy and smuggling in the delta, as the demand for tiger skin from neighbouring China entices petty forest-goers to take to such misadventure. The stories of Bonbibi and Dukhe embodies a moral overtone of the harmony that exist between humans and non-humans inside the forest and the injunctions to enter the forest with an open heart and selflessness.

Dhona presents himself as the immoral soul who leaves the forest. Dukhe on the other hand emerges as the clear-hearted person whole believes in Bonbibi. The protagonist of the popular is also a reflection of thousands of precarious lives in the Sundarban delta. The popular story of Bonbibi, as Jalias (2010) presents in her work, produces ‘Islamic egalitarianism’ in the delta, where there are no jatis or caste divisions. The territorial control of Bonbibi ends where human settlement begins, as they are marked by hierarchies and different morals and ethos of the peasantry.

To the people living in the cities and upcountry, the popular tradition of the Sundarban presents a fantasy of sorts, as phantom figures brave the journey deep in the jungle and risk their lives for a little honey and wax. With increasing restrictions set by the Forest Department and the issue of boat licence to regulate foresters’ trip to the jungle, the activity is slowly becoming profligate and barely supports their livelihood. But for fishers and foresters, this has been their occupation since birth, which they cannot relinquish, as they know no other way to make a living. The Bonbibi’s tenets are followed by foresters and the bawla, who guide them inside the forest (tiger charmers maintain a disciplined lifestyle to keep them free of corruption when they venture into the forest with teams of forest-goers, woodcutters and honey gatherers gatherers). However, these days such bawla are hard to find, as all villagers are connected to the city and the aspirations of materialistic life.

Global and Local in Folklore

In the contemporary everyday life in the Sundarbans, Bonbibi’s tale has seen transmission to new territories. Globalization – not the older kind that added Bonbibi’s ritual status to the long list of local pantheon during the sixteenth century – has now put her in the global marketplace. The jatra tradition of Bengal is replicated by pala popular drama performers that showcase the local culture, organised by tourist lodge operators. Lodge owners in the Sundarbans organize Bonbibi’s pala in order to entertain foreigners who visit the Sundarbans from mainland India, metropolitan Kolkata and all over the globe to get a glimpse of the Bengal tiger. I was eyewitness to two such performances on the invitation of my interlocutor, Shama Prasad Baidya (the lead performer of the local drama group, Tarangini), who inspired my interest in popular literature and local shrines in the delta.

To this end, much recent ethnographic literature on material culture has focussed on the effect that globalization and transnationalism (Appadurai, 1996) have had on the production and consumption of traditional art and culture (Marcus & Mayers, 1995). One thing that emerges clearly from such commodification of art is that it becomes competitive and contested among the community. Particularly in the context on my investigation, I discovered that different Dalit performance groups lay claim to the authenticity of their performances. While Shama Prasad Baidya asserted that his group were the pioneers in pala performance in Dayapur village, others contested such claims and deprecated its validity. These are common occurrences in all regions of the sub-continent, where local art forms have been commodified to attract global cash flows and to empower local communities with cultural capital by intermediaries who act as cultural brokers. The West Bengal Department of Art and Culture promotes the performance of dramas involving Bonbibi as representative of their folkloristic past and ancholic (regional) cultural tradition. In this competitive setting, issues of patronage, jealousy, innovation and even authenticity become topics of contestation. These, many of my village informants observed, have further polluted the forest environment, which makes the tigers wild and bloodthirsty. Bonbibi’s ordered restraint on human greed and her ethos of worship are today breached by people who once visited the forest. People who still go the forest and involve themselves in such performances and business become weak-hearted and often fall prey to tiger ambush inside the forest. The ethics of restraint remains a morality tale among Dalit forest-goers, who are at present corrupted by the lure of market capitalism and the incentive to make quick money through theatre performances.

The growth of ‘eco-tourism’ and the plight of people after the 2009 devastation that Cyclone Alia wrought on urban places (cities and towns) and livelihoods has forced many traditional fishers and forest-goers to join the tourist lodges and hotels as daytime cooks and gatekeepers, while at night Bonbibi’s o they entertain guests in open air theatre for paltry donation sums that they collect in the Islamic way by taking their chadar and sari across the gathered audience. The government and conservation NGOs project ‘eco-tourism’ as a way forward to sustainable livelihood that would prevent Dalit forest-goers from destroying the mangrove forest and minimise the risk to the lives of the vanishing tigers. For the local villagers, whom I interviewed, the Forest Department staff and babus are the undeclared poaches and exploites of forest resources, as they secretly work in connivance with the big smugglers and traffickers. Occasionally, they catch small forest trespassers that are highlighted in the media and are used as scapegoats to establish their guardianship of the forest as a national treasure – a UNSECO World Heritage Site. The foresters and village settlements are always blamed for the deaths of tigers.

I came to know from a local veterinary doctor that some tiger deaths get underreported by the mainstream media when they die in captivity of the Forest Departments care units, unlike a poaching incident, which catches international limelight. It so happened that during my stay in Dayapur, news of tiger trapped in a ditch was reported by villagers. The Forest Department patrol team soon located the tiger and used their tranquilizers to sedate the animal. The tiger was kept in the Sajnakhali Tiger Reserve Forest Office inside an iron cage for treatment, and nobody was allowed to visit the place except forest staff and doctors. I had a luckily chance to interview the Forest Department doctor who treated the tiger. The tiger ultimately died in captivity, as the medical intervention failed to save his life. The doctor disclosed to me in private that Sundarban tigers not only get killed by poaching but they also die because of innumerable diseases and changing climatic conditions in the delta and the declining share of food inside the forest. We should not simply correlate the decline in tiger population with growing human settlement in the islands, although they are also part of the cause.

We can surmise from the above example how tiger conservationism presents an important dilemma for the human–animal coexistence debate. The popular literature of the Sundarban delta presents an intellectual history of religious and cultural encounters in the region, which transformed humans’ relationship with nature by forging the ethics and morality of forest resource use between humans and non-humans. Dalit Bengali cultural morals came to occupy a dominant place in people’s lives through the emulation of ballads by Muslim theologians since the sixteenth century. The fluid Hindu identity of the delta communities are reinforced by the veneration of Bonbibi (the forest goddess) and Manasa (the serpent goddess) among other vernacular gods and goddesses who derive their lineage from both religions. The popular narrative of Bonbibi thus should be seen from a wider global and local historical perspective, where the littoral has come to take centre stage. While examining why the delta community has come to incorporate and localise both Hindu and Islamic forms of commensality and faith through the workshop of the forest goddess, the answer lies in the liminality that does not represent a particular religious identity. The upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh and Hindu nationalism in India prompted by radical nationalist factions is challenged by the unity and reverence of the more varied ethos in the Sundarban delta. The mythical lore of Bonbibi has become even more relevant in the contemporary period to understand South Asian littoral societies, religion and culture. In this context, Dalit worship practices of village and local deities have rich plural and sacrilegious cultural philosophies presented in the vernacular literature of the delta.