ABSTRACT
For naturalists, the Sundarbans have always held an irresistible charm. In common perception, the forests of the Sundarbans, located in the southernmost parts of West Bengal in India and south-western Bangladesh, remain synonymous with the Royal Bengal Tiger and, to some extent, the mangrove forests unique to South Asia. Historical studies of the region have tended to be piecemeal in nature, and have generally formed a part of the revenue history of the Sundarbans. The Sundarbans, by virtue of its exotic flora and fauna, exercised a powerful appeal to Bengali literary imagination, both traditional and modern. The punthi literature in Bengali verse, devoted to the gods and goddesses of Sundarbans, thrived in lower deltaic Bengal between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. These deities were not the regular godheads of the Bengali pantheon. They were the gods and goddesses of woodcutters, honey gatherers, beeswax gatherers, boat builders and the most desperate cultivators.
