ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how denizens of mud and water at the edges of deltaic Bengal have survived for centuries, redefining their immediate surroundings with hand-crafted vessels, nets, drifts, trawls, bags, fishing spears, armed with generational knowledge of ocean tides, monsoons, estuarine biodiversity, and marine ecology. Sifting through colonial anthropological surveys, early census data, and accounts dating back to the nineteenth century, it seeks to reconstruct a natural, preternatural, and visceral history of this aqueous terrain, along with the lifeworld of people that the colonial anthropological surveys and censuses called the Dravidian “boat castes”, remnants of a “distinct aboriginal tribe”. It reimagines their livelihood and struggles as coextensive with the spatiotemporal singularity of this vast shoreline marked by geological subsidence, ebb and flow oceanic tides, torrential monsoons, and diurnal oceanic tidal bores. Such a history can only be articulated through a long-term ecology of the delta as a shifting and volatile geo-historical formation, where fossil remains of ancient peat-beds, freshwater and marine sediments, and carbonaceous clay suggest a remarkable depth of species-habitat and long-term cultural adaptation to jungles, mangroves, riparian channels, marshes, and swamps, before the surveys, resettlements, and the advent of extractive economies of the contemporary era.
