What Sundarbans Islanders should Learn from COVID19 Crisis: The Failure of Middle Path
A recent message of a school teacher and a development worker from interior Sundarbans makes my worst fears come true. As a researcher of environmental humanities, in the last seven years of my engagement with the inhabitants of Sundarbans, I have often thought about this kind of a crisis when islanders would be left to depend on their forgotten ways of life and livelihoods for bare survival. I have always remained skeptical of whether inhabitants will be able to ride through those crises. It seems that they are hardly managing as the message conveys, “Rohin Sikdar [pseudo-name], age 29, resident of Gosaba died of tiger attack as he went for honey collection. Due to COVID lockdown, Rohin, a daily laborer, had no other option but to join the group for honey collection, which can help him arrange food for his family”.
Many like Rohin, who live in the Sundarbans, depend on the city or adjacent towns for their livelihood as daily-wage laborers. Nowadays, younger folks choose not to depend on forest-based livelihoods or as they called ‘jungle kora’ and instead find some other opportunities to support their families. Improvements in transport facilities, in terms of bridges and road networks, allow them to venture into the city for livelihoods. Often islanders get support from various government and non-governmental institutions to develop new skills to opt for non-forest based livelihoods, as the conservation of Sundarbans mangroves is of utmost importance in this era of the climate crisis. The government also attempts to prevent villagers from entering into the forest and creeks either for fishing, crab collection, or for gathering non-timber forest products. Stringent rules and regulations are in place, and villagers with limited economic resources and social networks find it hard to comply with necessary bureaucratic requirements. Moreover, in recent times tiger attacks on islanders in the forest have spiked significantly as the number of tigers shoots up owing to tiger conservation. Villagers, from adjacent villages of the tiger reserve, who often visit creeks inside the forest for the small-scale fishing, get attacked regularly. So, on the one hand, due to the threat to life and imposition of stringent rules and regulations, and on the other, driven by the aspiration to get associated with more ‘civilised’ city-based livelihoods, the younger workforce chooses not to pursue traditional livelihoods anymore. Instead, they acquire new skills ranging from tailoring to driving to construction works.
Crisis: Outside and Inside
COVID lockdown poses two-fold challenges for Sundarbans. The first corresponds to what daily wage and migrant labourers across the world or at least the developing world are currently witnessing in meeting their daily needs. In Sundarbans, however, the situation gets complicated further as adjacent forests and water-bodies provide these distressed individuals a lucrative opportunity to meet at least their food requirements. For individuals like Rohin, it is difficult to ignore the opportunity to go to the forest either for fishing or for crab or honey collection. My research highlights the fact that forest-based livelihoods require specific skills, and individuals hone these skills through years of engagement. When one discards this traditional livelihood and does not regularly visit the forest and its adjacent creeks, their skills start waning. Honey gathering, in particular, requires physical strength to walk through the forest, attentiveness to the surroundings, cohesion to follow the group, and the courage to dwell in the forest. Without being in touch with these skills, if an individual takes up forest-based livelihood all of a sudden, the risk of getting attacked by the tiger increases immensely; the lack of courage does not allow the victim to fight back — as soon as attacked, one surrender. Villagers who regularly engage with forest-based livelihood say, it is not only a livelihood; it is a sacred practice that one needs to follow to dwell safely in the forest. The new livelihood trend creates a disengagement between islanders with the land-waterscape that Sundarbans is. As young individuals embrace new skills and get habituated to city-scapes, they lose their ability to manoeuvre on this land-waterscape. With the lack of these necessary skills, the desperate need to opt for traditional livelihoods makes them much more vulnerable so far so that it becomes life-threatening. During this crisis, many islanders are forced to downplay these risks — the immediate gain overrides the risk perception.
The Precarious Middle Path
Covid-19 is majorly impacting the world in various ways and the Sundarbans is no exception. For their immediate survival, inhabitants had to rely on traditional livelihoods. The question here is not whether they are prepared for it, rather it is time to ponder whether the Coronavirus pandemic is a one of a kind scenario? Experts say these kinds of events are going to increase in the age of climate change. Moreover, the effects of climate change in the near future can disconnect Sundarbans from the mainland, as well as rapidly transform this land-waterscape. If that imaginary future becomes a reality, then are these islanders capable of living a life in the Sundarbans? The transition in the livelihoods that islanders embraced in the past decade made them alienated in their own land. In the name of development and better occupation, they are losing the necessary skills to survive in their homeland, which is unique on earth. COVID situation makes it clear that either the islanders need to rely on Sundarbans for life and livelihoods so that they don’t get alienated from the land-waterscape, or they need to find their life and livelihood outside Sundarbans. The dangerous middle path that most of the population is presently following makes them unprepared for a life in the Sundarbans and unable to lead a life outside it. To survive in this liminal landscape, which is rapidly changing due to climate change, one cannot afford to be oblivious of traditional knowledge and intuitive understanding that grows out of the everyday dwelling. Sundarbans islanders need to remember, the pandemic is not the only crisis for them nor is the tiger the only threat to their lives; they are instead awaiting the unfolding of a much bigger crisis.
