‘Liquidity of the Sundarbans: If the Tigers and Cyclones Don’t Get You, the Law Will’

“An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerse us in a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river systems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers are sourced in the Himalaya, venerable mountains created when the shifting mass of the Indian subcontinent crashed into the Eurasian tectonic plate, throwing up land that reaches the sky. Snow on the mountains thaws into rivers—more than ever now with climate change—running across rich alluvial plains, depositing ever more silt and producing, on meeting the Bengal basin, the largest delta area of forest and shifting islands in the world. That the Sundarbans and the rivers themselves confront imminent environmental and ecological catastrophe is a story told in each of the three books under review with a fluent yet turbulent style, wholly appropriate for tempestuous times”. Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta, by Debjani…