Amitav Ghosh
In the year 1864 of the Common Era, Abu Muhammad ‘Abdul Ghafur Khan Khalidi, District Magistrate of Rajshahi, and a noted Urdu writer, commonly known as ‘Abdul Ghafur Nassakh, encountered a devastating cyclone on the Padma River. He describes it thus in his autobiography, Khudnawisht:
I decided to go to Calcutta during the Durga Puja holidays. I would normally travel to Calcutta via Murshidabad but my friends advised me that if I went by boat to Kushtia and then took the train, I would be in Calcutta the following morning. Accordingly at about eight o’clock in the morning on the fourth of October, I set off on a very small boat, about eighteen feet long. I only had my chuprassy [personal assistant] with me. After we passed Khulna, I instructed the boatmen to stick to the shore but I could see that they were struggling to maneuver the boat which was drifting mid-stream. They said that they could not control the boat as the wind was very stiff. For about an hour, we drifted along even as the boatmen tried their best to get the boat near the banks. Up ahead, I could see a very large island on the river Ganga, that is, Padma. I told them to aim for the island and we finally managed to reach land. As the day progressed, the speed of the winds increased steadily. By the end of the day, many more boats landed at the island which was completely uninhabited with not a sign of man, animal, or tree. Since my boat was very small, it did not have an anchor. I asked the boatmen to haul the boat up and secure it. They were concerned that the boat would break asunder but I assured them that I would compensate them if that happened. They then hauled the boat up from the river to dry land and tied it down with pegs hammered into the earth. As the winds continued raging, the other boats also were hauled up by their owners. The wind was now as noisy as thunder and the toofan was raging. I had never heard such a sound. Finally, the toofan died down at nightfall. The next morning we saw that all the twenty-four boats which had been hauled up were safe.
I went back home [to Rajshahi] where I saw that the upper storey of my house had collapsed. A lot of trees and houses had fallen down. Hundreds of boats had sunk into the river and those boats which had been tied up near the banks had also been destroyed. The same day, I went to Murshidabad. I noticed that the trees along the road had been uprooted. When I reached Murshidabad, I heard more details about the toofan. The next day I set off for Calcutta. When I reached Calcutta, I heard that, as compared to Rajshahi, the toofan was more violent in Calcutta and the areas south of it, that is towards the sea. Thousands of boats and ships had either sunk or were destroyed. During this toofan, I had my family amulet with me which had been given to my father. If this amulet was present in a boat, it would never sink. The amulet has been with me for twenty-five years during which time, I have been caught in very serious toofans but, thanks to the grace of God, I have emerged unscathed. This toofan is known as ‘cyclone’ in English.
‘Abdul Ghafur Nassakh was fortunate to survive these storms unscathed. My ancestors were not so lucky. According to my father’s telling of our family’s story, in the mid-nineteenth century our ancestral village in Bikrampur District was destroyed by one such cyclone, during which the Padma River went through one of the periodic changes of course for which it is famous. Following this calamity, our ancestors migrated westwards and eventually settled in the riverport town of Chhapra, in Bihar. Yet they always retained a powerful sense of connection with their ancestral land, and continued, over generations, to marry into families from Bikrampur and its neighboring districts. As a result stories about Bikrampur, and the Padma River, lived on in the family, forming a kind of umbilical connection for a long time afterwards.
So powerful was this connection that it drew my father back to the site of the village more than a century later. One of my most vivid memories of the years I spent as a child in what is now Bangladesh
(it was East Pakistan then), is of that journey up the Padma, in a motor-launch. The quest ended, inevitably, in disappointment: there was indeed no trace of the village, although some local people claimed to know where it had once stood. I remember looking down into the Padma’s silted waters, from the deck of the launch, and wondering whether any trace of the village’s huts and houses still remained on the riverbed.
Strangely, this memory of what can only be described as an absence, an erasure, has remained powerfully alive in my mind, through all these years, and it has perhaps, in some profound way, nurtured in me a vivid awareness of the vitality of the Earth and the untamable power of rivers. In that sense my memories, and my sensibility, have also been formed by the geomorphological phenomenon that is variously described in this volume as ‘the Padda process’ and ‘the Padma dynamic.’ This is, of course, none other than that state of constant riverine mutability that manifests itself more powerfully, perhaps, in the Bengal Delta than anywhere else on Earth. My early experience of the Padma River may be the reason why I never succumbed to the belief that rivers can be ‘tamed’ through engineering—an idea, that emanates, as Iftekhar Iqbal points out, “from a modern mind that detests the panoply of mud, moist and mazes of fluids and privileges dryness, speed and bodily comfort.”
Of all the rivers of Bengal–itself a deltaic land, created by the silted waters that flow down from the high Himalaya–there is none perhaps as powerful, as majestic, as fecund, and as storied as the Padma. As many of the essays in this collection testify, the Padma has inspired legions of poets and writers ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to Kazi Nazrul Islam, and film-makers like Gautam Ghose.
But the Padma’s avatars are many and in one of them she is also a peerless nurturer and provider of nourishment. It is no accident that the “most treasured and sought after fish in every Bengali household,” the ilish (hilsa), is often referred to in this collection, because, as Syed Manzoorul Islam notes in his essay, “Padma is synonymous with this iconic fish which has given rise to a lore of its own.” It is certainly true that in my family, as in many others, the ilish of the Padma was, in Pritha Sen’s words, “not a fish but an emotion.”
So many indeed are the avatars of the Padma that it is only fitting that she should be the subject of this pioneering collection of essays, by geologists, urban planners, historians, sociologists, and, of course, literary critics and scholars of film. It is as if the river itself had risen up to wash away the boundaries that usually keep these specializations within their disciplinary silos. The result is a fascinating, multivocal conversation, and a fitting tribute to its storied subject.
Brooklyn November 1, 2021
1. The Khudnawisht Sawanih Hayat-i-Nassakh (Autobiography of Abdul Ghafur Nassakh), ed. Abdus Subhan, The Asiatic Society of Calcutta, 1986. I am grateful to Murali Ranganath for bringing this book to my notice and for translating the passages quoted here.
The story of river Padma (or Padda in Bangla) begins with the pivotal bifurcation of the mighty river Ganges (or Ganga in Bangla) into two distinctive channels, the Bhagirothi-Hooghly and the Padma, each inaugurating and claiming separate ecological and cultural regimes. The two have defined two destinies inscribed in the political-administrative identities of West Bengal in India and Bangladesh, formerly eastern Bengal. A singular flow with two names, the Bhagirothi and Hooghly channel flowing through West Bengal, is vigorously claimed as the Ganga extending the mythical, mystical, and mythological aura of that ancient river. For the most part a river of eastern Bengal, and now Bangladesh, the Padda does not carry the reified charge of the Ganges–it is not considered to be sacred–but remains the principal protagonist in a hydro-geological drama: the making of the dynamic delta of Bengal.
Considering that the cosmologized and sacralized status of the river has captivated the imagination of people in India since ancient times, accounts, anthologies, and treatises on the river Ganges are prolific. An estimation and understanding of the river Padma, on the other hand, remain inadequate. Such a narrative paucity is surprising if the Padma is now the principal and natural continuation, as well as the epical termination, of the Ganges.
The Padma is the Ganges, and the Padma is not. Both are true. Which is to say a narrative of the Padma/Padda as the last Ganga requires an understanding of the continuity of India’s ancient river as well as the distinctiveness displayed in its deltaic incarnation. As with all rivers that have sustained societies and settlements, the Padda is unique in generating one of the densest and most productive human habitats in the most vulnerable place on earth. Linked to the glorious Ganges, but a powerful and enduring phenomenon itself, the Padda has granted its own range of responses, from the mystical to the emotive, and the mythical to the innovative.
The Great Padma is the first book of its kind in approaching the final journey of the Ganges from diverse documentative, narrative, and interpretative lenses. From the geological origin of the river and the delta with which it is existentially imbricated, the social, cultural, and settlement practices that describe a distinctive river realm, historical and political events that have turned with the twists of the river, and the imaginaries through which its fierce force has been reckoned with in life and literature, the book presents Padda in a comprehensive way.
As an assemblage of essays, notes, photographs, and maps, many gathered here for the first time, The Great Padma may very well claim to be a source book for understanding a river that defines Bengal/ Bangladesh, its land, water, and people. Topics in environment and ecology, geography and hydrology, bridges and settlements, boats and transports, and even a chicken curry appear in The Great Padma What perhaps comes forth as a thread is the water ethos developed by the people in the delta living in a reciprocal relationship with the blight and benefaction of a tumultuous river.
In the enumeration of rivers in Bengal, the Ganges-Padma, or the Ganga-Padda, is not by itself. Before it plunges into the sea, the Padda is already half Brahmaputra at the first mohona, and later merges with the Meghna to form a second mohona. The word Mohona carries a more beautiful set of meanings in Bangla than the straight hydrographic fact of being a river confluence. A mohona is more than a meeting of two–it is a merging of flows and the unpredictable productions of new forms and conditions, and often the turning point for new histories. Much of the turns and twists in human settlements, from glorious cities to modest villages, have been precipitated by how the water has flowed.
Four hundred billion cubic feet of silt, along with water, flows silently down towards the sea each year through Bengal. An Englishman calculated that the silt amounts to more than 300 pyramids, each the size of Giza. It’s a monumental theater of nature, one of the greatest living, moving forces on earth.
It sustains more than 200 million people in two countries, in two Bengals, although keeping them on tenterhooks.
The flow continues into the belly of the ocean. Moving through an amorphous land-water nexus at the coast, the silt and water finally create a submarine landmass greater than the size of two Bengals together. It is in the encounter between the river and the sea, between the sweet and the salty, between two directions in which waters flow–the riparian and the tidal–that the present Bengal Delta has taken form and shape. Is taking form and shape as the process is an unfolding one. With the Ganga as the harbinger of the most powerful mythopoeia of India, perhaps a greater attention was given to the origins of the Ganga in the mountains and not to how it ends in the sea. The story of a river is as much about mountains as the sea, and the terrain it traverses. Our book takes off where others have stopped short in telling the story of the Ganga. A big part of the incomplete story is how the Ganga ends.
The end of the Ganga is about the river Padda, as the mighty river comes to be known from the threshold of the Bengal Delta. While one end of the bifurcated Ganga implicates the Bhagirothi-Hooghly channel all the way to Sagar Island in a relatively placid way, the end depicted in the Padda is far more tumultuous and dynamic. As the biggest phenomenon of the Gangetic flow, the Padma fractures into multiple channels before its submarine transformation in an operatic termination of a river journey. “The Ganges is young and sparkling when it comes out of the snow-covered Himalayas,” writes Qurratulain Hyder, in her mini epic Fireflies in the Mist. “It grows muddy and middle-aged as it traverses the hot and dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. By the time it crosses half of Bengal and reaches Naryan Gunj near Dacca it becomes world-weary and is called Boorhi or Old Ganga.” Whether the Ganges reaches Dhaka as the Buriganga is an over estimation, or evocation of the theory that the Ganges-Padma once flowed close to Dhaka, Hyder presents a rich and complex tapestry weaving the destiny of nations old and new in a Gangetic spectrum.
When the Ganga reaches the Bengal Delta, it reincarnates with a new energy. It is hardly “world-weary.” From the accumulated mud and silt, it grows into a new enchantment, Padmavati, as the river Padma was first called. For a river as grand as the Ganges, to have it terminate with the name Padma is telling, since the “poddo” or lotus refers to the blooming of a new time. Geological studies of the delta show how the distinct layers of silt deposit over time, almost in a rhythmic way. A sectional image of the deltaic silt shows not only the layers of material deposits, the fine difference in microscopic properties, but a deposit of time itself. From a geographical to a political history of the delta, the layers are quiet witnesses to life enacted on that dynamic domain.
Physicist and science writer Dipen Bhattacharya and geographers Arfar Razi and Sanjoy Roy, in their essays here, provide a cosmogonic scenario of how the free-floating Indian subcontinental plate crashed to create the Himalayas, leaving the eastern end mostly as a primordial sea. The Tibetan Plateau is an outcome of that grand collision, and the legendary rivers–the Ganges and the Brahmaputra–an epochal consequence. Originating in the great plateau, and in the same lake (Manasarovar), the two rivers descended with water, silt, and debris from two opposite directions into that still unformed or nascent delta, then mostly estuarine waters. Because of the topographic difference, and incessant carry-over, silt began to be deposited and land literally started to rise from the bed of the sea. Thus was the hydraulic beginning of the Bengal Delta, and the making of a terraqueous geography.
It would be another 15,000 years or so, since the first silt deposit, before I would stand on the banks of the river that would come to be called the Padda.
My first sighting of the Padda came with the strange sensation of two terrors experienced simultaneously. It was sometime in late April of 1971, that momentous year of war and liberation for Bangladesh. A primal terror was triggered by the sudden encounter with the magnificent and certainly beautiful river that had already formed an entity larger than life even before I had seen it, and now I was, a young boy, facing the very river whose other side was not visible, and which we must cross. Flowing gloriously and indifferently, the river appeared to have a mythic scale against which I felt terribly puny. In the immediacy of the beautiful, I am sure I sensed that terror of the sublime in the best Burkean sense without understanding it. In one of his elegies, that I read later, Rainer Maria Rilke makes it more ominous: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror...” I would also come to find the appellations of “shorbonasha” (all destroying) and “kirtinasha” (destroyer of human achievements) in Bangla folk songs and poems when describing the magnificent river.
The other terror was more insidious, one that led my family to the bank of the river on that day in April planning to cross to the other side. A tantalizing line in the distant horizon, that other side seemed ethereal and incomprehensible. Fleeing Dhaka city from the murderous campaign of the Pakistan Army, we were headed south, towards the mighty river, intending to cross it to reach relatives on that side. As if crossing the river would throw off the horde that came to the delta from mountain passes and arid fields from distant lands in the west.
Intending to find a safe harbor by crossing the river, my father took the family on a road journey from Dhaka to Srinagar, about thirty kilometers south. We stayed with some relatives in Srinagar, realizing that this was our ancestral land in the area broadly called Bikrampur, a famously ancient janapada (habitation) between the Padda and the Meghna rivers. A few days later, we crossed the great river at Louhojong, and moved over to Bhanga in Faridpur. Even at that time I found the name Bhanga intriguing, assuming that it may be tied to the capricious river a few miles north, for bhanga meant “broken, eroded.” The river leaves its trace even when it is no longer there.
Perhaps my father imagined a safety on the other bank of the Padma arguing that the Pakistani army would never cross that oceanic expanse. I now wonder about those young Pashtun and Punjabi soldiers and compare them with the thirteenth-century Turks and Afghans–the other historical incursion–who came over and got absorbed in the delta. Adding to that list, the Arakanese Moghs and the piratical Portuguese who would travel up from the coast to inland rivers, I now wonder how much marauding and devastation have happened on the banks of the Padda, not to mention the unrecorded dissolution of so many cities, settlements, and villages in its waters? So much of that is obscured history.
*
Beyond the physical and hydrological facts, and life lived with it, a river attains the status of an idea in the imaginaries it nurtures and instigates. To recall the many unknown and occluded stories of the river was one of the prompts for making this book. A key motivation to understand the Padda–the “soul” of the Bengal Delta, as it were–in a fulsome way was triggered by a series of realizations.
One simple reason for a book on the Padda was it has not been done. There is no shortage of books on the Ganges, but most give scant attention as the river enters the Delta. It seems by the time the Gangetic narrative reaches the Delta, it has run out of things to say or is hard pressed to understand the river from its more or less ribbon-like state to the oscillating and intertwined quality in the Delta. It would appear that Padma has been subsumed in the overflow of the Ganges. There is also the unresolved matter of how the Bhagirothi and the Padda are to be related to the Ganga. Padda’s presence and esteem in western Bengal, where the Bhagirothi-Hoogly channel continues
to be seen as the Ganga, are ambiguous. A critical question raised by Arfar Razi and Sanjoy Roy, which forms a significant content of this book, is not about where the Padda starts, but where the Ganga ends. The answer is not one of a simple riparian or hydrographic nature, although that is primary: where the Ganges ends or flows is very much a question of sacred geography and political imagination.
Before my first sighting of the river, the Padda was already etched in my mind as an allegory of Bangladesh, or eastern Bengal, as the region was known for the longest period. Crossing Bengal diagonally, the Padda links up all major landscapes, as well as divides them, in a concatenation of land borrowed from water. What gives a definition to eastern Bengal is the Padda imaginary, as well as what the historian Iftekhar Iqbal describes in a more ecological sense as the Padda Process, or what Razi and Roy claim as the Padma Dynamic. In his preface to the book, Amitav Ghosh notes the dynamic as a “state of constant riverine mutability” that is also more powerful than anywhere else on Earth.
To approach the Padda imaginary and process, and give an account of its many natures, we invited scholars, researchers, and writers from diverse fields, and photographers with different interests. It is not surprising that most writers have tried to define the dynamism of the delta through an understanding of Padda River. With all its tributaries and distributaries, and partnering rivers, the Padda is the principal source of the incredible hydrological network that gives form and shape to the Bengal Delta. Dipen Bhattacharya provides a sweeping geological history of the formation of the Delta that connects the time of the supercontinent Gondwana and the epochal collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates to the present landscape of avulsions and accretions. Architect, cartographer, and historian of geography Anthony Acciavatti gives an account of the dynamic traversal of Himalayan mountains to the diluvian delta, in the form of silt, debris, and fluid land whose constant accumulation are the stuff of the delta. He sees the rising of Dhaka city, from riverine clay rematerialized as burnt bricks of buildings, as “one great exhalation of the Himalayan jetsam.”
Iftekhar Iqbal extends the ecological significance of the Padda to establish the intertwined agrarian and cultural life-world as part of the “Padda Process.” In a more located elaboration of how the Padda is at the heart of Bangladesh’s agricultural-economic matrix, Iqbal describes the transport hub Goalundo at the confluence of two great rivers as the “ecological capital” of the Delta.
The Padma is a constant test of the mettle and métier of the people who live by its unreliable banks. Researchers Hassan Rakib and Afifa Razzaque assembled a summary documentation of thirteen selected settlements along the Padma, from the city of Gaur to the island of Hatiya, from deep inland to the turbulent coast, to present a panorama of riverine Bengalis trying to make settlements with an unsettling force. Life lived on the tenuous terrain defined by the Padda is literally a moving drama, and calls for new modes of observation and documentation as well. Architect Marina Tabassum describes how lives are lived within an accepted flux in lands and properties, and how innovative models of building respond to that.
From ancient Greek perception of the Ganges that consigned a paradisal land at the end of the river and puranic narratives which established a Gangetic cosmology, as noted by architect and researcher
Shakeel Hossain, to the many poetic, literary, and representational forms through which the Padda is invoked in more recent times, as discussed by writer and critic Syed Manzoorul Islam, the spectrum of the “idea” of the Ganges-Padma is wide and multivalent. Islam extends his argument to describe a “river sphere,” in which he perceives a duality in the river itself, in its “grace and fierceness, immensity and intimacy, and timelessness and the temporal,” that he finds reflected in the Bengali psyche. “This dual attitude to rivers,” Amartya Sen writes in his memoirs, “I would gradually come to understand, is innate in the minds of many people in east Bengal.” In attempting a more complex “reading” of the faces of the river people, anthropologist and scholar Naveeda Khan extends Goutam Ghose’s cinematic rendering of the river and its riverine people in his epic film “Padma Nodir Majhi,” and explores the intimacy between the geographic landscape and facial fabric.
As a principal river in a riverine network, the Padda also shows how Bengalis have attempted to navigate and traverse it. Sailor and restorer of deltaic boats, Yves Marre gives a panorama of boats in Bengal, how they evolved and formed diverse types. Architect and boat enthusiast Arijit Chatterjee gives a closer look at the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s famous bajra, itself known as the “Padma,” which was the setting for many of the poet’s famous writings when he lived in the river realm of east Bengal. Boats and riverways also carry dire stories. Historian Tariq Ali argues how the integrated system of colonial rail and steamer service on the Padda was an infrastructural innovation, but also a significant part of the colonial-imperial program to administer and rule over a water-fissured landscape; it was no less than a “conquest of the Padma.” Beyond being an ecological nexus and critical transit point in the steamer circuit, Goalundo emerges again in the culinary essay of food historian Pritha Sen. Wishing to revive the history and taste of the famous “Goalundo Chicken Curry,” she traces its origin in the humble cooking of Padda fishermen on their small boats to the elegant cabins of colonial-era steamers. In nourishing the food needs of people on its banks, the Padma provides an agro-ecological sustenance which, as writer and educator Zeenat Chowdhury reports, is observed even in the tradition of making sweets.
In the building and completion of the Padma Bridge this year, the river is implicated in the fifty-year mark of the nation-state of Bangladesh. Engineer and bridge designer Robin Sham writes about the challenges of building the monumental bridge over the unbridled waters, and taking a step forward in the often conflicted overlay of infrastructure and ecology. Architect and writer Adnan Morshed takes a far view of the Padma Bridge, in not only how it appears to him to proceed into an infinitude on the other side, the thin line that he witnessed, but how it may change the horizon of Bangladesh.
Crossing over to that tantalizing line on the other side that I experienced some fifty years ago, the year that poignantly marked the birth of Bangladesh, I wonder if being Bengali requires a Padmatic test. The publication of this book some fifty years later is an anniversary gift to that vexing question. When the Buddhist mystical poet Bhusuku, in his Charyapada poem, becomes a “Bangali” in crossing the Padma, he could never imagine the immensely convulsive conjunction of bridges and crossings, infrastructure and environment, national imagination and new estimations twelve centuries later. The Great Padma is a new reckoning of an ancient river and the old topic of becoming Bangali.
Acknowledgments
It may sound clichéd, but a book on the Padma took on the attributes of the mighty river. Like the river, the work for the book meandered and swerved, lean at times although propulsive otherwise, but accumulating fresh layers of understanding. A huge effort was required in arriving at the present content of the book, with the support of and participation by many.
I would like to thank all the contributors and supporters of this grand project:
First, all the contributors whose original essays have enriched our understanding of the Padma.
Amitav Ghosh for generously agreeing to write the preface, and turning to a topic that we know is dear to him.
The research team at Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements whose energy and dedication to the topic gave it a new life: Hassan Mohammad Rakib, Arfar Razi, Afifa Razzaque, Sanjoy Roy, and Nusrat Sumaiya. Sanjoy and Razi were especially dedicated to writing a major component of the book, and reviewing and editing other sections.
Muntakim Haque and Afifa Razzaque at Bengal Institute for the grueling work of acquiring, managing and editing the vast visual content. Samira Marzia and Khalifa Sampad for producing the maps in the section on settlements. Farhat Afzal, Kazi Farzana Akter, and Syeda Fatematuj Zohura for their supporting role.
All the photographers whose work are included here, and those who supported in sharing their personal archives.
Irteza Ameen, the incomparable designer of the book, who rematerialized the overflowing content of the book into a beautiful gift.
Nusrat Sumaiya for the overall management of the research and logistical work carried out with her usual boundless enthusiasm.
Friends, colleagues and well-wishers – Salauddin Ahmed, Hasina Choudhury, Saif Ul Haque, Iftekhar Iqbal, Syed Manzoorul Islam, David Ludden, and Jyoti Puri – who have read or heard sections of the book, and offered various suggestions and comments.
Abul Khair, chairman of the executive board of Bengal Institute and chairman of Bengal Foundation, for his enthusiastic and relentless advancement of the book, suggestions and advice, and taking the project to its finality.
Various individuals and organizations that supported our efforts through granting images, photographs and other materials from their collection: Dr Jayanta Sengupta at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, the Southern Methodist University, the Royal Geographic Society, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Kisak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Library.
Gordon Goff and his wonderful team at ORO Editions in San Francisco, especially Jake Anderson, for undertaking the publication of this book and bearing with the various sways along the way.
And, finally, the sponsor: The IFIC Bank Ltd, in Bangladesh, for their whole-hearted and generous support towards the publication of the book.
James Rennell F.R.S., 1786
Following the victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company commenced ruling in the Indian subcontinent. The Company expanded its territory in the lower Gangetic plain after winning the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and implemented the Diwani throughout Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The Company established its capital in Calcutta in 1773 and appointed Warren Hastings as its first governor-general. By 1793, it had abolished Nizamat (local rule), and taken complete control of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, making the Nawabs as pensioners of the Company. In 1764, James Rennell, a leading English geographer, was appointed as the Surveyor General of India under the British East India Company. Rennell developed precise maps of the dominion of East Indian Company in the Indian subcontinent and published ‘A Bengal Atlas’ that was crucial from British strategic and administrative interests. His ‘A Map of Bengal, Bahar, Oude, Allahabad with part of Agra and Delhi exhibiting the course of the Ganges from Hurdwar to the Sea’ is considered one of the finest cartographic advancements of the Eighteenth century that represented the Company’s supremacy (shaded with pink on the map) in the subcontinent until the 1780s. On this map, Rennell provided detailed and precise hydrological networks, orographic and geomorphic features, and names of places, as well as extensive road networks of the Company’s territory in the Indian subcontinent. One of the striking features on this map is how the Padma used to follow a different course, more west of the Lower Meghna River, before ending up in the Bay of Bengal. The current Arial Khan River may be a remnant of its earlier path. He never mentioned the Padma on the map but presented the Ganges River as a whole, from Haridwar to the Meghna estuary.
The poet Rabindranath Tagore lived in his ancestral estate house, kuthibari, with his wife and children for the last two years of his decade-long stay, from 1891–1901, in Shilaidaha, in the Kushtia district of undivided Bengal (present day Bangladesh). When the kuthibari was under construction, Tagore first visited Shilaidaha in 1889 to supervise construction and manage the vast family estate. At the age of twenty-eight years, he took refuge on a boat with his family for the first time, and since then the boat remained an inseparable aspect of the poet’s life at Shilaidaha. The boat was called the Padma
The Padma boat was key in establishing Tagore’s inseparable affinity with the fluvial landscape of Bengal, hosting and inspiring his poetic exploration of the rivers. Tagore wrote most of his short stories, notably Chitra (1913), Kalpana (1900), Khanika (1899), and Naibedya (1901) on the boat, and started to write the dance drama Chitrangada (1892), as well as poems for Gitanjali (1910), Geetimalya (1912), and Balaka (1916). Many notable songs were written during his stay on the boat. In Chinnapatrabali (1906) and Pitrismriti, written by the poet’s son, there are detailed accounts of the Rabindranath’s everyday life on the boat. In Shilaidaha, Rabindranath met Gagan Harkara, who familiarized the poet with the great baul Lalon Shah, since then a lifelong influence on Rabindranath Tagore.
Commissioned by Rabindranath’s great grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore as a budgerow (bajra in Bengali), and built in Dhaka, the Padma boat was moored on the Hooghly River in Calcutta most of its life until Rabindranath moved it to Shilaidaha. The family fleet had other bajra boats namely Chitra, Durga, Atrai, and Nagor, and also a Jolly boat, two dinghies (laldingi), and two other small boats named Chapala and Chanchala. For leisure and travel, the Tagores used the bajras to sail on the Icchamati, Padma, Gorai, Jamuna, Atrai, Fuljhor, and Nagor. Rabindranath personally spent most of his time sailing on the Padma boat on the Padma River. To easily navigate on the seasonal rivers and tributaries, the bajra boats were built as shallow draft vessels. The hull did not have a keel, but a network of ribs and lateral tie members held the structure of the planked and skillfully caulked hull, all in seasoned hardwood. In Pitrismriti, the poet’s son Rathindranath describes the bajra boats as a symbol of wealth among landlords and the wealthy of Bengal. In a letter to Mrinalini Debi (dated January 19, 1901), Rabindranath proposes a river voyage with the entire family in two bajra boats in the winter—a vacation on the river and on the char islands. The Padma had two lavish bedrooms with beds, easy chairs, tables, stools, and a small library. It had a washroom and a multipurpose roof deck. For sailing, the bajra had twelve oars and a single mast with a square canvas sail arrangement. The crew included guards (borkondaj), boatmen (majhi), helmsmen managing the heavy
rudder, house help, butler, and cleaners to help with everyday requirements of the master, his family, and invited guests.
Accounts of long river journeys with the poet’s family— Dwarakanath’s voyage to Benares (1846), Rabindranath’s travel to Orissa in a bajara boat, among many others—substantiate the constant presence of the river and its multi-hued dimensions in Rabindranath’s imagination.1 Rabindranath would stay for months alone on the boat with only his crew. In Chinnapatrabali (1906), he describes the Padma to be his host for all seasons. When with family, temporary arrangements were made on the char islands for bathing and leisure—wooden posts and planks were used to make dip pools for children, covered areas to cook, and changing rooms for men and women. When the bajras set sail, it would have a dinghi or pulwah attached as a baggage boat carrying provisions, firewood, servants, and their belongings. Rabindranath would sometimes go for a swim or a walk across the sandy islands. His deeply perceptive observations of village life on the banks, the nomad islands, and the river itself are reflected in his writings and correspondences from Shilaidaha, especially his letters to his niece Indira Devi (written between 1887 and 1895).
In Rabindranath’s oeuvre, the description of the landscape in relation to the river are astoundingly lucid yet spiritual. The banks, the seasonal shrinking and swelling of the river, and the feminine personification of the ‘nature of Padma’2 made him relate to new and unknown dimensions. Rabindranath thought with the river. Through his days on the Padma boat he emplaces the river in his thoughts, but the river kept moving. One can argue that the duality of this situation led the poet to find a phenomenological grounding
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