Muddy Lines and Murky Waters: The Making of a Colonial Deltaic Forest, 1816–1828

This article focuses on the extensive, low-lying mangrove forests in the lower Gangetic Delta, commonly called the Sundarbans, in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The English East India Company (EIC) sought to bring this shifting, unstable, partially submerged, and thickly forested deltaic terrain into its framework of civil law and revenue administration. The people most intimately connected with the forest, however, were marginalized in the EIC state’s correspondences and reports. The EIC exerted a stranglehold over the labor and movement of itinerant forest users like boaters, fishers, woodcutters, and honey collectors. They were removed from the forest as their subsistence base and compelled to work as agricultural laborers or salt boilers to further the company’s mission of maximum revenue extraction from the Sundarbans. This had important long-term environmental ramifications, including intensified exploitation of a much-shrunken forest and heightened human-tiger conflict in the region.