and people were well off and there were fewer of them. Food was plentiful. But now we don't get that much crop. We get a fourth of what we used to get. The land that used to produce one maund [in Panipur, a little over eighty pounds] now hardly yields ten seers [about twenty pounds]. The fertility has gone down that much.
Why has the fertility reduced so much?
Because of the silting of the river, we don't get the rich soil we used to in the floods.
As we settled in to talk, people wandered in and sat down. Sunil told us he owned about fifteen acres of land, a fair-sized farm in these parts, and that his farm had changed over the years :
I had people working for me, three or four men; I paid them a salary. I worked along with them.
Have you ever had any sharecroppers or subtenants?
No, not then. Now I have sharecroppers. Because now I can't get good, sincere workers. These workers don't want to work on a monthly basis, only on a daily basis. It's more expensive that way.
When you used to hire workers, were they Hindu or Muslim?
They were all Hindus. Hindus had Hindu workers, Muslims had Muslim workers. The hired workers, too, would only seek work from people of their own community.
Why did you hire only Hindus?
I searched for Hindu workers because the person I kept on a monthly basis lived with us as a member of my family, so he had to be Hindu.
On a daily basis, it doesn't matter whether they are Hindu or Muslim. They work for the day, then they go away. When the work was greatest, I would hire both Hindus and Muslims on a daily basis.
What kinds of problems would you have staying with Muslim laborers?
Eating, going to the kitchen, because the person who would work here would be a member of my family. He has to have access to each and every corner of my house. In the case of Muslims, there's a communal difference. For instance, we won't let him touch the altar of the goddess Lakshmi.
What's the problem with eating?
Muslims take onion and beef. But we don't eat those things.…We don't use the glasses or plates used by others. Also, we don't touch the leftover food of others. But they don't have those same prejudices, they don't care. We care, they don't care. There are some Muslims who mind, but nowadays not many have that attitude.
Sunil clearly expressed a religiously based sense of community, identifying himself as a Hindu in distinction to Muslims. But Sunil was a Namasudra, a person of low caste, and himself subject to discriminatory rules of precisely the same sort from Hindus above him in the caste system.
History of a Tribe
The history of Bangladesh, and especially of this western district bordering India, is a drama with three characters: the Muslims, the caste Hindus, and a variety of low—or outcaste peoples and tribes who stood in the wings socially but center stage dramatically.
In the days of the British Empire, the Faridpur district population consisted of unequal numbers of Hindus and Muslims, and most of the former were Namasudras. Cultivators and artisans, they shared more customs and traits with their Muslim neighbors than with the caste Hindus who were landlords and moneylenders to both.
The origins and fortunes of the Namasudra community are interwoven with the history of the land. It is impossible to understand the character of these people without an image of the territory they occupy. Faridpur defies intuitive concepts of a fixed landscape. Growing up on the American continent, I had always relied on geology to stay put. “The land” as an expression was to me a metaphor for solidity, agelessness, groundedness. To be sure, I understood theoretically that the land had a history, but I believed that it moved in geological time, which is to say, so slowly as to be irrelevant. Bangladesh reeducated me. Time after time, people would point to some solid-seeming expanse of land many miles from anything wet and say, “Only a few years ago we used to catch the ferry here.” Rivers wander, villages disappear overnight, and new lands appear, fertilely beckoning to litigious farmers.
I had thought I understood about the rivers. Only slowly, though, as I learned the histories of the people settled here and as I traveled from one distinct geographic area to another only a few miles distant, did I come fully to comprehend what a living, changing thing this land is and how much its changes interacted with the histories of the peoples occupying it.
The Namasudras were historically fishermen and boatmen, occupying the swampy territories of the districts where even today most live and where six months of the year the land is under water. Adept at the amphibious existence their environment demanded, they were nonetheless scorned by their fellows, partly because of their work and partly because they were newcomers to Hinduism. They were originally a tribe:
[Their] Hinduisation possibly took place at a comparatively late period, when the caste system had taken its fully developed shape and outsiders were admitted reluctantly and only at the bottom of the structure. This explains, to a large extent, the social degradations [they] were subjected to.…Many branded them as the “lowest of mankind,”…whose touch defiles the pure.21
But in the nineteenth century, life began to change for the Namasudras. First, the swamps receded, leaving behind many square miles of fertile new farmland. This alteration in the natural and economic terrain was accomplished by British engineers, who cut a series of roads and drainage canals through the region, a land-reclamation project of gigantic proportions.
Traveling about Faridpur district is a journey into the lives of the waterways. Boats ply them, carrying passengers, jute, fish, and every other essential of village life. Bridges over them wash away in frequent floods. People bathe in them. Women launder clothing and small boys fish in them. Rural development projects are built on their banks. In the days of Empire, the waterways of Faridpur were a favorite topic for letters home from British officials and their wives. In 1884 Lady Beveridge wrote to her children a long account of a journey by boat through the domain of her husband, a district magistrate:
When we first started we were in a narrow river and our way lay through fields of rice without many houses but afterwards we came into a wider river and there were many houses on the banks each standing in its own grove of fruit trees. The country is flat and only a little above the water so that it is easy to see how bad the great storm waves must be when they come up from the sea and run over the land.22
In 1920 Lt. Col. L. N. Bavin described his adventures in the same territory in terms a good deal less favorable:
[It] was a terrible spot.…I used to tour about that country in a primitive houseboat called a budgerow, braving these perilous waterways, creeping up narrow creeks that wound on for miles from one river to another, crossing huge seas where you could get out of sight of land, and calling in at villages that were untouched by the waves of world upheavals.23
One can always tell canals from natural waterways: the latter wander all over the place; the former travel straight on for mile after mile. It is difficult to imagine the countryside without the canals, and easy to imagine what a difference was made by their construction. Their banks act as dams and their courses drain the channeled waters, leaving behind relatively dry land. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the area under cultivation rose from less than fifty percent of the total to almost eighty.24
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