By Sunil Amrith

Click here for an interesting video by Naimul Haq on Bangladesh’s response to natural disasters. A widely predicted effect of climate change is the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events—to which Bangladesh has been no stranger. Haq’s video discussion examines the effects of Cyclone Mohasen, which struck in May 2013. He points out that loss of life was far lower than in previous cyclones (Alia in 2009, Sidr in 2007): in part this was because Mohasen had weakened by the time it hit land, but Huq argues that this also owes much to Bangladesh’s increasing preparedness and resilience in the face of natural disasters. He emphasizes the efficiency of the evacuation of over a million people in advance of Mohasen, thanks to Bangladesh’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme, which has increased its reach and its capacities over the past three decades.

by Sunil Amrith

Check out Suchitra Vijayan’s important ongoing project, The Borderlands: a photographic documentation of South Asia’s borderlands.

 ByDebojyoti Das

After a chance encounter with the former keeper of the Customs House archives in Kolkata while doing research in the Hamilton archives in the Sundarbans, I was filled with curiosity about the records. Soon I completed my archival work in Gosaba and headed for Kolkata. It was on a Tuesday morning that I called up my friend Shantanu Acarya (Superintendent of Revenue and Customs, DOV) to arrange my visit to the Customs archives.

He received me warmly at the office entrance and took me to his chamber in the third floor.  The building was grand with a high ceiling. Rebuilt in 1942, it initially acted as a hospital during World War II. The building has unique features: designed in Victorian style, it is one of the few buildings of its time built with reinforced concrete and hollow cement blocks. The entrance at the main gate has a stone buried in the foundation that testifies to its history. The building originally housed horse stables during colonial times. Today there is parking space for cars, palm trees and gardens. On display is a vintage car designed in 1935, seized during a maritime customs operation in 1985. Gold and hashish were discovered in the car. A decade later, the cars seats were dismantled for repair work and more gold bars were discovered. The ground floor of the building also had a statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, installed by the “Group D” staff—members of the labour union. 

Mr Shantanu next guided me to the director’s office and the archives. As the director was away, his personal assistant asked us to make an appointment for the following week. Next he took me to their Customs Club, where employees were playing chess, pool and table tennis. I took a photograph of Customs Preventive Service that commemorated the customs officials who died in World War II. Mr Shantanu explained to me that during the British period, the customs department were not as centralised as today, each of the major port cities had customs offices. We also gleaned from the display board that the archives held the records of commissioners who served in this department since 1900.

In the year 2003-4 on the initiative of the central government a custom museum was commissioned in Goa’s Portuguese-era Blue Building, built in the 15^th century. During that time Mr Shantanu was asked to dig out the archives so that they could be transferred to the museum for display. Mr Shantanu took a keen interest in record-keeping and soon he discovered a wealth of material that was of curious interest. He explains that a record of 1940 contains a seized fridge priced Rs. 7000, run on kerosene. He also recovered a logbook of daily records dating back to the 1930s that contained notes on items seized, organized by sea route on a day-to-day basis.

Once the exercise was over a number of files were transferred to Goa for the museum’s display. Under the commissionership of different IRS (Indian Revenue Service) officials, several safai abhyan were carried out to clear the archives of their growing records. One member of staff speculates that the old records must have been removed and destroyed in one of these campaigns. However, I did discover a number of files dating back to the 1960s during my short inspection of the Record Room. Mr Shantanu assured me that he will try his best to locate the wooden chests that he saw a decade back containing records of colonial period.

Although I was not very happy about the state of record keeping, this is unfortunately not unusual in contemporary India. Mr Shantanu soon had other interesting things to share with me as we climbed up the stairs to the building’s rooftop. On the skyline in the distance we could see the majestic Howra Bridge with small boats and steamers ferrying tourists. On the south side was the Vivekananda Setu (bridge), the only cable bridge over the Ganges in India. In the distance we could see the Howra Railway Station and remnants of the railway track that once connected the Kolkata port. The Custom House was strategically located close to where ships once docked. Surrounding the building were historic monuments like the Writers Building, the Reserve Bank of India and the Mackinnon and Macintosh Shipping Company building that is now transformed into a shopping mall after a 2003 fire.

My visit was at an end. I had planned to meet the Commissioner once she was back from New Delhi. Mr Shantanu gave me the contact details of other people involved in the museum project and the names of officials who took keen interest in preservation of the records, including those responsible for an exhibition of old records that took place few years back. I left the building with some hope that future visits might prove fruitful.

By Debojyoti Das

I am currently in the Sundarbans, investigating local experiences of environmental change.

The sketches below were made by Mr Mukondo Gyan who is a poet, freelance insurance agent and writer from Doyapur village. His writings have appeared in the local Bengali press, and his poems are also published. These sketches were made in 2011 with toothbrushes and colours that he collected from the neighbouring forest. The sketches depict the destruction and the very nature of the cyclone that brought immense misery to the settlements in Doyapur. The area’s agricultural fields are barren and mostly saline. The production of rice, potato, cereals and chilies have declined after the cyclone. Although the tourism industry is booming on the island, it has brought new social and environmental problems.

By Sunil Amrith

Recent data from the World Bank suggests that global migrant remittances exceeded $400 billion in 2012. They are estimated to reach $534 billion by 2015. Remittances have shown “remarkable resilience” through the global financial crisis; they amount to around three times the total sum of development assistance. Though the United States remains the greatest source of migrant remittances in the world, the strongest growth is within Asia. India is the world’s largest recipient of migrant remittances, amounting to $70 billion annually: the greatest source of those remittances is the large population of Indian contract workers in the Middle East. Remittances from overseas amounted to 3.4 per cent of India’s GDP in 2011; in neighbouring Bangladesh, this figure is over 10 per cent.

I will write more in a separate post about migrant remittances in historical perspective. Is the growing importance of migrant remittances a novel symptom of globalization, or can we see parallels or even connections with an earlier history of Asian migration? My last book, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia, attempted to provide a narrative of that longer history.

Remittances are particularly relevant in the context of coastal regions of Asia that are particularly threatened by rising sea levels, more frequent flooding, and land subsidence. As Sam Knight pointed out in an important feature in the Financial Times a few years ago, while most policy discussions of climate change and migration see migration as an inevitable consequence of climate change—think of the spectre of “climate refugees”—the relationship can work the other way. In some instances, migration is “no longer an act of abandonment, but part of what allows people to stay.” The migration of some family members, and the remittances they send back, allows others to maintain their homes against drought or rising waters.

It would be short-sighted to separate a discussion of “climate migration” too clearly from a broader consideration of inter-regional movement around the Bay of Bengal, both in the past and in the present. The Asian Development Bank acknowledges that “migration flows associated with climate change” will use “existing migration corridors … already used by family or community members.”

By Sunil Amrith

In their incisive and exhaustively-researched book, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari provide an alternative perspective on India’s headlong rush to economic growth since the liberalization of the 1990s. Without denying the very real benefits that economic expansion has brought to India’s rising middle classes, and while recognising the progress towards poverty reduction among some sections of the population, they examine the other side of the oft-reported tale of India’s success: the impoverishment and neglect of rural India, rising social and economic inequality, a veritable “land grab” by the state and powerful corporations at the expense of local people’s rights and livelihoods—and they focus on the environmental costs of the pursuit of growth.

In the parts of the book most directly relevant to the research of the Coastal Frontiers project, Shrivastava and Kothari’s account of how coastal regions are changing provides much food for thought. The expansion of aquaculture for shrimp farming since the 1980s has altered the ecological balance of coastal regions—changing levels of salinity, encroaching upon mangrove forests, undermining the livelihoods of local fishers. Mining, too, is no longer confined to the “charred coal landscapes of eastern India” or the “radioactive uranium belt of Jharkhand”—large swaths of the Orissa coast are being targeted for sand mining for thorium. Port construction proceeds apace, all the way down India’s eastern seaboard: from the  dozen new ports slated for construction along the Orissa coast to the Cuddalore-Nagapatrinam Petroleum Corridor proposed in Tamil Nadu. Churning the Earth charts the effects on the beaches of South Asia of the global trade in waste—the ship-breaking yard of Alang, Gujarat, is the world’s largest, followed closely by the facility in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The work is hazardous, the process is toxic; thousands depend on these yards for employment.

One of the key questions this project seeks to ask is whether a longer historical perspective might add something to our understanding of these changing land- and seascapes, and of the changing strategies that local people adapt—while many of these ecological shifts have accelerated since the 1980s, they have roots in colonial and post-colonial history, as Shrivastava and Kothari acknowledge at many points in the book.

 Churning the Earth is essential, sobering, reading. The picture the authors present is not wholly bleak, however: the second half of the book focuses on their vision for a “radical ecological democracy.”

Crossing Yangon River

 By Sunil Amrith

At Pansodan Jetty, I am ushered into the Manager’s office by two youths. An old man, longyi-clad, asks us to sign a ledger, and writes out painstakingly two tickets: to Dalah and back. The journey takes all of ten minutes. We exchange a few words in Tamil; “I am Tamil,” he says, “but born in Burma.” Out of historian’s habit, too ready to see locked drawers as archival stashes, I wonder what materials are contained in his office.

The rickety ferry that takes us across the river is at least thirty years old—quite possibly much older than that. Once they were run by the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. Vendors of everything roam the decks. An old Muslim man operates a makeshift wheelchair attached to a bicycle. Young men hawk DVDs of the comedian Zargana—released from prison only in 2012—and of Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches. Everything is as it was, yet things in Myanmar are completely different.

The ferry is full of commuters, but the container port hosts only a few ships. Surely that is set to change—Myanmar beckons to the world’s hungry investors.

The purpose of my trip is to see Dalah which, on the account of my nineteenth century sources, was a thriving shipyard. Already by 1890 Dalah, across the river from Rangoon, had developed into a thriving dry dock and repair station: “here also were situated Boiler Shops, Erecting Shops, Machine Shops, Carpenters Shops and all the other type of shops which go to make up a shipyard.”

Today it bears little trace of that history. It is an unremarkable place with a somewhat abandoned air to it. For a moment, I imagine making a tour of the Bay of Bengal’s once-great now-forgotten ports: Dalah and Nagapatnam and Masulipatnam. A project for another time, perhaps.