There is a thought-provoking feature in the New Yorker on the effects of recent cyclones in the Sundarbans, featuring the superb photographs of Ismail Ferdous.
By Sunil Amrith
I have been working through the fascinating archives of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Among the company reports and other miscellaneous items are many details about the company—which tells us something about history of steam power in South Asia, and about the Irrawaddy River itself.
The Company’s grand headquarters now house the Myanmar Port Authority. The building still dominates Yangon’s skyline; though it is unclear how long that will remain the case, given the construction boom that appears to be underway in the city.
The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company was formed in 1865, owned by the brothers Henderson, originally from the village of Pittenween in Fifeshire, Scotland. The family’s fortunes rose from the initial misfortune of George Henderson, shipwrecked while commanding a sailing vessel “trading to the near east.” He survived the ordeal, and installed himself in Italy, where he flourished in the marble trade to Britain—the Glasgow end of the business was handled by his three brothers. By the 1850s, the Hendersons had abandoned marble and moved into long-distance shipping: they owned a small fleet that sailed between Scotland, New York and Quebec; at the turn of the 1860s, they were at the “forefront” of the “emigrant trade” to New Zealand. On the return journey from New Zealand, the Hendersons’ vessels began to call at Rangoon, where they took on cargoes of rice and teak. Before long, the Burma rice trade proved so profitable that they abandoned the antipodean leg of the voyage altogether; around the same time, they purchased a small fleet of steam-powered river craft to profit from the Irrawaddy’s flourishing trade.
A promotional booklet of 1872 assured potential investors that “there is no trade to the east more capable of … continuous expansion than that of Burmah.” The Irrawaddy had “its banks studded with towns and villages, crowded with an active, industrious population to whom this river is the great highway.” Until the advent of steam, “the whole traffic on the river was conducted by native boats”—up to twenty-five thousand of them. Now steam power, “by its speed, regularity, and safety, is gradually superseding native craft”; all that was needed was a “sufficient supply of plant to monopolise, in great measure, the traffic.” For two decades, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company imported its coal directly from Britain; from the 1890s, supplies began to arrive from the coal-fields of Bengal.
* Full references will appear in chapter 4 of my forthcoming book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013)
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.
By Sunil Amrith
This temple is unusual in Malaysia in facing directly out to sea. It was built in the late-nineteenth century by local Tamil fishermen—the story I was told is that many had arrived in Malaya to work on the rubber plantations, but made their way from the mainland to Pangkor to make their living from the sea. It is likely that they originated from coastal districts in Tamil Nadu, quite possibly from fishing communities. Read the rest of this entry »
By Debojyoti Das
My preliminary field visit to the Sundarbans in May 2012 was challenged by the roasting heat and by tidal waves. I was warned of the turbulent waters by Mr. Ajit Sarkar, director of Help Tourism who had visited the islands recently. On my trip, he introduced me to Bali Island, adopted by Help Tourism as a model village. Read the rest of this entry »
By Sunil Amrith
Rachel Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, is one of the most poetic works of science writing that I know. Some of her most evocative descriptions were reserved for the mangrove forests of the U.S. Atlantic coast. “Mangroves are among the far migrants of the plant kingdom, forever sending their young stages off to establish pioneer colonies” she wrote. Mangroves excelled in “creating land where once there was sea.”
By Sunil Amrith
A recent trip down the Tamil Nadu coast took me further inland, to the heart of Chettinad. The Chettiars of this region once had a commercial empire that stretched from their arid corner of the Tamil plains to Rangoon, Penang, Singapore and Saigon.
In the early-twentieth century, Chettiar agents could be found in every small village in Burma, and they were the main bankers to Burmese rice farmers. Young men from this tight-knit community moved constantly back and forth across the Bay of Bengal. The usual pattern was three years in Burma, and then a period of “home leave.” Read the rest of this entry »