Awakened Waters: Rethinking Extraction and Enchantment in the Sundarbans

Divine and demonic powers play an important role in everyday life in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India, shaping how people relate to the delta’s multispecies ecologies and to each other. On Basanti Island, where I have conducted ethnographic research since 2016, certain creeks, ponds, and lakes are recognized as “awakened” (jagroto), a term that connotes sentience and spiritual potency. In the multi-faith, multi-ethnic village where my research is based, these water bodies are enlivened by the presence of beings that people most often call jokkho, a Bengali term derived from the Sanskrit yaksha. Yaksha have been venerated across religious boundaries in South Asia for millennia, and the multiplicity of names and forms that the beings assume reflect such fluidity. Locally, they are referred to alternatively as deities (debata), evil spirits (apadebata), the Islamic spirits known as jinn, and even as the devil (shaytan). The many ways of knowing and naming water beings draw on longstanding idioms of more-than-human power in South Asia, which are found among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike. Whatever name they assumed, however, the water beings were closely associated with aquatic animals like crocodiles, tortoises, and boal fish, a freshwater catfish with razor sharp teeth. Boal fish are known for their immense size and can grow up to five feet in length. Water beings often assumed the embodied form (rup) of these animals, and many accounts referenced sightings of crocodiles and fish adorned with red vermillion powder and golden nose rings — signs of femininity, fertility, and auspiciousness in rural Bengal. The beings were also understood to possess vast troves of wealth, and many fishermen told miraculous stories of golden treasure glimmering just below the surface of the water.

During the period of my research, relationships with water beings were changing dramatically. Many of the delta’s water bodies were in the process of being converted into private fisheries for export-oriented aquaculture. Increasingly, the owners of these water bodies also sold the water to farmers for irrigation, and in many cases the water was becoming polluted with agricultural runoff or trash. Under these increasingly unpleasant conditions, many people told me that the water beings had simply vanished. Like aquatic animals and certain indigenous varieties of fish, the beings were said to be “extinct” (bilupta). “Can a deity (debata) stay in such a polluted (dushito) place?” people asked, inevitably answering themselves in the negative. Over time, I came to understand these statements about the creek’s pollution in moral as well as material terms. People explained that water beings could no longer endure the “torture” or “oppression” (atyacar) inflicted on them by humans, so they fled. Many people on the island were refugees who framed their own experiences of displacement this way, so these statements were exceptionally poignant. Moreover, the creek’s waning power existed parallel to a sense that people’s humanity was diminishing. Even though past relationships with water beings had been complicated, the departure of the beings was experienced by some as a profound loss. A middle-aged Muslim woman made this explicit when I asked about the water beings and she explained to me that “before, there were many deities (debata) here.” Expressing a sense of nostalgia, she said that as the deities had abandoned the village, faith (biswas) and love (bhalobasha) between neighbors and kin had similarly diminished. To my surprise, however, the new owners of private fisheries claimed that water beings were still present. Even as they relied on scientific aquaculture technologies and fish hatcheries, the fishery owners continued to enact relations with water beings through prayer and ritual.

Changing and contested relationships with water beings have pushed me toward questions about how people experience, conceptualize, and contest environmental change. This article adopts a cosmopolitical ecology approach to understand shifting entanglements between humans, nonhuman nature, and supernatural beings in the Sundarbans’ waters. The disappearance of deities and spirits from the world has often been theorized through a lens of disenchantment, understood as an evolutionary process of rationalization by which scientific understandings of the nature replace mythic understandings. In the twenty-first century Sundarbans, however, a different picture emerged. Most of my Hindu, Muslim, and Christian interlocutors understood the ebbing power of water beings as an effect of material transformations in the island’s more-than-human ecology, including the enclosure of common lands and waters as property and the gradual retreat of aquatic animals. On the other hand, the transition toward commercial aquaculture was also mediated by engagements with water beings. Prior to casting their nets, fishery owners prayed and made offerings in the water and/or at the water’s edge to ensure their safety and a good catch. In this way, extraction from the Sundarbans’ aqueous ecologies emerged as a cosmologically rich cultural formation. This paper considers how human power dynamics and processes of extraction articulate with more-than-human relations, generating material and spiritual gains for some and disorienting losses for others. Extending from this, I approach ruptures in more-than-human relations as a form of violence in aqueous extractive zones.