It is 3.30 in the morning. Still struggling with whether to finish the next assignment or to hurry and prepare the early pre-Fajr meal (sehri/suhoor). Just decided to go along with oatmeal; fastest, and of course healthy and filling. But the dilemma still lies; get done with the next assignment or wash the dishes.
For a girl to live on her own, it’s tough. Especially, when you have to travel outskirts in about 3 hours after your sehri/suhoor. Now, as a female, residing in and belonging to the region of Bengal, a lifestyle as such is still considered “out of culture”. We aren’t helping preserve the culture our ancestors took the pride in. Or, is it?
Coming back to traveling outskirts early in the morning on a weekend. Now this trail following my today’s story goes beyond the gender. Why am I still talking about a female perspective? Because from here on, whatever you are about to read today, is going to be through my eyes and ears, simple.
Away from the hustling city, the banks of Dhaleshwari, Savar holds a land worth the treasure. It holds a very vital portion of the history of Bengal.
If we travel back, just a few years ago we would know how from messages to living beings traveled around this region. As a riverine country, our means have always based on boats. Boats, unique to their native, to their lands, rivers, and culture.
These wooden boats are an integral part of Bengal’s history and culture. Traditional boatbuilders have carried this skill as their legacy within their generations, for as long as the boats lived. For the sake of the first kind of division, these boats can be mainly divided into three categories: fishing boats, cargo boats, and passenger boats. Although passenger boats are almost vanishing due to reduced demand and little knowledge on their significance, a certain level of applaudable approach has been taken to protect both the vanishing and lost knowledge – we will come to this later.
But what makes each boat unique is even more interesting. During the trip, we were explained how each of the boats was precisely designed for regions they represent. This distinctiveness varied due to the depth and width of the river, density, and salinity of the water, and sometimes merely because of the culture they represented. This put me in another dilemma, how deeply did we, as a generation taking the country ahead ever think of something so vital about our geography? Until and unless our majors require us to know this, how many of us ever bothered to understand the issues of salinity in a river and how much it varies from state to state? How many of us even know that each of these boats had their unique names? Let’s come to that now.
Sampan, the most familiar among various types of boats, has its front head high and curved, but the backside is straight. This type of boat travels on huge waves of the sea and are seen in Chittagong and Kutubdia.
Bojra, often seen around the regions of Sirajgonj and Pabna was a favourite to elites. These people converted the boat identical to a house and included all kinds of facilities therein.
Now coming to Dingi, the most familiar boat in Bengal. This small sized boat helps people of the coastal regions to cross the rivers mostly. Again, for its utilization around the coastal region, it can be seen around Cox’s Bazar or Chattogram.
Interesting, isn’t that what culture of ours is? What blew away my mind, even more, was the information that the architecture used to build the boats is 3000 years old, a heritage.
Bengal once flourished in the phase where it held onto almost 120 unique kinds of boat, and today that number has reduced to almost 80. What happened to the rest? Lost.
Nonetheless, there have been approaches (as mentioned earlier) in order to protect these architectures in a feasible way. Because we are eating away our rivers, preservation of this part of the culture has taken place in a miniature form. Today, we may not see much of the Sampans or Bojras in life-size, but they still can be found in the miniature size where it has taken the same manner of construction, same design, same material to be built. The Cultural Preservation Concern of Friendship (NGO) has been working to protect this portion of our heritage in a smaller size.
Although this may sound like we have already saved the riverine heritage of Bengal, the architects and craftsmen of this very heritage may have a little more light to shed.
Baidyanath, one of the oldest craftsmen, has been building boats since he was 15 years old, a craft he learned from his father and has passed down to his sons. Almost 75 now, Baidyanath appreciated the fact that he is being able to protect the information of such a vital portion of his life. However, according to him, there will be nothing that will satisfy his happiness to build another life-sized boat. Having said that, he is still happy to preserve the knowledge of building these boats so dear to cultural heritage of Bangladesh.
While I am struggling to bring this entire trip to a conclusion, I realize how empty it already feels. One piece is not enough to talk about all those lost portions of our cultural heritage. And here I am, another 5.30 am. Another day of thinking how stuck up we are in our own definition of culture and preservations. Looking for another reason to debate about how my lifestyle is such an attack on our culture. Now this is exactly where we confuse societal norm with culture, and exactly where we need to question; which part of the culture do we want to preserve and how?
Sanjida Tanny is the Founder of Contentier (more known as The Raconteuse/Storyteller) and a passionate Art Curator