Slippery Entanglements: Spiritual and Gendered Experiences of Uncertainty in the Riverine Context of Bengali Char lands

Annemiek Prins

doi:10.3390/rel12110906

Abstract

This paper focuses on the spiritual and gendered experiences of dwelling-in-uncertainty in the context of Bengali char lands. Chars are temporary sandbanks in the river that continuously erode and re-emerge as the river changes course, thereby subjecting their inhabitants to repetitious cycles of losing and regaining land. In this paper I take the ethnographic literature on Bengali chars as a point of departure for exploring what the radical uncertainty of climate change might mean in a context where erosion or land loss does not necessarily involve the irreversible loss of a particular habitat, but often coincides with the anticipation of return. In analyzing the gendered ways in which char dwellers navigate this spiraling cycle of land loss and return, I draw specific attention to the churning, immaterial and spiritual powers that reside below and beyond the water, thereby highlighting the ways in which people are caught up in a land/waterscape that is only knowable to some extent. Whereas debates around climate change often treat religion and spirituality as either obstacles to knowledge or vehicles of meaningful storytelling, this paper deliberately foregrounds the more-than-human forces that linger at the periphery of people’s perception and knowledge of the world. In doing so, the paper seeks to move beyond probabilistic notions of climate change and adaptation towards a diverse understanding of the existential uncertainties of the Anthropocene.

Highlights

This paper focuses on the spiritual and gendered experiences of dwelling-in-uncertainty in the context of Bengali char lands
Taking heed of such indistinct supernatural, immaterial or spiritual powers that reside below and beyond the water challenges probabilistic perspectives on climate change, and helps to dematerialize the reified solid–fluid distinctions that continue to inform our understanding of the radical uncertainties of the Anthropocene
It paves the way for a perspective on climate change and adaptation that acknowledges the embodied and gendered experiences of inhabiting a land/waterscape that is only knowable to some extent

Summary

Introduction

“Here even a child will begin a story about his grandmother with the words: ‘in those days the river wasn’t here and the village was not where it is . . . ’” The “here” in this evocative description by Amitav Ghosh (2016, p. 6) refers to the Bengal river delta, where the various branches of the Ganges, Padma, Brahmaputra and Meghna interweave and interlace as they find their way to the Bay of Bengal. Instead of taking the wet and watery qualities of this landscape as a point of departure for theorizing uncertainty, I suggest that we need to pay better attention to the immaterial, opaque and spiritual powers that reside below and beyond the water. These more-than-human undercurrents, which are well-documented in the literature on chars, provide my starting point for making sense of the relationship between uncertainty and adaptation in a riverine context of continuous variation. Char contexts have inevitably, been shaped by such wider tensions (see Das 2021), the literature suggests that people’s spiritual and embodied engagements with their amphibious surroundings continue to be shaped by a degree of “localized syncretism and hybridity” (Harms 2014, p. 282)

Char lands

Amphibious Uncertainties

Conclusions