In a climate-ravaged Indian village, marginalised farmers sing about ‘floating in tears’ after years of erratic weather
- In India’s Sundarbans, farmers have endured over a decade of erratic weather brought on by climate change and evolving farming patterns
- Some of them have come together to produce folk music describing the stories of struggle, loss and the resilience of farmers
Indian farmer Probir Mandal, 51, recently planted seeds of two traditional paddy varieties on his one-acre land in Kalitala, the last border village in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest on the Indo-Bangladesh frontier.
He is fervently hoping for rain, so he can transplant the gobindobhog and kamini seedlings into the field.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the rains,” said Mandal, who lost 25,000 Indian rupees (US$300) from low yields arising from unexpected drought, cyclone and floods over the past three years. “We have been cursed with erratic weather for more than a decade, making it extremely difficult to produce rice.”
To convey their desperation at the lack of rain and the changing weather pattern, Mandal and two other local farmers have written some 50 songs in Bengali, encapsulating the challenges of economically and socially marginalised farmers in the Sundarbans – a region commonly ravaged by rains, floods, cyclonic storms and cyclones caused by climate change.
Part of Tridhara (which means “three tributaries” in Bengali), a cultural group formed in 1982, the three farmers composed bhatiali songs – a form of folk music to bring rivers and their communities to life – that describe the stories of struggle, loss and resilience of farmers in the Sundarbans.
In one song, Mandal wrote: “Disastrous excessive rain, you destroyer, flooding my farmland, breaking my happy home … I am an unfortunate farmer, floating in my tears.” In another, he wrote: “Farmer provides food to the nation, death of a farmer is a stigma for the nation.”
Tridhara co-founder farmer Palas Mondal, 58, said that little was known worldwide of the farmers in the Sundarbans, a region famed as one of the last habitats of man-eating royal Bengal tigers, but their songs will tell the world about human lives there.
