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Paper short abstract

Bengal’s waterways, spanning the Ganga delta and the Bay of Bengal, have shaped centuries of cultural exchange and colonial power. Drawing on oral lore, myths, history, and literature, this paper examines sacred and secular meanings of navigation, trade, and hydrology.

Paper long abstract

Bengal (West Bengal, part of India, and Bangladesh) occupies a strategic geographical position in terms of hydrological connections, constituting the Ganga-delta, world’s largest delta, and the Bay of Bengal in the south. The waterways have not only provided for sustenance but have witnessed, through time and tide, the endless episodes of ‘cultural osmosis’, wherein tales, beliefs, and customs were seamlessly exchanged and adapted, and ‘colonial geopolitics’, both of which are efficaciously recorded in postcolonial historiography as well as oral narratives. While oral “hydro-lore”, like those dealing with merchants’ navigations and underwater voyages, are a microcosmic representation of a macrocosmic geo-political world, written discourses, both in fiction and non-fiction, capture the ever-changing dynamics of waterways through histories (past explorations), networks (crossroads), and empires (colonial settlements). Such narratives, though seldom explored, encompass aquatic connections from historical navigations to multiple trade links to colonial hydrology. With respect to this, the paper attempts to examine, through myths, histories and narratives, the sacred (religious and cultural) and the secular (political and economic) purposes associated with Bengal’s maritime exchanges and influences. Further, it also aims to bring forth the politics of hegemony through the colonizer and the colonized, of exploitation as in trade and slave trade, of economic gains, of exploration and cultural diffusion, through the past and present times in the context of Bengal. Finally, this paper tries to make some deliberations on how the Bengal water-system continues to be of great geo-strategic importance in contemporary times.