Ganges Delta

Was that your intention in writing the book, or it sort of just came out of the evidence?

When I finished my first monograph, Bengal Delta, I was already thinking because I realized that what we call delta is, is a result of all the silts and, you know, for millennia of the silts creating these lands.

And so I thought that actually this can be replicable to all the, uh, rivers in some way if you take a longer trajectory.

So I was already thinking that this, this would in a way conceptually dismantle this area studies.

It's rather a more strategic choice by the ethnic groups.

Because probably if you are in the upland, it's probably they have better strategic value.

And if that upland is a place where lot of mobility of products and cultural practices and ideas and commodities, everything is about to move across from one end to another, from Bengal Delta to, to North China Sea, from Gulf of Tonkin to the Mekong Delta.

So if you position yourself in that crossroads, probably you will not need prompting, you will not need suppression to go there.

Now, the three reasons that, you know, Sundarbans is made of basically a very fragile combination of sweet and salt water.

So this, you know, the sweet water, which is basically all the rivers which are emptying into the, you know, the Ganges Delta and ending in the Sundarbans, which provide the sweet water.

And then, of course, the salt water comes in from the sea, the Bay of Bengal.

So this combination is what makes the region a biodiversity hotspot because it is, you know, this is where all these mangroves survive.

Instead, the incidence might drop to a lower, steady rate.

Often that's similar to what the incidence was before the outbreak, like the short-lived outbreak of cholera we looked at in the Ganges Delta in episode 1.

The rate of new cases started off small, then jumped up during the outbreak, and finally gradually fell back down to the original level.

But sometimes the disease might become endemic when it wasn't before.

If anybody knows, let me know.

During the 19th century, people around the Ganges Delta in what is now Bangladesh reportedly reported mysterious cannon-like explosions.

They became known as the Barisal guns.

The descriptions are wonderfully eerie.

And these are the same floodwaters that would irrigate the rice crop.

Then West Bengal and the Gangetic Delta, where there is a lot of monsoon rainfall, there are floodplains, there's low-lying land, there's poor drainage, there are natural wet landscapes.

These are the places where paddy would be grown.

Orissa is also a good state which has a lot of diversity of rice ecologies.