Climate Migration in Humayun Kabir’s Men and Rivers: the Padma and Faridpur

Abstract

The intensely precarious integration in many parts of Bangladesh between life, rivers and water has been reflected in the country’s river novels that describe the experiences of fishermen and riparian peasants. Among river systems in Bangladesh, the Padma (the Ganges in India) has inspired the greatest number of artists and their writing. Humayun Kabir’s Men and Rivers (1945) stands out as a climate document on the life of the peasantry, whose survival and livelihoods are entwined with this river. However, this novel has remained inadequately known and has not garnered sufficient critical attention in recent years. Filling a lacuna in South Asian literary studies, and combining such studies with climate change discourses, this article discusses Kabir’s novel as a document depicting the environmental challenges faced in Bangladesh, exploring why this literary work has not received prominent coverage.

Introduction

Humayun Kabir (1906–69) was an Indo-Anglian writer, Tagore scholar, literary critic, educationalist, political philosopher and statesman. Describing him as an ‘internationally reputed intellectual of undivided Bengal’, Subrata Kumar Das (2010) also notes, however, that Kabir later ‘sadly passed into oblivion where a study of Bangladeshi literature is concerned’. Haq (2022: 283) argues that although he is ‘usually classified as Indian’, because of his birth and upbringing in what is now Bangladesh, and based ‘on the strength of his English novel Men and Rivers (1945)’, he can be ‘reclassified retroactively as a Bangladeshi writer’. During the political and spatial upheavals of 1947, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, the latter included East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971. The Independence troubles meant that almost 15 million people crossed these newly drawn borders in both directions during the first few years of partition (Ghosh, 2011: 28; Zamindar, 2007). Muslims from India migrated to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan came to India. Though a Muslim and born in what later became East Pakistan, in 1947 Kabir chose to remain in India (Hasan, 2022a: 744), maybe also because he was married to a Hindu woman. As Amartya Sen (2021: 31) puts it: ‘Humayun Kabir, as a Muslim political leader, had firmly rejected separatism, and indeed stayed on in India after Partition as a leading intellectual and powerful secular activist’. He became joint-secretary in the Ministry of Education and subsequently was India’s third Minister of Education. Having contributed to the literary and scholarly culture of both India and Bangladesh, he is highly regarded for his collaboration in writing Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s political memoir India Wins Freedom (Azad, 1959).

Kabir’s novel Men and Rivers, first published in English in 1945, appeared seven years later in a Bengali transcreation as Nadi O Nari (Kabir, 1952). Initially, it was rated among great literary works (Das, 2010). However, later it fell into oblivion. After reading the English novel, in a letter dated 19 October 1945, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) wrote to Kabir: ‘I had your book Men and Rivers with me…. I read it with great interest. I recognize your ability to write novels’ (cited in Bhavsar et al., 2011: 70). Once Men and Rivers was on the English literature curriculum of major universities in India and was the first literary text by an Indian to be taught in the country along with those by English writers (Rahman, 2005: 71). According to Amartya Sen (2021: 31), who read the novel when he was at high school, it ‘was a much-read—and much-discussed—book … and the issues it raised received widespread attention. It was a moving story of family life facing both the benefaction and the wrath of a mighty river’. However, Sen appears to be mistaken about the publication chronology of the two texts when he says that Nadi O Nari was published in 1945 and Men and Rivers was its English translation. The artist and writer Murtaja Baseer (1932–2020), the youngest son of the legendary linguist Muhammad Shahidullah (1885–1969), wrote an adaptation of Nadi O Nari for the journalist Sadeq Khan (1933–2016) to produce and direct the Bangla film Nadi O Nari (1965).

Astonishingly, Raza (2007) and Hasan (2022a) have thus far remained the only notable research work on this novel. Despite being most relevant, it is also absent from a repertoire of novels that deal with ‘Bengal’s unique river-centric identity’ and ‘narrate the routinely precarious life and experiences of fishermen, boatmen and small farmers’ (Bhaduri, 2018: 83S). In a non-fiction work on climate change, Amitav Ghosh (2016: 8) laments that ‘when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction’, but fails to mention Kabir’s fictional work on the subject. This particular omission of Men and Rivers is even more puzzling since, like Kabir (1945), Amitav Ghosh features the Padma prominently. In fact, his ancestors came from its banks in Madaripur district, previously part of (Greater) Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh. Moreover, like Kabir’s birthplace Faridpur in Men and Rivers, Ghosh’s ancestral home Madaripur is omnipresent in his Gun Island (Ghosh, 2019).

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who is originally from present-day Dhaka, in the chapter ‘The Rivers of Bengal’ of his autobiography (Sen, 2021), makes prominent mention of Kabir’s Men and Rivers, stating that ‘the noted Bengali novelist and political essayist Humayun Kabir presented a far-reaching account of the way the relationship between rivers and people influences Bengali life’ (Sen, 2021: 30–1). However, Kabir’s work is not sufficiently discussed in literary studies in Bangladesh, perhaps because he is mostly regarded as an Indian writer, while in South Asia as a whole, Muslim writers face marginalisation (Hasan, 2012). Given the need to study the various aspects of Men and Rivers, this article seeks to remedy the critical neglect of this important text by shedding some light on its realistic fictional representation of climate issues.

Kabir’s depiction of a riparian population reflects the close connection between Bangladesh and its rivers and water. As Novak (1993: 22) states: ‘At least 10 percent of the people [of Bangladesh] live in boats, up to 40 percent depend on the sea and rivers for a livelihood, and 100 percent depend on the rain and floods for food’. As a prototypically Bangladeshi novel, Men and Rivers also describes what Bhaduri (2018: 82S) calls ‘the precarious riparian setting of Bengal’, clearly a matter of perennial concern for many writers in Bangladesh. A comparable, near-contemporary work, Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the Padma) by Manik Bandopadhyay (1936), also provides a socio-economic picture of riparian sites while describing the livelihood of rural people in Bengal. However, there is a surprising lack of attention to Men and Rivers, while Padma Nadir Majhi has attracted considerable critical acclaim, maybe because it was made into a successful movie by Goutom Ghosh in 1993.

Largely set in Kabir’s birthplace Faridpur, Men and Rivers recognisably describes distinctive features of the life of its people who live in the fragile floodplain and sandbank island (char) environment of the Padma. Other major litterateurs known for their connection with the river include Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), whose prolonged time on a boat named Padma, in which he spent much time on the Padma river, has achieved a proverbial status in Bangla literature. In order to administer his parental zamindari estate, Tagore along with his family moved from Santiniketan in India’s West Bengal to a mansion house, Shelaidaha Kuthibari, near the bank of the Padma at Kushtia, which is now in Bangladesh, and lived there for about 10 years, from 1891 to 1901. Tagore acknowledged to W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) that it was his most productive creative period (Quayum, 2014: 26) and his 1910 collection of poems Gitanjali, for which he received the Nobel Prize, was largely written on the boat to and from Shelaidaha.

Kabir’s contemporary and the author of Padma Nadir Majhi, Manik Bandopadhyay (1908–56) is another illustrious literary figure who describes the connection between the Padma and its people. Bandopadhyay (1936) constructs an imaginary village, Ketupur, on its bank and analyses ‘the relationship between fishermen and fishing in the river system’ (Das, 2008: 270). He mainly delineates the life and travails of Padma boatmen in the water and the conditions under which they operate. The setting is largely riparian floodplains and riverine islands, focused on peasant life and the forces of nature. Even though characters in the novel undertake (often risky) journeys on the Padma only occasionally, its waters are always in their consciousness, haunting them and their everyday lives with feelings of hope, fear and vulnerability. Kabir (1945) depicts the quotidian details and intimate concerns of the peasantry and their inseparable, topographical relationship with the Padma and sees it from their perspectives.

Some other important river novels in Bangla literature involving the Ganga (Ganges) and the Padma, which refer to the same river system in Bangladesh, are mentioned by Bhaduri (2018: 83S). All these river novels, including Padma Nadir Majhi and Men and Rivers, are set in eastern Bengal, reinforcing the observation that environment and literature in Bangladeshi culture are closely intertwined, depicting the geographical character of the country. The diversity of subjects that this literature treats includes ‘the soil, the climate, the terrain, the water, the plough, the boat, the yeoman farmer, and the sareng, or pilot of a vessel’ (Novak, 1993: 110).

Describing everyday issues in the life of the people of the Padma, Men and Rivers is dominated by images of climatic hazards, especially drought and flood disasters. Its setting and characterisation identify the novel as a realist work that reflects the vicissitudes, sufferings, resilience and adaptive capacity of the riverine rural people who live in Faridpur along the Padma. Kabir (1945) depicts an intimate relationship between humans and nature as a climatic force in Bangladesh. The Padma river constitutes a combination of vulnerability and resilience of its riparian population due to the dangerous annual cycle of drought and flood. Kabir’s depiction of this cycle is representative of the character of the climate in Bangladesh. As Novak (1993: 31) notes: ‘Too much water and Bangladesh starves. Too little and it starves’.

The meandering Padma river provides water and fertile land for agriculture as well as fishing opportunities and other sustenance needs for the people on its banks, who are also in a continuous struggle with the river, facing storms and effects of floods which cause loss of lives, crops and other means of livelihood. During the monsoon season, its water swells and devours homesteads, educational institutions, bridges and most importantly cultivable land and fishponds in the floodplains and channel margins on which the peasants depend for their survival. Over decades, this has rendered innumerable Bangladeshis, especially those from Faridpur, environmental refugees or climate migrants, as natural disasters often force them to move to new areas and engage in alternative livelihood options. For example, most slum dwellers in Dhaka are climate refugees who were displaced by riverbank erosion (Islam & Hossain, 2020: 370).

Given this background, the article first discusses the centrality of the Padma to the lives and livelihoods of the peasants as well as their predicament, displacement and resilience in light of Kabir’s portrayal in Men and Rivers of a river flood (bonna) and the associated ordeals of its riparian population in Faridpur. Since the Padma and its banks and islands in the district constitute the setting of the climax of the novel, the following section provides relevant details of the river flow and its relationship with Faridpur and its people.

The Padma and Faridpur

The Padma is the main distributary of the Ganges that originates in the Himalayas and its drainage basin ‘crosses China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh, making it a quintessential international river’ (Bhuiyan et al., 2017: 2). After flowing through India, upon entering Bangladesh through the country’s north-western part, the downstream river takes the name Padma (also known as the Lower Ganges), while its other distributary, the Bhagirathi, flows through the Indian state of West Bengal before joining the Bay of Bengal. The Padma forms the boundary of the two countries for a distance of about 80 miles and runs for another 70 miles wholly through Bangladesh, before it joins the river Brahmaputra–Jamuna at Goalundo in Rajbari district (Abbas, 1983: 51). The Padma passes through various areas, including Faridpur, before it meets the Meghna river at the Padma–Meghna–Jamuna (also called Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna) confluence in Chandpur district, where it ‘forms an inland sea in the heart of Bangladesh, a sea that often is so wide one cannot see the banks even from midstream’ (Novak, 1993: 26). Finally, the triangular river channel empties into the Bay of Bengal where, along the coast, it forms numerous chars, silt islands of different sizes made up of the deposits carried downstream by the rivers. In India, the Ganges has long been accorded the status of a sacred river worshipped by Hindu devotees (Sen, 2019). However, once the river flows into Bangladesh and takes the name of Padma, it remains of little religious/spiritual significance. Hence, for instance, although the author of Padma Nadir Majhi, Manik Bandopadhyay (1936), has a Hindu background, the novel’s fishermen ‘are not shown as approaching the river in a ritually structured relationship’ (Prayer, 2015: 173).

The setting of Men and Rivers is unmistakably the Padma floodplains stretching from Katihar, an upstream district in the Indian state of Bihar, through Faridpur to a char island near the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh. In the novel, Nazu Mia, Asgar Mia and others, including their leader Rahim Baksh, are originally from Katihar. At the beginning of the novel, Rahim Baksh said: ‘Why come all the way from Katihar to work on other people’s land? No, we will take land of our own and become farmers ourselves’ (Kabir, 1945: 1–2). This suggests that they migrated from Katihar earlier to settle in Faridpur. Interestingly, contrary to this fictional relocation, Amitav Ghosh’s ancestors undertook a real-life reverse climate migration from Greater Faridpur to Bihar. As Ghosh (2016: 4) puts it:

The story, as my father told it, was this: one day in the mid-1850s the great river [Padma] suddenly changed course, drowning the village; only a few of the inhabitants managed to escape to higher ground. It was this catastrophe that had unmoored our forebears; in its wake they began to move westward and did not stop until the year 1856, when they settled once again on the banks of a river, the Ganges, in Bihar.

Clearly, water-induced climate migration has been a typical response and reality for the riparian population of the Ganges/Padma for a long time. Nazu Mia and others in Men and Rivers were presumably uprooted from Bihar because of floods, riverbank erosion or other extreme climate events. After the great flood in Faridpur that Kabir depicts in the novel, the surviving characters, including Asgar Mia, Malek, Nuru and Aziz, move downstream to Byanchar, ‘a small island that formed in the Bay near the confluence of the Padma with the sea’ (Kabir, 1945: 122), most likely somewhere in or near Noakhali district in Bangladesh (Hasan, 2022b). Thus, the spatial setting of the story involves a long strip of the Ganges/Padma River, beginning from India’s Katihar down to Byanchar and its banks and sandbank islands.

Among the current districts in Bangladesh through which the Padma flows, such as Rajshahi, Rajbari, Faridpur, Madaripur and Shariatpur, Kabir’s birthplace Faridpur, which at the time of his birth was the only district (Greater Faridpur) in this region, is most closely associated with the Padma river. It is so central to Faridpur that in 2017 the proposed divisional administrative unit, Faridpur Division, was named Padma Bibhag (Padma Division). This division comprises Faridpur and the four other neighbouring districts of Gopalganj, Madaripur, Rajbari and Shariatpur, all of which earlier comprised Greater Faridpur.

Among all the river districts in Bangladesh, Faridpur is perhaps the worst affected by the lateral shifts of the Padma. The landscape described in the novel and the one that currently exists may no longer be the same. Due to its susceptibility to erosion and accretion processes, and morphological changes of the Padma, the landmass or spatial structure of Faridpur and other districts on its banks has undergone massive transformations over time. As Ghosh (2016: 5–6) maintains: ‘Overnight, a stretch of riverbank will disappear, sometimes taking houses and people with it […]. This is a landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition’. The city of Faridpur was originally founded near the Mora Padma (dead Padma) which has thus far shifted roughly 20 miles away from the current location of the Padma. But the fact remains that Faridpur has always been bounded by the Padma and its main distributary, the Kumar river (Turza, 2021: 243), as well as the Madhumati river, which also passes through Greater Faridpur.

Other rivers, such as Gorai and Arial Khan, that have passed through Faridpur have also ‘changed their courses slightly with time’ (Turza, 2021: 245), further reflecting the precariously dynamic landscape of the district. Geographically, Faridpur is ‘located in the active flood plains’ of the Padma (Tareq et al., 2013: 78). Hence, the problem of riverbank erosion in the district is a perennial phenomenon and a major cause of displacement, dislocation and forced population migration. Providing shelter to innumerable victims of flood and riverbank erosion (Ali & Stevens, 2009: 2), the district town houses a large number of internally displaced persons who are mainly victims of flood and riverbank erosion and are living in slums, exposed to many environmental hazards. Faridpur is traditionally considered an ultra-poor area where many people become homeless on a regular basis (Halder & Husain, 2000: 18). According to a study on slum dwellers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, 34% of them came to the city from what is now Faridpur, which is about 100 kilometres south of the capital (Rahman, 2010: 62). Given this geographic and environmental pattern of Faridpur, Kabir’s choice of the district in Men and Rivers as the site of drought, flood and riverbank erosion and consequent agricultural breakdown, human suffering and climate migration is most appropriate.

As noted, people living on the banks of the Padma are both beneficiaries of its water and victims of its shifting hydrodynamics. As the narrator in Men and Rivers describes, at times the river seems ‘placid and content’, while at others it vents ‘power and cruelty’ (Kabir, 1945: 1). This resonates with how Ghosh (2016: 3) rhetorically describes the elemental force of nature, saying: ‘Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?’. In the story, the dark and sinister Padma is compared to a ‘witch’ that ‘has swallowed hundreds of villages and men. She puts on an appearance of calm only to lure unwary boats’ (Kabir, 1945: 33).

In fact, the Padma is a mix of boon and bane for the people on its banks. Amartya Sen (2021: 21) states: ‘The rivers of Bengal, which are one of the main sources of the traditional prosperity of the region, are also an unpredictable hazard for human life and security’. Regarding the Padma, Bhaduri (2018: 90S) remarks that the benevolence-malevolence continuum that underlies the relationship between the river and its riparian population in Faridpur is comparable to the one between the Atlantic Ocean and island communities in Ireland. Like the Atlantic Ocean, the Padma river ‘is the provider of life force, but also the destroyer of life’, and its riparian people ‘lead their life with a constant premonition that they may be destroyed by the Padma at any time’ (Bhaduri, 2018: 90S). Previously, after migrating from Katihar, Nazu Mia and other characters lived by ‘a friendly and quiet brook’, by which the novelist may have referred to the Kumar river that currently flows by Kabir’s birthplace Komarpur. However, in Men and Rivers, it is the Padma, and not the friendly and quiet brook that promises Nazu Mia, Asgar Mia and Rahim Baksh prosperity.

Strategically, the Padma is very useful for agricultural work, as in the story some of Asgar Mia’s fields ‘lay by the side of the river and could be watered from the stream’ (Kabir, 1945: 112). It offers those men the possibility of moving their way up the agricultural ladder. It helps them realise their dream of tilling their own land and fulfil their aspirations of becoming yeoman farmers, not simply farmhands with little opportunity for ascension in social and economic hierarchies. Therefore, Nazu Mia’s ‘life was wedded’ to the Padma ‘when Rahim Baksh first brought him to her banks and selected a plot of land for him’ (Kabir, 1945: 2). Novak (1993: 26) describes the river as ‘the last resting place, the mother’s breast’ and ‘the main artery of the Indian subcontinent’. However, despite the promises it holds and the obvious advantages it offers, the Padma causes recurrent havoc and always presents itself as a danger that clouds the horizon of those who live on its banks and islands. It is always present in the backdrop, as the characters in Men and Rivers are confronted with its raging fury.

The realism of Men and Rivers lies in its thorough and penetrating description of the characters’ relation to their surrounding environments. It tallies with Kabir’s observation of life in this part of the world that ‘people have to struggle with nature to eke out a living. They are more enterprising but also more impetuous …. Families become poor overnight’ (Kabir, 1968: 106). Accordingly, the climax of the story in Men and Rivers involves a colossal flood preceded by a long period of drought, as the following discussion elaborates.

Drought and Flood Disasters

In 1943, two years prior to the publication of Men and Rivers, a drought event in Bengal claimed 5 million human lives (Novak, 1993: 31). Before the great flood in Faridpur’s Rahimpur village in Men and Rivers, there were long periods of drought with no ‘speck of cloud’ in the ‘brazen blue’ sky, while the ‘parched earth looked brown and burnt’ (Kabir, 1945: 111). Due to the lack of rainwater, agricultural activities came to a complete standstill, as it was impossible to prepare the fields for agricultural use. In a land where ‘all life depends on the coming of the rain’ (Novak, 1993: 27), the drought caused significant yield reduction, abject poverty and economic stagnancy, coupled with an appalling scarcity of food and agricultural produce. The village leader Asgar Mia was helpless, too, as his fields also turned arid, dry and barren. Eventually, no one was spared, as in the third year of the drought food insecurity and hunger worsened, affecting all and sundry.

Kabir provides a graphic, poignant description of the hunger and suffering of men, women, children and cattle during the years of drought and consequent famine. As the villagers did not have food for themselves or for their domestic animals, in the second year, they slaughtered all cattle. In the absence of tilling cattle, in the third year, they sought to till their lands by yoking themselves to their ploughs, wearily dragging them ‘across the scorched earth’ (Kabir, 1945: 113). Even though there was no rain and they did not have any seeds, they scrambled to till the land, just in case something good came up miraculously. Men wanted to sell their land and other belongings for food, but there was no buyer. People demanded rice from Asgar Mia, the village leader. After seeing his empty granary, as they ‘clamoured that he had secret stores’, he ‘took off his shirt and showed them his bare body: the ribs stood out and the stomach was empty like a cave. His figure was a skeleton of bones with hardly any flesh’ (Kabir, 1945: 114). Asgar Mia’s daughter Nuru and Nazu Mia’s son Malek, who became part of Asgar Mia’s family after the death of his father and grandmother, hardly grew during this time of scarcity.

After three years of drought, one evening there was a terrible storm, which made the waters of the Padma rise. The storm and flood initially came in the form of lightning, thunder and heavy rain, for which people expressed gratitude to God. But these heavy rains continued for four days without interruption, inundated all agricultural land and slowly crept up to the houses of Rahimpur until they disappeared completely in the water. On the fourth night, more intense rain and strong wind churned the Padma’s waters and burst its banks, so that it inundated the surrounding areas, resulting in death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. In the morning, there was no trace of Rahimpur village and the survivors saw a few boats that looked like ‘black spots that were a pathetic symbol of man’s insignificance before the elemental forces of nature’ (Kabir, 1945: 117). One such boat carries Asgar Mia, his wife Amina, Malek and Nuru.

As portrayed in the novel, historically, such climatic events in the region affected vast populations, causing huge fatalities and collateral ecological damage. Describing historic floods in Bengal, Hofer and Messerli (2006: 65) state that there were floods in Bengal in 1769, 1787, 1871 and 1885, the last two events being more severe and well-documented. Among all these floods, Faridpur is reported to have been affected by the one in 1871, which the District Gazette regarded as ‘a rare event’ (Hofer & Messerli, 2006: 68). Iqbal (2010: 60) designates 1870 as the year of ‘excessive flooding in the Faridpur district’, which is reported in the District Gazette of 1871. Sister Nivedita (1907) describes a terrible flood that occurred in 1906 and swept through almost the whole of East Bengal, devastating farms and villages. Ghosh (2018) mentions a number of other floods in colonial North Bengal in 1892, 1902, 1918 and 1922, but does not identify Faridpur as one of the affected areas, even though the district is highly risk-prone. Perhaps, if Men and Rivers is to be read and interpreted from a realistic point of view, Kabir (1945) may have creatively described in the novel one of these or other such floods that inundated Faridpur and displaced its people. Conceivably, while depicting the flood, Kabir had in mind a post-Victorian view of early twentieth-century Bengal. This is because when Malek is captured by sea pirates, he says to their leader: ‘I have been taught to obey the [British] King’s law and submit’ (Kabir, 1945: 157). In line with this premise, Hasan (2022a) provides textual evidence to suggest that the setting of the novel is British colonial Bengal.

Generally, the Bangladeshi peasantry suffers from two climate extremes of drought and rainfall (and associated floods), which constitute the climax of the story in Men and Rivers. Bangladesh floods are of two types, namely normal flooding (barsha) due to rainfall and abnormal flooding (bonna), which involves river inundation, which is what happened in Rahimpur in the story. Bonna usually occurs in the Bengali month of Baisakh (mid-April to mid-May) when peasants are busy cultivating the land. It is the month of thunderstorms and thundershowers, locally known as the Kal Baisakhi (Baisakh’s calamities), which lead to flooding, destruction of properties and often many deaths.

Kal Baisakhi thunderstorms occur mainly in the afternoon. Ayesha in the story says to her son Nazu Mia: ‘Don’t you know that Baisakh still mornings are followed by stormy afternoons?’ (Kabir, 1945: 47). Such storms are often preceded by a prolonged drought and ‘damage the standing crop and spoil the unthreshed grain’ (Clay, 1982: 204), bringing unfathomable sorrow for farmers. In the novel, as mentioned, Kal Baisakhi along with the subsequent flood washes away the entire village of Rahimpur, kills many people and uproots the rest. They are divorced from their old identities and find their old social ties severed. As the flood propels them into an uncertain economic environment, some follow Asgar Mia to Byanchar to start a new life. They have become climate refugees. Asgar Mia and his family, including Malek, on the boat follow the movement of water in search of a new habitation. After lots of drifting and wandering, they finally settle on the far-off island of Byanchar. They do not choose an earthbound land area or a terrestrial landscape, but opt for this precarious aquatic char, hundreds of kilometres away from Faridpur.

In this respect, it is pertinent to mention that Men and Rivers was written during the last years of British colonial rule in South Asia. Terrestrial areas, like Dhuldi where the colonial agent Dewan in the novel comes to exact taxes and revenues, and urban environments such as cities and towns, were turned into colonial metropoles and subjected to imperialist exploitation. Perhaps Asgar Mia wanted to avoid the crippling conditions of the colonial order and rather opted for a rural setting where, as Prayer (2015: 171) writes in reference to Padma Nadir Majhi, ‘nature and society could be elevated beyond the deprivations and defeats of the colonial situation’. The water channel that Asgar and others in the novel follow and the aquatic area near the Bay of Bengal that they choose offer the hope of freedom to pursue their own way of life, avoiding colonial modes of domination and exploitation.

This dimension of the novel indicates more trouble for the dreary, unsettled lives of the villagers. Terrestrial urban environments were vitiated by colonial onslaughts and attempts to consolidate all power in such locations, where the peasants would be routinely exploited. In Dhuldi, Nazu Mia is economically exploited by the Dewan, an agent of colonialism, and culturally humiliated by the Hakim, representing the power of colonial modernity (Hasan, 2022a). The villagers of Rahimpur have to pay land taxes to the Dewan stationed in Dhuldi, otherwise their lands will be seized by the coloniser. This is how colonialism constricted territories and forced the native populations to take refuge in nature, which resulted in human incursion into the wilderness, tropical forests and areas of natural reservoirs. The experience of living in such a colonial context inspires the survivors of Rahimpur to seek an alternative way of living that is at the same time more environmentally sustainable and impervious to colonial hegemony. As a distant island near the Bay of Bengal, Byanchar promises possibilities for growth and vitality, but could also be subjected to devastating floods. This ecological fragility facilitates positive transformation in the characters, while awareness that fate plays a significant role in their lives would remain ever-present.

In Men and Rivers, Nazu Mia and Asgar Mia inhabit a median space, Rahimpur, which is between the colonial power centre of Dhuldi and the riverine islands that are far removed from colonial influences. The intrepid Nazu Mia is a misfit in Dhuldi and is therefore drawn to sandbank islands. He seems to regard them as oases that would help him evade the colonial gaze and the tax burdens of Dhuldi. The riverine islands make it possible for him to dodge the colonial grasp and evade the colonial reach. Therefore, he defies the ominous weather patterns of Baisakh and, along with Basir, Idris and Ramzan, undertakes the perilous, fateful boat journey across the Padma. But soon a storm develops and takes a violent turn, wrecking the boat in the middle of the river. At first, the helm is ripped off and with it goes Basir. Without the helm and with one man less, Nazu Mia, Idris and Ramzan cannot do much to save the boat or themselves and die in the choppy waters of the Padma, even though Basir unexpectedly survives.

Death and its continuous fear in the presence of the ominous Padma and her predatory crocodiles do not seem to make the inhabitants of the riverbanks timid or less adventurous. This is characteristic of most people in Bangladesh, as Novak (1993: 18–19) puts it: ‘What surprises many visitors is that the needs of the poor [in Bangladesh] are so slight, while their ability to help themselves is so much greater than outsiders are led to expect’. Activities like fishing in the river, crossing it and watering their fields from it are an integral part of the livelihood of the protagonists in Men and Rivers. In their settlement in Rahimpur and the resettlement of some of them in Byanchar, their resilience and ability to adapt to changing situations and to new requirements and responsibilities are aptly depicted in the novel, as the following section explores.

Resilience of the Riparian Population

When Asgar Mia and Malek move to Byanchar after losing everything in Rahimpur, in the prime vigour of his unabated youth and undiminished enthusiasm, Malek retains his optimistic confidence and vision of human potential, saying to Asgar Mia: ‘[W]e shall build it up all again. You have told us how you came to this land with your bare hands and turned the waste into a garden. You have done it before, you can do it again’ (Kabir, 1945: 117). Towards the end of the novel, Kabir (1945: 175) celebrates the resilience, fortitude and adaptability of the riverine peasantry through a moving and powerful statement voiced by Asgar Mia:

We are men of the river. We are peasants. We build our homes on sand and the water washes them away. We build again and again, and we till the earth and bring the golden harvest out of the waste land.

This resilient impulse and capacity are prevalent among the characters in the novel as well as in real life. Before the great flood, Nazu Mia, Asgar Mia and Rahim Baksh prospered as farmers in Rahimpur. Later, upon migrating to Byanchar, Asgar Mia, Malek and Nuru clear and cultivate the fertile land on the island, thrive as farmers and adjust successfully to the new environment. All these point to the commitment and routine hard work of Bangladeshi Muslim peasants, vividly portrayed by Novak (1993: 46). Asgar Mia and others resettle in Byanchar and keep expanding their agricultural fields. As they cannot manage all this work on their own, they hire farmhands to till the land and bring home the produce, and thus create employment opportunities for others. During planting and harvest times, all in Byanchar remain busy in the field. Malek carries lunch for Asgar Mia and the farmhands, and ‘master and men would dine together on the edge of the paddy fields’ (Kabir, 1945: 101). Asgar Mia’s egalitarian treatment of the farmhands is in sharp contrast to the binary race logic of the Self/Other dichotomy that the colonial system of government established in South Asia and other colonial lands.

In Bandopadhyay (1936), Moynadeep (Moyna Island) is a site of exploitation and the people who have migrated there fall prey to the greed and capitalist attitude of Hossen Miya (Prayer, 2015: 17). Conversely, Kabir presents an alternative island where Asgar Mia and others advance prosperity and equity, while safeguarding the environment. Thus, Kabir, in the words of Singh (2021: 387, 388), puts forward sustainable alternatives to cope with upcoming environmental challenges, ultimately at the global level, as his place-centric novel Men and Rivers celebrates Byanchar as ‘a nurturing, protective and empowering entity’. With Asgar Mia’s touch, Byanchar becomes alive with people and activity. During harvest time, the only person left at home is Nuru. After the demise of her mother, she has to run the house singlehandedly, while the ‘men were in the fields and the women too had gone out to help. The men reaped the golden corn and the women piled them into stacks’ (Kabir, 1945: 125). Thus, as regards the Byanchar community led by Asgar Mia, the novelist Kabir realistically depicts that many women customarily work alongside men in agricultural production and play vital, albeit different roles.

In addition to agricultural work on land, people in Byanchar are also involved in fishing. Thus, beginning from scratch, but with the capable leadership of Asgar Mia, its inhabitants have transformed the island into a dynamic economic space. They also bring about demographic changes in the island, as other people come over to settle there. Devastated by a natural disaster that wiped out their homesteads and lands and took away lives and livelihoods, the resilient people of Rahimpur land on this faraway island and build new homes and a vibrant life. Again, what Asgar Mia and others in the story do in Byanchar stands in opposition to the colonial-capitalist mode of production and exploitation depicted in Bhaduri (2018).

Conclusions

The predicaments for survival of the characters in Men and Rivers can be interpreted futuristically as those of the entire human race in the context of environmental risks and current climate crises. In Bangladesh, where ‘droughts, famines, floods, and other natural disasters are ever on the horizon’ (Novak, 1993: 56), the challenges faced by farmers living near the Padma river, as depicted by Kabir (1945), reverberate across local and national boundaries. The realistic portrayal of the peasants in Men and Rivers as a heroic and remarkably rational group of people, though worthy of recognition as an ecological role model, may have been too realistic and mundane, or not activist enough in the view of many readers and critics. The connection between Faridpur and the novel is palpable, as place names like Dhuldi, Rahimpur and Gazir Tek are all real, situated in the district. The realism in the novel resonates with ‘a new note of egalitarianism in Bengali literature’ (Kabir, 1968: 102). As Bandopadhyay (1936) does in Padma Nadir Majhi, Kabir takes culture ‘to the doorsteps of the toiling and struggling masses’ and does not consider it ‘a monopoly of the sophisticated few’ (Bhaduri, 2018: 84S). He celebrates the farmers who remain active all year round and have no retirement age. In Men and Rivers, describing Nazu Mia’s active and laborious life in the wilderness, the narrator says: ‘Nazu Mia worked as long as he could …. Those were days when there seemed no end to his energy. Nor to the work he had to do. The land had to be cleared and the grass and the reeds removed’ (Kabir, 1945: 3). As Kabir (1968: 108) puts it: ‘A majority of the people of Bengal live in sub-human conditions where all their energies are exhausted in the bare struggle for life. It is an achievement for many when they secure one full meal’. All of this leaves little time for activist engagement, as survival is the dominant agenda. It makes the characters in the novel all the more human, but also rather mundane and unremarkable, which may have added to the low profile of this novel.

Kabir wrote Men and Rivers in the first half of the twentieth century, but floods, river bank erosion and channel changes are still real and palpable in Faridpur and many other riverine areas in Bangladesh and in different ways elsewhere on the globe. Innumerable people on riverbanks and defenceless char lands of the Padma still become homeless as a direct result of erosion, deposition, flooding of lowlands or other natural disasters. The literary presentation of Kabir (1945) depicts how those with resources and willingness may pull themselves together and migrate to other places to try and secure a better future. By contrast, those without sufficient means become beggars or slum dwellers, whom Novak (1993: 219) applauds for their ‘unbelievable courage’. They relocate to surrounding rural spaces, regional towns or remote urban centres across the country, or nowadays even opt for ‘overseas contract work’ (Novak, 1993: 47).

We see here early glimpses of the current worldwide scenario of international migration streams that have now become dominated by exploitative patterns of people trafficking. This new dimension of the global refuge and migrant discourse overshadows the continuing perilous realities and predicaments of local people that continue to exist in ecologically sensitive spaces such as riverine Bangladesh. What to do about this in terms of remedies and policies was not the topic of this article, but given the unceasing currency of environmental migration and refugeehood today, Humayun Kabir’s Men and Rivers constitutes and remains an important and pioneering work in the annals of climate fiction. Today it is as relevant as Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), while Kabir (1945) appears to have been neglected in terms of analysis. This is maybe so because this older work, as a piece of literature, is not anchored in an explicitly activist or political agenda. It also remains unclear to what extent the Indian/Bangladeshi factor in the public image of Kabir contributes to the lack of attention to Men and Rivers.