On the banks of river Rupnarayan, overlooking Tamluk (the ancient port town of Tamralipta), a boat has remained tied to a peg for the past six months. The 37-foot-long and 9.5-foot-wide V-shaped wooden structure stands apart from other boats at Dihimandal Ghat of Howrah Shyampur block. The wooden structure with a beautiful arch has not been painted and lies unused in a nondescript rural village in West Bengal. Yet, it has inspired an international project — The Chhotbuilders of West Bengal Project: Documenting the vanishing craft knowledge of a unique boat-building tradition.
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Under the collaborative project between the University of Exeter, United Kingdom and the Central University of Haryana, India, boat-makers near Dihimandal Ghat were commissioned to build the boat last year.
Panchanan Mondal (72) occasionally visits the ghat to see the chhot he built. On an April afternoon, when temperatures were soaring above 40 degrees Celsius and a high tide took the boat a little farther away from the bank, Mr. Mondal made his way to the structure in knee-deep waters, sprinkled water on it from his palms and climbed the boat to inspect the damages it had suffered.
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“This chhot we built was after 30 years. There are no more chhot boats around. The knowledge of boat-making has been passed to us by our forefathers,” the specialist boatmaker said. The word chhot in Bengali means ‘to run’ and Mr. Mondal explains how the boat is completely different and superior to the L-shaped boats and dinghy boats in use now.
Panchanan Mondal, a veteran boatmaker alongwith his son Amal Mondal at Dihimondal Ghat in Howrah with a Chhot boat that he built as a part of an international programmee ‘The chhotbuilders of West Bengal Project: Documenting the vanishing craft knowledge of a unique boat-building tradition’. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
Mr. Mondal and his four sons — Amal, Manimohan, Dilip, and Dipak — made the boat from different kinds of wood over several months as researchers and academics from the University of Exeter documented the entire process. The Mondal family said the place was flooded with media persons who came to witness the boat being built. Two academics associated with the project — John P. Cooper of Exeter University and Zeeshan Alli Shaikh, an England-based researcher — also camped at the village for almost a month last October to document the boat-making process, once a lifeline of the people living in the coastal areas of south Bengal who used the boats extensively for navigating the rivers and estuaries of the region.
However, after the boat was finished, the Mondal family was left alone with probably the last chhot ever built on the quiet banks of Rupnarayan. “I have told everyone that the boat needs to be preserved. But nothing has worked out. It pains me that the boat is left unattended and in the open. Soon, the structure will be damaged,” the veteran boatmaker said.
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Anthropologist Swarup Bhattacharya, who played a key role in the whole initiative, said the particular model of boat and the artisans at Dihimandal Ghat were selected after considering a few other lost traditions of indigenous boat-making. The exercise was part of the project Endangered Material Knowledge programme and the entire digitised material will be preserved with the British Museum Archive, he explained.
No takers
The concept note of the initiative says the structure cannot be used for commercial purposes. Like Mr. Mondal, the anthropologist agreed that there are anthropogenic and geological reasons the river bed has accumulated silt and a V-shaped boat may get struck in it and tilt, throwing people and goods into the river.
Mr. Bhattacharya, a fellow of the Anthropological Survey of India and a long-term researcher on wooden boats of West Bengal, pointed out that when the boat was being built, it was agreed that it will be kept at the upcoming Maritime Museum at Lothal, being developed by Ministry of Shipping. Yet, even nearly six months after it has been ready, the boat has no takers. Emphasising that the chhot is a unique boat, which like many typological varieties of boats built for special purposes has become lost, Mr. Bhattacharya expressed an urgent need for the protection of the last specimen of an extinct boat species.
Professor Vasanth Shinde, well-known archaeologist and former founding director of the National Maritime Heritage Centre, Lothal, said that the Maritime Museum developed by the Ministry of Shipping in Lothal was “still a long way” off and for the time being, the boat can be preserved by the Anthropological Survey of India. “Later, it can be acquired for the museum also. The idea is to protect it,” he said.
He said that boat-making is very much a part of our culture and indigenous knowledge and it goes back to Harappan times, from which period archaeologists found remains of actual boats. “The knowledge of boat-making was created long back, going back to Harappan times. This knowledge has to be preserved for our future generations,” he added.