Kanailal Sarkar has lived in the Sunderbans all his life. His village was the last habitation built on Satjelia Island. Says the 72-year-old, “In 1936, Mahatma Gandhi sent his secretary Mahadev Desai to our village. Desai raised the slogan ‘sadhu hou’, and that’s how our village got its name Sadhupur.”

It’s not as if Sarkar did not get the opportunity to leave the Sunderbans. He says something about landing a clerical job in Calcutta in the late 1970s. Then adds, “But my parents feared the big, old city.” And so he stayed.

His first job was as a schoolteacher in Satjelia. Some years later, he joined a local NGO called the Tagore Society for Rural Development. It has been 40 years and he continues to work for the same NGO. And in the last two decades, he has come to be known as the “mangrove man” of the area. He has been planting different varieties of mangroves, thinking about land erosion and climate crisis.

“One evening in 1988 changed the way I look at the Sunderbans,” says Sarkar. “It was a Tuesday. Around 6.20pm, a cyclone with a speed of 200 kilometres per hour ran through the islands, leaving behind wreckage and devastation.”

The next day, Sarkar went around Satjelia and the neighbouring villages, and the other islands as well. He says, “I saw death everywhere. I can never forget the image of a mother lying on the ground, clutching her baby to her chest with one hand and some paddy in the other. Both were lifeless.”

The cyclone could wreak such havoc on the Sunderbans for a variety of factors, but perhaps the most crucial was the case of the missing mangroves. Had the mangroves not been recklessly cleared to meet human greed… Says Sarkar, “We have occupied the Sunderbans, a place that was not originally meant for human habitation.”

In 2007, Sarkar started a mangrove project. As he tells the story, near Dayapur Bazaar, a village close to Sadhupur, the river had shifted eastwards. It left behind muddy flats devoid of mangroves. Sarkar planted many varieties of mangroves here. He says, “I wanted to build a model park where tourists would come and see all kinds of mangroves, and learn to identify them.”

At first, he planted only 26 varieties. Next, he approached the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a public research university in Germany, for sponsorship. Says Sarkar, “The university agent was impressed; he asked us to expand the park. With financial support, I acquired five bighas of land.”

Sarkar, with the backing of Tagore Society, planted goran, keora, khalsi, gorjon and kankra side by side.

Not everything got off to a rip-roaring start. Says Sarkar, “The kankra just wouldn’t survive. Later, I learnt that this variety cannot grow in these conditions, and I had to work on my technique instead.”

Currently, the park is home to 36 kinds of mangroves. From a boat on the Gomor river, one cannot tell where the park ends and the forests begin.

Sarkar’s work with mangroves is not just to protect the Sunderbans from soil erosion. It is also an effort to restore the habitat for tigers and other wildlife.

At the mention of tigers, the young man in Sarkar flashes through. Has he ever seen a tiger? “Have I not! I have seen it run, jump, swim, kill and I have even touched one,” he says, all in one breath.

The stories tumble out. One evening in 1982, he was returning home from work. It was late and on a whim he took the shorter route. Recalls Sarkar, “I was humming to myself. Just as I reached home, I heard my neighbours scream out in fear.” To cut a long story short, a tiger had been following him all the while. For some reason, the animal did not attack Sarkar, but it did prey on the goats and sheep belonging to the family next door.

More stories. Sarkar says, “Once, an ojha came to our village. He promised to rid us of tigers. He did his magic and declared the village safe. The very next day, a tiger killed several sheep and goats.”

Still more tiger tales. How a tiger was found roaming inside an islander’s house. How the forest department finally came to the rescue; officials shot a tranquillizer through the hut window. “I touched it,” says Sarkar. It seems this particular tiger even found a home in Calcutta’s Alipore Zoo. It was named Dayaram, after the village Dayapur, where it all happened.

At present, Sarkar is collecting and documenting the medicinal uses of mangroves. This initiative too, comes with a long backstory. When the caretaker of the mangrove park Madhusudan Tarafdar fell off a bamboo bridge and scraped his knees, Sarkar suggested he apply a paste made from the bark of the goran tree. And sure enough, the wound healed quickly.

Talking about the process of documentation, Sarkar says, “I speak to the older women of the islands. And also those who regularly go into the forests, those who fish.” He continues, “The fishing folk tell me that when fish like the kain magur and pairatoli sting, it can be fatal. In such cases, the thing to do is to apply a paste made from the roots of the tora tree.”

Sarkar has a certain calm about him. His demeanour does not give away all that he is working on for the people of the Sunderbans. What propels him to stretch himself in so
many directions?

He replies, “If nature claims our land, our cattle, ponds and crops, we will end up as climate migrants. Then who will take us in?”