Sundarbans’ Vanishing Wisdom: Climate Drives Tradition Away

Bapi Mondal and his wife Shanti in Bangalore. Climate change has forced the couple from their traditional livelihoods in the Sundarbans. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

Bapi Mondal’s morning routine in Bangalore is a world away from his ancestral village, Pakhiralay, in the Sundarbans, West Bengal. He wakes before dawn, navigates heavy traffic, and spends eight long hours molding plastic battery casings. It’s not the life his honey-gathering forefathers knew, but extreme storms, rising seas, and deadly soil salinity forced the 40-year-old to abandon centuries of family tradition and travel miles away to work in a concrete suburban factory.

Bapi still remembers his traditional skills—walking through mangroves to find honeycombs, mending boats and fishing nets, and performing traditional plays. His 19-year-old son, Subhodeep—working alongside him in the factory—has lost that heritage.

The Sundarbans—the world’s largest mangrove forest—is on the frontlines of climate change, and local livelihoods are taking the hit. Villagers who once relied on fishing, honey collection, and farming now grapple with rising tides, saltier water, and more frequent storms. Life is becoming a struggle to hold on to centuries-old ways.

Sea levels in the Sundarbans are rising nearly twice the global rate, flooding villages and forcing families out. Saltwater ruins rice fields and ponds, making farming and fishing harder. Mawalis, the honey gatherers, struggle as climate change disrupts flowering and damages mangroves, reducing wild bee populations.

Salinity, once held at bay by freshwater flows, is climbing year after year, affecting both fishing and farming. Pollution, poorly managed embankments, and overexploitation of resources add to the challenge. As incomes shrink and lands disappear, thousands leave for cities, often finding only life in urban slums.

City life is unforgiving for migrants like Mondal. He spends eight grueling hours on his feet, molding battery casings six days a week. At the end of each day, he returns to a small one-room apartment shared with his wife, Shanti, and son, Subhodeep. Bapi earns ₹19,000 per month (USD 215), while Shanti earns ₹15,000 (USD 169) at a garment factory. The family pools their wages to survive.

The migration has split their family. Their 11-year-old daughter remains with Bapi’s in-laws in the Sundarbans. “It breaks my heart to be apart from my daughter, but we want her to have a good education and life—that’s why we sacrifice,” says Shanti.

Bapi’s family were Mawalis, honey gatherers who knew the forest through knowledge passed down for generations. His father, Gopal Mondal, still ventures into the dangerous forests, risking tiger attacks and cyclones. But the forest that once fed families is now failing them. Cyclones strike more often, fish populations have crashed, and honey harvests shrink.

“The forest no longer provides enough honey or fish,” Bapi shares. Efforts to survive in the Sundarbans, like driving a van gaari, barely paid enough. Migration was the only option left.

Climate change erodes more than livelihoods; it undermines memory, identity, and ancestral knowledge. Bapi still carries traditional skills—navigating waters, collecting honey, catching shrimp and crabs—but his son has not inherited them.

Human activity compounds the problem. Mangroves were cleared for farms and fish ponds, and embankments blocked tidal flows, causing salt contamination, poisoned soil, vanishing species, and a broken landscape.

About 4.5 million people live across the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and India. A recent survey shows that nearly 59% of households have at least one family member who migrated for work. Across Bangladesh, weather-related disasters displaced 7.1 million people in 2022 alone.

Beyond displacement, a quieter crisis unfolds: the erosion of centuries-old ecological wisdom, culture, and tradition. The Sundarbans’ folk arts—Bonbibi stories, Jatra Pala theatre, fishermen’s songs—are disappearing as younger generations leave. Traditional skills like net weaving, boat building, and reading weather patterns are vanishing with them.

Gopal Mondal, in his early sixties, still collects honey using prayers to Bonbibi, the “Lady of the Forest,” for protection. But the younger generation shows little interest in these professions. Honey gathering, once a defining skill, is fading from the Sundarbans.

Climate migration expert M. Zakir Hossain Khan warns that the loss of deep forest knowledge and traditions threatens the very fabric of Sundarbans communities. As young people turn away, centuries of ecological wisdom risk disappearing—leaving a region not just economically changed, but culturally empty.