Brothers Bound by a River
The sun has just come up in Kolkata. A few more hours and Chhath Puja, a Hindu celebration of the sun, will end. At the moment though, it’s a party at the city’s many waterfronts, or ghatson the banks of the Hooghly River: Howrah, Ramchandra Goenka, Babu, Prinsep.
From his small wooden boat, a few dozen yards offshore, veteran boatman Abdul Kalam, 58, watches festival-goers splashing in the shallows at Prinsep Ghat: Many women have long streaks of neon orange powder marking the length of their nose until their forehead. Devotees launch their offerings — straw trays filled with coconuts, leaves, and flowers, with a lit diya, a tiny oil lamp made of mud, in the centre — into the water as a love-filled thanksgiving to the giant star in the sky. Nearby, open trucks filled with cheering people park as close as possible to the festivities, cordoned off from the waterfront by police.
Kalam is assisting the police today, with a local policeman on board, on the lookout in case someone accidentally falls in the river and needs rescuing. So far this hasn’t been necessary, but the day has just begun. He belongs to a group of 32 boatmen that have operated at Prinsep Ghat for more than two decades, mostly taking tourists, families and love-struck couples on a joyride close to the Vidyasagar Bridge.
These men live on their boats, away from their families, sleeping on board each night while anchored in the middle of the river. They do practically everything together: cook, eat, work, smoke beedis, which are a local kind of cigarette, share jokes, and listen to songs on their mobile phones. Ten of them are Hindu; the rest, including Kalam, are Muslim.
The following day, it’s a quiet weekday afternoon at the ghat, which is also a park with benches and walkways, where young men and women mostly sit, walk together, enjoying some privacy from their families or nosy neighbors.
While waiting for customers, Kalam and the other boatmen are sitting under a tree. In repose, he looks older than his 58 years. His beard is white. His hair is grey — nearly missing on top, wiry and unkempt on the sides. He wears a white kurta, which is like a long shirt worn in many parts of South Asia, on a lungi, a kind of men’s sarong. The kurta reaches his knees. Both need to be washed. There are gaps between his stained teeth. His smile is wide and real. He rubs some tobacco in his palm. When he’s satisfied, he takes a pinch of it and shares it with another boatman sitting next to him. Here, religion is irrelevant.
“Their faith is for them,” Kalam says. “It doesn’t matter whether someone is Hindu or Muslim. Everyone is the same.”
Sheikh Nozryl, 49, another boatman, is Abdul’s cousin. The two are from the same village: Diamond Harbour, a municipality 60 kilometres from Kolkata. He came here as a child after dropping out of school in class six. His father was a boatman in Kolkata and he always wanted to be one too. He began working in construction but switched to this profession. He’s built like a man who, with some training, could compete in professional wrestling.
Like Kalam, Nozryl says that someone’s faith is of little importance to him. “If you cut us, we will bleed just like a Hindu.” He doesn’t pray regularly, he says, and neither do the other Muslim boatmen. But everyone celebrates Eid together, cooking and sharing fish, Muslim or not. “We spend more time here, with each other, than at home,” he says.
The steady thrum of a motor punctures the air. The smell of fuel mixes with that of the grey water’s. Can water smell damp? This river, which is a major distributary of the Ganges, sustains this community in multiple ways. At meal times, someone chops onions, someone else gets the stove going. Once food is cooked, small groups sit cross-legged in a circle on a boat’s wooden deck, eating rice from metal plates with their hands. The river is how they make a livelihood, where they wash dishes. This is also where they expel bodily waste.
This lifestyle seems to work for Dipankar Biswas, 33, another boatman. “I like Kolkata more than home.” He resembles the Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn (one of his favourite actors), if you overlook his paunch. His moustache is so dark and neatly clipped that it appears taped to his upper lip. He’s from Nadia District, two and a half hours by trainfrom Kolkata, where he has a wife and a two-year-old daughter.
There’s a dense fog that hangs above the water. Visibility extends for some distance but you have to make an effort to see the Howrah Bridge. Putting the full weight of his body towards the oar gracefully, in a move that looks like a dance step, Dipankar steers the boat.
West Bengal’s relationship with Islam goes back to at least 1756, when the Muslim ruler Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, attacked and defeated the British. The Partition of 1947, and Indian Independence, permanently severed Bengal into two entities, placing most Hindus in West Bengal and Muslims in East Bengal, which became a part of Pakistan. After seceding from Pakistan in 1971, East Bengal became present-day Bangladesh.
According to the 2011 Indian Census, Muslims form about 20 percent of West Bengal’s population and close to 15 percent of India’s, making it the country with the second highest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. There are nearly two billion Muslims across the globe. That’s about a quarter of all human beings.
Religion in India is rarely subtle. It’s often on full public display in colour, music and raw human spirit — especially during publicspectacles such as Chhath Puja. The reality though, is that we live in increasingly polarized times, along religious lines, not just in India but in many parts of the world.
Depending on which part of the planet you live on, who or what you pray to can determine whether a house is rented to you, whether you’re allowed to enter a country and how strangers treat you. Religious discrimination, much like racism, is alive and well.
But hope has been around much longer than hate. And for the boatmen in this part of the Hooghly River, that means treating their colleagues with respect, no matter how or when they pray.
Today the setting sun has turned pink. The illuminated disk in the sky slips behind the bridge and then seems to dissolve into the clouds.
The boatman of Prinsep Ghat will operate for a few hours past sundown. These men are brothers, Muslim and Hindu, bound by a river. In a world that can feel dark on many days, this is their place under the sun.
This story was written as part of the course requirement of the National Geographic Out of Eden Walk Workshop in Slow Journalism held in Kolkata, India in November 2018.
