In the Sundarbans, the tiger is king. In its shadow stands the Sundari tree, an endangered mangrove. The Frontline talks to a group of women whose husbands were killed by tigers and is now conserving these trees to protect the forest where their partners were lost.
Geeta Mridha, a soft-spoken woman, points at the stretch of land beyond the Gosaba River to India’s Sundarbans, the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest. “We gathered the seeds of Sundari trees there,” she said . “Are there tigers there?” I asked. “There are tigers everywhere in the Sundarbans,” she laughed.
It’s a windy February day, but at least it’s not summer. Mridha is outside with about 12 other women who have finished their housework of cooking for their family. It’s now time for them to work on the Sundari plants, the most common mangrove tree species in the Sundarbans of India and Bangladesh. It’s also a species that makes up an ecosystem that’s endangered and rapidly declining.
This group of women are trying to reverse that. Mridha and I stood on a newly constructed road on Gosaba Island that marks where civilization ends and where the Sundarban jungles begin. On the other side, the women work to clear the grass at the base of the Sundari plants under Mridha’s supervision—labor that is quite tiring in the heat. These women are tiger widows. Mridha is one of them.
Colloquially known as byagro bidhoba in Bengali, the tiger widows have all lost their husbands in tiger attacks. Many were left without any income after their husbands were killed. These women are now making money protecting the very forests that took away their husbands forever. When a tiger killed Mridha’s husband in 2012, she found herself completely helpless. She was left with two young children and no way to care for them—until she found this job. “You won’t find a home in the Sundarbans where there isn’t a victim of a tiger attack.”
India holds less than a quarter of the world’s tiger habitat, yet it has 70% of the world’s wild tigers—or almost 3,000 animals, per the latest tiger estimate in 2018. Yet while millions are spent to protect tigers, the Sundari tree perishes in silence, unnoticed and unrecognized. But tiger conservation comes with its own problems. Tigers often seek food from human settlements, and it is not uncommon for them to kill livestock, as well as humans. Men are often killed when they venture into the forest to catch fish and crabs or gather honey and wood because agriculture and fishing are some of the main occupations in the Sundarbans. From 2015 to 2018, tigers killed an average of 34 people in India. “You won’t find a home in the Sundarbans where there isn’t a victim of a tiger attack,” said Pushpa Mondal, another tiger widow.
The Sundarbans cuts across Bangladesh and the eastern state of West Bengal, India. The ecosystem is powered by an abundance of mangroves: the Sundari trees. Overharvesting, increase in water salinity, erosion, coastal expansion, and disease are all threatening the Sundari tree’s future. Top-dying disease has been especially devastating, killing 15% of the trees since the 1980s. The disease starts to kill the trees from the top (hence the name) before engorging the tree’s stems as it makes its way down, rotting the plant.
Mangroves are natural ecological barriers that protect coastal settlements from storm surges and slow the deterioration of the intertidal zone. West Bengal’s frequent cyclones could have more severely caused loss of human lives and livelihood if not for the Sundarbans. The species’ complex root systems protect the earthen embankment from the shock of rising waves. The Sundari tree is also widely used in traditional folk medicine. “The fish workers in Sundarbans were afflicted by three things: the high salinity of water due to water pollution; global warming, which hindered the growth of fishes in the area; and frequent tiger attacks,” said Pradip Chatterjee, the president of Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum (DMF), a collective of small-scale fish workers in West Bengal.
Locals and non-governmental organizations estimate at least 3,000 women have been widowed as a result of tiger attacks in the Sundarbans since the 1980s. Oftentimes, their husbands were the sole breadwinners in their families, so their deaths lead to the ruin and poverty of their wives and children. But that shouldn’t be the case. The tiger widows are entitled to compensation from the West Bengal government’s forest and fisheries departments, as well as the state’s insurance. However, the money comes with many conditions, Chatterjee said….