Bonbibi

The boats tie up at the tree line before dawn and nobody steps ashore until the fakir has finished. He clears a patch of mud at the edge of the mangrove, sets a lump of clay on it, lays out sweets and a fistful of rice, and mutters words the crew is not permitted to hear. A rag of red cloth hangs off a pole in air that tastes of salt and rot. Only then do the honey collectors go in, barefoot and carrying nothing that could be called a weapon, into a country where the water climbs and drains twice a day over ground that is never entirely land. Every one of them goes in with the same name ready in his mouth.

The name is two ordinary Bengali words, forest and lady, for a woman who rules roughly ten thousand square miles of mangrove. The Sundarbans straddle the border of West Bengal and Bangladesh, and the people on its fringes call it the land of the eighteen tides. Twelve million or so live there, and the poorest of them go into the forest for fish, firewood, wax and honey. The forest kills people every year. A Bengal tiger of four or five hundred pounds stalks in silence, takes its prey from behind at the neck, and carries it off through the stilt roots as though it weighed nothing. Hindus and Muslims of the delta both hold that Bonbibi is what stands between those two facts.

Her story begins in Mecca rather than Bengal. A fakir named Berahim had a wife, Phulbibi, who could not conceive, and she sent him to pray at the tomb of the Prophet. The answer came back through Fatima, keeper of paradise: take a second wife and two children will follow. Phulbibi agreed on one condition, that a wish of hers be granted later, whatever it was. When the second wife, Golalbibi, fell pregnant, the wish turned out to be exile, and Berahim led the pregnant woman deep into the forest and left her there in labour. Four heavenly women came down to attend the birth. The twins were named Bonbibi and Shah Jangali, and their mother, unable to carry two infants out of that place alive, took the boy and left the girl behind. In the telling, the abandoned daughter says plainly that any mother would have done the same.

A doe suckled the child for seven years. That detail does more work than it looks: the forest did not merely shelter her, it fed her, and she came out of it knowing how it behaves. Reunited with her family, she sent her parents home, took her brother, and went on pilgrimage to the Prophet’s grave. Fatima blessed her there and promised that those who sought her in the swamp forest would be answered. The twins became disciples of one of the Prophet’s grandsons, received grace to do the work, and turned south and east toward the tidal country.

Shah Jangali gave the call to prayer as they arrived, and the sound rolling out over the water was, to the incumbent, an act of war. Dakshin Ray, the Southern Lord, was the son of a brahmin and a clairvoyant who could take any shape he pleased and mostly chose the tiger. His mother Narayani insisted on fighting in his place, since the intruder was only a woman, and came out with an army of witches. Bonbibi was very nearly beaten. She called on Fatima, was granted the strength to win, and then declined to finish it. Narayani, on the ground, called her friend. Bonbibi took her rival’s mother into her lap and handed the pair a district called Kedokhali to govern under her. She did not drive the tiger out of the forest. She gave it a landholding and a rule to keep, which is the whole political settlement of the Sundarbans in one gesture.

The rule held badly. A trader called Dhona, whose name means wealth, sailed seven boats in after honey and wax and neglected to make an offering to Dakshin Ray, who hid every drop of honey in the country. Combs hung in the branches, dry as paper. Dakshin Ray came to Dhona in a dream and named his price: a human sacrifice, and specifically the poor cowherd boy Dukhey, whose name means sorrow, and whose mother had told him at the boat that if the worst came he was to call out to Bonbibi as though she were his mother. Dhona took the boy inland on a pretext and left him. The tiger came out of the trees, and the boy called. She was there in an instant with her brother, who chased Dakshin Ray south until he took shelter with his old friend Bara Khan Gazi and begged him to negotiate. The Gazi did. Dakshin Ray was pardoned on a pledge to hunt no more men, Dukhey went home loaded with the wealth that had been promised him, in one telling on the back of a crocodile, and eventually married Dhona’s daughter Champa and became a landlord himself.

Dakshin Ray had not always been the villain. In the Raymangal, composed by Krishnaram Das in the 1680s, he is the benevolent lord of the tidelands, and the Johuranama simply annexes him. The Bonbibi text is much younger than the veneration it records. Munshi Muhammad Khater printed his version in Kolkata in 1880 because people from the Sundarbans kept coming to the city and asking him for one, and Abdur Rahim Sahib and Bayanuddin produced others; they run in rhyming couplets of dwipodi-poyar, in a Bengali thick with Persian and Arabic, and the chapbooks open from the right as a Quran does though the letters are Bengali throughout. Long before any of that, François Bernier came through in 1665 and wrote about boats moored clear of the bank because of the tigers, Krishnaram wrote his poem, and by the time W. W. Hunter compiled his statistical account in 1875 and O’Malley his Khulna gazetteer in 1908, the colonial record was already describing the fakirs, the little tent-like shrines and the offerings made before a single tree was cut.

What she looks like is a question the tradition answers with clay rather than description. The oldest form of her shrine is a mound of earth and nothing else. New images go up each year at the festival that falls at the turn of Poush into Magh, in the middle of January: painted figures with a yellowish complexion, a crown, a garland of wildflowers, set in huts of mud and thatch. Where Hindu devotion dominates she carries a club and a trident and a tiger crouches as her mount; where Muslim devotion dominates she has braided hair, a cap with a tikli, a ghagra worn over pyjamas and shoes on her feet. She is never depicted by herself. Around her stand Shah Jangali, Bara Khan Gazi, and small Dukhey, with Dakshin Ray in tiger form somewhere in the group, so that the whole quarrel is present in every shrine, permanently unresolved.

Her powers are narrow and absolute. She is obliged to answer, immediately, anyone in that forest who calls her mother, and the obligation runs regardless of whether the caller is Hindu or Muslim, since the words Hindu and Muslim never appear in her book. She knows the forest from the inside because it raised her. As its sovereign she can open or close its produce to a boat crew. Her method is mercy: she wins fights and then leaves her enemies in place with terms.

The limits are just as clear. She nearly lost her own war and had to call for help to win it, her brother does the pursuing while she does the deciding, and the treaty she chose over victory means the tiger keeps its share of the country by right. Her authority stops at the mangrove and at this life. She has no part in salvation or rebirth, no purpose outside the delta, and no claim on anyone who no longer needs the forest to eat. And the protection is conditional, on entering by day, on going in unarmed and clean, on taking only what the household requires and leaving the small flowering trees alone. When the tiger takes a man anyway, the party does not conclude that she was absent. They conclude that somebody broke a rule.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bonbibi?

Bonbibi is the guardian of the Sundarbans mangrove forest, venerated by both Hindu and Muslim residents of the delta in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Honey collectors, woodcutters and fisherfolk call on her for protection from tigers before entering the forest. Her story is told in a Bengali chapbook epic called the Bonbibi Johuranama.

Is Bonbibi a Hindu goddess or a Muslim saint?

Both communities venerate her, and her own story is framed in Islamic terms: she is the daughter of a fakir from Mecca, charged by Allah and blessed at Fatima’s grave. Hindus install painted clay images of her and perform puja; Muslims usually avoid images, tying red cloth and offering a sweet called shirni instead. The words Hindu and Muslim do not appear anywhere in the Johuranama.

Who is Bonbibi’s enemy?

Dakshin Ray, the Southern Lord, a shape-shifting figure who ruled the tidal forest before Bonbibi arrived and who takes the form of a man-eating tiger. Bonbibi defeated his mother Narayani in battle and then spared her, granting mother and son a district to govern under her authority. Dakshin Ray later demanded a human sacrifice anyway, which set off the story of Dukhey.

What happens in the story of Dukhey?

Dukhey is a poor cowherd taken on a honey and wax expedition by a wealthy trader named Dhona, who abandons him in the forest as a human sacrifice to Dakshin Ray. The boy remembers his mother’s instruction and calls out to Bonbibi, who arrives at once with her brother Shah Jangali and drives the tiger off. The Muslim saint Bara Khan Gazi brokers a peace, Dakshin Ray swears off hunting people, and Dukhey returns home wealthy.

How old is the worship of Bonbibi?

The written Bonbibi Johuranama dates only to the late nineteenth century, with Munshi Muhammad Khater’s Kolkata printing of 1880 the best known version. The practice is considerably older: François Bernier described the terror of the Sundarbans tigers in 1665, Krishnaram Das composed the Raymangal about Dakshin Ray in the 1680s, and British administrators including W. W. Hunter in 1875 recorded woodcutters making offerings to forest deities before starting work.

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