SHUNYØ RAJA: Stories from the Edge of the Ganga-Brahmaputra Delta | Arko Datto
The Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta, comprising Bangladesh and West Bengal (India), is the world’s largest delta. It empties into the Bay of Bengal and is home to the Sunderbans, the world’s largest contiguous halophytic mangrove forest. Due to human-induced climate change, the Delta faces severe challenges as the delicate balance between land, air, and sea is increasingly threatened.
Using a melange of environmental portraits and expansive landscape images depicting the inhabitants in this brutal, ever-changing milieu, SHUNYØ RAJA, a three-part project by Arko Datto, comprehensively documents contemporary life in the Delta, offering an in-depth view of its many ground realities.
“The title of the project is derived from something a man—now an environmental refugee himself—once told me: ‘Bereft of our land and livelihood, we are all but shunyo rajas (kings of a bereft land) in this erstwhile land of plenty.'”
Arko Datto,
Visual Artist
I Kings of a Bereft Land
In the Delta, where millions live, cyclones like Aila, Hudhud, and Sidr have destroyed property and livelihoods, plunging people into enormous economic debt. After Cyclone Aila, a mass exodus of able-bodied men to more prosperous regions and the Gulf states was observed. Primarily fishermen or farmers, they often lack adequate skills and end up working as labourers in the construction sector. Migrating with their families to nearby cities, many have become the first environmental refugees in both countries.
Expansive in its scope and ambition, this project has already been underway for the past six years and focuses on a critical examination of seven islands in India and six in Bangladesh, spread across the Delta.
II Where Do We Go When the Final Wave Hits?
Many have recounted stories of horror: neighbours being swept away by a raging river in the dead of night or the sea coming in and breaking down the walls of their homes. The setting sun itself comes coded with terror, and the approaching night brings with it an omnipotent adversary. Countless others live in constant anticipation, knowing that during the next monsoonal tide, their houses will be destroyed and their lives uprooted.
This work explores the precarious existential and physical states of those living in lands that are gradually being consumed by water, told through an exploration of the night.
It seeks to build an equivalence between the global war on terror and the battle against climate change, which both deal with invisible yet omnipresent omnipotent enemies that can strike anytime, anyhow, anywhere, thereby attempting to locate climate change in relation to the ever-present narrative of the war on terror.
III Terra Mutata
Terra Mutata attempts to explore the migrant condition in a poetic and evocative way. The use of infrared imagery here illuminates a dystopian universe that is simultaneously haunting and poetic. The Delta as a region has been historically fraught with multiple waves of migration, with climate change being the most recent catalyst.
When migrants and refugees look back to their ancestral spaces, there is immense nostalgia in the way they recall the beautiful lands they once knew—starry skies, rivers, ponds, and gardens that they have been forced to leave behind in their journey to the grimy urban metropoles of Dhaka, Kolkata, and elsewhere. This work seeks to visualise the beauty that was lost, as well as the lives left behind in the wake of climate change.
The once-rich multivariate nightly ecosystem of Bengali folklore and ghosts has now been replaced by the ghosts of the Anthropocene: those left behind, those unable to escape, and those lingering in the ruins and broken embankments. In fact, “ghostlike” is the metaphor frequently used by victims to describe paramilitary forces and extralegal death squads whose phantom-like nightly visits have ruined their lives.
Words and Photography by Arko Datto; visit his website to explore his work further.
