Mohona
Sundarban is a vast stretch of mangrove forests spread across an archipelago of islands in the Gangetic delta
in India and Bangladesh. Inhabited by over four million people and few hundred Royal Bengal tigers,
Sundarban is a site with a high frequency of human‐animal encounters.
The Bengali word for confluence is Mohona, a term which reflects this ambiguous boundary separating and co-joining the river and the sea. Sundarban, a place where Mohona is the dominant feature, is inevitably a landscape of ambiguity.
As night falls over Sundarban the ambiguities become even more pronounced. The landscape feels dense,
the visibility becomes deceptive and the air gets still. The atmosphere is unsettling yet calming. There is no
clear sense of where the forest begins or the village ends. It becomes evident that the Sundarban is a single
entity. An entity wherein the habitat of one is continually encroached upon by the other. An entity where all
the inhabitants struggle to survive, assert their rights and yet manage to coexist, for there is a delicate sense
of belonging that connects the people to the nature at the Sundarban.
