As wetlands of Assam’s Majuli island go dry, ecology thrown out of balance
Bird populations are declining while residents are struggling to catch fish amid a threat to livelihoods.
Legend has it that in a village on the island of Majuli in Assam, whenever someone needed something, they would go to a nearby beel (wetland) and pray to the water god (devata) and their wish would be fulfilled. Even today, the wetland is known as Bhakati beel, meaning “the beel of devotion”.
“Symbolically, this legend shows the significance of wetlands in the life of the people of Majuli,” says Gobin Kumar Khound, a writer and local environmental activist in the island. “Beels are the arteries of Majuli.”
Situated in the middle of the Brahmaputra, the landscape of Majuli is dotted with a string of beels. The variety of these wetlands is so rich that there’s an elaborate indigenous taxonomy of water bodies in Majuli.
In the book, Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam (2023), political ecologist Mitul Barua writes, local people in Majuli divide the wetlands into many categories depending on their size and characteristics, such as beel, jan, suti, erasuti, dubi, ghuli, hola, pitoni and so on.
“A string of beels in a landscape indicates the presence of major rivers in it in the past, which may have migrated channels over time. Majuli is a classic case of that, given the elaborate...
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