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Feature

Mawallis of the Sunderbans

Md.Shazzad Hossen Milton

The Sundarbans of Bangladesh is a maze of rivers, creeks and islands at the mouth of the Ganges Delta. Honey and wax production is a major seasonal activity of bees in the Sundarbans forest areas. Around 2000 local people are employed or engaged in gathering honey and bee-wax in the season from April to June. These people are locally called Mawallis. According to the Forest Department records about 200 tons of honey and about 50 tons of bee wax are gathered by the Mawallis in every season, which constitutes approximately 50% of the total production in Bangladesh.

The Mawallis of the Sundarbans face great dangers while collecting the precious wild honey from the forest. They enter deep in to the forest at the risk of their lives. As the Sundarbans is home to the Royal Bengal tiger, each year more than twelve Mawallis fall prey to the tiger. They also have to face many other problems in the forest. According to two hundred Mawallis opinion we identified the five major problems faced in the forest during the search of honey. These are: tiger, other animals, forest robbers, money, technique, tools and lack of arms to protect themselves. According to the 200 Mawallis, 50% problems come from tiger, 30% from forest robbers, 10% from lack of money, 5% from other animals and the other 5% from lack of technique and tools. Every year more than twenty Mawallis die from one of the above reasons. Traditionally, honey is a resource that is exploited by the poorest sector of the local community. The demand for honey is large and with improvements in the quality the potential for increasing price is a distinct possibility. The Mawallis represent relatively small yet ecologically and commercially significant user groups who have very little say in the conduct of its affairs. Mawallis are very poor people and have no savings. So before they go to the forest they borrow from moneylenders. Upon return from the forest they have to pay a great amount to the moneylender. If any organization or the Government gives them loan and provide them with scientific tools, as well as teach them proper techniques for improving honey harvesting, it will also result in improvement of the net honey production.

The method of harvesting honey from the Sundarbans
The Sundarban forest is the world's largest mangrove forest. Two-third of it is in Bangladesh and the other onethird in India. It occupies 6017 sq. km along the country's southern shoreline. The Sundarban forest has huge varieties of living organism. Honeybees are one of the most important insects of Sundarban forest.

It is so important because it gives honey, which has high food value and is also a popular sweet poly-carbohydrate.
The honey collectors of the Sundarbans face great dangers while collecting the precious wild honey from the forest from April to June, when the Giant Asian Honeybees (Apis dorsata) build huge honeycombs in the trees and bushes. The honey collectors seek them out to harvest the wild honey. The Mawallis enter deep in to the forest at the risk of their lives, for they share this domain with one whose name it is forbidden to utter inside the forest.

The Forest department used to sale individual honey collecting permits accompanied through moneylenders and middlemen. Honey collectors are permitted to enter the forest on the 1st of April every year to collect honey from nests of the migratory wild bee Apis dorsata. The Mawalli are the professional honey collectors in the forest, but they use most wasteful technique to collect honey from the forest. Unfortunately, spurred by the need to collect as much honey as possible since man-eating tigers seem to selectively follow and prey on wandering honey gatherers, all nests whether ripe or unripe and harvested. Furthermore; they do not know about the lifestyle, honey gathering process, maturation of honey-containing stage of hive and colonies, role of bees as pollinators, beekeeping knowledge, relation of bees with flowering plants and plant penology. Above all, they are not provided with the scientific tools and techniques of honey collection. On the first of April every year the search for wild honey starts. In an official opening ceremony the boats are blessed and the permission papers from the Forest Department are handed out. The Mawallis then load their wooden boats and start their annual journey into the maze of the forest.

Last year (2005) about 25 boats gathered for the ceremony. Only five years earlier more than one hundred boats had started out together for the honey collection season.

Due to the drastic increase of pirates in the coastal waters, many Mawalli simply cannot afford to continue their traditional occupation.

Eight men normally form a group that stays together on the boat in the forest for about one month. During the first days they look for an ideal area with a comparatively higher prevalence of flowering trees. Once the locale is found, the work begins. The Mawallis construct a roof on their boat with golpata leaves, under which they store their personal belongings: mosquito nets, mats, blanket and of course bide and betel-nut.

The huge clay pots in the boat are filled with drinking water: in the Sundarban fresh water is rare. Under the floorboards of the elongated wooden country boats the Mawallis store their provision: rice, lentils, oil, salt, spices, potatos, gur (molasses), and onion. For cooking, a small clay stove, a few pots and a grinding stone for spices is enough.

During the actual search they carry only the most important things: a thin cotton cloth, called the gamcha, matches for lighting torches, a basket for the honey and a machete (dao) for slicing the hive. The 'dao' also affords the Mawallis their only protection against the tiger. Some Mawallis wear shoes to protect their feet from the long thorns of the hental bush, but the need to stay agile is of utmost importance because the search often involves crossing creeks as well as wading through thigh-deep mud.

The Mawallis search the area for about three to four hours, and then come back to the boat for water and food and then head off into the forest again. One of the men stays on the boat, keeping it close to the group, while the others disperse in a semi circle. They comb the dense forest at amazingly high speed, staying within calling distance of each other. Sound carries in the forest, and the calls give the group a clear picture of the location of the other members and the boat.

When a Mawalli discovers a honeycomb, he alerts the others with a loud, excited shout. The group then gathers at a short distance from the beehive and quickly makes torches with dried green leaves.

Thick smoke envelopes the surrounding areas once the torches are lit. In the safety of this smoke the Mawallis approach the beehive and the agitated bees disperse. The Mawallis in charge of slicing the hive swiftly climb up the tree and wipe off the remaining bees with their bare hands. They then delicately take off the part of the hive filled with the glutinous honey and white wax, dropping it into the basket. As soon as the hive is cut, the Mawallis leave the area, keeping the smoke torches lit for quite a distance, and continue the search.

The amount of honey gathered from the comb depends on the size of the bee colony, and can be as much as eight kilograms per comb.

Once the Mawallis have returned to the boat, the honey is pressed out of the wax and filtered through fine cloth. The clear and filtered honey is stored in large containers.

The wax fetches a good price. It's mostly used by the cosmetic industry. The honey is sold to a middleman, who often provides the loan for permission and provision. The price for one kilogram of honey in the local market is about 110 taka. In the cities the Sundarban honey is sold at up to 300 taka per kilogram.

Socio-economic conditions of the Mawallis
The Mawallis are the professional honey collectors in the forest .They are the poorest segment of the local community. Mawallis are now leading a very miserable life. They live from hand to mouth, and often cannot give food and clothes to their wives and children.

Their household work is very simple. They eat two meals per day- in the morning and evening. Along with rice they take fried or boiled green vegetable or some chili sauce or even plain rice with salt. At other times, they eat chapatis (home baked flat wheat bread) with molasses or chili sauce. Cooking takes up very little time for them. So the housewives have plenty of free time which they spend in doing practically nothing.

In this investigation we found that 95% Mawallis are completely illiterate and even their children do not go to school. So economically this group is at the bottom of the rung. Their only capital is their strength. They possess no special agricultural tools, nor are they considered to possess any special skills for which they could be given priority. They are simply unskilled laborers.

As honey collection is a seasonal work only for three months, during other months of the year they have to find other work. Unfortunately there is no such opportunity for work, as they have no land for cultivation. In the Sundarbans or near it, there are many branches of rivers. Some of the parts of these rivers are now used for shrimp-culture and rest for fishing. The amount of fish in the river is decreasing day by day. So most of the Mawallis engaged in fishing during off seasons are now leaving this profession. Other Mawallis go to town to pull Rickshaws or to work as day laborers. In the survey on 200 Mawallis, we found that in off season 31.5% Mawallis work as day laborers, 26% have no work, 19% work as fishermen, 11.5% work as bike drivers, 10% go to town to pull rickshaws and 5% work as wood cutters.

The writer is a Ph.D research student in the Zoology Department, Dhaka University