Char dakhal in art and politics

Faridpur-born Humayun Kabir (1906-69) studied at Oxford University, became the secretary of the Oxford Union and was once only four votes short of becoming its president. He was a global intellectual celebrity often sought after for speeches. His lectures at the universities of Wisconsin-Madison and London morphed into books.

Despite his global reach and cosmopolitan credentials, Kabir was not removed from the lifeworld of rural Faridpur. In his place-centric English-language novel Men and Rivers (1945), he showcases some beautiful and not-so-beautiful aspects of life in his place of birth to a global audience. One of them is char dakhal or grabbing of riverine/shoal islands.

What are generally called bars that emerge in the middle of rivers or adjacent to riverbanks, are called chars in Bangladesh. In “Charland and Right of the Landless” (The Daily Star, October 27, 2007), Md Abdul Kader states that in Bangladesh “the amount of charland due to alluvium is more than two thousand square kilometres.” Battles over chars in rural Bangladesh have gained proverbial currency, as char dakhal is a household phrase in the country.

Charlands or sandbars abound in Kabir’s Faridpur; they emerge as islands within the channel of the Padma as a result of bank erosion and accretion. Many place names in Faridpur—as in Bangladesh as a whole—are prefixed or suffixed by the word char. For example, Charbhadrasan, Char Jashohardi, Char Madhabdia, Decreerchar, and Majchar are known places in Faridpur. The syllable char in these names suggests that these places were originally sandbanks or alluvial islands which later became human settlements.

Like Humayun Kabir, Bangladesh’s famous artist and painter SM Sultan (1923-94) was a cosmopolitan personality and a globe trotter. After touring countries such as India, Pakistan, Britain, and the US in the early 1950s, Sultan chose to live a reclusive life in a remote village on the bank of the river Chitra in Narail. He lived there from “the mid-1950s until his death in 1994” and produced paintings to extol the labour of the peasantry. In his famous 1976 oil painting “Char Dakhal,” Sultan shows the intensity of the battle over control of charlands as well as the heroism of peasant warriors.

The peasants who fight for charlands in Kabir’s Men and Rivers and Sultan’s “Char Dakhal” are uncouth and rustic. In Sultan’s painting, the charland warriors are an embodiment of the strong will and energy of the Bangladeshi peasantry. The weapons they use are conventional and locally-produced arrows, spears, long knives, and round shields. They are not products of modern technology that has brought the destructiveness of long-distance, remote-sensing warfare.

Powerful local elites seek to establish claims on newly emerging charlands. In a research work titled “Political Culture in Contemporary Bangladesh” (2010), Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi says that, generally, battles over charlands involve “rival landlords, escorted by their private militia wielding sticks as weapons, facing each other off in symbolic and literal battles as each lays claim to the newly emerged land.”

There are two types of river islands over which the battle of char dakhal occurs: newly emerged charlands without any human habitation and old charlands where poor and homeless people have already taken shelter. In the case of grabbing the latter, unjust attempts are made to displace poor peasants and farmers from their houses and fields—external and/or local power-wielders snatch away their livelihood and encroach upon their community and agricultural activities.

Formed mainly by the sedimentation of silt, char landmasses are fertile, which makes them desirable for agricultural and settlement uses. Soils of char areas are easily arable and can be watered more efficiently and have many other potential agricultural benefits. Therefore, charlands are highly sought after and constitute bones of contention among farmers and village leaders of surrounding areas.

In a journal article titled “Chars: Islands That Float Within Rivers” (2014), Kuntana Lahiri-Dutt of Australian National University states that, in Bangladesh, some legal framework regarding the acquisition of chars was introduced in 1972 and amended in 1994. However, the practice of char dakhal has now taken different forms and shapes. As Ahmed Humayun Kabir Topu explains in “Decreer Char on Padma: Where Influentials Control Shoal Land” (The Daily Star, January 27, 2024):

“Once upon a time, local influential people used to hire musclemen to take control of shoal land in rivers. There were fights between rival groups, and the winner would take the land and use [it] for agriculture. Decades later, the practice somewhat still remains the same, only muscle power has been replaced by political influence.”

Previously village leaders and influential groups used brute force to grab charlands, but now political forces exercise their clout to make profits from such lands. Since muscular power is the only factor in determining who establishes control on sandbars, in Bangladesh the term char dakhal has become a metaphor for lawlessness, chaos, and the exercise of undue force and violence.

The proverbial practice of char dakhal has now extended to politics in the form of chandabaji (money extortion) as a metaphor for criminal greed. Its pervasiveness has taken a firm grip on various sectors including transport, markets, slums and even university dormitories to be forcibly grabbed and extortioned by political parties and hooligans.

As regards char dakhal, Humayun Kabir and SM Sultan demonstrate the valour, heroism, pride, and resilience of the peasantry, but there is no such admirable thing present in the heinous and vile practice of chandabaji. It is full of hypocrisy, cowardice, deception, violence, and fear-mongering. It functions under the guise of political puppeteering and under the patronage of immoral political leaders whose only goal is to go to and stay in power and whose only interest is in racketeering and amassing wealth.

After the change of political power, cowardly chandabajs (extortionists) run away to avoid getting a good hiding by those from whom they extort money. However, unfortunately, they are soon replaced by extortionists of a rival political party that has gone to power or is eagerly waiting in the wings.

Chandabaji undoubtedly contributes to price hike. In order to stay afloat, business people and shopkeepers—who are forced to give money to extortionists—have to increase the price of goods and services that they sell and we buy. Thus, political extortionists extort money from us all. Therefore, the evil of chandabaji is much more pernicious and extensive.

Creating public awareness about the political structure of chandabaji—which is the political manifestation of char dakhal—is important so that, at election times, people can punish politicians who are on the receiving end of chanda (extorted money). As Humayun Kabir and SM Sultan depicted the lawlessness of char dakhal, we need writers and artists to expose the corruption of sleazy politicians and their henchmen involved in chandabaji.

Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the International Islamic University Malaysia. He can be reached at [email protected].

Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.