Water Gypsies
Text: Zeiske, Christina, Berlin
Water Gypsies
Text: Zeiske, Christina, Berlin
Seven percent of Bangladesh’s total area are covered by water. The river and channel network has for more than thousand years been inhabited by the Bede people, Muslim river nomads. Nowadays, not only the climate that is becoming ever more extreme but also the increasing erection of levees and floodgates make travelling on the rivers in part too dangerous. For that reason, the Bede are shifting their lives to the land step by step. In doing so, they use their houseboats as models for their dwellings at the riverbanks.
Dhaka, a metropolis that is always changing rapidly, is a laboratory of spontaneously appearing and quickly disappearing spatial situations that are partly symbiotic. This statement holds true for the emergence of unplanned as well as for the further development of planned structures. Spatial changes that in European cities take decades are happening here in rather short periods. The unplanned structures in particular offer the chance of exploring the emergence of processes of change and their regularities.
One of the settlements in question is the one where the Bede people are living. The Bede are an ethnic community that has existed for more than 1000 years; in the 17th century, they followed their king Ballal Raja on the waterways from present-day Myanmar to Bengal. Over the course of time, they have become Muslims and went to the Dhaka area from where they travelled to various regions of Bangladesh and Assam. The Bede themselves are convinced that their community has Arabic roots and that the name “Bede” was derived from the Arabic word “bedouin”. Like the Arabs, they have been living as nomads with the difference that they travel on the waterways for the most part. They earn their living by selling cooking utensils, self-made seashell and pearl trinkets, fish, spices, and medicinal herbs. They perform animal shows in which they also produce magical tricks and act as fortune tellers and snake charmers. 8 to 10 months a year, roughly from April to December, the families predominantly live on boats or in tents and tour diverse regions of Bangladesh along the waterways. At the beginning of the dry season they return for a period of roughly two months to a permanent settlement.
But today, this traditional rhythm is changing. As one of countries most affected by climate change, Bangladesh suffers increasingly from the consequences of changing weather patterns. In the last years, unpredictably heavy rainfall has alternated with dry periods. And the waterway network, consisting of rivers, tributaries, and channels, that comprises 7 percent of Bangladesh’s area and has existed for centuries, is now changing too. Of the original 24,000 kilometres now only 16,000 kilometres in the wet season and no more than 6000 kilometres during the dry season are still navigable. The increasing pollution of the water – mainly caused by industrial sewages from the surroundings of Dhaka -, newly built levees and floodgates as well as illegal water abstraction make travelling on the rivers increasingly dangerous and partly even impossible. While at the beginning of the 1990s all Bede – 1.5 million people – were living on the water, in 2002, only 800,000 of them still lived there, and their number had decreased by further 250,000 people by 2009.
From the water to the land – the transformation of a settlement pattern
When the Bede started to settle down permanently 25 years ago, the Bede settlement Tongi emerged north of Dhaka. Today, one can study new building typologies of quite diverse forms there. In the beginning, the roofs of the boat were dismantled year by year in the dry season and brought to the river banks in order to execute repairs on the boats. But during the last 5 or 6 years more and more families have permanently settled down in Tongi, preferring living on land to the insecurities of river life. Their ways of earning a life has changed too, as the rivers become less and less navigable. Today, some Bede exclusively live on boats anchored at the shore while more and more have settled down on land. Thus, by and by new building types have developed out of the boat roofs that were formerly only temporarily placed on land. These types contain more or less formal and constructive borrowing from traditional elements depending on the inhabitants’ predilections. As basic types, two particular forms can be identified. On the one hand, there are the original boats, and on the other cubic forms that hardly differ from the typical self-built (corrugated iron) huts in Dhaka’s settlements of the poor. In almost all versions, there is a platform superimposed on supports. People are living on these platforms, not directly on the ground. This is caused by the sloping ground and by the changing river levels. The construction of these platforms has been adapted from boat construction. Another characteristic feature of traditional boats, the barrel-shaped roof, has also been adapted to the changed context and has become a new building element according to need. Apart from the barrel-shaped type there are also cubic huts set on supports. The measures of the huts in some cases correspond to those of the boats. These constructions convey the impression that they could easily be moved from one place to another.
In the shore area seemingly lighter constructions of different sizes all set on (bamboo) stilts predominate, while the buildings along the slope and thus farther removed from the river bank seem to stand nearer to the ground and tend to be more voluminous. Some special types are scattered amongst them which is partly due to the fact that some families own both a boat and a hut. In many cases bamboo and other cheap materials such as plastic sheeting and textile fabrics have been used as building materials. Metal, which has gradually replaced the traditional bamboo as the building material for simple huts in Dhaka, is unaffordable to many Bede.
The encountered housing typologies of the Bede demonstrate in which way the “one room housing” of the boat, in which the Bede’s family life had organised traditionally, is becoming similar to a permanent form of settlement. Although similarly “improvised” and hybrid building forms have evolved as in other settlements of poorer communities in Dhaka, the Bede settlement has its own, specific character. One can only hope that the special culture of the Bede people will survive in their new, urban context.
Translation from German by Christian Rochow
One of the settlements in question is the one where the Bede people are living. The Bede are an ethnic community that has existed for more than 1000 years; in the 17th century, they followed their king Ballal Raja on the waterways from present-day Myanmar to Bengal. Over the course of time, they have become Muslims and went to the Dhaka area from where they travelled to various regions of Bangladesh and Assam. The Bede themselves are convinced that their community has Arabic roots and that the name “Bede” was derived from the Arabic word “bedouin”. Like the Arabs, they have been living as nomads with the difference that they travel on the waterways for the most part. They earn their living by selling cooking utensils, self-made seashell and pearl trinkets, fish, spices, and medicinal herbs. They perform animal shows in which they also produce magical tricks and act as fortune tellers and snake charmers. 8 to 10 months a year, roughly from April to December, the families predominantly live on boats or in tents and tour diverse regions of Bangladesh along the waterways. At the beginning of the dry season they return for a period of roughly two months to a permanent settlement.
But today, this traditional rhythm is changing. As one of countries most affected by climate change, Bangladesh suffers increasingly from the consequences of changing weather patterns. In the last years, unpredictably heavy rainfall has alternated with dry periods. And the waterway network, consisting of rivers, tributaries, and channels, that comprises 7 percent of Bangladesh’s area and has existed for centuries, is now changing too. Of the original 24,000 kilometres now only 16,000 kilometres in the wet season and no more than 6000 kilometres during the dry season are still navigable. The increasing pollution of the water – mainly caused by industrial sewages from the surroundings of Dhaka -, newly built levees and floodgates as well as illegal water abstraction make travelling on the rivers increasingly dangerous and partly even impossible. While at the beginning of the 1990s all Bede – 1.5 million people – were living on the water, in 2002, only 800,000 of them still lived there, and their number had decreased by further 250,000 people by 2009.
From the water to the land – the transformation of a settlement pattern
When the Bede started to settle down permanently 25 years ago, the Bede settlement Tongi emerged north of Dhaka. Today, one can study new building typologies of quite diverse forms there. In the beginning, the roofs of the boat were dismantled year by year in the dry season and brought to the river banks in order to execute repairs on the boats. But during the last 5 or 6 years more and more families have permanently settled down in Tongi, preferring living on land to the insecurities of river life. Their ways of earning a life has changed too, as the rivers become less and less navigable. Today, some Bede exclusively live on boats anchored at the shore while more and more have settled down on land. Thus, by and by new building types have developed out of the boat roofs that were formerly only temporarily placed on land. These types contain more or less formal and constructive borrowing from traditional elements depending on the inhabitants’ predilections. As basic types, two particular forms can be identified. On the one hand, there are the original boats, and on the other cubic forms that hardly differ from the typical self-built (corrugated iron) huts in Dhaka’s settlements of the poor. In almost all versions, there is a platform superimposed on supports. People are living on these platforms, not directly on the ground. This is caused by the sloping ground and by the changing river levels. The construction of these platforms has been adapted from boat construction. Another characteristic feature of traditional boats, the barrel-shaped roof, has also been adapted to the changed context and has become a new building element according to need. Apart from the barrel-shaped type there are also cubic huts set on supports. The measures of the huts in some cases correspond to those of the boats. These constructions convey the impression that they could easily be moved from one place to another.
In the shore area seemingly lighter constructions of different sizes all set on (bamboo) stilts predominate, while the buildings along the slope and thus farther removed from the river bank seem to stand nearer to the ground and tend to be more voluminous. Some special types are scattered amongst them which is partly due to the fact that some families own both a boat and a hut. In many cases bamboo and other cheap materials such as plastic sheeting and textile fabrics have been used as building materials. Metal, which has gradually replaced the traditional bamboo as the building material for simple huts in Dhaka, is unaffordable to many Bede.
The encountered housing typologies of the Bede demonstrate in which way the “one room housing” of the boat, in which the Bede’s family life had organised traditionally, is becoming similar to a permanent form of settlement. Although similarly “improvised” and hybrid building forms have evolved as in other settlements of poorer communities in Dhaka, the Bede settlement has its own, specific character. One can only hope that the special culture of the Bede people will survive in their new, urban context.
Translation from German by Christian Rochow
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