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River gypsies in Bangladesh have decided to give up their nomadic lifestyle as the rivers are increasingly becoming erratic. What future do they now have? At the end of every year, after the monsoon rains, about 800,000 river gypsies in Bangladesh, known locally as ‘bedey’ dismantle their houseboat on the Bangladeshi delta and head to the mainland. This time many of them will not be coming back.
The river gypsies have for generations lived on the nation’s waterways between May and December and on land for the rest of the year. But lately they have decided to give up the nomadic lifestyle because the rivers have become increasingly erratic and impossible to navigate — which experts attribute to effects of climate change and upstream development.
For many families, it means an end of the eight-month season during which they families paddled two rickety bamboo houseboats across the vast delta.
The gypsy families earn their living through small work. The men usually earn some income diving for jewellery lost by women bathing, or catch fish. The women are often biggest income earners in the family, selling ornaments and offering herbal treatments for toothache.
Although there is no caste-system in Bangladesh, bedeys are on the bottom rung of society and almost all are illiterate and desperately poor. They mostly survive by being skilled snake charmers or by selling ornaments, traditional medicine and cosmetics in villages. Some Bangladeshis believe they also have secret healing powers.
But, according to Grambangla Unnayan Committee, a Dhaka-based charity, Bangladesh’s bedey community could disappear within a few decades as they abandon their annual migration between land and water.
‘The shift to the mainland is happening at a speedy rate. Just 15 years ago, all bedeys were based on water. Pretty soon we may not have any gypsies on our rivers,’ reported the Dhaka-based charity. In the past decade alone 250,000 bedeys had been forced off the water and predicted that within two years 90 per cent of gypsies would have to live on land permanently.
Retired history professor Jainal Abedin Khan, who has written several books about bedeys, reports that they arrived in Bangladesh in the 17th century when the region was part of the Mughal Empire. They originally hail from what is now Myanmar but they moved across into the delta, his research tells. ‘They are a huge part of folklore here, and are the origin of many myths and legends.’
Low-lying Bangladesh has one of the world’s largest water networks, criss-crossed by 700 rivers, tributaries and canals which cover 24,000 kilometres or seven per cent of the country’s surface. Bangladesh’s Inland Water Transport Authority says that today just 16,000 kilometres of waterways are navigable during the rainy seasons and 6,000 kilometres in the dry months from November to April.
International scientists believe that Bangladesh — through which the mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers flow into the sea — is one of the countries worst affected by climate change. Increased pollution and changing weather patterns, including unpredictable rains, were the main reasons why rivers were suffering.
This year Bangladesh barely had any rain during June. The country almost had a drought until heavy rain finally arrived in August. The weather is definitely changing and inconsistent rain — heavy one month, dry the next — affects the waterways. Many rivers and streams are also drying up because of human extraction of water, large-scale dumping of industrial waste and unplanned building of hundreds of dams, climate experts warn.
Cultural experts say bedeys face many social as well as environmental pressures.
The ornaments they sell are no longer in demand. Orthodox medicine is preferred so there is no demand for their products. The gypsies also have to often struggle to blend into mainstream Muslim society.
Many find it difficult to integrate because they lack education and skills. However, — if Bangladesh loses its bedey people it will lose a slice of its history and culture. These river gypsies in the past used to live on boats, roaming every place. The boat was their only house as well as their means of transport. They had had better days on boats, which now they are forced to leave. Social scientists in Bangladesh fear that fnding jobs on the mainland will be tough for these bedeys because they are not skilled at anything but being bedeys. 
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