Making of nearly extinct Bengal boat, digitally preserved by British Museum project

Discover the endangered Chhot boat's history preserved in the British Museum's digital archives, saving a piece of Bengal's maritime heritage.

A boat that carries centuries of Bengal’s history but is nearly extinct has found a place in the digital archives of the British Museum, something that not only saves it from being totally forgotten but also gives access to anyone in the world about its manufacture.

The Chhot, considered highly stable, was among the few maritime boats of Bengal; it could go against the current tide over the waves and go into the open sea. It mainly carried cargo. A real-life model was constructed in 2022 at the Dihimondal Ghat by the Rupnarayan River in Howrah district under the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme of the British Museum funded by Arcadia. The digital archives of the project became accessible on February 12.

“I have been researching boats for 28 years now, I have documented many boats, and published many papers, but this kind of a thing has happened for the first time in India. It is a proud moment not just for Bengal or India but for boat lovers across the world,” Swarup Bhattacharyya, who was a part of the project along with Professor John P. Cooper of the University of Exeter and Zeeshan Ali Shaikh of Southampton University told The Hindu.

Dr. Bhattacharyya is an anthropologist doing field-based research on man-boat relationships and at present making to-the-scale scientific boat models. “The manufacture of the boat took up 10TB of digital space. From that, we extracted 1,300 pictures, 15 interviews, 10 ritual documentaries, one full-length documentary, and countless live drawings. It was a tedious process. Imagine how happy the boat makers are going to be — extremely skilled people like Panchanan Mondal and Amal Mondal. They can now show their children and grandchildren — ‘Look, that’s me!’,” he said.

According to Dr. Bhattacharyya, such digitisation was extremely important because it was next-to-impossible to faithfully explain such boatmaking — which he called intangible cultural heritage — through books or documents. “We need more of such digitisation to prevent our boats from being forever lost to time. Digitisation captures the minutest of details — it is like going back in time to watch the actual boatmaking,” he said.