Place · mangrove national park · India

Sundarbans National Park

The 4,264-square-kilometre Sundarbans National Park in South 24 Parganas district, West Bengal — the Indian share of the world's largest mangrove forest at the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta mouth, together with the Bangladesh Sundarbans holding the only population of the Bengal tiger that regularly swims and takes human prey (about 100 tiger-related deaths annually across the delta). The park holds about 100 Royal Bengal tigers, the saltwater crocodile, the Irrawaddy and Ganges river dolphins, and 300 bird species. Established 1973, UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. The 2009 Cyclone Aila and the 2020 Super Cyclone Amphan devastated large sections. Rising sea levels threaten the mangrove ecosystem; several islands have already disappeared.

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Catastrophe & landscapeRivers & water

Date: 1987
Function: Archaeology & heritage
Confidence: Established / referenced
Location: 21.950, 88.900

Connections (2)

Imperial administration ofKhān Jahān ʿAlī
Khan Jahan Ali cleared forest on the northern fringe of the Sundarbans, dug tanks and settled cultivators — the standard mechanism by which the delta was brought under rice and, in the process, converted. Richard Eaton's account of the rise of Islam in Bengal is built on cases like his: not conquest but agrarian frontier settlement, with a Sufi holding the land grant and a mosque going up where the forest came down.
Alternative toKeoladeo National Park
Keoladeo is a wetland that was dug and flooded in the 1890s for shooting parties; the Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest on earth. One is a designed habitat that became a World Heritage site and depends on a water allocation from a canal; the other is a deltaic wilderness that is losing islands to the sea. Both are listed under the same natural criteria.

On these journeys

Sources

List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia

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