Sundarbhans
The Sundarbhans (or Sunderbans) are the densely forested wetlands of the sea-face delta of the combined Ganges and Brahmaputra River, as they empty into the Bay of Bengal. Two-thirds of the area falls within Bangladesh, and the western third in West Bengal State, India. This area is about 200 kilometers from east to west and 50 kilometers from north to south, the much indented coast forming its southern boundary. The western boundary is the Hooghly River and the eastern the Meghna. Despite the relative closeness of Calcutta to the north, the Sundarbhans were once generally inaccessible and desolate; but since 1990 the West Bengal government has been promoting the area for tourism. The Sundharbans are today the world's largest remaining tropical mangrove forest, a national park where there is a great variety of wildlife, including Bengal tigers, deer, boar, monkeys, and crocodiles. The human population is reportedly very sparse.
Further Reading
Greenough, Paul. (1998) "Hunter's Drowned Land: An Environmental Fantasy of the Victorian Sunderbans." In Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, edited by Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 237–272.
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