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Chhot is a fishing boat, found in coastal water and coastal rivers of Bengal. This boats were widely used by fishermen in the lower reaches of the Rupnarayan and Hooghly rivers. The ship is capable of sailing in coastal waters.
Chhot boats were used for fishing as well as for transporting goods. However, the use of these boats is on the verge of extinction.
The chhot is a rarity in that its planking is joined using metal staples, a technique unknown elsewhere in India that echoes sewn-boat construction, while its keel-less construction echoes traditional watercraft in southeast Asia. The chhot-building tradition is threatened by dwindling demand for the vessel as a result of improved road infrastructure, rising wood costs, overfishing and new materials.
EMKP project
Principal Investigator: Prof. John P Cooper, University of Exeter, UK
Collaborator: Zeeshan Alli Shaikh, Independent Resaercher, UK
Exeter Associate: Swarup Bhattacharyya, Anthropologist, Kolkata
The chhot-builders of West Bengal, India: Documenting the vanishing craft knowledge of a unique boat-building tradition
The project aims to record the endangered craft skills and material culture underpinning construction of the chhot river boat—a wooden vessel of unique construction found on the Rupnarayan river, a tributary of the Hooghli river in West Bengal, India.
Project Goals
Our project aimed to record the material and intangible aspects of the construction of a particular watercraft type—the chhot boat, found in parts of West Bengal, India. Working on the banks of the Rupnarayan River estuary, just south of the village of Dihimandalghat, in Hawrah district. We followed the work of the Mondal family of boatbuilders as they built this 10.7m-long vessel from scratch to launch. The chhot is built in the ‘stapled’ tradition of historic Bengal, according to which hull planks are attached to each other and to the keel and posts using small metal staples—rather than, for example nails or stitching, as have been found historically in other parts of India and the Indian Ocean. This vessel type has disappeared in recent years as a result of changes to estuarine conditions caused by large-scale infrastructure projects, such as upstream barrages, that have favoured other types of boat.
The principal knowledge-holders in this project are the Mondal family of boatbuilders—father Panchanan, and sons Amol, Manimohan, Dilip and Deepak—who are residents of Dihimandalghat. As much as the project sought to document the material manifestations of a largely vanished material cultural tradition, it also sought to capture—and celebrate—the skills and knowledge of a family who are the protagonists of that materiality, insofar as that is ever possible.Boats do not simply exist: they are created out of the vision, technological knowledge and artisanal skills of individuals, working within knowledge traditions that transmit them from generation to generation, so long as they are required. Our practical aims therefore embraced a detailed recording of the structure of the vessel itself, the processes and sequences of its making, the materials involved in its construction, and the techniques and methods that the Mondal family deployed in turning raw materials into a working watercraft.
Material Practices and Culture
The Monday family builders constructed the chhot in less than a month between October¬-November 2022 on a patch of ground alongside the Amberia football field, to the south of Dihimandalghat village and at the edge of the salt marshes of the Rupnarayan estuary. The construction site was not a boatyard per se, but a conveniently situated, flat area serving that purpose for the duration of the build.
The chhot is a double-ended fishing boat. Construction takes and approach that academics call “shell-first” or “shell-conceived”: its hull planking (the “shell”) is built up first, before any internal framing timbers are installed for support. Moreover, most of the planking is laid in “parallel” fashion: rather than the ends of each strake being scarfed into the stem or stern posts, they remain free until after the tenth strake has been built up. At that point, a girdling eleventh strake is attached, and the ends of the all the previous strakes are scarfed into it, locking the stucture of the hull. A massive twelfth strake completes the planking. Joinery is complex: the planks are edge joined with rebates and end-scarfed with locking joints. Through beams brace the hull, while pairs of half-frame timbers, together with floor timbers, take a largely (but not exclusively) passive role in bracing the shape of the hull. Crucially, for the cultural significance of the craft, the planks are joined to each other, and to the keel, stem and stern posts, with metal staples that are pointed at each end—a practice unique to the historic Bengal region.
Propulsion is by oar and/or a single square sail on a single mast, steering using a steering oar secured at the stern quarter.
Construction of the hull was preceded by a Hindu propitiatory ritual at the Mondal family home; completion and handover to the new owner was also done in a ritual context that echoed the handover of a bride to her new family.
Background and Context
This project came into being as an academic endeavour as a new collaboration between three individuals—Professor John P. Cooper, the project’s Principal Investigator and Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology & Arabic at the University of Exeter; Dr. Zeeshan Alli Shaikh, the project’s Collaborator, maritime archaeologist and recent graduate of the University of Southampton’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology; and the project’s Research Assistant, Dr. Swarup Bhattacharyya, then a researcher with the Anthropological Survey of India. Each has a longstanding research interest in the nautical heritage of the Indian Ocean world, but it was the latter’s deep knowledge of specifically Bengali traditions that allowed this project to coalesce around the idea of following the construction of a now-vanished chhot boat. It is certainly not true to say that no work has been done on the traditional watercraft of historic West Bengal—the works of the late Professor Lotika Varadarajan and Dr Bhattacharyya’s own Boat Museum in Kolkata’s Institute of Cultural Research are evidence to the contrary. However, it is the case that much work remains to be done before the stapled boat-building tradition of the region is as well known and understood as other boatbuilding traditons of the Indian Ocean periphery. The researchers hope that this project constitutes a useful step in that direction. In West Bengal, as in much of the rest of the world, traditional boatbuilding practices are under pressure from (inter alia) new, industrial technologies, modernising economies, overfishing, coastal development and population migration to urban centres. As traditional vessel types disappear, the skills required to make them disappear, and are often lost before they are recorded.
Documentation and Research Methods
We developed our the project’s documentation strategy to satisfy our ambition to recording the construction of a chhot boat from scratch. This fundamentally required a creative and intellectual collaboration between the researchers on the one hand, and the Mondal family builders on the other, centred around conversation, observation and demonstration, and in a context of trust and mutual respect.
Fieldnotes, taken as required by the researchers, were an essential part of understanding and remembering the details and complexities of the build. Still photography—using a digital SLR camera, a compact camera and, occasionally, a mobile phone¬¬¬— enabled the focused documentation of moments, people, tools, techniques, materials, etc. It also formed the basis for 3D photogrammetric modelling—of the unfinished hull at the tenth-strake milestone, of the entire hull on completion, and of the grapnel anchor. The second of these models in turn formed the basis for scale construction drawings and naval lines drawings—both conventions of boat recording that achieve a level of detail that should, in principle, enable a reconstruction to be attempted in the future. However the principal method of in-field recording was high-resolution video photography. This technology was used to record set-piece interviews with the principal participants, as well as less formal question-and-answer discussions with the craftspeople as they demonstrated various processes related to the build--for example, the method of stapling, the shaping and installation of a plank, making of a complex sscarf joint, or the shaping of a framing timber. An edited selection of the resulting data constitutes the core of this archive. They are complemented by explanatory diagrams and text explaining various aspects of the build.
Following completion of the construction of the chhot, the researchers arranged for thevessel to be transferred to the planned India National Maritine Heritage Complex, under construction in Lothal, Gujarat. It was duly collected in the summer of 2024 by the Kolkata Poret Trust as the first step on its journey to the Complex, where it will be admitted into the national collection.
The Importance of this Knowledge
This project documented, in far greater detail than ever before, the construction of a boat in a “stapling” tradition that is unique to the region of historic Bengal. As a technological approach to boatbuilding, this method has received limited attention; it has been eclipsed, for example, by interest in the sewn and clenched-nail construction traditions of elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. This project therefore addresses a lacuna in that respect. It also documents the making and form of a type of vessel that was formerly highly prized, but had disappeared before detailed documentation could take place: it was our commissioning of the craft—under the auspices of the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme—that allowed this record to be made.
More importantly, however, the project celebrates through its documentation efforts the remarkable skills of Panchanan Mondal and his four boatbuilding sons, as well as the auxilliary crafts of of caulkers Ranjan Nayak, Ashim Dalui and Dhiron Porey, nailsmith Raju Rana, and sail makers Krishnachandra and Shyamsundar Debnath. Traditional academic records—published text, drawings and photographs—often struggle to capture the dynamism, skill, nuance and acuity inherent to the transformation of raw materials into a working boat, along with the individual voices and personalities of the craftspeople holding these skills. It was therefore the immense priviledge of the academic researchers in this project—John P Cooper, Zeeshan A. Shaikh, and Swarup Bhattacharyya—not only to witness the artisanship of these individuals, but to deploy forms of media that help convey these skills to a wider audience.
