Vanishing Tradition: Climate Change and the Decline of Traditional Healing in the Sundarbans

Koyra Upazila, Bangladesh – The Shakbaria river’s low tide has pulled the water back, exposing a wide, slippery mudbank between Suranjan Raptan and the edge of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest tidal mangrove forest. For most of his life, Suranjan has relied on this forest as his pharmacy. He rises before the sun, crosses into the mangroves in a small boat and walks barefoot through the clay-mud jungle for hours, carrying a knife to cut the leaves, roots and bark he uses to make medicines. Today, the 40-year-old traditional healer, or kabiraj, has come to borrow his uncle’s boat. “Uncle, are you home?” he calls from outside the house. Chapal Raptan, Suranjan’s uncle and a honey collector, is a medium-built man with sharp features. “Suranjan? Come in and sit,” Chapal Raptan answers, his voice hoarse. “I worked in the rain yesterday; now I have a cold, so I’m resting.”

“Sad news,” Suranjan replies. “Drink hot tea with tulsi leaves and honey. It will help. I won’t sit now; I’m heading to the forest to bring back some plants. I want to take your boat.” His uncle tells him where to find it. “Okay, uncle. Rest well. If you feel worse, I’ll send medicine,” Suranjan says as he sets off. Suranjan Raptan crosses the Shakbaria river in his uncle’s boat. Beyond the courtyard lies the road, then the Shakbaria river, and across it, the Sundarbans. Suranjan finds the overturned boat and lowers it into the water. Leaves and fruits from the forest have gathered on the muddy bank. His feet sink deep into the sticky mud. He climbs into the boat, dangling his legs over the side to wash them, and the wind pushes him across small waves towards the forest.

Stepping into the Sundarbans, the smell of wet mud and salt fills the air. Mangrove roots twist up from the water like claws. Kingfishers sound sharp notes in the half-light; insects hum and leaves sway in the breeze. Suranjan walks barefoot, saying it allows him to feel the ground and move quietly, and that sandals slip too easily. “A deer passed here not long ago,” he says, pointing to a small hole in the mud. “These leaves,” he says at a bush, “boil them when the stomach aches.” A few steps later, he touches the bark of a tall tree. “Scrape it, mix with water, it helps when the cough won’t go away.” Then he finds a tall Sundari tree, with dark-green, oval leaves. “This is the tree that gave the forest its name: Sundarbans. Now it is rare. We are lucky to see it here.”

He remembers a different forest. “Before Cyclone Aila in 2009, the forest was so dense that sunlight could not enter. Since then, it has thinned. The forest feels empty.” The change became particularly noticeable around 2015 or 2016, he says, when sunlight began reaching places that had once been heavily shaded and familiar medicinal plants became harder to find. Today he is looking for a particular tree. He searched for it the last time he came but could not find it. He worries it has disappeared. Suranjan has been a kabiraj for 21 years. He learned from his father, who learned from his grandfather. Nothing was written down. He was taught how to identify plants, where to find them, which parts to harvest and how to prepare them - knowledge passed through practice and memory.

Suranjan lives in Koyra, in Khulna district on Bangladesh’s southwestern coast. From his yard, he can see the green canopy of the Sundarbans rising beyond the canal. Twenty years ago, Suranjan says, scores of patients filled his yard, men and women, children accompanied by mothers or grandparents, people with coughs, fevers, wounds or stomach pain. Some carried bundles of leaves and roots for him to identify. The crowds began to thin about a decade ago. Now he treats a handful within the community. Part of the change was happening in the forest. Regular cyclones and rising salinity were making some of the medicinal plants he depended on harder to find. But the choices available to villagers were changing, too. Bangladesh had begun revitalising its community clinic programme in 2009, expanding primary healthcare in rural and hard-to-reach areas. By 2015, about 14,000 community clinics were operating across the country, offering basic health services closer to people's homes. Alongside them was a vast network of retail drug shops, where medicines were widely available, often without a prescription.

Today, Suranjan’s face carries the glow of a new father. Two days ago, his first child, a daughter, was born at her maternal grandparents’ home. Mother and baby are healthy, and the news has spread through the village. Neighbours stop him as he passes. “How are the mother and the baby?” To younger neighbours, he smiles, places a hand over his heart and says, “With your blessings, mother and daughter are healthy.” With elders, he brings his palms together in greeting. Each encounter ends with another blessing for his newborn daughter. At home, Suranjan lowers himself onto the smooth earthen floor. When someone suggests he sit on a rug, he smiles and refuses. “One day I will return to this soil,” he says. “It feels special.”

The Sundarbans stretches across 10,000 square kilometres of Bangladesh and India. Its green canopy shelters the Royal Bengal tiger, saltwater crocodiles and more than 300 plant species. Nearly 2.7 million people live in the coastal districts surrounding the forest on the Bangladesh side alone. For generations, communities here have turned to the forest for food, firewood and medicine. Kabiraj have long provided care in rural areas where formal medical services can be difficult or expensive to access. Their remedies are made from leaves, roots and bark, and their knowledge has traditionally been passed from one generation to the next. Rising seas and repeated cyclones are pushing saltwater further into coastal ecosystems, causing medicinal plants to become scarcer.

Professor Md Abdur Rahim, chairman of the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, describes a forest whose botanical balance is shifting. “Salt is slowly rewriting the forest. The hardy trees may survive, but the plants that heal, the ones kabiraj rely on, are disappearing,” he says. Meanwhile, villagers like Deepa Mandol and Suvodra Mondal continue to rely on healers like Suranjan and Provat Sarder because formal medical treatments remain costly and distant. Provat, a 65-year-old kabiraj in Mothbari, worries that he may be the last of his kind as younger generations turn away from the practice and the vital medicinal plants vanish due to climate change and rising salinity.