Boat Museum, Kolkata

Boat Museum is a public museum that is solely dedicated to the documentation of the history of boats in the Bengal region. Located in the Institute of Cultural Research in Kankurgachi, Kolkata, the museum is a rare initiative that aims to preserve the memories of Bengal's riverine past. The museum has been referred to as India's first museum dedicated to understanding boats, indigenous boat-making, and their heritage. Adjacent to the Boat Museum is the Puppet Museum, Kantha Museum, and a collection of tribal artefacts.

Other similar establishments include the Kolkata Port Trust Maritime Archives and Heritage Centre, located on Strand Road, Kolkata.

History
The Bengal region is known as the “land of two rivers” as it is topographically situated around the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. This delta is formed by the confluence of the river Ganges, also referred to as the Padma River in Bangladesh, and the Brahmaputra River. These two rivers, alongside their innumerable tributaries, flow through the Bengal region, shaping its geographic landscape and contributing to its agricultural productivity. The abundant water supply from these rivers has made the Bengal region a prominent agricultural and cultural hub in South Asia. Therefore, different kinds of boats have historically performed an important role in different kinds of rivers. For instance, dholai is a cargo boat which is relevant in the Sunderban region, whereas salti is a traditional fishing boat which was relevant for fishing purposes in the wetlands of East Kolkata. Boats and their structure radically varied since the ones in Northern Bengal would not be suitable for the river conditions in Eastern or Southern Bengal. Swarup Bhattacharyya, an anthropology researcher and one of the minds behind facilitating the exhibits at the Boat Museum, says “Boat-making as a craft is passed on through the guru-shishya tradition." Given there does not exist any formally educated community of boat-makers, with the emergence of more industrialised and mechanised fishing equipment, indigenous boat-makers much like the boats started to disappear and soon came to represent a bygone era. It is to preserve the memories of what Bengal used to be, and to illustrate its rich riverine heritage, the Boat Museum was established in 2014. It was inaugurated by "Upendranath Biswas, formerly the joint director of the Central Bureau of Investigation and the former minister for backward class welfare in the West Bengal government." Biswas was born on the banks of the Madhumati River and his father owned boats.

With the vanishing of many of Bengal's indigenous boats and boat-making traditions, cultural activities like boats racing one another too decreased insofar as it has become a very rare sighting now. Thus the idea behind the Boat Museum is also to raise awareness regarding the riparian ecosystem of Bengal which does not typically find mention in any textbook or news and has almost disappeared from collective memory. The museum is a testament to one of Bengal's important traditions that stand to be lost in time.

Collections
Boat Museum presently houses "46 wooden replicas of boats" that depicts Bengal's boat heritage. From cargo boats of Sunderbans, coastal fishing boats, and popular flat-bottomed boats of Northern Bengal to all-purpose boats known as dinghi have been featured in the museum. The museum also exhibits a replica of the poet Rabindranath Tagore's boat called Padma and a replica of a boat from the Mohenjo-daro era.

Since boat-making is a tradition passed on from generation to generation, typically performed by communities that have become marginalised now, all the boat model exhibits presented in the museum have been made by the Rajbangshis of South Dinajpur district to highlight traditional craftsmanship.