Mandarmani is a small village on the coast of West Bengal. The story told is that it got its name from the Mandar, bright red flowers of the coral tree (gen.: erythrina) — the beach, the locals say, was so heavily populated with red crabs that from a distance it looked like a large garden of Mandar. But with the rapid growth of tourism from 2010, the garden of crabs has been replaced by a garden of tourists. The tall and lofty dunes of Mandarmani were flattened to make space for more than seventy-five hotels and resorts in the area.[1] The beach that was once used extensively by fishworker families for fishing, sorting out the day’s catch, docking boats, and drying fish, now has only one small hut and a few boats left for the fishworkers.
