Description
Book SynopsisWhen anthropologist Delwar Hussain arrived in a remote coal mining village on the Bangladesh/India border to research the security fence India is building around its neighbour, he discovered more about the globalised world than he had expected. The present narrative of the Bangladesh/ India border is one of increasing violence. Not so long ago, it was the site of a monumental modernist master-plan, symbolic of a larger optimism which was to revolutionise post-colonial nations around the world. Today this vision and what it gave rise to lies in spectacular ruin; the innards of the decomposing industrial past are scattered across the borderlands. The dream of a top- down, organised state and society has been replaced by a vibrant, market determined, cross-border coal industry that has little respect for the past, people or the environment. In keeping with these changes, there are new opportunities and prospects too. Social and intimate lives have transformed in unexpected and hopeful ways. While the book explores the relationship between those with a vision for the future and those without, it ultimately seeks to shed light on the communities and places that pay the highest price for the present need to develop. By focusing on the peripheries, the book at once gets to the contradictions at the heart of the neoliberal condition.
Trade ReviewAsian Affairs 'This rich and detailed account of the Bangladeshi-Indian borderlands addresses urgent questions concerning "development" and its failures, the uneven effects of industrialisation and the lived realities of geopolitics in South Asia. Delwar Hussain's vivid prose makes the book an engrossing as well as an informative read. * Katy Gardner, Professor of Anthropology, University of Sussex, and author of Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh *
Delwar Hussain has explored one of the still remote borderlands of the world; a place where marginality becomes central, and the periphery is at the heart of life. This was a line of partition between India and Pakistan; and when the former East Pakistan became independent, it divided India from Bangladesh. It was the site of a major limestone project, monument of post-colonial industrialisation, now abandoned and derelict. Today's livelihoods depend on the cross-border coal trade, much of it illegal, between small-scale entrepreneurs, who employ ill-paid migrant labourers. Delwar Hussain, who writes with humane clarity, tells a compelling story of colonial memory, independence, decolonisation, and neo-liberalism, the ambiguous freedoms and mutating poverties of development. * Jeremy Seabrook, author of Freedom Unfinished: Fundamentalism and Popular Resistance in Bangladesh and Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives *
