Dancing with the River

Download or read book Dancing with the River written by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid landscapes.” Focusing on chars—the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal—the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life.