An intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid landscapes” and their inhabitants

With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid environments.” 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.

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“Dancing with the River offers a richly panoramic study of a unique geographical context. It will be indispensable to scholars of marginality, poverty, and vulnerability, as well as to geographers, historians, and anthropologists of South Asia.”—Science