Asian 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