Ruination and Removing Embankments: Differences between India and Bangladesh

Mr. Jones’s narrative overlooks the complex factors behind seasonal salinity, including how silted rivers and canals reduce the capacity to retain rainwater to counteract tidal saline flows in the dry season. His claim that Bangladesh will drown in rising sea levels illustrates how shrimp aquaculture is integral to the dynamics of “anticipatory ruination,” a discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats (Paprocki 2019, 295). Anticipatory ruination is seen as a legitimizing discourse for depolderization—that is, removing the embankments to allow tidal waters to inundate the area within, either completely or partially during certain times of the year or for an extended period of several years.

Thus, removing the embankments today would likely cause complete inundation of entire islands, and the necessary displacement of the communities that inhabit them. Depending on the scale of depolderization, the populations affected could be tremendous. . . . Wherever depolderization is discussed (by consultants, donors, and practitioners), it is talked about as an integral component of a broader vision of development for the region. That is, the anticipation of climate crisis combines with and brings about a normative vision of developed futures. These imagined futures entail the end of rural livelihoods in the delta, replacing them with a highly stylized (and age old) vision of development where the rural population transitions into an industrial labor force (Paprocki 2019, 306–7).

Depolderization illustrates the materiality of discourses of ruination used not only by the tiger-prawn adaptation regime, but also conservation and tourist interests (WWF and World Bank) in West Bengal seeking to remove populations from southern Sundarbans forest islands (Paprocki 2019). This is an important point considering West Bengal public debates about “planned retreat” and moving mostly Bangladeshi migrants away from areas deemed more worthy of conservation to attract high-end tourism (Mehtta 2019; Bhattacharyya and Mehtta 2020).

Such planned retreat interventions in India, which involve removing embankments and stopping human habitation, would result in year-round, permanent salinization. As such, depolderization is different from Tidal River Management (TRM) in southwest coastal Bangladesh. TRM is a silt management strategy to solve embankment-caused siltation by strategically cutting the embankments at the mouths of canals and rivers to allow sediment into the floodplain with the tides. Bringing sediment onto the floodplains would reduce silt choking up rivers and in the long-term helps increase freshwater retention capacity. TRM started as a bottom-up people’s concept known as jowar bhatar khelano (free play of tidal flows): to cut embankments as a response to extensive waterlogging. This was then formalized by the Bangladesh Water Development Board and the Asian Development Bank in the 1990s Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation project—a project that was heavily criticized (ADB-OED 2007; Kibria 2006; Tutu 2005; Pasha 2010). When I conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh in 2015, there was little hope that TRM could be implemented because of the institutional constraints of compensation to polder communities when the embankment is temporarily breached. However, there appears to be a paradigm shift in terms of trying to deal with siltation management in the southwest coastal zone. TRM is now accepted by those working in Bangladesh’s water sector as effective in managing the delta’s silt problem (Hanlon 2020, 31), and more attention is directed toward how to compensate and engage local community ownership through experiments with NGOs such as Uttaran (Ahmad 2020; Gain et al. 2020).

The Benefits of Tidal River Management

A meticulous review of changes in Bangladesh’s water policy highlights the possibilities of TRM as a hybrid solution: it departs from existing engineered embankments, but is distinctly open in regard to the temporary restoration of tidal flood dynamics in the wetlands. Researchers highlight how dealing with tidal flood dynamics is not about closing down rivers in the face of twice-daily rising water levels; it is also about occasionally opening up a river for its suspended sediments (van Staveren et al. 2017).

A study of Polder 32, where Cyclone Aila breached the embankment in several places in 2009, highlights the sediment starvation inside embankments. Within the two years that it took for the embankment to finally be repaired, the sediment had considerably raised land levels inside the embankment (Auerbach et al. 2015). Rather than complete inundation, breaching embankments helps raise land levels so that longer agricultural lives can be sustained in the southwest coastal zone, revitalizing water bodies and futureproofing against damaging jalabaddho floods. Contrary to depolderization as anticipatory ruination, such a silt management regime impedes the activities of tiger-prawn ghers as they are unable to operate. Furthermore, depolderization and planned retreat for the southern West Bengal Sundarbans islands, with their year-round saline tidal rivers, constitutes both a different political and socioenvironmental context compared to Bangladesh’s southwest coastal zone, where agriculture was (since the 1800s) and still is possible because of freshwater rivers.

TRM has the potential not only to sustain freshwater agriculture and local livelihoods, but also to resolve siltation and raise land levels, as well as ensure higher retention of freshwater to counteract salinity—all needed to increase Bangladesh’s capacity to deal with climatic change (Hanlon 2020). However, institutional mechanisms for its implementation must ensure compensation to all affected (e.g., universal basic income) and provide alternative livelihoods (e.g., rural employment schemes such as pond and canal excavation projects) so that TRM does not end up also being a case of dispossession by development (Makki 2014; Ahasan and Gardner 2016).

Water Grabbing and the Loss of Commons

This violence was also connected to water grabbing. Gher owners not only illegally appropriated public land intended for state distribution to landless people (khas jomi), but also public canals (khas khal) (M. Rahman and Wiest 2003, 17; M. Rahman 2003; Guhathakurta 2003). This process of accumulation was very much characterized by canal grabbing (khal dakal)—the appropriation of khas canals and the imposition of private fishing rights in public water bodies. This was a major problem in embanked floodplains such as Nodi, a wetland ecology. Many of these leased khas canals have “private” nets that compartmentalize and obstruct the free flow of canals and migratory routes of fish, reducing both the access to fish as well as the fish’s ability to breed (Hasan 2012). Neither fish nor people could now move through these canals.10

Canal grabbing is intrinsically connected to the expansion of brackish shrimp aquaculture, as Bakul pointed out: “Entire rivers and canals are blocked and used as ghers. You will not be able to differentiate between a river, paddy land, or land grabbing; all these processes are linked together.” In this context, water grabbing, or taking control over water resources, entails salinizing freshwater bodies and altering their seasonal properties by reversing the original purpose of embankments. Local people were no longer able to travel by boat in the canals, nor were they able to fish for their own consumption in the deltaic commons, which were now privatized to produce tiger prawns for export. The recreational use of the canals for play and swimming was also taken away, and the salinity of the rivers made the nearby areas desolate and unfit for lush and green vegetation. Dispossession here is thus one both of violent land grabbing and the reduction of labor opportunities (Paprocki 2019, 305), as well as one where the salinization of wetlands and canals is coupled with the loss of social and reproductive spaces.11 This highlights how it is the brackishness of tiger-prawn aquaculture, rather than the capitalist activity itself, that contributed to the affective and socioecological dimensions of dispossession.

The appropriation of previously open-access wetlands and canals for bagda ghers resulted in the poorest of the poor losing access to fish. Ahmed Kaka, an eighty-year-old

Capitalist Relations in a Fluid and Seasonally Saline Delta

In practice, bagda ghers privatized the open-access commons of wetlands, canals, and mangrove forest. Yet what enabled the state-owned canals to be leased in the first place? Is this loss of land and access simply a case of “primitive accumulation” (Marx 1976, 500–502)13 or “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD; Harvey 2005)?14 These influential concepts have shaped the analysis and conceptualization of land grabbing in the Global South (Kelly and Peluso 2015; Makki 2014; Sassen 2014; Walker 2008) and act as powerful correctives to liberal narratives that see markets solely as spheres of voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange (Hall 2012). However, several empirical studies highlight that a significant flaw with both primitive accumulation and ABD is the way in which the concepts dichotomize and homogenize the actors into the state versus the dispossessed (Adnan 2013; Levien 2011, 457).15 For example, Gardner (2012) shows that land loss among the local population is “not a simplistic tale of exploited peasants resisting development.” In contrast to ideas of the state simply clearing the way for multinational corporations (MNCs), the corporations were found to have negotiated with different local and national political groups with contradictory interests (Ahasan and Gardner 2016, 12).

Similarly, Shapan Adnan (2013; 2016), in his case study of the shrimp industry in the southeast coastal zone of Bangladesh, criticizes primitive accumulation and ABD for being unable to explain complex processes of capitalist development. He points to the diverse coalitions between foreign aid funders and domestic actors (World Bank, NGOs, private businesses, governments, and powerful elites) involved in promoting (and opposing) the bagda industry, including local (wealthy) landowners. Through their own relations of political support and patronage, tiger-prawn cultivators use violence with impunity (Finan 2009). Such capitalist assemblages are linked through class and power that favor the relatives of army officers, bureaucrats, bankers, and businessmen, where there is an inherent inequality of access to the technology and capital necessary to adopt aquaculture (Deb 1998, 81).

As Marx noted, a distinguishing feature of capitalist relations is the ironic combination of an ideology that stresses freedom, but with material relations that simultaneously restrict it (Li 2014, 3). Cash crops require an ability to mobilize capital and land, meaning that not everyone can benefit from their introduction (Li 2014). Large landowners in Lonanodi are those that are most able to participate in the capitalist relations required for tiger-prawn cultivation, while poor landless people’s capacity to survive is governed by rules of competition and profit that dismantled their rights to the commons. Furthermore, tiger prawns were heralded as “white gold,” and many poor families indebted themselves as a result, dreaming of wealth and prosperity. Those able to engage in these capitalist relations were able to benefit, while those who could not, like the landless, lost out.

The structure of capitalist relations, and the way they produce new forms of poverty, is invisible in liberal accounts that advocate the expansion of the market as the route to increased productivity and wealth (Li 2014, 7). This is illustrated in Bangladesh’s bagda industry where these capitalist relations are obscured in narratives of both “poverty reduction” and climate change. Rather than a straightforward case of primitive accumulation or ABD, tiger prawns were expanded through capitalist relations between various coalitions of domestic actors, including local landowners and assemblages of development actors, of which Mr. Jones is one.

Thus, forced salinity intrusion is not simply a case of a sudden land grab or “ex situ displacement”—that is, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities, and livelihoods. The long-term salinity intrusion of the coastal land- and waterscape has resulted in local people losing their life-support services over a prolonged multistage process of removal with a slow-motion loss of entitlements from previous rights and identities. This could be referred to as “in situ displacement” (Feldman and Geisler 2012, 974). The concepts of in situ and ex situ displacement shed light on the processes of land dispossession, and how shrimp aquaculture reduced labor opportunities and increased indebtedness and greater rates of migration in Polder 23 in the Khulna District (Paprocki and Cons 2014a), a few hours north of Lonanodi. These problems of underemployment, debt, and migration are also common in the freshwater villages of Dhanmarti. Ending brackish aquaculture through social protests—characteristic of dissent against accumulation by capital—involves a return to freshwater cultivation. Yet, this may not help address the problems of out-of-pocket expenses and indebtedness for rural Bangladeshis that motivate migration (chap. 5).

In addition, Marxist concepts such as primitive accumulation and ABD are inherently “land-centric,” as nature is reduced to land as a “fixed stock” of the means of production in a given location (Adnan 2013). Yet Lonanodi belongs to a monsoon-dependent delta. “Land,” as Bakul pointed out, “merges with rain, rivers, and canals,” making any demarcation or boundary fluid. Thus, enclosures do not capture the fluid entanglements of deltaic ecologies. Indeed, the focus on land grabbing may be Western-centric in its very conceptualization of nature and the environment. Furthermore, the difference between Lonanodi and Dhanmarti highlights that the problem is not that of accumulation for capitalist production alone. By producing capitalist commodities in a freshwater environment, not only would the environment be saved from salinity, but women could more easily carry out reproductive tasks.16

The Emotional Suffering of Saline Water

Noshima lives with her son Sohel, his young wife, their baby son, and her adolescent daughter Nisha in a half-broken hut—part crumbling mud, part sticks with ragged cement bags as cover—next to the embankment. She has had a hard life from the onset. Her parents were landless and moved to Khulna city in the 1990s when tiger-prawn cultivation was first introduced to the area. She worked as a kajer meye (child maid) and was married off at the age of fourteen. When her daughter Nisha was only three months old, her husband brought her to Lonanodi and left her there. He then went on to start a new family with a new wife. She describes how it felt to return:

I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables. The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat. . . . The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more. During this time, we must bathe in the saline river. Salinity is the worst problem in our area. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.

Noshima’s statement captures not only the loss of food sovereignty caused by shrimp aquaculture’s saline and barren deserts, but also the emotional suffering that saline lands bring about.17 Rice is harvested in January, after which dry season salinity intensifies, making the situation in Lonanodi increasingly worse. From mid-March to mid-June, the salinity levels in the rivers are at their highest. The freshwater that filled the rivers during the monsoon had receded, and is unable to stop salt tidewater from creeping upward from the Bay of Bengal. Cracked mud fields (fig. 3.1) illustrate how tidewater penetrates the soil and makes it dry and less fertile.

Figure3.1. Cracked soil in Lonanodi during the dry season, March 2015. Photo by author.

During this time, ponds and canals slowly dry up and tiger-prawn cultivators open the embankment sluice gates during high tide to bring in salt tidewater for their ghers. Embankments, originally envisaged to protect fields from dry-season salinity, are now serving the opposite purpose. By May, there were brackish ghers as far as the eye could see.

Reproductive Suffering

It was during this saline dry season, after having spent several months regularly visiting Noshima, that I asked her whether she could take me around Lonanodi village to conduct a jorib (household survey), so I could better understand how other local people in Lonanodi experienced living in a brackish aquaculture village. Through oral histories, they described how replacing the fallow period with tiger-prawn cultivation reduced the number of livestock that landless day-laboring families kept for fertilizer, meat, and milk. It also reduced the availability of, and access to, fish, and brought on lower rice yields, dying fruit trees, nonexistent vegetable gardens, the loss of grazing lands, and the loss of by-products from paddy cultivation such as kurte (rice grains left over after the paddy harvest) and nara (paddy straw used for roofs, as cooking fuel and livestock feed).18 Nara and kurte are some of the foods and materials that the poor (garib) in Lonanodi, particularly women, can no longer freely access. Large landowners prohibit others from entering their monsoon season rice fields, and keep nara so that it decomposes and becomes fertilizer, prompting people like Noshima to buy nara for their roofs, buy fuel for cooking, and buy feed for the cows and goats given to the poor by NGOs.

Bakul noted: “When bagda is cultivated, the land turns to salt. Nothing else can grow. The cows and milk, chicken and eggs, are no longer produced in these gher areas. We cannot just look at how much money it brings in per kilo.” The costs of rice, fish, vegetables, cooking fuel, fodder, and other items, exacerbated by environmental degradation caused by salinity, are seldom considered when the “profit” and monetary value of shrimp is calculated, nor is the personal suffering and anxiety of living in a barren, saline environment. Bakul highlighted the importance of how the income of the rural poor (the landless and the near-landless) consists of two components: exchange income (primarily wage income) and nonexchange income obtained directly from nature without monetary exchange. This includes wild fruits, wild animals, firewood, building and thatching materials, water from tanks, streams and ponds for growing vegetables and fruit (mainly for domestic consumption), free-ranging poultry, and grazing or fodder for livestock, including sheep, goats, and cattle. These nonexchange sources of income depend to some extent on common access or low-cost access to natural resources (Alauddin and Tisdell 1991, 161).

As the “market” develops, everything required to engage in capitalist production becomes a commodity, including the food to be consumed (Li 2014, 7). The salt reduces the health of the soil, resulting in a wilted environment that makes survival difficult for all forms of life. In addition to reduced livability for livestock, freshwater fish, rice and fruit trees, reproductive labor is impeded by the lack of vegetation to collect for cooking fuel for earthen stoves (I spent a day with Noshima trying to collect fallen leaves from the few saline-tolerant trees). Furthermore, for the people of Nodi it is not just calorific intake that matters. The quality of food, particularly sensory experiences of freshness and taste, plays an important role in well-being and social interactions. Drawing on emotional political ecologies—that is, affective realities that have direct bearing on how resources are accessed, used, and fought over (Sultana 2011, 163)—sheds light on how the struggle for resources is not only economistic, social, or rational choice issues centered on food sovereignty, land control, and labor.

The intense salinity that accompanies tiger-prawn cultivation is felt most severely by marginalized, landless families who rely on agricultural labor opportunities to sustain their livelihoods. Nowhere was this as visually stark as in Lonanodi. In the days I spent in the barren earthen homes of Rozina and Noshima, looking at large enclosed mansions with their own water systems and tall lush trees peeking above the high walls, it became clear that the burden of living with salinity was unequally borne by the poorest. Large landowners—those most able to participate in the capitalist relations required for tiger-prawn cultivation—do not feel the environmental cost of their lucrative practices. Noshima expressed her bitterness: “Rich people live comfortably in these saline lands. We do not have access to our own saline-free enclaves with rainwater tanks, ponds, and tube wells in our own homesteads, isolating our orchards and vegetable gardens from saline water. We must live in this saline environment; we have no choice but to live with it. . . . It’s better for the rich people with leases [to do tiger-prawn cultivation]. Will they listen to me? I’m poor. What’s the point in complaining?”

The results of the survey showed that a clear majority of the landless poor stated a clear opposition to brackish aquaculture. Small tiger-prawn farmers and their families, meanwhile, argued that there are no other means of cultivation when everyone else is bringing in saltwater—they favored a collective return to freshwater cultivation—thus contesting Saidul Islam’s (2014) claim that tiger-prawn cultivation is now “normalized” and accepted in southwest coastal Bangladesh.

Most notably, all women—including those married to small tiger-prawn cultivators—emphasized how they suffer, whether it be because of a lack of drinking water and water for rinsing rice, the difficulty in washing clothes, the lack of cooking fuel (cow dung, wood, leaves), the complications involved in cooking food, or the amount of time it takes to fetch usable water. They also worried about skin diseases from bathing in saline rivers, damage to their hair, and the increased darkness of their skin, which makes them less attractive as future brides and daughters-in-law. They described the experience of living in the barren saline villages as ashanti (unrest, worry, turmoil, anxiety): an ambiance that was simultaneously suffocating and draining with an embodied heaviness that brought out the negativity in people through tension (anxiety). Whenever I left the arid shrimp deserts of Lonanodi and entered into Shobuj town and Dhanmarti union with their lush vegetation, I instantly felt that a weight had been lifted from my chest as ashanti dispersed and I could breathe easily.

When I described this feeling to Hassan as we rode into Shobuj town under the thick tree cover, he replied: “Dhanmarti was once like Lonanodi. The barren desert, the dryness, the ashanti, this was the same here in Dhanmarti.” Hassan, who had once cultivated tiger prawns on his five bigha (traditional unit of land area), noted: “Our incomes are less now, but our costs have reduced. Our lives are much better now. We no longer need to buy rice. Local people can gain shares of the rice harvested locally and get more vegetables and fruit trees. We feel shanti [peace].” In contrast to the rich gher owners in Lonanodi, who are able to diversify risks through owning several large bagda ghers, small bagda cultivators in Dhanmarti like Hassan felt the losses of failed tiger prawn harvests keenly and they played an important part in ending bagda.19

For many women, the end of tiger-prawn cultivation heralds the rejuvenation of the land. Hassan’s neighbor Sayma is a widow with four daughters who benefited from the noncommoditized food and fuel in a freshwater environment:

Everything grows here now, sunflower, boro rice, sesame. There is more work for day laborers. We can excavate canals and repair roads. We can grow vegetables and rice, keep goats, chicken, and cows. There is much rice and kurte [residue rice] from the harvest. I spent a month going through the fields collecting kurte and managed to get two to three mon [eighty to 120 kilos] it will last us a good few months and helps me save money from buying rice. Now with the ghers gone, shojna [moringa] trees are lining the roads. Its delicious fruit are available to all of us. Sometimes, my youngest daughter manages to catch some fish from the canal that we eat, or neighbors like Hassan share fish he has caught with us. During the monsoon rice season, the fish moves freely, anyone can catch fish from these inundated lands. Once the rice is harvested, I can collect nara [residue rice straws] to use for fuel and for thatching the roof. Hundreds of cows will freely graze on the green pastures and eat what remains of the tall nara and the quickly growing grass. Many women like myself collect the cow dung and make bori [used for cooking stove fuel] that we can also sell to other households. I am lucky that there is no bagda here.

Sayma’s account of living in freshwater village (see figs. 3.2 and 3.3) stands in stark contrast to Noshima’s life in a saltwater environment that undermines livelihood strategies—both paid and unpaid. To make ends meet, Noshima also works for people in the villages as a kajer mahila (working woman, maid). She brings her employers water from afar, washes dishes, engages in sporadic earthwork, and works in ghers. The latter entails standing up to the neck in saline water contaminated with chemicals to remove aquatic weeds (sheula bacha), an activity that often results in skin disease. However, with a transition to herbicides in the ghers, this has resulted in less work for Noshima. Noshima and other landless women unable to migrate also collect tiger prawn fingerlings from the river: “It’s the easiest available income for us. On a good day, I can catch thirty to forty fry, but generally I end up only getting ten to twenty taka per day. One kilogram rice costs twenty-eight taka.” Catching tiger prawn fry provides an important, albeit small, source of income in an area where other opportunities are sparse.20 Noshima takes any job as it comes, each day filled with uncertainty. Ultimately, women’s work in Lonanodi is irregular, and where local labor opportunities are limited, any means of income is essential for buying rice and other food items.

Figure3.2. Woman fishing in a field of rice, 2014. Photo by author.

Figure3.3. Woman making cow dung sticks, 2015. Photo by author.

Salinity and Mourning the Loss of Fish

People in Lonanodi also missed the taste of freshwater fish, which were no longer available in local ponds or beels. The way in which tiger-prawn fingerlings are caught in the wild contributes to the bycatch of several fish species that are thrown away, reducing their availability in the wild.21 Furthermore, freshwater species are unable to thrive in saline ghers. Thus, tiger-prawn fry collection contributes to the reduction of the number of fish in the rivers and poses a major threat to the long-term sustainability of wild fisheries (Deb 1998; Thornton, Trent, and Williams 2004).22 Ahmed Kaka recalls how before embankments and bagda ghers there were many canals and an abundance of fish: bhetki, tengra, shoil, koi, golda, bagda, chela, chingri, rui, katla, mrigal.

The canals were khas [public] and there were no restrictions because there was so much fish. Everyone could eat fish all year and several times a day. . . . We can no longer freely access fish; the canals have also been leased. We must buy fish now. Once, bagda cost one taka per kilo, now it’s two hundred taka per kilo. Months pass before we can eat [larger] fish. When we buy fish, we can only afford cultivated bideshi fish and they do not taste as good as wild fish. They are filled with lime, pesticides, and fertilizer to keep the water clean and to make the fish big. It’s like soap, how can eating soap be good for us? Cultivated fish is bhejal [impure, adulterated], but they don’t care. They only care about profit.23

This lived experience of the loss of fish highlights not only the importance of food sovereignty, but also the affective entanglements between food and well-being. The frequency and quantity of fish pre-bagda is reflected in the Bengali proverb: Maach-e, Bhaat-e Bangali (rice and fish makes a Bengali).24 The taste, freshness, and quality of the fish matters for all classes of people in Nodi—it was my first time seeing people preparing live fish—and they were all notably suspicious of mora maach (dead fish). Desi (indigenous) fish are seen as filled with shakti, and small indigenous fish species in Bangladesh—consumed whole—are an important dietary source of vitamin A and calcium in rural Bangladesh (Roos, Islam, and Thilsted 2003). Bagda, in contrast, is not even available for the poor to eat. Instead, it takes six kilograms of wild fish to produce one kilogram of farmed shrimp (Reinertsen and Haaland 1995, 73), calling into question the claim that export-oriented bagda cultivation helps “feed the hungry.” With the introduction of export-oriented bagda, fish became a commodity to be owned and sold for profit, available to those that could afford it.

The leasing and subsequent salinization of khas canals and wetlands produces a range of emotions and experiences of loss and suffering. These conflicts of saltwater versus freshwater, and khas versus leased waters, illustrate how broader social relations of power are (re)negotiated and (re)produced in water–society relations (Sultana 2011, 171)—illustrated also by Ahmed Kaka’s skepticism toward poor quality farmed fish. Taking seriously the everyday affective dimensions of food and eating illustrate the processes through which political and economic forces take shape and are coconstituted (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013, 88). The structural political and economic forces of bagda production that produce these socioecological inequalities are made explicit through Sayma’s and Noshima’s contrasting experiences. Ahmed Kaka’s longing for wild-caught indigenous fish and his dismissal of farmed fish as bhejal captures a critique of the current aquaculture regime, an experience highlighted by how Sayma feels fortunate to have regained access to fresh fish from local ponds and canals. This highlights what emotions do rather than what emotions are (Ahmed 2004, 4). In addition, attention to the embodied experiences of shanti/ashanti (peace/suffering) help us to critically question what constitutes “well-being,” the “good life” (Elmhirst 2015), and what makes life worth living across generations (Narotzky and Besnier 2014).

Export-oriented shrimp aquaculture forms part of global capitalist systems of accumulation (Paprocki and Cons 2014b). Juxtaposing the different affective responses to well-being in a saline versus freshwater environment further highlights that global capitalist production in itself may not be uniformly dispossessing in ways that reduce income or food sovereignty. Both freshwater golda prawns (Macro brachium rosenbergii) and brackish tiger prawns are cultivated for export-oriented profit, but farmers organize against bagda in favor of golda. Golda can be cultivated together with rice crops and freshwater species, thus enabling crop diversification and biodiversity (Ito 2002).

The forced salinity intrusion of bagda ghers causes great anxiety and inhibits socioecological entanglements of social reproduction. Thus, people in Dhanmarti are happy to fish for crabs in the Sundarbans and cultivate freshwater golda prawns for export, but they do not want saline aquaculture that negatively affect their lived environments. These concerns are not limited to food but also extend to trees; earthworms; drinking, bathing, and cooking water; cooking fuel; freshwater fish; and earthen homes that do not crack as a result of salinity.