Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a decade in the making, and countless people and institutions have helped me along the way. Although this list is not exhaustive, I am immensely grateful to you all. Misreading the Bengal Delta could not have been written without my applied research experience and I am thankful to Aditi Mukherjee and Marie-Charlotte Buisson for introducing me to polders more than a decade ago and for giving me so much independence in conducting critical qualitative research. Without this, the contextual knowledge to conduct this ethnographic research would not have been possible. I am deeply grateful for the vast amount of support and help that Bangladeshi colleagues and their institutions provided, helping me to understand the social and environmental complexities of Bangladesh over the years. I would especially like to thank friends and colleagues in Khulna city and Dhaka. As promised, I have disguised your identities as much as possible: Sanvi, Gaurav, and Hossain have shared much time and wisdom with me. I owe my greatest debt to my interlocutors in Nodi for their kind generosity and openness to share their lives with me—without your time and support this book would not have been possible. Fupu, may you rest in peace—I am so glad and so privileged you shared your wisdom with me. Sadhu Kaka (Sage Uncle), I hope I can give this book to you in person—you taught me so much about aushtomashi bandhs and agriculture.

I was able to conduct the research for this book between 2013 and 2017 through a generous interdisciplinary and intercollegiate grant funded by the Bloomsbury Consortium. It helped facilitate collaboration between Birkbeck College and SOAS University of London during this time. The writing up of my research was supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award. I am thankful to Sunil Amrith for pushing me to expand and engage with history, teaching me how to do archival research, introducing me to key historical texts on the Sundarbans and the Bengal delta, and giving me the opportunity to do research in Bangladesh for the European Research Council “Coastal Frontiers” project. His guidance greatly shaped the thinking behind this book, even when moving from Birkbeck to Harvard to Yale. I am grateful to Penny Vera-Sanso at the Department of Geography, Environment, and Development Studies (GEDS) at Birkbeck for always challenging me and pushing me to further clarify my thinking and arguments. I am indebted to David Mosse at the Department of Anthropology at SOAS for his unwavering support and regular intellectual guidance. His work on development brokerage and our conversations over the years have continued to inspire and encourage me. This book would not have taken the form it has today without him.

Thanks also to Katy Gardner at the London School of Economics and Political Science and James Fairhead at the University of Sussex for their careful reading and valuable engagement with earlier drafts of this manuscript. Our thought-provoking discussions and their instructive and detailed feedback is greatly appreciated. Sincere thanks to Annu Jalais and Jason Cons for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped strengthen the coherence of my arguments and more clearly engage with wider scholarly debates on Bengal, colonial water infrastructure, and critiques of aid-funded climate projects. I am grateful to the editorial and marketing teams at the University of Washington Press, especially K. Sivaramakrishnan, Lorri Hagman, and Christopher Pitts for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. Heartfelt thanks to Tracey Heatherington for her enthusiasm for my research and for giving me the friendly push I needed to work on my book proposal.

The Birkbeck School of Social Sciences and GEDS have generously supported conference grants to present this research at the Annual Association of American Geographers (2016) and the Nordic Geographer’s Meeting (2017). Thanks to Frank Trentman and Hilary Sapire at the Department of History, Birkbeck, for constructive comments on my historical work. A special thanks to SOAS—the Department of Social Anthropology, the Doctoral School, and the SOAS Library—especially to Stephen Hughes, Ed Simpson, and Catherine Dolan for their critical remarks on my research proposal and its ethical implications. Thanks to Shahana Bajpaie at Languages of South Asia for her excellent Bengali classes that enabled me to converse fluently with my interlocutors. I would like to thank Caroline Osella for her critical reading and advice on the gendered aspects of my research and Elizabeth Hull for her valuable insights and suggestions on environmental and food-related topics. Thanks especially to Christopher Davies for her guidance and poignant insights that helped me collect and organize my fieldwork impressions into chapters and, ultimately, this book. Thanks also to Harry West and Jakob Klein for introducing me to the anthropology of food. I am thankful to my fellow colleagues at SOAS for providing valuable feedback and critical engagement on earlier drafts, particularly Tung-Yi Kho, Petra Matijevick and Helen Underhill, as well as Thomas van Der Molen, Leo Pang, Edoardo Siani, Katerina Graf, Anna Cohen, Ze Chen, Michele Serafini, Alyaa Ebbiary, Zoe Goodman, Marte Agosti Pinilla, and Taha Kazi.

I am deeply grateful to Elisabeth Schober for her unwavering mentoring and granting me the possibility to work on this manuscript during my research fellowship at the University of Oslo (Norwegian Research Council grant number 275204/F10). I am especially grateful to my remaining “Lifecycle of Container Ships” colleagues Johanna Markkula and Camilla Mevik for their support and the time they spent reading and commenting on several earlier drafts of chapter 2. All of my colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo have been wonderful with their constant collegial support, encouragement, and guidance, including the members of the three departmental research groups: Anthropology of Toxicity, Political Ecologies, and Offshoring Anthropology. I am grateful to SAI colleagues past and present for our inspiring discussions, intellectual collaborations, and for the ways you have introduced me to new concepts and ideas. Special thanks to Lena Gross and María Guzman-Gallegos for introducing me to chemo-ethnographies and who, together with Cecilia Salinas, introduced me to their decolonial thinking seminars. Thanks to Wenzel Geissler, Ruth Prince, and their PhD students Signe Mikkelsen, Christian Medaas, Samwell Moses Ntapanta, Konstantin Biehl, and Franziska Klaas for active thought-provoking debates—showing the many similarities between South Asia and East Africa. A special thanks to Nefissa Naguib and Marianne Lien for always being so supportive and creative, and inspiring me to excel. Thanks to SAI’s Professor IIs: Penny Harvey for thought-provoking conversations and reflections on my work and Laura Ogden for stimulating workshops and hands-on professional advice. Thanks to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Knut Nustad, Keir Martin, Matthew Tomlinson, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Theodoros Rakopolous for stimulating conversations and hands-on advice. Special thanks to Rune Flikke for the institutional importance given to decolonizing academia and supporting early career researchers.

I have received continual support throughout the years from colleagues at various conferences, panels, and seminars. I want to thank Paige West, Vigdis Broch-Due, Marco Armiero, Andrea Nightingale, Ivana Macek and Arild Ruud for inviting me to present my drafts at their departmental seminars. The participants also provided important and critical suggestions that have helped shape the current manuscript, especially Veronica Davidov for useful feedback on structure and Arne Kaijser for pushing me on the military aspect of colonial railways. I also want to thank Tom Widger for inviting me to participate in his workshop Toxic Legacies and Global Pollutants, where I received much useful feedback on the agricultural aspects of my research, especially from Ben Campbell and David Arnold. Thanks to Sophie Haines for inviting me to the workshop “Negotiating Environment Knowledges” at the University of Oxford and the participants for their engagement with an earlier draft of chapter 2. Thanks also to the SOAS Food Studies Centre for inviting me to present at their postgraduate workshop and providing critical reflections and suggestions, particularly Katharina Graf, Anna Cohen, Brandi Simpson, and Francesca Vaghi, as well as Mukta Das, Megan Larmer, and Zofia Boni. I am grateful to Daniel and Ursula Münster for engaging me in collaborations on soil and microorganisms, as well as more-than-human anthropology, which has enriched chapter 4.

During the years, I have spent much time researching and teaching at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and appreciate the friendly, social atmosphere there. I am thankful to Siri Schwabe, Hege Leivestad, Gabriella Körling, Tomas Cole, the late Heidi Moksnes, Johan Lindquist, Mark Graham, and Helena Wulff for constructive feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts. A special thanks to Bengt Karlsson, Shahram Khoshravi, and Annika Rabo for publicly engaging with my work on climate reductionism and migration at Stockholm University’s Sustainability Forum in 2019. I am thankful to LSE Development Studies, particularly to the late Thandika Mkandawire, Kate Meagher, and Stuart Corbridge for their critical teachings on development and structural adjustment policies, which have shaped my own thinking in the past decade and were crucial for the last chapter of this book. I am also thankful to Rudra Sil for inspiring me to pursue an academic career through creating intellectually stimulating experiences at the University of Pennsylvania and for being the first to introduce me to James C. Scott and Karl Polanyi.

I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, the Indian Office Records and Maps divisions, and the National Archives of Bangladesh for their valuable help in locating historical records, and to Patricia Saunders for her support in navigating these historical sources and for her critical insights on Bengal rivers. Thanks to Iftekhar Iqbal and the librarians at the National Archives of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, and Khulna divisional library for supporting me with my archival research. I am thankful to the photographer Probal Rashid for permitting me to use his striking photograph for the front cover of this book, to Ata Mojlish for his artistic help, and to Ben Pease for making such wonderful maps. A special thanks to the late Hugh Brammer for his detailed readings and critical comments on embankments, siltation, and salinity. We did not always agree, but Hugh’s Physical Geography of Bangladesh and his insistence on engaging with complexity in the Bengal delta has been invaluable in developing the arguments of this book—a book I regret I cannot hand to him in person at the British Library where we first met.

I also want to thank my friends who embarked on PhDs alongside me: Katerina Pantelides, Sophie Stammers, and Nari Senanayake for their support. Nari, in particular, put me on this academic course more than a decade ago and to this day challenges me in my thinking. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Sibilia, Megnaa Mehtta, and Debjani Bhattacharyya for their comments and suggestions on the first chapter, and to Anwesha Dutta for her unwavering support to help motivate me to finish this manuscript during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to Rahul Ranjan for his constant positive encouragement and to Sindre Bangstad, Aike Rots and Hugo Reinert for their collegial support. I am also grateful to the many fellow hobby epidemiologists and citizen activists in Sweden for their compassion, courage, and intellectual honesty during difficult times.

I could not have done this research and the subsequent write-up without family. Warm thanks to Sabiha and Runa Apa and their family, particularly their late mother, in Khulna city for welcoming me into their homes and treating me as family during my breaks from fieldwork in Nodi. I am honored to have been able to spend time with such an exceptional and intellectual family. I am grateful to the Tagg-Roberts family for welcoming me into their home in London and a special thanks to Daphne for invaluable proofreading, critical commentary, and endless encouragement in the earliest versions of this manuscript. Thanks to my in-laws Gabrielle Welle-Strand and Christian Wetlesen Horn for their endless hospitality, generosity, and patience over the years. I am deeply indebted to all my family in Dhaka: my maternal aunts, Mejho Mama and Mami, and maternal cousins, particularly Dewan Akram-ul Haq and Shaila Arman, for their help with Sadhu Kaka’s song. A special thanks to the entire Alam family (Choto Khalama and Khalu, Moyukh, Rumi, Aadro, and Shemonti) for providing me with a second home in Bangladesh, and for caring for and feeding me and my family over the years. Thanks to Boro Khalama for her amazing cooking, and Laila Arman, Omar Ali, Dhrubo, Shaion, and Dewan Sohel for anchoring me to Bangladesh in Sweden. Thanks to my family in Pabna: my late Boro Mama and Mami, and Choto Mama and Mami. I am particularly grateful to my late Nani for inspiring me to work in Bangladesh. My deepest gratitude to my mother Farida, sister Emelie, and father Dewan Nausher Ali for being supportive in various ways throughout the different stages of my academic career: your generosity, encouragement, intellectual curiosity, and moral support has been invaluable. Lastly, thanks to my daughter Aurora for her patience and to my husband Ulrik for his emotional, reproductive, and practical support during all the fieldwork, long working hours, and deadlines. I am indebted to Ulrik for reading countless drafts, providing constructive suggestions, and unfaltering encouragement while enabling me to focus on my writing—I could not have completed this book without him.