River life and the upspring of nature: by Naveeda Khan, Duke University Press, 2023

The question why people live in flood-prone areas has been explored through different methodological lenses. Part of the literature studies how communities straddle the wellestablished boundaries between water and land, creating a unique waterland, in chars (diyaras in northern Bihar, chaporis in Assam, or baets in the Indus valley in Punjab). Chars are sandyclayey islands that rise and sink within the riverbeds and present a very particular environment that present anomalies and refuse neat classification into specific categories such as water or land. The epistemic limitations of nature/culture or water/land dichotomies become apparent in some geographical locations. Bengal, if we use the term as a geographical entity, or Bangladesh, the political unit that is a part of Bengal, is one such location. Understanding this hybrid world explains how people’s lives on river islands are significantly different from those of people who live on terra firma