River Life and the Upspring of Nature

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan, also published by Duke University Press, and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South, and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan.

"An empirically rich study of changing land and those seeking to carve out an existence upon it. [River Life and the Upspring of Nature] can serve as a model for other authors seeking to look at the interrelation between our environment and ourselves, and the existential questions that a changing world poses to us."- Andrew Alan Johnson (Ethnos) "The book is well written, impressive in its scope, and detailed in its application. . . . a valuable addition to the growing literature on rethinking rivers, lands, and peoples in South Asia, especially those people who are living on river islands that had remained beyond the periphery of mainstream academic vision. It aids understanding of why people live tenuous lives on uncertain grounds, and how their lives are shaped by the river and how they shape the river’s flow." - Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (Asian Studies Review)

• List of Maps  ixPreface  xiAcknowledgments  xiiiIntroduction. River Life and Death  11. Moving Lands in the Skein of Property and Kin Relations  282. History and Morality between Floods and Erosion  593. Elections on Sandbars and the Remembered Village  944. Decay of the River and of Memory  1315. Death of Children and the Eruption of Myths  160Epilogue. The Chars in Recent Years  191Notes  197References  215Index  229