Khan, N. (2023). River life and the Upspring of Nature. Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478019398 (paperback, US$27)/ ISBN 9781478016731 (hardcover, US$100) / ISBN 9781478024002 (ebook)
(URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/river-life-and-the-upspring-of-nature )
Anup Kumar Saha
South Asian University, New Delhi, India; anupkumarsaha08@gmail.com
To cite this Review: Saha, A.K. (2025). Review of “River life and the Upspring of Nature, Duke University press, by Naveeda Khan, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/384-Chauras
Bringing rivers into ‘protidin’ (everyday life), excavating tragedy and trails between time and space, and integrating resilience and coexistence within and beyond communities, Khan explores the extent to which the river acts as a surrogate for various agents, activities, and events in shaping the lives of the Chauras, a community living on the sandbars of the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Naveeda Khan has intuited that an ingeniously collective emotion of ‘protidin,’ a Bengali word that resonates with a deep-seated, fierce fear of an unmoored self, intertwined with ‘yearning’ and ‘warning,’ is embodied in the lives that the Chauras made for themselves alongside capricious rivers. She provides a lucid and fine-grained text about how ‘the physical volatility of the riverine landscape was absorbed into the sinews of the social.’
Drawing from political ecology, posthumanism, and postcolonial stances, Khan paves the ground for an epistemological foundation to study the lives of the riverine communities who live on the Chars and demonstrates how they challenge the binary between land and water. Offering an in-depth ethnographic study of the Chauras, Khan’s driving argument is that ‘nature is more internal than external, more subject than object, and serves as the ground and possibility for human subjectivity, thought, and culture (p. 9).’
Given the changing climate, Khan suggests that we must acknowledge that the Chauras’ way of living is coming to an end. In her book, she explores shifting existence and ongoing continuous changes. Thus, the life of the Chauras is not driven by or embedded in the idea of perpetuity but rather in a reality of constant change. The Chauras’ lives are not rooted in permanence but in an adaptive relationship with the river's volatility. This shifting relationship challenges traditional notions of ownership and stability, illustrating that nature’s forces—like water—are the true agents of change. The book also delves into myths and practices that help the Chauras understand their relationship with the river, illustrating a profound understanding in which nature itself shapes culture, guiding and reshaping societal structures.
In the first chapter, Khan seeks to understand how Chauras’ sociality is imbricated through laws, lands, and lives. In the second chapter, she explores the Chauras’ way of thinking through their lived experiences, illuminating how their perspectives evolved throughout history, with a morality shaped by their relationships with otherness and their sense of displacement. The third chapter reconstructs the land-water relationship through major political events, such as elections. After that, the fourth and fifth chapters argue that human culture and the natural world are connected through the ways people remember and narrate stories (myths) about nature.
The text offers numerous lived instances that Khan, following affective ecology theory, refers to as ‘lathikhela,’ a indigenous knowledge system that informs ecological connectedness (Morton, 2016) and serves as a tool for everyday resistance against dominant forces. Khan argues that the study of the Chauras and the everyday has epistemic value. It allows establishing a dialogue between the centre (dominant) and the margin (marginalized) by opening up alternative ways of knowing and challenging dominant epistemologies. Drawing from Schelling’s work on nature, Khan holds that nature configures culture, shaping alternative ways of living through the dynamic interaction between natural forces and cultural practices.
The emphasis on nature proves critical for understanding the complex relationship between ecology, conflict, and politics, especially as River Life and the Upspring of Nature navigates the cases, events, and incidents that have shaped the discourse on riverine politics in South Asia. Methodologically, there is a certain amount of Schelling’s ‘intellectual intuition’ in Khan’s account: knowledge is not only rational but, rather, relational and contextual, as well as embedded in multiple layers of historical, political, and social imaginations. Khan draws out how the history and morality of resilience shape Chauras’ experience and practices.
The strength of Rivers life and the Upspring of Nature resides in how Khan ties her politics of imagination, deep academic endeavour, and an appeal for Chaura embeddedness—how the Chaura way of life is not separate but rather entwined with natural, social, and historical forces. The text offers an enriched perspective on how the Chaura way of life, shaped by their deep connection to water, can guide more effective and inclusive approaches to water governance.
Despite its many strengths, River life and the Upspring of Nature is not beyond limitations. Perhaps the most notable is the paucity of space given to questions of collective resistance and ecological activism. While feelings likely refer to embodied experiences, emotional responses, or sensory engagements with the environment, the Chaura perceive non-violence as a site of resistance (Badri, 2024). Emotions and affective practices —such as belonging, attachment, care, and loss — play a significant role in shaping non-violent forms of resistance, and can be seen as a form of ecological activism and struggle for recognition and survival.
River life and Upspring of Nature is not only a curious read; it also stands among titles on water in South Asia. It fuels a holistic approach that puts to the fore the agency of nature. While Lahiri-Dutt contributes to the epistemology of the Chars by examining how people, states, and policy makers conceptualize these (Lahiri-Dutt & Samanta, 2013), Khan goes beyond this and explores the ontology of the Chars by questioning how humans and rivers are interconnected in being, feeling, and memory. In so doing, she illuminates how riverine identity can expand and potentially improve how water is shared through a transformative process.
References
Morton, T. (2016). Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press: New York.
Badri, A. (2024). Feeling for the Anthropocene: affective relations and ecological activism in the global South. International Affairs 100(2): 731-749.
Lahiri-Dutt, K. & Samanta, G. (2013). Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia. Yale University Press: New Haven.
