'Be more attentive to the workings of nature around us and through us'

Congratulations on your new book, "River Life and the Upspring of Nature." With your academic background in religious studies and social life in Pakistan, what prompted you to shift your focus towards studying the river life and char communities in Bangladesh?

Thank you for your kind wishes. I was initially trained as an anthropologist of religion, with a focus on Islam and South Asia. For my first project I studied the messiness of integrating Islam within the nation state of Pakistan as experienced and commented on by ordinary Muslims living in the neighborhoods of Lahore. 

When I decided to study Bangladesh, mostly to be closer to my family, I found myself a little tired of studying Islam and state formation after more than a decade of doing so.  Although Lahore had been a beautiful and hospitable field site, and its neighborhoods provided a great vantage on the state, I wanted to experience rural and more specifically riverine landscapes in northern Bangladesh.  After all, these landscapes were important to my father's memories of his childhood. 

What I was interested in was not the usual story of migration to cities, alienation from the countryside and its subsequent romanticization, but rather how people, such as my father, bore elements of the landscapes of their birth within themselves, in their memories of course, but also in their discourse and gestures. 

The diversity of individuals, societal structures, institutional set ups I encountered in the chars reflected of course the history of struggle of this region, of Bangladesh in particular, but it also vividly exemplified beyond all expectations that nature is not just the biological or the physical but also ideational. 

One way to explain what I mean is that I came to see how the river did not just physically structure char lives but also made available ideas and concepts through which char lives expressed the river.  For instance, many "chauras" (a term for those living in chars, which is generally understood to be derogative, but was also used almost self-mockingly by many whom I knew) described the river in terms of wholes—where it started, where it flowed, where it leapt to, and where it ended up. Where did this idea of the whole come from?  I would suggest that this concept of the whole with respect to the river emerges out a certain life alongside the river.  However, of course, this is not to say that char lives were lived exclusively in relation to the river.  Char lives are also very much integrated within the larger polity and economy of Bangladesh. 

Over the course of my fieldwork, I found many interesting ways in which memory, imagination, intuition, desires, senses rather than straight out articulations of right and wrong were expressed.  This led me to expand my understanding of nature from the river in char lives to the unconscious within humans as expressing nature in a broader sense, as one of the sources of our ideas, concepts and the sense of things.

Land-related conflicts are very common in char areas. How do you perceive this situation?

Scholars who have studied chars in Bangladesh have rightfully noted that char lands are conflictual spaces and have pointed to the fact of existing land regimes, incomplete land surveys, contradictory property rights, illegal usurpation as the primary spur for such conflicts.  I do not disagree with any of these important findings.  However, as an anthropologist I am interested in what gets left out of such stories, most notably the fact that kinship relations are also part of the practices and processes involving land.  The family dimension is a very important characteristic of land related conflicts in the region as it is often one's relatives and intimates who deprive one of one's rights and know well how to do so. 

At the same time as I was interested to bring in this familial dimension to land related matters, I was also interested in how such intertwined land and family related conflicts intentionally or unintentionally ended up serving the land, in ensuring its perpetuity as property, a legal fiction, in the face of its dissolution by water through erosion and floods. This interaction between social conflict and land seemed to me to well illustrate the point I laid out earlier, which is how nature gives us our concepts.  By this I mean how nature stands to bring matter (in the form of land) and mind (in the form of legal land regimes, bureaucracy, family structures) into interrelation. These interrelations between land and family may be of course exclusively explained by history, politics, sociology, but the humble suggestion in my book is that we can also bring nature with its own orientation, tendencies and desired outcomes into play, without diminishing char sociality or the complexity of humans more generally. 

Can you share any insights from your research that highlight the unique dynamics of char communities and their relationship with the river and natural surroundings?

There were several instances in which chaura people seemed to express nature through their actions of which they could not provide the most thought through explanation or rationale.  The most vivid of such instances was the way they acted when the river was seen to be eroding their lands.  They acted as if instinctively to get organized, to move their few belongings, to set up temporary shelters, and so on.  When asked where they had acquired this knowledge, they would say that they didn't learn from their elders as their elders had mostly lived their entire lives on land that was qayim, that is, permanent land and not char land.  When they said this repeatedly, it seemed to me that we could reasonably speculate that the river entrained people in the way that it entrains silt to move in a certain direction or wind entrains dust and so on.  Why can't we imagine ourselves also immersed in and moved by such invisible forces as we do say family circumstances or electoral politics. My interest isn't in making nature the only important operative here but rather to simply bring it into view as one of the many factors pushing and pulling on us.  In other words, man's presumed mastery over nature, which is the hallmark of modernity, is perhaps a bit of a story we tell ourselves.

I would say that my interest in land conflicts, electoral politics, among other social practices that are very much human constructions was not only to show that they are the products of history, politics, etc. but also that they had an element of the natural in them.  My effort in the book was to give a reasonable description of these all too human constructions, being mindful that my description was both empirically sound and historically grounded, but to be also attentive to the aspect of nature as providing us some of our ideas, concepts, sensibilities through its tendencies, orientations and horizons.  However, I should underline that it isn't as if nature is just there for us to acknowledge.  In fact, I am not sure that we can know in advance its workings through us but only through fleeting traces within and around us. 

Could you elaborate on how the prevalence of myths and their practices reflects the role of nature in shaping a vibrant culture within the lives of people in Chaura communities?

My interest in turning to myths was to show how even the stories that we hold dear about our origins or the origins of the world bear traces of nature within them.  This is a different way of saying that nature creates culture.  Others have said such things before but meant them in quite simplistic terms.  For instance, evolutionary biologists have speculated that culture emerged out of the human need to survive in particular physical locations.  Given my interest in the ideational side of nature, I was more interested to explore how myths, or culture more generally, helps us to work through intellectual puzzles that are in nature.

I suppose my strongest suggestion would be for us to again be more attentive to the workings of nature around us and through us, going beyond the most obvious understanding of nature as say weather, pests, etc.  Also, we cannot presume to know how we will be with nature.  Consider for instance that those living in chars, majority Muslims, have a very ambivalent relationship to dogs.  They are even revulsed by them.  However, in several instances I have seen such magnificent defenses of dogs in the face of their possible extermination on grounds of shared creaturely existence.  Where did this sense of responsibility come from?  Being Muslim we will no doubt say from God but I would contend that we also ask how there may be an additional dynamic, a fellow sympathy, that sparks between bodies and minds in which nature resides.

Naveeda Khan is the chair and associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.  She is the author of River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2023) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023, https://research.library.fordham.edu/literary/2/).

This interview was conducted by Pranav Menon, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Md Raihan Raju, a PhD researcher in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi.