People of Many Rivers: Tales from the Riverbanks

Epistemology or sources of knowledge has always been problematic and contentious, which is not only with reference to the issue of hegemony, when the empowered tends to impose its knowledge on the disempowered but also with reference to the political contamination of disciplinary quests and treatment of space, often tending to distort knowledge itself. If this is the case there is good reason to hold the view that the treatment of space, whether land or water or, for that matter, sources of knowledge, cannot remain apolitical. Contrarily, focus on land is as political as the focus on water. Epistemology otherwise is hardly devoid of politics: whose perception, whose reasoning or whose testimony is as vital as the hegemonic apparatus within which perception or testimony is reproduced. Tales from the riverbanks are no different. A deliberate attempt has been made to focus on rivers and, at the same time, collect stories from those residing on the riverbanks, mainly to understand the intricate relationship between water and people and recover lost or hidden knowledge. In fact, oral history tends to focus on groups of individuals who might otherwise have been hidden from history, mainly to have a sense of the living experience and not a reconstructed one via secondary sources or through opinions of the out-of-place experts! This helps not only to challenge the current land-centric understanding of things, often a distorted form of knowledge when it comes to water, but also to venture on the scopes for mitigating the dismal conditions faced by the riverbank dwellers and the people of many rivers of Bangladesh. The stories have been collected from ten unions, located in four districts, and from a cross-section of people all residing on the riverbanks. Half of the interviews were carried out with riverbank dwellers near the Indo-Bangladesh border, while the rest half were carried out far from the border, mainly to see variations in the stories.