Katy Gardner: Songs at the river's edge. Stories from a Bangladeshi village. London: Pluto. 1997 (1991). 160 pp. ISBN 0 7453 1094 X Pb 9.99 / 0745310958 HB 30.00.

This is the narrative of a young anthropologist doing 16 months of field work in Talukpur, a small hamlet in the Sylhet District of Bangladesh, in 1987 and 1988. Her personal observations allow valuable insights into the villagers' life, but also into her own reflections, since participatory observation has its impact most probably on the observer as well as on the observed. Talukpur, of course, is not the true name of the place and the names of people have been changed, but all other she tells most probably has been experienced by her; still, the book has been classified as "fiction" in the Library of Congress Cataloging. Without the restrictions of an academic exercise - doing field research for her doctoral thesis - she could write a very readable book, one of the few on Bangladesh, which creates sympathy with the people and their country. The stories she tells are of birth and death, of women and marriage, of festivals and saints, of poverty and indebtedness, of natural calamities and successful and failed attempts to improve one'e lot by emigration. Trying to integrate herself into society, she describes the life of the women, mainly confined to the security and restrictions of purdah and sharom (shame). There is little on agriculture and husbandry, on socio-economics or on lineage and marriage systems. Having studied anthropology, certainly had sharpened her eye for a situation of being "exposed" for the first time to a different culture, if not to an unfamiliar environment. For the uninitiated there is a useful glossary of Bangla/All-Indian terms which enrich local English.

The book was first published in 1991 and has been positively reviewed. Since then she has re-visited the village and gives a short account of the many changes in the new preface. Given the small number of readable and informative books on Bangladesh, one has to be glad, that the book has been made available as paperback at an affordable price. It is to be highly recommended for first reading on Bangladesh, if not on village life in (Muslim) South Asia.
 

Wolfgang-Peter Zingel
Südasien-Institut der Universität Heidelberg,
Abteilung Internationale Wirtschafts- und Entwicklungspolitik