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DEWAN, CAMELIA. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and 
Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 
 
“Climate change is a fact” (p. 74). So begins anthropologist Camelia Dewan’s conversation with 

a western development professional called Mr. Jones, who works for a prominent aquaculture 

organization in coastal Bangladesh. Mr. Jones goes on, presenting his views on how Bangladeshis 

can best adapt. He explains that farmers should shift from cultivating rice – a cherished staple – to 

producing commodities for global export, like prawns. Dewan reports feeling stunned by this 

vision. Her own research with fishers and farmers in Bangladesh revealed myriad social, 

ecological, and embodied harms wrought by export-oriented saline aquaculture. She had become 

acquainted with grassroots activists, who were working to limit the expansion of prawn cultivation. 

Mr. Jones dismissed such concerns. In his view, the shift to saline aquaculture is “inevitable” (p. 

74).    

 Ethnography is arguably at its best when it challenges entrenched senses of inevitability 

and creates openings toward other ways of seeing and acting in the world. Misreading the Bengal 

Delta accomplishes this feat admirably. Dewan’s account is a rich and nuanced portrayal of how 

climate change and development practitioners like Mr. Jones translate climate change into practice, 

and the effects that these translations have on local communities. She convincingly argues that in 

their search for climate adaptation solutions donors and practitioners undertake “climate reductive 

translations” (p. 15), which simplify and de-politicize the complex social, political, and natural 

ecologies of deltaic Bangladesh. In doing so, many of the climate change adaptation initiatives 

they promote may in fact exacerbate climate-related vulnerability.  

In stark contrast to such simplifications, Dewan’s account is thick with historical, 

sociocultural, political, and environmental context. Adopting a decolonial approach, she links her 

critique of present-day climate adaptation to longer genealogies of colonial and capitalist 

extraction from land, water, and people in Bangladesh. In this way, the ethnography provides an 



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altogether different vision of what it means to encounter and respond to socio-ecological change 

in Bangladesh.  

Chapter 1, which explores histories of embankment construction, builds an informative 

foundation for the book as a whole. Dewan traces continuities between colonial and national land 

reclamation schemes, embankment-building, and present-day climate and development initiatives. 

Large tracts of the delta were first reclaimed by the East India Company in their efforts to expand 

arable, taxable land. At that time, some forms of flooding were still considered beneficial for 

farming. Monsoon floods, for example, bring vital fresh water and rich deposits of silt to fields 

and thus increase the fertility of the soil. For this reason, embankments were usually temporary. 

Over time, however, floods became portrayed as damaging, and the British Raj erected permanent, 

impenetrable embankments. After independence and partition, the shift to permanent 

embankments continued. In the 1960s, Dutch-style “polders” were introduced as a part of the 

USAID and World Bank-funded Coastal Embankment Project. Such infrastructures were ill-suited 

to the flow of water and sedimentary dynamics in the delta. Over time, these infrastructures led to 

the siltation of water bodies and raised the water level outside embanked areas, resulting in 

waterlogging. Despite the deleterious effects of these embankments, similar infrastructures are 

today advanced as effective means of climate adaptation.  

In Chapter 2, Dewan presents a fascinating account of heterogenous “development 

assemblages” comprised of NGOs, donors, state units, and other non-state actors. Dewan finds 

that development practitioners generally follow an official script about climate change when 

undertaking projects, even though informal “hidden transcripts” (p. 62) reveal more critical 

opinions. These critical views rarely find expression in international and Anglophone circles, 

partly because they tend to be voiced in Bangla rather than in English. Apart from this, critiques 

can lead to loss of employment and even blacklisting. Again, however, Dewan deftly displays that 

there is nothing “inevitable” about how climate change and adaptation unfolds in Bangladesh; 

rather, “[i]t is the composition of brokers and donors in these assemblages, their various 

institutional agendas and mandates, that shape whether the final interventions fit the needs of the 

populations they are seeking to assist” (73). Indeed, some local development practitioners 

creatively draw on what one interlocutor calls the “spice” of climate change (55) to access funding 

for drinking water projects, latrines, and the excavation of channels that have silted up. Such 



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projects appear to be more effective because they address the situated concerns of coastal 

communities.  

Chapters 3 and 4 develop intimate portraits of socio-ecological change in the delta. As 

described above, Chapter 3 explores the effects of saline aquaculture. Many foreign development 

practitioners laud saline aquaculture as a climate solution, but Dewan’s account shows how export-

oriented aquaculture has emerged out of dynamics of agrarian dispossession and the privatization 

of commonly held water bodies. As a result, saline aquaculture often leads to a loss of food 

sovereignty and profound emotional suffering for poor and landless communities.  

Chapter 4 is noteworthy for its original approach to agrarian ecologies. In this chapter, 

Dewan employs a multispecies approach that is attentive to the entanglements of people, rice, and 

soil, as well as earthworms, cows, manure, microbes, and micronutrients. She explores the 

ambivalence that farmers feel about the introduction of capital-intensive agricultural technologies, 

such as high-yield varieties of rice and agrochemicals such as pesticide and fertilizer. While these 

post-Green Revolution technologies have led to greater outputs, farmers mourn what they refer to 

as a loss of shakti in their food and soil. Shakti refers to life force, strength, soil fertility, and energy 

(pp. 100-108). While indigenous varieties of rice are said to possess abundant shakti, high-yield 

varieties lack shakti, and agrochemical fertilizers are said to “suck the earth dry” (p. 109). Dewan 

reads shakti in material terms, positing that its loss may be equivalent to a loss of micronutrients 

in the soil and food.  

This approach is intriguing and marks a departure from most accounts of shakti, which 

emphasize its symbolic importance, especially in Hindu contexts. As Dewan mentions in an 

endnote, shakti also refers to primordial cosmic energy and is worshipped by many Hindus as the 

mother goddess (p. 175). Dewan’s work mostly focuses on secular meanings of the term shakti, 

but her discussion of spirituality in this chapter points to the fact that coastal Bangladeshi worlds 

are not just inhabited by multiple species; they also involve engagements with divine and spiritual 

agencies. Like so much of everyday life in the delta, these dynamics are elided by contemporary 

climate change and development discourse and practice.  

Misreading the Bengal Delta is a brilliant and urgent ethnography. Dewan is a sensitive 

ethnographer, whose care and dedication to the people and ecologies of Bangladesh come across 

strongly in the text. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, especially those 

whose work relates to environmental and/or climate justice. Though the regional focus is South 



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Asia, the book’s conceptual and theoretical contributions are of much broader relevance, and the 

text would also make a valuable addition to graduate and undergraduate courses in anthropology, 

environmental studies, and development studies.  

 
Calynn Dowler is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her 
research explores religious and ethical relationships with water in the Sundarbans delta of West 
Bengal, India. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Boston University in 2022.  
 

 

 

© 2023 Calynn Dowler 

 


