Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh

Abstract

Economics, where he completed a PhD in economic history, including entertaining portraits of former professors like Dharma Kumar and Sukhamoy Chakravarty alongside a description of institutional challenges. He also writes of his years studying, researching and teaching in France (where the discourse of solidarity butted heads with the reality of individualism), the USA (where the self-image of the country clashed with the Al Qaeda’s perception of it), and Portugal (where he fell in love with the language and culture). He is affectionate yet critical as he scatters parts of himself everywhere, and carries parts of these places with him. The arguments of connected history are more methodological than geographic, and ‘connection’ includes the importance of collaboration and affinity when producing work. Subrahmanyam has co-authored several books, including Textures of Time with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, and Writing the Mughal World with Muzaffar Alam. The individual does not operate alone, and ‘connectedness’ is perhaps ultimately an affective concept, a desire to bring discrete experiences into relation and give them narrative order, in both the personal and universal realms. This is the impulse of the historian as well as the novelist. The challenge is to retain loving attention to specificities without losing grasp of the bigger picture, neither getting bogged down in particularities nor succumbing to the ease of a catch-all narrative that ignores the exquisite detail.