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There is a limited freshwater fish fauna in the high Arctic, with Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) dominating in most aquatic systems. In the high Arctic, Arctic char are the only resident freshwater species, which display a complex variety of life-history tactics, varying in growth and feeding patterns to produce ecophenotypes that occupy distinctive niches. Anadromous Arctic char use lake habitats for critical life-history stages, including reproduction, juvenile growth, and over-wintering. Lakes, therefore, provide essential habitat for all Arctic char populations. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) also occur in the Arctic, and are an important food source where they occur. Most other species, with the exception of sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus and Pungitius pungitius), occur only as populations at the northern fringes of their distributional range. While their occurrence can complicate the ecology of any given lake, such species are not an integral part of most high Arctic lake environments.

Focusing on the later poetry, this chapter analyses further the topography of Sereni’s lyric subject, looking back to the model of the desiring self in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which Sereni reworks as a facet of his own desiring landscape. The point of interchange between the two authors emerges in the identity of the ‘phantasm’: a recollected space in the imagination and memory understood as a dynamic mise en scène of desire that implicates the subject as much as his object. Deixis again maps the vicissitudes of the ‘I’ in this space and Sereni’s more limited success with respect to Petrarch. Close-readings of poems by both poets confirm the powerful force exerted by the memory of Petrarch’s lyric universe as a ‘luogo ideale’ [ideal place], from which Sereni is progressively estranged and his inability to create the same conditions of desire that existed for the earlier author.

This chapter focuses on the livelihoods of char dwellers by developing a sense of community that allows people to help each other in the struggle for survival. They have honed a fine appreciation of the nature of the river in order to use every bit of opportunity available to them and create a hybrid livelihood. The char location provides a unique setting, providing a geographical context in understanding the livelihood strategies of women-headed households. Choruas build a sense of community in securing livelihoods for themselves and their families. Chars are not deterritorialized in the process in which culture and power is enmeshed, even though in the chars, neither locality nor community is rooted in natural identities. Thus, char communities create new forms of economic citizenship that are beyond the state through their complex and hybrid livelihood strategies.

This section describes the concept of formative force in drawing and argues that drawing is the idea, the true form of the thing. More precisely, it is the gesture that arises from the desire to show this form and to trace it so as to reveal the form—but not to trace in order to show it as a form already received. Drawing designates the form or idea, but its “fait accompli” is not simply that of the thing’s monstration; it is the monstration of the form, idea, or thought. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Henri Matisse, Félix Ravaisson, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Max Loreau, and Pablo Picasso.

This chapter outlines how and why tropical rivers such as the Damodar are different from the rivers, and discusses the ecological processes of char formation. The Asian river experts pointed out that tropical rivers and tropical hydro-geomorphological processes are different from temperate rivers and their hydrology. The geographical uniqueness of the Damodar basin has led to a great interest in the river, and there is a significant amount of literature on the hydro-geomorphological characteristics of the river. In Bengal, a char can only be accepted legally as land if it continues to exist for over 20 years. Some chars might stabilize enough and support enough people to gain legal recognition as land, but most of them do not quite fit the conventional description of land and hardly support any significant infrastructure, such as roads and markets or water supply and sanitation facilities.

This chapter focuses on the migration history of the chars and shows that people arrived on chars from different areas at different times. Both groups of migrants—Biharis and Bangladeshis—who live on the Damodar chars have a tradition of outmigration from their own lands. At present, the majority of char dwellers belong to the Bangladeshi Hindu community and these refugees were granted patta to settle on chars by the district government of Burdwan after the Partition. The char dwellers live in a hostile environment, coping with floods, using skills and resources they have learned over years of experience with this phenomenon either in Bangladesh or in India. Chars could be only one area where the lower castes settled on the Indian side of the border. Geography and history come together in exploring twentieth-century legacies of colonial rule and in viewing divisions such as the Partition as political solutions.

This chapter describes the varying circumstances in which young people became servants, and their experiences as servants. It explores the relationship between servants and their parents, the influence of mothers, and the significance of wages. The work of cleaners and chars is foregrounded, and the existing historiography is criticized. The persistent tendency to see servants only as victims is rejected through attention to the very diverse narratives that emerge from oral histories and memoirs. Finally, social class is explored within these narratives, and held to be an insufficient framework for capturing the subjectivities of domestic service

This chapter charts the laughter prompted by the everyday interactions of employers and servants that were widely represented in music hall, cinema, periodicals, newspapers, and other forms of mass leisure. It suggests that laughter is an intensely revealing emotion that structures relationships of inequality and offers both forms of resistance and support for the status quo. The use made by scholars of laughter is reviewed, and some new directions are suggested. The chapter assess the failed jokes, and shared jokes, of the century, and suggests that cultural representations of service, cleaning, and char work continued to be widely found funny during the period between World War II and the 1980s when the numbers employed in service were very low. Service continued to have cultural resonance, and has profoundly shaped traditions of British humour.

This chapter discusses the potential of applying cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to the assessment of the economic efficiency of natural disaster risk management and climate adaptation projects. CBA is a standard tool for assessing the economic efficiency of projects and policies, yet it has generally not been applied sufficiently and robustly to climate adaptation and disaster risk management projects, particularly in a development assistance context. The analysis is contextualized by a case study on flood proofing homesteads against flood risk to riverine islands, known as Chars, in Bangladesh. We discuss the key methodological elements of our approach involving a consideration of the dynamic driving forces of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. A key concept employed in this analysis is the probabilistic representation of risks by loss-frequency functions. We consider monetary and economic risks, which generate benefits when they are avoided, in terms of structural risk to dwellings, inventory risk, income risk and other potential losses, such as due to cleanup costs. While the results indicate that overall the options studied seem to be economically efficient based on CBA decision rules, we stress that estimating extreme event risk and the benefits of risk reduction is fraught with large and many uncertainties. These uncertainties importantly reduce the economic viability of options studied and should thus be factored into any decision process.

This chapter focuses on the chars as hybrid environments, uniquely fluid environments where the demarcation between land and water is neither well defined nor permanent. The hybrid environments of chars offer real-life examples that challenge a number of naturalized concepts and categories. Chars are also quintessentially hybrid because the distinction between the boundaries of land and water is not clear. Within the Gangetic plains, the main focus is on the Bengal delta, and specifically the bagri, or the western part of the delta. Under the microscope of examination are the chars rising out of the bed of the Damodar River in its lower basin. Related closely to the history of river control is the story of how the Damodar chars came to be settled, a process that began in the late nineteenth century, when groups of Muslim fishermen migrated from Bihar to those riverine locations.

This chapter examines the colonial and postcolonial history to delineate the factors of char formation, and to substantiate the claim that chars are as much products of human intervention as they are of the ecology of Bengal. A large-scale char formation in the Damodar River occurred with the commencement of the formation of chars that stabilized over time rather than being flushed away during the monsoons. The BADA was designed primarily to protect the interests of the original owners and saw chouras as infiltrators. One aspect of this was the complexities in defining and regulating the relationship between landlords and tenants. Colonial land systems not only left their imprint on Bengali social and economic lives but also had far-reaching impacts on the ecology. Thus, what happened during the colonial period was critical to understanding the production of an environmental discourse that was also part of the Bengali milieu.

This chapter examines the interactions between chars and mainland areas—areas that lie across the embankments within which the chars have formed. The prosperity of agricultural Burdwan continues to attract migrants to the chars despite the fact that chars have largely remained outside the purview of rural development programs. Burdwan received a significant portion of postindependence rural development programs because it is one of the selected Integrated Agricultural District Programme (IADP) districts in India. Chars are nowhere near the general development indicators that make Burdwan such an important district in eastern India as they are located at the margins of the mainland and due to their uncertain legal status. Even in recent times, the existence of char communities remains largely unknown, ill understood, and unexplored by those living across the embankments of the Damodar.

This chapter outlines the mental maps of char dwellers, and shows the coping and adjustment strategies that they adopt to live in an environment of vulnerability and isolation. People live in a risky and uncertain environment not only because they have incomplete knowledge or because their rationality is bounded by compelling factors, but also because they take a calculated risk. They opt for a chance like that in a lottery or a gamble, a risk which is informed by the intimate knowledge developed over many years of living in a fluid and dynamic environment. Ill health, especially of income-earning members of the community, brings vulnerability to char dwellers because of their extreme poverty, affecting both the expenditures and income of households. Thus, char dwellers have honed their adaptive capacity as an important strategy for coping with the fragile environment in which they live.

This chapter explores how the poor live on a diverse mix of minimal resources by examining the households, and shows how individual families manage their incomes and how people mobilize resources on an informal basis. Rivers are always present in the collective consciousness of Bengal, not just as symbols or even as physical manifestations of cultural meanings, but forming the relations between places. Elements of nature such as the rivers do not stand alone within a specific context; they are part of the interconnected ecological processes within which both plant and human communities live. On chars, water remains the most important source of wealth as well as the biggest threat to a secure life. Thus, microscopic study of char livelihoods illuminates the importance of specific geographic context in understanding special adjustment processes.

This chapter examines the scientific experimentations aimed at identifying the germination stimulants and compounds present in certain plant forms. It surveys the effects of the different methods, namely wood charring and the bioassay-driven fractionation process, that led to the observation that germination-affecting chemicals may be water soluble, thermostable, and active in low concentrations.

This chapter recounts the birth of a river and growth of a floodplain. Drawing from the geological, hydrological, and biological sciences and other similar works, the chapter narrates the river’s early geological history, the life and times of its waters, sands, soils, climate, monsoon, etc. While recounting these dynamics of the river, the chapter asks questions such as: Where do the Brahmaputra’s waters arise from? How does the sand move? Is the life on the land surrounding the river dependent on the latter? What happens when the river receives more water than it can carry? The chapter claims that an understanding of this deep history of the river is essential for a sense of the long, turbulent times the river has undergone and will experience in the future.

This chapter explains how the British officials learned about the intricacies of coexisting with water. Along with ecological impacts, human interventions too wrought changes that called for regulation and corrective measures. This state intervention began through a complex as well as difficult redesigning of the floodplain landscape. The utilitarian and cultural imagination of the Assamese peasants hardly distinguished the islands of the river from that of the vast stretches of sandy riverbanks. Both were inseparable. Nineteenth-century Assamese lexicons described both as chapori. A cartographic division of this riverine geography began to take shape in the legal and revenue parlance of the British officials in Assam. Familiar with the vocabulary of Bengal, the British officials began to make a distinction between the two; the islands came to be mentioned as chars while the river banks were described as chaporis. The chars were looked down upon as the unfortunate geographical extension of the chaporis.