A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh VillageA quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-seaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the readers meets some of the world's poorest people - peasants, sharecroppers and landless labourers - and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villager's poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of charachter. Rather, it is the outcome of a long history of exploitation, culminating in a social order which today benefits a few at the expense of many. |
Contents
THE MAKING OF A VILLAGE | 9 |
BEHIND BAMBOO WALLS | 73 |
THE CLASSES | 123 |
The Padlocked Storeroom | 135 |
Husains Ambitions | 144 |
The Trials of a Poor Peasant Family | 160 |
The Death of a Landless Labourer | 169 |
WHO WORKS? WHO EATS? | 177 |
Land and Labour | 194 |
The Double Edge | 214 |
Common terms and phrases
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