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“What India needs is more farm laborers and fewer farmers,” says Anand Subhedar, a Vidarbha-based agriculturist. “We have created a situation where the farmers are gambling their lives with debt on the chance of getting a good crop, which hasn’t happened in recent years. It would be far better if they were simply collecting a wage.” But it is hard to make that break, because Indians are passionate about owning the land. They consider the land a goddess and pray to her. “The farmer doesn’t know how to invest the money and make a better future for himself,” says Mr. Subhedar, “so he will wait around until the last straw breaks.”

THE ARRIVAL VILLAGE

Biswanath, Sylhet, Bangladesh

Given Biswanath’s even more remote location, its isolation from any major cities, its tiny plots of land, and its dense population, this village in the Bangladeshi district of Sylhet might well have shared the same fate as Dorli, India. But Sylhet, an almost completely rural rice-farming district in the far northeast corner of Bangladesh, has one major difference: Since the 1960s, it has sent a continuous stream of permanent migrants to the arrival cities of London and other British centers. An estimated 95 percent of Britain’s Bangladeshis hail from this small district, and the links have brought a surprising metamorphosis to the muddy villages here, as the back-and-forth flows of arrival-city migration and village-bound remittances have transformed the economy. In Sylhet, the relationship between the arrival city and the village has reached its dramatic, penultimate stage.

To drive into Biswanath is, at first, to enter any large Bangladeshi farming village. There are the tottering wood-and-corrugated-tin huts housing dozens of people who live on less than a dollar a day; there are children gathering fish in the rice paddies and adults reaping with scythes, pulling rickshaws, and selling anything they can lay their hands on. The poverty of rural life strikes first. Then, toward its teeming center, the village itself reveals the precise opposite: There are dozens of multi-story shops and even a full-scale shopping mall, Al Hera, which sports an escalator, smoked-glass windows, and air-conditioning, selling shoes and electronics and cosmetics and Western-style toilets, things never before seen in rice-farming villages. There are restaurants, fast-food joints, and kebab shops, many with English signs and names like London Fried Chicken, and an astonishing number of real-estate agencies. This is a highly urbanized village. Most of the villages of Sylhet district, unlike any of the other 64 districts of Bangladesh, have been similarly transformed.

The next shock comes just beyond the village limits, as you drive along the narrow lanes between the rice paddies, where the horizon is interrupted every dozen hectares by the looming spectre of an absolutely enormous modern house, three or four storys tall, usually with an ornamental roof terrace, an elaborate walled garden, and a circular driveway befitting the seat of a grandee of the Raj, all of it built in the grandiose architectural styles of the Persian Gulf or the wealthiest districts of Dhaka. Approaching these gleaming castles, it is quickly apparent that many of them are uninhabited and barely furnished, even though they are surrounded by rickety slum-housing developments full of people and rice fields swarming with farm workers.

These are the “Londoni” houses, owned and built in absentia by the families known as Londonis—the Sylheti term for anyone who has migrated permanently to any place in Britain. These palatial abodes typically cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, though they would be worth millions if they were built on such a scale in the West, and are often inhabited only a few weeks of the year, when the Londoni relatives come to visit. Somewhere near the big Londoni house is typically an impressive one-story residence, also built with British funds, occupied by the non-migrant relatives of the Londonis.