• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1645 0

storefronts to open his own shop in the center of Biswanath, selling the sort of running shoes that are popular on the streets of London. He lives in the blue house with his mother and his three younger sisters and a brother who is enrolled in secondary school; he spends a good part of his time ensuring that the Londoni house is cared for, cleaned, and ready for one of his uncle’s increasingly rare visits. The property costs 15,000 taka ($600) a month to maintain, 9,000 ($180) of which goes to the monthly salaries of two full-time, live-in servants, Masuk Ahmed, 56, and Moinul Ahmed, 25, peasant farmers who moved here from neighboring Habiganj district to take advantage of the Londoni money. They each send at least 80 percent of their salary back to their family, and they manage to visit their wives and children two or three times a year.

After the Western economies dipped into their credit-driven downturn and Britain faced a property-market slump in 2008, the remittances from Mominul’s uncle turned into periodic gifts, then disappeared altogether. The construction stopped, and the whole enterprise had to be run from the revenues earned in Biswanath, mainly from the storefront rentals. This cutoff, repeated in thousands of households across the district, rapidly transformed the local economy from feudalism into capitalism, forcing non-productive enterprises to shut down. In Mominul’s case, it was his shoe shop that had to go: He laid off his six employees and shuttered it. Altogether, at least two dozen people either directly or indirectly employed by the family have lost their jobs. The farm, previously operated out of a sense of charity and agrarian pride, suddenly became a financial consideration, and Mominul plans to turn out three crops a year and possibly switch to market crops.

What has happened in Biswanath? On one hand, it changed from a peasant economy into a highly dependent economy of tribute and monumentalism: The money from the arrival cities of Britain supports an economy that is sometimes driven more by pride than by economic reason. As the anthropologist Katy Gardner has documented in her exhaustive studies of the Sylheti economy and social system, some of the Londoni money goes to building roads and schools, consolidating farmlands and other productive investment uses, but just as much is spent on large houses, flashy storefronts, and other projects designed to raise the status of the family, improve the marriage prospects of the family members remaining in Sylhet, and produce the visible symbols of modernity and worldliness.14

But something more sustainable is occurring beneath this flash. As the Bangladeshi scholar Tasneem Siddiqui has shown in detailed studies of the economies of these villages, the money and knowledge from the arrival cities of London and Dhaka are creating consumer markets within the rural region (where consumerism, and the possibility of earning money, had not previously existed) and investments in high-productivity agriculture in Sylhet. It is a female-led form of progress, with women in the villages often being the leading figures investing in irrigation, craft industries, and agricultural marketing with the help of circular migrants.15 Some Londoni investments take the place of an absent government: Aside from scores of English-language schools built by migrants and staffed by villagers, there are four full-scale colleges in Biswanath, all of them built and maintained with Londoni money, and all appear to be doing well, with full enrollments as local families have eagerly invested in post-secondary educations to give their children a better chance of winning immigration status or attracting a foreign spouse. The tighter Britain’s immigration regime becomes, the more profit these schools make, and they appear to be improving the cultural resources of new Bangladeshi migrants to Britain. But other Londoni investments, those with less value to the locals, have been killed off in the downturn. Mominul Islam’s running-shoe store was far more devoted to expressing his tastes and Londoni