Kuntala Lahiri–Dutt is a senior fellow in resource management in the Asia-Pacific Program at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She lives in Canberra. Gopa Samanta is an associate professor in geography at the University of Burdwan. She lives in Golapbag, Burdwan, India.

“This is a refreshing perspective on what remains a little understood region…it can be put alongside a now speeding train of thought on classics such as Seeing like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed and a cascade of writings on post-development and geographies of hope literature.”— Rohan D’Souza, Jawaharlal Nehru University, author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India