A Quiet Violence: View From a Bangladesh Village

A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world's poorest people--peasants, sharecroppers, and landless laborers--and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villagers' poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character. 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.

A Quiet Violence: View From a Bangladesh Village

"Here, in a microcosm, is a fascinating, carefully constructed account of the way life works in a million Third World villages."
--Susan George, author, How the Other Half Dies

"Through the sensitive eyes of Hartmann and Boyce, we meet some of the extraordinary people whose lives and struggles are hidden in the anonymous statistics of world hunger. Their powerful, first-hand account enables us to pierce through the many myths about the world's hungry majority...by taking us with them into a single country--a single village."
--Frances Moore Lappé, author, Diet for a Small Planet
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I: The Making of a Village

Chapter One: Golden Bengal
Chapter Two: The Man with a Tiger's Face
Chapter Three: Aktar Ali's Youth
Chapter Four: Newcomers
Chapter Five: The Three Faces of Katni

Part II: Behind Bamboo Walls

Chapter Six: The Reluctant Bride
Chapter Seven: Heaven Under Her Husband's Feet
Chapter Eight: The Children

Part III: The Classes

Chapter Nine: Nafis, the Landlord
Chapter Ten: The Padlocked Storeroom
Chapter Eleven: Husain's Ambitions
Chapter Twelve: The Trials of a Poor Peasant Family
Chapter Thirteen: The Death Of A Landless Laborer

Part IV: Who Works? Who Eats?

Chapter Fourteen: The Market
Chapter Fifteen: Land and Labor
Chapter Sixteen: Religion: The Double Edge

Part V: Interventions

Chapter Seventeen: Law And Disorder Come To Katni
Chapter Eighteen: Little People And Big People
Chapter Nineteen: Tubewells for the Rich.
Chapter Twenty: Foreign Aid: A Helping Hand?