Talk by Nusrat S Chowdhury (Anthropology, Amherst College)

This paper contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy by focusing on a river bridge in Bangladesh which is by far the country’s most high-profile infrastructural project. While the Padma Bridge was inaugurated only in 2022, its status as a populist project and an index of postcolonial corruption dates back more than a decade. In 2011, the World Bank voiced concern over possible corruption and decided to withdraw funding. In 2013 a Canadian court dismissed the case in absence of acceptable evidence. In 2019, multiple people in Bangladesh were killed based on a rumor that the Padma Bridge needed children’s heads for timely completion. In light of these entangled set of events, along with the fetishistic attachments that the bridge has unearthed, my paper aims to situate megaprojects as articulating a specific imagination of development. Analytically, I propose that while infrastructural development thrives on and energizes visibiliites, language is often seen as a supplement to the visual. I want to rethink this relationship to argue that language, as much as visibility, is constitutive of the connections that Padma Bridge brings to our attention.

Nusrat S. Chowdhury is a political anthropologist who focuses on questions of political communication and popular sovereignty. Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular is an ethnography of the crowd. Her current book is a meditation on populism as mediated through infrastructure. This work also privileges language as integral to the way in which infrastructure is accommodated in everyday life that goes beyond the spectacular visuals that development megaprojects thrive on and promise.