Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury and Ranabir Samaddar (eds.), The Rohingya in South Asia: People Without a State

village versus city, leading to dangerous claims such as the annihilation of the village. Even in the Western theory of urban and rural space, the influence of the concept of the city as a lens to view the countryside has been critiqued both at the politico-economic as well as an aesthetic and sensibility starting with Raymond Williams’ work. As Williams’ work focused on the commons and literature written on villages and cities in Britain to show the paucity of the concept of separating the city from the countryside, the author’s work becomes a landmark study in describing this paucity in understanding the rural and urban landscape in India. To summarise, the work addresses the politics of knowledge production as the selection of the language also decides the questions one is choosing to ask, the audience one is speaking to, and the position one elects to enunciate. The author’s work thus creates a different conceptual plain questioning the existing categories of studying space, both urban and rural. While the politics of knowledge production has been acknowledged across different academic forums, the depth and dimension of its loss can only be realised, recovered from, and dealt with in weaving together the concerns and concepts in the vernacular with ethnography.