Bangladesh: Disposable Rags Of Humanity

It is more than one year since a major industrial devastation rocked Dhaka. Jeremy Seabrook examines in The Song of The Shirt why the horror can happen again, writes Pradyot Lal in Tehelka

When the Rana Plaza catastrophe happened and killed more than 1,300 garment workers in Dhaka last year, all that it merited was a sense of outrage, which never went beyond telling us how bad and horrible the whole thing was. There was hardly any attempt to go beyond the mundane obvious, to tell us why it happened and why it could happen again. For those seeking such basic answers, this volume does singular service. The admirable Jeremy Seabrook has come up with this necessarily grim volume detailing the sheer tragedy of those who create such wonderful and fashionable garments for the elite, but who themselves live a life bereft of even the most basic of comforts.