This event is in collaboration with th e Interdisciplinary Histories R esearch Cluster\, and is co-sponsored by the Department of History\, and the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies.
The immense flowing rivers of South Asia ─ from the sprawl ing Indus system in the West to the volatile Irrawaddy in the East ─ were t urned into modern rivers through the course of British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. This ‘great hydraulic transition’\, I argue\, was phil osophically premised on the need to separate land and water ⎯ as two disti nct non-overlapping natural domains. A transition effected\, in the main\, by the interventions of colonial engineering with which rivers were quant ified as units of flow\, disclosed by comprehensive control and harnessed with weirs\, embankments and dams. The introduction of colonial hydraulic i nfrastructure\, in essence\, was to sustain land as legal claim and to be i magined as permanent ownership\, while river flows were recast as resource.
Modern rivers as the subdued and stable volumetric channel\, however \, has remained haunted by its other irrepressible geological energies: as capricious silt leaden currents\, fluvial biological webs and recurring tor rential entanglements with soil. The transition to a shackled geometric st raight line of contained flows\, in other words\, has been repeatedly calle d to contend with the rivers many watery pasts of radical seasonal overflow \, eclectic channel oscillations\, frenzied avulsions and sudden fluvial b ursts.
The making of modern rivers in South Asia\, I suggest\, is a h istory that brings to the surface the ecological and ideological that has thus far remained submerged by the overbearing triumphalist narrative of c olonial engineering. By reconsidering rivers as geomorphological process an d as stochastic pulses rather than mere volume and stock\, I hope to recove r perceptions\, philosophical dispositions\, institutional mind sets\, soci al complexity and issues of power that shaped the great hydraulic transiti on in South Asia.
As the quest for large dams and megawatts continues to convulse the political and ecological worlds of South Asia (and many ot her parts of the world)\, subversive histories about colonial engineering a nd river control\, I argue\, will be critical to how we re-imagine other so cial possibilities.
Rohan D’Souza is Associate Prof essor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto Unive rsity). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawahar lal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90)\, on the political platform of t he All India Student’s Federation.
He has held postdoctoral fellowshi ps at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley)\, besides having had visiting fellowships at the C entre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at t he Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University). He holds honorary affiliation as Senior Research Associate at the Centre for W orld Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short Term Ch air at the University of Tokyo ( Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contempora ry Indian Studies.
He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonia l Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and the joint e ditor of The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encou nters in South Asia (2011). He has also edited the Environment\, Te chnology and Development: Critical and Subversive essays (2012) for the Economic and Political Weekly Series. His research interests and publicat ions cover themes in environmental history\, political ecology\, sustaina ble development and modern technology.