“The Great Hydraulic Transition: Colonial engineering and the making of modern rivers in South Asia”

The immense flowing rivers of South Asia ─ from the sprawling Indus system in the West to the volatile Irrawaddy in the East ─ were turned into modern rivers through the course of British  colonial rule in the nineteenth century. This ‘great hydraulic transition’, I argue, was philosophically premised on the need to separate land and water ¾ as two distinct non-overlapping natural domains. A  transition effected, in the main, by the intervention of colonial engineering with which rivers were quantified as units of flow, disclosed by comprehensive control and harnessed with weirs, embankments and dams. The introduction of colonial hydraulic infrastructure, in essence, was to sustain land as legal claim and to be imagined as permanent ownership, while river flows were recast as resource.

Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90), on the political platform of the All India Student’s Federation. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley), besides having had visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University). He holds honorary affiliation as Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short Term Chair at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies.

He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and the joint editor of The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011). He has also edited the Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive essays (2012) for the Economic and Political Weekly Series. His research interests and publications cover themes in environmental history, political ecology, sustainable development  and modern technology.

Organized by the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, in collaboration with the Centre for India and South Asia Research.