The Great Hydraulic Transition: Modern Origins of Land and Rivers in South Asia

CASI Seminar
CASI Fall 2013 Visiting Scholar
Rohan D'Souza
Assistant Professor, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Center for the Advanced Study of India
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

About the Speaker:
Rohan D'Souza is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006). His edited books include The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011) and Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive Essays(2012). He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and Visiting Fellow at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University). Dr. D'Souza was recently awarded the Short Term Chair at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (2012).

About the Lecture:
Most writings on lands and rivers in South Asia have disingenuously accepted the “politics of Separations.” Land as property and river as resource, thus, are overwhelmingly recognized as distinct conceptual domains. Histories about land settlements, rent extraction, the burdens of revenue, legal ownership, or the commons have occupied discussions only as the political economy of the soil. Rivers, on the other hand, became a technical subject involving infrastructure and the biographies of engineering and control. Dr. D’Souza will argue that this politics of separations acquired a defining force in the region only through the course of the long nineteenth century. An amphibian South Asia with its soil-water admixtures actually characterized its environmental and social worlds before being transformed into the reptilian terrain of colonial modernity.

Event Flyer

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.