Red Rivers against Hard Concrete: Have historians trumped engineers on the large dam debate in India (1948-2000)? | Humanities & Social Sciences

Red Rivers against Hard Concrete: Have historians trumped engineers on the large dam debate in India (1948-2000)?

HSS Occasional Seminar
Speaker: 
Rohan D’Souza, Professor, Kyoto University
Date and Time: 
Wed, 13/11/2024 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Schedule: 
03:30 PM to 05:00 PM
Venue: 
Committee Room (MS-611) Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5th Floor, Main Building, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Abstract: Red Rivers against Hard Concrete: Have historians trumped engineers on the large dam debate in India (1948-2000)?

As a mode for understanding and acting upon the world, is engineering different from the discipline of history? And if so, how does one discuss and identify the conceptual boundaries and overlaps. In a little remembered publication of 1919, C.A. Williams, then superintendent engineer (Public Works Department, Bengal), titled his booklet under the heading History of the Rivers in the Gangetic Delta (1750-1918). In it, he cautioned his readers that the effort was not an exercise in documentation but rather to ‘forecast what is likely to happen in the future’ and inform ‘future policy’. History, for Williams, was thus a tool to predict and shape the future. While this is an interesting definition, my presentation will explore how ideas about modern river-control in nineteenth and twentieth century British India help us explore the tensions between engineering world views, the historians craft, and the large dam debate in post-colonial India.

Bio:

Rohan D’Souza is Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and some of the select edited volumes include: The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011); and Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand (2020). His areas of research and teaching broadly deal with concerns in environmental history, environmental politics in the Anthropocene and technology studies. He is also a regular contributor to several popular online magazines and newspapers in India such as The Wire, Scroll, The India Forum, Hindustan Times and the Hindu.