The Discourse of Contained Waters in Colonial Dacca: Buckland Bund and Dacca Water Works

• In Event: Reimagining Flooding in the Era of Climate Change: What Environmental History Offers to Navigate a Watery World

Abstract

In the British colonial context, the dynamic riverine landscape of the Bengal Delta was perceived as a hindrance in the functioning of territorialization, governance and taxation. Through mapping, legislation, and infrastructure, successive colonial administrations worked tirelessly to construe the deltaic environment as a dry one, creating ways of knowing it and modifying it as such in order, that promoted its own political agency, governmental legitimacy and profit extraction. Some influential natives pursuing their own interests also became involved in these modernizing projects, which helped them consolidate their own political and cultural capital. The knowledge formation of the first half of the colonial period was manifested in the built environment of Dacca through some crucial infrastructural projects during the second-half of 19th century. A prominent theme in these projects was - drying the urban land by containing its waters.



This paper will explore the two initial projects - the Buckland Bund and Dacca Waterworks in legitimizing subsequent infrastructural interventions and facilitating a process of abstraction though which a particular idea of land and water was formed. The funding for these projects was collected mostly from the locals while the labor was provided by the convicted criminals. With these interventions, soft soil transformed into metal roads, shifting river to contained waters, marshes and forest to high and dry urban productive grounds and soaking ecology to a fixed landscape. In times, these geo-cultural transformations created a complex tradition of seeing and representing landscape that came to be shared by both colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were also driven by, and helped disseminate, utopian and seductive notions of improvement, progress and futurity despite resistances – through which previously autonomous locales being drawn into conversation with the metropole not only through the circulation of capital, knowledge and power, but also images and imaginaries.

Author

• Labib Hossain, Cornell University