Measuring the Fluid Landscape: Colonial Law and Mid-Gangetic Agro-ecology

• In Event: The River and Mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 1850-1950

Abstract

This paper looks at fluvial landscape of northern and eastern India – variously called diaras or churs – to understand the process of colonial legal interventions, and how such interventions shaped the meanings of land and rights in this landscape. According to informed estimates, diaras comprised about 10 to 15 per cent of total land in different riverine districts of Bihar. The paper looks at two interrelated aspects: one, a series of riparian laws and regulations to understand the nature of colonial state’s legal intervention; and two, the rights of raiyats cultivating these lands. In particular, it focuses on the act of measurement as part of the legal framework in which the state operated. The predicaments of this legal exercise on the one hand left the colonial state with an unachievable task of ‘fixing’ the ecological setting, on the other it led to the erosion of rights for cultivating peasants.

Author

• Nitin Sinha, Zentrum Moderner Orient