Pre-Colonial Irrigation, Late Colonial Political Anxieties, and Contemporary Environmental Alternatives: The Bengal Delta's “Overflow Irrigation” in Historical Perspective

During the 1920s and 1930s, scientists, engineers, journalists, politicians and others debated the “decadence” of the Bengal delta, defined by its increased mortality from malaria and decreased agricultural yields. The malariologist C. A. Bentley and the engineer Sir William Willcocks argued that British ignorance and arrogance had allowed a pre-colonial system of “overflow irrigation,” admirably suited both to the control of malaria and the maintenance of a productive agriculture, to be wrecked by ill-advised public works and neglect. They advocated the revival of overflow irrigation and the reconfiguration or abandonment of important colonial public works that interfered with it. Despite widespread acceptance of their ideas, however, the post-independence water regime in the delta (divided by partition in 1947) featured other approaches to managing water: large dams higher in watersheds, the Farrakha barrage across the Ganges, the attempted chemical control of malaria, and heavy reliance on groundwater harvested through tubewells. The urgent problems associated with these systems (e.g. the underperformance of large dams, the spread of arsenicosis through tubewells, and the resurgence of malaria) have restored interest in Bengal's surface water resources and the appeal of some of Bentley and Willcocks' ideas. But assessing the utility of these ideas for addressing such problems is not a straightforward task. Willcocks and Bentley's ideas both attempted to describe nature and history, and also advanced complex ideological and bureaucratic claims within the political context of the late Raj. This paper asks how far the system they theorized actually existed, and also analyzes the political contexts in which such representations were made--the political agendas they served and the reactions they sparked. It considers how their historical and hydrological claims have been re-imbricated in new political imaginaries in light of the failures of the dams and tubewells favored by engineers and policy makers after independence.