Making Modern Flows: The Great Hydraulic Transition in South Asia

South Asia was witness to roughly a century of colonial hydraulic practices, interventions and experiences. A period in which rivers were quantified as units of flow, disclosed through modern engineering visions for comprehensive control and sought to be repeatedly harnessed by technological fixes. This great hydraulic transition was effectively premised on the attempted separation of land and water, as two distinct non-overlapping natural domains. While land became property, water was valued as irrigation. Whereas soil was invested with the permanence of ownership, fickle rivers were meant to be harnessed only as resource. Revenue as legal claim and water cess as economic charge were thus mixed for agrarian cultivation and yet sustained as distinct elemental factors of nature. This paper will discuss how the crafting of landscapes from deltaic waterscapes was enabled in the colonial period. A history involving the struggle to contain rivers from their dramatic tendencies for seasonal overflow, wild oscillations, avulsions, rapid channel alteration and, often times, have their onrushing currents sweep vast swathes of adjoining cultivated tracts into their watery depths. A dynamic environment, in other words, part water part land, involving a geography that was relentlessly rearranged. In the sustained and often times trying attempts to separate land and water as discrete economic domains and resources, the colonial regime was compelled to fundamentally rework the relationships between soils and flows. The great hydraulic transition, in other words, was based on generating separations rather than admixtures. A process of purification, in the words of Bruno Latour, rather than translations between nature and culture.