The Biological Bay: Fish and Science in Bengal Waters, 1852–1953

The Bay of Bengal (Bay) is in crisis. Home to countless people who depend on its resources for food and security, today’s Bay is also the site of an alarming “dead zone” roughly the same area as Sri Lanka. Discovered in 2017, this anthropogenic hotspot carries dire implications for aquatic food webs and the arc of megacities that stretch from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia. For the Bay, ecological and economic life are deeply intertwined. Yet recent scholarship has fashioned this basin as a space of human crossings and creole belongings, focusing largely on how its waters and currents moved bodies, ideas, diseases, and goods from port to port and from shore to shore. Consequently, the Bay has been rendered less as a biological place and more as a “[basin] born of movement”: metaphorically visible but materially absent (Braudel 1972).

This paper charts a different kind of story. It recovers the Bay not as a zone of cultural circulation but as a site of knowledge production. It shows how fishes and the Madras-based experts who studied them can help us cast a history of the Bay in waters that are materially new and intellectually uncharted. Through the lives of hilsa ((Tenualosa ilisha Hamilton, 1822) and B. Sundara Raj (1888-1974, the first local director of the Madras Fisheries Bureau), among other examples, the paper explores a history from below while narrating a story about how the Bay became biological—mortal and vulnerable—in the span of a century. In this way, looking at the study of fish allows us not only to historicize our scientific knowledge of the Bay, but also, and more critically, to surface decolonial and multispecies ways of rethinking the “ocean” in Indian Ocean history.