In the first and second chapters of Debjani Bhattacharya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta (2018), she analyzes in great detail the ecological and administrative forces that shaped Calcutta from the mid eighteenth century to the nineteenth. She begins by using the case of Benjamin’s Lacam’s proposal for a harbor in the east bank of the Hooghly River to underscore the legislative instruments that were devised in order to manage land acquisition practices in a place where land was not landed — or anchored.
The vocabulary used to describe alluvial ecologies, ‘native’ investment patterns in Calcutta (in Bhattacharya’s “Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta”), and finally the city of Old Delhi (in Nayanjot Lahiri’s “Delhi’s Capital Century”) stand out to me. Words like “capricious,” “anomalous,” “vulnerable,” and “dangerous” are used by researchers and colonial administrators alike to categorize the spaces in need of colonial “management.” These words seem to predate the scientific measurements and environmental studies needed to formally fold certain spaces into legal infrastructures of control. These words are the starting point. Once an object, a community, an environment is placed on the “peripheries,” that are “marginal to the grand schemes of the planners and the political class” (Lahiri, 1) action can be taken.
Bhattacharya cites the Hooghly River’s perceived “capriciousness,” she then uses the word again to describe the perceived irrational speculations of indigenous investors, “for the British officials, capriciousness, unlike rational exchange, played a dominant role in commercial transactions undertaken by the indigenous population” (Bhattacharya 2016, 477). “Capricious” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour: a capricious and often brutal administration” and then as: “changing according to no discernible rules; unpredictable: a capricious climate.” The word comes from the French capricieux/se, often used to describe a child’s (often feminized) unpredictable, unreasonable whims. And caprice in French is a tantrum, a crisis.
Using adjectives of crisis to describe the ecology (in the widest sense of the word) of colonial Calcutta and Delhi sets the groundwork for systems of management and control. The crisis embodied in this vocabulary seems to in fact be a resistance to representation and categorization. Bhattacharya even describes the difficulty of mapping Calcutta in the eighteenth century—the “capricious” tide spat out pieces of land while swallowing others, shifting the river’s banks and fighting against the cartographer’s gaze. The river and its ecologies as anti-colonial agents is a fun proposal.
However, this very resistance—the Hooghly mobilizing against Benjamin Lacam—is the justification for new legal and administrative instruments: “the infrastructural battles with water that were often overwhelmed by the tides of the Hooghly must be read not merely as the failure of colonial engineering, but also as productive moments in the making of a particular kind of property in the marshes” (Bhattacharya 2018, 83). There seems to be a cyclical movement between the identification of an object to be managed (by using adjectives like capricious, dangerous, anomalous), to a type of scientific or measured categorization, resistance to that categorization (working class mobilization in Delhi for example in the 1930s as described in Lahiri, 18), framing that resistance as a crisis and then the cycle begins again.
Sources:
Bhattacharyya, Debjani. Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. doi:10.1017/9781108348867.
Bhattacharyya, Debjani. “Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 465-482. muse.jhu.edu/article/639553.
Lahiri, Nayanjot. “Delhi’s Capital Century (1911 – 2011): Understanding the Transformation of the City.” In Colloquium Program for Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, March 2011. https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/colloqpapers/20lahiri.pdf.
“capricious.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary, 2021.
