Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime

Abstract

Increasingly, in the twilight years of Empire, Bengal’s rivers were declared to be an indisputable ‘water problem’.1 For the official colonial imagination, the delta’s fluvial arms were too temperamental and snaked their way across the capacious flood plains only to wastefully empty ‘millions of tons’ of their watery burden into the Bay of Bengal. Usually a swollen rage during the monsoon and an irrelevant trickle by the winter, such hydrographic quirks, it was authoritatively held, regularly depressed and enfeebled the Bengal peasant.