Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence 2018056220, 9781138285316, 9780429242694

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of plates
List of tables
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: the materiality of liquescence
PART I Vision and space, ca. 1500–1750
2 The shape of Babur’s lake: architecture and water in the central Indian frontier
3 Water is a limited commodity: ecological aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614
4 Lakes within lake-palaces: a material history of pleasure in 18th-century India
PART II Surface and depth, ca. 1750–1950
5 Photos of the ocean: pearl fisheries, British colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar
6 Deep time as intimate stranger: the age of water in the religious imagination at Girar, 1855
7 From nallah to nadi, stream to sewer to stream: urban waterscape research in India and the United States
PART III Materiality and infrastructure, ca. 1950–2015
8 Water: its meanings and powers in the Indian Sufi tradition
9 Developmental aesthetics: modernism’s ocular economies and laconic discontents in the era of Nehruvian technocracy
10 A critical look into the existing practice of water governance in cities: the case of Chandernagore
11 Making water media in 21st-century South Asia
PART IV Mediations
12 The religious and affective actualities of the Yamuna: conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi
13 From Bundi to Delhi: water harnessing systems in semiarid regions
14 You always step into the same river!
PART V Afterthoughts
15 Cosmographia universalis: environmental crisis and the water aesthetics of global South Asia
Index

Citation preview

Water Histories of South Asia ‘This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.’ Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water’s artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present. This is one of the first books on South Asia’s art, architecture and visual history to interweave the ecological with the aesthetic under the emerging field of eco art history. The volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers of art history, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, urban studies, architecture, geography, history and environmental studies. It will also appeal to activists, curators, art critics and those interested in water management. Sugata Ray is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His research focuses on the intersections among early modern and colonial artistic cultures, transterritorial ecologies and the natural environment. His publications include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019); Ecologies, Aesthetics and Histories of Art (coedited, 2019); and essays in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art History and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Venugopal Maddipati is Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. His research focuses on geological thinking, architectural history and ecological histories. His publications include Gandhi and Architecture Against History: The Contemporaneity of LowCost Housing (forthcoming) and essays in journals and books such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Sarai Reader 09; Simon Starling/Superflex: Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests; and LA, Journal of Landscape Architecture.

Visual and Media Histories Series Editor: Monica Juneja, Heidelberg University

This series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings, maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another. Opening up the field of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses are brought alive. Through its regional focus on South Asia, the series locates itself within a prolific field of writing on non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies and to perceive temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specific local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can re-constitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read onto and through one another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the series to include those which cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship – sculpture, painting and monumental architecture – from other media: studies of film, photography and prints on the one hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings and cityscapes on the other. Garden Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India: Histories from the Deccan Edited by Daud Ali and Emma J. Flatt Women Architects and Modernism in India Madhavi Desai No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia Edited by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India Edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence Edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Visual-and-MediaHistories/book-series/VMH

Water Histories of South Asia The Materiality of Liquescence

Edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ray, Sugata, editor. | Venugopal, Maddipati, editor. Title: Water histories of South Asia : the materiality of liquescence / edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Visual and media histories | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018056220 | ISBN 9781138285316 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429242694 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: South Asia—Civilization. | Water and civilization—History. | Water—Social aspects—South Asia—History. | Bodies of water—Social aspects—South Asia—History. | Material culture—South Asia—History. | Visual communication—Social aspects—South Asia—History. | Water in art— History. | Art, South Asian—History. | Architecture—South Asia—History. | South Asia—Environmental conditions—History. Classification: LCC DS339 .W38 2019 | DDC 333.9100954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056220 ISBN: 978-1-138-28531-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-24269-4 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents List of plates

vii

List of tables

xi

List of contributors

xii

Foreword by Monica Juneja

xiii

Acknowledgments

xvi

1 Introduction: the materiality of liquescence

1

S U G ATA RAY AND VE NUGOPAL MADDI PATI

PART I

Vision and space, ca. 1500–1750 2 The shape of Babur’s lake: architecture and water in the central Indian frontier

17 19

TA M A R A I . S E ARS

3 Water is a limited commodity: ecological aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614

37

S U G ATA RAY

4 Lakes within lake-palaces: a material history of pleasure in 18th-century India

60

D I P T I K H E RA

PART II

Surface and depth, ca. 1750–1950 5 Photos of the ocean: pearl fisheries, British colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar

93 95

N ATA S H A E ATON

6 Deep time as intimate stranger: the age of water in the religious imagination at Girar, 1855

119

V E N U G O PAL MADDI PATI

7 From nallah to nadi, stream to sewer to stream: urban waterscape research in India and the United States J A M E S L . WE S COAT J R.

135

vi

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Contents

PART III

Materiality and infrastructure, ca. 1950–2015 8 Water: its meanings and powers in the Indian Sufi tradition

159 161

C AT H E R I NE B . AS HE R

9 Developmental aesthetics: modernism’s ocular economies and laconic discontents in the era of Nehruvian technocracy

185

AT R E Y E E GUP TA

10 A critical look into the existing practice of water governance in cities: the case of Chandernagore

209

G O PA S A MANTA AND MAL AY GANGUL I

11 Making water media in 21st-century South Asia

226

B I S H N U P R I YA GHOS H

PART IV

Mediations 12 The religious and affective actualities of the Yamuna: conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi

243 245

PA D M A D . MAI TL AND

13 From Bundi to Delhi: water harnessing systems in semiarid regions

260

A S I M WAQI F

14 You always step into the same river!

276

AT U L B H AL L A

PART V

Afterthoughts 15 Cosmographia universalis: environmental crisis and the water aesthetics of global South Asia

295 297

PA RT H A MI TTE R

Index

309

Plates 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5

Palampore from the Coromandel coast, India, ca. 1725–50. Painted and dyed cotton chintz, 329 × 224.8 cm View of the landscape around Chanderi Map of routes taken through central India by Ibn Battuta and Babur Map of key rivers and streams around Kadwaha Map of waters around Kadwaha: (a) physical map, (b) satellite map Kadwaha site map, showing the hypothetical contours of Babur’s lake Chandal Math temple, from southeast, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, from the south, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, from the north, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century View of goddess temples along the banks of the artificial lake, Sakarra, ca. 9th century The river Yamuna at Mathura. Albumen print by Chunni Lall & Co., Muttra [Mathura], ca. 1890. 27.9 × 30.4 cm Vishram Ghat, Mathura Pavilion, upper terrace, Chashma-yi Nur [Fountain of Light], Ajmer, 1615 Torana, Vishram Ghat, Mathura, 1614, with later refurbishment Great Stupa, Sanchi, ca. 50–25 BCE “Astrologer’s Seat”, Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571 Façade, Man Mandir, Gwalior, ca. 1500 Pillar, Principal Haramsara (Shabistan-i Iqbal), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571 Jagniwas lake-palace (today known as the Taj Lake Palace hotel, Lake Pichola, Udaipur), inaugurated 20 January 1746 Sukha and Syaji, Maharana Jagat Singh II and His Queens at Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, 112.8 × 57.6 cm Artist unknown, The Poet Approaches Radha under a Monsoon Sky, Udaipur, ca. 1665. Opaque watercolour on paper, 19.3 × 24.4 cm Artist unknown, vignette represents Maharana Udai Singh II’s development of lakes and palaces in Udaipur, Mewar court’s new capital, part of scroll painting depicting the history of the rulers of Mewar, Udaipur, 1732. Opaque watercolour on paper, ca. 45 cm wide Artist unknown, Maharana Sangram Singh II at the Gangaur Boat Procession, Udaipur, ca. 1715–20. Gouache on paper, 78.7 × 78.74 cm

2 20 22 24 27 28 29 29 31 32 38 40 41 44 45 47 48 49 61 62 66

67 69

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4.6

4.7 4.8

4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12

4.13

4.14 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

5.8 5.9 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Plates

Artist unknown, Rama Enjoying the Gardens of Ayodhya with Sita, from the Jagat Singh Ramayana, Udaipur, 1648–52. Gouache on paper, 23 × 39.9 cm Shivprasana Amar Vilas Mahal (today known as the Baadi Mahal), City Palace Museum, Udaipur, Amar Singh II period (r. 1698–1710) Jairam (attributed), Maharana Sangram Singh and Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh enjoying delicacies at Jagmandir, ca. 1728. Gouache on paper, 50.2 × 43.1 cm Jiva and Jugarsi, Maharana Jagat Singh II at a Garden-Courtyard at Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, 68.6 × 68.6 cm Jairam, Maharana Jagat Singh II with His Ladies at Dilaram’s reservoir at Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, Dimension not known Jairam (attributed), Maharana Jagat Singh II Bathing with His Nobles at Jagniwas, Udaipur, ca. 1746–50. Gouache on paper, 46.9 × 81.3 cm Artist unknown, Maharana Jagat Singh II at Jagmandir Lake-Palace, Udaipur, ca. 1750. Opaque watercolour, gold and silver on paper, 47.5 × 60.3 cm Dilaram, Lotus-themed reservoir in the courtyard of the Bado Mahal at Jagniwas lake-palace (today known as the Lily Pond of the Taj Lake Palace hotel, Udaipur), inaugurated 20 January 1746 Lake Jait Sagar, with blooming lotuses covering the water surface, seen from the terrace of the Sukh Mahal, Bundi, 1776 Lionel Wendt, Gay Abandon, ca. 1940 Unknown photographer, Bronislaw Malinowski and Billy Hancock, ca. 1917 Lionel Wendt, Strange Décor, 1933–34 Lionel Wendt, Adventures in Space, ca. 1930s–1940s Lionel Wendt, Dreaming, 1933–34 Edgar Thurston, Silver South Indian Charms, ca. 1900 Artist unknown, Iskandar in a Ship, Observing Sea Monster, Folio from a copy of the Iskandar Nama, ca. 1600. Opaque watercolour on paper, 23.8 × 15.9 cm James Hornell, Plan of Part of a Pearl Camp at Tondi, 1914 Lionel Wendt, Silence, ca. 1930s–1940s Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, Sectional Elevation of Girar Hill Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, Section of Sitabuldi Hill Shrine of Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, Girar Hill A tank by the shrine of Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, Girar Hill Spherical nodules with acicular crystallisation sold in Girar today Back Bay Fens, Boston Barapula Nallah, New Delhi Pollution in Back Bay Fens, Boston Barapula Nallah, New Delhi

70 71

72 74 75 76

76

79 80 96 97 100 101 102 104

107 109 111 122 124 127 127 128 137 138 139 140

Plates

7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 11.1 11.2 11.3

Frequency of different nallah transliterations over time Back Bay Fens, Boston, ca. 1896. Digitised lantern slide W. Caney, general view of the Bara Pula [Barapula] Bridge, Delhi, 1875 Watershed scale studies relevant for the Barapula Nallah stream restoration, 2012 Children playing in Shab-i Barat Nallah bridge area, 2012 Site design proposal for Shab-i Barat bridge area, 2012 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 16th century to present Father and son with recently shaved heads, Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 2007 Votive tin plaque with ship, Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 2007. 11.11 × 6.8 cm Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Georgetown, Penang, 1801 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Singapore, 19th century Flag-raising ceremony at the Beach Mosque shrine for Sufi saint Hamid al-Nagori Kalmunaikkudy, eastern Sri Lanka, June 2008 Hauz-i Shamsi, Mehrauli, Delhi, 13th century to present Stepped well, Dargah of Nizam al-Din, Delhi, 14th century W. M. Cline Co., Tennessee, Diagram of TVA Water Control System, ca. 1945. Postcard Sunil Janah, Meghnad Saha, physicist, at the cyclotron in Calcutta University, ca. 1944. Black and white photograph Diagram of TVA Water Control System, ca. 1945. Woodblock poster Diagram of Damodar Water Control System, ca. 1944 Sunil Janah, Dam under construction, Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph Sunil Janah, Power station turbine hall, Damodar Valley Corporation, Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph Sunil Janah, Storage yard for steel products, with water tank in the distance, Burn & Co., Howrah, West Bengal, ca. 1955. Black and white photograph Sunil Janah, Women carrying stone chips, Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph Le Corbusier, drawing from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1947–52, detail of pillar Le Corbusier, drawing from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris Le Corbusier, drawing from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris Hindustan Times, Sarvajal Water ATM, 5 November 2015 M. Madhuraj, Women Trek to Fetch Water, July 2002 Stringer/AFP, Sharad Haksar Coca-Cola Billboard, Chennai, 14 July 2005

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ix

142 146 146 149 150 151 163 164 166 167 168 169 172 174 186 188 190 191 194 195 196 198 201 202 203 204 227 229 231

x

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Plates

11.4

Sean Gallagher, Boatman on the Ganges Polluted with Effluents, December 2013 11.5 Sean Gallagher, Effluents Gushing into Irrigation Canals, December 2013 11.6 NewsX channel (“Fighting the Tide”), Jal Satyagraha at Omkareshwar Dam, 28 September 2012 12.1 View of Nigambodh Ghat from the Yamuna River, New Delhi, 2015 12.2 Pandit Premchand Sharma, 2015 12.3 Resident of Nigambodh Ghat performing morning ablutions, 2015 12.4 Pandit Premchand Sharma preparing for a puja, 2015 12.5 Nigambodh Ghat with the metro rail line in the background, 2015 12.6 Pandit Premchand Sharma standing in the doorway of his house at Nigambodh Ghat and watching the Yamuna River, 2015 12.7 Nigambodh Ghat in the evening light, 2015 12.8 The Yamuna at night at Ghat 23, 2015 13.1 Excerpt of research done on Bhavaldi Bavdi, ca. 17th–18th century and Dabhai Kund, ca. 19th century, 2006 13.2 Schematic plan, water harnessing system, Bundi 13.3 Schematic section, water harnessing system, Udaipur 13.4 Agrasen ki Baori, ca. 14th century, New Delhi 13.5 Kabadiwallahs (scavengers) by the Yamuna River, New Delhi 14.1–14.15 Atul Bhalla, I Was Not Waving but Drowning-II, 2005. Archival pigment print, 27.94 × 19.05 cm each 15.1 Hendrick Jacobsz Dubbels, View of Batavia, 1640–76. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 84 cm 15.2 Neuromast and Neuron development of a Zebrafish using Crispr/Cas9, 2015

232 234 236 246 247 248 251 252 253 257 257 262 264 266 269 271 278 300 305

Tables 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9

Status of water supply, Chandernagore Increase in household connections, Chandernagore Daily average water use in Chandernagore in winter Daily average water use in Chandernagore in summer Projected domestic water demand, Chandernagore Average yield of pump houses over time, Chandernagore Pre-existing structure of water tax, Chandernagore Domestic water tax, Chandernagore, 2005 Estimated amount of domestic water tax, Chandernagore, 2013

211 213 214 214 215 216 220 220 221

Contributors Catherine B. Asher is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota, USA. Atul Bhalla is a visual artist based in New Delhi, India. His works incorporate sculpture, painting, installation, video, photography and performance. Natasha Eaton is Reader in the History of Art Department at University College, London, United Kingdom. Malay Ganguli is Assistant Professor of Geography at Sister Nibedita Government General Degree College for Girls, Kolkata, India. Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor in the Departments of English and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Dipti Khera is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, USA. Venugopal Maddipati is Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. Padma D. Maitland is the Patrick J. J. Maveety Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, USA. Partha Mitter is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History at University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Sugata Ray is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Gopa Samanta is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Burdwan, India. Tamara I. Sears is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, USA. Asim Waqif is a visual artist based in New Delhi, India. His works incorporate sculpture, sitespecific public installation, video, photography and large-scale interactive installations. James L. Wescoat Jr. is Aga Khan Professor in the Program for Islamic Architecture and CoDirector of the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Foreword

I

n December 2008, when the city of Delhi came alive during the public art festival 48°Celsius Public.Art.Ecology, the artist Sheba Chhachhi re-opened a long-neglected basement of the Delhi Public Library, making it public once more in the Gestalt of her work The Water Diviner. The immersive installation transformed the dark, dusty, damp space, once a colonial swimming pool and now a dump for broken furniture and stacks of unwanted books, into an imaginary underwater theatre that would trace the memory of water in the city back to premodern and colonial times. Descending into the darkness towards the sound of running water, the visitor entered an environment of oceanic blue light and black water pouring through the head of a sandstone lion fountain at the top of the stairs. Spots of light shining through screens illuminated open books and projected digitally reworked images from early modern manuscript folios, evoking a lost world of gardens irrigated by water channels, or of gopis bathing in a river. The Water Diviner tells a liquid tale of the Yamuna, imagined as a beautiful, sensual goddess that today lives on, in the words of the artist, as “a wounded female form”;1 the piles of books reaching up to the ceiling evoke a multi-layered way of thinking about the river – a goddess to be worshipped and a problem to be managed, a source of life and a repository of urban waste. Water has become a commodity in crisis. Can we recover personal and social ways of relating to it, as Chhachhi’s practice does, by recuperating ancient iconography, myth and history to calibrate an enquiry into contemporary issues? Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence is an enterprise of a team of scholars, a curator and two artists that sets out to address these and more questions while probing the sedimentation of time and cultural memory through the medium of water. Water – life giving, elemental, with the force to devastate, vulnerable to death by industrial poisoning, a material to be managed, owned and regulated – has multiple faces, inconsistent moods and unstable textures that the authors delve into as they engage with a range of human practices that ascribed meanings to water and valorised its material and sensorial qualities. The contributions investigate those ordering activities of humans that make up the broad realm of “water management” in the past and present – hydrological engineering, riparian architecture, claims to own, harness or detoxify water as resource. In addition, they draw our attention to its incarnations as affective vision and sacred site, its power to make place, to solder citizen solidarities, to maintain a cosmological equilibrium, to prescribe an ethics of the everyday and the perennial human need to uncover its submerged, neglected wisdom. Both scholarship and art practice, in their connected yet distinct paths to creating knowledge, share a desire to recover a mythopoetics of water that appears magical in an age of looming anthropogenic disaster and in the process grapple with the unresolved questions that such an act of resignification of “nature” brings forth.

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The editors of Water Histories of South Asia consciously locate the book in the emergent field of eco art history, whose contours the chapters they have assembled intend to sharpen. Eco art history is a sub-domain of eco-aesthetics, inspired by the philosophical currents of new or radical materialism, which argues for the agential quality of matter in a move to challenge the Enlightenment ontologies separating nature and culture. Taking its impulse from contemporary art, ecoaesthetics positions itself at the intersection of art production, politico-ecological theory and environmental activism. Driven by discourses of the Anthropocene, it promises new and radical ways of comprehending ourselves in relation to the more-than-human world. The call issued by the visual theorist T. J. Demos to “decolonize nature”2 entails transcending human exceptionalism and viewing nature no longer as a source of endless bounty to be exploited, rather as a conjoined actor and producer of a shared world. Studies positioned in the scholarly domain of eco art history address the aesthetic strategies and the creative responses in artistic practice that ensue from such a perspective. How might “critical art” and the scholarly domain built around it contribute to fostering an alternative imagination of ecology that considers nonhuman agency? The project of subjecting existing art historical methods and framing units to non-anthropocentric realignments challenges a discipline premised on the modernist ideal of artistic autonomy, one that valorises the agency of the patron or of the individual artist as the pinnacle of creativity. Such an undertaking is caught in a methodological paradox: given that artistic production is intrinsically anthropocentric, our access to the natural world, the domain of the nonhuman, takes place through a humanly configured medium and is governed by its protocols and conventions. The contributors to this volume respond to this challenge by seeking to enter this medium in ways that would enable questioning the grain of the discipline’s explicit programme and undermining its modernist teleologies. The chapters all focus on sites in South Asia, a regional anchor that accounts for an eschewal of issues centring on Bruno Latour’s eco-philosophy questioning a concept of the “natural” premised on Cartesian dualism.3 Using water as a lens, they instead direct attention towards questions of justice, rights and political-cum-historical responsibility. By placing water at the unstable intersection of materiality and aesthetics, the chapters make it possible for environmentally animated artistic practice to relinquish an autonomous and exceptionalist positioning, and widen its parameters to encompass a broader notion of visual culture, together with forms of participation, phenomenology of sites and approaches culled from alternate archives and vernacular memories. A further methodological challenge that the authors of Water Histories of South Asia grapple with is the matter of juggling time scales. The unmeasurable time of the Anthropocene can no longer be reconciled with the human-scale time; its planetarity is inappropriate for the study of artistic articulations. The editors of this collection posit the deep moving geographical time of Braudel’s histoire immobile as a backdrop against which human time that structures the dynamics of empires, modernisation and mobility of people, commodities and capital unfolds. The individual case studies engage with the connectivity and relationality of the geological, vegetal and human in conjunction with other time scales – the social, historical, mythological, theological, political and, finally, microscales of the everyday.

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The age of the Anthropocene is both a place of ecological foreboding and a site of memory nurtured by imaginaries of suppressed cosmologies. It can be represented only by evoking the now effaced pre-capitalist past that preceded it. In artistic memory, this past becomes an archive and a resource. Idyllic and pastoral waterscapes, now ravaged by modernity and uncontrolled urbanisation, come to stand for the destruction of locality, the loss of familiar cultural referents. How do we assess and recuperate this past, its narratives, its innumerable negotiations of the volatile divide between the human and nonhuman domains, while taking care to avoid the trap of a romantic, transcendentalist primordialism? An important contribution of this volume is its privileging of a longue durée that allows for a historical unravelling of systemic dimensions of pre-and early modern formations and their modalities of living with the instability, vulnerability, unpredictability of the biosphere. The chapters give us access to ontologies that preceded or bypassed those of the European Enlightenment, to their strategies of (re-)signifying and sacralising nature and place, of creating an ethics of the everyday – aspects that were all imbricated in issues of power, access to resources, conquest, migration in the labour of transforming barren land into habitable place and quotidian experiences of feudal/colonial/postcolonial servitude, compliance, sociability, solidarity and resistance. Water Histories of South Asia provides many impulses to rethink the pedagogy of a discipline that has remained riveted for too long on the persona of the artist/patron as the sole source of agency and intentionality. Through the lens of water – as material and liquescence – it urges us to pay attention to contingency and instability as factors that make the essentially anthropocentric act of creating – images, buildings, narratives – an act of co-production. Monica Juneja

Notes 1 Sheba Chhachhi, ‘A River of Memories’, ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 77, November 2011, http://artasiapacific. com/Magazine/77/ARiverOfMemoriesShebaChhachhi, accessed on 8 August 2018. 2 T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. 3 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Acknowledgments

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his volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, where the editors convened a conference titled Spaces of Water: New Paradigms in Ecocritical Enquiry in July 2014. We are greatly indebted to the community at Nehru Memorial, especially Indira Vancheswer and Nisar Kizhakkayil for their help in organising the conference. Our heartfelt thanks to the participants in the conference: Catherine B. Asher, Hannah Baader, Amita Baviskar, Atul Bhalla, Dipti Khera, Rila Mukherjee, Vasudha Pande, Suhas Paranjape, Madhav Raman, Gopa Samanta, Tamara I. Sears, Kavita Singh, James L. Wescoat Jr. and Tripta Wahi. Many of the participants in the Nehru Memorial conference contributed to this volume. Natasha Eaton, Malay Ganguli, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Atreyee Gupta, Padma D. Maitland and Partha Mitter responded to our invitation to contribute essays with enthusiasm. Our sincerest gratitude. Over the two days of the Nehru Memorial conference, conversations continued over magnificent dinners hosted by Anagram Architects and Parul Dave-Mukherji. We are grateful to Madhav Raman of Anagram Architects and Dave-Mukherji for warmly opening their homes to us. For his generous help in organising the conference and for opening the conversation, we express our deepest gratitude to Mahesh Rangarajan, former director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. We would also like to thank faculty at the School of Design, Ambedkar University Delhi, especially Jatin Bhatt, Jogi Panghaal, Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan and Abeer Gupta for their unstinting support. Monica Juneja, editor of the Routledge Visual and Media Histories Series, offered substantive encouragement and helped shape the contours of the book. Our sincere thanks also to Shoma Choudhury and Rimina Mohapatra at Routledge India for seeing the project to completion. Both the conference at the Nehru Memorial and the volume were conceived by the editors during fellowships at the Kunstgeschichte und ästhetische Praktiken programme of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. We would like to thank the programme directors Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf for their intellectual camaraderie. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank our colleagues and students at the University of California, Berkeley and Ambedkar University, and our families, friends and loved ones for sustenance, reassurance and infinite patience as we slowly but surely moved towards the completion of this book. We are in your debt.

1 Introduction The materiality of liquescence Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati

The 18th-century textile reproduced in this book belongs, as it were, to an art history of movement, mercantilism and global commodity cultures produced and sustained by the flow of objects across vast bodies of water (Plate 1.1). Presently housed in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the intricately painted and dyed palampore would have been crafted between 1725 and 1750 in the Coromandel coast of south-eastern India to fulfil an escalating European demand for cotton.1 The textile, however, was fundamentally transformed by water stains accrued over time. The exact words used in the museum’s catalogue entry is “water damage”.2 Following its corporeal and chemical logic of flow, permeation and immersion, water, in other words, has left its obdurate trace on a textile that is all too often valued as a paradigmatic artefact of early modern maritime trade. Certainly, the museum is not wrong to record the fabric’s structural transformation through material contact with water as “damage”. Indeed, most often, we recognise such traces as flaws that somehow detract from or reduce an object’s intrinsic value. Yet, such traces, one could contend, also fall within the purview of art history. For even as maritime trade shaped the production of the textile in the 18th century, intractable interactions with a chemical compound of oxygen and hydrogen conditioned its subsequent material transformation. Can objects such as these then allow us to comprehend aesthetic systems and water systems as coterminous and intersectional? As a discipline, art history, of course, takes objects, structures and artistic representations produced by the human species as its principal archive and locus of analysis. Consequently, artists, their patrons and their audiences emerge as the primary agents in this history. But, might a renewed alertness to the natural environment, water accretions in this particular instance, realign the methods and methodologies of art history? What do we stand to gain from this realignment? These questions are neither polemical nor fortuitous. Water, after all, has increasingly become a locus of political action in its own right. By 2008, water was already a global commodity with an emerging class of exchange-traded funds and water utilities stocks.3 As the book was being conceptualised by the editors, over 100,000 low-income residents of Flint, Michigan, were exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water due to deficient water treatment. By December 2015, Flint had declared a state of emergency. In the same year, farmers in Madhya Pradesh effected by the submerging of land due to an increase in the height of the Omkareshwar Dam launched a Jal

Plate 1.1 Palampore from the Coromandel coast, India, ca. 1725–50. Painted and dyed cotton

chintz, 329 × 224.8 cm. Source: Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Acc. No. IS.33–1950

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Satyagraha (non-violent resistance relating to water) by standing in waist-deep water for over a month.4 As “water wars”, to use the ecologist Vandana Shiva’s words, erupted in India and the United States, among other locations, the United Nations declared that the world might only have 40% of its required water by 2030.5 Environmental think tanks, non-profit organisations, activists and scientists have already begun to address the “water wars” that continue to rage in dispersed parts of the world.6 As we confront cataclysmic climate change and large-scale environmental degradation, artists too have engaged with the political ecologies of water. In the recent past, art projects such as 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (12–21 December 2008), for instance, have sought to mediate in New Delhi’s embattled ecological present through public installations spread across the city.7 Rather than maintaining distinctions between the political, the environmental and the artistic, such interventions have offered ways of imagining the imbrications among the ecologies of the natural environment, human subjectivity and social relationships. What has come forth are new organisational systems that place water in an intrinsically interconnected field linked through an interweaving of the ecological and the aesthetic. By emphasising the materiality of liquescence, this volume aims to bring the emerging field of eco art history into the conversation.8 The book highlights the importance of water and its ecologies in the visual and spatial cultures of South Asia from the early modern period to the present. Put differently, the book addresses the centrality of material practices and aesthetic systems related to water in writing art and architectural histories of the subcontinent. While, at first glance, it might seem unfeasible, even incongruous, to link histories of the natural environment with histories of art and architecture, the book suggests that an eco art history becomes operative when phenomenological approaches can be reconciled with the material force of water. In turn, presenting water as a substance that is shaped by its contingent movement and ever-accruing integration into different experiences in different spaces and registers of the imagination can have significant implications on how we engage with the materiality of art and architecture. Within the arena of water histories, the thrust of scholarship thus far has been directed towards an engagement with water as a product and effect of environmental governance.9 But water also seeps into our cultural memory, historical consciousness and visual and material practices to fundamentally structure how we see, touch, feel, ingest and comprehend its form. Water, in short, is affected by the phenomenal world. Taking affect seriously, then, allows us to recognise the constitutive role played by performative cultures, spectatorial regimes and the materiality of objects and built spaces in shaping water histories. Taking affect seriously also allows us to return to the 18th-century Coromandel coast textile and (re)read it as fundamentally shaped by water. The palampore was indubitably an artefact of Indian Ocean trade, but one whose ensuing life was also materially shaped by water spilt on it. From the macrostructures of global trade spanning vast oceanic spaces to the microhistories of consumption, water, in all its messiness, leaks onto the textile, bringing together seemingly unconnected histories of production, circulation and use. Far exceeding its own physical confines, water, consequently, opens up diverse indexes of both the phenomenal and the noumenal in South Asia and beyond.

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Liquid worlds As a vital natural resource, water has always been intimately linked to political, cultural and aesthetic practices integral to sustaining life. We know that water connects oceanic littorals. But what forms of innovative practices did these connections engender inland, at a considerable remove from the ocean? We know that lakes and river systems connect land and water. But in what ways did the mobility of riverine flows impact the optics of riparian architecture? How were lakes suffused with cultural and political metaphors? These are only some of the questions that the book takes up. What comes forth from the chapters is an attempt to rethink both physical and representational waterscapes by excavating their often-neglected aesthetic dimensions. This, in turn, highlights questions of seeing, regimes of visibility, contested environments, the ethics of ritual practices and themes of purity and pollution, bringing to the fore new methodological possibilities that conjoin the environmental with material, visual and architecture practices. Despite the diverse themes, contexts and temporal periods addressed in the book, it is an engagement with the fluidity and flux of liquid worlds that shapes the intellectual focus of the volume. Undoubtedly, there is a political urgency in writing such new histories. We only have to return to 17 May 2014. After a landslide electoral victory, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, stood by the river Ganga in the pilgrimage centre of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, to celebrate his success. “I will represent Varanasi in Lok Sabha & I look forward to this wonderful opportunity to serve Ganga Maa & work for Varanasi’s development”, Modi tweeted.10 Surrounded by the media and zealous supporters, the Hindu nationalist demagogue co-opted the river’s mythopoetic form as a goddess to shape a new iconography of right-wing conservative ecological discourse.11 This was a carefully orchestrated visual spectacle to emphasise the Bharatiya Janata Party’s purported custodianship of India’s ecology and natural resources, drained here of density and reduced solely to the epistemology of a Hindu sacred landscape. Moving beyond such conservative and nostalgic fetishising of the natural environment, Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence underscores how liquid worlds can never be contained within homogenous constructions of nature, culture or geoterrains. The multiple frameworks and conceptual paradigms adopted by the authors reflect the multiple disciplines that the book also connects. This, for the editors, was a strategic decision and is of some significance today, when ecological thinking increasingly demands that the idea of nature itself be extracted from any stable transcendent concretisation.12 In a time of anthropogenic climate change and massive human intrusions into our very conception of natural history, nature can no longer be visualised as a pure autonomous entity. Perhaps, it never was. The chapters in the book demonstrate that water both disperses and is made recognisable through an infinite array of perceptual, affective and material systems and registers. As Catherine B. Asher notes in her deliberations on water cultures in Muslim shrines in Chapter 8, until recently, water carriers in Delhi specialised in drawing water from particular wells in the city. Families would tell by taste from which well water was drawn and would only purchase their preferred liquid. It is necessary to be attentive to such gustatory distinctions. For they offer an understanding of water, and the natural environment more broadly, as variably construed through cultural, social and aesthetic

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systems. An alertness to the inconsistent epistemologies of water, then, deracinates any attempt to contain it within singular ideological frameworks, nationalist or otherwise. This volume is the first of its kind to foreground such strikingly inconsistent epistemologies of water. Previous efforts at historicising water systems, particularly from within the discipline of art and architecture history, have all too often given primacy to the essential elementality of water that ostensibly remains consistent in spite of its peregrination through diverse spatial, representational and conceptual environments over time. Rather than emphasising water as a transcendental and unchanging natural element, Water Histories of South Asia brings together case studies in which water is marked by its contingent movement through divergent imaginaries. At the same time, the transmediatic focus through case studies ranging from architecture, urban practices, painting, travel narratives, advertising and photography to geological imaginaries, oral histories and contemporary performance art further allows for a destabilising of the ontological solidity of water.

Tracing Liquescence In the recent past, the development of a distinct field of environmental humanities has led to a significant body of scholarship that focuses on the ecological footprint of social, cultural and political practices in South Asia.13 Much has also been written on water from disciplines such as history, sociology, environmental sciences, geography and political science. Scholars have investigated water infrastructure and access, governance and development, sustainability and hydro-engineering, public health and hygiene, among other themes.14 But, arguably, a certain hydrothinking was internal to the disciplinary formation of the art and architectural history of South Asia. To recover the contours of this thought, one could perhaps begin in a transversal mode with the writings of Charles Lyell, the foremost geologist of the mid-19th century. In his influential Principles of Geology, Lyell drew attention to the manner in which “Oriental Cosmogony”– that is, narratives of genesis that the geologist traced back to the Vedas (ca. 1500–300 BCE) – could be reconciled with actual evidence of prehistoric floods.15 As a geologist, Lyell’s conviction in the palaeontological evidence of flooding emboldened him to bring together narratives of the creation of the universe from the cosmic water with the material world of accretion and deposits. “The remains of marine animals imbedded in the solid strata are so abundant”, Lyell observed that they may be expected to force themselves on the attention of every people who have made some progress in refinement; and especially where one class of men are expressly set apart from the rest, like the ancient priesthoods of India and Egypt, for study and contemplation. [. . .] Those modern writers, who are disposed to disparage the former intellectual advancement and civilization of Eastern nations, may concede some foundation of observed facts for the curious theories now under consideration, without indulging in exaggerated opinions of the progress of science; especially as universal catastrophes of the world, and exterminations of organic beings, in the sense in which they were understood by the Brahmins, are untenable doctrines.16

Using William Jones’ 1794 translation of the Laws of Manu (Manusmṛti; ca. 200 BCE–ca. 100 CE) as a foundation for his deliberations, Lyell identified Indic myths of the “submersion of land beneath the waters of a universal ocean” as the Oriental Cosmogony.17 A geological and

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palaeontological understanding of catastrophes related to water, then, became the means to speculatively corroborate the historicity of a cosmogonic knowledge of the natural environment. If, in the 19th century, the primacy of palaeontological evidence of water’s peregrinations fomented conjectural forays into the historicity of an Oriental Cosmogony, an anti-colonial impulse governed intellectual departures in the early 20th century. Enter Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. After graduating from the University College, London, with a degree in geology, Coomaraswamy’s career began in the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon in 1903. By 1905, his interest in mineralogy had been supplanted by a discontent with the rapid loss of indigenous cultures under colonial rule.18 This discontent may have sparked an analogous interest in Indic cosmology and the place of water in it. About a decade later, Coomaraswamy, now an art savant, philosopher and a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, published Yakṣas: Essays on the Water Cosmology, a book that, in retrospect, becomes formative in the historiography of water symbolism in South Asian art and architecture.19 Writing by the Back Bay Fens in Boston, Coomaraswamy presented a hydrogeological ground for the emergence of religious architecture in Yakṣas, a text that explored the allegories, philosophies and mythologies surrounding water through ornamental motifs, iconographic conventions and religious treatises. What function did the Yakṣas serve within the terse terrains of the colonial world? Placing Coomaraswamy’s 1928 volume within a larger intellectual history of thinking about water and architecture might be fruitful. The colonial archive, of course, is replete with administrative accounts, reports and writings that deliberate on hydraulics and architecture.20 In stark contrast, Coomaraswamy traced the phrase “water cosmology”, as opposed to what ought to have been more appropriately referred to as water cosmogony, to Robert E. Hume’s 1921 The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.21 In particular, he drew attention to references to the genesis of life in water in Hume’s translation of the sacred treatises that had been compiled approximately between the 7th century BCE and the early centuries of the Common Era. More significantly, while delving into philosophical allusions to the pelagic origins of life, Coomaraswamy traced the concurrent emergence of this concept in the hydroagricultural communities of late Neolithic Egypt, the ancient Mediterranean and, of course, South Asia. Coomaraswamy’s proposition, however tenuous, had a markedly anti-colonial tenor. On the one hand, the author established a deep history of philosophical thinking in the colony by underscoring conceptualisations of water cosmology that persisted in Vedic and post-Vedic literature. On the other hand, a comparativist lens allowed Coomaraswamy to link South Asia to other ancient civilisations to emphasise shared worldly affinities that were in place, he argued, before the advent of the British Empire. Explorations of genesis myths related to water continued to animate the field of South Asian art history well into the mid-decades of the 20th century, drawing to the fore consanguinities between architectural and territorial imaginations. John Irwin, Keeper of the Indian Section, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for instance, delivered the Lowell Institute Lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1973, where he explored the origins of ca. 3rd-century-BCE monumental lithic pillars at Buddhist sites such as Sankisa, Rampurva, Kosam and Vaishali.22 Why, Irwin wondered, had “giant monoliths weighing up to 40,000 kilos” been “erected in heavily waterlogged subsoils” without the benefit of supportive placement stones beneath them? This

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line of enquiry led him to look beyond technical and processual systems. Irwin explored the necessity of the presence of water in the foundations of the pillars from the vantage of a cosmogony in which the universe was created through a separation of heaven and earth in an ocean with a lump of solid matter floating on it. The apparatus separating heaven and earth, in such a perspective, was a tree, pillar or mountain, Irwin observed. Irwin read the cosmogonic iconography of these pillars through conceptions of sovereignty and kingship. The king, Irwin thus observed, “acquires sovereign power by virtue of his identification with the axis mundi”.23 While architecture served as a fulcrum between sacred geographies of water and hydrogeologies of land for Ananda Coomaraswamy and John Irwin, the recent past has seen a range of scholarship that have attempted to reconcile the natural environment with built spaces, design and the circulation of objects through oceanic trade. Jutta Jain-Neubauer’s study on stepwells, Michael Willis and Julia Shaw’s analyses of water management at particular archaeological sites, Amita Sinha and D. Fairchild Ruggles’ examination of riparian architecture, Julia A. B. Hegewald’s research on the typologies of water architecture and Partha Mitter and Finbarr Barry Flood’s explorations of the material culture of oceanic trade are but few recent engagements with water and the art and architecture of South Asia.24 However, it is Mughal water gardens, reservoirs and canals that have received the most sustained attention over the last century. Beginning with Constance Mary Villiers-Stuart’s early 20th-century account to more recent scholarship by James L. Wescoat Jr., Elizabeth B. Moynihan, Catherine B. Asher, Ebba Koch and Perween Hasan, among others, much has been written on Mughal hydrocultures from art and architecture history.25 Water Histories of South Asia builds on this rich historiography. Indeed, a number of scholars cited here are contributors to the volume, enriching the book immeasurably in the process.

The book The liquescent materiality of water is the locus of enquiry in this book. This, in itself, precipitates a significant shift. On the one hand, the volume explores the manner in which water was, and continues to be, constituted through perceptual fields emerging from prevailing engineering, landscaping, representational and geological discourses. On the other hand, the volume explores how water itself is shaped in, and by, an expanded field of hydrological thinking. This expanded field, which we annotate as eco art history, overflows the boundaries of the natural ecosystem encompassing imaginative practices emerging from artistic, architectural and spatial formations. Water Histories of South Asia thus brings to the forefront the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of material culture in early modern, colonial, early post-colonial and contemporary South Asia. Our choice of an expanded temporal frame is deliberate. By leading the reader from the early modern to the contemporary, the volume seeks to make visible South Asian water systems as a palimpsest of technological improvisations and creative acts of imagining space. In the 16th century, emperors such as Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, had commissioned gardens, water pavilions and reservoirs to both conserve and manage water but also to embellish imperial land. Much later, the colonial British government began

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restoring and reusing Mughal waterworks to enable agriculture, facilitate riverine transport and supply drinking water to urban centres.26 In 1817, the British, for instance, repaired the Delhi Branch Canal constructed by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1626. Under British governance, the canal now provided water to the Mughal capital in Delhi while also irrigating agricultural land around the city.27 After India’s independence in 1947, the post-colonial state took it upon itself to further develop and maintain the colonial irrigation network built by the British on an earlier Mughal grid. Thus, by privileging a longue durée approach that extends from the 16th century to contemporary times, the book follows Fernand Braudel’s magisterial La Méditerranée to make a case for excavating long-term arrangements as crucial to comprehending eco art histories of water in South Asia.28 Accordingly, we begin Part I with a large lake that the first Mughal emperor Babur saw in January 1528 during his campaign to take control of the Chanderi fortress at the eastern edge of the Malwa plateau. Babur’s interest in water systems has, by now, received significant scholarly attention. The chaharbagh or fourfold garden, a Timurid garden typology with symmetrically divided enclosures, elevated paths and water channels, was introduced in South Asia by Babur. Scholars have suggested that Mughal gardens in South Asia were both metaphors of paradisiacal imaginaries and a symbolic attempt by the emperor to make visible his control over nature.29 Describing his renovations to watercourses in an imperial garden in Istalif near Kabul, Babur thus noted, “A one-mill stream flows constantly from the middle of the garden. [. . .] The stream used to run higgledy-piggledly until I ordered it to be straightened. Now it is a beautiful place”.30 The garden, with its streams, was thus a visual manifestation of Babur’s power and authority mapped out, quite literally, onto the very land controlled by the emperor. In this book, Tamara I. Sears argues for the role of seeing water in writing histories of architecture and the built environment using survey analysis, Geographic Information Systems technology and a careful reading of texts such as the Baburnama, Babur’s personal memoirs. Sears takes up the relationship between architectural production and water landscapes in central India to highlight intersections among architecture and travel narratives. The question of seeing water is further developed by Sugata Ray in his chapter on 17th-century riverine architecture in Braj, the primary pilgrimage site in north India where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his youth. Ray argues that pilgrims and devotees in Braj mobilised architecture to delineate the moral horizon of beholding sacred water in an era of cataclysmic global droughts. Reading Hindu architecture practices in relation to Mughal visualities allows Ray to problematise contemporary conservative fetishising of a pristine Hinduism that can be accessed, as it is often argued, through its material culture. The next chapter in Part I further delineates practices of looking, here associated with pleasure, through an analysis of lakes and lake-palaces in 18th-century Udaipur in western India. Dipti Khera suggests that Udaipur’s painters, poets, courtly patrons and audiences construed the celebrated Jagniwas lake-palace as a heterotopia that operationalised imaginaries of idealised worlds of pleasure and power. Looking at lakes and looking from lake-palaces, thus, provides Khera with a spatial lens to demarcate pleasure as an aesthetic topoi and communal political practice in mid-18th-century South Asia. In effect, all three chapters develop a critical lens to bring together questions of vision, power and spatial practices in the early modern period. In Part II, we move to the colonial period, ca. 1750–1950. The three chapters in this section broadly coalesce around questions of water’s surface and depth. Natasha Eaton’s chapter on pearl

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fisheries in the Gulf of Manaar takes the British subjugation of the region in 1796 as a point of departure to reflect on the materiality of pearls, photographs and chunam or building material prepared with shell lime, egg white, sugar and coconut shells. Photos of the ocean by the Sri Lanka–based photographer Lionel Wendt, together with a history of pearl fishing, provides Eaton with an archive to reflect on the power of liquidity and the function of surfaces – the surface of the sea, the surface of photographs and the glimmering surface of pearls – in creating a liquescent modernity. While Eaton defines modernity as surface, Venugopal Maddipati takes us to the depths of the earth. Late 19th-century debates on a large freshwater lake dating to the Eocene period provides Maddipati with a frame to analyse the nature of colonial geology. His chapter examines the ways in which geological evidence of the existence of Eocenic freshwater deposits in the hill known as Girar produced a transregional geological history. At the same time, Maddipati complicates easy histories of colonial scientificism by highlighting local narratives that situated geological formations within a sacred realm. Maddipati’s chapter, then, takes up deep time as it was imagined in colonial South Asia by both state and non-state actors to bring out diverging notions of prehistoric water. How do streams become sewers? Arguing for a broader socio-hydrologic approach to water management, James L. Wescoat Jr. provides a comparative study of water systems in India and the United States. Beginning with the etymology of the word nallah, he shows how streams such as the Barapullah Nallah in New Delhi became sewers over time. Following a different strand, Wescoat then brings in the Muddy River Back Bay Fens restoration project in Boston to compare current efforts to redesign both of these systems at the watershed, riparian corridor and site scales. In the process, Wescoat’s chapter offers a new methodology in comparative hydrohistories. Part III focuses on the materiality of infrastructure in the post-colonial period. The section begins with Catherine B. Asher’s chapter on shrines associated with water and its curative powers. Asher explores popular religious sentiments about water through studying the shrines of Shah al-Hamid Nagori in south India and Nizam al-Din Auliya in New Delhi. She places special emphasis on recent restorations undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture to highlight questions of access to water, community formation and the role of religious spaces in an urban metropolis. Turning to the centrality of vision in the making of a post-colonial waterscape, Atreyee Gupta’s chapter engages with the Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s interventions in the aestheticisation of the Bhakra hydro-engineering project, Sunil Janah’s photographs of infrastructure and the Indian atomic scientist Meghnad Saha’s involvement with the Damodar Valley Corporation. Bringing together a disparate cast of characters, Gupta shows how, in each case, the attempt was to shape “development’s ocular modality”. The chapter, then, offers a new schematic to rethink the place and space of hydro-infrastructure in a post-colonial world. Gopa Samanta and Malay Ganguli take us to post-2000s Chandernagore in the state of West Bengal in eastern India. Through a close anthropology of water governance in the city, the authors provide a microstudy of different modalities of managing water. Samanta and Ganguli analyse how water policies and practices in non-metropolitan contexts depend on a number of social, cultural and political factors. Notably, they place equal emphasis on geographic environments and geological formations to explore solutions to Chandernagore’s current water crisis. Bishnupriya Ghosh’s chapter, too, takes up current water crises. Ghosh, however, engages the logic of quantity/drought (popular struggles

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against Coca-Cola), quality/pollution (pollution from tanneries) and directionality/flood (the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s mobilisation against dams on the Narmada River) to examine three iconic instances of the struggle for safe and sufficient water. In each instance, Ghosh reads photographs that highlight how popular struggles are contested at the level of the visual. For Ghosh, then, “water democracies”, as it is produced through mediatic interjections, can generate new systems of political mobilisations under the sign of an environmental imaginary. This environmental imaginary is further developed in the last part of the book. Highlighting experimental ecological practices today, Part IV includes interventions by contemporary artists and architects, and an interview with a water priest. Padma D. Maitland’s conversation with Pandit Premchand Sharma, general secretary of the Yamuna Ghat Panda Association and a hereditary water priest by profession, attempts to comprehend the quotidian nature of everyday life by water. Sharma underscores the role of the routine and the ordinary in hydrocultures that corresponds with the ebb and flow of the river. Yet, 78-year-old Sharma barely ekes out a living by a river that, as he also acknowledges, has drastically changed physically, symbolically and socially within his lifetime. Artist-architect Asim Waqif turns to traditional rainwater harvesting systems in western India that he had examined during a recent project for the Global Rainwater Harvesting Collective. The project led Waqif to develop a sustainable approach to urban water management based on indigenous technologies that are still in place in non-metropolitan contexts. Drawing on this research, his chapter offers some preliminary observations on revitalising local water management systems. We return to the Yamuna in New Delhi with the last mediation. Atul Bhalla’s photo-performance alongside the river Yamuna provides the core for his experimental chapter on water and embodiment. The project reproduced in this book had emerged from a five-day walk by Bhalla along the Yamuna that engaged natural and constructed environments in New Delhi. As neoliberal economic pressure continues to devastate the Yamuna and its catchment area in India’s capital city, Pandit Premchand Sharma’s testament bears witness to the threat to everyday life that the death of a river can cause. This threat undoubtedly revolves around access to safe water. But the threat is also to the liquescent materiality of water and the sociabilities it engenders. As Sharma wistfully notes, “These days, people drink distilled water. Our water is in bottles. Before, in different places people would build piaos [places for the public dispensation of water] as a religious act. Now it is a business and people sell water”. In the end, Partha Mitter offers some afterthoughts by way of returning to our current environmental crisis. As the Sixth Extinction or the Anthropocene Extinction, now underway, radically alters how we conceive our-both human and nonhumanplace on the planet, the question of water takes on a renewed urgency, Mitter notes. Mni/water, as the Lakota expression goes, is wiconi/life.31

Notes 1 For a recent analysis of early modern textile trade, see Amelia Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. 2 The Victoria and Albert Museum’s catalogue states, “The flowers on this chintz hanging or bed-cover are extremely finely drawn, with very delicate shading on the petals of the carnations, for example. The

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guard border is of a type more often seen on chintzes for the Southeast Asian market, particularly Thailand, but the rest of the design is typical of western-market chintz of the period. One border has been cut off, and the whole piece has unfortunately suffered badly from water damage”. http://collections.vam. ac.uk/item/O141128/palampore-unknown/, accessed on 10 July 2017. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘Water Crisis to Be Biggest World Risk’, The Telegraph, 5 June 2008, www. telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/utilities/2791116/Water-crisis-to-be-biggest-world-risk.html, accessed on 23 September 2017. See Chapter 11 for a discussion on the protests surrounding the Omkareshwar Dam. United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, The United Nations World Water Development Report 2015: Water for a Sustainable World, Paris: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2015, p. 11. Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, London: Pluto Press, 2002. For 48°C Public.Art.Ecology, see Christiane Brosius, ‘Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology and Public Space in New Delhi’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 1, 2015, pp. 75–125. Recent scholarship from the emerging field of eco art history include James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (eds.), A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009; T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016; Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 213–32. From South Asian art and architecture history, see Venugopal Maddipati, ‘Water in the Expanded Field: Art, Thought and Immersion in the Yamuna River: 2005–2011’, in Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown (eds.), Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 60–77 and Sugata Ray, ‘Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures, and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, ca. 1560–70’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, March 2017, pp. 1–23. See, for instance, David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003 and Anne M. Rademacher, Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Narendra Modi (narendramodi), “I Will Represent Varanasi in Lok Sabha & I Look Forward to This Wonderful Opportunity to Serve Ganga Maa & Work for Varanasi’s Development”, 29 May 2014, 4:28 AM. Tweet. For the Bharatiya Janata Party’s environmental politics, see Emma Mawdsley, ‘Hindu Nationalism, NeoTraditionalism and Environmental Discourses in India’, Geoforum, vol. 37, no. 3, 2006, pp. 380–90. See, for instance, Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. The foundational works that led to the creation of the field of an environmental humanities of South Asia in the 1990s include Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (eds.), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (eds.), Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, Stanford: Stanford University Press,

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15 16 17 18

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1999, among others. For a review of this now vast literature, see Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review Essay’, Environment and History, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, pp. 129–44 and Rohan D’Souza, ‘Nature, Conservation and Environmental History: A Review of Some Recent Environmental Writings on South Asia’, Conservation and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2003, pp. 117–32. Recent scholarship includes Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (1803–1946), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; Amita Baviskar (ed.), Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007; Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014; and David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, among others. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Or, the Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology, London: John Murray, 1853 [9th Edition], pp. 4–8. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 5. In 1905, Coomaraswamy condemned the adoption of European clothes in early 20th-century Sri Lanka as indicative of the “destruction of national character” under colonial rule. A 7-page essay published by the aesthete, appropriately titled Borrowed Plumes, led to the formation of the Ceylon Social Reform Society, an organisation devoted to the preservation and revival of traditional arts and crafts in the very next year. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Borrowed Plumes, Kandy: Industrial School, 1905. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Yakṣas: Essays on the Water Cosmology, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1928. See Chapter 7 in this volume for a discussion of the text. For instance, the noted engineer William Willcocks, best known as the chief designer of the Old Aswan Dam, spent time in Bengal in the 1920s studying the pre-colonial irrigation system in the region. The report was published in 1930. William Willcocks, Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and Its Applications to Modern Problems, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1930. See Rohan D’Souza, ‘Water in British India: The Making of “Colonial Hydrology”’, History Compass, vol. 4, no. 4, 2006, pp. 621–8 for a history of imperial water governance. Robert E. Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Irwin’s lectures were subsequently published as a series of essays in four successive issues of the Burlington Magazine. John Irwin, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 115, no. 4, November 1973, pp. 706–20; Irwin, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence II: Structure’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 116, no. 4, December 1974, pp. 712–27; Irwin, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence III: Capitals’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 117, no. 4, October 1975, pp. 631–43; and Irwin, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence IV: Symbolism’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 118, no. 4, November 1976, pp. 734–53. Irwin, ‘IV: Symbolism’, p. 749. Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat in Art-Historical Perspective, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1981; Michael Willis, The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Julia Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century B.C. to Fifth Century A.D., London: The British Association for South Asian Studies, 2007; Amita Sinha and D. Fairchild Ruggles, ‘The Yamuna Riverfront, India: A Comparative Study of Islamic and Hindu Traditions in Cultural Landscapes’, Landscape Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 141–52; Julia A. B. Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002; Partha Mitter, ‘The Early British Port Cities of India: Their Planning and Architecture Circa 1640–1757’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 45, no. 2, June 1986, pp. 95–114; Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

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25 Constance M. Villiers-Stuart, Gardens of the Great Mughals, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913; James L. Wescoat, Jr., ‘Early Water Systems in Mughal India’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 2, 1985, pp. 51–7; Elizabeth B. Moynihan, ‘The Lotus Garden Palace of Zahir Al-din Muhammad Babur’, Muqarnas, vol. 5, 1988, pp. 135–52; Catherine B. Asher, ‘Babur and Timurid Char Bagh: Use and Meaning’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 1–2, 1991, pp. 46–55; Ebba Koch, ‘Mughal Palace Gardens from Babur to Shah Jahan (1526–1648)’, Muqarnas, vol. 14, 1997, pp. 143–65; Perween Hasan, ‘Paradise Flooded: Water and Architecture in Bangladesh’, in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 292–313. 26 For a history of colonial appropriations of pre-existing Mughal water systems, see George W. Macgeorge, Ways and Works in India, Being an Account of the Public Works in That Country from the Earliest Times Up to the Present Day, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1894. 27 Ibid., p. 136. 28 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. 29 See, for instance, essays in James L. Wescoat Jr. and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (eds.), Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, and Prospects, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996. 30 Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, Baburnāma, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston as The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002, p. 162. 31 During the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the term mni wiconi (water is life) was mobilised by Water Protectors in North Dakota to enunciate a perception of vital water beyond its characterisation as solely a natural resource.

References Arnold, David and Ramachandra Guha (eds.), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Asher, Catherine B., ‘Babur and Timurid Char Bagh: Use and Meaning’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 1–2, 1991, pp. 46–55. Babur, Zahir al-Din Muhammad, Baburnāma, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston as The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002. Baviskar, Amita, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. ——— (ed.), Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. Braddock, Alan C. and Christoph Irmscher (eds.), A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. Braudel, Fernand, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. Brosius, Christiane, ‘Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology and Public Space in New Delhi’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 1, 2015, pp. 75–125. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Borrowed Plumes, Kandy: Industrial School, 1905. ———, Yakṣas: Essays on the Water Cosmology, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1928. D’Souza, Rohan, ‘Nature, Conservation and Environmental History: A Review of Some Recent Environmental Writings on South Asia’, Conservation and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2003, pp. 117–32.

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———, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (1803–1946), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———, ‘Water in British India: The Making of “Colonial Hydrology”’, History Compass, vol. 4, no. 4, 2006, pp. 621–8. Demos, T. J., Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose, ‘Water Crisis to Be Biggest World Risk’, The Telegraph, 5 June 2008, www. telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/utilities/2791116/Water-crisis-to-be-biggest-world-risk.html, accessed on 23 September 2017. Flood, Finbarr Barry, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Gadgil, Madhav and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Gandy, Matthew, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Gilmartin, David, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Grove, Richard H., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan (eds.), Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Guha, Ramachandra, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Hasan, Perween, ‘Paradise Flooded: Water and Architecture in Bangladesh’, in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 292–313. Hegewald, Julia A. B., Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002. Hume, Robert E., The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Irwin, John, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 115, no. 4, November 1973, pp. 706–20. ———, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence II: Structure’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 116, no. 4, December 1974, pp. 712–27. ———, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence III: Capitals’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 117, no. 4, October 1975, pp. 631–43. ———, ‘“Aśokan” Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence IV: Symbolism’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 118, no. 4, November 1976, pp. 734–53. Jain-Neubauer, Jutta, The Stepwells of Gujarat in Art-Historical Perspective, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1981. Koch, Ebba, ‘Mughal Palace Gardens from Babur to Shah Jahan (1526–1648)’, Muqarnas, vol. 14, 1997, pp. 143–65. Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology: Or, the Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology, 9th ed., London: John Murray, 1853. Macgeorge, George W., Ways and Works in India, Being an Account of the Public Works in That Country from the Earliest Times up to the Present Day, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1894. Maddipati, Venugopal, ‘Water in the Expanded Field: Art, Thought and Immersion in the Yamuna River: 2005–2011’, in Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown (eds.), Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 60–77.

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Mawdsley, Emma, ‘Hindu Nationalism, Neo-Traditionalism and Environmental Discourses in India’, Geoforum, vol. 37, no. 3, 2006, pp. 380–90. Mitter, Partha, ‘The Early British Port Cities of India: Their Planning and Architecture Circa 1640–1757’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 45, no. 2, June 1986, pp. 95–114. Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Mosse, David, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 213–32. Moynihan, Elizabeth B., ‘The Lotus Garden Palace of Zahir Al-din Muhammad Babur’, Muqarnas, vol. 5, 1988, pp. 135–52. Nisbet, James, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Peck, Amelia (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. Rademacher, Anne M., Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Rangarajan, Mahesh, ‘Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review Essay’, Environment and History, vol. 2, no. 2., 1996, pp. 129–44. Ray, Sugata, ‘Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures, and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, ca. 1560–70’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, March 2017, pp. 1–23. Shaw, Julia, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century B.C. to Fifth Century A.D., London: The British Association for South Asian Studies, 2007. Shiva, Vandana, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, London: Pluto Press, 2002. Sinha, Amita and D. Fairchild Ruggles, ‘The Yamuna Riverfront, India: A Comparative Study of Islamic And Hindu Traditions in Cultural Landscapes’, Landscape Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 141–52. Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, The United Nations World Water Development Report 2015: Water for a Sustainable World, Paris: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2015. Villiers-Stuart, Constance M., Gardens of the Great Mughals, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913. Wescoat, Jr., James L., ‘Early Water Systems in Mughal India’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 2, 1985, pp. 51–7. ——— and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (eds.), Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, and Prospects, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996. Willcocks, William, Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and Its Applications to Modern Problems, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1930. Willis, Michael, The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Website accessed http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O141128/palampore-unknown/, accessed on 10 July 2017.

Part I

Vision and space, ca. 1500–1750

2 The shape of Babur’s lake Architecture and water in the central Indian frontier Tamara I. Sears

O

n the eve of Monday, 9 December 1527, the Mughal emperor Babur (1483–1530) set off on a campaign through central India to reclaim the hilltop fortress at Chanderi. Located on the eastern edge of the Malwa plateau in central India, Chanderi had long stood as a fortified centre overseeing frontier territories between larger states and geographic regions (Plate 2.1). Established first in the 10th century by Hindu rajas claiming descent from the imperial Gurjara Pratiharas, Chanderi had been conquered and claimed many times in subsequent centuries.1 Babur’s own effort was spurred by the capture of the fortress by forces loyal to his Rajput rival, the Maharana Sangram Singh. His successful siege later became a popular subject for illustration in Mughal-era productions of the Baburnama, or the emperor’s memoirs, which often depict not only the battle but also details of Chanderi’s topography, highlighting a high citadel, situated within a verdant landscape, surrounded by streams and forested hills.2 The significance of hills and water in the emperor’s written account cannot be overstated. While Chanderi’s hilly landscape bolstered the defences of the fortress, it was the need to transport water from the streams below that led to its defeat at the hands of Babur’s army. The assault itself was launched at the site of a conduit which had been installed in order to bring water into the fort. Because the rampart housing the conduit was lower than the hill, it remained vulnerable to attack. In Babur’s words, it was “the one place where an assault can be made”.3 At the same time, the water-laden landscape itself served less as Chanderi’s downfall than as its main strength. In his description, Babur also extolled its “many flowing streams” and immense reservoirs, and a lake culled from the Betwa River that was “renown throughout Hindustan for its good, sweet water”.4 It was these features that made Chanderi, in Babur’s estimation, a truly “superb place”.5 Babur’s emphasis on reservoirs, lakes and streams in his evocation of Chanderi’s landscape fits well within the broader framework of the Baburnama. As a text that largely follows Babur’s travels from Fergana and Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan to the heartland of the Indian subcontinent, it is deeply invested in the geography of routes and the mechanics of travel. While the Baburnama is peppered with recounting of battles, much of the narrative follows Babur’s army from one camp site to another as he progressed in his efforts to consolidate new bases of power. Along the way, he carefully observed a wide range of waterworks, both natural and manmade, including rivers, streams and lakes, as well as stepwells, reservoirs and dams. Although access to water was essential for the development of settlements, for town planning and for the

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Plate 2.1 View of the landscape around Chanderi. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

maintenance of fortresses, it also played a critical role in facilitating long-distance travel. Simply put, armies and caravans travelling with pack animals and horses needed daily access to places with adequate water to drink. In this chapter, I take Babur’s military campaign from Agra to Chanderi as a point of departure for looking at how water landscapes shaped, and were shaped by, the production of architectural space in pre-colonial central India. My interest is less in the final battle at Chanderi than in the hydrology of the terrain that he passed along the way. Within the Baburnama, this segment of Babur’s journey reveals ways of thinking about movement that closely followed rivers, lakes and streams, and, more generally put, the distribution of waters. By juxtaposing Babur’s textual description with the actual physical terrain that he traversed, I examine how water-laden landscapes functioned on practical and conceptual levels, both as real geographies and as geographical imaginaires. My chapter is organised in the following manner. First, I look at the region of central India through which Babur travelled in order to lay out the ways in which rivers were linked to the distribution of key places and the determination of routes of travel. Second, I focus on the significance of human intervention by turning to Babur’s particular investment in artificial lakes and dams. I focus particularly on Babur’s description of a place called Kachwaha, synonymous today with the village of Kadwaha, which he thought particularly notable for a large artificial lake produced by means of a nearby dam. Finally, I conclude by thinking about how looking through

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the lens of water can enable fruitful reframings of architectural spaces, expand methods for historicising natural geography and make it possible to re-evaluate the relationships between literary sources, built environments, and real landscapes.

River routes and the larger region Babur’s journey from Agra to Chanderi can be fruitfully divided into two geographic segments, each of which followed the flow of a distinct set of waters. The first, which extended chronologically from 9 December 1527 to 1 January 1528, approximately followed the contours of the Yamuna River (Plate 2.2). The second, which continued through the rest of January, marked a departure from the Yamuna and a move southwards into the heart of central India, through a region largely defined by three of the Yamuna’s major offshoots: the Betwa to the east, the Chambal to the west and the Sind in the centre. These, in turn, gave rise to many smaller tributaries that wove through the terrain, integrating it through an extended network of interlocking streams. In traversing this region, Babur accordingly moved variously overland and by boat in an alternating fashion, following the branching paths of these waterways and directing his army to convenient fords and crossing points. The specifics of his journey can be summarised as follows. Babur set off on his campaign against Chanderi from his base in Agra, first marching towards Jalisar (present-day Jalesar), where he spent two days preparing his army and equipment.6 Then he turned southwards to march to Anwar, not far from the banks of the Yamuna River. From Anwar, he travelled by boat until reaching Chandwar. There he disembarked and continued eastwards, marching overland to Kanar ford, which Babur crossed on Thursday, 26 December (2 Rabi‘ II). He then pleasurably passed the next four or five days floating in boats and indulging in ma‘jun (opium), while the rest of his soldiers methodically made their way across the ford. He also took the opportunity to make a trip upstream to visit the confluence of the Chambal and Yamuna rivers. He then proceeded again by boat, presumably accompanying his soldiers who remained on the march, until reaching Kalpi, where he stopped to accept the hospitality of the amir, his long-standing ally Alam Khan.7 From Kalpi, Babur’s path turned away from the Yamuna and towards the Betwa and Sind. Departing on Monday, 6 January, Babur marched southwards towards Iraj (present-day Erach), situated on the banks of the Betwa River, which he reached by the Friday of that week. He then turned west and continued onwards without pause to Bhander, which was located not on the Betwa, but on the Pahuj nadi, a smaller tributary of the river Sind. On Monday, January 6, Babur sent 6,000–7,000 troops ahead from Bhandar to form an advance guard to Chanderi while he continued onward more slowly with the heavy artillery and supply carts, likely following the path of the river diagonally to the southwest. On 17 January, ten days later, he stopped outside a place called Kachwaha (present-day Kadwaha), where he stayed for two days to give overseers and shovellers time to clear the overgrown jungle and to repair the roads beyond to ensure that they were passable. From Kachwaha, he moved in a south-easterly direction until he reached the ford at Burhanpur, which allowed for passage across the Or Nadi, a small river that flowed into the Betwa to the east. And, finally, he advanced forward to the south, overshooting Chanderi by a short

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Plate 2.2 Map of routes taken through central India by Ibn

Battuta and Babur. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears Note: Some of the maps produced here are historical in nature and are included here for representative purposes. The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations and other information shown do not necessarily imply any judgement concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such information. For current boundaries, readers may refer to the Survey of India maps.

distance in order to set up camp at a convenient watering spot, atop a dam and next to a sizeable pond. It was from there that he gave the orders for his troops to fall into position; for the soldiers to ready the shields, ladders and other implements of siege; and for his shovellers to prepare the batteries for firing the mortars.8 Babur was neither the first nor last ruler to head southwards in an effort to conquer Chanderi, which had long functioned as a major stronghold in the central Indian frontier. The area around

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it initially emerged as a crucial political centre in the 10th and 11th centuries, with the rise of a ruling family claiming descent from the Gurjara Pratiharas.9 Likely local in origin, this family established a strong and growing presence just to the north of the later fortress, at a site called Budhi Chanderi, situated along the Or Nadi, not far from Babur’s crossing point at Burhanpur. With the establishment of the Delhi sultans, Chanderi became a coveted target, first in the 1250s under Balban and later in the 1290s under Ala al-din Khalji. Both launched campaigns into central India to conquer another crucial fortress at Narwar before continuing on to Chanderi.10 Under the Tughluqs, Chanderi continued to serve as a point of departure for campaigns further south into the Deccan, but in the 15th century, it again became a site of contestation between the sultans of Malwa and the Lodi rulers in Delhi.11 The significance of both Chanderis – old and new – was linked to their strategic location at the crossroads of several major established regions, including Bundelkhand to the east, Malava to the west and Darsanadesa to the south. On a local level, the topography of the general area was well suited for mounting a defence against military aggression. The winding path of nearby tributaries stemming from the Betwa River curved around the two sites, in effect creating a defensible pocket that acted like a moat that could slow the advance of enemy forces. Both the topography and the geography of the area around Chanderi contributed significantly to the key role it came to play in the integration of long-distance routes of conquest and travel which continued to connect north India with the Deccan well through the eras of Maratha expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries and the British bid for control of Malwa in the 19th and 20th centuries.12 Unlike the case of Babur, the precise route taken towards Chanderi during military campaigns in earlier centuries is not known for certain. Fragmentary sources from earlier Sultanate era rulers indicate that the path of conquest likely moved in slightly different direction, from Gwalior to Narwar first, and then to Chanderi, which served as a gateway for launching further campaigns both east towards Bundelkhand and west towards Malwa and the Deccan.13 Under the Khaljis, the accession of Chanderi is mentioned in conjunction with the appointment of governors (walis) also to Dhar, Ujjain, Mandu, Alaipur and Erach.14 Some sense of the route that was likely followed can be gleaned through reference to Ibn Battuta, who travelled through central India while en route from Delhi to Cambay, accompanied by a caravan intended for China, in the early 1340s (see Plate 2.2). According to his Rihla, he departed from Delhi in the late summer of 1342. He began by heading eastwards along the Ganges-Yamuna doab, halting briefly at various towns and watering holes before arriving at the former imperial centre of Kanauj. From Kanauj, he moved southwards, making stops at Umri, Mehgaon, Alapur, Gwalior, Narwar and Kadwaha before arriving in Chanderi. From Chanderi, he turned westwards through Malwa, making stops along the way at Ujjain and Dhar, after which he turned again to the south, crossing the Narmada and Tapti rivers and arriving in the regional capital of Daulatabad. From Daulatabad, he headed north again, through Nandurbar and Songarh, before arriving in Cambay.15 While the routes taken by Ibn Battuta in the 1340s and Babur in 1527–28 were, ultimately, quite different, they intersected in two crucial ways. The first is through their close correlation with the flow of central India’s main rivers. Both paths began along eastwards along the Yamuna River and then branched off to the south following the tributaries stemming variously from the

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Betwa and the Sind. Whereas Ibn Battuta’s journey followed the weaving waters of the Sind river and its tributaries before transitioning to the Betwa at Chanderi, Babur began moved back and forth between first the Betwa (through Erach) and then the Sind (from Bhander). The second is through their point of convergence, which occurred not at Chanderi, as might be expected, but slightly further to the north at what is today the village of Kadwaha, which was known to Babur as Kachwaha and to Ibn Battuta as Kajarra.16 As a site that remains relatively obscure today, Kadwaha might seem an unlikely place for the coming together of two journeys undertaken two centuries apart. However, this fact too might be fruitfully connected to its riverine landscape. Although Kadwaha is not situated directly on a main branch of either the Betwa or the Sindh, it stands directly between them, at a meeting point where the trickling flow of the various streams stemming from the two rivers eventually converge.17 Whereas the nalas and nadis to its south and east flow into the Betwa, those to its north and west flow into the Sind (Plate 2.3). Thus, whereas Chanderi was indisputably the region’s most significant centre in terms of politics, trade and cultural influence, Kadwaha can be understood as no less important if seen from the perspective of hydrology and water.

Plate 2.3 Map of key rivers and streams around Kadwaha. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

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Narrating the shape of Babur’s lake Historically, the streams and local groundwater that flowed around Kadwaha contributed significantly not only to its emergence as an important stopping point along routes of travel but also to the broader envisioning of its built environment. To demonstrate this point, I turn again to the Baburnama, which includes a remarkably detailed description of Kadwaha’s geography with particular attention to its hydrology, and specifically to a large artificial lake that surrounded it, like a moat, on three of its sides. The length of Babur’s description here notably points to Kadwaha’s particularly privileged and strategic position. Other than Chanderi itself, Kadwaha is the only stop that received such careful attention in Babur’s account. Of Kadwaha, Babur wrote, On Friday the twenty-fourth [17 January], camp was made near Kachwaha. The people of Kachwaha were given quarter, and the town was given to Badruddin’s son. Kachwaha is a fine little place. All around it are little hillocks. Across the mountain to the southeast of Kachwaha is a dam and behind it a large lake with a perimeter of five to six kos has formed. This lake surrounds Kachwaha on three sides. On the northwest side is a neck of dry land on which the town gate is located. On the lake are small boats that hold three or four people. Whenever the people need to flee, they get into the boats and go out into the middle of the water. Before reaching Kachwaha, we saw two other places where dams were built across hills to form lakes, but the lakes were smaller than the one at Kachwaha. We stayed in Kachwaha two days, during which time overseers and many shovellers were assigned to repair the pits and potholes in the road and to cut the jungles so that the carts and artillery might pass without difficulty. The land between Kachwaha and Chanderi is forested. We spent the night in Kachwaha and camped within three kos of Chanderi, having crossed the river at Burhanpur.18

Babur’s detailed account establishes three distinct points concerning Kadwaha’s landscape. The first is the nature of its topography and particularly the fact that its outskirts were dotted by small hills. The second is that it was densely forested and quite remote, so much so that the roads needed to be cleared before Babur could proceed with his wheeled carts and artillery. And the third is that it not only possessed but also was spatially framed by a large artificial lake created through the erection of a dam. Given Kadwaha’s remote location, even in Babur’s day, the conscious crafting of the lake can be understood as an act of territorial definition, of carving out a habitable and defensible place for human activity in an otherwise inhospitable and densely forested terrain. The clear significance of the lake in Babur’s account makes it all the more poignant that it no longer exists today. Instead of being encircled by water, the present village of Kadwaha is surrounded by extended stretches of arable land. Indeed, the difference between the described landscape and what appears in real life is so dramatic that it might raise questions of whether Babur’s account can be trusted, or of whether the place he described as Kachwaha can be

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indeed identified with the village of Kadwaha today. Such issues are only further complicated through a comparison with Ibn Battuta’s account of his encounter with the place two centuries earlier. Like Babur, Ibn Battuta’s account of Kadwaha notably centres on a body of water. However, his description is not of a large artificial lake, but a clearly constructed stepped well or tank. He wrote, We travelled from the town of Parwan to the post-station of Amwari and on to the post-station of Kajarra (i.e. Kadwaha). Here there is a large tank, about a mile in length, on the sides of which there are temples containing idols which have been mutilated by the Muslims. In the centre of the tank there are three pavilions of red stone, three stories high, and on each of the four corners another pavilion.19

This elaborate tank, adorned by temples and pavilions at both its edges and centre, was notably home to a company of yogis, whom he described as follows: There live there a company of jugis (i.e. yogis) who have matted their hair and let it grow until it has come to be as long as themselves. They are generally of a yellow colour because of their mortifications, and many Muslims become their disciples in order to learn their secrets. They say that if a man suffering from some bodily disease such as leprosy or elephantiasis resorts to them for a long time, he will be cured by the grace of God.20

This description of Kadwaha’s yogis served, in Ibn Battuta’s account, as a launching point to tell a longer and more elaborate story about his first introduction to yogis, in the Chaghatai Khanate, or the Mongol state of Turkistan in Central Asia. There he encountered a group of 50 cavedwelling yogis, who engaged in a range of marvellous and magical practices, at least one of which involved an aphrodisiac made of iron filings that led to the poisoning of a king.21 While the presence of a large tank in Ibn Battuta’s account resonates with Babur’s later description, there are enough discrepancies, in both scale and form, that there is some question as to whether the two could possibly be one and the same. Here the evidentiary nature of a travel narrative can be fruitfully called into question, since the main incentive in recording such a journey would be to impress and entertain. In this case, I am not entirely convinced that Ibn Battuta was nearly as invested in detailing a real landscape as he was in spinning an intriguing tale. The tank that he describes is, in fact, of a generic type found in many places, but that I have been as of yet unable to locate at Kadwaha. Given that his Rihla was composed not during his time in India but only upon his return to Fez in 1354, I might posit that his investment was less in realistically detailing a small post-station in the central Indian wilderness than in enthralling an audience with tales of exotic yogis located elsewhere in the world. By contrast, Babur’s travels were motivated by a broader effort to consolidate a new kingdom, and his account accordingly seems to be invested in recording a real geography. Despite its disappearance, the lake described in the Baburnama can still be traced by coordinating visual cues with empirical evidence gleaned through use of modern GIS software and technology. A ground-shaded

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Plate 2.4 Map of waters around Kadwaha: (a) physical map (map data ©Google 2017), (b) satellite

map. Source: Imagery ©2017 Terramatrix via Google 2017. Map produced by Tamara I. Sears using QGIS 2.14.2

relief map of the area around the village, for example, reveals a long area to the southeast that is bounded by hillocks. Through its centre flows a stream stemming from the Betwa River that may have been fashioned into a lake by means of a dam (Plate 2.4a). Satellite imagery illuminates, even more distinctly, a water-saturated area, which envelops the village as Babur describes, and which could easily represent the general contours of what may have been the emperor’s lost lake (Plate 2.4b). Babur’s investment in recording details of Kadwaha’s hydrology and topography could easily be understood in relationship to his broader obsession with landscapes and gardens.22 However, in the context of a campaign of conquest, his interest seems to be strategically linked with defensibility and the pragmatics of military travel.

Hydrology, town planning and environmental design The significance of Babur’s account for historicising a local landscape cannot be overstated. Not only does it enable us to recover a lost body of water but also it fruitfully draws attention to the role that water played in larger acts of village and town planning. This becomes clear if one maps the approximate contours of Babur’s lake in relationship to Kadwaha’s broader built environment (Plate 2.5). Despite its remote location and its relative anonymity, Kadwaha is a remarkably complex site with discernible architectural traces stretching back at least 1,100 years. It first emerged

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Plate 2.5 Kadwaha site map, showing the hypothetical contours of

Babur’s lake. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

as a significant local centre in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, and it witnessed intensifying building activity up through the middle of the 11th century. The most visible traces of this history can be traced through the remains of a large Shaiva monastery, a handful of tanks and wells, and no fewer than 15 surviving temples, all of which stylistically fall within this period. The monastery, which was built by Shaiva ascetics belonging to the prominent Mattamayura lineage, appears to have been central to Kadwaha’s early development. Situated directly at Kadwaha’s centre, it acted as the nucleus of the growing settlement. The temples, by contrast, encircled its outskirts and may have both marked and sanctified the habitable boundaries of the growing town. It may be coincidental that the earliest and latest of these temples – the Chandal Math and Toteshvara Mahadeva, respectively – marked the outermost extents of the village (Plates 2.6 and 2.7). Although the layered history of subsequent building is beyond the scope of this chapter, I can note briefly that by the time of Babur’s visit, the monastery at Kadwaha’s centre had been transformed twice – first into a fort complex and then into an Islamicate ribat, indicated by the remnants of a mosque.23 The catalyst to this transformation was also rooted in water, as indicated by a stone inscription found on a slab next to the temple within the fortress. The inscription tells

Plate 2.6 Chandal Math temple, from southeast, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

Plate 2.7 Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, from the south, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

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of damage done to a tank or stepwell (jaladhara) in the years 1309–10 (VS 1366), at a time when mlecchas, in this case most likely the forces of Ala al-din Khalji, had overrun the earth.24 In order to make amends, Bhutesvara performed special worship of the temple’s Shiva linga and repaired the broken well, which was likely to have been coincident with a nearby stepwell that was excavated recently by the Archaeological Survey of India. In the centuries that followed, Kadwaha continued to grow into a fully fortified outpost under the general aegis first of the Tughluqs and then of the sultans of Malwa. The residential area that emerged around the central fortress was similarly enclosed by walls, which provided an additional layer of protection against the constant threat of bandits and the occasional spectre of military campaigns. During my last visit, in December of 2012, I was able to locate two of what I believe were once four gateways positioned at the cardinal directions.25 Kadwaha’s many temples, however, remained beyond the walled residential areas, where they and their enshrined gods continued to gird the village in a ritually efficacious circuit. It was just beyond these temples that the lake described by Babur likely stood as a body of water encircling both the village and its temples and acting as an extension of the outlying landscape. This lake may well have served, as implied through the Baburnama text, a defensive purpose, enabling, as Babur notes, the local residents to “get into the boats and go out into the middle of the water” in times of crisis.26 But it also can be understood as an extension of a sacred landscape, one that fulfilled a core requirement associated with the construction of both temples and towns. Architectural treatises and ritual manuals unilaterally require the presence of a constant source of water in close proximity to dwelling sites and religious shrines. According to the Mayamata, a site selected for building should be bordered by a water course, whose water is “of pleasant colour, odour, and taste”, and whose soil is “pleasing to the sight and to the mind”.27 According to the Brihat Samhita, temples should be built at places where there are water and gardens, artificial tanks or rivers and streams.28 Whereas Babur’s account draws attention to the fact that Kadwaha once possessed a lake, the distribution of its monuments suggests that that lake not only preceded Babur but also was likely part of the original village design. The distribution of temples along the edges of the erstwhile lake is particularly telling. It appears as if they were intentionally positioned in close proximity to the water, and certain temples may well have been intended as lakefront shrines, situated directly overlooking the waters. One particularly clear example can be found in the Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, which stands accompanied by a smaller Shaiva-Shakta shrine at Kadwaha’s far eastern edge. The two temples were built on a larger stepped platform set within an expansive enclosure erected in recent years by the Archaeological Survey of India (Plate 2.8). Just beyond the enclosure is a heavily cultivated tract of land produced from the fertile silt left by a larger artificial lake that still stood just a few decades earlier. In addition to appearing in archival photographs, this body of water was noted in the 1939–40 Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of Gwalior State, which described the two temples as standing “on the bank of a tank with ghats in front”.29 Remaining traces of these ghats were still present in the form of long dressed masonry slabs scattered along the edges of the fields when I first visited Kadwaha in 1999 and 2000–01. However, since then, they have disappeared from the landscape.

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Plate 2.8 Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, from the north, Kadwaha, ca. early 11th century. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

The idea that Kadwaha’s temples were built specifically in conjunction with the production of a new artificial lake is both tantalising and compelling. Not only does it fit well within the parameters of textual prescriptions linking temples with waters, but also it resonates with real world practices of building riverfront and lakefront temples, which are well documented in larger cities and places of pilgrimage (tirthas) through the Indian subcontinent. However, even more pertinent comparisons found locally in rural central India. In the nearby village of Sakarra, there are clusters of early medieval temples adorning the banks of a large reservoir similarly fashioned by building a dam across nearby hills in order to harness the waters of a seasonal stream (Plate 2.9). At Kadwaha, however, the creation of a lake acted not merely in service of temples or residential life. In fact, part of the point may well have been the act of encircling both temple and town. In early medieval India, and in central India in particular, important towns, fortresses and political centres were frequently established at sites that were naturally encircled by bends or confluences in rivers. This was the case, for example, at the fortresses of Narwar and Chanderi, the two regional centres that framed Kadwaha directly to the north and south. But it was also true of the nearby town of Pawaya, which served as the ancient capital of Padmavati under the Naga kings, and which was explicitly described in the 8th century by the Sanskrit poet Bhavabhūti as a place “girdled by the broad rivers of the Para and the Sind” (see Plate 2.3).30 Situated in an area

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Plate 2.9 View of goddess temples along the banks of the artificial lake, Sakarra, ca. 9th century. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

distinctly lacking a larger perennial river, Kadwaha’s builders may well have created an equivalent encircling hydrological formation by diverting local, and most likely seasonal, waters.

Conclusions Above all, the case of Babur’s lake highlights a range of methodological problems endemic to any attempt at historicising hydrological landscapes. As is well known, rivers shift over time, dams get dismantled and lakes dry up. Similarly, bodies of water can be seasonal, and, indeed, it was common practice to divert seasonal rivers and streams into artificial lakes or reservoirs in order to harness water for household use and irrigation in drier seasons. Some changes may have happened slowly over the course of many centuries, but others may have occurred at a remarkably rapid pace. Of the latter, the most transformative developments in recent years have been wrought through agrarian encroachment in rural areas, which has led both to the diverting of older waters and, of even greater concern, to rapid deforestation. The often-undocumented nature of such changes to rural landscapes complicate any effort at historicisation. Texts, such as the Baburnama, can provide a point of departure, but they rarely can alone serve as verifiable fact. As a medium, textual sources are limited to frames of representation that operate in a discursive fashion. This is particularly true of travel narratives. Not only are travel narratives temporally bounded by the duration of a visit or encounter, itself a transitory event, but also they, at best, represent a translation across media, from the material world to an immaterial idea. Whereas the

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fields surrounding Kadwaha enable a physical mapping of place, textual narratives gesture towards the ways in which water landscapes existed within broader cultural and literary imaginaires. In this case, Babur’s journey provides a way of seeing a local landscape as it once was while also reminding us of the fragility of riverine landscapes and presenting a method for charting transformations across a longue durée. However, the ultimate testament lies in the physical and material traces that can only be found in situ. Whereas texts can only go as far as representing an idea of a place, the place itself, when scrutinised carefully, can often reveal a deeper history. Laid out using the fertile soil that was once the silt from the lake’s bottom, Kadwaha’s fields carry an indexical relationship to its former lake, produced by diverting a local stream whose waters now flow instead through irrigation channels. The transformation of lake into farmland is not unconnected to the changing social and economic status of the area as a whole. Once situated along routes of travel, Kadwaha functioned distinctly as an outpost in a complex web of long-distance networks. Today, however, it remains part of the rural hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, which has been subject to extensive agricultural development. The government of Madhya Pradesh has been heralding a growth rate triple the average across India and encouraging agro-business entrepreneurs to make use of the state’s low land prices and “large tracks of cultivable virgin wastes as well as untapped irrigation potential”.31 In an era in which the most well-worn routes are determined largely by train tracks and airports which bypass many older overland paths, the waterways of central India no longer serve the same purpose. Instead of facilitating travel and connecting a wide web of places, now regional rivers and local streams are diverted in the service of a globalising nation.

Notes 1 On Chanderi, see Gérard Fussman et al., Naissance et déclin d’une qasba: Chanderī du Xe au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols., Paris: Boccard, 2003. See also Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 197–9. 2 Two extant versions can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (IM.266–1913) and the British Library (Or. 3714). 3 The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002, p. 406. 4 Ibid., p. 407. 5 Ibid. 6 There is some question as to the identification of Jalisar. Although a place called Jalesar exists today in the vicinity of Agra, it is situated approximately 45 km away. In his translation of the Baburnama, Wheeler Thackson notes that Babur’s Jalisar is “not the Jalesar that is northeast of Agra”, which he cites as being in the wrong direction. Rather, he suggests “it is probably another village in the vicinity of Agra”. Thackston, The Baburnama, p. 506, n. 165. Given that Babur’s main intention was to gather troops and enable his soldiers to ready their arms, I see no issue with the northeasterly direction of present-day Jalesar, especially given that it was home already to an old fort that had been established, under the name Muhammadabad, by the Tugluq Sultan, Muhammad Shah III in 1392. See Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 309. What is puzzling, however, is Babur’s description of distance. He notes that he arrived in Jalisar

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“after marching three kos”, a distance that would amount to no more than 12–13 kilometres, following common assumptions that a Mughal kos was equivalent to approximately 4.17 kilometres or 2.5 miles. However, the kos has historically varied significantly across localities and regions, and while the Mughals were known for their efforts at standardisation through the installation of new road markers, these came under the aegis of later Mughal rulers. See, for example, Subhash Parihar, Land Transport in Mughal India: Agra-Lahore Mughal Highway and Its Architectural Remains, New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2008, p. 14; Susan Gole, Indian Maps and Plans: From Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys, New Delhi: Manohar, 1989, p. 14. It is entirely possible that Babur’s own measurements fluctuated enough to account for the difference in relationship to Jalesar. For example, elsewhere in the Baburnama, Babur notes that the distance from the tomb of Shaykh Yahya at Maner Sharif to the banks of the Son river was about half a kos. Thackston, The Baburnama, p. 446. In real distances today, that measurement could be anywhere between 4 and 7.5 kilometres, depending on the point of embankment. Thus, it is possible that a distance of 3 kos could have ranged between 24 and 45 kilometres. Thackston, The Baburnama, pp. 403–4. Ibid., pp. 404–5. This dynasty is known primarily through a handful of inscriptions. See, for example, Michael Willis, Inscriptions of Gopakṣetra: Materials for the History of Central India, London: British Museum Press, 1996, pp. 3–4, 112–13 and F. Kielhorn, ‘Siyadoni Stone Inscription’, Epigraphia Indica, vol. 1, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889, pp. 162–79. These campaigns were recorded by Zia-ud-din Barani in his Tarikh-i-Firuz Shāhi, trans. by A. R. Fuller and A. Khallaque, Calcutta: Pilgrim, 1967, p. 48. See also Jackson, Delhi Sultanate, pp. 197–9. See, for example, Sir Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 4, London: Trübner and Company, 1867–77, p. 467, note. 1. See also Jackson, Delhi Sultanate, p. 323. On the continuity of routes through Chanderi, see Dilip K. Chakrabarti, The Archaeology of the Deccan Routes: The Ancient Routes from the Ganga Plain to the Deccan, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2005, pp. 123–7, 129–30, 135–6. On later histories, see Stewart N. Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 11, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–40. Andre Wink, Al Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 2: The Slave Kings and Islamic Conquest in the 11th–13th Centuries, Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. 158; Jackson, Delhi Sultanate, p. 144. Jackson, Delhi Sultanate, p. 199. For a complete description of this journey, see The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (A.D. 1325–1354), vol. 4, trans. by H. A. R. Gibb and Charles Beckingham, Cambridge and London: The Hakluyt Society, 1994, pp. 773–96; The Travels of Ibn Batūta, trans. by Samuel Lee, London: Oriental Translation Committee, 1829, Chapters 16–17. The term is transliterated as kajarrā in Gibb and Beckingham, The Travels, 790, and as kajwarā by Lee in The Travels, 162. I was able to confirm this point in my own fieldwork conducted through the auspices of a Fulbright Nehru Senior Research fellowship in December 2012. Thackston, The Baburnama, pp. 404–5. Ibn Battuta, 15.39–40; trans. by Gibb and Beckingham, The Travels, 790. Ibid. Ibn Battuta, 15.40–1; trans. by Gibb and Beckingham, The Travels, 790–1. See, for example, Catherine Asher, ‘Babur and the Timurid Char Bagh’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 1–2, 1991, pp. 46–55; D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, pp. 9–10, 54, 70.

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23 I covered this material in an earlier publication. See Tamara I. Sears, ‘Fortified Maṭhas and Fortress Mosques: The Transformation and Reuse of Hindu Monastic Sites in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Archives of Asian Art, vol. 59, 2009, pp. 7–31. 24 Willis, Inscriptions, p. 22; M. B. Garde, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of Gwalior State, Gwalior: Alijah Darbar Press, 1941, p. 53. 25 While I am not yet certain of the date of the eastern gateway, I am fairly certain that the northern gateway was already up by the early 16th century. I find it unlikely that the four gateways had radically disparate dates as they seem to be part of a fairly cohesive plan. 26 Thackston, The Baburnama, pp. 404–5. See the aforementioned. 27 Mayamata 3.4–7a. The Manasara similarly requires a water body, or pond, and fertile soil (Manasara 4.13–14, 40–2). 28 Brihat Samhita 56.1–8. 29 Garde, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of Gwalior State, p. 7. 30 See Bhavabhūti, Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava, with the Commentary of Jagaddhara, ed. and trans. by M. R. Kale, Bombay: Oriental Publishing, 1908, pp. 79–80. 31 Government of Madhya Pradesh, official webpage: http://mp.gov.in/en/unlimited-potential-in-agriculture, accessed on 31 May 2015.

References Asher, Catherine B., ‘Babur and the Timurid Char Bagh: Use and Meaning’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, vol. 1–2, 1991, pp. 46–55. Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002. Barani, Zia-ud-din, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shāhi, trans. by A. R. Fuller and A. Khallaque, Calcutta: Pilgrim, 1967. Bhavabhūti, Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava, with the Commentary of Jagaddhara, ed. and trans. by M. R. Kale, Bombay: Oriental Publishing, 1908. Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Archaeology of the Deccan Routes: The Ancient Routes from the Ganga Plain to the Deccan, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2005. Elliot, Sir Henry Miers and John Dowson, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 4, London: Trübner and Company, 1867–77. Fussman, Gérard, et al., Naissance et déclin d’une qasba: Chanderī du Xe au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols., Paris: De Boccard, 2003. Garde, M. B., Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of Gwalior State (1939–40), Gwalior: Alijah Darbar Press, 1940. ———, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of Gwalior State, Gwalior: Alijah Darbar Press, 1941. Gole, Susan, Indian Maps and Plans: From Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys, New Delhi: Manohar, 1989. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, trans. by Samuel Lee, London: Oriental Translation Committee, 1829. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (A.D. 1325–1354), trans. by H. A. R. Gibb and Charles Beckingham, vol. 4, Cambridge and London: The Hakluyt Society, 1994. Jackson, Peter, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kielhorn, F., ‘Siyadoni Stone Inscription’, Epigraphia Indica, vol. 1, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889, pp. 162–79.

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Parihar, Subhash, Land Transport in Mughal India: Agra-Lahore Mughal Highway and Its Architectural Remains, New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2008. Ruggles, D. Fairchild, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Sears, Tamara I., ‘Fortified Maṭhas and Fortress Mosques: The Transformation and Reuse of Hindu Monastic Sites in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Archives of Asian Art, vol. 59, 2009, pp. 7–31. Willis, Michael, Inscriptions of Gopakṣetra: Materials for the History of Central India, London: British Museum Press, 1996. Wink, Andre, Al Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 2: The Slave Kings and Islamic Conquest in the 11th–13th Centuries, Leiden: Brill, 1997.

Website accessed Government of Madhya Pradesh, official website: http://mp.gov.in/en/unlimited-potential-in-agriculture, accessed on 31 May 2015.

3 Water is a limited commodity Ecological aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614 Sugata Ray

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he river Yamuna, the daughter of the solar god Surya, flows 1,376 kilometres from the glacial formations of the Himalayas to its confluence with the Ganga and the fabled Sarasvati in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. As the river meanders through the north Indian plain, it passes the Vishram Ghat in Mathura, the principal ghat in Braj, the epicentre of Krishna worship in India (Plate 3.1).1 In Braj, the Yamuna, however, has a specific significance that underscores the aesthetic effect of seeing the river as it surges through the pilgrimage centre. Yamuna had accrued connotation as the sensual drops of sweat that emerge during Krishna’s lovemaking with his devotees.2 Thus, along with other symbolic associations, Yamuna was now also ecstatic love in liquid form. Indeed, the act of ritually seeing the river as it flows past the Vishram Ghat was considered meritorious for pilgrims visiting the sacred site. The cognitive orientation of this particular mode of seeing the riverscape, however, emerged from an expanded field that encompassed natural resource management, environmental catastrophes and theology based on venerating the natural environment. Along with droughts of unprecedented intensity that ensued with the formation of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), the 17th century had seen the emergence of extensive river engineering under the Mughal empire.3 Riparian architecture in the pilgrimage centre of Braj – 150 kilometres south of the imperial Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (established 1639) and 60 kilometres north of the Taj Mahal, the celebrated mausoleum built by the emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666) on the banks of the Yamuna – was thus coterminous to Mughal endeavours to connect north India through hydrological projects. Reading the spatial cultures of Braj alongside the architectonics of Mughal imperial hydrology, Vaishnava (the worship of Vishnu/Krishna) aesthetics and the large-scale rearrangement of the natural environment in the 17th century, this chapter provides a deeper history of architecture practices that places water in an intrinsically interconnected field linked through an interweaving of the human and the environmental. Doing so opens up new passages in art history – ecological passages that bring to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between architecture and the natural environment. At the same time, the evocation of a Malthusian metaphor in considering water as a limited commodity allows for a mediation on the emerging debate surrounding the possibilities of an eco art history.4 Influenced by Thomas Malthus’ theorisation on scarcity, the emergent field of eco art

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Plate 3.1 The river Yamuna at Mathura. Albumen print by Chunni Lall & Co., Muttra

[Mathura], ca. 1890. 27.9 × 30.4 cm. Source: Photograph © Radha Gopinath Temple Archive, Vrindavan

history has emphasised the Anthropocene – that is, the current geological age in which human activity has been the dominant force on the planet – as a period that saw the materialisation of aesthetic formulations attuned to the impact of extensive environmental alterations.5 In sharp contrast, epochs preceding the Anthropocene become, for art historians, periods characterised by “unusually stable climatic conditions that made human agriculture and civilization possible”.6 The genealogies and horizons of the aesthetic that is invoked here, then, become indelibly interlinked with the environmental crisis that emerged with the Anthropocene (read modernity). In effect, pre-18th-century ecologies and their attendant aesthetic interactions with geographical, geological and climatic formations are rendered opaque under purportedly “stable climatic conditions”. The sweeping rearrangement of both the natural and the human environment in 17th-century South Asia, however, provides a somewhat different perspective. Emerging from the interstices of aesthetic practices, theological economies and widespread environmental transformation, the material culture of water in Braj presents us with an exemplary site that produces an alternative ideation of an ecological aesthetics articulated from within an early modern world of sacrality,

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political governance and natural resource management. In such an ideation, the act of seeing water becomes the crucial link that connects localised creative practices with an expanded transterritorial arena of water scarcity and drought.

Framing water in the Little Ice Age: the Vishram Ghat, Mathura, 1614 Writing on early modern climate histories, scholars have noted that the Little Ice Age – a period approximately between 1550 and 1850 – witnessed the climate of Europe becoming generally harsher when mountain glaciers expanded to their greatest extent due to diminishing solar output, changes in atmospheric circulation, and massive volcanic activity after the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 900–1300 CE).7 While the flow of polar continental air masses extended over large parts of Europe, farmlands were destroyed in Norway and Iceland. In other parts of the world, the climatic phenomenon of the Little Ice Age caused greater frequency of droughts. In West Africa, the Sahel – that is, the dry frontier of the Saharan fringe – pushed southward in the 16th and the 17th centuries, causing a series of calamitous droughts.8 In Mexico, catastrophic droughts of great intensity occurred between 1545 and 1580.9 From 1554 onwards, the frequency of droughts increased in South Asia, with the worst catastrophe ensuing in 1630.10 Travelling to Agra from Surat in November 1630, the Cornish merchant Peter Mundy wrote, [A]ll the high way was strowed with dead people, Our noses never free of the Stinck of them, especially about Townes; for they dragg them out by the heeles starke naked, of all ages and sexes, till they are out of the gates, and there they are lefte, soe that the way is halfe barred upp.11

Thus, in the wake of a climatic catastrophe that had severely unsettled the political, religious and cultural milieu of north India, the act of seeing water took on a specific symbolic and aesthetic meaning. The actors in my narrative were almost certainly unacquainted with the sweeping climatic transformations that were concurrently occurring in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe in this period. Consequently, their artistic responses to monsoon failures and droughts were specifically embedded within the ecumenical world of Braj. But recent scholarship on the Little Ice Age in other parts of the world offers an exemplary model for narrating histories that takes into account the intersections between the biophysical world and the world of knowledge, culture and power, all of which form integral components of the new interdisciplinary field called environmental humanities. It was Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée, the tour de force history of the Mediterranean world during the reign of Philip II, that laid the ground for historians such as Brian Fagan, Jean M. Grove, Sam White and Geoffrey Parker, among others, to re-examine political and economic histories of the Little Ice Age.12 Building on this scholarship, this chapter aims to bring art history into this conversation on climate change in the early modern period.13 Indeed, it was during the drought of 1613–15, the first major drought in the 17th century, that we see the Vishram Ghat, the principal ghat for pilgrimage in Braj, emerging as the locus of riparian projects that made seeing the flowing Yamuna central to architecture’s structural conception

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(Plate 3.2). Notably, the 1614 constructions at the Vishram Ghat occurred in the wake of two major events – one environmental and the other propelled by human agency – that altered the history of early modern South Asia. On the one hand, the 1613–15 drought had resulted in severe famine, followed by a bubonic plague that lasted for eight years.14 The Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569–1627) wrote in his memoirs, [A] great pestilence appeared in several places in Hindustan. The epidemic began in the Punjab countryside and spread little by little to the city of Lahore. Many people, both Muslims and Hindus, died of the disease. [. . .] Since it appears from what aged people say and from history books that this illness has never appeared in this province before, the physicians and the learned were asked about the cause. Some say that since there have been two successive dry years with little rain during the monsoon, it has been caused by the putridity of the air arising from the dryness and lack of rain.15

Cumulatively, the catastrophes of these two years took a heavy toll, with over one thousand deaths occurring on a daily basis in Agra even in 1616.16 To ward off the effects of the 1613–15 disasters, Jahangir established hospitals in a number of north Indian cities with funds from the

Plate 3.2 Vishram Ghat, Mathura. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

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royal treasury.17 The emperor also donated cauldrons that could feed 5,000 people at shrines such as that of Muin al-Din Chishti in Ajmer.18 At the same time, Jahangir constructed a series of riparian pavilions near the city of Ajmer in western India, where he had moved his court for three years.19 In 1615, the emperor constructed a small hunting palace on the banks of the Pushkar lake, a Hindu pilgrimage site near Ajmer. In the same year, he built another pavilion in the hills west of Ajmer, adjacent to a stream that cascaded to the lower level of the structure bringing together architecture and flowing water within one architectonic system (Plate 3.3). While scholars are yet to take seriously the aetiological linkages between water scarcity propelled by droughts and the emergence of architecture practices that privilege a vision of water, a reappraisal of the architectonics of Jahangir’s edifices in relation to the 1613–15 drought could perhaps connect the natural and the social in early modern South Asia. Describing his 1615 pavilion in Ajmer, Jahangir himself noted, There is a very lovely ravine in the vicinity of Ajmer, and at the end of the ravine is a spring, the water of which collects in a long, wide pool. It is the best water in Ajmer. [. . .] When I passed by, I ordered a structure worthy of the site built since the place was worthy of development. In one year it had been turned into a real place, the likes of which world travelers could not point to. A pool forty ells square had been constructed, and the water from the spring had been made to pour into the pool

Plate 3.3 Pavilion, upper terrace, Chashma-yi Nur [Fountain of Light], Ajmer, 1615. Source: Photograph © Yael R. Rice

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through a fountain that sprayed ten or twelve ells high. Next to the pool were pavilions. Likewise, on the upper terrace, where the tank and spring were, harmonious pavilions and delightful porticos and dwellings had been built – some decorated and painted by expert masters and skilled painters.20

The natural undoubtedly shaped the aesthetic. But such a reading would also have to proceed with caution. As products of very different dynamisms, the linkages between architecture and drought should not offer either a deterministic history of the environment’s agency or a reductionist non-anthropocentric history of architecture. Although coeval, there is no evidence to bring these two moments – one environmental and the other architectural – together. But it was water as affect – that is, the connections between drought in South Asia and the affective responses to it – that intimately bound them. A transversal movement from the optical sensibility of riparian architecture to the natural environment, and vice versa, could, perhaps, then offer a relational field that makes visible the political, social, theological and aesthetic imperatives of water as a limited commodity.21 Both of these episodes, I suggest, led to a new hydroaesthetics centred on water systems. It would not be farfetched to read the construction of riparian architecture in Braj in relation to both the extensive droughts that had devastated north India in the 17th century and imperial Mughal hydrological projects. Like the careful framing of water in Jahangir’s pavilions near Ajmer, architecture was carefully ordered in Braj as well. Water, a limited commodity in droughtstricken north India, was thus rendered visible through architecture systems. Expanding on this line of thought, one could also link the sweeping climate changes that occurred in north India with the Little Ice Age to a new topophilic Vaishnavism in Braj that was based on loving the natural habitat as Krishna himself. Indeed, in Braj, the development of an architecture of beholding water had emerged from a philosophy of place that conjoined a topographic theology based on venerating the environment as a manifestation of divine form with imperial Mughal water cultures.22 Given the powerful symbolism of the river Yamuna as the daughter of Surya, the Vishram Ghat in Mathura, the epicentre of pilgrimage in Braj, had been a centre of solar worship prior to the 13th century. Pre-16th-century architecture at the Ghat, however, is not extant. But 16th-century pilgrimage manuals assert that this Ghat was the precise location where Krishna had rested after killing his evil uncle Kamsa.23 Hence, the name Vishram Ghat or the ghat of rest. From other accounts, we learn that Sikandar Lodi, the Afghan ruler of Delhi between 1489 and 1517, had allegedly erected a mechanical contraption to prevent pilgrims from performing customary rituals at the Ghat.24 Seventeenth-century sectarian literature narrates that the contraption erected by Sikandar Lodi would result in pilgrims sprouting a beard when they attempted to perform rituals there. Other narratives suggest that the ruler had assembled a machine at the Ghat that automatically circumcised Hindus who went there. In retaliation, the Vaishnava reformer Vallabha (1478–1530) wrote an incantation on a piece of paper and gave it to his followers, asking them to hang it above one of the main gates at Sikandar Lodi’s capital in Delhi. As a result of the spell, Muslims who passed under the gate lost their

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beards. A repentant Sikander Lodi then removed the contraption. Veracity notwithstanding, such accounts suggest that the control of Mathura, an urban centre located at the entrance to the fertile Gangetic plains, had become vital for control over the riverine system, which by this time had become crucial for the trade route connecting northern and western India to Bengal and beyond.25 By extension, the river Yamuna, as it flowed through Mathura, also acquired symbolic resonance within the cultural economies of early modern north India. It was also during the reign of Sikander Lodi that Vaishnava reformers, such as Chaitanya (1486– 1533) and Vallabha, arrived in Mathura to preach a new Krishna devotion based on venerating the natural environment of Braj.26 Sectarian literature informs us that, after arriving in Braj in 1514, Chaitanya embarked on a mission to discover the sacred sites in the region from the Vishram Ghat. He embraced trees and creepers, collapsed in ecstasy on seeing embodied land and leaped into the dark blue waters of the Yamuna, imagining Krishna perpetually playing with his devotees in the river.27 The performative piety of Chaitanya’s pilgrimage was thus centred on a bodily experience of natural phenomena. This mode of experiencing the topos, however, had resonances in the late 9th- or early 10th-century Ancient Tales of the Lord (Bhāgavata Purāṇa) where Uddhava, Krishna’s closest companion, took aesthetic pleasure in seeing the Yamuna, the forests and the blossoming trees of Braj.28 Uddhava then wished to be reborn as a creeper in Braj so that the feet of devotees and the dust of Braj would cover him in rapturous love. In this sense, the reclaiming of the Vishram Ghat during Lodi’s reign was grounded on a theological claim to space as embodied. The increasing popularity of Vaishnavism or the worship of Krishna in the early 17th century led to a series of structures being constructed at the Ghat by Vaishnava devotees. Built by Bir Singh Dev (r. 1605–27), the ruler of the central Indian kingdom of Orchha, the most prominent structure at the Vishram Ghat in the 17th century was a tulabhara torana, a ceremonial archway used as a weighing scale to measure and distribute valuable commodities (Plate 3.4). The ruler had sponsored the archway or torana when he weighed himself and donated his weight in gold at the Ghat during pilgrimage to Mathura in 1614, along with an additional 81 man (ca. 6,480 pounds) of gold representing the 81 districts (parganas) that constituted his realm. This was a significant gesture. As the historian Dirk H. Kolff notes, For centuries, the Orchha family would cherish the fact that the balance prepared to weigh the great king was still kept at Mathura on the Vishrant Ghat, dedicated to Krishna. His munificent gifts were mentioned in sanads [deeds] held by priests at the place.29

The archway functioned as a ceremonial threshold linking the liminal space between land and flowing water, an architectonic configuration that corresponds to the etymon of the word torana as movement or rushing forth.30 To move forward, however, requires a spatial configuring of a rite of passage. As an architectural device, freestanding toranas were accordingly used as gateways to religious structures from as early as the 1st century BCE (Plate 3.5).31 In the context of a temple or a Buddhist stupa, the movement through the torana would denote a movement from the profane to the sacred realm as an embodied practice of transforming oneself provisionally.

Plate 3.4 Torana, Vishram Ghat, Mathura, 1614, with later refurbishment. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

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Plate 3.5 Great Stupa, Sanchi, ca. 50–25 BCE. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

At the Vishram Ghat, the torana, however, functioned as a device of enframement. The flowing Yamuna could be viewed through the torana, while the river concurrently framed the architectural device. Is the object of art history, then, the view of water and the frame of the architectural device an ideation of human intention and purpose bordering the view? Or is the object of art history the torana, framed by expansive water and the natural environment? As an optical arrangement, the frame is hardly ever inconsequential. Rather, as part of a representational whole, the frame most often operates as a generative space connecting the interior to the exterior and the internal to the external. Thus, neither is the view of water from the torana fully internal nor completely external to its frame. Bir Singh’s torana, then, underscored a different relationship between flowing water, sacred space and vision. Operative here was a possible mode of seeing where the view of water was framed by the archway, and water, in turn, framed architecture, conjoining the frame and the object in a theological and aesthetic schema. The function of the frame in artistic praxis had been, of course, most powerfully articulated by the Italian artist, architect and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise on painting.32 According to Alberti, it was the frame that set the object of representation apart from what lay beyond it. While art history has revisited, over and again, the conundrum of the frame as an

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architectural arrangement that measures, determines and regulates the fictional space of representation, an eco art history, following Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the parergon, might perhaps offer an ideation of the frame that “does not remain simply outside of the work, acting from the sidelines, next to the work (ergon)”.33 The horizontal movement of the effervescent waters of the river Yamuna, we might then concede, produced an aqueous waterscape that shaped a very different system of spatial boundaries. How, then, does one account for the liquescent materiality of a substance that is constantly on the flow? Does one begin by discerning stable architectural and representational forms that frame, contain or, conversely, transmit the fluidity of water? While architecture treatises categorise the myriad forms of toranas on the basis of placement, function and embellishment, the tulabhara torana was specifically used as a balance for weighing gold, grains and other precious commodities that were then ceremonially distributed. According to 11th-century architecture treatises such as the Architect of Human Dwellings (Samarāṅganasūtradhāra), the freestanding tulabhara torana was a symbol of a monarch’s royal benevolence.34 Indeed, we see granite portals for the distribution of wealth in Hampi, the 16th-century capital of the Vijayanagara empire in south India. The Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605), too, had transformed this recognised state ritual into an imperial Mughal spectacle. Described in the mid-17th-century History of Shah Jahan (Shāhjahānnāma) as the celebration of weight (jashn-i wazn), Akbar, it seems, weighed himself twice a year and distributed the wealth in charity.35 Festivals and fireworks lasted for days, and Akbar might have, indeed, used a square platform with a canopy and flanking toranas in his capital in Fatehpur Sikri, around 60 kilometres south of Mathura, for this particular royal celebration (Plate 3.6).36 Subsequent emperors, such as Jahangir and Shah Jahan, continued the practice, giving the custom imperial Mughal authority. In Akbar’s palace complex, the richly carved ornamental torana brackets of the platform emerge from the mouth of mythic elephantine creatures to form a succession of semi-circular arcs that meet under the centre of each lintel. Described as the andola torana in architecture manuals, a torana that mimics the undulation of waves, this device was commonly used in post-10th-century temple entrances to mark the threshold that demarcated the sacred from the non-sacred.37 The andola torana was likewise frequently used as architectural ornamentation, the most prominent of such usage being in pre-Mughal western Indian mosques established by the Ahmad Shahi dynasty (ca. 1408–1577) and at the ca. 1500 fort complex in Gwalior, built by the Tomar ruler Man Singh (r. 1486–1516) (Plate 3.7). The deployment of this particular torana in Fatehpur Sikri was, thus, consistent with Akbar’s larger architecture programme of adopting both Hindu and Muslim preMughal styles to posit his palace complex as epitomising an imperial cultural cosmopolitanism. In keeping with the non-anthropomorphic architectural ethos of Fatehpur Sikri, the representations of deities in the interstices of the individual arcs were, however, replaced with characteristic Mughal rhombus-shaped decorative patterns. Bir Singh Dev’s torana on the Vishram Ghat referred both to the larger political significance of the ritual dispensation of wealth as a form of imperial munificence and the architectural form of this freestanding structure. The use of red sandstone, now painted brilliant yellow, along with the mobilisation of Mughal floral motifs in lieu of sculptural representations of deities certainly takes

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Plate 3.6 “Astrologer’s Seat”, Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

us back to the architectonics of imperial Mughal architecture. Indeed, the lotus-shaped finials, the representation of flowers and rhombus-shaped decorative motifs on the brackets and spandrels and the austere pillar capitals based on typologies popularised in Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri suggest a cognisant attempt on part of Bir Singh Dev to incorporate Mughal architecture into the sacred riverfront of Vaishnava Braj. While evidence points to artisans from Gujarat being employed in the construction of Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri, we are yet to uncover histories of artisanal patronage or praxis in early 17th-century Braj.38 Thus, it would be difficult to surmise whether these Gujarati artisans were commissioned to build the torana after Fatehpur Sikri had been abandoned by Akbar in 1585. Perhaps that was the case. But an analysis of the ornamentation on the 1614 Vishram Ghat torana and on pillars in the palaces at Fatehpur Sikri, for instance in the principal haramsara (Shabistani Iqbal), insinuate that both structures were undoubtedly constructed keeping an analogous architectural paradigm in sight (Plate 3.8). Motifs such as the lotus-shaped finial, the distinctive hanging chain-and-bell pattern, rosettes in semi-lotus forms and oblong diamond shapes on both pillars suggest a shared notion of ornament that connects the structures, even as the origins of the motifs lay in the Hindu and Muslim architecture of pre-Mughal Gujarat. Thus, even as 17th-century Braj was built on sites made sacred through Krishna’s primordial inhabitance, the

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Plate 3.7 Façade, Man Mandir, Gwalior, ca. 1500. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

discursive framework that structured the optical experience of this space was a Mughal palace complex. The evocation of red sandstone, the stone used to build Akbar’s fort-palaces, within the soteriological space of Braj further insinuates that practices of imagining the pilgrimage centre involved seeing space, not only through a metaphysical order but also as construed through contemporaneous expressions of political power. At the same time, the floriated arch with a scrolling vine and lotuses emerging from the mouth of two chimeric elephant-headed creatures, the aquatic makara, places the structure in a longer history of Vaishnava water cosmologies that emphasised creative abundance associated with plentiful water.39 Yet, unlike the emblematic function of the torana as a passage from the profane to the sacred, the structure on the Vishram Ghat did not allow for a ritualistic transformation that could occur with bodily movement through the portal. Indeed, the torana at the Vishram Ghat does not demarcate spatial distinctions between the sacred and the non-sacred. Instead, the sole function of Bir Singh’s torana, at least for pilgrims visiting the site, was to behold the river as it was framed

Plate 3.8 Pillar, Principal Haramsara (Shabistan-i Iqbal), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

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by the structure and to see the structure as the river framed it. Moving away from the ritualistic architectonics of passage, the torana generated a spatial intersection between sight and site, thus creating a different relationship between water and architecture in an age of unusual droughts. Even today, pilgrims approach the water, but not by passing through the portal. Then, it is in the unfeasibility of an object-frame binary operative here that a possible eco art history emerges – one that joins the frame and the object, architecture and the natural environment. Bir Singh’s own meteoric rise in the early 17th century was, as scholars have suggested, premised on the close political relationship that he shared with Jahangir, the fourth Mughal emperor who ruled from 1605 until his death in 1627.40 Court poetry was marshalled by Bir Singh to further concretise a triangulated relationship between his capital in Orchha, the pilgrimage centre of Braj and imperial Mughal cultures. In Deeds of Bir Singh Dev (Vīrsiṃhdevcarit; 1607), a chronicle composed for the ruler’s accession in 1605, the court poet Keshavdas Mishra thus celebrated the river Betwa’s beauty as it passed through Orchha and flowed into the Yamuna. Using the topography of north-central India to create a connected geography of piety, Mishra’s eulogy was both evocative and explicit. Mishra wrote, The minds of kings are charmed and captivated at its [the Betwa’s] mere sight. When the dark waters of the Betwa brighten up, then this looks like the Yamuna [. . .] This Betwa is an ally of Yamuna, just like Ganga is an ally of Yamuna and this Betwa has, like the Ganga, huge waves and hence she is as beautiful and glorious as the Ganga.41

What emerges from this poetic chronicle is a cartography of connected rivers, each embedded within particularised local imaginaries yet inherently linked through the flow of water from one river system into another. The Betwa flows into the Yamuna, the Yamuna meets the Ganga and, in the process, connects Orchha to Braj and onwards onto the Gangetic plain. At the same time, the emphasis on the physical form of the Betwa as the river that captivates the “minds of kings” by “mere sight” brings to the forefront the role of the ocular in producing an imaginative geography that, in turn, enabled a political praxis. The court poet, Keshavdas Mishra, thus produced a constitutive relationship between geopolitics and vision by underscoring the function of seeing the “beauty” of the turbulent waters of the dark Betwa. Consequently, seeing the river became pivotal in the production of a connected geopolitics that was grounded on comprehending the aesthetics of the natural environment. In effect, both courtly architecture and literary cultures were mobilised by Bir Singh Dev to collocate Vaishnava Braj, Mughal Agra and his own kingdom in central India.

Theology in an ecological frame The emergence of a distinctive ecological aesthetics of seeing flowing water in 17th-century Braj interwove Vaishnava theology and political governance. In many ways, the vision-centric ideation of the Yamuna framed through Bir Singh Dev’s architecture project in Braj had paralleled the emergence of a new theology based on the veneration of natural phenomena. Chaitanya, the

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Vaishnava reformer from Bengal, for instance, found geographic markers in the topography of Braj during his 1514 visit that allowed him to claim the region as the primordial space inhabited by the divine Krishna. Scriptural descriptions of sacred spaces were marshalled as evidence. Thus, a grove on the east bank of the Yamuna became the legendary site of Bhandirvan, where Krishna had brought forth water from the ground. A well at the site is supposed to turn milky even today during the new moon.42 Although the Sanskrit term vraja, literally an enclosure of herdsmen, was frequently used in scriptures to refer to the mythic space where Krishna had spent his youth, Braj, as a geographic space, was invented only in the 16th century. In order to link the spaces of these newly discovered sites to the mythological realm where Krishna dallied with his consort Radha, theologians reiterated that Vajranabha, the great grandson of Krishna, had reclaimed the sacred spaces of Braj by building temples, establishing wells and tanks and inviting Krishna’s adoptive clan to return to the region.43 Chaitanya, then, was not responsible for discovering these sites. Rather, he was responsible for reinstituting worship at sites that had already been revealed by Krishna’s great grandson. The ocularcentric liturgy proposed by theologians in Braj emerged from a reformulation of the theory of rasa (a mode of experiencing aesthetic enjoyment) to articulate a new devotional culture of loving Krishna.44 Theologians delineated four forms through which the Supreme Being appears in this world as embodied: in scriptural texts such as the Ancient Tales of the Lord; through the aural presence of Krishna’s name uttered; in the geographic space of Braj; and in the icon worshipped in the temple.45 In this new form, Vaishnavism articulated a more intense “emotional bhakti” or devotion for Krishna that moved away from earlier orthodox practices of seeing the divine as a warrior god.46 Indeed, according to texts such as Rupa Goswami’s The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu; 1541), the act of seeing Braj had the power to fundamentally transform the one who was seeing.47 By the 16th century, the act of seeing the natural environment of Braj had thus become a key mode of articulating devotion to Krishna. The act of seeing this 233-square kilometre region to attain transcendent bliss also led to the creation of a pilgrimage practice known as the vanayatra, a journey through the forests of Braj, a circumambulation of the sites where Krishna had purportedly spent his youth. The circumambulation of Braj covered an area stretching 11 kilometres to the east and south of modern Mathura and nearly 50 kilometres to the west and the east. Very soon, Chaitanya’s devotees settled at these sites, creating strong pilgrimage centres in Braj. Not only did they build temples to consolidate their sectarian presence in the region but also the disciples of Chaitanya wrote elaborate manuals on pilgrimage practices that would become the foundational texts of this new religious practice. Composed by Narayan Bhatt, a disciple of Chaitanya, the Devotional Enjoyments of Braj (Vrajabhaktivilāsa; 1552), for instance, was one of the most elaborate texts ever written on the sacred geography of Braj.48 The seventh chapter of the text prescribed the route of the journey through the forests of Braj. Arising out of the larger practice of the circumambulation of temples and shrines, the circular journey through Braj allowed pilgrims to gain merit. Given the significance of forests, rivers and lakes in the construction of piety, the site of Braj was thus transformed into an iconic space that embodied the structural and conceptual symbolism of a temple.

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By circumambulating and thus seeing Braj, pilgrims could, at least in theory, gain an aesthetic experience of the cognitive spaces of a worldly Braj. Liturgical texts repeatedly reiterate the celestial beauty of the sacred sites in the region, describing in detail the leaves and fruits of trees that gleam like divine jewels. The corporeal topophilia inherent in such sensuous imaginings of the natural environment drew the devotee into a bodily relation with the environment. That is, by perceptibly experiencing the embodied space of worldly Braj, devotees had the potential to construe an immersive relation between her/his body and ideational space. Thus, the emergence of a new riparian architecture in Braj in the early 17th century brought together contemporaneous Mughal hydrocultures as well as a new practice of seeing the natural environment of Braj that had been articulated in local liturgical texts from the mid-16th century onwards. It is, however, crucial to note that this new architecture emerged only after the droughts of the Little Ice Age devastated the region. Certainly, artists and patrons, before and after the Little Ice Age, in and beyond South Asia, have experimented with visual and architectural form in response to climate change. But, as historians of religion have noted, there was something exceptional about the liturgy of Braj.49 For the emphasis on embodied land – the idea that Krishna lives eternally in Braj in north India and in the transcendent realm – engendered a pilgrimage practice that privileged a sensorial experience of place. Although pilgrimage across sectarian and religious boundaries certainly have a shared sensibility in relationship to sacred land, the liturgy of embodied place articulated in Braj thus makes it an exemplary case study to explore the methodologies of an eco art history. By the 1740s, European visitors, for instance the Jesuit missionary Joseph Tiefenthaler, would write about the prominence of the Vishram Ghat in pilgrimage practices in Braj.50 We see continued patronage at the site well into the 18th and the 19th centuries. Augmenting Bir Singh Dev’s architecture programme, Jai Singh II (1688–1743) of the Kachhwaha dynasty of Amber in contemporary Rajasthan built a temple at the Ghat in 1732. The founder of the city of Jaipur, Jai Singh II had, in fact, visited Braj earlier in 1727 as well, when he had offered his weight in gold at the Ghat.51 The monarch, one assumes, would have used Bir Singh’s 1614 torana to ritually weigh himself, emphasising the sustained importance of this particular edifice. Jai Singh’s patronage at the Ghat could, without a doubt, be situated within a recognised Kachhwaha genealogy of religious patronage in Braj that began with the establishment of the pilgrimage site in the 16th century. The Kachhwaha ruler Bhagwantdas (r. 1573/4–89), for instance, had sponsored monuments in Braj in 1570. Man Singh I (r. 1590–1614), one of Amber’s most illustrious rulers and the highest ranking officer in Akbar’s court, had also built the famed Govind Dev temple in Braj in 1590.52 In 1727, the same year that he had performed the tulabhara ceremony at the Vishram Ghat, Jai Singh II made Govind Dev, the icon of the 1590 temple, the tutelary deity of his kingdom. From then on, Govind Dev was seen as the ruler of the land and the Kachhwaha monarchs merely the icon’s agents. Jai Singh’s royal seal further reiterated the political suzerainty of the icon by stating that the Kachhwahas had taken shelter at the feet of the icon. The 19th century continued to see sustained construction at the Vishram Ghat, including the building of a number of temples and subsidiary toranas. The Maharaja of Banaras, for instance, had performed the tulabhara ceremony in 1891 at the Ghat. Expanding the existing architecture programme, the monarch sponsored a new torana to commemorate his act of royal benevolence.53

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Water as a limited commodity In 17th-century Braj, a distinctive aesthetics of seeing flowing water interwove Vaishnava theology and the ritualised act of beholding the natural environment. At the same time, the deliberate attempt to rehearse intimate associations with Mughal hydrocultures also demands a reengagement with the political ecologies of water in early modern India. As an analysis of the Vishram Ghat’s architecture makes visible, the material culture of water in Braj was closely linked to the Islamicate aesthetics of the Mughal empire, an aesthetic paradigm that Marshall G. S. Hodgson had aptly described in the 1970s as “the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among nonMuslim”.54 More recently, art historians of South Asia have further explored Hodgson’s notion of the Islamicate through analysing non-Muslim art, architecture and sartorial cultures that makes visible shared sensibilities, codes of conduct and aesthetic systems in the subcontinent.55 Indeed, the steps leading to the Yamuna at the Vishram Ghat was built under the patronage of ‘Abd alNabi Khan, the commandant (faujdar) of Mathura under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618– 1707).56 The Mughal officer, who paradoxically emerges as a zealot Muslim in both scholarly texts and local histories, had also sponsored Mathura’s Jami mosque in 1660–61.57 Certainly, ‘Abd alNabi Khan’s concurrent sponsoring of a mosque and patronising the steps to the most important ghat in Mathura should not surprise us. Given the significance of the Vishram Ghat in contemporaneous pilgrimage practices, this may have been an astute political manoeuvre designed to win over Vaishnava constituencies in Braj. That the Mughal commandant’s astute manoeuvre was, indeed, effective becomes evident from a 1782 account that reports a local aphorism in Mathura: “Nabījī tum bin Mathurā sūnī”.58 Without you, Abd al-Nabi Khan, Mathura is dreary. It is precisely this manoeuvre that also leads me to read water as a limited commodity in early modern India. By bringing together two discrete strands in historiography – one centred on the ecological aesthetics of sacrality and the other engaged with political aesthetics – I propose we reconsider the cognitive and political orientation that is critical for an eco art history. Rather than maintaining distinctions between the political, the environmental, the technological and the aesthetic, transversality, as Félix Guattari stresses, may indeed allow us to connect optics, ecological aesthetic and theological philosophy.59 Such a manoeuvre might provide a deeper history of architecture practices, political governance and natural resource management that places water in an intrinsically interconnected field linked through an interweaving of the human and the environmental.

Notes 1 Typically, ghats are platforms with a flight of steps that provide access to water bodies. Often, ghats, especially in pilgrimage sites, are used for ritualised bathing. More frequently, however, ghats are built to provide access to water for domestic use. See Julia A. B. Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002. 2 David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River in Northern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, p. 203.

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3 Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 4 See especially, Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Others Writers, London: J. Johnson, 1798. Recent art historical engagements include Alan C. Braddock and Renée Ater, ‘Art in the Anthropocene’, American Art, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 2–8; James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014 and T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. 5 While there has been some debate regarding the precise beginning of the Anthropocene, it is now accepted that James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784 was the crucial tipping point. This argument was first made by the Nobel Laureate chemist Paul J. Crutzen and a marine science specialist Eugene F. Stoermer. For a critical analysis, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. 6 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, p. 213. 7 Hubert H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past and Future, vol. 2, Climatic History and the Future, London: Methuen and Company, 1977, p. 104. 8 Sam White, ‘Climate Change in Global Environmental History’, in John McNeill and Erin Maulden (eds.), A Companion to Global Environmental History, London: Blackwell, 2012, p. 401. 9 John R. McNeill, ‘Envisioning an Ecological Atlantic, 1500–1850’, Nova Acta Leopoldina, vol. 114, no. 390, 2013, p. 23. 10 The years between 1613–15, 1630–2, 1658–60 and 1685–7 saw unprecedented droughts of great intensity in South Asia. See Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707, 3rd ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 112–20. 11 Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, vol. 2, London: Hakluyt Society, 1847, p. 44. 12 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe, vol. 2, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. For recent scholarship on the Little Ice Age, see Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850, New York: Basic Books, 2000; Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern, 2 vols. London: Routledge, 2004; Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; and Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 13 The chapter is drawn from my recent book on artistic and architecture practices in Braj during the Little Ice Age. See Sugata Ray, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 14 Poonam Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, p. 51. 15 Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston as The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999, pp. 196–7. 16 ‘Joseph Salbank at Agra to the East India Company in London’, 22 November 1617; India Office Records and Private Papers, The British Library, London, IOR/E/3/5 ff 196–7. 17 Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies, p. 27. 18 Catherine B. Asher, The New Cambridge History of India, I: 4 the Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 118. 19 For Jahangir’s architecture projects, see Ibid.

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20 Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, p. 162. An ell is approximately 18 inches, representing the length of a man’s arm from elbow to middle finger. 21 The transversal relationality that connects diverse ecologies is discussed in Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone Press, 2000, p. 43. 22 See David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; John S. Hawley, At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; and Barbara A. Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Krṣṇa Bhakti, New York: Routledge, 2015, for the history of the development of Krishna worship in early modern Braj. 23 The 16th-century Glories of Mathura (Mathurā Māhātmya), attributed to Rupa Goswami, refers to a sculpture of Surya being worshipped beside the Yamuna at Mathura, possibly in the vicinity of the Ghat. Rupa Goswami (attr.), Mathurā Māhātmya, trans. by Bhumipata Dasa as Śri Mathurā Māhātmya: The Glories of the Mathurā-Maṇḍala, Vrindavan: Rasbihari Lal & Sons, n.d., p. 87. 24 Hariray, Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā, Nathdwara: Vidyavibhag Mandir Mandal, 1986, pp. 10–11. For other versions of the narrative, see Alan W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1987, p. 135. 25 In the early decades of the 16th century, the two major routes for the transport of goods between Bengal and the coast of Gujarat was through Mathura by both river and land and by the Kalpi-ErachhChanderi route. K. K. Trivedi, ‘The Emergence of Agra as a Capital and a City: A Note on Its Spatial and Historical Background during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 37, no. 2, 1994, p. 162. 26 Responsible for establishing the Pushtimarg sect after a pilgrimage to Braj, Vallabha would play a significant role in the sweeping spread of the sect in North and West India. Chaitanya, a Vaishnava reformer from Bengal, had established the Gaudiya Vaishnava sect. See Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhācārya, Faridabad: Thomson Press, 1976 and Joseph T. O’Connell, Religious Movements and Social Structures: The Case of Chaitanya’s Vaiṣṇavas in Bengal, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993. 27 See especially the madhya līlā of Krishnadasa Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, trans. by Edward C. Dimock Jr. as Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 28 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Book X, trans. by Edwin F. Bryant as Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa Book X), London: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 201. 29 Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 130. 30 Parul P. Dhar, The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2010, p. 1. 31 The torana was as frequently used as a motif in architecture. By the mid-16th century, the torana as a motif was used on the façade of the Sati Burj in Mathura. 32 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. and ed. by Rocco Sinisgalli, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. For a critical reading of Alberti, see Simeon K. Heninger Jr., The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, Chapter 5. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Parergon’, trans. by Craig Owens, October, vol. 9, 1979, p. 18. For art historical engagements with the frame, see essays in Paul Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 34 Bhoja (attr.), Samarāṅganasūtradhāra, revised and ed. by Vasudeva S. Agrawala as Samarāṅgana-Sūtradhāra of Mahārājadhirāja Bhoja, the Parmāra Ruler of Dhārā, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, No. 25, Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1966, Chapter 46.

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35 ‘Inayat Khan, Shāhjahānnāma, ed. and completed by Wayne E. Begley and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai as The Shah Jahan Nama of ‘Inayat Khan: An Abridged History of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, Compiled by His Royal Librarian, the Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Translation of A. R. Fuller, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 28. 36 While scholars are still unsure about the function of this particular structure, it is generally assumed that the kiosk, popularly known as the Astrologer’s Seat, served as a space for Akbar to consult mystics and astrologers. See Michael Brand and Glen D. Lowry (eds.), Fatehpur-Sikri: A Sourcebook, Cambridge, MA: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985, p. 190. Visiting Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri in the 1580s, the Portuguese Jesuit priest Antonio Monseratte, however, notes that the emperor publicly distributed copper coins from the palace courtyard suggesting that the kiosk was indeed used for the charitable distribution of wealth. Antonio Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J. on his Journey to the Court of Akbar, trans. by J. S. Hoyland, London: Oxford University Press, 1922, p. 208. 37 See Dhar, The Toraṇa for torana typologies. 38 Artisans trained in Gujarat worked on Shaikh Salim’s 1580–81 tomb in Fatehpur Sikri. Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, p. 56. 39 For the history of the motif, see Lakshman Ranasinghe, ‘The Evolution and Significance of the Makara Torana’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, vol. 36, 1991/1992, pp. 132–45. 40 For the history of Bir Singh Dev’s architecture patronage, see Edward L. Rothfarb, Orchha and Beyond: Design at the Court of Raja Bir Singh Dev Bundela, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2012. 41 Cited in ibid., p. 41. For the history of the text, see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 46–54. 42 Entwistle, Braj, p. 298. 43 Ibid., p. 60. 44 For the philosophical reformulation of rasa in the 16th century, see Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment, pp. 86–91. 45 Ibid., p. 96. 46 Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 36. 47 Rupa Goswami, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, trans. by David L. Haberman as The Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2003, p. 22. 48 Narayan Bhatt, Vrajabhaktivilāsa, trans. by Krishnadas Baba, Kusum Sarovar: Krishnadas Baba, 1951. 49 Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation and Hawley, At Play with Krishna. 50 Joseph Tieffenthaler, Des Pater Joseph Tieffenthaler’s Historisch-geographische Beschreibung von Hindustan, trans. by Johann Bernoulli, Berlin: ben dem Herausgegeber, 1785, p. 143. 51 Entwistle, Braj, p. 190. 52 For the patronage of Man Singh I, see Catherine B. Asher, ‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage’, in Barbara S. Miller (ed.), The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 183–201. 53 The Maharaja of Banaras’ construction is recorded in an inscription at the Ghat. 54 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 59. 55 See, for instance, Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 1996, pp. 851–80. 56 Sujan Rai Bhandari, Khulāsat al-Tawārīkh, trans. by Shahbaz Amil as Khulasat-ut-Twarik of Sujan Rai Bhandari, New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 2006, p. 34.

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57 See, for instance, Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib Based on Original Sources, London: Longmans Green, 1920 and Frederic S. Growse, Mathurá: A District Memoir, Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1874, among others. 58 Murtaza Husain Bilgrami, Ḥadīqatu’l Aqālīm, Lucknow: Nawal Kishor, 1879, p. 170. 59 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 43.

References Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. and ed. by Rocco Sinisgalli, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Asher, Catherine B., The New Cambridge History of India, I: 4 the Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———, ‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage’, in Barbara S. Miller (ed.), The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 183–201. Bala, Poonam, Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Barz, Richard, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhācārya, Faridabad: Thomson Press, 1976. Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Book X, trans. by Edwin F. Bryant as Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa Book X), London: Penguin Books, 2003. Bhandari, Sujan Rai, Khulāsat al-Tawārīkh, trans. by Shahbaz Amil as Khulasat-ut-Twarik of Sujan Rai Bhandari, New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 2006. Bhatt, Narayan, Vrajabhaktivilāsa, trans. by Krishnadas Baba, Kusum Sarovar: Krishnadas Baba, 1951. Bhoja (attr.), Samarāṅganasūtradhāra, ed. by Vasudeva S. Agrawala as Samarāṅgana-Sūtradhāra of Mahārājadhirāja Bhoja, the Parmāra Ruler of Dhārā, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, No. 25, Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1966. Bilgrami, Murtaza Husain, Ḥadīqatu’l Aqālīm, Lucknow: Nawal Kishor, 1879. Blake, Stephen P., Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Braddock, Alan C. and Renée Ater, ‘Art in the Anthropocene’, American Art, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 2–8. Brand, Michael and Glenn D. Lowry (eds.), Fatehpur-Sikri: A Sourcebook, Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1985. Braudel, Fernand, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. Busch, Allison, Poetry of Kings: Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Enquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. Demos, T. J., Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Parergon’, trans. by Craig Owens, October, vol. 9, Summer 1979, pp. 3–41. Dhar, Parul P., The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2010. Duro, Paul (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Entwistle, Alan W., Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1987. Fagan, Brian, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850, New York: Basic Books, 2000. Goswami, Rupa, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, trans. by David L. Haberman as The Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2003.

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——— (attr.), Mathurā Māhātmya, trans. by Bhumipata Dasa as Śri Mathurā Māhātmya: The Glories of the Mathurā-Maṇḍala, Vrindavan: Rasbihari Lal & Sons, n.d. Grove, Jean M., Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern, 2 vols., London: Routledge, 2004. Growse, Frederic S., Mathurá: A District Memoir, Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1874. Guattari, Félix, The Three Ecologies, trans. by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone Press, 2000. Haberman, David L., Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River in Northern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Habib, Irfan, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707, 3rd ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardy, Friedhelm, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hariray, Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā, Nathdwara: Vidyavibhag Mandir Mandal, 1986. Hawley, John S., At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Hegewald, Julia A. B., Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002. Heninger, Jr., Simeon K., The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Holdrege, Barbara A., Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Krṣṇa Bhakti, London: Routledge, 2015. Jahangir, Nuruddin Muhammad, Jahāngīrnāma, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston as The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999. Kaviraja, Krishnadasa, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, trans. by Edward C. Dimock, Jr. as Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Khan, ‘Inayat, Shāhjahānnāma, ed. and completed by Wayne E. Begley and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai as The Shah Jahan Nama of ‘Inayat Khan: An Abridged History of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, Compiled by His Royal Librarian, the Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Translation of A. R. Fuller, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kolff, Dirk H. A., Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Malthus, Thomas R., An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Others Writers, London: J. Johnson, 1798. McNeill, John R., ‘Envisioning an Ecological Atlantic, 1500–1850’, Nova Acta Leopoldina, vol. 114, no. 390, 2013, pp. 21–33. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 213–23. Monserrate, Antonio, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J. on his Journey to the Court of Akbar, trans. by J. S. Hoyland, London: Oxford University Press, 1922. Mundy, Peter, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, vol. 2, London: Hakluyt Society, 1847.

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Nisbet, James, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. O’Connell, Joseph T., Religious Movements and Social Structures: The Case of Chaitanya’s Vaiṣṇavas in Bengal, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993. Parker, Geoffrey, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Ranasinghe, Lakshman, ‘The Evolution and Significance of the Makara Torana’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, vol. 36, 1991/1992, pp. 132–45. Ray, Sugata, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Rothfarb, Edward L., Orchha and Beyond: Design at the Court of Raja Bir Singh Dev Bundela, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2012. Sarkar, Jadunath, History of Aurangzib Based on Original Sources, London: Longmans Green, 1920. Tieffenthaler, Joseph, Des Pater Joseph Tieffenthaler’s Historisch-geographische Beschreibung von Hindustan, trans. by Johann Bernoulli, Berlin: ben dem Herausgegeber, 1785. Trivedi, K. K., ‘The Emergence of Agra as a Capital and a City: A Note on Its Spatial and Historical Background during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 37, no. 2, 1994, pp. 147–68. Wagoner, Phillip B., ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 1996, pp. 851–80. White, Sam, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———, ‘Climate Change in Global Environmental History’, in John McNeill and Erin Maulden (eds.), A Companion to Global Environmental History, London: Blackwell, 2012, pp. 394–410.

4 Lakes within lake-palaces A material history of pleasure in 18th-century India Dipti Khera* Building a lake-palace for pleasure Udaipur, established as the Mewar court’s capital around 1559, registers as a city of lakes within the dry desert landscape of north-western India.1 Contemporary visitors to the Jagniwas lake-palace set within Udaipur’s Lake Pichola arrive in a motorised boat to a historic site transformed as the Taj Lake Palace hotel, yet the sunlight dancing over water delights just as it would have when the lake-palace was completed in 1746 (Plate 4.1).2 One feels the calm of moving along with the cool breeze that blows from the lake bank to the lake-palace. Colourful squares of glass set within projecting windows punctuate the whiteness of the lake-palace walls. Once inside the Jagniwas, unique water pools and glass and mirror inlay invite us to touch and view vertical and horizontal surfaces while fragrant air wafts from the gardens and fountains play in the courtyards. The lake waters are visible from the windows and broad terraces. Even in the greatly adapted luxurious hotel interiors, where divisions often restrict the flow of air, light and sound, the presence of the surrounding lake constantly inflects the moist feel and floral scent of the gentle breeze inside the lake-palace. Taking its cue from such sensorial experiences, this chapter explores historical mediations on the sensual pleasures of lake-palaces. Paintings and poetry, architecture and setting and political networks and personal friendships coalesce around Jagniwas. The locally charged imaginings present the Jagniwas as a powerful ideational and material place, and as an exceptional lake-palace at the time of its establishment. Historical makers and imaginers invited courtly men and women to deeply experience the pleasure and power of the lake-palace. The channelling of water into courtyards to create an elaborate reservoir in Jagniwas reveals that both the water itself and the imaginary of beautiful lakes played a key material and metaphorical role in the design of the lakepalace. Like historical poetry that connected water to ideals of kingship, architects and artists, too, sought to emphasise its efficacious potential as a sensory medium for enticing courtly companions. Seen in this light, Jagniwas emerges as a site that was designed to enchant and effect its mid-18th-century world through an aesthetic of delight and wonder. Historians have generally turned to two accounts to explain Jagniwas: the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829) written by Rajasthan’s British political agent James Tod and paintings by mid-18th-century Udaipur painters.3 In Tod’s account, the backdrop of Udaipur’s landscape with lakes, palaces and “fairy-islands” dominates as a place-marker distinct from the ruins of other

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Plate 4.1 Jagniwas lake-palace (today known as the Taj Lake Palace hotel, Lake Pichola, Udaipur), inau-

gurated 20 January 1746. Source: Photograph © Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, Media Office, Eternal Mewar, the City Palace, Udaipur

towns.4 An often-quoted passage describes the sensuous materiality of the lake-palace and the scented lakes: [. . .] Nothing but marble enters into their composition; columns, baths, reservoirs, fountains, all are of this material, often inlaid with mosaics, and the uniformity pleasingly diversified by the light passing through glass of every hue. . . . Here they listened to the tales of the bard, and slept off their noonday opiate amidst the cool breezes of the lake, wafting delicious odours from myriads of the lotus-flower which covered the surface of the waters. [. . .] [T]he Seesodia princes and chieftains recreate[d] during two generations, exchanging the din of arms for voluptuous inactivity.5

The second archive consists of court paintings that depict the interior worlds of the Jagniwas lake-palace (Plate 4.2). Udaipur court artists Sukha and Syaji picture Jagat Singh II (r. 1734–51) at Jagniwas: he listens to music, observes the dance of the women encircling Krishna and strolls the gardens, experiencing sensual delights with his female companions. The inscription on the painting’s verso describes it as a picture (pano) of the likeness (surat) of Jagat Singh and of the bhava, the mood or feel of Jagniwas (jaganivasarobhava), associating royal portraiture with pleasure and allying the fine arts through collective mood. Depictions of pleasurable parties can seem deceptively simple and scholarship, grounded in 19thcentury historical accounts, has generally viewed such 18th-century paintings as evidence of courtly decadence. While historians of architecture cite such paintings as documentary proof of the spatial history of lake-palaces, histories of Indian painting draw upon Tod’s writings to describe the pleasurable parties depicted in 18th-century paintings.6 Interpretations of these paintings, akin to aesthetic treatises, as Katherine B. Schofield emphasises, raise a theoretical

Plate 4.2 Sukha and Syaji, Maharana Jagat Singh II and His Queens at

Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, 112.8 × 57.6 cm. Source: Photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Lent by Sir Howard Hodgkin, Acc. No. LI 118.24

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problem related to both the shadows of Orientalist and post-Enlightenment narratives and to how we interpret and translate literary terms that relate joy and enjoyment to kingly ethics within the rubric of “merely pleasure”.7 We elicit a different view of courtly pleasure from the 18th-century poetry of the Jagvilasa.8 The Udaipur court poet Nandram composed the vilasa or the pleasures of the lake-palace in this 405-verse-long poem to commemorate the 3-day inauguration ceremony and celebration of Jagniwas that commenced on 20 January 1746. Nandram, like other Sanskrit and Braj poets writing historical-literary poetry, classicises pleasure by incorporating aesthetic topoi of kingly praise, such as the sikh-nakh, head-to-toe description and the nagaravarnana, emotive descriptions of beautiful cities and plentiful settings that call upon ideal and real places alike.9 He not only describes the many sensual pleasures of the party but also the king’s stupendous gift giving, including the names of nobles and poets who received the gifts and descriptions of the horses, gems, gold and robes that they received. Nandram compares the king’s pace of giving gifts to the pace at which the water flows in the lakes of Udaipur. While engaging with broader aesthetic ideas and contemporary politics, the historical poetry of Jagvilasa invokes affective metaphors of praise particular to the local topographical environs.10 Jagvilasa may be thus translated as “Jagat Singh’s delights” or the “pleasures offered by Jagniwas” or the “jaga of vilasa”, the “world of pleasure”, that the poet presents as an idealisation of real gatherings.11 The particulars of a joyful sensorium in mid-18th-century Udaipur were rooted in an analytic of pleasure performed in India’s earlier courtly worlds. Kama, which literally means pleasure or desire, was not an isolated practice of sex, but the making of an aesthetically encoded world of the eponymous Hindu god of love and of the urbane man, a rasika, the ideal courtly connoisseur of this “kama world” on earth. A “properly lived worldly” life by kings included “proper enjoyments” of material things like wines, garlands and jewellery.12 Consumption likewise refined and defined men in courtly Sultanate and imperial Mughal circles, as Persian conduct manuals, such as the Nimatnamah and Mirzanamah advised.13 Drawing upon the text and context of these manuals, Emma J. Flatt underscores that friends and associates performed an act of “sitting together” when they shared perfumes, foods and scented spaces in 15th-century Mandu and other Deccani courts.14 Like objects, music and poetry, olfactory substances, equally shaped convivial settings which were central for maintaining political authority. The education of a mirza, the cultivated connoisseur, enlists the education of the rasika of Sanskritic worlds, but also, as Rosalind O’Hanlon argues, speaks specifically to the emergence of new nobility by the late 17th century.15 Elite men strived to cultivate all five senses, bodily gestures and emotions to fashion themselves as powerful statesmen and ethical selves. The representations of Jagat Singh II within Jagniwas reveal the connoisseur-king and his court enacting such historically contingent aesthetic ideals to form the Udaipur political community.16 The shifting political landscape after the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 engendered a new pressure on regional courts to keep friends loyal.17 The alliances between the Udaipur, Amber and Jodhpur rulers in 1708 and 1734 reflected both renewed tensions over regional territories and the need to resist Maratha forces, who were looking to expand their authority after the Mughals.18 The formation of political communities in Udaipur increasingly depended on the kings’ relations with other regional kings, as well as their ties to elites who populated the daily courts.19 In this political climate, Jagniwas was established as a captivating space that seamlessly integrated the pleasures and politics of diplomacy.

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Design of and desire for lake-palaces The building of Jagniwas was part of a wider phenomenon in mid-18th-century architectural, artistic and political practice. This chapter examines one aspect of a larger story: the shift in the place of pleasure and leisure from lands to lakes, from gardens to lake-palaces. Contemporary architects and historians, for their part, have analysed buildings and landscapes associated with leisure, yet have not fully explored the material role of water in creating immersive spatial experiences for collective audiences.20 The existence of gardens, fountains and pools within courtly and funerary complexes highlights the importance of water and connects design paradigms across time and space. Similarly, historical accounts like that of the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s descriptions of Mandu’s palaces and the imperial party’s journeys to the lakes and gardens of Srinagar and Kashmir in the emperor’s memoirs, the Jahangirnama (ca. 1605–24), display the acute attention he paid to sensory pleasure, including the sounds and sights of water-related elements.21 Water channels demarcate platforms and pavilions in Akbar’s fort capital in Fatehpur Sikri (ca. 1571–85), lotus-shaped water pools mark Babur’s garden, Bagh-i-Nilufar, in Dholpur (ca. 1527–30), artificial lakes surround buildings such as the Jahaz Mahal in Mandu (late-15th century), and intimate settings around orchards as well as underground water channels created within palatial and funerary complexes in Bidar, Gulbarga and Vijayanagara in the Deccan, in addition to Firozshah Kotla and Hauz Khaz in the north point to Sultanate-period examples.22 The site of lake waters connects the Jagniwas not only to older lake-palaces like the Jagmandir (island’s circular chamber of the Gol Mahal, ca. 1620–28) and the Mohanmandir (1628–52) built in Udaipur’s Lake Pichola but also to other 18th-century lake-palaces, such as the Jal Mahal (ca. 1734) in Jaipur and Sukh Mahal (1776) in Bundi.23 Patrons and planners thus exploited the topography of local environs, creating a sensorially bounded courtly space, away from the main palatial quarters.24 Nandram’s Jagvilasa reveals Jagat Singh II’s desire to build the most impressive lake-palace in mid-18th-century Udaipur, in order to foster affective bonds with his friends and to assert authority over the material exchange of gifts, food and drink.25 Its introductory cantos highlight the king’s enthralled reaction to the lake-palace’s prospective location.26 It compares the proposed location of Jagniwas to that of the earlier Jagmandir lake-palace on Lake Pichola, where the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is remembered for building works with good thinking (vivek) and knowledge of prescribed ways (suvidhi) of architecture.27 Nandram’s recalling of Jagmandir’s history may suggest 17thcentury Mewar-Mughal competition or more likely a popular lore, which claimed that Jagat Singh II decided to build the Jagniwas lake-palace because his father, Sangram Singh (r. 1710–34), denied him permission to visit the Jagmandir.28 The poet notes that Jagat Singh II also called upon his court noble and brother-in-law, Thakur Sirdar Singh, who, like Shah Jahan, was singled out for his discerning knowledge of architecture, and directed to spearhead the building project.29 When viewed from the outside, rooftop pavilions, corner terraces and projecting windows define the elevation and skyline of Jagniwas. As one enters inside the lake-palace and senses the scents, sounds and sunlight, open-to-sky courtyards envelop and orient the visitor. Both the court poet Nandram and the court’s scribes who recorded the daily activities, excursions and meetings of importance within official dairies (haqiqat bahida) convey the sequence in which the courtly party of the later king Bhim Singh (r. 1778–1828) visits the spaces of the Jagniwas, such as the Dhola

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Mahal, Khush Mahal, Phul Mahal and Bado Mahal.30 While some of these rooms and courtyards have been adapted for reuse as a hotel, the uniqueness of the enclosed pillared hall of the Bado Mahal on the northern side of the adjoining courtyard with the lotus-themed reservoir is discernable even today (see Plate 4.13). The use of bado in the name of the palace suggests both a garden (badi) and a large palace. Its projecting windows and octagonal corner pavilions overlooking the lake are prominently visible while approaching the Jagniwas lake-palace’s main entrance.31 In interpreting the design choices made by Jagniwas’ builders and architects, especially in the central lotus-themed reservoir, along with the compositional choices poets and painters made in mediating the historical experience of Jagniwas, the role water played in the making of joyful sensoriums is revealed.32 If gardens and assemblies emerge as significant heterotopias in the courts of Mughal India – spaces shaped by real practices and ideal imaginaries – then Udaipur’s architects and craftsmen point towards expanding this conception to include the agency of makers and the material contingency of local environments.33 The aesthetic deployment of the most imperative element of the dry surroundings in northwestern India – water – to make pleasurable places exceptional suggests novel modes of imagining and claiming local belonging.34 Udaipur painters in the 18th century depicted lavish gatherings at lake-palaces, emphasising the critical work lake waters performed in bounding a palace and bonding a courtly community. The sounds, sights and scents of pools and lakes provided a shared, persistent sensory experience. The concluding section of this chapter unravels the use of the medium of water in lake-palace interiors and the adoption of poetic metaphors associated with pouring rains and oceans of joy to characterise these spaces. Each of these artistic choices participates in broader and deeper genealogies within landscape design and literature on its own terms. Yet, pursuing poetry, painting, architecture, urban topography and historical circumstance of the mid-18th century at once allows us to ask how water-filled mediations alert us to artistic and material innovations in the making and ontological conception of a lake-palace. Ascribing lake waters as an affective medium beyond simple site conditions, initiates a conversation on the key role premodern materialities and sensorial pleasures played in the efficacy of art.35 While recognising semiotic affinities between lotus as a motif that signified beautiful lakes and rivers, Jagniwas’ creative makers establish new conceptual and aesthetic deliberations in their water-filled imaginaries.36 The engagement with water as a constitutive metaphor to narrate the poetry of pleasure, as an object of description to compose joyful intimacies in paintings and as material to design the delightful interiors of a lake-palace invokes a space and metahistory shaped by lake waters. Both the Jagniwas lake-palace and lake waters became what Alfred Gell called “art objects”, not only for their cultural or aesthetic value, but also mainly for their role as components in the “technology of enchantment”.37 Their ability and potentiality to charm us into a world of pleasure appears itself established by Udaipur citizens’ enchantment with plentiful and scented lakes.

Looking at lakes Along with besotted lovers, lightning streaks thundering clouds, crying peacocks, roaring lions and rutting elephants, painters depict lotus-filled lakes and streams coursing with rainwater as omnipresent aesthetic spaces. The poetic genres of the ragamala (a garland of musical

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compositions) and the barah-masa (a heroine’s lament for her absent lover divided into descriptions of the 12 months) were paramount to the contemplation of the moods of peoples, places, flora and fauna during the rainy seasons (of bhadon, August and September, and savana, July and August).38 Generating emotions and moods (bhava) in visual and literary arts was foundational to the theory of Indian aesthetics, yet its connection with pictorial practice was hardly straightforward.39 No less than the artworks from any other regions in India, Udaipur court painters keenly imagined the bhava of poetic places. A ca. 1665 painting shows a poet reciting poetry to a lady, perhaps Krishna’s consort Radha, under a monsoon sky. The poem was likely about love (Plate 4.3). The pink lotuses bloom in the dark blue lake, the trees sway slightly and lines of rain that fall from a sky painted with watery clouds and lightning appear to cool the red heat of the summer and separation that engulfs Radha. Even in the absence of a literary verse, it compels us to imagine the two contrasting atmospheres and, by implication, the pain of longing and the anticipation of union. Udaipur painters in the 18th century overwhelmingly turned to picturing not only idealised lake imaginaries but also the mood of lakes and lake-palaces in their urban vicinity.40

Plate 4.3 Artist unknown, The Poet Approaches Radha under a Monsoon Sky, Udaipur, ca.

1665. Opaque watercolour on paper, 19.3 × 24.4 cm. Source: Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of John Goelet, Acc. No. 66.118

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A ca. 1732 painted scroll depicting a genealogical history of Mewar kings reveals that the creation of lakes was central to the conception of Udaipur as the court’s new capital (Plate 4.4).41 A landscape of dams and winding channels circulate silvery water into mountain-rimmed lakes. Scroll painters highlight Udaipur’s topography and status as a city built in a valley, not a fort on a hilltop like Chittorgarh, the former capital of the Mewar court.42 Maharana Udai Singh II (r. 1537–72) is framed in the window of lakeshore palace. Its three domes likely refer to the Rai Aangan courtyard, which was one of the earliest palatial spaces built in ca. 1559 by Udai Singh II. A scribe notes the Mewar court’s settlement in Udaipur city on the boundary wall of the depicted courtyard.43 Vignettes of ordinary life – temples with swaying red flags, marching processions of men on horses and on foot and modest homes with thatched roofs amidst herdsmen and cows – suggest settlement on the banks of the lakes. An area of around 16 kilometres’ radius on the Girwa plain became the site of Udaipur, offering secure terrain that would also allow for the creation of large reservoirs for water in the Arravalli hills. In contrast, the tract of the Debari valley where Udai Singh II initially decided to relocate

Plate 4.4 Artist unknown, vignette represents Maharana Udai Singh II’s development of lakes and palaces in Udaipur, Mewar court’s new capital, part of scroll painting depicting the history of the rulers of Mewar, Udaipur, 1732. Opaque watercolour on paper, ca. 45 cm wide. Source: Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, Acc. No. 07965:2/(IS)

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Mewar’s capital in 1553 lacked a perennial source of water.44 Thus, royal employees tracked depressions and located small lakes in mountain passes.45 The hills on the west near Lake Pichola provided a natural barrier and the ruler created Udai Sagar between 1559 and 1564 for security on the eastern frontier. The expanse of land on the northeast was available for settlement and cultivation and Udai Singh’s personnel created a tank called Dudh Talai on the nearby mountain peak of Machla Magra as a watchtower for invading armies.46 The creation of lakes was a hedge against droughts. The orientation of the undulating topography of the region restricted access to perennial rivers and necessitated the construction of water tanks and lakes. The rulers of Mewar realised that their power and control over land and people was ultimately tied to the sustenance of life and livelihoods. From the 16th century onwards, historical-literary sources note Udaipur’s man-made lakes (Pichola, Udai Sagar, Fateh Sagar, Rup Sagar, Rang Sagar, Jana Sagar, to name a few) dams (bund or pal), platforms (ghat) and stepwells (baori).47 Maharana Raj Singh I (r. 1652–80), for instance, commissioned Rajsamand Lake in 1680, 64 kilometres north of Udaipur, to further mitigate drought conditions.48 The court poet Ranchoda Bhatta composed the Rajprasasti, a Sanskrit poem inscribed on 25 stone slabs along the shores of the lake with a description of its 7-day consecration ceremony and an extensive genealogy of Mewar kings.49 The Jagvilasa resembles the Rajprasasti in that it commemorates the inauguration of architecture associated with lakes. But, instead of relating the Udaipur court to the past, it focuses on the beauty of the court and praise for the city in the present.50 A ca. 1715–20 portrait of Sangram Singh demonstrates how Udaipur painters mediated their admiration of Udaipur’s lakes and hills (Plate 4.5).51 In the brightly painted lower register that represents the city by the lakeside, women teem around the goddess Gauri in the temple and men, women and children line the streets to view the procession of the goddess. In the dark-hued upper register, three images of the king and his courtiers on a royal boat denote their movement through the lake. The artist employs chiaroscuro to render the night view of the lake and the town on its opposite shore. Gold paint illuminates fireworks and a white-coloured wash conveys an effect of lit-up wall surfaces. These bright areas draw our gaze to the king’s barge and to the painter’s careful rendering of lakeside temples, stables accommodating elephants, horses and camels and smaller houses with unassuming tiled roofs. Like the king, the courtly entourage and ordinary citizens, we look from up close and from far away to take in the feeling of the lakeside setting and the joyous mood of the festivities on display.

Locating pleasures: from lands to lakes, from gardens to lake-palaces In early modern paintings, memoirs, chronicles and poems, Mughal, Deccani and Rajput gardens were paramount aesthetic spaces where rulers, intellectuals and connoisseurs assembled and bonded over material delights and conversations on poetry, philosophy and arts.52 The joys of a springtime landscape came into full bloom in Vasanta-vilasa (1451), an 11-metre-long cotton scroll painted in Gujarat, where the figure of Kama, the god of desire and love, presides over an array of intertwining ideal men (nayaka) and women (nayika) frolicking within flowering and fruit bearing trees.53 A folio from a Ramayana painted in Udaipur (1648–52) shows Rama extolling the gardens of Ayodhya to Sita (Plate 4.6). The author Valmiki tells us that the highly ethical

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Plate 4.5 Artist unknown, Maharana Sangram Singh II at the Gangaur Boat Procession, Udaipur, ca. 1715–20.

Gouache on paper, 78.7 × 78.74 cm. Source: Photograph © Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, Museum Archives of the Maharanas of Mewar, Udaipur, Acc. No. 2012.19.0014_R

god-king Rama engaged in enjoyment (sukha) after having completed his kingly duties (dharma). The painter’s imaginary sought to overjoy the senses: a coloured courtly building, a blooming garden, a flowing fountain, a deer and a peacock with transfixed gazes, a group of attendants who offer betel leaves and musicians who wait upon the audience. In contrast to the Vasanta-vilasa

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Plate 4.6 Artist unknown, Rama Enjoying the Gardens of Ayodhya with Sita, from the Jagat Singh

Ramayana, Udaipur, 1648–52. Gouache on paper, 23 × 39.9 cm. Source: Photograph © the British Library Board, London, Acc. No. Add. MS 15297(2), f.70r

scroll and the Ramayana folio, a ca. 1708–10 painting depicts the Udaipur king Amar Singh II playing the springtime festival of colours with his 16 nobles, the scribes identify the depicted idealised lush green garden as a particular place: the garden (badi) of “Sarabat bilasa”, named after the pleasures of sweet drinks prepared from flowers.54 Just like Nandram’s Jagvilasa, the nomenclature of gardens often incorporated words like bilasa, vilasa and sukha, emphasising their pleasurable environments. Similarly, the names of spaces complete with pavilions, gardens and pools referenced the joy (khushi) they brought to the hearts (dil). We know of the creation of spaces named Dilkhush Mahal and Khush Mahal in the Jagniwas lake-palace. The first setting of vilasa in the Jagvilasa, too, is a garden-palace. The Baadi Mahal, as the gardenpalace is popularly called today, is located in the main royal quarters on the lake bank and includes a courtyard with a large raised square pool in the centre. Nestled amidst towering trees and surrounded by colonnaded spaces, it alludes to earlier Mughal and Rajput gardens (Plate 4.7).55 The cross-axial layout would not necessarily have been read as a vision of Islamic paradise. The garden-palace’s original name “Shivprasana Amar Vilas Mahal” is allied metaphorically with the joys (prasana) of the god Shiva’s abode, indicating that courtly patrons and architects associated

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Plate 4.7 Shivprasana Amar Vilas Mahal (today known as the Baadi Mahal), City Palace

Museum, Udaipur, Amar Singh II period (r. 1698–1710). Source: Photograph © Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, Media Office, Eternal Mewar, the City Palace, Udaipur

it with an ideal divine landscape.56 Nandram equates the high mountains of Mount Kailasa, Shiva’s abode, with the Shivprasana Amar Vilas Mahal’s garden-palace since it was situated at the highest point in the hilly city. He imagines Jagat Singh getting dressed, arriving at his throne, praying to various deities, listening to devotional songs and scriptures and giving charity on the day of Jagniwas’ inauguration. The poet interweaves pleasures with kingly duties, describing how the joy (sukha) felt from looking at paintings and tasting food leads to the experience of being charmed in and by the garden-palace setting itself.57 Painting seems to have inaugurated the representation of localised spaces of pleasure; the city’s poets followed suit.58 Udaipur court painters often represented Amar Singh II within garden spaces, wherein visual compositions and textual inscriptions worked together to evoke metaphorical and actual gardens.59 Later, Sangram Singh’s painters also built upon these innovations, focusing on the city’s lakefront and lake pavilions. One of the most striking uses of a palace pavilion by the lakeside appears in a portrait depicting Sangram Singh and the Jaipur ruler Jai Singh in a meeting that led to their three-way alliance with the court of Jodhpur (Plate 4.8).60 The scribe identifies the symmetrical setting on the back of the painting as the Jagmandir’s windowed

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Plate 4.8 Jairam (attributed), Maharana Sangram Singh and

Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh enjoying delicacies at Jagmandir, ca. 1728. Gouache on paper, 50.2 × 43.1 cm. Source: Photograph © private collection

pavilion of the palace shaped from 12 stones (barah pathar ka mahal). Seen in a diplomatic context, the choice of the painter, thought to be the Udaipur artist Jairam, to employ the spatial setting of the lake-palace is significant. A night sky consisting of a central moon and stars painted in a uniform pattern echoes the vision of idealised moonlit landscapes seen within painted leaves of devotional manuscripts; it lends iconicity to this picture depicting a crucial meeting of allies.61 The kings and their companions partake in the collective enjoyment of food and wine in Jagmandir. Sumptuous details of the architecture, the textiles seen in royal attire and the delicacies being cooked and offered seem to prefigure the evocation of Jagniwas in Jagvilasa two decades later as the lake-palace where powerful men and connoisseurs gather. This geographical shift of joyful assemblies from land to lakes and the perception of gardencourtyards and lake-palaces as overlapping spaces for courtly pleasure is palpable in Nandram’s poetry. The poet adapts classical poetic tropes to move his courtly patrons and poetry’s audience from the pleasures of the Baadi Mahal on the lake bank towards Jagniwas. Nandram shifts easily from bodily praise of the king to material praise of things that would have added grandeur to

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his court, including elephants and horses, drums and trumpets and umbrellas and palanquins.62 Rather than opting for an effect of documentary verisimilitude, Nandram describes the material effect of the marching horses and shining drums. Succeeding verses visualise the royal procession travelling towards the city’s lakefront, stopping so the king can offer homage to the Jagannath Ray deity and to the community of pundits who served as court’s priests. About Udaipur’s citizens besotted by the king’s beauty, Nandram writes, Over there the crowds of men and women is dense Like a beautifully laid line of flowers on the city Everyone’s hearts are eager to admire Auspicious clouds of joy rain down there63 Flowers and rains acquire a local charge in the poet’s imagining of Udaipur’s citizens and streets as fragrant, freshened and blessed by the sight of the king. Likewise, as discussed next, water metaphors shaped the poetic description of the pleasures inside the Jagniwas lake-palace. These allusions recall transregional poetic tropes in early modern India describing the hearts and bodies of every man and woman captivated with the arrival of rains.64 Given the poet’s attention to the urban topography of Udaipur, this water-filled panegyric poetry, however, also conjures the imaginary of inhabiting the lake-palace during a season of good rains surrounded by abundant lakes. The interweaving of metaphors and materials of joy and the attention to temporal and spatial pointers in Nandram’s poetry highlight the journey from the lakeside to the middle of the lake. Each description of movement – from the garden-courtyard in the palace to the streets, from the streets to the temple, from the temple back to the streets and on to the lake bank and the royal boat – provokes an imagining of the city’s geography. As the party moves to ride the royal boat to Jagniwas, the poet emphasises departure at an auspicious time. Jagvilasa invokes a mood of anticipation of pleasure inside the lake-palace.

A world of pleasure inside a lake-palace In imagining Jagat Singh II at Jagniwas, poetry and painting intertwined to compose courtly communities immersed in sensorial pleasures. One strategy for rendering immersion was interiority. Of the five paintings of Jagat Singh at Jagniwas, three convey the feeling of the interiority of a lake-palace courtyard. The architectural space surrounds the king’s portrait, which in turn is surrounded by courtly men, women and musicians. One example by painters Jiva and Jugarsi shows Jagat Singh walking towards a garden-courtyard in the company of courtiers, and again seated under a canopied throne where he listens to female musicians (Plate 4.9). Similar framing strategies are at work in the paintings Jagat Singh with His Ladies at a Pool at Jagniwas and Jagat Singh Bathing with His Nobles at Jagniwas (Plates 4.10 and 4.11). The paintings combine a planar view of a courtyard with oblique projections of arcaded spaces and elevations of walls and entranceways that depict the surrounding verandas. Nandram employs a parallel emphasis on interior spaces in the Jagvilasa. In one instance, we hear that time had passed. It was time for the king to get dressed

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Plate 4.9 Jiva and Jugarsi, Maharana Jagat Singh II at a Garden-

Courtyard at Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, 68.6 × 68.6 cm. Source: Photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Lent by Sir Howard Hodgkin, Acc. No. LI 118.20

and adorned for courtly gathering and time for him to proceed to the sitting hall (darikhana) of another courtyard. Elsewhere, like the painters, we hear that Nandram’s spatial tour of the Jagniwas also begins with the Bado Mahal’s striking and large garden-courtyard, enjoying and admiring each of the lake palace’s courtyards one at a time. The Bado Mahal is here, which is made on the eastern side Dilaram has done beautiful work, the overall forms are well-made A unique reservoir in the center looks resplendent, seeing it gives joy Several beds of roses and fountains make the most beautiful design65 Artists in Jagat Singh II’s court had multiple models at their disposal when they created a new subgenre of topographical paintings focused on the pleasures of Jagniwas. For example, a contemporaneous painting of Jagat Singh II at Jagmandir shows him hunting water buffaloes gathered by staff and then enjoying the pools and gardens of Jagmandir’s courtyards (Plate 4.12).

Plate 4.10 Jairam, Maharana Jagat Singh II with His Ladies at Dilaram’s reservoir at Jagniwas,

Udaipur, 1751. Gouache on paper, Dimension not known. Source: Photograph © private collection

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Plate 4.11 Jairam (attributed), Maharana Jagat Singh II Bathing with His Nobles at Jagniwas, Udaipur, ca.

1746–50. Gouache on paper, 46.9 × 81.3 cm. Source: Photograph © Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, San Diego Museum of Art, Acc. No. 1990:624

Plate 4.12 Artist unknown, Maharana Jagat Singh II at Jagmandir Lake-Palace, Udaipur,

ca. 1750. Opaque watercolour, gold and silver on paper, 47.5 × 60.3 cm. Source: Photograph © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of William P. Wood, 1996, Acc. No. 1996–120–4

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The painting references earlier depictions of Sangram Singh at Jagmandir, but painter Jairam’s and poet Nandram’s interior visions of the architectural frame of Jagniwas’ courtyards embody and embolden Jagat Singh’s portrait.66 The Udaipur painters’ compositional move towards interiority becomes a recognisable artistic choice for expressing the immersive experience at Jagniwas. Jairam accentuates the formal relation between the beauty of the central water pool at the Bado Mahal and the beauty of the king: he surrounds the king’s body on three sides with the patterned spatial vignette of blooming lotuses, thus bringing the royal portrait into central focus (see Plate 4.11). The movement of the king configures the unfolding of the building structure. Both painted and poetic visions link the lake-palace and king. Painters equally made interiority a formal tool for expressing the mood of collective sensorial intimacy. The painting of Jagat Singh bathing with his nobles replaces the formality of the king in the earlier painting with bodily expressions of leisure (see Plate 4.11).67 The men float and dip in the pool with open arms. The painter distinguishes the skin tones and facial hair on their naked upper bodies. The figures of men relaxing by the poolside and swimming in the pool are juxtaposed with the fully clad, standing courtly men in attendance outside the pool and the activities of staff preparing delicacies, tending to plants and carrying goods across the complex. The smoke rising from the fires and an array of cooking pots gesture towards gustatory pleasures that will be ready for the swimmers. Both the poetic and painted images suggest that expressions of intimacy were cultivated in this isolated world of Jagniwas in the middle of Lake Pichola. Feelings of intimacy between the people in attendance and the place itself could be recalled upon seeing or hearing such images. The Jagvilasa similarly imagines the ambience of the inauguration party. Nandram describes the overwhelming tastes of dishes of fish, goat and deer prepared in a variety of ways; sweets (from laddu to ghewara) and sweet breads served with milk; fruits such as watermelons, oranges and lemons; and numerous kinds of stews of lentil and rice (khichri). The verses convey how the aroma of delicacies like buttermilk mixed with crystallised sugar (misri) and rose (gulab) spreads through the courtyards of Jagniwas. From noting gustatory sensory satisfactions, the poet moves to praise the mesmerising beauty and visuality of the Jagniwas palace itself, lit up as it is by candles in the night and filled with the smells of flowers and the sounds and sights of music and dance. The lakepalace becomes a powerfully affective frame for praising Jagat Singh’s kingship, to be experienced through the joys of architecture, poetry, music, dance, gifts, food and, above all, water.

Poolside pleasures: water as motif, metaphor and material of joy The atmospheric and environmental medium of water was critical to the inception of an architecture of lake-palaces. Udaipur’s architects, craftsmen, painters and poets engaged the material and sensorial qualities of water, in the process transforming both the design and the mediation of spaces of Jagniwas. As art historians strive to think about objects as “sources, streams or fountains rather than dry traces of the creative process”, they take note of the metaphorical and affective dimensions of artworks in the writing of art history, a messy but necessary task.68 The role of dryness and wetness as metaphors for methodology is debatable and dependent on content and

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context, nonetheless germane to the topic at hand. The sensing of materialities – through smell, sound, taste, touch and vision – acutely affects how we may think beyond textual referents of the ontology, perception and efficacy of both lakes and lake-palaces. While the mid-18th-century poetry and painting discussed here offer foundational insights into the conception, representation and experience of the Jagniwas lake-palace, the Udaipur court’s archiving of the kings’ daily activities from a slightly later time period, briefly touched upon in the first section, suggest the king’s wondrous fascination with lotus-covered lakes and the Bado Mahal’s water-filled reservoir. The foregrounding of the material, sensorial and metaphorical role of lake waters within Jagniwas reconstitutes lakes. We find ourselves looking from lake-palaces onto lake waters in new ways, just as we look longingly from Lake Pichola towards Jagniwas. Nandram’s poetry develops water as a medium, articulating and deploying it to shape the ontological role of the lake-palace to cultivate intimacy and joy for a collective. Nandram asserts that the king rules with sukha – that is, by generating feelings of joy and contentment among his companions (sukhasorajatrana) – at the courtyard of Bado Mahal inside Jagniwas.69 He notes, for instance, All the joys and modes of enjoyment, singers sing songs Playfulness pours like rain drops, the Rana (king) is the happiest [here] Water metaphors overflow as the poet praises the lotus-themed reservoir built in the courtyard outside the Bado Mahal (Plate 4.13). The poet develops the bhava, the literary moods of pleasurable places, by engaging the poetic moods of the monsoon season. Just as regional poetry describes courtly lovers and ordinary citizens overwhelmed by rains, the king captivated every person through the pleasures the lake-palace offers. Depicting sukha in Jagniwas as a rain cloud invites us to imagine rains pouring into the city’s lakes, perhaps a sight best enjoyed from the lake-palaces. The pervasiveness of water in poetic imaginaries of Jagniwas denies the constant threat of droughts. While lotuses do not bloom today in Udaipur’s Lake Pichola, they do in other lakes in the region, imparting a heady, sweet scent, and we know they did during the reign of Udaipur king Bhim Singh. The court scribes make a note on at least two occasions, once in the monsoon of 1788 and the other during the summer of 1781, of the king venturing on a boat ride to admire a bed of lotuses floating on the lake’s surface (nav asavar huya so kamal dekhwa padaraya). The blooming lotuses in real lakes strikingly transform the visuality of lake surfaces (Plate 4.14). Rising among circular green leaves, the blooming lotus flowers also allowed for a reimagining in paintings of local lakes as beautiful, fragrant and filled to capacity (see Plates 4.3, 4.4). The architecture of Jagniwas also reflects a desire to make water-filled lakes permanent, providing sights and scents to savour. Dilaram’s design and craftsmanship of the central reservoir made of local stone stands apart from other pools found in the region’s palaces. 71 The splaying of each of the petals from a central circular form creates a complex pattern of shallow channels on all four sides of the reservoir, distinct from the more common planar view of the flower commonly carved in relief (which also appears in the adjoining palatial hall of Jagniwas’ Rang Mahal). The design of the pool references blooming lotuses on standing waters, with each of the flowers and leaves emerging from separate tubular stalks that grow deep. The shape of the stone highlights the curve of the petals of a lotus flower, the curved connection to the petal on the horizontal surface seems

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Plate 4.13 Dilaram, Lotus-themed reservoir in the courtyard of the Bado Mahal at Jagniwas lake-

palace (today known as the Lily Pond of the Taj Lake Palace hotel, Udaipur), inaugurated 20 January 1746. Source: Photograph © Dipti Khera

to suggest the vertical stems and the larger size of the circular central form evokes broad leaves that lend a lotus pond its surface texture. Udaipur’s craftsmen expanded the formal iconography and metaphorical potential of the established lotus motif, specifying its form as a fully bloomed lotus flower integrally connected to beautiful lakes. This lotus-themed pool could seduce connoisseurs, invite wonder and stimulate envy while materially enhancing the efficacious potential of Jagniwas as a space for courtly sociability. Beyond Nandram’s praise of his craftsmanship, Dilaram’s specific role as the architect or mason at Jagniwas remains unknown.72 Ideational and design innovations such as his, however, claimed regional distinction and enabled patrons to cultivate a sense of belonging. Both were critical to assert kingship in an 18th-century world. All the more as kings created lake-palaces as circumscribed spaces of courtly pleasure across India, Dilaram’s design of this courtyard for collective enjoyment presents an important local instantiation of forms and meanings. Udaipur’s courtly audiences were fascinated by Dilaram’s unique design. Here, again, the daily diaries of Bhim Singh’s court are insightful. Numerous entries narrate the king’s excursions to the

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Plate 4.14 Lake Jait Sagar, with blooming lotuses covering the water surface, seen from the terrace of the

Sukh Mahal, Bundi, 1776. Source: Photograph © Dipti Khera

Jagniwas while also visiting surrounding lake environs, including the noble Sirdar Singh’s lakeside mansion, the smaller pavilions of Mohan Mandir and Jagmandir, and the gateways and broad steps leading to the lake. In making a note of both short excursions and long stays at the Jagniwas, the court scribes consistently record the king’s arrival at the Bado Mahal. More importantly, the entries suggest that Bhim Singh most often ordered for opening the faucet to fill Dilaram’s pool (dilaram padhar birajya dilaram nal chudaya). For instance, on a spring day in 1780, the scribe suggests that Bhim Singh arrived at Jagniwas and then ordered for pools to be filled, then had his lunch, before proceeding on the boat to return to the lakeside palace complex.73 In the following year, during the monsoon season of 1781, the scribe notes the sequence in which the king visits Jagniwas, starting with the Dhola Mahal, proceeding to the Khush Mahal and then finally relaxing in Dilaram’s courtyard where he had the reservoir filled with water before settling down for a game of chess.74 The very fact that scribes included Dilaram’s name for identifying the elaborate pool is extraordinary. Its capacity to enchant stands iterated in the archive. Like Udaipur’s contemporary poets and painters, Dilaram sought to recreate the bhava or the mood of the lotus-filled waters, to create emotion in signification. By emphasising blooming lotuses as representational matter, Dilaram engaged anew the immediacy of lake waters and the very notion of a palace surrounded by water. His design proposed sensing lake waters on the inside and the

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outside of the lake-palace and in connection to each other as a powerful layering of aesthetic ideas and architecture. Admiring the pool’s design, especially after it was filled with water, constituted a momentous event, worthy of entry into the historical record, and also suggestive of the desires that motivated Udaipur’s kings and queens to visit the Jagniwas lake-palace ever so often. The material trace of lake waters inside the lake-palace invites us to think how intermedial deliberations alert us to the creativity of craftsmen and their intellectual engagement with aesthetics. If Nandram turned to metaphors of rains and clouds in describing the pleasures of the Bado Mahal, Udaipur painters expressed their admiration by highlighting abstractions of blooming lotuses (see Plate 4.10). Artist Jairam’s curved outlines of the design in stone accentuate the channelling of water between the petals and stalks, and animating the king’s portrait such that he and the women with him occupy the water-filled surface just as lotus flowers float above the surface of lake waters. Closer examination reveals that Jairam painted each of the circular forms connected to the petal-shape planter beds as shimmering silver-coloured water bodies with blooming lotuses. Likewise, his vignettes of roses and tall cypress trees in the petal-shaped beds recall painted landscapes in poetic and devotional manuscripts. Even as 20th-century transformations in the architecture hinder our excavations, such choices suggest metaphoric rather than mimetic representations of contemporary landscapes.75 They, nonetheless, establish meaningful connections between a motif that defined plentiful and beautiful water bodies, and the material use of water in the design of the lotus-themed water pool of Jagniwas. The evocation of lake waters inside the lake-palace connects the outside and inside, the setting and ideation and the sensorial and material. Poetry, architecture and paintings elicited sensorial and emotional responses, aiding sociality in courtly settings. Each recreated the lake-palace and potentially triggered an experience or memory, and each instantiation presented the power to affect and offer an entirely new connection. Each medium thus performed representational and presentational roles, so too did lakes.76 They became art in multiple ways. The bhava-infused imaginary of lotus-filled lakes inside Jagniwas overtakes any established mimetic route, presenting the lake by abstracting the pattern of the blooming flower in stone, isolating petals and leaves with the water streams of the pool flowing around them. Both painters and architects invoked the surface of lotus-filled lake waters, which distinguished a plentiful water body from a dry one and the mood of an idealised scented lake from a real one. These representational choices evoke a productive ambiguity between the real experience of Lake Pichola and the imagined sites of scented lakes. Lakes became objects and mediums of enchantment. Lake waters were seen as site and metaphor, material and sense. This sensorial reminder of how Udaipur’s courtly citizens experienced the surface of lotus-filled lakes is pertinent. The medium of water – lakes, fountains, pools and rains – had the capacity to create boundaries and shape collectivities. Each iteration, with a different character of stillness and speed of flows, sounds and smells, created ephemeral atmospheres that potentially provoked sensorial conversations in shared assemblies. The materials and senses for the intertwined practice of pleasure and politics were in place within the mid-18th-century Jagniwas lake-palace. Patrons, architects, painters and poets presented Jagniwas as a lake-palace that could charm courtly publics, perhaps even in dry seasons or hot summers without monsoons, when no water-filled lakes to soothe the body and mind could be found.

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Notes * Acknowledgments. I thank Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar and the Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation, City Palace Museum and Taj Lake Palace, India, for enabling access to the Jagniwas lake-palace and related sources. I remain grateful to Dr Prem Rajpurohit for transcribing the Jagvilasa manuscript and to Dr Andrew Topsfield for sharing his knowledge and images of Udaipur paintings. I thank editors of the current volume and Molly E. Aitken, Catherine B. Asher, Debra Diamond, Finbarr B. Flood, Meredith Martin and Sylvia Houghteling for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. Any remaining shortcomings are of course mine. For the convenience of the broader audience, I have eliminated diacritical marks except for transliterated verses included in the footnotes. 1 The oldest parts of the palace date from 1567 and the city’s name is associated with Maharana Udai Singh II (d. 1572). Giles Henry Rupert Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces: The Development of an Architectural Style, 1450–1750, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 88. For building phases of Udaipur’s palace complex, see Shikha Jain and Vanicka Arora, Living Heritage of Mewar: Architecture of the City Palace, Udaipur, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with Maharana Mewar Historical Publications Trust, 2017. 2 Now called the Taj Lake Palace, the Jagniwas has operated a hotel since 1966. See www.eternal mewar.in/research, accessed on 7 August 2017. 3 By the early 18th century, Udaipur’s court painters shifted their attention to 3- to 5-feet-long paintings, which portrayed the rulers enacting their authority within courtly settings. On the constitution of this place-centric vision, see Dipti Khera, ‘Picturing India’s “Land of Kings” between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its Environs’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2013. 4 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, vol. 1, London: Smith Elder, 1829, p. 653. 5 Ibid., pp. 433–4. 6 A discussion of Nagaur court paintings depicting pleasures is an exception. Authors emphasise that patrons and painters were driven to visualise plentiful, luxurious visions of gardens and palaces to contrast the courtly world from the surrounding desert. See Debra Diamond, Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008, pp. 71–97, cat. 10–20. 7 Katherine B. Schofield, ‘Sense and Sensibility: The Domain of Pleasure and the Place of Music in Mughal Society’, unpublished lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2009, pp. 1–31. On postcolonial discomfort with court cultures, see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 11–17. 8 I thank Dr Prem Rajpurohit for transcribing the manuscript copy of the Jagvilasa (Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Udaipur, Acc. No. 2216). See Khera, ‘Picturing India’s “Land of Kings”’, Chapter 3, for transliterated and translated verses from the Jagvilasa. 9 On basic principles of classical poetry composed in Brajbhasha, including the role of literary emotions, description and settings, see Busch, Poetry of Kings, pp. 68–83. 10 For examples of 17th-century poets paying attention to ‘local inflections’, but not necessarily focusing on one architectural space, see ibid., pp. 72–3, 148–51, 181, 191–2. 11 Elsewhere, I have attended to the intermediality of painting and poetry and to the dialectic of imagining the real and ideal in creating a world of pleasure. See Dipti Khera, ‘Jagvilasa: Picturing Worlds of Pleasure and Power in 18th-Century Udaipur Painting’, in Molly Emma Aitken (ed.), A Magic World: New Visions of Indian Painting, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2017, pp. 74–87. 12 Daud Ali, ‘Rethinking the History of the Kama World in Early India’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–13.

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13 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42, no. 1, 1999, pp. 47–93; Katherine Butler Brown, ‘If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal “Mehfil”’, in Francesca Orsini (ed.), Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 61–86. On advice for the 15th-century Malwa Sultans, see Norah M. Titley, The Ni‘matnāma Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan’s Book of Delights, London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005. 14 Emma J. Flatt, ‘Social Stimulants: Perfuming Practices in Sultanate India’, in Kavita Singh (ed.), The Arts of the Deccan, Mumbai: Marg Publications, forthcoming; Emma J. Flatt, ‘Sitting Together: A Practice of Friendship in Indo-Persian Courtly Societies’, unpublished paper, 2011. 15 O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, p. 50. 16 Many scholars seeking to define the centrality of the arts in producing sociability and political subjects in the early modern world have turned their attention to pleasure and friendship. On 17th-century assemblies and the role of painting, see Molly E. Aitken, ‘The Laud Ragamala Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting’, Archives of Asian Art, vol. 63, no. 1, 2013, pp. 27–58. 17 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Cultural Pluralism, Empire and the State in Early Modern South Asia: A Review Essay’, Indian Economic Social History Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2007, p. 368 and Mana Kia, ‘Adab as Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India’, in Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (eds.), ‘No Tapping around Philology’: A Festschrift in Celebration and Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014, pp. 281–308. 18 For a summary, see Rima Hooja, A History of Rajasthan, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006, pp. 654–63. 19 In spite of much study of Rajput-Mughal alliances, how the Rajputs created their loyalty networks among themselves and with other groups has been understudied. Norman Zeigler, ‘Rajput Loyalties During the Mughal Period’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia, New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 274–7. 20 George Mitchell, The Royal Palaces of India, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 52–60; Catherine B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, New Cambridge History of India I:4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 123–7; Dominic P. Brookshaw, ‘Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-Gardens: The Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis’, Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 6, no. 2, 2003, pp. 199–223. For an overview of pools related to courtly spaces and pleasure, see Julia A. B. Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002, Chapter 7. For a recent volume discussing how ‘architecture engages and designs water’, see Jutta Jain-Neubauer, ‘Introduction’, in Jutta Jain-Neubauer (ed.), Water Design: Environment and Histories, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2016, pp. 8–31. 21 On Jahangir’s account of Mandu, see Asher, Architecture in Mughal India, pp. 80–1. On Kashmir see, Anubhuti Maurya, ‘Of Tulips and Daffodils: Kashmir Jannat Nazir as a Political Landscape in the Mughal Empire’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 52, no. 15, 2017, pp. 37–44 and Sunil Sharma, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry at an Indian Court, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, Chapter 4. 22 Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, p. 23. For an account of water palaces and features developed at the sites of northern and Deccani Sultanates (14th –15th century), see Helen Philon, ‘Deccani Gardens and Architectural Landscapes in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, South Asian Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 2011, pp. 157–84. We also know about the use of models. The Kachhwaha Raja Man Singh of Amber’s 17th-century water palace in Bairat, northeast of Jaipur, was, for instance, based on Shah Quli Khan’s late-16th-century water palace in Narnaul. See, Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, p. 84. 23 Smaller lake pavilions like the Mohan Mandir in Udaipur’s Lake Pichola had been built under the patronage of Jagat Singh I (r. 1628–52). Chittorgarh, the former fort capital of Mewar, also includes a water palace, referred to as the queen Padmini’s Mahal, built in the middle of a what today is a small dried-up lake. The Jal Mahal water place within Lake Mansagar was built by Jaipur’s Sawai Jai Singh

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around 1734, several decades earlier than the date previously suggested. Future research may yield connections with Udaipur’s lake-palaces where we see Jai Singh portrayed around the same time. See Vibhuti Sachdev and Giles Henry Rupert Tillotson, Building Jaipur: The Making of an Indian City, London: Reaktion Books, 2002, p. 70 and Shailka Mishra, “Maps and Map-Making at the Amber-Jaipur Suratkhana in the 18th Century”, Jnana-Pravaha Research Journal, vol. 18, 2015, p. 143. Though lakes, water tanks and water palaces that made up 18th-century Jaipur highlight both secular and devotional concerns. See Monika Horstmann, ‘Jaipur’s Waterscape: A Cultural Perspective’, in Jain-Neubauer (ed.), Water Design, pp. 96–107. Likewise, Chandar Bhan Brahman, the state secretary and poet in Shah Jahan’s court, revealed that ‘political business and literary pleasure’ were inextricably linked during parties. See Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015, especially Chapter I, p. 43–4. See Jagvilasa, verse 7 in Khera, ‘Jagvilasa: Picturing Worlds of Pleasure and Power in 18th-Century Udaipur Painting’, p. 74. Modern histories often recount that prince Khurram before he became emperor built and lived in the Gol Mahal (Circular Palace), the most iconic building on Jagmandir Island. My research suggests Jagvilasa is the first literary-historical source that associates Shah Jahan with Jagmandir. On the chronology in which the various palaces in the Jagmandir lake-palace complex were built, see Dipti Khera and Raju Mansukhani (eds.), The City within a City: Volume I Jagmandir on Lake Pichola, New Delhi: Penguin Enterprise, 2002. For the retelling of this popular lore about Jagniwas, see Kavirāj Śyāmaladāsa, Vīravinoda: Mevāṛa Kā Itihāsa: Mahārāṇāoṃ Kā Ādi Se Lekara San 1884 Taka Kā Vistr̥ ta Vr̥ ttānta Ānushaṅgika Sāmagrī Sahita, vol. 3, Udaipur: Maharana Mewar Historical Publication Trust; Jodhpur: Co-published and distributed by Rajasthani Granthaghar, 2007, p. 1233.; Mewar’s 17th-century historical literature retold the court’s illustrious past in the context of growing Mughals power and rival kings in the imperial service. See Cynthia Talbot, ‘Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 211–43; Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithvi Raj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, Chapter 5. Jagvilasa, Verse 10. The position of estate holders in Mewar, with titles thakur and rawat, was linked to their king at Udaipur through complex kin-based and political relationships. Their estate lands (thikana) were essentially smaller kingdoms. At the turn of the 18th century, Udaipur’s ruler Amar Singh II institutionalised a hierarchy of first-, second- and third-class estates based on each clan’s ancestral services to the Mewar Court. See Hukamasiṃha Bhāṭī, Rājasthāna Ke T.hikānoṃ Evaṃ Gharānoṃ Kī Purālekhīya Sāmagrī, Udayapura: Pratāpa Śodha Pratishṭhāna, Bhūpāla Nobalsa Saṃsthāna, 1996, pp. 95–7. Thakur Sirdar Singh’s patronage offers a view on the communities Jagat Singh II sought to bring to Jagniwas, which is out of the scope of the current chapter. See Khera, ‘Picturing India’s “Land of Kings”’, chapter 3. I thank the Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation for making available the transcribed copy of Maharana Bhim Singh’s haqiqat bahida. I remain grateful to Sarita Shrimal for teaching me how to read these archival sources. At the time of its creation, the Bado Mahal may have also been accessed via the steps located on the northeast corner of the building. These steps enable a direct access from the lake to the Bado Mahal. This route though is not accessible to the public today. The Bado Mahal currently houses the Taj Lake Palace hotel’s Jharokha restaurant. The sensorial turn in art history and humanities closely follows the material turn, underscoring anthropological and phenomenological approaches. For instance, see Martin Jay, ‘In the Realm of Senses: An Introduction’, The American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 2, 2011, pp. 307–15; Jenni Lauwrens, ‘Welcome to the Revolution: The Sensory Turn and Art History’, Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 7, December, 2012, pp. 1–17; David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, Oxford;

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New York: Berg, 2005; and Sally M. Promey (ed.), Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Both historians and art historians have raised methodological connections with research on contemporary contexts suggesting the limits on imagining historical sensescapes. See, for example, Nina Ergin, ‘Rock Faces, Opium and Wine: Speculations on the Original Viewing Context of Persianate Manuscripts’, Der Islam, vol. 90, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65–105 and Nina Ergin, ‘The Fragrance of the Divine: Ottoman Incense Burners and Their Context’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 96, no. 1, 2014, pp. 70–97. On the use of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to describe the operationalisation of gardens in early Indian courtly society, see Daud Ali, ‘Gardens in Early Indian Court Life’, Studies in History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2003, p. 225. For a discussion that connects flowing rivers, representation and climate change in the 16th century, see Sugata Ray, ‘Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, c. 1560–70’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–23. For recent examinations of the visual framing of rivers and running water in Mughal India, see Sugata Ray, ‘Ecomoral Aesthetics at Mathura’s Vishram Ghat: Three Ways of Seeing a River’, in Jain-Neubauer (ed.), Water Design, pp. 58–69 and Jutta Jain-Neubauer, ‘“Waters Should Be Made to Flow . . .”: Babur’s Obsession with Running Water’, in Jain-Neubauer (ed.), Water Design, pp. 70–83. For discussions on the efficacy of objects in relation to art history that privileges neither texts over objects nor specific temporalities or geographies, see essays in two recent volumes: Hannah Baader, Ittai Weinryb and Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Special Issue: ‘Images at Work’, Representations, vol. 133, no. 1, 2016 and Roland Betancourt (ed.), Special Issue: ‘The Medium before Modernism’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol. 23, no. 2, 2016. Flood points to the problematic assumption of an “ontological distinction between images and words and their referents”, which marginalises the possibility that images could illuminate ideas. Finbarr B. Flood, ‘Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral: Ambiguity and Efficacy in the Nishapur Wall Paintings’, Representations, vol. 133, no. 1, 2016, p. 44. Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 40–66. Charlotte Vaudeville, Barahmasa in Indian Literatures: Songs of the Twelve Months in Indo-Aryan Literatures, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986; Anna L. Dallapiccola, Catherine Glynn, and Robert Skelton (eds.), Ragamala: Paintings from India, London; New York: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011. Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book discusses how Udaipur painters imagined the city as a place of rains and lakes at the turn of 18th century. In the foundational 3rd–4th-century Sanskrit text on the science of drama, Bharata explained that works of art, especially dance and theatre, should aim to create a dominant bhava or emotion through characters, gestures and settings. The dominant emotion would lead to experiencing various kinds of aesthetic rasa or juice. For an overview of historical development and interpretation of Indian aesthetic theory, see Sheldon Pollock, Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 1–46. In relation to the problematic of relating rasa to art history, see Molly E. Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 50–5. Other examples of painters’ engagement with lakes and water palaces include a manuscript depicting Kashmir’s lakes commissioned in 1633 by Zafar Khan, a noble at the court of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. See Sharma, Mughal Arcadia, pp. 143–59. Jodhpur paintings from ca. 1775 depicting Rama and Sita’s idyllic realm of Ayodhya exhibits the use of ‘the aesthetic of a water palace’ seen in Nagaur paintings. See Diamond, Garden & Cosmos, pp. 134–5, cat. 29. For examples from Kishangarh court

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painting, see Navina Haider, ‘NihalChand’, in Milo Cleveland Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy (eds.), Masters of Indian Painting, vol. 2, Zurich, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011, pp. 595–606. Cynthia Talbot, ‘The Mewar Court’s Construction of History’, in Joanna Williams (ed.), Kingdom of the Sun: Indian Court and Village Art from the Princely State of Mewar, San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2007, pp. 12–33. Udaipur’s founders imagined the place as a city (pur) and not a fort (garh). Udaipur painters highlighted Chittor’s fortified landscape in both genealogical scrolls made between 1730 and 1740, as did Mughal painters in the Akbarnama. The inscription notes udaipurnagarbasayo. Debari valley was around 10–13 kilometres away from the current location of Lake Pichola. None of the main rivers in the region, for instance Berach locally known as Ahad, and Kotra, flowed for all 12 months of the year. See Ishwar Singh Ranavat, Rajasthan Ke Jal Sansadhan, Udaipur: Chirag Prakashan, 2004, p. 4, 15. The story goes a gypsy created Lake Pichola, which today measures 4 kilometres from north to south and 2.5 kilometres from east to west, in the late 1380s. Ibid., pp. 94–7. Ibid., p. 79. Geographers like Ishwar S. Ranawat have mined such sources to highlight the development of water technology by Udaipur’s builders in the Aravalli valley. See ibid., Chapters 1 and 2. The poetry of Kharratargacca Jain monk-traveller Jaichand offered an ecological perspective on the history of rains from 1658 to 1714 in Mewar and other regions in Rajasthan. For an overview of this historical source, see Brijmohan Jawalia, ‘Food Security in Rajasthan with Specific Reference to the Marwar Region during the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Asian Agri-History, vol. 5, no. 4, 2001, pp. 265–82. Jennifer B. Joffee, ‘Art, Architecture and Politics in Mewar, 1628–1710’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2005, pp. 104–8. Also see Hooja, A History of Rajasthan, pp. 621–3. For a summary of Rajvilasa and Rajprakasa, see Hukamasiṃha Bhāṭī, Mevāṛa Ke Aitihāsika Granthoṃ Kā Sarvekshaṇa, Jodhpur: Rājasthānī Granthāgāra, 1996, pp. 2–3. The creation of the Jaisamand lake at a scale seven times larger than Rajsamand, another source of drought relief, 51 kilometres southeast of Udaipur followed during the reign of Raj Singh’s successor, Maharana Jai Singh (r. 1680–98). Raj Singh I’s patronage of historical manuscripts, art and architecture – especially as integrated at the public site of the Rajsamand Lake – alludes to the Anasagar lake at Ajmer, a contemporaneous building project initiated under the direction of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. See Joffee, ‘Art, Architecture and Politics’, Chapter 4. See fn. 28. Andrew Topsfield, The City Palace Museum, Udaipur: Paintings of Mewar Court Life, Ahmedabad: Mapin; Middletown, NJ: Grantha, 1990, p. 23. cat. 20. Daud Ali and Emma J. Flatt, ‘Introduction’, in Daud Ali and Emma J. Flatt (eds.), Garden and Landscape Practices in Precolonial India: Histories from the Deccan, New Delhi: Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–17. For explorations of premodern gardens in Buddhist contexts, see Daud Ali, ‘Gardens in Early Indian Court Life’, Studies in History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2003, pp. 228–35 and Gregory Schopen, ‘The Buddhist “Monastery” and the Indian Garden: Aesthetics, Assimilations, and the Siting of Monastic Establishments’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 126, no. 4, 2006, pp. 487–505. Molly E. Aitken, ‘Aesthetic Pleasure and the Power of Mughal Painting’s Perfectly Beautiful Women to Shape Empire’, unpublished lecture, Tang Museum of Art, Skidmore College, 2015. For the complete inscription, see Andrew Topsfield and National Gallery of Victoria, Paintings from Rajasthan in the National Gallery of Victoria: A Collection Acquired through the Felton Bequests’ Committee, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1980, p. 62, cat. 58.

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55 Water was likely drawn into the pool through the use of a Persian wheel. See D. Fairchild Ruggles and Jennifer B. Joffee, ‘Rajput Gardens and Landscape’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Middle East Garden Traditions: Unity and Diversity: Questions, Methods and Resources in a Multicultural Perspective, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; Cambridge: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 278–80. For the architectural layout of the Baadi Mahal courtyard, see Jain and Arora, Living Heritage of Mewar, pp. 80–3. 56 Kavirāj Śyāmaladāsa, Vīravinoda, vol. 2, p. 790. 57 For Jagvilasa, verses 45 and 46, see Khera, ‘Jagvilasa’, p. 74. 58 Though we may be missing key texts by Udaipur poets that make architecture an object of affection. 59 Inspired by the creation of new Islamicate gardens like the Shivprassana Amar Vilas Mahal, a nimqalam painting of Amar Singh II (r. 1698–1710) depicts him enjoying sex and sensorial pleasures in a Mughal-styled garden with his beloved. See Figure 108 in Andrew Topsfield, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar, Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2001, p. 130. 60 This painting commemorates one of the meetings of the two kings that took place between 1728 and 1734. See Ibid., pp. 160–1. The 1891 Mewar royal collection inventory also describes a painting related to the 1708 alliance as ‘the three rulers meeting by the lake’. See Molly E. Aitken, ‘Portraits, Gift Giving and The Rajput Alliance of 1708’, in Naval Krishna and Manu Krishna (eds.), The Ananda-Vana of Indian Art: Dr. Anand Krishna Felicitation Volume, Varanasi: Indica Books; Abhidha Prakashan, 2004, p. 359. 61 For example, a page from a dispersed Gita Govinda painted at Udaipur. See https://www.metmuseum. org/art/collection/search/38027, accessed on 20 August 2017. 62 Jagvilasa, verses 55–109. 63 Ibid., verse 125. 64 For example, the poetic genre of the barah-masa (twelve-month sequence) was paramount to the contemplation of the moods of peoples, places, flora and fauna in the rainy season. It is always structured as a lament divided into descriptions of 12 months, each expressing the pain of separation when a nayika’s lover goes abroad. See, Busch, Poetry of Kings, 75. 65 Ibid., verse 179. chand gītikā sabtina bado mahala taha kahu puraba disa so bhanī dilārāma bāriya kāma bhāriya rūpa besa banī dhanī ika hoja bīca anūpa rājata dekhate sukha pāvhī rastāna men nala haĩ ghane gulkyāri hai susuhāvani (179) I discuss Dilaram’s design of the lotus-themed pool in the following section. 66 See examples of paintings depicting Jagmandir in Andrew Topsfield, ‘Jagmandir and the Other Royal Palaces in Udaipur Painting’, in Khera and Mansukhani (eds.), The City within a City, pp. 117–41. 67 In a three-part portrait of Amar Singh II’s pleasures from ca. 1708–10, the artist maintains a figural formality in rendering the bodies of the king and the women who surround him in a pool party. See Andrew Topsfield, Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2012, pp. 230–1, cat. 98. 68 Scholars engage this methodological conundrum introduced in Christopher S Wood, ‘Editorial: Source and Trace’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 63–64, no. Spring–Autumn, 2013, pp. 5–19. My quote draws from an essay in the issue by Milette Gaifman, ‘Timelessness, Fluidity, and Apollo’s Libation’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 63–64, no. Spring–Autumn, 2013, p. 39. 69 Nandram incorporated the word sukha in each of the nearly 30 verses that described the courtyard. See Jagvilasa, verses 176–204. I translated one exemplary verse no. 194 here. The original dohā says,

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sukha barkhata harkhata hai sabai gāyana gāta gāna moja barkhata megha sama saba saũ rījhata rāna (194) 70 Unpublished Haqiqat Bahida BH 644, part I, see entry for: samvat 1844 bhadav vid 3 sukre; samvat 1837 jeth vid 14 home. 71 For an overview of pools in palaces and gardens that reference lotus flowers, see Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia, pp. 196–8. The author notes the abstraction of lotus petals and sprouts in the design of the pools at Mandu and the use of the motif to design the pool corner in Mughal Agra. 72 Nandram notes in Jagvilasa, Verse 10 that Jagat Singh II directed Sirdar Singh to hire the best trained architects (gajdhar) and masons (kamkarak). Research on the division of building practice into architecture design and craftsmanship in premodern South Asia remains limited. Regarding this lacuna, see Nachiket Chanchani and Tamara I. Sears, ‘Introduction’, in Nachiket Chanchani and Tamara I. Sears (eds.), Special Issue: ‘Transmission of Architectural Knowledge in Medieval South Asia’, Ars Orientalis, vol. 45, 2015, pp. 7–13. 73 Unpublished Haqiqat Bahida BH 644, part I, see entry for: samvat 1836 chait sud 7 bhume. 74 Unpublished Haqiqat Bahida BH 644, part I, see entry for: samvat 1837 bhadav vid 3 sukre. 75 The unknown current location of this painting hinders my research. I have relied on the reproduction shared by Dr Andrew Topsfield for which I sincerely thank him and the staff of Marg Publications, Mumbai. A vertical painting, likely an album folio from ca. 1710–15, depicting Udaipur king Sangram Singh II’s visit to a holy man, shows the blooming lotus connected to a water-filled tank and comprising the border. See http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/8/per_page/50/offset/0/sort_by/date/ object/11307, accessed on 21 August 2017. Examples of 19th-century picchvais (cloth backdrops for shrines in temples devoted to Krishna) also show that painters isolated the form of the blooming lotus referencing the fluvial setting of river Yamuna. See Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdvara, Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1987, p. 77, 149, 161. 76 For a discussion on how pictures that engage mimesis perform representational and presentational roles alike, see Keith Moxey, “Mimesis and Iconoclasm”, Art History, vol. 32, no. 1, 2009, pp. 52–77.

References Aitken, Molly E., ‘Portraits, Gift Giving and the Rajput Alliance of 1708’, in Naval Krishna and Manu Krishna (eds.), The Ananda-Vana of Indian Art: Dr. Anand Krishna Felicitation Volume, Varanasi: Indica Books; Abhidha Prakashan, 2004, pp. 355–66. ———, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ———, ‘The Laud Ragamala Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting’, Archives of Asian Art, vol. 63, no. 1, 2013, pp. 27–58. ———, ‘Aesthetic Pleasure and the Power of Mughal Painting’s Perfectly Beautiful Women to Shape Empire’, Unpublished Lecture, Tang Museum of Art, Skidmore College, 2015. Ali, Daud, ‘Gardens in Early Indian Court Life’, Studies in History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2003, pp. 228–35. ———, ‘Rethinking the History of the Kama World in Early India’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–13. ——— and Emma J. Flatt, ‘Introduction’, in Daud Ali and Emma J. Flatt (eds.), Garden and Landscape Practices in Precolonial India: Histories from the Deccan, New Delhi: Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–17. Ambalal, Amit, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdvara, Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1987. Asher, Catherine B., Architecture of Mughal India, New Cambridge History of India I:4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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Baader, Hannah, Ittai Weinryb and Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Special Issue: ‘Images at Work’, Representations, vol. 133, no. 1, 2016. Betancourt, Roland (ed.), Special Issue: ‘The Medium before Modernism’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol. 23, no. 2, 2016. Bhāṭī, Hukamasiṃha, Mevāṛa Ke Aitihāsika Granthoṃ Kā Sarvekshaṇa, Jodhpur: Rājasthānī Granthāgāra, 1996. ———, Rājasthāna Ke T . hikānoṃ Evaṃ Gharānoṃ Kī Purālekhīya Sāmagrī, Udayapura: Pratāpa Śodha Pratishṭhāna, Bhūpāla Nobalsa Saṃsthāna, 1996. Brookshaw, Dominic P., ‘Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-Gardens: The Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis’, Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 6, no. 2, 2003, pp. 199–223. Brown (née Schofield), Katherine B., ‘If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal “Mehfil”’, in Francesca Orsini (ed.), Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 61–86. ———, ‘Sense and Sensibility: The Domain of Pleasure and the Place of Music in Mughal Society’, Unpublished Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2009. Busch, Allison, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chanchani, Nachiket and Tamara I. Sears, ‘Introduction’, in Nachiket Chanchani and Tamara I. Sears (eds.), Special Issue: ‘Transmission of Architectural Knowledge in Medieval South Asia’, Ars Orientalis, vol. 45, 2015, pp. 7–13. Dallapiccola, Anna L., Catherine Glynn and Robert Skelton (eds.), Ragamala: Paintings from India, London and New York: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011. Diamond, Debra, Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008. Ergin, Nina, ‘Rock Faces, Opium and Wine: Speculations on the Original Viewing Context of Persianate Manuscripts’, Der Islam, vol. 90, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65–105. ———, ‘The Fragrance of the Divine: Ottoman Incense Burners and Their Context’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 96, no. 1, 2014, pp. 70–97. Flatt, Emma J., ‘Social Stimulants: Perfuming Practices in Sultanate India’, in Kavita Singh (ed.), The Arts of the Deccan, Mumbai: Marg Publications, forthcoming. ———, ‘Sitting Together: A Practice of Friendship in Indo-Persian Courtly Societies’, Unpublished Paper, 2011. Flood, Finbarr B., ‘Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral: Ambiguity and Efficacy in the Nishapur Wall Paintings’, Representations, vol. 133, no. 1, 2016, pp. 20–58. Gaifman, Milette, ‘Timelessness, Fluidity, and Apollo’s Libation’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 63–64, no. Spring–Autumn, 2013, pp. 39–52. Gell, Alfred, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 40–66. Haider, Navina, ‘NihalChand’, in Milo Cleveland Beach, Eberhard Fischer and B. N. Goswamy (eds.), Masters of Indian Painting, vol. 2, Zurich, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011, pp. 595–606. Hegewald, Julia A. B., Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings, Leiden: Brill, 2002. Hooja, Rima, A History of Rajasthan, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006. Horstmann, Monika, ‘Jaipur’s Waterscape: A Cultural Perspective’, in Jutta Jain-Neubauer (ed.), Water Design: Environment and Histories, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2016, pp. 96–107.

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Ray, Sugata, ‘Ecomoral Aesthetics at Mathura’s Vishram Ghat: Three Ways of Seeing a River’, in Jutta JainNeubauer (ed.), Water Design: Environment and Histories, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2016, pp. 58–69. ———, ‘Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, c. 1560–70’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–23. Ruggles, D. Fairchild and Jennifer B. Joffee, ‘Rajput Gardens and Landscape’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Middle East Garden Traditions: Unity and Diversity: Questions, Methods and Resources in a Multicultural Perspective, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; Cambridge: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 278–80. Sachdev, Vibhuti and Giles Henry Rupert Tillotson, Building Jaipur: The Making of an Indian City, London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Schopen, Gregory, ‘The Buddhist “Monastery” and the Indian Garden: Aesthetics, Assimilations, and the Siting of Monastic Establishments’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 126, no. 4, 2006, pp. 487–505. Sharma, Sunil, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry at an Indian Court, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Śyāmaladāsa, Kavirāj, Vīravinoda: Mevāṛa Kā Itihāsa: Mahārāṇāoṃ Kā Ādi Se Lekara San 1884 Taka Kā Vistṛta Vṛttānta Ānushaṅgika Sāmagrī Sahita, Udaipur: Maharana Mewar Historical Publication Trust; Jodhpur: Co-published and distributed by Rajasthani Granthaghar, 2007. Talbot, Cynthia, ‘The Mewar Court’s Construction of History’, in Joanna Williams (ed.), Kingdom of the Sun: Indian Court and Village Art from the Princely State of Mewar, San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2007, pp. 12–33. ———, ‘Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 211–43. ———, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithvi Raj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Tillotson, Giles Henry Rupert, The Rajput Palaces: The Development of an Architectural Style, 1450–1750, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Titley, Norah M., The Ni‘matnāma Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan’s Book of Delights, London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005. Tod, James, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, vol. 1, London: Smith Elder, 1829. Topsfield, Andrew and National Gallery of Victoria, Paintings from Rajasthan in the National Gallery of Victoria: A Collection Acquired through the Felton Bequests’ Committee, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1980. ———, The City Palace Museum, Udaipur: Paintings of Mewar Court Life, Ahmedabad: Mapin; Middletown, NJ: Grantha, 1990. ———, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar, Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2001. ———, ‘Jagmandir and the Other Royal Palaces in Udaipur Painting’, in Dipti Khera and Raju Mansukhani (eds.), The City within a City, vol. 1: Jagmandir on Lake Pichola, New Delhi: Penguin Enterprise, 2002, pp. 117–41. ———, Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2012. Vaudeville, Charlotte, Barahmasa in Indian Literatures: Songs of the Twelve Months in Indo-Aryan Literatures, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986.

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Wood, Christopher S., ‘Editorial: Source and Trace’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 63–64, no. Spring–Autumn, 2013, pp. 5–19. Zeigler, Norman, ‘Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal Period’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia, New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 274–7.

Websites accessed http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/8/per_page/50/offset/0/sort_by/date/object/11307, accessed on 21 August 2017. www.eternalmewar.in/research, accessed on 7 August 2017. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/38027, accessed on 20 August 2017.

Part II

Surface and depth, ca. 1750–1950

5 Photos of the ocean Pearl fisheries, British colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar Natasha Eaton

Introduction: fotos of a “stone” But an earthly stone Flashing here and there Changed into a dove Changed into a bell Into immensity, into a piercing Wind; Into a phosphorescent arrow, Into salt of the sky. – Pablo Neruda, “Piedras del cielo”, Poem I For Pablo Neruda, silence can be “intensified into a stone” where “broken circles are closed”.1 Neruda’s friend was the largely neglected Sri Lanka–based photographer Lionel Wendt, now best known for his posthumously published “photobook” (Plate 5.1).2 Wendt’s photomontage is perhaps most conventionally comprehended through its pastiche montage of De Chiricoesque shimmering arches, René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas un oeuf (or other works), Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna and Georges Bataille’s rumination on the story of the eye and the recurrent vignette of a distant brig.3 Captioned by either Wendt or his posthumous compiler as Gay Abandon, there is in Plate 5.1 a slight and pearlescent look towards the absurd. It might also, however, be a photo of stone, if both photo and stone are broadly defined along this shoreline of “colonial rubbish” and the subaltern. Given Wendt’s and Neruda’s numerous tours of northwest Sri Lanka during the 1930s and the 1940s, such poetry and photomontage are conjectured here to refer to their time in the Gulf of Manaar. For thousands of years, the Gulf of Manaar or Salubham (the sea of grain), most often associated with the Buddha’s third eye as a pearl of the highest essence of wisdom, the Mahawanso Pearls of King Vijaya of Ceylon, Adam’s Bridge in the Ramayana, Pliny’s Natural History, Marco Polo’s Travels, Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea constituted the world’s most important oyster shell, chank shell, lime and pearl source. Although

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Plate 5.1 Lionel Wendt, Gay Abandon, ca. 1940. Source: Photogravure from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager Publishers Ltd., 1950. Photogravure author’s collection

the Gulf of Manaar was taken by British military force from the Dutch in 1796, Muhammad Ali, the Nawab of the Carnatic, refused to allow any pearl fisheries under the English East India Company’s “jurisdiction” to take place. After his son’s death, the British attempted relentlessly to extract pearls to the point that they quickly and mindlessly exhausted the possibilities of sustaining or increasing the oyster pearl population. Pearls might appear to continue to dazzle in all their shimmering, mysterious qualities as countless exhibitions and celebrations of their mnemonic, mesmerising qualities suggest. Against the grain of art historical and museological fetishisation of pearls, perhaps pearls were the waste of, or supplement to, the globalising shell economy: pretty trinkets with next to no “real” global value.4 Certainly, in the Gulf of Manaar, it would seem that the need for lime that was essential for architecture long predated the market for pearls. At least as the supplement for gold, shell money constituted the currency of the 19th-century globalising economy, carrying with it a tremendous and archaic (oceanic) depth. For Karl Marx, there is something anachronistic about pearl diving. Pearl diving went against the modern trend for artificial pearls, which brings to a head the crisis in value. Marx asks us to think about what happens to use value when substances such as wax, glass or mother-of-pearl attempt to imitate the lustre of seawater pearls?

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By the time of Marx’s 1844 writing on economics and philosophy, scientists and jewellers were injecting hollow beads of glass with a mixture of liquid ammonia and white matter taken from the scales of fish. The assumed essence or core of the pearl came from crushed herring scales. In terms of the phenomenology of the commodity, it begs the question: “What is value in the light of the development of simulants and the redeployment of rubbish?”5 Marx’s writings on jewels – their simulation and how they might delude the senses – can be viewed as the culmination of his examination of species being and labour.6 Pearls and pearl diving are also at the heart of the formation of fieldwork-based anthropology, at least in relation to photography. Branislaw Malinowski’s relatively perfunctory photographic practice was radically improved – both in technique and his visual engagement with the subject – once he encountered the pearl trader Billy Hancock in the Trobriand Islands (Plate 5.2). The pearl trader and the anthropologist playfully exchange places with their respective cameras. Hancock stands, perhaps shyly, to the right of Malinowski: “The picture of the two of us is very bad”.7 However, there might still be possible recourse to magic and the archaic held within labour, which, as the anthropologist Michael Taussig puts it, can be (photographically) redeemed.8 In this chapter, I am concerned with what I have playfully termed “fotos” of the ocean. I take as my inspiration several photographs gleaned from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon and Neruda’s Islamic-mystical inspired poems. These are read eccentrically as a “device” for defamiliarising both the pearling

Plate 5.2 Unknown photographer, Bronislaw Malinowski and Billy Hancock, ca. 1917. Source: Photograph in the collection of the Malinowski Archive, the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, Artwork in public domain

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economy in Sri Lanka and the “data ratio” or the “optical unconscious” induced by the photographic image.9 Christopher Pinney has argued that Hindu chromolithographs in the home, the public sphere and the bazaar are often dubbed to be “fotos” of the gods.10 “Foto”, a colloquialism or vernacular reference to image/memory, is one way of espying the divine. To glimpse the gods in the quotidian economy of the bazaar through the agency of the printed image is to capture the auspicious and possibly the giving and receiving of darsan through the printed or photographic image. Pinney’s evocative analysis of bhakti, mirrored photographs and chromolithographs in relation to such practices as subaltern thrashing bears relevance for my own discussion of the figure of the shark charmer of Manaar. In his other work on what makes Europe fundamentally creole, Pinney invokes Lyotard’s notion of “the figure” as that affective space which goes beyond mere representation where “intensities are felt”.11 The figure can be a shaman or a thing, as evinced, for instance, by Roland Barthes’ stunning introduction to Bataille’s Story of the Eye.12 Wendt’s and Neruda’s hanging stones also possess many possible histories as the eye or as the pearl suspended before what might be termed maritime space. Stone need not necessarily be eye or pearl but culch and the material of the abject – pertaining to the world of sharks, shamans and the diver. The current turn towards the liquescent modernity makes more than a passing reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known excurses on maritime space.13 In contradistinction to their extensive juxtaposition of striated and smooth concepts of space, “the maritime model” would seem to mess with such contrasts. The maritime can be seen and felt to be based on symptoms and evaluations: Intensities, wind and noise, forces and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrast, is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriving from it.14

This “is where the very special problem of the sea enters in”.15 For the sea can pertain to both the smooth and the striated. It is after all where Portuguese navigation disciplined the ocean through charts, astronomy and other forms of bearings. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is precisely the smooth surface, the open space of the sea, which first brought the “striation strategies” of modernity into being.16 They argue that directionality over dimensionality increasingly took hold of the ocean: this is “undoubtedly why the sea, the archetype of smooth space, was also the archetype of all striations of smooth space”.17 Thus the maritime investigations of modernity did not eradicate the smooth. Deleuze and Guattari are keen to consider the aftermath of the sea as striated space through man-made marine technologies as the sea in modernity became like air and the stratosphere “smooth space again, but in the strangest of reversals”.18 Such reversals mean that deterritorialisation can never be complete. Their maritime model of space then always has to contend with the (vague) multiplicities of what might be la vague or le vague.19 Following A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze continued to muse over the power of liquidity and Western modernity but this time in relation to the cinematic La Nouvelle Vague. Regarding cinema, liquidity assumes “a qualitative shift, which occurs in the transition from land to water to air”,

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which the film camera is able to capture as a series of de-solidifying perceptual shifts.20 Both in his writing on 20th-century cinema and in his sustained collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze returned to the lateral multiplicities of liquidity: On land movement always takes place between two points, while on water the point is always between two movements; it thus marks the conversion or the inversion of movement, as in the hydraulic relationship of a dive and a counter-dive, which is found in the movement of the camera itself.21

I would like to suggest that this camera need not only invoke the cine-eye. Wendt’s photographs also pertain to Deleuze’s Bergson-inflected attention to a kind of liquidity which reaches beyond human perception. To read Wendt’s photo-engagement with the ocean is to seek out a more “delicate perception and a vaster perception, a molecular perception”.22 Taking her lead from Deleuze, Renate Dohmen asks if technology driven perception (in her case the cine-eye) can be compared with South American shaman’s trances? What is the eye in matter?23 My own research is concerned with the magic of the shamanistic shark charmer – a figure who sought to harness modern technologies to his or her own powers of sympathetic magic. In well-respected anthropological discourse, exemplified by Val Daniel’s notion of “being a person in the Tamil way”, personhood and the sacred are continually faced by the danger of slipping into chaos.24 Dohmen proposes that such fluidity and flux can then be said to be analogous to the cinematic/maritime space imaginatively charted by Deleuze and Guattari.25 In my case, south Indian and Sinhalese notions of the body, the home and the ocean were constantly in flux – flux determined by the maritime economy of Manaar. As the double/counter point to this frenzied and contested (cosmopolitan) oceanic shoreline bazaar and the seasonal hazards of diving, which I examine next, Wendt’s slight and quiet experiments with photomontage can be said ludically to elicit a glimpse, a photo of the sacred. To see the sacred is to see the shaman qua labour.26 Although there has been admirable work on the coming of a machinedriven modernity and its “market imaginary” in late 19th- and early 20th-century Sri Lanka, what must also be accounted for is the persistence of the archaic.27 The archaic is the world of the abject, the shoreline and the nomadic. It is the world of the impoverished diver who worked naked without the right to a diving suit, nose clip or diving stone and was forced to dive for up to 12 hours at a time with little reward and limited opportunity to sell his oysters at the daily sunset shore auction.28 It is also the world of the male or female itinerant shark shaman.

Argentine telepathy: economy of the shark charmer The natives had a notion of some powerful queen having resided at Coudramalle, and that this ridge was formerly an island, on which the dead from the city were buried. – W. M. G. Colebrooke, “Observations on the Pearl Fisheries of the Island of Ceylon”29

Although rarely engaging with the politics of the everyday, it is possible to project vernacular fear and desire on to at least three of Wendt’s photographs. In Plate 5.3, his placement of the ShawStalin pamphlet, the approaching brig and the lone goat might possibly be caught within a world

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Plate 5.3 Lionel Wendt, Strange Décor, 1933–34.

Source: Photogravure from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager Publishers Ltd., 1950. Photogravure author’s collection

of the tele-graphic/-pathy, as suggested by the half-present telegraph station (Plate 5.3). Adventures in Space reverses four times against a brooding horizon a lone man with an umbrella wondering along the silverine shoreline (Plate 5.4). Possibly a shark shaman, he might be, unbeknownst to us, communicating with his fellow shamans, that is, that isolated shaman regarding an Argentine fish talisman in his beach hut; the other working with the divers 32 kilometres out at sea. A few photos earlier, a crouching figure, perhaps a fisherman or a diver, may be dreaming of a nubile girl shimmering in the watery depths below (Plate 5.5). A sea spirit, a lost love or a talisman, this languid, erotic figure can be said to bear certain resonance with the oceanic economy of sea wives and the trans-oceanic Hindu/African goddess Mami Wata.30 Increasingly demonised since the 1970s, Mami Wata participates in a wider cult of globalising salt water “fetishisms” and their “unresolvable oscillations”.31 Anthropologist Patricia Spyer considers mythical, fetishised sea wives who assist pearl divers in Eastern Indonesia.32 In return, the sea wives demand storebought goods, which divers can ill afford. The sea wives’ presence is crucial to the workings of local and long-distance commodity trade and debt. For Roy Wagner, working on Papua New Guinea, pearl shells “epitomise a kind of cultural metamorphosis that has been central to our understanding and misunderstanding of Melanesian

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Plate 5.4 Lionel Wendt, Adventures in Space, ca. 1930s–1940s. Source: Photogravure from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager Publishers Ltd., 1950. Photogravure author’s collection

life”.33 Pearl shells are either dismissed as emblems of vanity or else they are restricted to a utilitarian purpose. Pearl shells constituted a form of coercive currency as can be seen in the case of pioneering prospectors who flew them over the Papua New Guinean Highlands in the thousands. Kina, Melanesian pidgin for pearl shell, was used in complex patterns of ornament and exchange. White colonialists became enthralled to shell money and the cargo cult which they sought to inflect through the coercive introduction of paper currency from the 1950s.34 Banks and government film companies issued propaganda films and booklets which sought to justify paper money in lieu of the “inferior” status of pigs and shells.35 In the South Highlands, banknotes, known as kina notes, were sometimes likened to kina shells. They could be used interchangeably. While Wendt’s shoreline figures either quietly contemplate or fantasise about an erotic ocean-asfigure, Ceylonese divers’ collective fears and obstinacy were repeatedly noted by colonial officials. Divers’ experiences were obviously incommensurable with the economic data-drive of colonial officials intent on maximising the pearl yield. Invited to the home of the Gomez family settled at Kilakari, James Hornell, a colonial zoologist, seafaring ethnographer and chief colonial official charged with inspecting the pearl fisheries, interviewed the local head diver M. Kirutuneia.

Plate 5.5 Lionel Wendt, Dreaming, 1933–34. Source: Photogravure from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager Publishers Ltd., 1950. Photogravure author’s collection

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Kirutuneia claimed to be 70 years old and to have dived since he was nine. Ever on the rather relentless if absurd search for objective data on the nomadic lives of elusive oysters, Hornell wrote somewhat disappointedly that Kirutuneia “had much to say, but few facts of consequence were elicited”.36 He also complained that very few local men would dive for the British at any time, especially when plans for a second fishing season were introduced: The divers utilized, with their usual skill, the stalking horse cry of “Sharks on the banks”. As any stick is good enough to beat a dog, so any excuse is considered good enough to utilize when the diverse for any reason wish a fishery to come to an end. At one time it is “sharks”; at another, the alleged scarcity of oysters, “chippie illei”, illness, rumours of cholera, small profits, rough weather, chill winds are all utilized with the utmost cunning but the true reason is that they have made enough money, is always kept in the background.37

Forever frustrated, Hornell suggested replacing divers with dredging machines. A second alternative would be to lure Arab divers from the Persian Gulf – men he considered more disciplined and able – as well as regulate diving as part of the establishment of a Government Fisheries Department.38 In “Problems of the Conditions of Parawas”, Hornell attempted to consider what he saw as the inexplicable mestizjo nature of the Parawa caste.39 Although he dedicated much of his career to the close empirical study of shell detritus and the lives of oysters, Hornell relies here, as many officials did, on what can be termed the recursive archive.40 For instance, to substantiate his scholarly claims, Hornell repeatedly turned to such writers as Van Reede and Lauren Pyl, now obscure figures in the colonial archive. It is as if his analysis of the Parawa caste had to generate afresh the rhetoric of previous and perhaps by then obsolescent European accounts: The Parawas are distinctly brachycephatic whereas the Dravidians who constitute the higher castes in South India are notably long-headed and approximate closely in physical characteristics to the Mediterranean race. The Parawas are probably derived from ancient elements akin to the progenitors of the Polynesians – perhaps the Nagas of the ancient Tamil clerics.41

According to earlier colonial accounts, it would seem that “poverty was the compelling power” to dive.42 Many men went blind from diving, and it seems to have been a common colonial practice to make the blind and the crippled dive. Sometimes the British forced divers to dive way too deep with fatal consequences. In return for their hard labour, which included having to lie on their hard-won bluebottle infested open oysters while waiting for the oysters to rot, which enabled pearls to be extracted, divers could buy small pieces of stone from the local rajas to establish their own villages.43 The purchase of local “waste” stone brought with it a certain authority in that the Parawas could then negotiate their own headsman if they gifted the local rajah an annual present in lieu of “other” taxes. They could then elect their own chief, known as the king of the Parawas. The king or “don” could acquire revenue from districts as far afield as Quilon and Bengal, although the British attempted to reduce his influence and revenue as far as possible.44 Not surprisingly, given his fixation with the regulation of the pearl/oyster driven bazaar, which I discuss next, Hornell cited what he believed to be an agreement between the Parawa divers and the local raja, whereby

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guards and tribunals were to be established to prevent all disputes and quarrels arising from this open market, every man being subject to his own judge, and his case being decided by him; all payments are then also divided between the headsmen of the Parawas, who are the owners of that fishery [. . .]. They had weapons and fisheries of their own, with which they are able to defend themselves.45

There was, however, also a magical/nomadic aspect to the rights of the Parawas. Whether Roman Catholics, Muslims or Hindus, the Parawa divers relied on the powers/presence of the shark charmer. Edgar Thurston, Hornell’s contemporary and the curator of the Madras Government Museum, became fixated with local shamans and what he termed their omens and superstitions. Although his fascination with these men and women was far from unique, what makes his investigations intriguing are two things: firstly, his brief discussion of the proximity of the shaman’s hut to the local telegraph pole, and secondly, his penchant for collecting silver “argentine” talisman (Plate 5.6). Perhaps both can be said to speak to sympathetic magic as telepathy. Telepathy might be a disjunctive, hybrid term capturing British colonial phobia/fetishisation of knowledge systems which colonial officials could not fully comprehend.46 Although the British considered replacing diving for pearls with dredging, a practice then being introduced in Northern Australia and the Torres Strait, they could not do so partly because they were held in “spiritual bondage” to the shark charmers. Divers would only agree

Plate 5.6 Edgar Thurston, Silver South Indian Charms, ca. 1900.

Source: Photograph reproduced from Edgar Thurston, Omens and Superstitions of Southern India, London; Leipsic: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912. Artwork in public domain

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to search for oysters if they were protected by at least two charmers. Known also as shark binders (kadal-kotti in Tamil; hai-banda in Hindustani), these shamans travelled for the seasonal pearl fishing. Perceived to have extraordinary powers, the shark charmers often worked in pairs at a distance: One goes out regularly in the head pilot’s boat. The other performs certain ceremonies on shore. He is stripped naked and shut up in a room, where no person sees him from the period of the sailing of the boats until their return. He has before him a brass basin full of water, containing one male and one female fish made of silver. If any accident should happen from a shark at sea, it is believed that one of these fishes is seen to bite the other. The divers likewise believe that, if the conjurer should be dissatisfied, he has the power of making the sharks attack them, on which account he is sure of receiving liberal presents from all quarters.47

Associated with volt sorcery and sympathetic magic, the shark charmer had for centuries held an important place in Portuguese, Dutch and British territories in south India. Without their presence, it is highly unlikely that any fisheries would have taken place.48 Edgar Thurston observed in his typically bricoleur manner: It is recorded by Marco Polo that South Indian pearl divers call in the services of an Abraiman (Brāhman?) to charm the sharks. “And their charm holds good for that day only; for at night they dissolve the charm, so that the fishes can work mischief at their will”. [. . .] Before the fishery of 1889, at which I was present, the divers of Kilakarai on the Madura coast, as a preliminary to starting for the scene thereof, performed a ceremony, at which prayers were offered for protection against the attacks of sharks. “The only precaution”, Tennent writes, “to which the Ceylon diver devotedly resorts is the mystic ceremony of the shark-charmer, whose power is believed to be hereditary. Nor is it supposed that the value of his incantations is at all dependent upon the religious faith professed by the operator, for the present head of the family happens to be a Roman Catholic. At the time of our visit, this mysterious functionary was ill, and unable to attend; but he sent an accredited substitute, who assured me that, although he was himself ignorant of the grand and mystic secret, the fact of his presence, as a representative of the higher authority, would be recognised and respected by the sharks”. At the Tuticorin fishery in 1890, a scare was produced by a diver being bitten by a shark, but subsided as soon as a “wise woman” was employed. Her powers do not, however, seem to have been great, for more cases of shark-bite occurred, and the fishery had to be abandoned at a time when favourable breezes, clear water, plenty of boats, and oysters selling at a good price, indicated a successful financial result.49

Working with the Parawa divers, the charmers encouraged these men to carry a charm made from a dried palmyra leaf on which were inscribed mystical characters which they wrapped in oil cloth.50 The British attempted to reduce their activities and rewards by stipulating that each shark charmer was only to receive one oyster a day from each diver before banning their presence at the fisheries altogether.51 Shifting sands, migrating oysters and unpredictable currents allow us to characterise these colonial fishing grounds in terms of what Taussig would call miasma or that unruly, ambiguous space of the abject commons that blurs land and sea.52

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Culching and the camp-as-city As is well known, the Mughal emperor Akbar’s chief chronicler Ab’l Fazl (1551–1602) repeatedly corrected his own writings and is rumoured to have drawn at least once drew bird’s eye view of the Mughal imperial camp “in the singular”.53 This camp of as many as 200,000 officers, servants and wives was in fact two near identical camps. Described by Ab’l Fazl as having travelled two days or so ahead of the emperor’s camp, such a doppelgänger camp was intended to provide a kind of fata morgana: to provide the horizon line with all its familiarity of Akbar’s arrival and to smooth over his desertion of its forebear. Possibly because of the promise of the replication of the imperial camp, the city is perpetually an invisible promise. For Ab’l Fazl writing under his ruler’s daily instruction, Akbar came to personify the city. Under Abl’ Fazl’s direction, Akbar was depicted by the emperor’s leading court artists as immersed in a kind of “bell jar” device being lowered to the ocean floor where he could encounter many fish and aquatic monsters.54 Perhaps not surprisingly, given Akbar’s penchant for militant/mythical/heroic forebears, he also demanded that his court artists portray Alexander descending and observing a beautiful, if maybe deadly, sea dragon (Plate 5.7). In Western modernity, the camp as the sinister double of the city can be stripped to bare life – at least according to the genealogy laid out by Giorgio Agamben’s early volumes of homo sacer.55 Excessively policed, the camp is for the 20th and 21st centuries the hideous space of industrial light, torture and confinement. Agamben’s timely intervention has enabled scholars to ruminate on the relationship between the city and the camp which is most presciently emphasised by academic attention to black sites as “invisible” centres of detention in the United States. One scholarly backlash to the harrowing testimonies of the expanded notion of the camp has been to think about dark, unruly spaces in terms of the “right to opacity”.56 To ruminate on the nomadic aspects of the pearl fishery as camp, the camp is then possibly a space which not only incites white racist surveillance but also whose “opacity” is instrumental to its very existence. Given the centripetal force of the shark charmer, perhaps the right to opacity determined the economy of the makeshift pearl fishery in the Gulf of Manaar. Manaar pearl fisheries necessitated sporadic “heterotopias” of up to 50,000 men, women and children who set up home and shop around the town of Marichchukkad. Living in makeshift huts, they gathered en masse through word of mouth, rumour or after the colonial government posted annual advertisements in the press announcing the immanent opening of the fisheries. Travelling from Malabar, Ceylon, the Malay Archipelago, Canton, Madras and northeast India, this cosmopolitan, subaltern crowd signified for some supporters of British colonialism “the scum of the East and the riffraff of the Asiatic littoral”.57 The camp-as-heterotopia soon came to be highly regulated by British colonial officials. They regularly doused the camp-city with cheap disinfectant while proudly announcing the presence of a police court, jail, bank, post and telegraph offices, auction room, hospital and cemetery. Heterotopia, as is well known, can be as much a counter or crisis space for beaches, ships, brothels, colonies and rites of passage.58 The beach camp population was counted as part of an attempt in the name of “public peace” to avoid any potential sedition, although regular riots and illicit

Plate 5.7 Artist unknown, Iskandar in a Ship, Observing Sea Monster, Folio from a copy of

the Iskandar Nama, ca. 1600. Opaque watercolour on paper, 23.8 × 15.9 cm. Source: Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, Acc. No. IS.294–1951

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trading took place.59 Avoiding the purview of the colonial gaze, divers swallowed pearls and hid shells on their bodies and in the ships’ sails. They returned to shore to open shells when they knew the colonial supervisor and his attendants would not be present. This way, they could open as many oysters as possible without being forced into the colonial tanks where they were closely watched in the activity of shell chucking. Deemed to be looting if caught, the removal of shells without colonial sanction could lead to imprisonment. In an attempt to alleviate some of the stench of rotting oysters in this “black mass of flies” brought to camp daily, the colonial government agreed to finance amateur inventor G. G. Dixon’s washing machine. Not particularly efficient, this arcane device became the source of controversy. Under pressure from the British government, colonial authorities in Ceylon and Madras had to agree to lease its fisheries out to the private Ceylon Company of Pearl Fisheries Limited in 1906 as well as to sell the machine to them. Although yielding the south Indian and Ceylonese colonial authorities’ largest single source of income, the fisheries repeatedly failed to produce a regular harvest. Within three years of taking over the Manaar fishery from the Dutch, the British had succeeded in depleting the number of oysters entirely, which led to an anxious spate of articles, public addresses and reports on the rapid collapse of a potentially lucrative luxury monopoly. In spite of this “archive fever” during the 19th century, only 36 fisheries took place. Colonial officials repeatedly concluded that “the pearl fishery is a branch of revenue too precious a nature to be comprehended at present”.60 Manaar oysters were believed to generate the best pearls when seven years old – just one year before their anticipated death. With their shells being thin and brittle, they were not suitable for the mother-of-pearl market. Rather, they ended up as “camp filling”, chunam, or they were ground up and digested along with betel nut (tiny pearls were also chewed, ingested and spat out in this way). Chunam and betel with areca nut together constituted “a luxury of which all ranks partake”.61 The bustling world of the nomadic camp invokes the coming together and displacement of several forms of economy. James Hornell, writing on the pearl fishery held at Tondi in 1914, observed the world of the camp as that lacking in wealthy merchants. Only three with any significant funds (all from Nagore) attended the oyster auctions. The lack of merchants was compensated for by the presence of a wide of retail dealers from local towns and villages, as well as from Madura, Kilakavai, Tinnevelly and Benares, and “a far wondering Arab trader gave Medina as his home”.62 Given his long-term commitment to the economy of pearls and conch shells, Hornell sought to advocate the disciplining and punishment of crowds. Including a detailed plan of what should constitute the built environment of the shell auction at Tondi, Hornell chose to make Tondi the modular makeshift city (Plate 5.8). Inhabited by as many as 50,000 divers, traders, merchants and their families, along with other camp dwellers necessary for the formation of a workable bazaar, the camp-city, Hornell advocated, should be rigorously regulated in terms of its spatial layout. The presence of a colonial police force he believed was necessary as “[t]he chief trouble experienced was in preventing

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Plate 5.8 James Hornell, Plan of Part of a Pearl Camp at Tondi, 1914. Source: Reproduced from James Hornell, “The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar and Palk Bay”, Madras Fisheries Bulletin, vol. XVI, Madras: Madras Government Press, 1930, pp. 1–188. Artwork in public domain

nuisances along the sea front; after a few examples were made the people learnt the necessary lesson and behaved satisfactorily”.63 Aside from the coercive implications of “making an example”, the camp included a resident medical officer who was supposed to assist in the eradication or at least in the containment of cholera and other diseases which the colonial authorities feared were being spread from the nomadic travels of the camp inhabitants and quotidian visitors. The makeshift hospital should in the case of all camps be located at the outer most edge. In Tondi’s case, it was beyond the northern creek. Additionally, the fishery city should include a telegraph, latrines and a water tank, as well as some kind of “lighting arrangements”: “Instead of a large number of miserable oil lamps, a dozen kitson lights were hired”.64 Kitson Empire Lighting & Co. claimed that these vaporised oil burners were six times more powerful than oil lights. Such an industry of light might seem to officials like Hornell as a way of disciplining the shoreline camp, but light “is devious” as luminosity “in itself only makes blacker and more opaque the surrounding darkness”.65 Although seemingly dissatisfied with the lighting conditions, Hornell and fellow colonial officials did not seem to be too much concerned with the architecture or aesthetic of these makeshift cities. Ironically, the south Indian camp had a critical role to play in the look and substance

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of colonial cities and Indian temples in the production of lime and an aesthetic of whiteness. Whiteness, so central to the creole aesthetic of neoclassicism in the colonial cities of Calcutta, Madras and the Anglican churches of Zanzibar and Singapore, had its origin in the use of ground and burnt shells used as plasters in south Indian temples and shrines.66 Although considered auspicious for millennia in the Gulf of Manaar region for the whitewashing of villages, temples and shrines, colonialists complained that lime was too ephemeral and unstable, and not suited for their desired intricacies of architectural ornamentation.67 The materiality of shell confounded and eluded colonial practices: much of empire was built on and of Madras lime (chunam). Again, as with the prescience of the shark charmer, the intelligence, allure and lore of the ocean calls to the magical, archaic worlds of the shell. Parawa women did most of the culching. These women worked under the license of government contractors who rented the shell pits from the Public Works Department. As payment for their labour, these women could open the molluscs and remove the flesh, which could then be sold to those castes who ate oysters.68 The waste from shell bangle making factories at Korkai at the mouth of the Tambaraparni was used in lime making (as in Bengal), as can be seen in the mortar of local temple walls.69 In certain districts, everyone had the right to gather shells from sea beds, although the collection of shells from other sources was increasingly controlled by the colonial authorities.70 Hornell lamented, “At present no control is exercised; the miners dig where they like [. . .]. The ground is unsystematically and wastefully worked”.71 Not surprisingly, given his desire for a modular pearl fishery camp-city, Hornell advocated government-regulated digging. Aside from a certain nod towards this sense of vernacular sacrality and its subsequent redirection towards domestic, ecclesiastical and bureaucratic structures, the British colonial authorities in south India sought to redefine the ocean bed by a return of some of the detritus of building materials to the sea. Dumped by the colonial government in the Gulf of Manaar, leftover building blocks made from chunam were intended to provide lime-coated homes for nomadic oysters ecologically redefining the shallows of the shoreline. Culching meant filling the ravines with oyster shells so as to reengineer the ecology of the “abject” shorescape: The heaps of shells from past fisheries [are] utilised for this purpose, as no great profit could be obtained from removing them to a distance for burning into lime or exporting them to Europe as a material for mother of pearl. The iridescence of the Ceylon pearl-yielding oyster is very beautiful, but the smallness of the shell detracts from its commercial value.72

The Manaar shorelines made up of millions of half buried shells dazzles and shimmers.

Conclusion: ocean as intelligence Busqué una gota de agua – Pablo Neruda, “Las Piedras del Cielo”, “Poem VI”

Wendt’s Silence offers a final, perhaps allegorical, photograph of the fate of pearl fishing in the Gulf of Manaar (Plate 5.9). Japan and China increasingly dominated the trade in synthetic freshwater

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Plate 5.9 Lionel Wendt, Silence, ca. 1930s–1940s. Source: Photogravure from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager Publishers Ltd., 1950. Photogravure author’s collection

pearls. Aside from the dumping of opened and unopened oysters in Papua New Guinea, oysters contributed to the formation of the light of modernity. The Third Reich’s experiments with colour and light (the best-known example being the concentration camp–based dyes and rubber projects of I. G. Farben) included oyster shells. In 1930s Germany, the pioneering of radiolithic paints produced the desired fluorescence that “allowed Nazi eyes to penetrate the darkness”.73 Perhaps it is possible to contemplate Plates 5.1 and 5.9 anew as a kind of closure. In Ceylon, archaic labour, like the shark charmer decades before, disappears into the ocean, leaving just ripples. The glistening beauty of Neruda’s “Las Piedras del Cielo” pays homage to jewels’ shimmering affinity with the ocean.74 Although Neruda never did make a poem addressed to the pearl, perhaps in memory of Wendt, his lost friend and his knowledge of the pearl/shell economy, these are fotos of the ocean: Silence is intensified Into a stone: Broken circles are closed. – Pablo Neruda, “Piedras del cielo” Poem XIX

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Notes 1 Pablo Neruda, Piedras del Cielo, London: Routledge, 1970, p. 54. 2 For Lionel Wendt, see Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Renaissance Man: Lionel Wendt-Creator of a Truly Sri Lankan Idiom’, Serendib, vol. 13, 1994, pp. 1–6; Lionel Wendt: A Centennial Tribute, Colombo: Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, 2000; and Rajit Juroda (ed.), The Gaze of Modernity: Photographs by Lionel Wendt, Fukoka: Fukoka Asian Art Museum, 2003. For Wendt’s nostalgia for Europe and ocean-as-memory, see Diva Gujral, ‘Pictures in the Water: On Time and Memory in Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon’, unpublished MA dissertation, University College, London, 2015. 3 Wendt learnt how to develop his own film by experimenting with photomontage, solarisation and brom-etching. The photographs I discuss in this chapter were reproduced using the technique of photogravure. Wendt wrote extensively in the journal Leica News and Techniques. His most famous work is the posthumously published Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon, London: Lincolns-Prager, 1950 and Colombo: Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, 1950, which was compiled by Bernard A. Thornley with L. C. Van Geyzel. It consisted of 120 photographs published with a print run of 5,000. Wendt’s photographs in this publication date from ca. 1933 to 1944. It was initially intended to be the first of three volumes; volumes two and three were abandoned because of the financial failure of volume one. It was re-released in 2000 with 110 additional photographs and accompanying essays as A Centennial Tribute. 4 For a different take on the importance of the shell see Charlotte Guichard, ‘The Shell in the 18th century: A Border Object?’, Techniques and Culture, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012, pp. 150–63. In this chapter, I am more interested in the shell as “waste”. 5 Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion, 2005, p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 72. 7 This remark is made by Malinowski in his diaries, which were never intended to be published. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: Routledge and Kegan and Paul, 1967, p. 148. There are over 1,100 of Malinowski’s photographs in the archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science, all of which make for fascinating viewing. Billy Hancock is included in the “Encounter” and “the Ethnographer” classifications of this archive. See also Michael W. Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography, 1915–1918, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Malinowski had an ambivalent relationship with Bill(y) Hancock with whom he worked in 1917–18. For instance, “The camera seemed too heavy. I reproached myself for not having mastered the ethnographic situation and Bill’s presence hindered me a bit [. . .]. He thinks this is all very silly”. Malinowski, A Diary, p. 148. 8 See Michael Taussig, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, 2008, pp. 1–15. In a number of essays and books, Taussig has employed photographs and drawings as a kind of photobook/extended photo essay. See Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. 9 For art as device, see Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher, London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990, pp. 1–14. For the optical unconscious and data ratio of photography see Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India, London: The British Library, 2008. 10 Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggles in India, London: Reaktion, 2004. 11 Christopher Pinney, ‘Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection’, New Zealand Journal of Literature, vol. 20, 2003, pp. 125–61.

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12 Story of the Eye, by Lord Auch (Georges Bataille), trans. by Joachim Neugroschel with a forward by Roland Barthes, London: Penguin, 1977. Christopher Pinney also makes reference to this work in Creole Europe, pp. 134–5. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. For useful literature on art history and the ocean, see Tricia Cusack (ed.), Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisioning the Sea as Social Space, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 14 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi, London: Continuum, 1987, pp. 528–9. 15 Ibid., p. 529. 16 Deleuze and Guattari make direct reference to Pierre Chaunu’s work on the extended confrontation at sea between the smooth and the striated “during the course of which the striated progressively took hold”. Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 530. 19 “La Vague” can refer to the wave. “Le vague” can be to be in the dark, for instance être dans le vague. As an adjective vague can be for instance terrain vague or wasteland. All are relevant here. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 45. See also Cinema II: The Time Image, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 21 Deleuze, Cinema I, p. 123. 22 Renate Dohmen, Encounters beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference, London: IB Tauris, 2016. 23 Ibid., p. 46. 24 Valentine E. Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way, Berkeley: University of California, 1984. 25 Dohmen, Encounters beyond the Gallery, p. 53. 26 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986. 27 Nira Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern: Early Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka, New York: Berghahan Books, 2014, p. 4. 28 Divers were male, which differentiates them from Japanese divers, who were often women. For anonymous photographs of these women divers, see the collection of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. I am grateful to Sarah Walpole for bringing these rare photographs to my attention. 29 William M. G. Colebrooke, ‘Observations on the Pearl Fisheries of the Island of Ceylon’, Proceedings of the Societies: The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India, vol. 10, no. 39, 2 February 1833, pp. 120–3. 30 The modern iconography of African “cargo/commodity” goddess Mami Wata was strongly influenced by the Hamburg-based company Adolph Friedlander’s 1880s chromolithograph of a Hindu snake charmer Maladamatajaute. At least 12,000 copies were printed in Bombay and sent to traders in Kumase, Ghana to be copied by the Shree Ram Calendar Company. As a transcultural icon, Mami Wata’s iconography is frequently merged with that of Lakshmi or the spirit Mami Titi in Ghana, Togo and Benin. See Henry Drewal (ed.), Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008. 31 It would appear that the cult of Mami Wata is also present in Haiti, Puerto Rica, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. For ‘fetishisms’ and their oscillations/instabilities, see Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 1. 32 Patricia Spyer, The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

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33 Roy Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Speech as Symbolic Obviation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, p. 64. 34 Robert J. Foster, ‘Your Money, Our Money and the Government’s Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia’, in Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishism, pp. 60–96. The term “cargo cult” was first used in the 1950s in the news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly as part of a three-sided debate between colonial administrators, expatriate planters and Christian missionaries. This did have a precedent in German colonies from 1990 onwards. In 1920, the colonial government of Australia issued the Native Currency Ordinance. 35 “The challenge of colonial education lay in teaching a mode of symbolization in which money could be apprehended as a signifier referring beyond itself”. Robert J. Foster, Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 66. 36 James Hornell, ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar and Palk Bay’, Madras Fisheries Bulletin, vol. 16, Madras: Madras Government Press, 1930, pp. 1–188. Interview 27 April 1904, p. 64. 37 Ibid., pp. 143–4. 38 Ibid., p. 144; pp. 166–7. 39 Ibid., p. 12. 40 In Hornell’s case, this is most readily apparent in his work ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar and Palk Bay’, Madras Fisheries Department, vol. XVI, which draws heavily on Portuguese and Dutch accounts and economic figures. 41 Hornell, ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries’, p. 12. 42 James Cordiner, A Description of Ceylon, Containing an Account of the Country, Inhabitants, and Natural Production with Narratives of a Tour Round the Island in 1800, the Campaign in Candy in 1803, and a Journey to Ramisseram in 1804, vol. 2, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807, pp. 33–4. 43 Stone was considered to be an inferior building material to shells. 44 By 1891, the don was only allowed by the government to have one boat for pearl diving. Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, Madras, no. 702 (1889). 45 Hornell, ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries’, p. 13. 46 The word “telepathy” was first coined by the English psychologist Frederic Myers in 1882. Taken literally, it means “feeling from afar” from tele + pathy. 47 Cordiner, A Description of Ceylon, vol. 2, p. 52. 48 For the Shark Charmer, see The Steubenville Herald, 12 November 1896; Robert Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon: Containing its History, Geography, Natural History, with the Manners and Customs of Its Various Inhabitants, London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1805, pp. 65–6; Colebrooke, “Observations on the Pearl Fisheries”, pp. 305–6. For more recent literature see Markus Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the 17th century, Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 95, 639 and N. Athiyam, “Shark Charming: A Magic Act in Pearl Fishery”, Indian Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014, pp. 21–30. 49 Edgar Thurston, Notes on the Pearl and Chank Fisheries and Marine Fauna of the Gulf of Manaar, Madras: Madras Government Museum, 1912, p. 198. 50 E. Rawdon Power, “The Pearl Fishers of Ceylon”, in Friendship’s Offering, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1837, p. 506; James Stueart, An Account of the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon with an Appendix, Colombo: Government Press, 1843, p. 15. These charms were often written by the Roman Catholic priests. At this time, each shark charmer received ten oysters a day from each boat. 51 George F. Kunz and Charles H. Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems, London and New York: MacMillan & Co., 1908, p. 116. 52 Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, pp. 45–56. 53 Ab’l Fazl, Akbarnama, trans. and ed. by Henry Beveridge, 2 vol., New Delhi: Rare Books, 1972, vol. 1, p. 123.

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54 See Maurice S. Dimand, ‘Mughal Painting under Akbar the Great’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, vol. 12, no. 2, 1953, pp. 46–51. 55 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 56 Edouard Glissant quoted in T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Democracy during Global Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, p. 132. 57 Kunz and Steveson, The Book of the Pearl, p. 109. 58 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–7. 59 Alastair M. Fergusson and John Fergusson, All about Gold, Gems and Pearls in Ceylon and South India, London: John Murray, 1888, p. 172. 60 Robert Colebrooke, An Account of the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon, London, 1831, p. 64. 61 Cordiner, A description of Ceylon, vol. 2, p. 98. 62 Hornell, ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries’, p. 82. 63 Ibid., p. 83. 64 James Hornell, ‘The Utilization of Coral and Shells for Lime Building in the Madras Presidency’, Madras Fisheries Bulletin, vol. 8, 1914–15, p. 84. 65 Leslie, Synthetic Worlds, p. 161. 66 For brief reference to the use of ‘Madras chunam’ in Anglican church building see G. Alex Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Architecture in the British Empire, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 167–8. On p. 167, he notes the difficulties of working with chunam as a building material, as it was almost impossible to drill a nail throughout it. It was prepared by adding shell lime, which must not include sand, which is then beaten with egg whites and coarse sugar to make a kind of paste to which water in which coconut shells had been soaked is then added to the mixture. 67 Although British colonial architecture erred towards the Doric or the Ionic order, in the Gulf of Manaar region, this might not have referred so much to either the “orthodox” Vitruvian order or the “stoic” revival of the more warlike order which had ideological ramifications, as seen in the proliferation of the Doric order in early 19th-century British architecture in Scotland for instance, as to the lack of colonial ability to grapple with shell lime as the material of the “higher” architectural orders. The simpler the structure, the cheaper to fix or destroy it would be. Perhaps in this way, colonial cities were not unlike the pearl fisheries camps. Bremner makes the important point that for the Anglican church, stone had always been the primary material chosen. But in a colonial context, it just did not weather as opposed to shell lime. 68 Hornell, ‘The Utilization of Coral’, p. 113. 69 Ibid., pp. 123–4. 70 Ibid., p. 14. For instance, in the Guntur and Kistna districts, Rs 2,443 was credited to the government as rental dues. 71 Hornell, ‘The Utilization of Coral’, p. 114. Hornell sought out areas for digging near Puttar. 72 Fergusson and Fergusson, All about Gold, Gems and Pearls, p. 381. 73 Leslie, Synthetic Worlds, p. 235. 74 The search for water is a recurrent them in Neruda’s Las piedras del Cielo. See, for instance, Neruda, Las piedras, p. 13, ‘Poem II’ on quartz (quartz being particles of sand): Quartz opens its eyes in the snow And grows spiky, Slipping on the white Into its own whiteness:

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Multiplying the mirrors It poses in facets, at angles: White sea urchins From the depths, It is the son of the salt That shoots up to heaven Glacial orange blossom Of silence, Very principle of foam . . .

References Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Athiyam, N., ‘Shark Charming: A Magic Act in Pearl Fishery’, Indian Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014, pp. 21–30. Bataille, Georges, Story of the Eye, by Lord Auch (Georges Bataille), trans. by Joachim Neugroschel with a forward by Roland Barthes, London: Penguin, 1977. Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Bremner, G. Alex, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Architecture in the British Empire, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. Colebrooke, William M. G., ‘Observations on the Pearl Fisheries of the Island of Ceylon’, Proceedings of the Societies: The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India, vol. 10, no. 39, 2 February 1833, pp. 120–3. Cordiner, James, A Description of Ceylon, Containing an Account of the Country, Inhabitants, and Natural Production with Narratives of a Tour Round the Island in 1800, the Campaign in Candy in 1803, and a Journey to Ramisseram in 1804, 2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807. Cusack, Tricia (ed.), Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisioning the Sea as Social Space, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Daniel, Valentine E., Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema I: The Movement Image, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———, Cinema II: The Time Image, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ——— and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi, London: Continuum, 1987. Demos, T. J., The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Democracy during Global Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Dimand, Maurice S., ‘Mughal Painting under Akbar the Great’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, vol. 12, no. 2, 1953, pp. 46–51. Dissanayake, Ellen, ‘Renaissance Man: Lionel Wendt: Creator of a Truly Sri Lankan Idiom’, Serendib, vol. 13, 1994, pp. 1–6. Dohmen, Renate, Encounters beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference, London: IB Tauris, 2016. Drewal, Henry S. (ed.), Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008. Fazl, Ab’l, Akbarnama, trans. and ed. by Henry Beveridge, 2 vol., New Delhi: Rare Books, 1972.

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Fergusson, Alastair M., and John Fergusson, All About Gold, Gems and Pearls in Ceylon and South India, London: John Murray, 1888. Foster, Robert J., ‘Your Money, Our Money and the Government’s Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia’, in Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 60–96. ———, Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–7. Guichard, Charlotte, ‘The Shell in the 18th Century: A Border Object?’, Techniques and Culture, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012, pp. 150–63. Gujral, Diva, ‘Pictures in the Water: On Time and Memory in Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon’, unpublished MA dissertation, University College, London, 2015. Hornell, James, ‘The Utilization of Coral and Shells for Lime Building in the Madras Presidency’, Madras Fisheries Bulletin, vol. 8, 1914–15, pp. 120–3. ———, ‘The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar and Palk Bay’, Madras Fisheries Bulletin, vol. 16, Madras: Madras Government Press, 1930, pp. 1–188. Juroda, Rajit (ed.), The Gaze of Modernity: Photographs by Lionel Wendt, Fukoka: Fukoka Asian Art Museum, 2003. Kunz, George F. and Charles H. Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems, London and New York: MacMillan & Co., 1908. Leslie, Esther, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion, 2005. Lionel Wendt Centre, Lionel Wendt: A Centennial Tribute, Colombo: Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, 2000. Malinowski, Bronislaw, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term , London: Routledge and Kegan and Paul, 1967. Neruda, Pablo, Piedras del Cielo, London: Routledge, 1970. Percival, Robert, An Account of the Island of Ceylon: Containing Its History, Geography, Natural History, with the Manners and Customs of Its Various Inhabitants, London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1805. Pinney, Christopher, ‘Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection’, New Zealand Journal of Literature, vol. 20, 2003, pp. 125–61. ———, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggles in India, London: Reaktion, 2004. ———, The Coming of Photography in India, London: The British Library, 2008. Power, E. Rawdon, ‘The Pearl Fishers of Ceylon’, Friendship’s Offering, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1837. Shklovsky, Viktor, ‘Art as Device’, in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher, London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990, pp. 1–14. Spyer, Patricia (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, London: Routledge, 1998. ———, The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Steubenville Herald, The 12 November 1896. Stueart, James, An Account of the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon with an Appendix, Colombo: Government Press, 1843. Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986. ———, My Cocaine Museum, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. ———, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, 2008, pp. 1–15. Thurston, Edgar, Notes on the Pearl and Chank Fisheries and Marine Fauna of the Gulf of Manaar, Madras: Madras Government Museum, 1912.

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Vink, Markus, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the 17th Century, Leiden: Brill, 2015. Wagner, Roy, Lethal Speech: Daribi Speech as Symbolic Obviation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wall, Jeff, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, New York: MOMA, 2007, pp. 106–10. Wickramasinghe, Nira, Metallic Modern: Early Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka, New York: Berghahan Books, 2014. Young, Michael W., Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography, 1915–1918, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998.

6 Deep time as intimate stranger The age of water in the religious imagination at Girar, 1855 Venugopal Maddipati* That we should find, therefore, cliffs where the sea once committed ravages, and from which it has now retired – estuaries where high tides once rose, but which are now dried up – valleys hollowed out by water, where no streams now flow, is no more than we should expect; these and similar phenomena are the necessary consequences of physical causes now in operation; and if there be no instability in the laws of nature, similar fluctuations must recur again and again in time to come. – Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 18371

Everyday places are far more waterworn than they appear. Or so one might have surmised in the middle decades of the 19th century upon reading the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Water may not have been visibly present in the landscape in one’s immediate vicinity. And yet, in so far as one hearkened to the physical world in the limiting criteria of knowable natural causes, one could, in keeping with Lyell, speculate about the landscape as evidence, in some instances, of the chafing action of seas, tides and streams. To the extent that one believed in the eternal constancy of “the laws of nature” “now in operation”, one could, at least in one’s mind’s eye, travel back to a beyond-human time to observe how water might have surged, perhaps even ferociously, as a terrain-sculpting agent. Indeed, no sooner did one begin to think like a naturalist about the uniformity of physical laws in the present and in the past, the very transpiring of the life of the landscape in front of one’s eyes might have ceased to belong within the remit of one’s own human everydayness. Instead, the transpiring of the life of that landscape might have suddenly catapulted itself into the remit of a vastly and perhaps even infinitely extended beyondhuman “natural time”. Small wonder, then, that the two Scottish geologists Stephen Hislop (1817–63) and Robert Hunter (1823–97) situated the transpiring of the life of landscape features, such as mountainsides in the Deccan plateau in central India, within the remit of a water-soaked “natural time” in their 1855 essay “On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur”.2 Surely, Hislop and Hunter, as dyed-in-the-wool naturalists, were spontaneously drawn towards speculating about the supervening power of natural forces. As geologists partial towards scientifically thinking through geomorphological changes, Hislop and Hunter may have been all too predisposed towards peering past their own immediate human existence into the earth’s more encompassing deep time in

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which water had initially deposited matter in the Deccan plateau region in the Eocene period that extended between 56 to 33.9 million years ago.3 Apparently, these freshwater deposits, scant traces of which could be found within the brows of hills, such as Girar and Sitabuldi in the Nagpur region in central India, were once a part of a single large extended freshwater body that stretched all the way from present-day Rajmahal to Mumbai and Rajamahendri.4 Surely, then, with their enduring interest in waterscapes and watersheds in the Deccan region, Hislop and Hunter may have found no work more satisfying than the task of chronicling the continuing fragmentation and evisceration of the traces of that sublimely large Eocene lake.5 Yet, even as one conjectures about Hislop and Hunter’s hearkening towards a beyond-human “natural time” in which water was a causal agent, one is also mindful of Hislop’s own deep religiosity. It bears mentioning that the Reverend Stephen Hislop was, in the words of his biographer George Smith, “ever the missionary first, the naturalist after”.6 As a person of faith belonging to the Free Church of Scotland, Hislop had initially arrived in the city of Nagpur in central India and settled by the Sitabuldi Hill in 1845 to take up evangelical work.7 At that time, Sitabuldi was a civil station roughly two and a half kilometres to the west of Nagpur. Moreover, the hill, which comprises two different summits, Chota tekri and Bada tekri, had been the site of fierce fighting in 1817 between the soldiers of the Maratha household of the Bhonsles who had ruled over Nagpur and British troops posted in the region to protect the Residency.8 It is at the base of this hill that Hislop took up residence in 1845 in a mission bungalow.9 Here, in the bungalow, Hislop began learning the Marathi and Gondi languages.10 He also took up prayer services in the nearby military cantonment of Kamptee.11 He was eventually joined at the mission by the Reverend Robert Hunter in 1847.12 From their new home by the foot of Sitabuldi hill, the two missionaries commenced travelling to the coal centres and cotton markets of the Wardha valley in the south and eventually arrived, over the course of their mission, at Girar Hill, roughly 80 kilometres south of Nagpur.13 Admittedly, then, as a historian of 19th-century visual culture, one experiences considerable difficulty in placing the square peg of Hislop and Hunter’s everyday time of religiosity and at-homeness in the greater Nagpur region, into the round hole of their fascination over the transpiring of the natural time of the region’s erstwhile waterscapes. Moreover, it also does not help while preparing a history of the field of Deccan geology, to learn that human time and natural time transpired at a distinct remove from each other in the imagination in 19th century. Indeed, the old Viconian-Hobbesian distinction between human affairs comprising civil and political frameworks, on the one hand, and nature’s work that was “ultimately inscrutable to man”, on the other hand, had stubbornly endured until relatively recently.14 It is only today that one witnesses how catastrophic transitions in the natural world can have a direct bearing on social histories from the vantages of current climate change–oriented thinking about human-induced tipping points.15 In short, the synchronicity between the calendar of “geological time” and “the chronology of human histories” is a wholly new development.16 Whatever else Hislop and Hunter were imagining while they were writing about freshwater deposits in the wider Nagpur region in the 19th century, then, it seems safe to say that they would

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not have been contemplating homologies between the time of human existence and natural time. In the 19th century, natural time, at a considerable remove from human time, may have been a distinct area of enquiry in its own right. One must be cautious and maintain a distinction between Hislop and Hunter’s own time and the time they studied and wrote about in “On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur”. It is, however, one thing to say that human everyday time and natural time did not exactly coincide in the colonial period in the Deccan region. It is or can be quite another thing to draw attention to the profoundly aleatory, out-of-joint nature of human time or religious everydayness in the British colonial imagination. In the former instance, one pits the deeply familiar time of everydayness and faith against the indifferent transpiring of natural time. In the latter instance, one grapples with the possibility that human everydayness and faith were sharply disjunctive sites in their own right. In such a formulation, objects, experiences and events may have become strange or foreign to one’s own sensibilities, when they assumed agency and withdrew themselves from one’s ability to know them or engage with them in familiar ways. I write this chapter from the latter perspective in which religious everydayness may not so much have only cohered as a time of adherence to scripture and the more comforting rituals of faith. Rather, it may have emerged as the holy time of the withdrawal of one’s immediate environment from the realm of one’s intimate comforting sense of familiarity with landscape features and waterscapes into the strange realm of natural or physical causation.17 Indeed, to the extent that terms such as faith, religiosity and home, contrary to how one conventionally understands them, infused a surplus of alterity into one’s immediate physical environment, one could begin to provisionally formulate the grounds for the emergence of Hislop and Hunter’s geological thinking as religion’s own intimate home-grown stranger. In short, when one makes religious everydayness as a locus of historical exploration, one is perhaps better placed to discern the dim outlines of an internal coevality between vastly incommensurable terms and categories, such as human time, natural time and even the time of mineralogical extraction and colonial expropriation.18 How, then, does one write about religious everydayness as a space of unfamiliarity, estrangement and alienation, or as a space in which, to use the words of the literary and political theorist Eric Santer, “every familiar is ultimately strange”?19 How does one describe the prior existence of a holy disjunctive religious everydayness so as to comprehend the exorbitant demand placed upon Hislop and Hunter by the landscape in front of themselves to engage with it in its own strange terms and criteria? Moreover, what are the entailments of an adherence to a disjunctive and strange religious everydayness in the realm of geological drawing? In this chapter, I attempt a few provisional answers to these questions.

Loomings That Hislop and Hunter were adherents of religion is not immediately apparent as the purport of their 1855 essay published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society in London. Certainly, at the face of it, the note immediately adjacent to the title of the essay indicates that “the Rev.

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Messrs. S. Hislop and R. Hunter”, or persons of religion, were the authors.20 And yet the essay itself, in terms of its contents, appears, at least on a cursory reading, as a paean to methodological naturalism. Hislop and Hunter may have devoted themselves to evangelisation in the Nagpur region. They may have adhered to the strictures and practices of religion. However, when it came to writing their essay, they appear to have exclusively confined themselves to thinking about a world of palpable natural causes. Hislop and Hunter’s writing principally comprised straightforward combinations of observations related to physical particulars in an immediate engirdling natural environment and the inferences they drew from these observations. Consider the references to Girar Hill. On the one hand, it is entirely possible that Hislop and Hunter initially arrived at the settlement of Girar, roughly 80 kilometres to the south of the city of Nagpur, while engaging in missionary work. On the other hand, upon scaling the hill, which was also home to the shrine of the saint Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar (1173–1266), the two authors engaged in the scientific pursuit of studying natural particulars. For instance, in what appears to be a rapidly drawn sectional elevation of the hill, Hislop and Hunter illustrated a freshwater deposit on the base that had accumulated in the Eocene period (Plate 6.1).21 More significantly, the freshwater deposit was enclosed from above and below by layers of basalt trap-rock. What set Girar apart as a geological entity, however, was the paradoxical repetition, within its brow, of the aforementioned composite structure comprising a freshwater deposit enclosed in traprock from above and below. As Hislop observed in the text accompanying the sectional elevation, See the accompanying section [of Girar] from east to west [. . .] where a is the deposit in plain white; b the same stratum of a red colour under the terrace; and c a repetition of it higher up and

Plate 6.1 Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, Sectional Elevation of

Girar Hill. Source: Reproduced from Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, “On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur, Central India”, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 345–383. Artwork in public domain

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brownish green. Whether there was a fourth stratum above c, the quantity of brushwood prevented me from observing. That all these strata are one and the same, though they differ in hue, I [Hislop] have no doubt. When we became acquainted with the changeableness of this deposit within the space of a few yards, its different phases on the eastern declivity of [Girar] hill occasion no difficulty [. . .].22

After reading this description, one can well imagine Hislop and Hunter’s perplexity over the recurrence of the “same stratum” at different altitudes. How did the nearly identical freshwater deposits reach their different roosts on the brow of the same mountain? While the two naturalists may have initially wondered about the repetition of deposits, by the time they wrote their essay in 1855, they seemed reasonably assured of a scientific explanation. Apparently, the freshwater deposits at different altitudes had once belonged at the same altitude. These strata were a part of a single extended plane of freshwater deposits with an underlying and overlying layer of trap in the wider Nagpur region. The deposits rose intermittently in the Eocene period over an already existing base of sandstone due to volcanic activity below. Writing in the context of the underlying and overlying layers of trap within which these freshwater deposits were ensconced, Hislop and Hunter observed, It is quite evident, that before either of the volcanic rocks [the two layers of basalt or the layers of underlying and overlying trap] was poured out in our area [in the region around Girar] there had been deposited on the sandstone a stratum [freshwater deposit] which must have been at least six feet thick. Over this there was spread a molten mass of lava, which hardened the surface of the stratum, and itself cooled into a flat sheet of globular basalt about 20 feet thick [the overlying layer of trap]. After a period of repose the internal fires again become active, and discharge another effusion [the material constituting the layer of underlying trap], which insinuates itself between the sandstone and the superior deposit; and accumulating in some parts more than in others, through force of tension ruptures the superincumbant mass [comprising the layer of freshwater deposit and the overlying layer of trap], tilting up the stratum and scattering the overlying trap, or raising both stratum and trap above the level of the plain, either leaves it a flat – topped hill, or with boiling surge pushes up its summit gradually or by fitful effort. In these convulsions, the more recent trap, where it has not titled up the deposit altogether, has generally encroached upon it, entangling some of its fragments.23

Drawing on these remarks, one can envisage how Girar hill was the outcome of volcanic activity that had, over a period of time, fractured and lifted portions of a single horizontally extended freshwater deposit with its underlying and overlying layer of trap to different levels at different spatial intervals. Indeed, in so far as one bears in mind Hislop and Hunter’s emphasis on the rise of the freshwater deposits owing to volcanic activity, one can begin to envisage how one was not so much in the presence of three different layers of deposits at Girar hill. Rather, one bore witness to the differential surfacing of a single underlying layer of deposits on account of sporadic volcanic activity. It is in this sense, then, that Hislop and Hunter referenced with some certainty the repetition of the same underlying structure of layered matter comprising freshwater deposits in three different locations on the face of the same mountain.

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That such freshwater deposits were fairly common in central India seems evident enough in the broader arc of Hislop and Hunter’s essay. Already, at Nagpur, closer to their mission bungalow, the two authors had stumbled upon evidence of the same formation. Nearer to the summit of the Sitabuldi Hill, Hislop and Hunter had discovered a freshwater stratum in the form of a narrow strip of greenish-yellow, calcareous indurated clay (Plate 6.2).24 This clay, on close inspection, was found to contain a number of decaying casts of freshwater shells.25 To the evidence of freshwater deposits at Girar and Sitabuldi, Hislop and Hunter then appended references to freshwater fauna that had been found in other locations. They mentioned, for instance, how the fossilised remains of the snail Physa had been obtained by the agent of the governor general in the Sagar and Nerbudda provinces in central India and at Rae, about 64 kilometres south of Gwalior in north-central India.26 Moreover, fossilised Physae had also been found at Suleya, east of Jabbalpur in central India, by the geologist G. G. Spilsbury in 1833.27 In addition, univalve and bivalve shells had been found in the marls and earthy limestone near Mandla by Captain Dangerfield.28 Shells had also been found at Jirpa in the central Indian district of Betul and at Chichundra, 128 kilometres northwest of Nagpur.29 Hislop and Hunter even cited the findings of a friend in the districts north of Hyderabad at Nandur in southeast India. This friend had discovered Physae from the banks of the Godavari at Nandur.30 In conjunction with recent findings of mostly fossiliferous freshwater deposits and a few nonfossiliferous freshwater deposits, Hislop and Hunter, then, reached for a spectacular synthesis. They integrated freshwater deposits from a variety of locations in the Indian subcontinent into one composite mass to observe, Here, then, we have the best proof which similarity of position and specific identity of contained fossils can afford that the [freshwater] deposit enclosed in trap at Padpangali [located in South East India] is properly contemporaneous with our freshwater deposit in central India, although a majority of its organisms are truly marine. It is evident that it was here our great collection of fresh water, stretching either in one continuous sheet or interruptedly a distance of 1050 miles, in a direct line

Plate 6.2 Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, Section of Sitabuldi Hill. Source: Reproduced from Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, “On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur, Central India”, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 345–383. Artwork in public domain

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from Rajamahal [located in East India] to Bombay and of 660 miles from N. to the neighbourhood of Padpangali, discharged itself by an estuary into the sea. Whether this great expanse of freshwater was one of many lakes, cannot now be determined, in consequence of the disappearance of trap from many situations where once it must have existed, but I am persuaded that the more careful the exploration made in the great basaltic region of western India, the more evident it will become that the intervals between the lakes, if any there were, must have been exceedingly small.31

Evidently, Hislop and Hunter drew from the identity of the fossils found within a wide array of freshwater deposits to infer the presence of an immense freshwater body extending from Rajmahal in eastern India and Mumbai in western India to Padpangali in southeast India in the Eocene period. The terrain of central India was, for them, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. One merely had to collate the observations and draw inferences to discern the encompassing picture of a sublimely large freshwater lake. Yet, even as one draws attention to Hislop and Hunter’s invocation of a vast Eocene freshwater lake, it also bears noting that the task of collating field observations might have been an extraordinarily challenging one. After all, the deposits were invariably different in terms of colour and material constitution. For instance, in their sectional elevation of Girar Hill, Hislop and Hunter drew attention to the distinct colours of the freshwater deposits at different altitudes. At three different altitudes, the geologists found the freshwater deposits to be white, red and brownish green, respectively. It would appear, in this sense, that the two naturalists, apart from emphasising the repeated presence of trap-enclosed freshwater deposits at different altitudes of the Girar Hill, were also considering the ways in which the appearances of freshwater deposits routinely differed from each other in different places. Writing about this very changeability of the freshwater deposit in a variety of locations, Hislop observed, The stratum in question is extremely varied. Not only is it of all colours and all mixtures of tints, but it is of all kinds of substance. [. . .] At one place it is calcareous, at another siliceous, at a third clayey, and a fourth a compound of all three. Here it is soft, and there indurated; frequently the upper layer, which is next to the overlying trap, is hardened, while the lower part remains unchanged. Here it is crystalline, there cherty, and elsewhere coriaceous. In one spot it is full of fossils, in another and neighbouring locality it is utterly devoid of all traces of ancient life. [. . .] I know not one constant feature that is characteristic of it. In judging its identity a useful guide to follow is its position between the nodular trap above and the vesicular trap below.32

Here Hislop described the baffling variability of the material constitution of the freshwater deposit. The deposit could be calcareous, siliceous, clayey, coriaceous, fossiliferous or nonfossiliferous. In that sense, the identity of the freshwater deposit as a remnant of the Eocene lake did not so much inhere in its material constitution. Rather, the identity of the deposit as a remnant of the Eocene lake inhered in its location between the trap-rock above and the trap-rock below. Surely, then, the task of discerning homologies and continuities between the deposits was a laborious one. Hislop and Hunter may have spent a considerable amount time observing and engaging in field-based thinking. The two geologists might not have commenced with an a priori

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assumption about the existence of a vast lake. Rather, Hislop and Hunter must have arrived at their conception of the lake as a totality by the means of systematic, field-based observation and reflection.

Girar and faith While writing about the geology of the greater Nagpur region, Hislop and Hunter clearly lilted to the law of a powerful scientific rhythm. To the cadences of field notes and observations related to geological particularities, there corresponded, measure for measure, in Hislop and Hunter’s 1855 essay, larger inferences about geological events and entities that might have existed in a remote period of time. Indeed, so powerful was the autotelic nature of Hislop and Hunter’s rhythm comprising observations succeeded by inferences that even religious beliefs and pietism were drawn into its perimeter. Consider, for instance, their observations related to the summit of Girar Hill. This summit was at the time, and continues in the present, to be a place for the veneration of Shaikh Farid or Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, a Sufi saint belonging to the Chishti order. Shaikh Farid is known to belong to the north of the subcontinent to what is today known as Chawali Mashaikh near Multan. A disciple of Hazrat Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Khaki (1142–1236), Shaikh Farid had reportedly settled in Girar in 1244 (Plate 6.3).33 There are relatively few historical sources on the shrine of Shaikh Farid in Girar. Among British colonial sources, the brief note on the shrine in the 1870 Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India appears to have drawn mainly from Hislop’s observations from the mid-19th century.34 Hislop had written about his experiences in Girar and mentioned how Shaikh Farid’s devotees lived by a tank on the summit that was full of fish, tortoises and duckweed (Plate 6.4).35 For his part, Hislop was critical of the beliefs of these fakirs or mendicants. In particular, he took issue with their assumptions concerning the tiny spherical stone nodules that they found in abundance on the plain south of Girar. These nodules, according to the mendicants, were originally fruits which had been miraculously petrified into stone by Shaikh Farid at the behest of a travelling merchant (Plate 6.5). While arguing against this belief, Hislop and Hunter noted, These nodules, according to the Hindus, are so many fruits and spices of different sorts, which [Sheikh] Farid converted into stone, the largest having once been coconuts, the middle size betel nuts (Areca), and the smallest nutmegs. There is a resemblance of the nodules to the last two natural productions [betel – nuts and nutmegs]; but all [nodules] alike display an acicular crystallization.36

One can further substantiate Hislop’s 1855 observations with his earlier account of Girar in an 1853 essay published in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society. In that essay, Hislop observed, This fable, though received by the [community] with their usual love for the marvellous, is evidently of a common legend in Palestine; Instead of [Girar] hill, read mount Caramel, for Sheikh Farid,

Plate 6.3 Shrine of Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, Girar Hill. Source: Photograph © Venugopal Maddipati

Plate 6.4 A tank by the shrine of Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, Girar Hill. Source: Photograph © Venugopal Maddipati

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Plate 6.5 Spherical nodules with acicular crystallisation

sold in Girar today. Source: Photograph © Venugopal Maddipati

substitute the prophet Elijah, and the merchant with his nutmegs and betel – nuts, change into a gardener with melons; and the two stories in their main features are identical. After this I need scarcely add that the so-called petrifications, that attest the reality of the miracle exhibit no trace of vegetable structure of genuine fruits, but are simply nodules of zeolite that have issued from the trap cavities in which they have formed.37

Here, evidently, Hislop drew on immediate observations of physical particulars and his knowledge of geology to contest the beliefs of the mendicants. He demonstrated how the so-called petrified fruits were merely zeolite or alumina-silicate crystals, which, upon being cracked open, reveal an acicular structure – that is, a structure that radiates from a centre. More significantly, Hislop, as he contested the beliefs of the mendicants, also drew comparisons between the legend of Shaikh Farid at Girar and the legend of Elijah at Palestine. The two stories, he noted, were identical in their main features. Notwithstanding his own religiosity and piety, the Reverend Stephen Hislop clearly was sceptical about miracles or theories related to spontaneous generation at Girar. In Hislop’s estimate, when it came to geological matters, natural laws reigned supreme. Moreover, to learn about the supremacy of natural laws, one merely had to take into account the physical and material constitution of geological entities. However deeply people may have believed in religious miracles at the Girar Hill, when it came to assessing physical particulars and natural causation, one had to, as an observer, step away from belief.

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Holy time and holy drawing What if one was to insist, against the grain of Hislop’s antagonism towards peoples’ religious beliefs at Girar, on persevering with him as a thinker of religion? Moreover, what if one were to suggest that Hislop and Hunter’s own time of religion was the same as natural time? Surely, for Hislop and Hunter’s own time of religion to be one and the same thing as natural time, the very transpiring of religious time would have to be constitutionally anachronistic. Religious time would have to verge at the very moment of its inception on becoming an entity other than itself. In short, Hislop and Hunter’s religious time would have to be open or solicitous enough to become incorporative, within its body, of the transpiring of the rhythms of a wholly alien time. How, then, does one write about the passage of the everyday time of religion, as a time that unhesitatingly plays host to a foreign guest: the passage of natural time? How does one reconcile the everyday rhythms of a human existence, with the passing of a time that is indifferent to all human adherences to scripture, and to all conscious human intentions? How, in short, does one write about a religious everyday time, as a time that is, in principle, entirely out of joint with itself? One way of answering such questions is to emphasise religious time not so much as an entity that presents itself as knowable in advance in scriptural terms, but rather as an entity that persistently withdraws from the repeatable rhythms of conscious knowability. Religious time, to extrapolate from the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, presents itself as an event in which objects appear noncontemporaneous with one’s intention to know them or to assign a place to them within the orderliness of already known devotional rituals and practices. Put differently, were one to ponder along with Levinas, religious time becomes a time of solicitude. In such a time of solicitude objects impose themselves upon people. Objects beseech people, to acknowledge the holiness of the task of seeking a ‘proper’ way of thinking about the transpiring of their time, strictly in their own, peculiar limiting terms and criteria, outside all pre-given notions of time that may stem from scripture or from human habitude.38 It, however, bears noting that one need not entirely depend on the 20th-century thinking of Emmanuel Levinas to appreciate how entities and beings could conceivably enjoin upon people. Rather, one could turn towards Hislop himself in the 19th century. That the transpiring of natural time or the time of the fossil may indeed have imposed itself upon Hislop is faintly evident in his writing. Consider, for instance, his account of how the transpiring of natural time in the wider Nagpur region, at least initially, was nowhere on his mind as stayed, along with Hunter, by the mission bungalow at the base of Sitabuldi hill. As Hislop observed, Virtually nothing was done by us or by others to understand the palaeontology of this part of India, until June 1851, when, walking with my fellow-labourer in the neighbourhood of our residence, two or three [Physae] in a deposit enclosed in a trap hill about a mile west of Sitabaldi, and two miles in the same direction from Nagpur, forced themselves on my notice. They were at once referred to the fossils which Voysey and Malcolmson had discovered in a similar situation, and the deposit in which they occur was identified with the freshwater formation that they had traced in several parts of the Nizam’s territory, and at Chikni and Hinghanghat in this state.39

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One could conclude from these remarks that the transpiring of the time of the fossil or the transpiring of the time of the remains of “two or three [Physae] in a deposit enclosed in a trap hill” had literally arrived as an epiphany. The two missionaries had not so much voluntarily sought to engage with the passing of natural time in their own everyday environment. Rather, the remains of Physae within freshwater deposits had forcefully seized hold of Hislop and Hunter: the fossils had apparently prevailed upon Hislop and Hunter –“forced themselves on my notice” – to find a suitable temporal framework within which to situate the transpiring of their existence. One could then provisionally argue that Hislop and Hunter’s particular experiences in the wider Nagpur region were not entirely reducible to their pre-given comprehension of religious experiences in scriptural terms. Rather, in an entirely different sense, in Hislop and Hunter’s very conception of religious and everyday time, immediately near objects and spaces may have become asymmetrical to a pre-given comprehension of them. In short, to be a religionist, or to endure in time as a religionist, may have been no less than the task of confronting one’s inability to enclose entities within the correctness of one’s own immediate interpretation of them, from the vantages of one’s habitual or scriptural comprehension of time. In that sense, when Hislop and Hunter turned towards geology and palaeontology, they may not have done so because they were people of science. Rather, they may have turned towards geological and palaeontological thinking so as to respond to a plaintive call from the fossil itself. It was the fossil that had forced Hislop and Hunter to think about its temporality on its own terms – that is, in terms outside scriptural ones. From the vantages of such a religious conception of fossils found within a matrix of freshwater deposits, one is perhaps better placed to read more deeply into Hislop and Hunter’s sectional elevation of the Girar Hill. One could, for instance, go to the extent of suggesting that the sectional elevation may have hearkened to the transpiring of religious everydayness. When one alludes to the transpiring of religious everydayness, one does not in a conventional sense imply the time of Hislop and Hunter’s at-homeness as evangelists in the wider Nagpur region. Nor does one allude to the time of Hislop and Hunter’s adherence to the familiarity of scriptures and sacred words as they travelled in the region. Rather, one implies quite the opposite. Religious everydayness at Girar might have hearkened to the hill becoming foreign to Hislop and Hunter’s own conception of it as a site of human habitation and evangelisation. Put differently, here religious everydayness might have referred to the withdrawal of the Girar Hill from its very confinement within the world of human pietism and comforting familiarity and its increasing affinity with the beyond-human realm of natural or physical causation. Far from being a site of evangelisation, Girar hill now became evidence of the continuing fragmentation and evisceration of the fragments of an Eocene period lake. Bearing in mind such an interpretation of the religious everydayness of the Girar Hill, one is perhaps better placed to conjecture why the two naturalists appended the “the Rev. Messrs. S. Hislop and R. Hunter” in the authorship note adjacent to the title of their 1855 essay. In so far as Hislop and Hunter approached religious everydayness as the time of the withdrawal of landscape features from their confinement within the world of human pietism and familiarity, their 1855 essay was certainly a religious text. Indeed, one could go even go so far as to suggest that Hislop and Hunter

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may not so much have written about the transpiring of natural or geological time for the sake of science as much as they may have responded, as people of religion, to the demand placed by the landscape in front of themselves to engage with it on its own proper terms. Setting aside the discussion on religious everydayness for the moment, one could take the contrarian position and argue that the geological reality of the Girar Hill was not all strange for Hislop and Hunter. After all, they had prepared a drawing of the hill. Such geological drawings were, if one is to believe the well-known Scottish geologist John MacCulloch, a measure of a naturalist’s familiarity with physical reality. In his 1831 tract A System of Geology: With a Theory of the Earth, and an Explanation of Its Connexion with the Sacred Records, MacCulloch had observed that the art of drawing produced “habitual accuracy of discernment; qualifying also the observer to remember and to record what escapes the unpractised eye” for geologists.40 Unlike writers who could become lost in “metaphysics” and in an “endless circumlocutions and details”, the geologist trained in the art of drawing was supposed to be most at home in conveying physical reality or what “words can never convey” by the means of a “few simple strokes”.41 Somewhat in keeping with sculptors and painters who were “acquainted with every portion and movement of the body” and “faithful to every form and [colour] of the landscape”, the geologist, according to MacCulloch, was to acquire the “habit of watching and recording carefully” by the means of drawing “every visible object”.42 At the very least, then, when geologists such as Hislop and Hunter engaged in the act of drafting or drawing in the mid-decades of the 19th century, they demonstrated a satisfactory level of awareness about the physical particularities of the landscape in front of themselves. Indeed, to the extent that one stays faithful to MacCulloch’s 1831 formulations, one could say that Hislop and Hunter were further ahead in their comprehension of physical reality than those geologists who merely wrote about physical reality in a circumlocutory way. In short, Hislop and Hunter’s section of the Girar may have vouched for their intimacy and familiarity with the physical reality of the hill. And yet if one reads the sectional elevation of the Girar Hill as an index, not so much of familiarity, but rather of unfamiliarity, one does so because one views the drawing from the vantages of Hislop and Hunter’s disjunctive conception of religious everydayness. When one arrives at that sectional elevation through Hislop and Hunter’s disjunctive religious everydayness, one begins to engage with the drawing as both the evidence of the waning of the salience of the human reality of Girar as a site of pietism and familiarity and as evidence of the emergence of the hill as a foreigner belonging to the beyond-human realm of natural or physical causation. One begins, in essence, to view the sectional elevation of the Girar Hill not so much directly from the vantages of the science of geology that examines physical realities and the transpiring of natural time. Rather, one views the drawing as a reference to the emerging visibility of the transpiring of a strange time that was at a remove from scripturally defined conceptions of time. In short, one witnesses the transformation of a time of faith into a strange time of natural causation. In that limited sense, then, one understands Hislop and Hunter’s sectional elevation of the Girar Hill as a religious drawing or a drawing attributable to a religion in which the time of human everydayness was entirely out of joint with itself.

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Notes * Acknowledgments. I had initially approached this project with the help of Vibha Gupta at the Gandhian Magan Sangrahalaya, Wardha. I would also like to thank the caretakers at the shrine of Shaikh Farid, Girar Hill. Thanks also to Hannah Baader at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Sugata Ray. The emphasis on spatial histories in this chapter derives, in some part, from Ray’s paper at the 2014 Asher conference in Chicago. In addition, I would like to thank the 2014 batch at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi, who travelled to Wardha with me and visited Girar as a part of their academic schedule. 1 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology; or, the Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology, 9th ed., London: John Murray, 1853, p. 290. 2 Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter, ‘On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur, Central India’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 345–83. 3 Ibid., p. 362. 4 Ibid., p. 365. 5 Hislop and Hunter studied the watershed area to the north and the south of Nagpur. Ibid., p. 346. 6 George Smith, Stephen Hislop: Pioneer Missionary & Naturalist of Central India, London: John Murray, 1888, p. 213. 7 Ibid., p. 52. 8 For an account on the events at Sitabuldi, see James T. Wheeler, Summary of Affairs of the Mahratta States, 1627 to 1856, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1878, pp. 242–3. 9 Smith, Stephen Hislop, p. 53. 10 Ibid., p. 54. 11 Ibid., p. 50. 12 Ibid., p. 69. 13 In the winter of 1847–48, Hislop and Hunter visited the cotton market of Hinganghat during a missionary tour. While Girar is not mentioned in the notes relating to this visit in Smith’s account, it is likely that Hislop and Hunter also visited Girar. Ibid., p. 70. 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009, p. 201. 15 Ibid., p. 205. 16 Ibid., p. 208. 17 In using the word holy, I refer to Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the holy as a distinct entity in comparison to the sacred. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 4–5. 18 It is important to note here that Hislop wrote about coal beds. Stephen Hislop, ‘On the Connection of the Umret Coal Beds with the Plant-Beds of Nagpur; and Both with Those of Burdwan’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 555–61. 19 Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 6. 20 Hislop and Hunter, ‘On the Geology and Fossils’, p. 345. 21 Ibid., p. 358. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 359. 24 Ibid., p. 349. 25 Ibid.

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Ibid., p. 362. Ibid., pp 362–3. Ibid., p. 363. Ibid. Ibid. Apart from the descriptions of fossil findings from a variety of locations in and around the region of Nagpur, Hislop also appended illustrations of a few fossil shells that had been collected by a variety of explorers from freshwater deposits in the region. In his illustrations, Hislop grouped these fossils according to genus. Stephen Hislop, ‘On the Tertiary Deposits Associated with Trap Rock in the East Indies, with Descriptions of the Fossil Shells by the Rev. S. Hislop’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 16, 1860, pp. 166–8. Ibid., pp. 365–6. Ibid., p. 359. Amaresh Dutta, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, vol. 2, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005, p. 1263. Charles Grant, ed., Gazetteer of the Central Provinces, Nagpur: Education Society Press, 1870, p. 197. Stephen Hislop, Letter dated 4 February 1858, Indian Christian Association Occasional Paper, no. 4, June 1859, pp. 36–7. Hislop and Hunter, ‘On the Geology and Fossils’, p. 366. Stephen Hislop, ‘Geology of the Nagpur State’, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 5, 1857, p. 64. For Levinas’ approach to scriptures, see Hanoch Ben-Pazi, ‘The Meaning of Scriptures in the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas’, The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, vol. 14, no. 2, December 2015, pp. 1–14. Hislop and Hunter, ‘On the Geology and Fossils’, p. 348. Italics mine. John, MacCulloch, A System of Geology: With a Theory of the Earth, and an Explanation of Its Connexion with the Sacred Records, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831, p. 482. Ibid., pp. 481–2. Ibid., p. 482.

References Ben-Pazi, Hanoch, ‘The Meaning of Scriptures in the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas’, The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, vol. 14, no. 2, December 2015, pp. 1–14. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Enquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 197–222. Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Dutta, Amaresh (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, vol. 2, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005. Grant, Charles (ed.), Gazetteer of the Central Provinces, Nagpur: Education Society Press, 1870. Hislop, Stephen, ‘On the Connection of the Umret Coal beds with the Plant: Beds of Nagpur; and Both with Those of Burdwan’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 555–61. ———, ‘Geology of the Nagpur State’, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 5, 1857, pp. 58–76. ———, ‘On the Tertiary Deposits associated with Trap Rock in the East Indies, with Descriptions of the Fossil Shells by the Rev. S. Hislop’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 16, 1860, pp. 154–82. ———, ‘Letter dated 4 February 1858’, Indian Christian Association Occasional Paper, no. 4, June 1859, pp. 36–7. ——— and Robert Hunter, ‘On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur, Central India’, The Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, vol. 11, 1855, pp. 345–83.

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Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology; Or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology, 9th ed., London: John Murray, 1853. MacCulloch, John, A System of Geology: With a Theory of the Earth, and an Explanation of Its Connexion with the Sacred Records, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831. Santner, Eric L., On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Smith, George, Stephen Hislop: Pioneer Missionary & Naturalist of Central India, London: John Murray, 1888. Wheeler, James T., Summary of Affairs of the Mahratta States, 1627 to 1856, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1878.

7 From nallah to nadi, stream to sewer to stream Urban waterscape research in India and the United States James L. Wescoat Jr.* The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 18541

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omparative international water research is paradoxically ubiquitous and rare. Students read texts that are the product of comparative international experience. Water researchers and professionals travel to international conferences and field sites, and make use of that knowledge at least implicitly in their work. But these groups are unlikely to produce detailed comparisons of water case studies. It is through this paradox that this chapter seeks to contribute to the theme of liquescent materiality. Implicit comparisons operate widely in ways that presumably make a material difference in what is built, operated and experienced, though it may not be clear how. Flows of knowledge, experience and material transformation often remain implicit and indeterminate. Reflecting on this situation, one response would be to try to determine the logic and utility of rigorous international comparison. However, another response would be to let comparisons flow as they will and to develop narrative historical-geographic accounts of how they arise and where they lead. While recognising the value of making implicit comparisons explicit, this chapter follows the second approach. It compares the historical geography of urban stream degradation and restoration in my home city of Boston with my sojourning city of New Delhi. The scale is “urban”, though, as we shall see, urban water is a complex spatial construct whose water supply regions extend far into regional metropolitan hinterlands, to sources far beneath the surface of the land to ever-deeper and declining aquifers, and far downstream to low-lying and degrading wetland, estuarine and coastal environments. Each urban configuration is different, from its headwaters to the city limits and long plumes of downstream effluents. But they have common characteristics as well, from the early modern era of the 16th century to the present in what are now the countries of India and the United States. Many if not most cities were located along a water body – a stream, lake or coast – often at the crossing of a water body by a road or ferry. These water channels are called rivers or streams in the

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United States and nahrs, nadis and nallahs in northern India. Water bodies known as nallahs have had a fascinating history, both the channels themselves and their names. It is widely believed today that a nallah is most commonly a gandah nullah [sic] – that is, a large, dirty, stinking open sewer. Many if not most urban rivers in the United States were also regarded as foul sewers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, though they did not coin a general name for this phenomenon other than “open sewer”. Instead, they acquired iconic images and place names, like “Bubbly Creek”, which gave off anaerobic gases from putrefying slaughterhouse wastes discharged into the small Chicago River; the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, which actually caught fire from volatile industrial effluents floating on its surface; and the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, whose toxic wastes contributed to cancers and birth defects.2 Industrial pollution has compounded the age-old hazards of sanitary waste disposal in urban streams. Thankfully, that downward trajectory is being confronted, and in some cases reversed, as sanitary wastes are sewered and treated, urban industries are relocated to exurban locations with intensive wastewater recycling facilities, and some measure of water quality regulations are enforced. Some of these adjustments have centuries-old precedents and have been adapted over time to address the changing dynamics of urbanisation and urbanism.3 Others involve a rediscovery of the value of urban streams, which are redefined as “blue-green urban infrastructure”.4 In still other regions, problematic forms of “bourgeois environmentalism” strive to clean up urban waterscapes while displacing the poor residents on their banks and covering or landscaping the channel and its banks.5 My initial aim for this chapter was to document how waterscape designers are restoring degraded urban streams in India and the United States. As I researched the topic, various underlying historical questions arose. Before asking how to transform sewers back into streams, it seemed important to understand how and when nallahs came to be associated with pollution. The early definition of a nallah was simply a stream or rivulet. What happened? I then asked: how might comparative international water research contribute to an understanding of these processes of urban degradation and ultimately restoration? It is interesting to compare urban waterscape histories in India and the United States for at least three reasons. The first is that these histories are sometimes connected with one another. Water systems in India have influenced those in the United States and vice versa. Even as independent cases, stream degradation in one country can inform historical trajectories in distant places. Similarly, river restoration efforts in one country can inspire or be adapted for cities in other parts of the world. I will offer examples of each of these processes in the next section. But this type of comparative urban water research between India and the United States remains rare.6 Important exceptions include comparisons of rainwater harvesting, storm water management and legal applications of the public trust doctrine to urban water bodies.7 The geographical foci for this comparison are Boston and Delhi. The first section introduces these two places through paired images. I then review the record of previous comparative water research more systematically and critically. I retrace the evolution of the words nallah and drain, which converged in mid-19th-century sanitation movements in India and the United States.

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In the United States, this movement was guided by Frederick Law Olmsted’s urban sanitary improvement plan for the Back Bay Fens in Boston. Its visionary origin, early failure, adaptation and revival as an urban ecological restoration project offer a rare long-term urban design case study for comparison with recent design proposals for the Barapula Nallah in Delhi. Conversely, Barapula’s urban history is many centuries longer, which puts the Boston urban design case study into a broader macro-historical perspective.

Nallahs east and west I began this enquiry with a pair of images in mind. Plate 7.1 presents a highway on-ramp cutting through mature vegetation along the Back Bay Fens in Boston, Massachusetts. The Fens were designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the early 1880s to address urban flooding, sanitary waste disposal and real estate development along the tidal Charles River and its infamously polluted Muddy River tributary.8 Much more will be said about this iconic case of urban landscape architecture, which is part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace of parks that is studied by urban design students worldwide.

Plate 7.1 Back Bay Fens, Boston. Source: Photograph © James L. Wescoat Jr.

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Plate 7.2 presents a comparable view of the new on-ramp to the Barapula Nallah flyover in south Delhi, which runs alongside the Nizamuddin Basti (village) whose fame arises from the dargah (shrine) of the early 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Awliya (d. 1325), which is a pilgrimage centre for Muslims and other spiritual groups from South Asia and beyond (Plate 7.2). Construction of the highway ramp in 2011 tore up the nallah bed and banks, and thereby created an opportunity for redesign. A kilometre downstream from Nizamuddin, the nallah passes under the Mughal-period Barapula (12-pier) Bridge, which gives the nallah its name, after which it issues into the Yamuna River, which has itself become a polluted channel.9 From these initial images, I moved to a second pair to show that initial impressions can be deceiving. Plate 7.3 shows brilliant green algae and aquatic weeds that choke stagnant parts of Boston’s Back Bay Fens, and that are the product of nutrient runoff today. The highway deck shades out streambank vegetation (Plate 7.3). A tall variety of invasive reed (Phragmites) rings the water edge. Less visible are polluting culverts that drain runoff directly from street surfaces into the water. Nearby views include various forms of litter. Thus, while nicely vegetated from some vantage points, the Back Bay Fens still suffers from chronic environmental pollution.

Plate 7.2 Barapula Nallah, New Delhi. Source: Photograph © James L. Wescoat Jr.

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Plate 7.3 Pollution in Back Bay Fens, Boston. Source: Photograph © James L. Wescoat Jr.

Plate 7.4 requires some imagination. It indicates that the now degraded Barapula Nallah was once lined with historic architecture and gardens, like the monumental tomb-garden of the Mughal nobleman Khankhanan Abdur Rahim on its northern bank (Plate 7.4).10 Imagine the bare nallah bank as a garden terrace perhaps with a pavilion overlooking the low flow of summer followed by the swollen discharge of the monsoon. The Barapula Nallah has drained the entire Delhi watershed from Shahjahanabad in the north to the Qutb Minar and Mehrauli area in the south. It had substantial social and environmental value for centuries, and like the Muddy River in Boston, it might still be restored. This comparison might thus be called “a tale of two nallahs”, with disturbing similarities and fascinating differences. However, I first want to situate these cases within the larger context of comparative water research.

The status of comparative international urban water research Comparative water research between the United States and India has been limited at all scales of enquiry.11 It should be noted that both countries have federal systems of government, which give states constitutional primacy over water issues, with the exception of navigation, interstate

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Plate 7.4 Barapula Nallah, New Delhi. Source: Photograph © James L. Wescoat Jr.

commerce and international water treaties. A large body of comparative international research has dealt with transboundary issues that involve multiple countries in both regions, but much less research has compared urban water systems.12 A second field of comparative study between India, the United States and other regions emanates from Karl Wittfogel’s infamous theory of hydraulic societies, which linked state, society and irrigation agriculture in a book titled Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Theories of irrigation and society may be traced back to the 17th-century travel accounts of Francois Bernier and others, who reported that deteriorating canals in northern India could be attributed to the absence of private property, excessive taxation and oppression of peasants, an idea picked up by Marx and Engels in the notion of an Asiatic Mode of Production and subsequent authors who have been reviewed extensively.13 Wittfogel argued that large-scale irrigation agriculture in arid environments gave rise to despotic regimes in Asia, the most recent example of which was the Soviet Union. These propositions provoked many comparative studies by other scholars to refute them. Another related line of comparative irrigation histories shows how a standard of waste and efficiency, known as the “duty of water”, diffused from its origins as a measure of steam engine

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efficiency in late-18th-century England to colonial canal irrigation in 19th-century northern India, where it established the maximum area to be irrigated by one cubic foot per second of public canal water. From there it diffused to the western United States where, by contrast, it was reconceived as a way to establish the minimum standards of irrigation efficiency for private water rights appropriators.14 One would think that modern urban water conservation in the 20th century would also receive intensive scientific comparison, but that has not been the case.15 A systematic bibliographic mapping project showed that urban water systems in India and the United States have rarely been examined through comparative research. Exceptions include urban rainwater harvesting and water utility benchmarking.16 Another line of comparative international water research involves the public trust doctrine, which originated in disputes over the control of submerged lands.17 Early cases involved rival claims of access to and control over the resources of tidal lands. However, a landmark US Supreme Court case in 1892 involving the urban waterfront of Chicago (Illinois v. Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois) established the state’s inalienable trust responsibility over its submerged lands on behalf of the public.18 This precedent was cited a century later in environmental law cases in South Asia, starting with M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath on the Beas River.19 That case was followed by an urban land use case in Lucknow and a coastal urban access case in Karachi, Pakistan. Most recently, public trust cases involving urban water bodies have been decided in the cities of Jaipur and Lahore.20 The Jaipur case is particularly relevant, as it involved private restoration of a public nallah in exchange for a long-term lease for land reclaimed from the Man Sagar lake bed. The Rajasthan High Court decided that this arrangement violated the public trust doctrine and that the fill lands and nallah treatment works must be removed, a decision that was later modified by the Supreme Court of India in 2014.21 These cases in India extend the public trust doctrine in ways that have relevance for United States urban water, land use and environmental law.

Nala, nallah, nullah and drain The word nallah is known across most of South Asia, but I know of no investigation of its etymology or evolving usage. It has several different transliterated spellings, three of them used in the 2014 Supreme Court case on Jaipur’s Man Sagar lake restoration alone. This section briefly retraces the terminology of nallahs to ascertain when and how they acquired the connotation of sewers. A brief discussion follows at the end of this section for the word drain, which is used in both Indian and Euro-American contexts. Nala is a Persian word meaning small stream, canal or ravine.22 Some sources suggest that it is associated with the Hebrew word nahal, which is similar to a wadi, sometimes wet and sometimes dry, which is also the case in subtropical monsoon environments. A more metaphorical yet perhaps associated meaning is the lament of a nal as a flute, song or poem. However, the word is more commonly transliterated today as nallah. The word nallah does not appear in early Mughal texts such as the Baburnama or the Akbarnama, but Jahangir referred to nallahs about a half-dozen times in his memoirs. The word appeared more frequently in the Shah Nawaz Khan’s Maathir-ul-umara, generally as a place name or general geographic term.23 Interestingly, it is a key word in the late

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Mughal treaty of 1739 between Muhammad Shah and Nader Shah of Iran when the Mughals were forced to cede territory up to the Indus and Nala Sankara. Late 18th-century dictionaries continued to define the nallah as a stream, small creek, rivulet or, sometimes, ravine. If we look at common transliterations in English today, the word nallah and its variants (with a capital N) are place names, which is still the most common use, and they are secondarily general geographic terms. A Google NGram search indicates that “nullah” has been the most common (but least appropriate) transliteration historically, though nallah is increasingly used (Plate 7.5). Usage increased and peaked towards the end of the 19th century. These general uses of the word continue with an increase in the nallah transliteration. More directly significant for this investigation is the evolving negative connotations of the nallah, which begin to appear in the 1850s. For that, it is useful to examine the content of works cited in Plate 7.5. They reveal the following developments: • • •

1850s: Early references to odour and filth involved nallahs in large cities like Madras and Calcutta (notably Tolly’s Nallah), as well as in some hill stations. 1863–4: Medical reports recommended that open nallahs be converted to covered sewers. They cited health problems associated with monsoon wet and dry seasons. 1860s and 1870s: These decades witnessed the development of urban public health regulations. For instance, the Bengal Council Laws of 1864 stated, “The owner or occupier of any part of the bank of any nullah or water course shall keep it free from filth, dense vegetation or other obstruction”. An 1872 report from the Sanitary Commissioner of the Central Provinces stated, “A well should not be constructed within 50 yards of a nala, tank, or pool containing stagnant water”.24

Plate 7.5 Frequency of different nallah transliterations over time. Source: Google NGram Viewer http://books.google.com/ngrams, 17 February 2017

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1876: Urdu histories and literature also refer to nallahs, a notable example of which is Shahjahan Begum’s Táj-ul Ikbál Tárikh, which discusses the nallahs, sewers and larger water systems of Bhopal.25 1885: The shift in meaning is completed by an entry in volume five of The Encyclopedic Dictionary, in which the word “nullah” (the most frequent but not accurate transliteration) was defined as a sewer.26

It is interesting to observe that the negative shift in meaning associated with nallahs coincides with a marked decline of references in Plate 7.5. This trend may reflect a shift underway from public health planning to modern biomedical science, with the formation of the Indian Medical Service in 1896, as well as the increasingly negative connotations of urban stream-sewers. From the late 19th century onwards, the word nallah also became increasingly translated as drain, a word that connotes storm and sanitary wastewater disposal in the English-speaking world as well.27 The noun drain has an Old English etymology dating back about a millennium and has been associated with natural as well as the more common meaning of artificial channels.28 Such channels were mentioned as draining urban as well as rural runoff as early as the mid-17th century. However, the association with sewage became strong in the compound word drain-pipe. In summary, the shift towards negative connotations of urban streams in both regions occurred during the late 19th century, which was associated with urban sanitation movements in India and the United States. Sanitation was a common concern among many, if not most, countries during the second half of the 19th century, as poor water, sanitation and drainage were associated with the miasmic transmission of disease and losses particularly in military camps.29 These sanitation movements have been subject to extensive critical research in recent years, in part for their impacts on cities and communities. Sanitation measures included ripping out aging housing, draining wetlands and widening transportation corridors to improve “ventilation”, laying out distant suburban cantonments and reinforcing social policies of segregation. The impact of poor sanitation on soldiers was a related driving force. Major reforms originated with the work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War that were extended to cantonment health in British India and military sanitation during the American Civil War, which involved landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who radically transformed urban environments through urban parks and waterscape design across the United States.

From Walden Pond to the Muddy River and Back Bay Fens During the 1860s, Frederick Law Olmsted played a prominent role on the United States Sanitary Commission, a non-governmental organisation influenced by English sanitation reformers Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and others. Olmsted had prior experience with landscape drainage design for Central Park and other projects, and he went on to incorporate grading and drainage works in most of his urban design projects, such as Boston’s Back Bay Fens. Before proceeding to that case study, it is interesting to briefly set the stage with a dramatically different account of water purity in India and the United States. I speak of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, his book on almost two years of simple living beside a small pond in Concord, Massachusetts, about 25 kilometres west of Boston. Walden has been

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profoundly influential in the history of American social and environmental thought. In the winter of 1854, Thoreau wrote, Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of [ice] farming [. . .] Thus, it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic], since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions [. . .] The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges [emphasis added].30

Thus, while Thoreau was attending to the micro-environmental economics of life at Walden Pond, he was reading Indian philosophical texts and marvelling at their wisdom. More than that, he imagined the material connections between Walden Pond and the thirsty cities of India and the American South, just as he critically contrasted the local harmonies of Walden with the dystopic corporate industrial life of urban Boston in the mid-19th century. Like many leading figures of the time, Frederick Law Olmsted greatly admired Thoreau’s courage and critical mind. As editor of The Nation, Olmsted published some of Thoreau’s writings. However, in contrast with Thoreau, Olmsted sought to transform the heart and soul of American urban environments and lifeways. He attempted this in Boston through a project he called the Back Bay Fens, which drained the Muddy River, a small tributary of the Charles River.31 By the 1860s, the urban drainage situation in Boston had become a foul and dangerous mess. The city was growing rapidly, in part through massive filling of tidal wetlands along the Charles River to develop new real estate. This combination of land filling and impervious real estate development increased storm water runoff and flooding of the Muddy River and its floodplain. Initially, the new urban development discharged raw sanitary sewage into these urban streams (call them gandah nallahs!), some of which washed out into the river during low tide only to float back into the city at high tide. The people of Boston lived with these sewage flats for over 50 years before coming up with the idea for a partial solution in the 1870s that involved collaboration between Olmsted, the Parks Commission and the city sewer engineer. Like most growing cities of this era in the United States, Boston created civic agencies, including a Parks Commission whose modest funding allowed it to purchase polluted flats along the lower Muddy River. The Parks Commission held a design competition that Olmsted refused to enter or jury, as he felt the results would not address underlying water problems. When the competition failed to bear fruit, the Park Commission hired Olmsted to prepare a plan, and he entirely reframed the project as one of urban sanitary improvement.32 Olmsted objected strenuously to calling the project a park, as it lacked the main visual, social and functional qualities of a park. He tried many names, concluding with Back Bay Fens, to describe what today would be called blue-green urban infrastructure.

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The Back Bay Fens improvement project put limits on further filling and wetland encroachment. It used raised bunds, curved water channels and gentle side slopes to reduce bank erosion from wave action as well as flooding. It included tide gates to regulate drainage and vegetation tolerant of fluctuating brackish flows. The Back Bay Fens design was so successful that it drew elite residential neighbourhood development and major institutions to its banks, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, built in the 1890s. But there were also some failures to adapt the design to its changing context. In 1910, only two decades after construction, the Charles River was dammed downstream, transforming the brackish tidal river into a freshwater reservoir, which undercut all of the hydrologic assumptions of the Back Bay Fens project design, and its tide gate became obsolete. Perhaps for that reason it came to be operated and seen more in aesthetic than urban ecological terms. The first Curator of Indian and Islamic Art in the United States, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, working in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on the banks of the Fens, wrote an extraordinary series of essays later compiled under the title Yakshas: Essays in the Water Cosmology.33 These essays discussed Indian water symbols and deities, such as makaras (mythic water creatures), nagas (serpent kings) and tirthas (sacred sites on waterways), as well as folk gods or yakshas. Coomaraswamy greatly admired Thoreau’s writings and often went to Walden Pond. However, his archives do not refer once to the Back Bay Fens urban water project just outside his office. The Fens condition worsened over time as it was used as a dump for subway excavation debris, new athletic fields and miscellaneous encroachments from rose gardens to war memorials. Invasive species began to choke its banks, and urban flooding increased in magnitude and severity. Notwithstanding a series of master plans from the 1970s to the present, the Fens became an under-maintained urban park, famous in name if not in eco-hydrologic functions.34 However, flood damage in the 1990s prompted a combination of federal and local intervention in a new Muddy River Restoration Project, funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers with an expert public Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee (MMOC).35 The MMOC has five guiding objectives: 1) mitigation of flood hazards, 2) improvement of water quality, 3) enhancement of aquatic habitat, 4) rehabilitation of landscape and historic resources and 5) implementation of best management practices. Phase I consists of daylighting a buried reach of the Muddy River stream-sewer to reconnect Olmsted’s Fenway with the Riverway park upstream. Phase II focuses on ecological restoration but remains unfunded to date. It will involve dredging accumulated sediments to increase storm water storage and also manage the dominant Phragmites vegetation along the Fens’ margins. Olmsted’s vision from 130 years ago is thus being renewed in ways that bear comparison with the Barapula Nallah in Delhi.

From Back Bay to the Barapula Nallah design workshop Amazingly, a photograph of the Back Bay Fens during its initial construction in the 1890s looks strikingly similar in visual terms to an historical photograph of the Barapula Nallah just downstream of the Nizamuddin area in south Delhi about a decade earlier (Plates 7.6 and 7.7). I have

Plate 7.6 Back Bay Fens, Boston, ca. 1896. Digitised lantern slide. Source: Photograph © Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, GSD4109di, American Memory Project. Artwork in public domain

Plate 7.7 W. Caney, general view of the Bara Pula [Barapula] Bridge, Delhi, 1875. Source: Photograph © The British Library Board, London, Shelfmark: Photo 1003/ (865)

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not found references to the nallah in Sultanate or early Mughal texts, though its significance as a boundary between Nizamuddin (then called Ghiyaspur) and the late-13th-century riverfront capital of Kilokri to the south must have been significant. The siting of Kilokri palace to the south and Ghiyaspur settlement to the north constitutes an important framing of the nallah’s significance in south Delhi. The Mughal Barapula bridge and subsequent funerary complexes in the 16th and 17th centuries helped defined the riparian landscape, but few textual references to it survive. In the early 18th century, the Barapula Nallah was mentioned as a place name just south of Shahjahanabad.36 Alexander Cunningham’s archaeological survey of Delhi also recorded the nallah and monuments near it in 1874.37 The next type of reference to the Barapula Nallah occurred in late-19th-century colonial public health surveys, coinciding with similar surveys in Euro-American cities undergoing sanitary reform along the lines mentioned in Boston earlier. These were not detailed documents of the sort prepared for the Tolly’s Nallah in Calcutta in the late-19th century, when the colonial government was still headquartered there.38 Modern sewerage and wastewater treatment proposals for New Delhi’s nallahs were elaborated later, after the shift of the new capital there in 1912.39 These engineering treatments continued with episodic civic attention through the 20th century leading to periodic desilting, bank stabilisation and channel engineering for hydraulic efficiency. Planning at the turn of the 21st century included slum eviction and transportation infrastructure to provide access to the 2010 Commonwealth Games. I have travelled across and along the nallahs of Delhi for several decades now, and these experiences have involved a mixture of historical interest, sensory affront and imagining the prospects for restoration design. Years ago, there were large squatter settlements along the nallahs upstream and downstream of the Nizamuddin area. Many of these jhuggi jhopris (temporary accommodations) were forcibly evicted. Their displacement was alternately lauded and criticised as the growing “bourgeois environmentalism” of New Delhi.40 More recently, designers like Morphogenesis and Oasis Design have proposed restoring the nallahs to nadis (streams) that can serve as blue-green infrastructure for the city.41 Several improvement projects have been built over nallahs, a notable example of which is Delhi Haat, an outdoor regional craft and restaurant emporium in the western part of the city. More commonly, nallahs have been buried in sewers and covered by new urban development on bridge decks. The lower Barapula Nallah in south Delhi, however, remains an open drain. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) has prepared and undertaken restoration design proposals for this reach of the Barapula Nallah.42 The AKTC has led an expansive programme of urban revitalisation in the Nizamuddin area for over two decades.43 The first phase of its work focused on the restoration of the Humayun’s tomb gardens, which was a gift from the Aga Khan IV to India on the 50th anniversary of independence in 1997. That work was completed in 2003 and followed by an expanded programme of conservation that includes 1) socio-economic development in the Nizamuddin basti (urban village), 2) architectural conservation at Humayun’s Tomb and 3) development of the Sundar Nursery as an urban environmental park. The Nizamuddin basti programme involved improvements in housing, schools, sewers, plantings and health facilities along the nallah. AKTC removed truckloads of silt and solid waste from the nallah bed. They

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mapped and rebuilt local sewer lines. However, the 2010 Commonwealth Games highway flyover alignment followed the nallah, which involved massive construction activity in the channel (see Plate 7.2). Landscape architect Muhammad Shaheer prepared a nallah improvement plan for the AKTC, and the construction of terraces and plantings began in 2016 with substantial clean up in 2018. Commonwealth Games construction activities in the lower reaches of the Barapula Nallah led to urban scale investigations.44 The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was fortunate to be able to work with AKTC on a design workshop to identify potential improvements in the Barapula Nallah. AKTC planner Shveta Mathur posed four guiding questions: 1 2 3 4

Can you develop a large-scale watershed perspective on the Barapula Nallah? Can you develop proposals to enhance riparian landforms and ecosystems? Can you link these watershed and riparian proposals with local socio-economic needs that would benefit the Nizamuddin community? Can you link these socio-environmental proposals with cultural landscape heritage conservation for the Nizamuddin area?

This section of the chapter briefly reports on the design workshop’s response to this suite of questions. At the watershed scale, the first finding was that the Barapula Nallah drained the entire Delhi Ridge and Plains from Shahjahanabad to Mehrauli (Plate 7.8). Its headwaters served fortresses and Sufi shrines, including the Chishti progression from the shrine of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki to those of Nasiruddin Chiragh Delhi and ultimately Nizamuddin Awliya.45 Along the way, the Kushak Nallah subwatershed and its tributaries passed through Sultanate water structures from the Hauz Shamsi to Hauz Rani, Satpula sluiceway and Chiragh Delhi Sufi shrine village. Although heavily modified, it is still possible to discern the urban watershed drainage and to some extent its hydrology. Comparatively, we notice similar uncertainties about the urban watershed in Boston, which also has aggravated urban runoff, flooding and stream pollution. Without a watershed analysis, however, it is not possible to understand or manage the hydrology of an urban water system, let alone its local streams, tanks and wells. Urban water problems express themselves most vividly in polluted stream channels. A large portion of Delhi’s raw sewage flows into various reaches of the Barapula Nallah. It comes from the vast sewage networks that drain the city, not always into interceptor sewers as required by design standards and regulations, but as raw sewage discharged into stream channels. Olmsted addressed similar issues in the problematic lower reaches of the Muddy River. As in Delhi, his design combined interceptor sewers for sanitary wastewater with the Back Bay Fens landscape for storm water storage. As mentioned earlier, however, Olmsted’s sewer systems were quickly superseded by the damming of the Charles River and by a combined sewer pumping system to an outfall in Boston Harbour.

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Plate 7.8 Watershed scale studies relevant for the Barapula Nallah stream restoration,

2012. Source: Photograph © MIT Aga Khan Program Design Workshop, Celina BalderasGuzman designer, James Wescoat instructor

Delhi also has plans to build or repair its interceptor sewers, the most fully documented of which are for the Najafgarh Drain in the northern part of the city.46 Some green wastewater engineering design alternatives have also been proposed in south Delhi. They include constructed wetlands along the banks and bed of the nallah and in-channel treatment through lagoon and reedbed systems.47 Our workshop also examined lagoon alternatives, which may be promising in the Nizamuddin reach. If the open sewer can be transformed back into a stream, through a combination of pollution prevention, interceptor sewers and in-channel treatment, landscape site design proposals have good prospects for success. Site design on a polluted channel could perhaps serve as a catalyst for cleaning up the root causes of channel degradation, but that is unlikely. More commonly, stream restoration precedes and helps support new site design improvements, investments and community benefits. Sites selected for local design studies along the Barapula Nallah are interesting to compare with those along the Muddy River in Boston. The latter include large open spaces, like Jamaica Pond,

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which have not developed along the Barapula Nallah corridor. Both case studies have elegant historical bridges and bridge proposals. Barapula design proposals include redesigned bridges and bridge abutment areas along the banks of the nallah. Two small pedestrian bridges connect the Nizamuddin Basti with an adjacent neighbourhood and a community graveyard across the nallah (Plates 7.9 and 7.10). The graveyard bridge is known as the Shab-i Barat Bridge, named after an annual festival that involves an evening procession across the illuminated bridge. In addition to an improved bridge, the workshop designers proposed a small tea stall on one side and graveyard entry garden on the other. The Barapula Bridge itself was selected for conservation design and community improvements on both sides of the nallah. At the larger neighbourhood scale, an area of the nallah near Nizamuddin Railway station received an urban design proposal for a civic water and environmental science centre to conduct field experiments and training. A fourth proposal would reconnect the Khankhanan Abdur Rahim tomb-garden with the nallah waterfront. These site design scale proposals addressed socio-economic and cultural dimensions of the nallah, as well as ecological design proposals at the reach scale, and socio-hydrologic planning concepts at the urban watershed scale.

Plate 7.9 Children playing in Shab-i Barat Nallah bridge area, 2012. Source: Photograph © MIT Aga Khan Program Design Workshop photograph, James Wescoat instructor

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Plate 7.10 Site design proposal for Shab-i Barat bridge area, 2012. Source: Photograph © MIT Aga Khan Program Design Workshop, Jheng Jie designer, James Wescoat instructor

Conclusion Cities around the world have historically despoiled, and now seek to restore, their urban streams. They have turned their streams into sewers, nallahs and drains. I have shown in this chapter how the words nallah and drain came to connote sewers by the mid-19th century. In the case of nallahs, the deterioration of meaning as well as material conditions led to the point where the word only connotes a gandah nallah (filthy sewer) at present. Drains have maintained a wider range of meanings related to storm water as well as sanitary wastewater, and the reclamation of urban drains in the United States is at this point moving well ahead of nallah restoration in India.48 However, another conclusion from this study is the value of thinking on longer historical time scales than those conventionally involved in modern environmental planning and design. That lesson was borne out not only in the language of nallahs and drains but also in the antecedent histories of urban streams, which proved to be significant in explaining the siting of Nizamuddin in relation to its nearby water benefits. A related lesson is to think at multiple scales, from the watershed to the steam reach and local sites. In principle, the scaling of water enquiry can go in either direction from site to watershed or watershed to site. In this study, we found that over long time scales larger watershed functions must be addressed before reach and site design proposals can be fulfilled. It is possible to do site design without reach or watershed interventions, but not

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in a way that will satisfy basic socio-hydrologic, eco-hydrologic or experiential requirements. The watershed scale was also found to be crucial for flood mitigation in Boston, and for storm water drainage and water pollution abatement in both cities. The reach scale was found to be a crucial nexus for pollution control, water quality treatment and landscape corridor design. Without effective interceptor sewers, in-channel water treatment and riparian landscape design, there can be little meaningful environmental design at the site scale. Many nallahs and urban streams remain noxious sewers. In-channel treatment has a long way to go to be effective in Boston for storm water management and nutrient control, and in Delhi for sanitary wastewater treatment. Should these watershed and reach conditions be fulfilled, the people-centred aims of site design can also be achieved. Neither case study has fulfilled these preconditions to date. In fact, the lesson from Boston was that initial design success in the Back Bay Fens was undermined within 20 years by modification of initial conditions and assumptions, followed by 50 years of unfulfilled plans that are only now being addressed. This is a sobering example for water and environmental planners in Delhi. Another interesting comparison is that the Back Bay Fens project established an historic landscape design within an urban area that had no precedents but that became an attraction upon completion. By comparison the Barapula Nallah was the main attractor for the siting of historic places from Sufi shrines to Mughal tomb gardens and bridges. Upstream reaches in both urban streams have important historical sites, from the Arnold Arboretum in Boston to Chiragh Delhi on the Kushak Nallah. Boston has linked these sites with greenways, and Delhi proposes to do so. Both systems have upstream water impoundments and controls. In Boston, Jamaica and Ware Ponds have inlet and outlet weirs, which are analogous to those of the Satpula and Hauz Khas water complexes in Delhi. Delhi has larger Sultanate-period masonry water control structures than one finds at the metropolitan water system scale in Boston, which encourages bold urban water design thinking in Boston at the site scale as well. With new urban hydrologic models and technologies, it is possible to reconnect these individual watershed processes, reaches, structures and communities. Although profoundly different in many ways, it is productive to compare these two urban streams. The Barapula Nallah and its tributaries have a far deeper, almost millennium-long, medieval heritage of urban water architecture. The cities of Delhi have reframed these water resources and heritage values many times, and in many ways, which may also be anticipated in Boston. The two streams have more closely comparable histories in the 19th century, when the flow of sanitation planning and policy was international in extent. Olmsted’s dramatic reframing of the Muddy River stands out as a premier example of urban sanitation improvement, notwithstanding its mixed performance over time. As criticisms of 19th sanitation programmes are absorbed in new approaches to 21st century urban water planning, their potential for shaping new approaches to environmental health problems in both cities has enormous promise. At present, both urban streams have stimulating proposals for restoration that emphasise various combinations of grey and blue-green infrastructure. This chapter shows that such proposals can be informed and inspired by comparative historical-geographic enquiry.

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Notes * Acknowledgments. I thank Drs Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati for creatively organising and curating the Spaces of Water conference, and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for hosting it intellectually as well as logistically. I am grateful to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and its CEO, Ratish Nanda, who have deepened my understanding of Delhi conservation ideas and methods through their Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Project. The Ramboll Foundation and Herbert and Bettina Dreiseitl supported a comparative study of “Blue-Green Urban Infrastructure in High Density Cities”, in which our research group focused on Boston’s Emerald Necklace. I thank the graduate students in the MIT Aga Khan Program design workshop, particularly Celina Balderas-Guzman for Plate 7.8 and Judy Zheng Jie for Plate 7.10. Finally, I am grateful to colleagues at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Indian Society of Landscape Architects and Vanderbilt University for feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. 1 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or A Life in the Woods, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854, p. 225. 2 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, who charted widespread examples of urban stream exploitation in the region of the US considered here. 3 Urbanisation refers to processes of urban spatial and physical development, as compared with urbanism which refers more to the culture of cities. 4 Ramboll Foundation, Liveable Cities Lab, ‘Enhancing Blue-Green and Social Performance in High Density Urban Environments’, 2016. Published online as ‘Strengthening Blue-Green Infrastructure in our Cities’, https://issuu.com/ramboll/docs/blue-green_infrastructure_lcl_20160, accessed on 19 June 2017. 5 Amita Baviskar, ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets’, in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds.), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, pp. 391–418; Gautam Bhan, ‘“This Is No Longer the City I Once Knew”: Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi’, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 21, no. 1, 2009, pp. 127–42; The Displacement Research and Action Network, India Displacement Research, http://displacement.mit.edu/delhi-1//, accessed on 19 June 2017. 6 James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Searching for Comparative International Water Research: Urban and Rural Water Conservation Research in India and the United States’, Water Alternatives, vol. 7, no. 1, 2014, pp. 199–219. 7 James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Submerged Landscapes: The Public Trust in Urban Environmental Design, from Chicago to Karachi and Back Again’, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, vol. 10, July 2009, pp. 435–75. 8 Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992. A song titled Dirty Water, named after the Muddy River, had the refrain, “Well, I love that dirty water / Oh, Boston you’re my home” (The Standells, 1966), www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/s/standells/dirty_water. html, accessed on 19 June 2017. 9 Bharat Lal Seth and Suresh Babu, Sewage Canal: How to Clean the Yamuna, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2007. 10 John Seyller, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. 11 Other overviews include James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Comparative International Water Research’, Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, no. 142, 2009, pp. 61–6. 12 Such as comparisons between the Indus or Ganges and other large or international rivers, for example the Mekong, the Colorado, Mississippi and the Nile. See, for example, Neda A. Zawahri, ‘International Rivers and National Security: The Euphrates, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris, and Yarmouk Rivers’,

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Natural Resources Forum, vol. 32, no. 4, 2008, pp. 280–9. Integrated river basin development has been exported internationally, emanating from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States, to the Damodar Valley in India in the 1940s. For a superb historical treatment see Daniel Klingensmith, “One Valley and a Thousand”: Dams, Nationalism and Development, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007. More could be done to compare the multi-decadal interstate tribunals in India with interstate compacts in the United States. The fields of comparative law and comparative politics are more developed than other water-related subdisciplines, which, along with international funding to address largescale development issues, helps account for research in those fields. Jessica Teisch, Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Wittfogel East and West: Changing Perspectives on Water Development in South Asia and the US, 1670–2000’, in Alexander B. Murphy and Douglas L. Johnson (eds.), Cultural Encounters with the Environment: Enduring and Evolving Geographic Themes, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 109–32; James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Water Rights in South Asia and the United States: Comparative Perspectives, 1873–1996’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Land, Property, and the Environment, Oakland: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 2001, pp. 298–337; James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Water Policy and Cultural Exchange: Transferring Lessons From around the World to the Western United States’, in Douglas Kenney (ed.), Search of Sustainable Water Management: International Lessons for the American West and Beyond, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005, pp. 1–24. David Gilmartin, ‘Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 48, 2003, pp. 5057–65; James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Reconstructing the Duty of Water: A Study of Emergent Norms in Socio-Hydrology’, Hydrology and Earth Systems Science, vol. 17, no. 12, December 2013, pp. 4759–68. Wescoat, ‘Searching for Comparative International Water Research’. Water utilities benchmarking is carried out by the American Water Works Association, the International Water Association, the Asian Development Bank and others. Wescoat, ‘Submerged Landscapes’. Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387, 1892. M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Others, 1 SCC 388. Supreme Court of India, 1997. Jaipur lake bed case, Prof. K.P. Sharma v. State of Rajasthan and Ors., consolidated, Rajasthan High Court decision, http://hcraj.nic.in/Jalmahal.pdf, accessed on 19 June 2017. The Rajasthan High Court decision was substantially modified in the Supreme Court of India decision titled Jal Mahal Resorts v. K.P. Sharma, 2014, http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/outtoday/41512. pdf, accessed on 19 June 2017. Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, Including the Arabic Words and Phrases to Be Met with in Persian Literature, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892. Wheeler M. Thackston, Harvard University, personal communication, 2014. Government of India, Abstract of the Proceedings of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, during the Year 1872, Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873. Shahjahan Begum, The Táj-ul Ikbál Tárikh Bhopal, or, the History of Bhopal, London: Spink, 1876. Robert Hunter, The Encyclopaedic Dictionary: A New & Original Work of Reference to All the Words in the English Language, with a Full Account of Their Origin, Meaning, Pronunciation, and Use, vol. 5, part 1, London, Cassel & Co., 1885, p. 227. Oxford English Dictionary online, citing Verney L. Cameron, Across Africa, ‘The Main Drain of the Country Is the Walé nullah’, London: G. Philip & Son, 1885, p. 511. This section draws on the Oxford English Dictionary online for “drain” as a noun and verb, accessed on 16 May 2015.

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29 Paul Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 30 Thoreau, Walden, p. 222. 31 Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted. 32 Frederick Law Olmsted, ‘Tenth Annual Report, Boston Park Commissioners, Report on Back Bay’, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years, 1882–1890, Vol. 8, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 228–31. 33 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Yakshas: Essays in the Water Cosmology, New Edition, ed. Paul Schroeder, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. 34 Anne Spirn has argued that landscape preservationists in the 1990s missed the mark by seeking to restore Olmsted’s scenery rather than address urban social and environmental functions in the way Olmsted did. Anne W. Spirn, ‘Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’, in William Cronin (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, pp. 91–113. 35 Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee, Muddy River Restoration Project, www.muddyriv ermmoc.org/, accessed on 19 June 2017. 36 For example, on an account of a march from Agra to Delhi, see William Irvine, ‘The Late Mughals (1707–1803)’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 67, part 1, 1898, pp. 141–66. 37 Archaeological Survey of India, Reports of the Archaeological Survey of India: New Imperial Series, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1874, p. 47. 38 The Punjab Public Administration report for 1896–97 mentions expenditure for a pucca (masonry) well along the Delhi-Mathura Road near the Barapula nallah. Government of India, Report on the Administration of the Punjab and Its Dependencies for 1896–97, Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1897, p. 180. 39 Commonwealth Shipping Committee, Report, vol. 20, London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1913, p. xlii. 40 See note 5. 41 Akash Hingorani, ‘Master Plan of South Delhi Greenway: Sustainable Urban Life’, LA! Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 27, issue 1, 2010, pp. 37–45; and Pradeep Sachdeva for his work on Dilli Haat and other nallah improvement proposals, www.psda.in/, accessed on 19 June 2017. 42 Earlier studies of the Barapula Nallah include Pallavi Kalia Mande’s thesis at the TVB School of Habitat Studies in Delhi. Landscape architect Muhammad Shaheer has prepared plans for improving the nallah in the Nizamuddin basti reach as part of the AKTC’s urban renewal initiative. 43 See AKTC Annual Reports, www.nizamuddinrenewal.org, accessed on 19 June 2017. 44 I was led to this research by Danny Cherian, ‘Land, Water and Urban Form in Sultanate Delhi: Hydraulics and City Planning from 1200–1500 A.D.’, in Umberto Fratino, Antonio Petrillo, Attilio Petruccioli and Michele Stella (eds.), Landscapes of Water: History, Innovation and Sustainable Design, vol. 1, Bari: Politechnico, 2002, pp. 225–8. And also Sunil Kumar, ‘Medieval Reservoir and Modern Urban Planning: Local Society and the Hauz i Rani’, in Sunil Kumar (ed.), The Present in Delhi’s Pasts, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2002, pp. 62–94. 45 James L. Wescoat Jr., ‘Watershed Architecture in Sultanate and Mughal Delhi: An Historical Geography of the Barapula Nallah & Its Tributaries’, Marg, special issue on Water Architecture (Mumbai: Marg, 2016), pp. 84–95. 46 Department of Delhi Jal Board, Laying of Interceptor Sewer along Najafgarh, Supplementary and Shahdara Drain for Abatement of Pollution in River Yamuna Revised Detailed Feasibility Report, New Delhi: Department of Delhi Jal Board, 2008. I am not aware of comparable engineering documents to date for the Barapula Nallah or its tributaries. 47 Reedbed treatment has been developed on a small branch nallah on the IIT-Delhi campus, while wetlands and in-channel lagoon treatment remain proposals for the Barapula Nallah. The literature on

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these technologies is substantial. See US Environmental Protection Agency, Report to Congress: Municipal Wastewater Lagoon Study, Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Municipal Pollution Control, 1987. That report includes discussion of advanced pond and lagoon treatment technologies, such as those pioneered by Dr. Bailey Green of Oswald Green Technologies, www.oswaldgreentech.com/, accessed on 19 June 2017. 48 An important exception is the Osho Ashram’s restored nallah in the city of Pune.

References Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative, numerous reports www.nizamuddinrenewal. org, accessed on 28 April 2019. Archaeological Survey of India, Reports of the Archaeological Survey of India: New Imperial Series, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1874. Baviskar, Amita, ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets’, in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds.), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, pp. 391–418. Begum, Shahjahan, The Táj-ul Ikbál Tárikh Bhopal, Or, The History of Bhopal, London: Spink, 1876. Bhan, Gautam, ‘“This Is No Longer the City I Once Knew”. Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi’, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 21, no. 1, 2009, pp. 127–42. Cherian, Danny, ‘Land, Water and Urban Form in Sultanate Delhi: Hydraulics and City Planning from 1200–1500 A.D.’, in Umberto Fratino et al. (eds.), Landscapes of Water: History, Innovation and Sustainable Design, vol. 1, Bari: Politechnico, 2002, pp. 225–8. Commonwealth Shipping Committee, Report, vol. 20, London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1913. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Yakshas: Essays in the Water Cosmology, New Edition, ed. by Paul Schroeder, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. Department of Delhi Jal Board, Laying of Interceptor Sewer along Najafgarh, Supplementary and Shahdara Drain for Abatement of Pollution in River Yamuna Revised Detailed Feasibility Report, New Delhi: Department of Delhi Jal Board, 2008. Duffy, Paul, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Gilmartin, David, ‘Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 48, 2003, pp. 5057–65. Government of India, Abstract of the Proceedings of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, During the Year 1872, Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873. ———, Report on the Administration of the Punjab and Its Dependencies for 1896–97, Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1897. Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hingorani, Akash, ‘Master Plan of South Delhi Greenway: Sustainable Urban Life’, LA! Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 27, issue 1, 2010, pp. 37–45. Hunter, Robert, The Encyclopaedic Dictionary: A New & Original Work of Reference to All the Words in the English Language, with a Full Account of Their Origin, Meaning, Pronunciation, and Use, vol. 5, part 1, London: Cassel & Co., 1885. Irvine, William, ‘The Late Mughals (1707–1803)’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 67, part 1, 1898, pp. 141–66. Klingensmith, Daniel, ‘One Valley and a Thousand’: Dams, Nationalism and Development, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007. Kumar, Sunil, ‘Medieval Reservoir and Modern Urban Planning: Local Society and the Hauz i Rani’, in Sunil Kumar (ed.), The Present in Delhi’s Pasts, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2002, pp. 62–94.

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Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee, Muddy River Restoration Project, www.muddyrivermmoc. org/, accessed on 16 May 2015. Olmsted, Frederick Law, ‘Tenth Annual Report, Boston Park Commissioners, Report on Back Bay’, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years, 1882–1890, vol. 8, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 228–31. Ramboll Foundation, ‘Enhancing Blue-Green and Social Performance in High Density Urban Environments’, 2016. Published online at https://issuu.com/ramboll/docs/blue-green_infrastructure_lcl_20160. Seth, Bharat Lal and Suresh Babu, Sewage Canal: How to Clean the Yamuna, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2007. Seyller, John, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Spirn, Anne W., ‘Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’, in William Cronin (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, pp. 91–113. Steinberg, Theodore, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Steingass, Francis Joseph, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, Including the Arabic Words and Phrases to Be Met with in Persian Literature, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892. Teisch, Jessica, Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. The Displacement Research and Action Network, India Displacement Research, http://displacement.mit. edu/research/india-practicum/, accessed on 16 May 2015. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, or A Life in the Woods, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Report to Congress: Municipal Wastewater Lagoon Study, Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Municipal Pollution Control, 1987. Wescoat, Jr., James L, ‘Searching for Comparative International Water Research: Urban and Rural Water Conservation Research in India and the United States’, Water Alternatives, vol. 7, no. 1, 2014, pp. 199–219. ———, ‘Submerged Landscapes: The Public Trust in Urban Environmental Design, from Chicago to Karachi and Back Again’, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, vol. 10, July 2009, pp. 435–75. ———, ‘Comparative International Water Research’, Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, no. 142, 2009, pp. 61–6. ———, ‘Wittfogel East and West: Changing Perspectives on Water Development in South Asia and the US, 1670–2000’, in A. B. Murphy and D. L. Johnson (eds.), Cultural Encounters with the Environment: Enduring and Evolving Geographic Themes, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 109–32. ———, ‘Water Rights in South Asia and the United States: Comparative Perspectives, 1873–1996’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Land, Property, and the Environment, Oakland: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 2001, pp. 298–337. ———, ‘Water Policy and Cultural Exchange: Transferring Lessons from around the World to the Western United States’, in D. Kenney (ed.), Search of Sustainable Water Management: International Lessons for the American West and Beyond, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005, pp. 1–24. ———, ‘Reconstructing the Duty of Water: A Study of Emergent Norms in Socio-Hydrology’, Hydrology and Earth Systems Science, vol. 17, no. 12, December 2013, pp. 4759–68. ———, ‘Watershed Architecture in Sultanate and Mughal Delhi: An Historical Geography of the Barapula Nallah & Its Tributaries’, Marg, special issue on Water Architecture, forthcoming. Zaitzevsky, Cynthia, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992. Zawahri, Neda A., ‘International Rivers and National Security: The Euphrates, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris, and Yarmouk Rivers’, Natural Resources Forum, vol. 32, no. 4, 2008, pp. 280–9.

Part III

Materiality and infrastructure, ca. 1950–2015

Plate 1.1 Palampore from the Coromandel coast, India, ca. 1725–50. Painted and dyed cotton chintz,

329 × 224.8 cm. Source: Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Acc. No. IS.33–1950

Plate 2.9 View of goddess temples along the banks of the artificial lake, Sakarra, ca. 9th century. Source: Photograph © Tamara I. Sears

Plate 3.2 Vishram Ghat, Mathura. Source: Photograph © Sugata Ray

Plate 4.5 Artist unknown, Maharana Sangram Singh II at the Gangaur Boat Procession, Udaipur, ca. 1715–20. Gouache

on paper, 78.7 × 78.74 cm. Source: Photograph © Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, Museum Archives of the Maharanas of Mewar, Udaipur, Acc. No. 2012.19.0014_R

Plate 4.10 Jairam, Maharana Jagat Singh II with His Ladies at Dilaram’s reservoir at Jagniwas, Udaipur, 1751. Gouache

on paper, Dimension not known. Source: Photograph © private collection

Plate 5.7 Artist unknown, Iskandar in a Ship, Observing Sea Monster, Folio from a copy of the

Iskandar Nama, ca. 1600. Opaque watercolour on paper, 23.8 × 15.9 cm. Source: Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, Acc. No. IS.294–1951

Plate 8.1 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 16th century to present. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

Plate 8.7 Hauz-i Shamsi, Mehrauli, Delhi, 13th century to present. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

Plate 12.8 The Yamuna at night at Ghat 23, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

Plate 13.5 Kabadiwallahs (scavengers) by the

Yamuna River, New Delhi. Source: Photograph © Asim Waqif

Plate 15.1 Hendrick Jacobsz Dubbels, View of Batavia, 1640–76. Oil on canvas, 65.5 ×

84 cm. Source: Photograph © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Acc. No. SK-A-2513

Plate 15.2 Neuromast and Neuron development of a Zebrafish using

Crispr/Cas9, 2015. Source: Photograph © Ingrid Lekk, Dr Steve Wilson, Wellcome Images

8 Water Its meanings and powers in the Indian Sufi tradition Catherine B. Asher

I

ssues concerning water – its use, its scarcity, its pollution and its sanctity – are among the most pressing in South Asia today. Residents of New Delhi, India’s capital city, are only too aware of the shortage of water as well as the polluted condition of the Yamuna River. Contemporary artists, such as Atul Bhalla, are attempting to bring this issue to the public’s attention. One of the most exciting projects of the early 21st century that brings together the revitalisation of water and culture is the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s restoration of buildings, gardens and waterworks, as well as the introduction of innovations in health care and education in the vicinity of Delhi’s Nizamuddin.1 At the heart of this project is the dargah of Nizam al-Din Auliya. Founded in the early 14th century, the dargah (a shrine of a Muslim saint) consists of many structures, including the tombs of Nizam al-Din and his famous devotee, the poet Amir Khusrau, a Jamaat Khana, today used as a mosque and a large baoli or stepped well. The baoli is believed to have been built by miraculous powers associated in popular tradition with the Sufi saint Nizam al-Din, and its water is associated with extraordinary curative powers for the physically and mentally ill. The claims of miracles, including those that reverse ill health are not unique to the dargah of Nizam al-Din, for they are found at various Muslim shrines throughout South and Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I will examine miracles and curative powers, especially those associated with water, at two South Asian shrines, one on the Coromandel coast in south India known as the shrine of Shah al-Hamid Nagori and the other Delhi’s Nizam al-Din Dargah.

The Nagore shrines Nagore, on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, is located 325 kilometres south of Chennai and some 135 kilometres south of the former French colony of Pondicherry. During the 16th century, when Shah al-Hamid settled there, Nagore was a seaport of considerable importance. There was active trade with Southeast Asia and by the early 17th century with Europe as well. The Muslim communities of the Tamil coast, some members of which had converted to Islam as early as the 8th century, were largely seafaring peoples.2 A number of Muslim shrines sprang up along this coast, the most significant of which is the dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori. Descended from a long line of mystic saints associated with Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad (1078–1166), Shah al-Hamid was born in the late 15th century in north India.3 He was initiated under the guidance of the famous Sufi Muhammad Ghaus Shattari of Gwalior, and then it appears that he

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travelled widely, including visiting the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. He travelled by both land and water crossing the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, suggesting why even today Shah al-Hamid is the saint of choice to be invoked before, while and after crossing the waters.4 Upon his return to the Indian subcontinent, he went south to spread the message of Islam. When in Tanjavur, he cured the Hindu ruler Achyutappa Nayakar of a long-term malady. In gratitude, Achyutappa Nayakar donated a large stretch of land at Nagore on the Tamil coast for his khanqah – that is, his quarters for living and for teaching the principles of Islam. Shah al-Hamid died sometime in the mid-16th century, probably 1558.5 This much is probably historically accurate. Shah al-Hamid is one of the three most important Sufis of south India and a considerable lore has developed around his persona. In these accounts, we learn he performed miracles even when he was in the fluid waters of his mother’s womb.6 At a young age, he was visited by Khizr, associated with the waters of immortality, who placed saliva, which might be thought of as a watery substance, from his own mouth into that of the child to endow him with grace. Saliva associated with a saint’s baraka or spiritual grace arises again when his “son” – a gift to a barren wife and her husband through betel nut the saint chewed and gave to the wife to consume – would ask for his real father and a toothbrush, the transmitter of baraka.7 Of his many encounters with major Muslim sites, for instance his visits to the important shrines of Mashhad, Karbala and Medina, some of these were reached by water, granting the saint a pan-Islamic importance. We also learn of the many miracles performed by Shah al-Hamid, especially those associated with his remarkable curative powers many of which have to do with water. For example, in one account, a paralysed boy is sprinkled with water from Shah al-Hamid’s kashkul (alms bowl) and is instantly able to walk.8 The boy’s father, a non-Muslim, instantly recites the kalima, the Muslim profession of faith, and converts to Islam. In another instance, a blind man is cured by water distributed by the saint.9 Shah al-Hamid is also able to transform salty water into sweet water.10 This miracle is re-enacted in the annual commemoration of the saint’s death anniversary.11 He turns a plate into a boat so he can cross a mighty river, makes rainfall to end a drought.12 Shah al-Hamid is also able to master jinns causing mental illness and instability. In one instance, he commands a river to rise to drown a band of jinns; in another instance, he extricates an evil spirit from a woman’s body and cures a king who was the victim of black magic.13 The ability to perform miracles, to fly through the sky, banish jinns and outwit Hindu yogis – skills possessed by Shah al-Hamid according to hagiographies – is not an unusual claim for a Sufi.14 What is less common are texts that describe the 108 flowers that fell from the saint’s mouth which were like a garland of fragrant advices suggesting a mouth of sweet liquid.15 Here we have a standard reference to the sweet-smelling words of the Muslim saint and to 108, an auspicious number in the Indic tradition. Tamil poetry composed by Chekuna Pulavar in 1812 further enrich this tradition of liquid imagery by likening Shah al-Hamid’s grace “to a rain-bearing cloud pouring life-giving waters on withered plants”.16 The poet further describes the Tamil landscape where his dargah is situated as lush with vegetation and red lotus-filled tanks.17 Moreover, Shah al-Hamid is viewed by his followers as an “Ocean of Grace”, who sooths and calms like the cooling waters of the great tank at his shrine.18 The saint is also known as the Sun of Nagore, and the poet claims the sun in the sky has to dip its face in the ocean before it can gaze on Shah al-Hamid’s face.19

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These references offer clues not to the saint as a historical figure but to his legend and the traditions that have built up around his shrine including associations with water. Established in the 16th century, the shrine has grown considerably over time. Today, its three most notable features are its enormous tank or reservoir on the dargah’s east, its multiple minarets and the area containing the tombs of Shah al-Hamid and his descendants. Tanks are a common feature at a saint’s dargah, for they provide water for the public’s benefit and are often associated with the saint’s power.20 A small dargah in Tranqebar, once a Danish port not far from Nagore, features a tank similar in shape to the one at Nagore. However, the extraordinary size of the tank at Nagore evoke comparisons with tanks at huge temple complexes such as Madurai or that at the nearby Church of Our Lady of Health at Velankanni.21 The tank was established after the death of the saint. According to lore, it was here that his corpse was washed and where the water accumulated a reservoir emerged.22 Those who bath in this tank are believed to be ritually purified and physically healed (Plate 8.1).23 It is on the banks of the Nagore tank, which is equated with the waters of Zamzam, where lifecycle rituals, for example tonsures, are performed both for children and adults (Plate 8.2).24 The newly shaved head is then anointed with cooling sandalwood paste made with the tank’s water, a phenomenon also practiced both at the nearby Church of Our Lady of Health and at Hindu

Plate 8.1 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 16th century to present. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

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Plate 8.2 Father and son with recently shaved

heads, Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore, Tamil Nadu, 2007. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

temples.25 In each case, the pilgrim, often as part of a personal vow, has the head shaved as an act of devotion. At the Nagore shrine, money equalling the shaved hair’s weight is offered to the shrine.26 Along with the tank the shrine’s most prominent features are its multiple minarets. Given that these are most often seen and photographed from the tank side, they have become an integral part of the water setting. The first one, 23 metres in height, was provided in 1645 by a Muslim associated with Gingee, a major Tamil fort.27 Later, in the 17th and 18th centuries, three more minarets were added by prominent Muslims, while the fifth and tallest of the minarets was constructed in 1757 by Maratha Raja Pratap Singh of Tanjavur in thanksgiving for the birth of a son.28 This minaret, which is almost 40 metres high, gives visual prominence to the shrine. The construction of multiple minarets, which increase in size as each new one is added, parallels the construction of multiple gopuras (tall temple entrance gates) that are added to south Indian temples by subsequent rulers. Just as elaborate flag-raising ceremonies are associated with south Indian temple festivities, the annual commemoration of the saint’s death anniversary also commences with

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elaborate flag-raising ceremonies.29 At both the Nagore Dargah and a major south Indian temple, the minarets and gopuras are the dominant features, not the shrine or temple that appears diminished next to them. The multiple whitewashed spires of the nearby Velankanni Church of Our Lady of Health, which while established in the 16th century and rebuilt in the late 19th century, recall the overall shape and multiple tiers of the Nagore minarets as well. Water also plays a role in the shrine’s ritual. After the pilgrim has been blessed, the shrine’s custodian then offers the supplicant water with tulsi (basil), a practice also common in Hindu temples. Water also features in ritual associated with the annual commemoration of Shah al-Hamid’s death anniversary. During this 14-day event, the head of the shrine, ritually enacting the role of Shah al-Hamid, proceeds to the ocean in an elaborate procession to break his two-day fast. At a seashore place known as Silladi where Shah al-Hamid had performed chilla, a 40-day meditation, the ritual saint then sips water from a recently dug hole.30 It is believed that at all other times, this water is salty, but the spiritual presence of the saint on this occasion renders it sweet. As S. A. A. Saheb notes, “This transformation reflects the miraculous powers of the saint and his power over nature”.31 He then proceeds to the sea paying homage to Khizr responsible for giving Shah alHamid grace as discussed previously. While the shrine’s pan-Indic qualities are striking, especially in comparison to major Sufi shrines of north India, there are features that are decidedly Muslim. These include the recitation of Fateha, the first chapter of the Quran; the presence of Arabic script in the shrine; the dress of the Muslim custodians, as well as that of a number of Muslim pilgrims; and the use of amulets associated with Indo-Muslim tradition. Nagore is a site of pilgrimage, particularly for Muslims as popular posters attest. I met people who had come from Singapore, Kerala and Pondicherry. Those from Southeast Asia not only visit but also endow the shrine. There are inscriptions indicating the shrine’s restoration by Malaysians whose ancestors trace their roots to the Tamil coast. Records indicate that Acehnse devotees donated money to the shrine, while in 1888, Tamils living in Singapore raised a large sum of money to purchase a crystal chandelier for the Nagore shrine.32 Today, the shrine’s popularity is seen in the numerous hotels that fill the town. Seven visits to Nagore are said to be equal to one to Mecca, putting Nagore as piously potent as the dargah of Muin al-Din Chishti in Ajmer, India’s most popular Muslim shrine.33 A paperweight I found in the dargah’s many stalls features an image of the Kaaba at Mecca, together with the Nagore shrine, visually reminding the pilgrim of the link between the two.34 In the paperweight, the two images are bound together by the watery fluid in which gold balls float, probably referring to the special aura of both sites. The gold on the side of the Nagore shrine may serve as a reference to Shah al-Hamid himself who is called the Aftab-e Nagore or the Sun of Nagore.35 The Nagore shrine is visited equally by Muslims and Hindus, most of whom are seeking cures for ailments, for barrenness and for safety in travel. Hagiographies claim Shah al-Hamid performed miracles while still in the womb. His baraka, spiritual essence, is so strong that it is believed Shah al-Hamid is able to perform miracles from his grave. Along with his ability to cure illness and barrenness, the saint is particularly associated with saving ships. Pilgrims offer money, prayers and chadars, elaborate sheets to cover the grave, to the shrine. Those who wish to be healed or to secure safe journeys purchase silver-coloured tin plaques with an image of the afflicted body

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part or a ship, a car or these days even an image of an aeroplane that they offer to the shrine (Plate 8.3). In premodern times, those about to take a sea voyage would make an offering to the shrine and when returning a ship representing Shah al-Hamid would meet the voyagers as they approached the Nagore port, taking from them monetary tribute that was ten times the original offering.36 Pilgrims also consume water from the tank, which is believed to have curative powers. Not far from Nagore at Velankanni is the Church of Our Lady of Health. This is a pan-Indian pilgrimage site for Catholics where nearly identical offerings are made. I met a family there who originally came from Goa, but now live in San Francisco and annually cross the waters to make the pilgrimage to this church to ensure their good health. Modern tourist brochures claim that this part of the Tamil coast is especially healthy due to the very high ozone levels in the seaside air. Perhaps, this is one reason there are two major shrines, one Muslim and the other Christian, but both visited by Hindus as well for this emphasis on wellness. The favour that Shah al-Hamid found was so great that when Indian merchants who came largely from the coast of Tamil Nadu crossed the waters of the Indian Ocean and settled abroad in the East India Company’s new colonies in Southeast Asia, they duplicated his dargah in multiple locations, of which three survive.37 While not completely unheard of in the Islamic world, multiple shrines to a single saint are unusual, for dargahs traditionally develop around a saint’s burial site. In 1801, Tamil traders in Georgetown, Penang established a small shrine to the memory of

Plate 8.3 Votive tin plaque with ship, Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore,

Tamil Nadu, 2007. 11.11 × 6.8 cm. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

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Shah al-Hamid that is still in active use (Plate 8.4).38 Between 1828 and 1830, a larger shrine to Shah al-Hamid was built in Singapore (Plate 8.5).39 It is visually even closer in appearance to the shrine at Nagore than the one at Penang. A similar shrine, known today as the Beach Mosque, was built in the early 19th century on Sri Lanka’s east coast at the town of Kalmunaikkudy. It was sponsored by Muhammad Tambi Lebbe, a merchant from Tamil Nadu, who had a vision of Shah al-Hamid instructing him to drink lime juice and sea water to cure his leprosy.40 Each of these shrines is called a dargah, the site of a Muslim saint’s grave – yet no body is present. We might then ask: what do these shrines represent? The Tamil Hindus who settled in Southeast Asia brought with them their gods. In this same manner, Shah al-Hamid’s baraka, his spiritual essence, was carried across the sea. The Penang Dargah serves as a memorial, as a sign in the complex indicates, to Shah al-Hamid. However, it is not just a memorial to him. Rather, it is a tribute to his karamat – that is, his extraordinary power to perform miracles – which is a gift from God. Among those miracles were ones associated with water that were re-enacted by Penang’s Tamil Muslims. They would toss valuable belongings donated to Shah al-Hamid with the belief that they would make their way to Nagore.41 The Singapore shrine was also a tribute to the saint’s karamat. Archival documents indicate that Tamil traders were

Plate 8.4 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Georgetown, Penang, 1801. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

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Plate 8.5 Dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Singapore, 19th century. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

reluctant to return to India in part because of the sea journey and in part from lost revenues when shops were closed.42 Asking for protection through the intercession of Shah al-Hamid, Tamil traders would stay in these shrines for up to three days before they commenced any sea voyage. Today, the flag-raising ceremony has been abandoned at the Singapore and Penang shrines, but is still celebrated at the Sri Lankan shrine with the flag timed to be raised at precisely the time the ceremony commences in Nagore (Plate 8.6).43 Even if these shrines are dedicated to the saint’s divine powers, we still need to ask: is there a precedent for these multiple shrines when they are rare in the Islamic world, although many Sufis have similar miraculous abilities? I believe one answer is found in the vicinity of Nagore itself. Sufi saints often perform chilla – that is, they retreat to a small chamber or cave to meditate for a 40-day period. The location of the chilla is sometimes known, although it usually remains a site of minor significance. In the case of Shah al-Hamid, two sites associated with these 40-day meditative periods are known, and each has been turned into an independent shrine. One is about 10 kilometres north of Nagore at Vanjur. While it has a mosque on the site, it is remotely situated and not actively visited. The other known as Silladi, however, only a kilometre south of Nagore, is right on the coast. It marks the site of the saint’s chilla during which he miraculously rescued sinking ships and where sweet water is sipped during the 14-day commemoration of the

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Plate 8.6 Flag-raising ceremony at the Beach

Mosque shrine for Sufi saint Hamid al-Nagori Kalmunaikkudy, eastern Sri Lanka, June 2008. Source: Photograph © Dennis McGilvray

saint’s death anniversary. Here large numbers of pilgrims come to experience the saint’s powers in spite of the fact that his body is not there. How do we explain this when in the Muslim tradition power emanates from the saint’s body, which is not considered dead but living? A case in point is a dargah in Tranqebar, the former Danish port. Before I entered the tomb, the custodian first knocked loudly on the door to let the saint know he had a visitor. If the saint is treated as if he were still alive and has an extraordinary ability to perform miracles, why can he not be present in multiple places at once? This seems to be precisely what was in the minds of the Tamil Muslims who crossed oceanic waters and settled in Rangoon, Sri Lanka, Penang, Aceh and Singapore, among other places, and remains in the beliefs of their descendants.

The shrine of Nizam al-Din Auliya, Delhi While the Chishti saints of north India and even those of south India are generally better known than Shah al-Hamid Nagori, contemporary rituals at the Nagore shrine have received more scholarly scrutiny than at either the north Indian Chishti shrines of Muin al-Din in Ajmer or Nizam

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al-Din Auliya. In the case of Nagore, the blending of ritual associated with Islam and Hinduism has attracted scholars whose other work often focuses on Hindu traditions. Scholars who work primarily Islam in Southeast Asia are attracted to the Indian Nagore shrine for cross-cultural concerns. Sources for the 16th-century Shah al-Hamid Nagori are later tazkiras – that is, biographies and poetry – while in the case of Nizam al-Din, his devoted disciple, Amir Hasan Sijzi, recorded for posterity many of the Chishti master’s sayings and sermons. Hence, much scholarship on Nizam al-Din has focused on his life, his theological interpretation of Islam and his place in late 13th through early 14th-century north Indian society. The types of primary sources and secondary studies of these two Sufis differ, but at the same time, it is possible to glean the impact of these men and how water plays a role in that impact. The biography of Nizam al-Din has been explored in detail and is easily available, so my account here will be terse.44 He was born in Badaun, about 220 kilometres to the east of Delhi, in 1243–44. When he was five, his father died, leaving his pious widowed mother and his siblings in extreme poverty. Even so, Nizam al-Din’s mother made sure he had an excellent education. When the future saint was 20, he went to Ajodhan (today known as Pakpattan, Pakistan) to study with Farid al-Din Gunj-e Shakar, the most esteemed Chishti Sufi of the time, who was then about 90 years old. Farid al-Din, deeply impressed with Nizam al-Din’s knowledge and genuine devotion, appointed the younger man as his spiritual successor upon his death. Upon receiving a revelation, Nizam al-Din, already living in various locales within Delhi, established himself in Ghiyaspur, then a sleepy part of the city on the banks of the Yamuna. As time passed, his khanqah – that is, his living and teaching quarters – became extremely popular. That coupled with the move of the royal court to a nearby neighbourhood made the saint wish for a quieter venue, but he never moved and was buried just outside his original khanqah. Nizam al-Din, we know with certainty, never ventured outside of north India, living most of his life in a single city. By contrast, Shah al-Hamid travelled through the Middle East and possibly Southeast Asia, crossing over land and oceans. As a result, Nizam al-Din retains north Indian and perhaps pan South Asian importance. Shah al-Hamid’s influence is headquartered in Tamil Nadu but had crossed the Indian Ocean into Burma, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Nizam al-Din welcomed all sincere people to his khanqah, although he avoided government representatives. He refused to attend court, even though more than once he had been commanded to do so. Even though his dargah today is associated with miracles (karamat), he performed none, unlike Shah al-Hamid Nagori, his south Indian Sufi counterpart. Nor did he have tolerance for Sufis who bragged about performing wondrous acts. Nizam al-Din also had no respect for those who disclosed the mental height they achieved while in an intense spiritual state. Nizam al-Din’s message was to treat humans with dignity, respect and compassion regardless of faith. This, while a common sentiment at the Nagore Dargah, was not a popular one in early 14th-century Delhi, even among some of his most ardent admirers, including the famed poet Amir Khusrau and the historian Zia al-Din Barani. The most significant source for Nizam al-Din’s beliefs is Sijzi’s Morals for the Heart. Sijzi compiled accounts of his 188 individual meetings with Nizam al-Din that spanned five different time periods from 1308 until 1322.45 The Shaikh’s discourses consisted of multiple themes that focused on

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examples of model Sufi behaviour with the goal of attaining salvation in the next world while assuring kindness and generosity in this world. In these discourses, water is used both as a metaphor and a place of transition from one mental state to another. Bodies of water, wells and hauz, which might be translated as a pond or reservoir, are used to define the territory of a saint. For example, according to Nizam al-Din, a man asked a holy man to pray for him as he set out on a journey with bandit-filled roads. The saint replied that he would be safe as he went from one hauz to another, each one marking a particular holy man’s territory.46 Water can also mark life-changing moments. Nizam al-Din tells a story from his own life where he had inadvertently offended his master Farid al-Din. Mortified and in tears, he ran until he reached a well. What followed next transformed his relationship with Farid al-Din.47 At the bank of a river, Nizam al-Din relates, divinely revealed knowledge of a holy man’s death was received by another saint.48 In another discourse, Nizam al-Din recounts an experience he had upon reaching a hauz where he was weak and ill, surely a way of stating his mental state was waning. He began to lose consciousness and suddenly called out to his Shaikh awaking with a sense of renewed confidence about his life’s work and purpose.49 At another hauz, a dervish urged the young Nizam al-Din to leave Delhi if he wanted to maintain his faith. Later at Rani Hauz in Delhi, an unseen voice told him to establish his dwelling at Ghiyaspur.50 This is where Nizam al-Din lived surrounded by followers and devotees for the rest of his life, and today, it is known as the locality of Nizamuddin in today’s New Delhi. In another discourse, Nizam al-Din likens the goal of life to a well, which is to provide water. The point here is “in every work there must be one principle goal and one must pursue that goal”.51 Water is also used by the master as a metaphor for the initiated Sufi to maintain the secrets of divine intoxication: “God’s heroes drain a thousand seas [. . .] yet thirst”.52 The negation of sensory fulfillment, crucial to Nizam al-Din’s vision of Sufism, is demonstrated by this story involving water. A saint asks his wife to cross a river to feed a dervish. She objects stating that crossing it will be difficult, but the saint responds that she should simply ask the river to part on behalf of the man who never slept with his wife. Even though puzzled, as she had born him multiple children, she did as he asked. On her return, the dervish told her to ask the river to part as a favour to the man who never ate for 30 years. The saint was only fulfilling his duties to his wife; he felt no desire. The dervish only ate, so he had the strength to exercise God’s will.53 At the same time, Nizam al-Din admonishes against performing such supernatural acts. A dervish had long cultivated a plot of land, but once a tax collector came to know of this, he demanded back arrears. The dervish had no means to pay, so the collector insisted that the dervish perform a miracle. He walked on top of a river to its other bank, and then the dervish demanded a boat for his return. The collector refused, stating he could return by walking on water, to which the dervish replied that pandering to the lower senses lacked wisdom.54 There is no society or religious tradition that does not recognise the need of water for life. The discourses of Nizam al-Din are no exception, at times giving water exceptional significance. The saint claimed that Sultan Itutmish (r. 1111–36) met favour in heaven because he provided the royal reservoir, the Hauz-i Shamsi, with especially sweet water for the benefit of his subjects (Plate 8.7).55 According to legend, Iltutmish had a dream showing the prophet ascending to

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Plate 8.7 Hauz-i Shamsi, Mehrauli, Delhi, 13th century to present. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

heaven on his horse, Buraq, at this very spot. The sultan commanded that a hauz be excavated here, and its water was originally supplemented with that from the spring at Zamzam, the divinely revealed well at Mecca.56 In another account, a holy man who recited the Quran each night for 30 days was sent a loaf of bread and a jug of water daily. In the end, it was discovered that he only consumed the water, a metaphor for God’s essence. He had no need of other sustenance.57 Just as Shah al-Hamid was able to change salty water to sweet water, the prophet transformed poisonous water to potable liquid.58 While Nizam al-Din’s discussion of miracles attributed to the prophet seems out of character, his plea to pray for rain in order to sustain life is less so.59 Shah al-Hamid, too, told drought-stricken villagers to pray for rain, which then poured down in bountiful quantities, ensuring life.60 Asking God for rain has a long tradition in Islam, not surprising, considering that much of the traditional Muslim world is in deserts. Amulets made of rock crystal, a stone especially associated with water due to its shimmery translucent quality, used for the request of rain have been documented throughout much of the Islamic world.61 While water ensures life, God’s servant, Khizr, who consumed the waters of immortality and has knowledge of the future, is evoked in both the lore associated with Shah al-Hamid and Nizam

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al-Din. According to the Tazkira, the Nagore saint, when very young, received saliva from Khizr, thus endowing Shah al-Hamid with baraka. Much later, Khizr again appeared showing the saint the spot where he would die and be buried.62 Khizr revealed that under this spot was a well, now covered, where Sikander, the Islamic version of Alexander the Great, had performed his ablutions. After excavating the well, Shah al-Hamid used its water for ablutions. Khizr promised the saint that if he continued to reside near the well, God would always assist him in his role of guiding people.63 The saint’s devotees pay homage to Khizr for endowing him with baraka during the annual flag-raising ceremony. According to hagiographies, Shah al-Hamid’s relationship with Khizr is a romanticised positive one. Nizam al-Din’s attitude towards Khizr, as told by Sijzi, is more complex. Nizam al-Din’s references to Khizr, who has not only consumed the waters of immortality but also has the ability to initiate people into Sufi orders, change over time. Sijzi records that in 1308 and 1309, the saint believed he would meet the eternal Khizr. Nizam al-Din states that he who repeatedly recites Sura al-Ikhlas, a Quranic chapter that confirms God’s monotheistic nature, is bound to meet Khizr.64 Five months later, Nizam al-Din alludes to Moses’ distress over Khizr’s destruction of a boat, a reference that is only comprehensible to an audience versed in the story of Khizr.65 What is left unsaid is that the purpose of Khizr’s destruction is solely to make the world a better place, which is only possible because Khizr knows the future.66 By 1314, Nizam al-Din tells Sijzi that during his initial period of his spiritual quest, he yearned to meet spirits such as Khizr, but over time realised this was a fruitless pursuit.67 Three years later, he referenced Khizr in a discourse, but in this instance, it was an opportunity to comment on female virtue. The parents of a son killed by Khizr then had a daughter. She, unlike her disobedient brother, was the paragon of piety, and when married, she gave birth to seven saintly sons.68 I have outlined references to water in Sijzi’s Morals for the Heart, but what is not cited is any reference to the famed baoli at Nizamuddin. Since at least the 19th century and perhaps earlier, there have been textual references that allege its initial creation by the hands of the saint himself and then by workers who during the day were forced to build Ghiyas al-Din’s fortress at Tughluqabad and at night opted to construct Nizam al-Din’s baoli.69 As the well-known story goes, the sultan, when he heard of the workers’ defiant behaviour, banned the sale of oil for lamps, believing this would halt all work. The saint told them to use water to light the lamps. Miraculously, the water turned to oil. According to legend, this event only further fuelled the animosity between the sultan and the saint, eventually resulting in the saint’s prediction of Ghiyas al-Din’s death before he entered the city with the famous phrase “Dilli hanuz dur ast; Delhi is still far”. Just as the water at the Nagore shrine is believed to have curative powers, so too is the baoli’s water at the Nizam al-Din Dargah (Plate 8.8). Although the water might appear dirty and polluted to the uninitiated, the believer has no problem with consuming and/or immersing him/ herself in it. A female devotee of the saint encouraged a reporter for a popular journal to drink the water from the baoli that had cured her 40 years earlier. He, looking at the debris floating on the baoli’s surface, was not convinced that this experience was for him.70 Arthur Saniotis, an Australian anthropologist, relates an incident where a Sufi, known as Shams, fully embraced the sacred landscape of the baoli and by extension consumed the saint’s baraka.71 Shams, well aware of

Plate 8.8 Stepped well, Dargah of Nizam al-Din, Delhi, 14th century. Source: Photograph © Catherine B. Asher

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the traditions of the dargah, entered the complex and went to the baoli. In a niche along the baoli’s wall, he lit a votive candle and some incense, providing the watery setting with an enhanced sense of sweet smell and a yellow glow reflected in the water below. He then removed all his clothes, which is highly unusual for maintaining a sense of decorum throughout the dargah is of the utmost importance. Shams then prayed and consumed the water. Saniotis relates that Shams’ mood, intense until now, became playful as he began to swim in its sacred waters. Others I have observed stand fully clothed on the baoli’s steps not venturing far into the water and in some cases pouring water from the baoli over their heads. Or a father or other male relative often dips young children into the water. Once I saw a man filling large containers with the baoli’s water to carry home. The only scholars who have written about contemporary ritual at the dargah of Nizam al-Din Auliya are Desiderto Pinto and Arthur Saniotis. They both underscore the significance of water’s curative properties and ritual associated with it. Here, unlike the Nagore shrine where there are no specific ceremonies associated with cures and exorcism, there are proscribed rituals and acts involved in cures.72 Pinto describes a Hindu man who was possessed by jinns and brought to the shrine by a Muslim friend to be cured. His treatment consisted of drinking water mixed with rose petals from the tombs of Nizam al-Din and Amir Khusrau from a tibb bowl – that is, a metal bowl inscribed with verses from the Quran used for medical purposes.73 While the bowl from which the jinn-possessed Hindu drank was probably an inexpensive machine-produced piece, such as those sold in the dargah’s vicinity, expensive handcrafted tibb bowls have been used for centuries in the Muslim world.74 Saniotis too recounts patients being given water in a tibb bowl to drink, which might have a talisman in it or words from the Quran.75 He also notes that healers who work in the shrine’s vicinity in the past relied not only on the baoli’s water but also on water from the eight wells, now all dry and disused, around the Nizamuddin Basti.76 According to a local healer, each of these wells held water with different properties for healing. Similar claims are made in a more secular context. Syed Asghar Ali Shandani, a Rampur Muslim who shifted to Pakistan during Partition but maintained his Rampur identity, claimed that water from a river near Rampur gave its Rohilla men a sense of bravery.77 Sohail Hashmi, a Delhi-based documentary filmmaker, recounts that he remembers, as a child, water carriers who specialised in drawing water from specific wells. Families claimed they could tell by taste from which well any water was drawn and would only purchase their preferred liquid.78 The tradition in Islam of the curative, holy qualities of water such as that at the tank in Nagore or the baoli at Nizam al-Din’s Dargah comes from that associated with the Zamzam well at the Kabaa in Mecca that was miraculously unearthed by Hagar, the concubine of Ibrahim, the first Muslim. Zamzam water saved the life of Ismail, Hagar and Ibrahim’s son. Signs can be found on the worldwide web that bear a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. It proclaims that the water of Zamzam is a source of nourishment and a “cure for the ill”.79 Just as visiting the shrine at Nagore or the dargah of Muin al-Din Chishti at Ajmer seven times is the equivalent to making the pilgrimage to Mecca, so too do the waters associated with some Indian Sufi shrines take on similar associations. For example, some tombs are washed in a manner reminiscent of how the Kaaba is cleansed. As at the Kaaba, the tomb of Muin al-Din Chishti is washed with rosewater.80

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At the dargah of Sayyid Salar Masud Ghazi in Bahraich, the tomb is washed two times a week on Monday and Friday. The water then runs into a hauz fed by a channel. This water is considered holy and particularly efficacious for those suffering from leprosy and skin aliments.81 So too at the dargah of Makta Pir, not far from Nizam al-Din’s shrine, water, drawn from the Yamuna and placed in a clay pot, was offered to supplicants for curing skin diseases.82 The 14th-century Qadam Rasul in Pahargunj, Delhi is today a largely forgotten dusty shrine, but was vital still in the 18th century.83 Darbar Quli Khan, who wrote about Delhi between 1739 to 1741, describes its hauz as one that provides sweet water coming from a spring that “fulfills the desires of the needy”.84 Chiraq-i Delhi, the tomb of the 14th-century Chishti Sufi Nasir al-Din, a disciple of Nizam al-Din, has no associations today with water. When I visited the dargah in the summer of 2013, I asked numerous people, including its current Kadim, about traditions once associated with water and the shrine. They all showed me a well that they said dried up 30 to 40 years ago. In spite of today’s beliefs, sources indicate that in the 18th century, a spring flowed near the dargah that was thought to contain the saint’s baraka. People who bathed in that stream, according to Darbar Quli Khan, were completely cured of any illness.85 The short-lived Mughal ruler Jahandar Shah (r. 1712–13) bathed in the spring along with his consort, seeking the blessings of Chiraq-i Delhi that they might have a son.86 Pilgrims who have gone on the Hajj frequently bring back containers of Zamzam water from Mecca. Before the ban on carrying liquids on flights was implemented, I recall seeing returning Hajjis in the New Delhi airport with enormous containers of Zamzam water. Nowadays, airlines serving Hajjis allow each passenger to check through without additional charge five litres of Zamzam water, as long as it is properly packed.87 I mentioned earlier that I observed a man taking water from the baoli at Nizam al-Din. While I am not aware if this is a tradition at Nagore, I recently saw a similar act at a shrine in Java. The shrine of Sunan Muria, one of the nine walis or Sufis credited with the spread of Islam in Java, is located in Colo, near Kadus, in north-central Java. The shrine itself is located on a hill, a one and a half-kilometre climb from where the road ends. Further up the hill is a magnificent waterfall whose water is associated with the saint’s baraka. There I observed people collecting containers of water, which they carried down the steep incline to the road below. If the baoli and its holy water is one focus of the Nizam al-Din Dargah, the other is the stunning white marble tomb of Nizam al-Din and its immediate surrounding structures including the 14thcentury Jamaat Khana, the elegant enclosed graves of Amir Khusrau, Jahan Ara and other important Mughal tombs.88 From the exterior, the dargah is almost invisible. Little of it can be seen from any of the roads that lead to it, which is quite different from the Nagore shrine whose tall minarets proclaim the shrine’s existence from a considerable distance. The Nagore interior is devoid of architectural beauty, unlike the beautiful interior structures of the Nizam al-Din Dargah. But Nizam al-Din’s Dargah cannot be separated from its nearby historical components, Humayun’s Tomb and the Sundar Nursery, to which it is tethered. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these Mughal structures are tied to the dargah, for surely the great Mughal tomb is located to the west of the saint’s tomb to imbibe his baraka. The nursery is the site of a huge garden serai that once was a major stop on the Mughal-period Grand Trunk Road.89 We can presume that besides feeding their horses, men were refuelling their souls at the adjacent dargah.

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The Aga Khan Trust for Culture Historic Cities Programme has embraced these three components – Humayun’s Tomb, Sundar Nursery and Hazarat Nizamuddin Basti – in its Urban Renewal Development. It was the restoration of the garden and waterworks at Humayun’s Tomb that I was initially critical of. As beautiful it was to have clear running water in the tomb’s channels and chadars, it seemed extravagant at a time when many of Delhi’s citizens lacked an adequate safe water supply. After reading literature written by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, talking to Ratish Nanda, the conservation architect in charge of this project, and speaking with other engaged scholars working on Delhi, I have changed my opinion. Detractors do exist, and they speak out: “What my tax money going to renovate a monument build [sic] by tribal warriors who came to loot and exploit India”.90 This ill-informed person evidently did not realise that the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and other organisations were paying for the renovation. Generally, comments have been more charitable. While all three parts of the Aga Khan Trust’s project involve water, I will focus here on Nizamuddin Basti. The revitalisation at the Basti includes childhood education centres, including computers known as “holes in the wall”, the construction of separate latrines for men and women, parks for women and their children, waste management, improved sewers and a clinic complete with on-site laboratory facilities. One of the reasons these improvements have been successful is that the residents wanted them. These improvements were not imposed on them. Another reason is that Nizamuddin residents are part of the project. For example, the clinic is run by trained local women, not outsiders, so trust is gained with some ease. Without doubt, the most interesting aspect of the Basti’s revitalisation for historians and art historians was the restoration of the great baoli. Parts of the wall were falling, and, over the centuries, debris had blocked the only active spring-fed baoli in the whole of Delhi.91 Sewerage was entering the baoli, so pipes had to be moved. An epoxy coating placed by the Delhi Jal Nigam had to be chiselled off manually. During the restoration, a passage was discovered that led from the well to the shrine that many believe was used by Nizam al-Din.92 Among the most delicate and difficult of all the tasks needed to restore the baoli was convincing families living on top of the baoli’s wall to relocate. Narayani Gupta, the well-known scholar of Delhi, told me that Ratish Nanda’s team’s efforts in relocating these families was a masterful work of diplomacy and showed how the project really cared for the residents of Nizamuddin Basti.93 While this project remains unique in its scope and success, there is at least one other project involving a dargah and the successful revitalisation of water. The dargah of Muin al-Din in Ajmer is probably India’s oldest and largest active shrines with a pan South Asian presence. As it is visited annually by thousands of pilgrims, both Muslim and Hindu, as at the Nizam al-Din shrine, the strain on water resources is phenomenal and exacerbated by Ajmer’s location in a desert. The shrine includes a deep reservoir known as a jhalra, which caught water as if ran off from the hills above. Over time, this cistern was neglected and became clogged rendering it useless. In 2008, the jhalra was restored using traditional water harvesting techniques. It now contains 40 feet of water and provides 63 litres of water daily for pilgrims.94 Belief in the curative power of water transcends any single religious tradition. This chapter, however, has focused on Sufi beliefs and rituals at two shrines. It is apparent from pursuing literature

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on South Asian Sufis that the role of water’s significance can be found at multiple shrines, but probably all rooted in its life-giving and life-assuring proprieties. The importance of water is recognised today in the work of many artists, activists and cultural organisations that strive to transform rivers and wells to potable life-giving liquids. In a time when Delhi’s water situation has reached a level of crisis, these ongoing projects are a lifeline to human well-being, a philosophy preached by Nizam al-Din himself.

Notes 1 ‘Where We Work: India’, https://www.akdn.org/where-we-work/south-asia/india/cultural-development/ urban-renewal-delhi-heritage-conservation, accessed on 21 March 2019. 2 Vasudha Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah of Hazrat Shahul Hamid’, in Mumtaz Currim and George Michell (eds.), Dargahs: Abodes of the Saints, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2004, p. 138. 3 For Shah al-Hamid, see Muhammad Yusuf Sahib, Tazkirat-e-Aftab-e-Nagore, Nagore: Dargarh Sharif, 1993; hereafter Tazkirat; Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah of Hazrat Shahul Hamid’, pp. 136–47; Vasudha Narayanan, ‘Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid’, in Selva J. Raj and William P. Harman (eds.), Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. 65–85; Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 91–4, 113, 115, 119, 123–5, 230–5; S. A. Azeez Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”: Hindu-Muslim Devotion and the Sacralising of Localism at the Shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif in Tamil Nadu’, in Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu (eds.), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotions in Sufi Cults, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 55–76. In spite of this volume’s 2014 publication, the text is based on research done in 1993. Khoo Selma Nasution, The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place-Making around the Kapitan Kling Mosque, 1786–1957, Penang: ARECA Books, 2014, pp. 68–71. Catherine B. Asher, ‘The Sufi Shrines of Shahul Hamid in India and Southeast Asia’, Artibus Asiae, vol. 69, no. 2, 2009, pp. 247–58. 4 Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”’, p. 59. 5 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 141 indicates 1570 and 1579 are also claimed. 6 Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”’, p. 56; Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 140. 7 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 141. A toothbrush would have been a stick cut from a Neem tree. Narayanan, ‘Religious Vows’, p. 68 indicates, “Transmission of divine grace through bodily substances, especially saliva, is a common motif in Tamil Islamic poetry”. 8 Tazkirat, pp. 46–7. 9 Ibid., p. 57. 10 Ibid., p. 98. 11 Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”’, p. 69. 12 Tazkirat, pp. 49, 138. 13 Ibid., pp. 34, 114, 106. 14 Simon Digby, ‘The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India’, Purusartha, vol. 9, 1986, pp. 160–8. 15 Tazkirat, pp. 188–99. 16 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, pp. 138, 140. 17 Ibid., p. 138. 18 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 134. 19 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 140.

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20 Catherine B. Asher, ‘Far from the Desert: Water Traditions in the South Asian Landscape’, in Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 284. 21 T. G. S. Balram Iyer, History and Description of Sri Meenakshi Temple, Madurai: Sri Karthik Agency, 1987, pp. 27–8. The Madurai tank probably dates to the 18th century. The current church at Velankanni is a 19th-century structure, but it and the tank were originally founded about the 16th century. 22 S. A. Azeez Saheb, Nagore-e-Sharief: A Sacred Complex Study, New Delhi: B.R. Pub. Corp., 2014. pp. 103, 175. 23 Ibid., p. 175. 24 Ibid., p. 73. 25 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 138. While at Velankanni and in temple towns, I witnessed similar rituals. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 143, discusses the potent cooling powers of sandalwood paste, which she sees in religious terms of controlling evil spirits. 26 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 94. 27 Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, p. 146. 28 Ibid., pp. 145–6. 29 See Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”’, pp. 61–74 for a detailed discussion of flag raising at the dargah. In Urdu, the death anniversary is known as the ‘urs, but in Tamil as the kanduri. For flag-raising festivals at the Madurai temple, see A. V. Jeyechandrun, The Madurai Temple Complex, Madurai: Mudarai Kamaraj University, 1985, pp. 210–12. 30 ‘Welcome to nagore dargah sheriff’, www.nagoredargha.com/, ‘Welcome to nagore dargah sheriff’, http://wellcometonagoredargah.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive.html, accessed on 4 June 2014 for photographs of the 2014 commemoration of this event. 31 Saheb, ‘A “Festival of Flags”’, p. 69. 32 Torsten Tschacher, ‘Witnessing Fun: Tamil Speaking Muslims and the Imagination of Ritual in Southeast Asia’, in Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schroder (eds.), Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, Halle: Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2010, p. 196. 33 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 216. 34 Several people have indicated that it is Medina not Nagore in the image, but pilgrims to the Nagore shrine believe it is Nagore. My chapter focuses on popular opinion. 35 The title of the Tazkirat is the Tazkirat-e-Aftab-e-Nagore. 36 Lore told to me at the Nagore shrine. 37 Those at Penang and Singapore still stand. For the Rangoon shrine, see Tschacher, ‘Witnessing Fun’, pp. 198, 202. I was told by Dennis McGilvray that it was destroyed by Islamicists, but the US Department of State claims that it was the Myanmar government. ‘U.S. Department of State: Diplomacy in Action, Burma’, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2011/eap/192615.htm, accessed on 5 June 2014. For the Sri Lankan shrine, see Dennis B. McGilvray, ‘Jailani: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka’, in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds.), Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation & Conflict, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2004, pp. 273–89. For the shrine at Aceh, Indonesia and more sites in Malaysia, see Nasution, The Chulia in Penang, p. 70. 38 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, pp. 93–4. This corresponds to information I was told at the dargah in Penang. Nasution, The Chulia in Penang, p. 68. 39 Anonymous, Nagore Durgha Shrine Preservation Guidelines, vol. 1, Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority for Preservation of Monuments Board, 1991, p. 4, http://singaporenagoredargah.com/a/, accessed on 10 June 2014. I was told that the shrine was closed to financial mismanagement. Dennis McGilvray, in a personal communication, claims it was due to pressure from anti-Sufi Muslims.

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40 McGilvray, ‘Jailani: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka’. 41 Torsten Tschacher, ‘Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma’bar and Nusantara’, in R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (eds.), Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009, p. 59. 42 National Archives of Singapore, Oral Histories, http://cord.nhb.gov.sg/cord/public/internetSearch/ catalogueForm.jsp?command=loadUpdate&id=12515&xAccess=false&total=28¤tPageNo=3& startPageNo=1&startNoBatch=0&thesaurusFlag=on&searchType=0&startIndex=20&count=10&sim pleSearch=nagore&B1=Search, accessed on 28 June 2007. 43 The Singapore shrine has been turned into a cultural centre, so the practice has been abandoned. Attendants at the Penang shrine told me that gaining permission for the processions associated with the ceremony was too difficult. For the Sri Lankan ceremony, see McGilvray, ‘Jailani: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka’. 44 See Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, The Life and Times of Shaikh Nizam-u’d-din Auliya, new ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. 45 Amir Hasan Sijzi, Nizam ad-Din Awliya: Morals for the Heart, introduction by Khaliq Ahmad Nizami; trans. and annotation by Bruce B. Lawrence, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992, p. 5. 46 Ibid., p. 240. 47 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 48 Ibid., p. 246. 49 Ibid., p. 149. 50 Ibid., pp. 243–4. 51 Ibid., pp. 258–59. 52 Ibid., p. 93. 53 Ibid., pp. 151–52. 54 Ibid., p. 237. 55 Ibid., p. 218. 56 Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa’-e Delhi, trans. and notes by Chander Shekkar and Shama Mitra Chenoy, New Delhi: Deputy Publication, 1989, p. 7. Hereafter Muraqqa’-e Delhi. 57 Sijzi, Nizam ad-Din Awliya, p. 226. 58 Ibid., p. 193. 59 Ibid., pp. 253–4. 60 Tazkirat, p. 138. 61 Venetia Porter, ‘Stones to Bring Rain? Magical Inscriptions in Linear Kufic on Rock Crystal AmuletSeals’, in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 130–59. 62 Tazkirat, pp. 113–4 and Narayanan, ‘Nagore: Dargah’, pp. 140–1. 63 Tazkirat, pp. 113–4. 64 Sijzi, Nizam ad-Din Awliya, p. 103. This was on 17 December 1308. 65 Ibid., pp. 175–6. This saying is dated 11 April 1309. 66 M. Longworth Dames, ‘Khwādja Khiḍr’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, second ed., Brill Online, 2014, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/khwadjakhidr-SIM_4126, accessed on 5 June 2014. 67 Sijzi, Nizam ad-Din Awliya, pp. 222–32. This is dated 1 July 1314. 68 Ibid., pp. 287–8. This is dated 3 December 1317. 69 Hasan, ‘A Guide to Nizamu-d Din’, pp. 5–7. 70 Arun Gunapathy, ‘The Dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya’, Life Positive, April 2009, http://lifepositive.com/ the-dargah-of-nizamuddin-auliya/, accessed on 19 May 2015.

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71 Arthur Saniotis, ‘Enchanted Landscape: Sensuous Awareness as Mystical Practice among Sufis in North India’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 1, 2008, pp. 18–20. 72 Narayanan, ‘Religious Vows’, p. 72. 73 Desirerio Pinto, ‘The Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah: The Accounts of Pilgrims’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 116. 74 They are often called magic bowls. 75 Arthur Saniotis, ‘Attaining the Mystical Body: Indian Sufi Ascetic Practices’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2012, pp. 76–7. 76 Arthur Saniotis, ‘Contesting the Sacred at Muslim Shrines in India: Conflict and Retrieval in the “Spiritual” Arena’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 33, no. 1, 2013, pp. 143–4. 77 Razak Khan, ‘Nostalgic Pasts: Space, Emotions and Histories of Princely Rampur’, unpublished paper delivered at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, 29 March 2014, pp. 19–20. 78 Sohail Hashmi, personal conversation, 13 January 2014. 79 ‘Blessings of Zamzam Water’, www.google.com/search?q=blessings+of+zamzam+water&safe=active&so urce=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=6taUU9S2PNSpyAT-voAQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920& bih=893#facrc=_&imgrc=OwMKfuCGJfH1CM%253A%3BUrWVT7MsDV54iM%3Bhttp%253A% 252F%252Fbestfacebook.net%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2013%252F04%252Fbless.jpg%3 Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fbestfacebook.net%252Fblessing-of-zamzam-water%252F%3B780%3B600, accessed on 7 June 2014. 80 Peter M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu’in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 129. 81 Tahir Mahmood, ‘Dargah of Sayyid Salar Mas’ud in Bahraich’, in Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India, p. 37. 82 Sadia Dehlvi, The Sufi Courtyard: Dargahs of Delhi, New Delhi: HarperCollins and the India Today Group, 2012, p. 155. 83 Muraqqa’-e Delhi, pp. 3–5. 84 Ibid., p. 4. 85 Ibid., p. 11. 86 Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, ‘Early Chishti Dargahs’, in Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India, p. 21. 87 ‘Zamzam’, https://support.airasia.com/s/global-search/zamzam?language=en_GB, accessed on 21 March, 2019. 88 Hasan, ‘A Guide to Nizamu-d Din’, pp. 10–36, Plate 1. 89 ‘Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative: Aga Khan Development Network’, http://www.nizamuddinre newal.org/conservation/ accessed on 21 March 2019. 90 ‘Before the Taj Mahal, There was this’, http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/09/18/before-the-tajmahal-there-was-this/, accessed on 18 December 2013. When I accessed the same site on 24 March 2014, this comment, but no others, had been removed. When I again accessed the site on 21 March 2019 all comments had been removed. 91 ‘Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme: Nizamuddin Baoli’, http://archnet.org/collections/54/sites/6400 for details of the work done, accessed on 14 March 2014. 92 ‘Times of India: Secret Tunnel found at Nizamuddin Dargah’, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ delhi/Secret-tunnel-found-at-Nizamuddin-dargah/articleshow/4442250.cms, accessed on 24 March 2014. I question this, for the site of the dargah did not develop until after the saint’s death. 93 Personal communication with Narayani Gupta, 23 January 2014. 94 www.cwp-india.org/Reports/pdf/REPORT_ON_DOCUMENTATION_OF_SUCCESS_STORYAJMER_SHERIEF_DURGAH.pdf, accessed on 10 June 2014.

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References Anonymous, Nagore Durgha Shrine Preservation Guidelines, vol. 1, Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority for Preservation of Monuments Board, 1991. Asher, Catherine B., ‘Far from the Desert: Water Traditions in the South Asian Landscape’, in Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 264–81. ———, ‘The Sufi Shrines of Shahul Hamid in India and Southeast Asia’, Artibus Asiae, vol. 69, no. 2, 2009, pp. 247–58. Bayly, Susan, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Currie, Peter M., The Shrine and Cult of Mu’in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa’-e Delhi, trans. and notes by Chander Shekkar and Shama Mitra Chenoy, New Delhi: Deputy Publication, 1989. Dehlvi, Sadia, The Sufi Courtyard: Dargahs of Delhi, New Delhi: HarperCollins and The India Today Group, 2012. Digby, Simon, ‘The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India’, Purusartha, vol. 9, 1986, pp. 160–8. Gunapathy, Arun, ‘The Dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya’, Life Positive, April 2009, http://lifepositive.com/ the-dargah-of-nizamuddin-auliya/, accessed on 19 May 2015. Hasan, Zafar, ‘A Guide to Nizamu-d Din’, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, no. 10, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1922. Iyer, T. G. S. Balram, History and Description of Sri Meenakshi Temple, Madurai: Sri Karthik Agency, 1987. Jeyechandrun, A. V., The Madurai Temple Complex, Madurai: Madurai Kamaraj University, 1985. Khan, Razak, ‘Nostalgic Pasts: Space, Emotions and Histories of Princely Rampur’, unpublished paper delivered at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, 29 March 2014. Longworth, Dames, M., ‘Khwādja Khiḍr’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Brill Online, 2014, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/khwadja-khidrSIM_4126, accessed on 5 June 2014. McGilvray, Dennis B., ‘Jailani: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka’, in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds.), Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation & Conflict, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2004, pp. 273–89. Mahmood, Tahir, ‘Dargah of Sayyid Salar Mas’ud in Bahraich’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 24–43. Narayanan, Vasudha, ‘Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid’, in Selva J. Raj and William P. Harman (eds.), Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. 65–85. ———, ‘Nagore: Dargah of Hazrat Shahul Hamid’, in Mumtaz Currim and George Michell (eds.), Dargahs: Abodes of the Saints, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2004, pp. 135–47. Nasution, Khoo Selma, The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place-Making Around the Kapitan Kling Mosque, 1786–1957, Penang: ARECA Books, 2014. Nizami, Khaliq Ahmad, The Life and Times of Shaikh Nizam-u’d-din Auliya, new ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pinto, Desirerio, ‘The Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah: The Accounts of Pilgrims’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 112–24.

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Porter, Venetia, ‘Stones to Bring Rain? Magical Inscriptions in Linear Kufic on Rock Crystal Amulet-Seals’, in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.), Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 130–59. Saheb, S. A. Azeez, ‘A “Festival of Flags”: Hindu-Muslim Devotion and the Sacralising of Localism at the Shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif in Tamil Nadu’, in Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu (eds.), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotions in Sufi Cults, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 55–76. ———, Nagore-e-Sharief: A Sacred Complex Study, New Delhi: B.R. Pub. Corp., 2014. Sahib, Muhammad Yusuf, Tazkirat-e-Aftab-e-Nagore, Nagore: Dargarh Sharif, 1993. Saniotis, Arthur, ‘Attaining the Mystical Body: Indian Sufi Ascetic Practices’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 23, no.1, 2012, pp. 63–85. ———, ‘Contesting the Sacred at Muslim Shrines in India: Conflict and Retrieval in the “Spiritual” Arena’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 33, no.1, 2013, pp. 139–51. ———, ‘Enchanted Landscape: Sensuous Awareness as Mystical Practice among Sufis in North India’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 1, 2008, pp. 17–26. Siddiqui, Iqtidar Husain, ‘Early Chishti Dargahs’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 1–23. Sijzi, Amir Hasan, Nizam ad-Din Awliya: Morals for the Heart, introduction by Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, trans. and annotation by Bruce B. Lawrence, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992. Tschacher, Torsten, ‘Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma’bar and Nusantara’, in R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (ed.), Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009, pp. 48–67. ———, ‘Witnessing Fun: Tamil Speaking Muslims and the Imagination of Ritual in Southeast Asia’, in Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese and Ulrike Schroder (eds.), Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, Halle: Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2010, pp. 189–218.

Websites accessed ‘Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme: Nizamuddin Baoli’, http://archnet.org/collections/54/sites/6400 for details of the work done, accessed on 14 March 2014. ‘Before the Taj Mahal, There was this’, http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/09/18/before-the-tajmahal-there-was-this/, accessed on 18 December 2013. National Archives of Singapore, Oral Histories, http://cord.nhb.gov.sg/cord/public/internetSearch/cata logueForm.jsp?command=loadUpdate&id=12515&xAccess=false&total=28¤tPageNo=3&star tPageNo=1&startNoBatch=0&thesaurusFlag=on&searchType=0&startIndex=20&count=10&simple Search=nagore&B1=Search, accessed on 28 June 2007. Dennis B. McGilvray, ‘Jailany: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka’, http://jailani.org/mcgilvray.htm, accessed on 24 June 2014. Arun Gunapathy, ‘The Dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya’, Life Positive, April 2009, http://lifepositive.com/thedargah-of-nizamuddin-auliya/, accessed on 19 May 2015. http://singaporenagoredargah.com/a/, accessed on 10 June 2014. ‘Times of India: Secret Tunnel found at Nizamuddin Dargah’, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/ Secret-tunnel-found-at-Nizamuddin-dargah/articleshow/4442250.cms, accessed on 24 March 2014. ‘Welcome to nagore dargah sheriff’, http://wellcometonagoredargah.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive. html, accessed on 4 June 2014. ‘Zamzam’, https://support.airasia.com/s/global-search/zamzam?language=en_GB, accessed on 21 March 2019.

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‘Where We Work: India’, https://www.akdn.org/where-we-work/south-asia/india/cultural-development/urbanrenewal-delhi-heritage-conservation, accessed on 21 March 2019. www.cwp-india.org/Reports/pdf/REPORT_ON_DOCUMENTATION_OF_SUCCESS_STORY-AJMER_ SHERIEF_DURGAH.pdf, accessed on 10 June 2014. ‘Blessings of Zamzam Water’, www.google.com/search?q=blessings+of+zamzam+water&safe=active&sour ce=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=6taUU9S2PNSpyAT-voAQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&b ih=893#facrc=_&imgrc=OwMKfuCGJfH1CM%253A%3BUrWVT7MsDV54iM%3Bhttp%253A%2 52F%252Fbestfacebook.net%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2013%252F04%252Fbless.jpg%3 Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fbestfacebook.net%252Fblessing-of-zamzam-water%252F%3B780%3B600, accessed on 7 June 2014. ‘Welcome to nagore dargah sheriff’, www.nagoredargha.com/, accessed on 4 June 2014. ‘Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative: Aga Khan Development Network’, http://www.nizamuddinre newal.org/conservation/ accessed on 21 March 2019. ‘U.S. Department of State: Diplomacy in Action, Burma’, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2011/eap/192615.htm, accessed on 5 June 2014.

9 Developmental aesthetics Modernism’s ocular economies and laconic discontents in the era of Nehruvian technocracy Atreyee Gupta

I

n 1945, a black and white diagrammatic poster appeared on the walls of several houses lining major avenues in Calcutta. Pragmatically, the diagrammatic mode rendered transparent the poster’s theme – the United States’ Tennessee Valley Authority water control system – with economy and efficiency.1 The meticulous labelling and the geometric compositional layout of the poster hinted at an effort to pre-empt perceptual confusion. Whether the strategy was successful is difficult to ascertain. It is likely that the content itself would have seemed abstruse, even obscure, for a large section of the poster’s intended audience. For some, the diagram might have taken on the appearance of a pictorial anagram with codes to which they had no access. Some might not have deciphered the diagram’s English typography. Even to the English-educated, the words Fontana Dam or Wheeler Dam in the Tennessee valley might have conveyed little. Mirroring a contemporaneous Tennessee Valley Authority postcard in circulation in the United States, the image was, after all, out of place (Plate 9.1). It was not out of time, however. Only two years earlier, a major deluge had collapsed the embankments of the river Damodar that ran through eastern India. The flood that ensued washed away villages from Bihar to Bengal, disrupting railway traffic on the key route that connected the Second World War’s famine-ravaged east Indian frontiers with its centre of command in the capital of British India in New Delhi. Given the scale of destruction and disruption, a multipurpose hydro-engineering project modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority – including flood control measures, multiple dams, a network of irrigation canals, hydroelectric plants and fertiliser manufacturing factories – was being seriously considered by the colonial state.2 The task at hand was the harnessing of the unruly waters and the utilisation of the flood-prone river for economic and agrarian development of the Damodar valley. Thus, the scientific minded supporters of largescale industrialisation and planned development – including Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who became independent India’s first prime minister – would have been able to easily populate the arcane diagrammatic poster of the Tennessee river’s water control system with an imagination of agrarian plenitude and economic regeneration that carolled under the sign of the Tennessee Valley Authority.3 With the formalisation of the public company Damodar Valley Corporation, the multipurpose hydro-engineering project on the east Indian river was finally set in motion on 7 July 1948,

Plate 9.1 W. M. Cline Co., Tennessee, Diagram of TVA Water Control System, ca. 1945. Postcard. Source: Author’s collection

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shortly after India’s independence. This was the first of several multipurpose river valley projects initiated by Nehru. In the 1940s, like many Indian intellectuals, Nehru too believed that only modernisation could restore the erstwhile colony’s place in the world by elevating the poverty of its people. This then was the promise of progress, plenitude and equality, the promise of a post-colonial modernity. Guided by its first prime minister, the new country had set forth on a course of accelerated modernisation and industrial advancement based on the US model, implemented through a controlled economy and Soviet-style, five-year plans. Within the developmental schema of Nehruvian modernity, the Damodar Valley Corporation joined a wide array of projects and processes initiated to achieve rapid industrial, technological, agricultural and scientific progress. Along with the hydro-engineering project on the river Damodar, the construction of Chandigarh, the new modern city built by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his team of Indian and European architects, and the Bhakra multipurpose dam, a major gravity dam not far from Chandigarh, were perhaps the most expansive in ambition and scale, at least at the time when they were initially imagined. This chapter focuses on the multipurpose dams on the Damodar river and the gravity dam at Bhakra. As such, the architecture and engineering of these monumental projects have received close attention.4 The entire gamut of initiatives that constituted post-colonial discourses of progress and development too has been the focus of much scholarly scrutiny. During the last two decades, the very conception of rationality that lay at the core of Nehruvian modernity has engaged scholars the most.5 My interest in this chapter is analogous to, but somewhat dissonant from, this broader scholarly thrust. Rather than examining the institutional and infrastructural processes through which Nehruvian modernity reordered the nation, I want to turn instead to the centrality of vision in the making of the post-colonial waterscape and horizon line. The Tennessee Valley Authority water control system poster that appeared in the streets of Calcutta in 1945 provides an apropos entry point into the question of vision and its relation to the modernising processes of development. The man behind the poster was the eminent Indian atomic scientist Meghnad Saha. By the early 1940s, Saha was already a formidable force in the Indian scientific community.6 Trained at the Presidency College in Calcutta by luminaries such as Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray, Saha had come into limelight early in his career with the publication of several critical essays on thermal ionisation. These led to postdoctoral scholarships in London and Berlin, where he, once again, proved to be distinguished. Upon his return to India, Saha first joined the Calcutta University in 1921 as the Khaira Professor of Physics, subsequently moving to the Allahabad University as the head of the Department of Physics in 1923. The year 1938 brought Saha back to Calcutta, this time as the Palit Professor of Physics at the Calcutta University. Perhaps Saha’s most lasting institutional legacy was the establishment of a physics laboratory at the Calcutta University with a 38-inch cyclotron atomic accelerator purchased in the early 1940s from the Ernest O. Lawrence National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, which had emerged as a major centre of wartime nuclear research in the United States.7 As the first cyclotron in India, the machine itself was of immense significance (Plate 9.2). Consequently, it was against the backdrop of this cyclotron that Saha was photographed by Sunil Janah, whose

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Plate 9.2 Sunil Janah, Meghnad Saha, physicist,

at the cyclotron in Calcutta University, ca. 1944. Black and white photograph. Source: Photograph © Sunil Janah, courtesy Arjun Janah

camera most pithily captured the developmental ocularity that this chapter seeks to intercept. We will turn to Janah’s oeuvre shortly. Le Corbusier, whose mandate from Nehru included the aestheticisation of the Bhakra dam through architectonic interjections, will also return to our deliberations. At face value, an Indian atomic scientist and a Swiss architect may seem unlikely compatriots. But aside from the coincidence of a shared date of birth, Meghnad Saha and Le Corbusier had much more in common, as we will see. As for Saha, the tenacity with which the atomic scientist took on the role of the public intellectual stemmed from the conviction that “science in India required institutionalisation and that the institution of India as a nation demanded the application of science”, to use Gyan Prakash’s words.8 Saha, now an internationally acclaimed scientist based in a colonial context that still lacked funding resources and infrastructure comparable to those in more industrially developed economies, began to actively advocate the public responsibilities of science and its practitioners. Thus, when the Bengal government assembled a group to evolve a programme for the prevention of catastrophic floods, Saha emerged as its most vocal member. “The Damodar Valley”, Saha argued,

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presents the closest parallel to the Tennessee Valley, though on a smaller scale. The radical solution of the problem of the Damodar Valley lies, therefore, in the adoption of similar procedure as has been done by the US government through the Tennessee Valley Authority, with necessary modifications.9

An unapologetic supporter of large dams and hydroelectricity, Saha continued his crusade, both for applied science and for large-scale hydro-engineering projects, through Science and Culture, a journal he initiated in 1935. Crucially for us, the conjunction of “science” with “culture” in the title of Saha’s journal was not purely semantic. Along with scientific research, Saha not only advocated a deeper integration between scientific knowledge and cultural creation in the inaugural issues of the journal but also regularly featured essays on geological and mineralogical compounds that may have affected artistic production in ancient India. In parallel, the journal gestured towards what can be recognised in retrospect as a paradigm of the ocular within the scientific through the utilisation of documentary photography. A short essay titled “Association for Scientific Photography”, for instance, noted, Photography in our country is still looked upon more as a hobby than as an essential scientific process in the investigation of scientific and industrial problems. Its great importance in the field of research and industry has been completely overlooked with the outbreak of the war [. . .]. The neglect of this fruitful branch of research and development has adversely affected the Indian film industry.10

The perceptual arena that Science and Culture sought to capture in celluloid and gelatin emulsion was, however, not analogous to a pictorialist use of photography or the aesthetics of art cinema. Rather, the ocular paradigm that Saha championed was one that sought to render science transparent for a broad audience through documentary photography, models and diagrams. The Tennessee Valley Authority poster campaign in Calcutta, then, was a principled expansion of this idea. Saha visited the United States twice, first in 1936 and then in late 1944 as a member of the Indian Scientific Mission organised to promote cooperation between scientists during the Second World War.11 Saha, however, might not have encountered the 1940s Tennessee Valley Authority postcard in circulation in the United States, for he makes no mention of the massive body of popular visual culture generated by the hydro-project. Neither could he have known about the 1941 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where the Tennessee Valley Authority’s photographs and diagrams had been displayed. Writing in the New Yorker, the American philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford had summarised the “TVA effect” succinctly when he wrote, [B]oth [the Egyptian] pyramid and dam represent an architecture of power. But difference is notable, too, and should make one prouder of being an American. [. . .] Ours was produced by free labour to create energy and life for the people of the United States.12

Saha might have agreed with this sentiment, having described his proposal for the Damodar valley on numerous occasions in similar terms. But Saha’s own comprehension of the need to bring to the public eye an image of a possible future of plenitude might have been intuitive. Compared to the sleek images circulating through the

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Tennessee Valley Authority’s extensive publication and exhibition programme, Saha’s means were dated.13 The Indian physicist had first encountered the diagrammatic representation of the Tennessee water control system in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s 1941 annual report. He included this diagram in his own recommendations submitted to the colonial government. In 1945, Saha enlarged this woodblock and transformed the image into a poster, which was then pasted on houses that lined the major thoroughfares in Calcutta (Plate 9.3).14 The labour-intensive process of woodblock printing may seem antithetical to the physicist’s technocratic aspirations. By the very dint of the printing process, wood grains texture the diagram’s otherwise ordered surface. Inadvertently, the horizontal granulations of wood splinter the diagram, exerting contrapuntal pressure on the thick black vertical lines that forcefully cut through the wood to mark the path of the river and the dams upon it. Inadvertent or not, we must treat the splinters as more than a fitful presence. For the intersections of nature and culture in modernity were multifarious; they generated a polyvocal image-world that has thus far escaped art historical scrutiny. Saha, of course, was most interested in the possibility of generating enormous quantities of hydropower, which could then drive atomic research.15 Thus, Saha’s vision for the Damodar valley had already taken on a definitive shape by 1944, the year he acquired the atomic cyclotron. “Nature,

Plate 9.3 Diagram of TVA Water Control System,

ca. 1945. Woodblock poster. Source: Author’s collection

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vested interests and thoughtless managements made a prosperous valley a wilderness, but Nature, Man, and Science can again make it a smiling garden”, Saha wrote in Science and Culture.16 Contrary to certain sections of the scientific community who believed that afforestation on the lower Damodar catchment areas could be sufficient for the prevention of floods, Saha was convinced that nature alone could not bring about positive transformation without the intervention of technology. Responding to critics who he identifies as “afforestation enthusiasts”, he emphatically noted that “afforestation can, under no circumstance whatsoever, prevent catastrophic floods of the type that frequently ravage the Damodar Valley”.17 Instead, he proposed eight dams. Making his position on afforestation abundantly clear, Saha continued, “Ground water is sucked up by the plants and ultimately evaporated off through the leaves. [. . .] [T]here is a considerable transpiration loss of water due to forestation”.18 Consequently, using the Tennessee Valley Authority’s water control system diagram as a model, his “Diagram of Damodar Water Control System” avoided marking out existing forested areas or sites for afforestation in the future (Plate 9.4). A few trees were present, however. A total of six, to be exact, spread over an area of 18,648 square kilometres.

Plate 9.4 Diagram of Damodar Water Control System, ca.

1944. Source: Reproduced from Meghnad Saha and K. Ray, ‘Planning for the Damodar Valley’, Science and Culture, vol. 10, no. 20, 1944, pp. 20–33.

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The appearance of the trees is puzzling, as is their haphazard placement. The Tennessee Valley diagram on which Saha’s image was based did not include any forestation. But, in all other respects, Saha’s image followed the basic appearance of the Tennessee valley woodcut. Indeed, it did so with exceptional fidelity. The thin lines that mark out the Damodar valley’s undulations in Saha’s version even begin to take on the appearance of the wood grains that splintered the surface of the woodblock print of the Tennessee Valley diagram. This similarity, of course, is superficial. Nevertheless, the lines seem excessive. Drawn all over the mountainous undulations, they exceed the demands of a schematic diagram for scientific purposes. The repeated use of thin lines gives the schematic representation of mountainous undulations the illusion of weight, volume and solidity. In effect, the protuberances confirm with the perspectival codes of nature paintings. The river, in contrast, is treated firmly. Uniform bold lines closely bind its flood-prone liquescence. Within this scenery, if one might describe a scientific diagram as such, the six trees in the landscape counterpoise the masterful control of the unruly river. Incongruously gigantic, they miniaturise the protuberances on which they stand, disrupting the orderliness of Saha’s technocratic imagination for the Damodar valley. This disruption, surely, was not Saha’s intention. Indeed, it would be safe to assume that Saha did not make this drawing himself. It is likely that a professional artist trained in realism in an art school in Calcutta was commissioned to produce the drawing with guidance from the astrophysicist. But the unnamed artist might have found it impossible to visualise mountains, rolling valleys and the meandering river without any indication of the moisture-laden lush greenery that dotted the land. That this lush riverine landscape had spawned an entire genre of pictorialist paintings from Bengal and Bihar says much about the location of such naturescapes within the region’s cultural imaginary.19 Was the image of technocratic India then destined to be a failure, shot through as it was with the nostalgia for pristine naturescapes? Far from it. It seems we cannot escape the centrality of the ocular in the making of the post-colonial development-scape. But neither can the technocratic evade the disruptive potential of the aesthetic. Indebted in 1950 to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for an initial sum of $18,500,000, an amount that would increase over the subsequent years to cover the project’s escalating expenses, the Damodar Valley Corporation was now required to submit detailed monthly reports to the World Bank, along with photographs documenting the progress accomplished.20 Sunil Janah might have been an obvious choice for the assignment. Having begun his career as a photographer for the Communist Party of India, Janah had begun to freelance as a documentary photographer in 1948. Although self-taught, Janah was already a distinguished documentary photographer by the 1950s.21 Incidentally, Janah’s own initiation into documentary photography had occurred in the backdrop of the flood that prompted the hydro-engineering project on the Damodar in 1943. The effect of the flood had certainly been severe. But the desperation that rapidly set in was compounded by the British government’s policy of diverting food grain supplies to army warehouses for the use of British troops engaged in the Second World War. Traffickers were already hoarding the little food that remained to sell at inflated prices at the opportune moment. The combined forces of the drought, flood, food hoarding and war tactics culminated in a cataclysmic famine that

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historians have described as one of the worst in India’s economic history.22 Despite this, the hydroengineering project on the Damodar received much national and international attention. Indeed, it was “recommended as urgent during the famine in 1943”.23 Sunil Janah, then a student of English literature at the Calcutta University, had become a willing recruit of the Community Party of India. In 1943, twin-lens Rolleiflex camera in hand, Janah travelled to the worst affected districts of Bengal with P. C. Joshi, the general secretary of the Community Party. Along with Joshi’s report, Janah’s photographs were subsequently printed in the People’s War, the journal published by the Community Party of India.24 As some of the first images of the famine to reach public eye, Janah’s photographs would contribute to the creation of a new ocular field, one that had social realism as its core component. Over the subsequent years, his images would be featured regularly in the journal. This “seemed to have sealed my destiny [. . .]. I had not intended to be a photographer”, Janah writes.25 Although reluctant, Janah nevertheless took up his role as witness and chronicler with alacrity –“it also interested me in doing it well”.26 Month after month, Janah travelled to the hydro-engineering sites at Maithon, Bokaro, Konar, Tilaya and Hazaribagh, photographing the progress made at the construction sites. Meticulously, he recorded the slow rise of enormous dams, thermal power stations and fertiliser plants. Solemnly, but not without awe, he witnessed “huge dams and power plants growing every month and towering up over the landscape”.27 Witnessing the emergence of a technocracy, it turns out, required the material support of technological infrastructure. But the camera equipment at his disposal – a medium format twin lens reflex Rolleiflex camera with one 75 mm lens and a Leica with one 50 mm Elmar lens – proved inadequate for fully grasping the sheer scale of the concrete constructions. The work at hand now necessitated the addition of a large format Linhof Technika camera with a built-in rangefinder and multiple lenses with varying focal lengths to his “armoury”.28 Now, standing at a distance with this new equipment, Janah was able to witness as an overview the rising concrete walls that steadily cut across the valley to contain the wayward movements of the unruly river (Plates 9.5 and 9.6). He was also able to capture the seriality of mechanisation, the identical forms of an army of power generators against whose gigantic form the human body was reduced to an ant-like denomination. The acquisition of technological equipment to “better witness” technocracy is perhaps not purely a functional expansion of the zone of vision. Undeniably, a very particular kind of documentary aesthetic found articulation in Janah’s photographs for the Damodar Valley Corporation, one that seemed to apprehend the optics of development as a form of serialisation and repetition. The Damodar Valley Project, of course, stood at the beginning of Janah’s involvement with industrial photography. Over the subsequent decade, Janah received a string of commissions to document Bengal and Bihar’s newly emerging industrial landscape, including the newly constructed Sindri fertiliser plant and the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works’ steam railway manufacturing units, both of which formed core components of India’s first Five-Year Plan. Janah’s other projects included Burn & Co.’s blast furnaces and steel plants, the Hindustan Steel factories, the assembly lines of the Hindustan Motors factory and the Tata Iron and Steel Company factories

Plate 9.5 Sunil Janah, Dam under construction, Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph. Source: Photograph © Sunil Janah, courtesy Arjun Janah

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Plate 9.6 Sunil Janah, Power station turbine hall,

Damodar Valley Corporation, Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph. Source: Photograph © Sunil Janah, courtesy Arjun Janah

and township. In parallel, he was commissioned to photograph the tea and jute industries (India’s two primary export crops in the 1940s), the impact of new technology on rice and wheat agriculture and the mining of coal, manganese, mica and bauxite. He had, in his own words, by the end of the 1950s “collected a fairly extensive range of photographs of whatever was turning the wheels of the country’s economy”.29 In turn, the photographer’s growing familiarity with India’s development-scape appears to have transformed his approach to composition and framing (Plate 9.7). The photographer seems to have innately grasped industrialisation and mechanisation as a new structure of visual order, which he then translated into a very particular compositional schema. Consequently, serialisation and repetition, which began as an optical sensibility of development in the Damodar Valley, progressively gave way to a formal engagement with the converging lines – literally the vectors of development – of material, machinery and architecture. He began to use the lines of architecture and machinery to frame and structure the viewing plane. This structure, of course, was not always composed symmetrically. Nevertheless, a certain uniformity of order can be evinced, one that was characterised by a strikingly deep perspective. In a sense, we could say that the photographer

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Plate 9.7 Sunil Janah, Storage yard for steel products,

with water tank in the distance, Burn & Co., Howrah, West Bengal, ca. 1955. Black and white photograph. Source: Photograph © Sunil Janah, courtesy Arjun Janah

seemed to visually approximate the intended effect of technological modernisation. Namely, the institution of a scientific worldview leading to an efficient increase in productivity, as opposed to the irrationality of the chaotic existence that presumably preceded it. Fundamentally tethered to technical excellence, Janah was equally preoccupied with the clarity of this image. He believed himself to be against “creativity”, which he understood to be a certain manipulation of clarity. Therefore, he discarded “blurred”, “grainy” or badly composed images, “even when the subjects were of great interest”.30 Order and clarity might present themselves as words that relate most fully to the developmental aesthetic that I have sketched here, along with the advancement of the technology of viewing that allows for the proper witnessing of this development-scape. But the story is not quite as straightforward as one might assume. Certainly, more than other genres, the trajectory of documentary photography has remained most intimately related to the material conditions of photographic technology. But it is hardly equivalent to it. Janah, we must recollect, had felt compelled

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to take up the camera as a profession in response to his own leftist commitments. In turn, his own reputation as a photographer had become intrinsically linked to the images that he produced for the Communist Party. Over subsequent years, he photographed pivotal moments in India’s history, including the sectarian violence that ensued with the Partition of the subcontinent and the creation of independent India and Pakistan. With Janah as one of its early pioneers in India, the history of the genre now known as documentary photography also became intertwined with the history of the leftist cultural movement, at least in the Indian context. Needless to say, the practice of documentary photography as a genre in India has its own destiny, not only in terms of technological infrastructure but also in terms of representational conventions. “I do not relish, to this day, the fact that I earned my early fame from the grim business of photographing the starving, the dying, and the dead victims of a dreadful famine”, Janah wrote.31 In Roland Barthes words, “Death is the eidos of that photograph”, but not in the way Barthes meant it.32 Rather, here was a peculiar beginning to a documentary photographer’s career, one that was inaugurated by death. As a photographer, Janah was haunted by death. I could not push out of my mind the images that haunted my memory – the starved, shrivelled men, women, and children, reduced to skin and bones, staggering down the road to the nearest town in hope of finding a meal; the bewilderment, terror, and agony in the eyes of people getting killed by their neighbours while attempting to escape from their burning homes.33

He had been a witness to death. He sought human “fortitude” and “dignity” in its place.34 Thus, when he travelled across the Damodar valley to the hydro-engineering sites at Maithon, Bokaro, Konar, Tilaya and Hazaribagh, Janah became engrossed by the rural Santhal men and women labourers who carried stone chips and cement at the construction sites. In his memoirs, he recollected the arresting sight of very modern industrial structures being built manually by primitive villagers and tribals carrying cement mixtures in pails on their head at the worksites, where giant steel piles were being driven into the ground by even bigger machines, and monstrous earth-moving machines were roaring around.35

The engineers under whose direction the work progressed do not appear in his photographs except as tiny specks in the distant horizon (Plate 9.8). The figures of the labourers, in contrast, are far larger in scale. They did not confirm, however, to the exalted iconography of the iconic proletariat worker that had gained international currency through Communist networks. They were far more prosaic. But this, perhaps, was the photographer’s intention. Indeed, the figures derive their power precisely from a projective insertion into an emergent narrative of development, a narrative in which they were otherwise configured as a backwards community who must be modernised. They were, in other words, figures of lack – the lack of reason, the lack of modernity. As such, they were the recipients of development, not figures who drove it. For Janah, in contrast, the Santhal communities of the Damodar valley formed part of the diegetic, as opposed to the non-diegetic, horizon of development.

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Plate 9.8 Sunil Janah, Women carrying stone chips,

Bihar, ca. 1953. Black and white photograph. Source: Photograph © Sunil Janah, courtesy Arjun Janah

Indeed, in the early years of the Damodar Valley Corporation, many had been anxious about the future of the large community of tribal people from whom agricultural land was appropriated for the project and whom the Damodar Valley Corporation later employed as industrial workers and labourers. B. Das, a member of the Indian Parliament from Orissa, had insisted that those displaced by the dams be allowed to live in accordance with their traditional customs. Others, such as Jaipal Singh, reminded the Constituent Assembly of India of the Santhal resistance to displacement and relocation, imploring the state to consider the “spiritual aspect of the problem of rehabilitation”.36 Provisions for the rehabilitation of the displaced had been made in a new residential area that was to be built for this purpose, with schools, markets and other facilities necessary for modern life. The township was modelled, of course, on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s utopian vision for a seamless integration of structural, environmental and social engineering. It was part and parcel of what James C. Scott has described as high modernism, “the most visionary and ultimately devastating ideology of the twentieth century” that articulated itself in “a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied – usually through the state – in every field of human activity”.37 For the Damodar Valley Corporation, this vision would ultimately be evacuated in favour of the vapid instrumentalism of

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a bureaucratic rhetoric invented to negotiate limited material gains with vast economic, ecological and cultural losses. But the renegotiation of rhetoric and effect transpired at a somewhat later historical juncture. Even as representational conventions obdurately interpolated the utopia of rapid scientific and technological progress with visions external to its intended scopic regime, the connections between artistic practices and technocracy remained firm, as if technocracy required the aesthetic for its accouchement. So much so that when Le Corbusier arrived in India at the Indian government’s invitation in 1950 to build Chandigarh, he was also appointed as the architectural advisor for the Bhakra gravity dam, India’s biggest multipurpose hydro-engineering project on the Sutlej river located about 107 kilometres from the city.38 Bhakra, however, did not adopt the Tennessee Valley Authority’s model of structural and social engineering. Nevertheless, its association with the Tennessee Valley Authority was sustained, especially with the recruitment of John Lucian Savage, the American engineer responsible for the first two Tennessee Valley concrete gravity projects. In India, Savage first conducted a preliminary survey at Bhakra in 1944.39 Returning to Colorado, Savage continued to supervise the design for the dam and thermal power stations. In the winter of the same year, the Indian atomic scientist and hydro-engineering enthusiast Saha, a member of the Indian Scientific Mission instituted to promote cooperation between scientific communities in India, Britain and North America, would have the opportunity to observe Savage’s work in close quarters when he visited the American engineer’s office at the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver. Saha also travelled to the Douglas, Cherokee, Fort Loudoun and Norris reservoirs in Knoxville, all of which had been constructed under Savage’s guidance. The visit only strengthened his confidence in the Tennessee Valley model of hydropower. Implicitly, Saha also knew of the existence of atomic cities in the United States and understood the direct connections between atomic research and the Tennessee Valley hydropower that served as its fuel. Although he was not allowed to visit the Manhattan Project, the atomic research centre in Tennessee, he did visit the Lawrence Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where related experiments in electromagnetic separation were being conducted.40 His own cyclotron had been acquired from this laboratory. Even in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Saha continued to believe in the positive potential of nuclear energy and consequently persisted in campaigning for the inclusion of hydropower in the post-war post-colonial economic reconstruction of India. The Tennessee Valley remained the model that was closest to Saha’s heart. Upon returning to Calcutta, Saha even set up a three-dimensional model of the Damodar valley based on the models that he had seen in the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver.41 Had the two met, the Indian nuclear physicist might have found a close compatriot in Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who reached the United States in the winter of 1946.42 Eugène Claudius-Petit, the vice president of France’s Commission on Reconstruction and Urban Planning who accompanied Le Corbusier, was also specifically looking towards the Tennessee Valley for a model of planning and regeneration to integrate post-war France’s public policies with its social programmes. Le Corbusier, on his part, was determined to play a key role in this reconstruction. As Mardges Bacon has recently pointed out,

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Such postwar projects coincided with a formal shift in Le Corbusier’s work, which emphasised architectural mass over volume as well as a renewed interest in infrastructure. This shift joined with other evolving tendencies, which advanced curvilinear forms and a sensitivity to regional, vernacular, and humanistic concerns.43

Like Saha, Le Corbusier’s primary point of interest in the United States was the Tennessee Valley. In the Tennessee Valley, he discerned clear reflections of the elements that he believed would affect the “new machine age” – namely, the symbiosis between architecture practices and social practices, social practices and public infrastructure and public infrastructure and the natural environment. These ideals may have resonated well with the Tennessee Valley Authority’s chairman David E. Lilienthal, who had repeatedly affirmed the potential of hydrology – a combination of machine, technology and science – to allow men “to work in harmony with the forces of nature”.44 Le Corbusier, on his part, believed that this harmony had indeed been achieved in the Tennessee Valley. By way of recording his impression of the Tennessee Valley project as a system, Corbusier wrote, Masterly symphonic urbanism. Negligence and greed had impoverished the land, deforested mountains, floods, erosion, desert increasing each year, misery spreading everywhere. Coup de barre [a change of course]: symphonic idea. One makes twenty or thirty gigantic dams, one regulates water madness. With these dams there is electricity in abundance, this power produces electrolysis, chemicals, fertilizers [. . .]. With these fertilizers, one regenerates the land, sowing grass that makes deep roots, fixes the land, removes erosion, and allows cows to graze in open fields in winter, enriches farmers who have mechanical equipment and electricity. The industry extends into the valley, the boats go back to New Orleans to the depths of the earth through gigantic locks. One of these dams is a marvel of complete agreement and harmony between man and nature. The proportion is almost automatic. It is an edifying spectacle.45

It is this spectacle that Le Corbusier sought to replicate in Bhakra, an infrastructural project that he related to the utopian image of a “symphonic urbanism” (Plate 9.9). Consequently, in a 1957 sketch of the Bhakra reservoir, the architect scripted the following words –“eau future”, literally future water.46 The inscription is edifying, as is the drawing. It is more so because we know that by 1957, the dam at Bhakra was already functional. Thus what Corbusier saw when he looked at the reservoir was the future, a sentiment that he shared with Nehru, who had described the dam as a “new temple of resurgent India”.47 The image of secular infrastructure as sacred architecture is, of course, both fabulous and fabricated, as Nehru may have also realised. For the fabulous fabrication of new temples necessitates the production of new iconographies. Having already rejected proposals from a New Delhi architecture firm for being too ornate, Nehru turned to Le Corbusier.48 By the time Le Corbusier appeared on the scene, the main dam structures, however, were already partially complete.49 Le Corbusier’s own contributions, therefore, related specifically to the surface, the skin of architecture, as opposed to the interior, the skeleton of the building. This included the addition of texture on the exposed concrete walls – otherwise known as béton brut de décoffrage, a checkerboard pattern of horizontal and vertical bands resembling wooden boards – that Le Corbusier had

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Plate 9.9 Le Corbusier, drawing from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives,

Paris. Source: Photograph © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018

seen in the Tennessee Valley’s Norris and Fontana dams and had sought to replicate in his Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (Plate 9.10). Thus, when he published photographs of the Unité d’Habitation in Oeuvre complète 1946–1952, his description of this specific element referred back to the Tennessee Valley’s architecture, as Bacon too has observed. “By 1946 Le Corbusier already knew the unrefined property of bare concrete”, Bacon notes. However, he had yet to negotiate its aesthetic capacities until his encounter with the Norris and Fontana dams, where the architect Roland Wank had imprinted alternating horizontal and vertical bands on exposed concrete. Thus, “what appears new to the postwar years is the union of béton [concrete] with brut [raw] and then their conjunction with décoffrage [formwork or shuttering]”.50 Le Corbusier had already situated the ideal symbiosis of infrastructure, construction and aesthetics in the Tennessee Valley’s Norris and Fontana dams. In Bhakra, he may have discerned an opportunity to device a mode of perception proper to this symbiosis. Thus, his interventions in Bhakra included the manipulation of lights to accentuate the monumentality of the structure and the inclusion of béton brut de décoffrage. He also planned a cafeteria overlooking the reservoir, which was completed posthumously, and designed a museum of infrastructure, which was never built. Le Corbusier’s perceptual schema for Bhakra was destined to remain largely unrealised. Nonetheless,

Plate 9.10 Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1947–52, detail of pillar. Source: Photograph © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018

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Plate 9.11 Le Corbusier, drawing from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier

Archives, Paris. Source: Photograph © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018

he produced a number of drawings and plans for the project. The drawing from 1957, for instance, belonged to a set of three drawings that he made in his sketchbook, standing at the long viewing galleries adjacent to the dam (Plates 9.11 and 9.12).51 The drawings were made from slightly differing angles. The architect, it would appear, was seeking a particular perspective – one that would provoke a very specific iconography of the dam. His intention was to determine the precise location for the placement of a glass viewing balcony projecting onto the reservoir. The most prominent feature of the third drawing is a large (viewing?) eye at the lower right-hand corner, possibly placed at the square balcony, and a diagonally placed cross-shaped form in the upper right. The cross-shaped form is marked “B” and the eye “A”. Le Corbusier’s scribbled notes on the drawing states: “Vérifier les profils [Verify the profiles] // Attention // balcon [balcony] // Malhotra me donner le profil A B à grande échelle [Malhotra give me the large-scale profile A B] // (déjà fait) [already done]”.52 The iconic cross-shaped form is clearly discernible in the other drawings as well. It is placed on top of the dam, crowning it as it were. Le Corbusier, then, had not only conceived an iconography of development but also was working out a system of perception proper to it. The cross-shaped form, of course, was the schematic representation of the open hand, which the architect proposed to place on top of the dam. At Bhakra, the icon was meant to symbolise the interrelationship between nature and infrastructure,

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Plate 9.12 Le Corbusier, drawing

from sketchbook no. M 52, India, 1957, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris. Source: Photograph © F.L.C./ ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018

although elsewhere, Le Corbusier often associated a range of diverse meanings to the same symbol. The “eau future” in his 1957 drawing, then, referred not to an objective assessment of the future of water infrastructure but to Le Corbusier’s conception of this future. At the very centre of this conception was the perfectly positioned viewing eye – the eye that Le Corbusier so emblematically enlarged to gigantic proportions in his drawing. Yet again, we are confronted with the centrality of vision in the making of the post-colonial waterscape and horizon line. Yet again, the utopic vision of technocracy meets with elements external to its intended scopic regime. Le Corbusier’s conception of Bhakra’s iconography was destined to remain precisely that – a projection of the architect’s imagination. The Open Hand Monument that Le Corbusier proposed to place on top of Bhakra, a placement that was to serve as the pivotal turning point in his iconography of technocracy, was not built. To the hydro-engineers, the monument may have seemed merely impractical, even inefficient. Moreover, unanticipated floods had inundated agricultural lands adjacent to the dam, causing significant political unrest in the area and adversely affecting local perceptions of the Bhakra hydro-engineering project.53 Bhakra, still incomplete, no longer qualified as a celebratory icon of development. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s glass viewing balcony was built. But it no longer functioned as an ideal vantage

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for development’s ocular modality. Instead, standing on the balcony, the viewer looked onto the blank space where the Open Hand Monument would have stood, bringing into even sharper focus a laconic fissure embedded deep within development’s ocular modality.

Notes 1 Kumud Bhuson Ray, Certain Aspects of River Problems in Bengal, Calcutta: Calcutta Phototype Co., 1945, p. 53. 2 For this history, see Daniel Klingensmith, “One Valley and a Thousand”: Dams, Nationalism, and Development, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007; Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, ‘Negotiating Water Management in the Damodar Valley: Kalikata Hearing and the DVC’, in Robert J. Wasson (eds.), Water First: Issues and Challenges for Nations and Communities in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage, 2008, pp. 316–48. 3 On the global influence of the Tennessee Valley Authority, see David A. Biggs, ‘Reclamation Nations’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 225–46. 4 There exists a voluminous body of scholarship on India’s hydrology of which two recent examples are Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004 and Ravi Baghel, River Control in India: Spatial, Governmental and Subjective Dimensions, Cham: Springer, 2014. 5 For example, see Terence J. Byres (ed.), The State and Development Planning in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State, London: Zed Books, 1998; Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 6 See Robert Anderson, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 133–48. 7 For a discussion on Ernest O. Lawrence and nuclear research in the United States, see Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 8 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 192. 9 Meghnad Saha, ‘Taming of the Tennessee River’ (1944, Science and Culture 9), in Santimoy Chatterjee (ed.), Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, vol. 2, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1987, p. 114. 10 Author Unknown, ‘Notes and News: Association for Scientific Photography’, Science and Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, September 1943, p. 115. 11 For an overview of the Indian Scientific Mission’s collaborations during the interwar years and during the Second World War, see V. V. Krishna, ‘Organization of Industrial Research: The Early History of CSIR, 1934–47’, in Uma Das Gupta (ed.), Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784– 1947, New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010, pp. 157–84. 12 Cited in Herman Pritchett, The Tennessee Valley Authority: A Study in Public Administration, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943, p. 313. 13 For a discussion on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s image campaigns, see Tim Culvahouse (ed.), The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2007. 14 Ray, Certain Aspects of River Problems. 15 For Saha’s role in India’s nuclear programme, see Anderson, Nucleus and Nation. 16 Meghnad Saha, ‘Planning for the Damodar Valley’ (1944, Science and Culture 10) in Chatterjee (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 116.

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17 Ibid., p. 132. 18 Ibid., p. 134. 19 For a discussion on the contemporaneous representation of the lush riverine landscape in Bengal, see R. Siva Kumar, Paintings of Abanindranath Tagore: Popular Edition, Kolkata: Pratikshan, 2013, pp. 133–84. 20 By 1955, the corporation had been forced to borrow $38,000,000 from the World Bank. See World Bank Documents and Reports India: Second Damodar Valley Corporation Project Memorandum and Recommendation of the President, Report No. P45, 1953/01/31; India: Second Damodar Valley Corporation Project Technical Operations Projects Series Staff Appraisal Report, Report No. TO 2, 1953/01/31; and Second Loan Administration Report, Asia Series No. AS 32, 1955/08/31. 21 Although several scholars attest to Janah’s importance in the history of photography in India, no scholarly monograph or substantive stand-alone essay has been published on his work. Published posthumously, Janah’s autobiographical writing serves to redress this lacuna, at least in part, and serves as a primary resource for this chapter. For Janah’s autobiographical writing, see Sunil Janah, Photographing India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. For a brief discussion on Janah’s place in the history of post-Independence Indian art, see Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 127–9. 22 For a history, see Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 23 As Robert S. Anderson writes, the Damodar project was “recommended as urgent during the famine in 1943”. Anderson, Nucleus and Nation, p. 232. 24 Between 1943 and 1946, Sunil Janah also served as the photography editor of the People’s War. 25 Janah, Photographing India, pp. 10–11. 26 Ibid., p. 23, emphasis mine. 27 Ibid., p. 40. 28 Ibid., p. 41. 29 Ibid., p. 42. 30 Ibid., p. 24. 31 Ibid., p. 10. 32 For Roland Barthes, all photographs embody a return of the dead by perpetuating an illusion of presence through photographic realism. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 15, emphasis mine. 33 Janah, Photographing India, p. 36. 34 Ibid., p. 23. 35 Ibid., p. 41. 36 Government of India, Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates (Official Report), 14 February 1948, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India, 1948, p. 737. 37 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 90. 38 Le Corbusier’s team included Pierre Jeanneret as the Senior Architect with Jeet Malhora serving as a Junior Architect for the project. 39 For documents pertaining to the preliminary survey, see John Lucian Savage Papers, 1903–1961, Series II, Box 4, University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center Archives. 40 For Saha’s account of the Indian Scientific Mission’s 1944–45 visit to the United States, see Meghnad Saha, ‘Experience as a Member of the Indian Scientific Mission (Presidential Address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1946)’, in Chatterjee (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 4, 489–504. 41 Unfortunately, there is no visual documentation of this model. But the model, which Saha erected with the help of his student Kamalesh Ray, is described in Santimay Chatterjee, ‘Preface’, in Chatterjee (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. vi.

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42 Le Corbusier’s visit had occurred exactly one year prior to Saha’s first visit to the United States. The two never met. 43 Mardges Bacon, ‘Le Corbusier and Postwar America’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 74, no. 1, 2015, p. 13. 44 David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March, New York: Pocket Books, 1945, p. xii. 45 Le Corbusier, ‘Visions et projets’, p. 21. Cited in Bacon, ‘Le Corbusier and Postwar America’, pp. 22–3. 46 Le Corbusier’s Sketchbook, India 1957, No. M 52, Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris. Reproduced in Architectural History Foundation, Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Vol. 4, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Fondation Le Corbusier, 1982, No. 85. 47 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Speech at the Inaugural of the Bhakra Nangal Canal’. Cited in Central Board of Irrigation and Power, Modern Temples of India: Selected Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru, New Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power, 1989, p. x. 48 Sarbjit Bahga and Surinder Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the Sands of Indian Architecture, New Delhi: Galgotia Publishing Company, 2000, p. 286. 49 Letter from Le Corbusier to S. Radhakrishnan, dated 22 June 1959, City Museum, Chandigarh. 50 Bacon, ‘Le Corbusier and Postwar America’, p. 30. 51 Architectural History Foundation, Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Vol. 4, No. 85–7. 52 Ibid., No. 88. 53 The controversies that surrounded the Bhakra project in the 1950s have been discussed by Vikramaditya Prakash. See Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002, pp. 140–3.

References Abraham, Itty, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State, London: Zed Books, 1998. Anderson, Robert, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Architectural History Foundation, Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Fondation Le Corbusier, 1982. Author Unknown, ‘Notes and News: Association for Scientific Photography’, Science and Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, 1943, pp. 115–16. Bacon, Mardges, ‘Le Corbusier and Postwar America’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 74, no. 1, 2015, pp. 13–40. Baghel, Ravi, River Control in India: Spatial, Governmental and Subjective Dimensions, Cham: Springer, 2014. Bahga, Sarbjit and Surinder Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the Sands of Indian Architecture, New Delhi: Galgotia Publishing Company, 2000. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bhuson Ray, Kumud, Certain Aspects of River Problems in Bengal, Calcutta: Calcutta Phototype Co., 1945. Biggs, David A., ‘Reclamation Nations’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 225–46. Brown, Rebecca M., Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Byres, Terence J. (ed.), The State and Development Planning in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Chatterjee, Santimoy (ed.), Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1987. Culvahouse, Tim (ed.), The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2007. Government of India, Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates (Official Report), 14 February 1948, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India, 1948.

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Gusterson, Hugh, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Janah, Sunil, Photographing India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kaviraj, Sudipta, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Khagram, Sanjeev, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Klingensmith, Daniel, “One Valley and a Thousand”: Dams, Nationalism, and Development, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Krishna, V. V., ‘Organization of Industrial Research: The Early History of CSIR, 1934–47’, in Uma Das Gupta (ed.), Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c.1784–1947, New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010, pp. 157–84. Kumar, R. Siva, Paintings of Abanindranath Tagore: Popular Edition, Kolkata: Pratikshan, 2013. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala, ‘Negotiating Water Management in the Damodar Valley: Kalikata Hearing and the DVC’, in Robert J. Wasson (ed.), Water First: Issues and Challenges for Nations and Communities in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage, 2008, pp. 316–48. Lilienthal, David E., TVA: Democracy on the March, New York: Pocket Books, 1945. Mukherjee, Janam, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Nehru, Jawaharlal, Modern Temples of India: Selected Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru, New Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power, 1989. Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Prakash, Vikramaditya, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Pritchett, Herman, The Tennessee Valley Authority: A Study in Public Administration, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943. Roy, Srirupa, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

10 A critical look into the existing practice of water governance in cities The case of Chandernagore Gopa Samanta and Malay Ganguli

Water governance has become one of the most important issues in water dialogue throughout the world under the existing knowledge paradigm that believes water scarcity is not linked to non-availability. Instead, it is argued that water scarcity is linked to bad management. Literature on water governance thus tries to focus more on the delivery mechanism, overlooking aquatic ecosystems and future water sustainability. Consequently, the existing literature on urban water focuses dominantly on water management vis-à-vis water governance, along with questions of equity and access.1 The new institutional arrangements of market-based water delivery have also been studied in greater detail in different cities of India. These studies indicate that a simple hiring of the model of private water supply cannot be an effective approach to urban water services, as the availability of water varies highly with socio-economic groups and areas in a city.2 Before we try to understand what water governance means, we need to discuss the very definition of the term “governance”. The United Nations Development Programme defines governance as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels.3 Broadly, governance encompasses policy, laws and organisations. The World Bank further defines governance as the manner in which public officials and institutions acquire and exercise the authority to shape public policy and to provide public goods and services.4 Thus, water governance is the manner in which authority is acquired and exercised on behalf of the public in developing, utilising and protecting water resources.5 Therefore, the government at the national, state and local levels plays important roles in the management of water. Although the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act of India delegates the power and responsibility of water supply in Indian cities to the Urban Local Bodies (ULB), the governance of water is linked to the overall policies on water at the national and state level. Moreover, it is beyond the capacity of municipal authorities in small cities to manage their own water supply because of the limited financial and infrastructural capacities. Therefore, in smaller cities, the Department of Physical Health and Engineering (PHE) takes the responsibility of water supply. Although institutional arrangements are shared between the PHE and ULBs, the city governments’ role in water governance is still significant. In West Bengal, many small cities have

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received the power of managing their own water. These cities, in most cases, try to meet the current demand by any means possible, ignoring ground realities and future prospects. The word “sustainability”, thus, does not have much significance in urban water management. Studies on urban water are also overwhelmingly concentrated on delivery mechanism, equity and access.6 In this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the importance of the physical aspects (availability and sustainability) of water, in addition to socio-economic aspects, such as access, equity and pricing in the overall urban water management. Based on empirical research carried out in Chandernagore, West Bengal, this chapter tries to understand the complexity of issues around water in cities. The chapter, thus, analyses how water policies and practices depend on physical environmental conditions, alongside a number of social, cultural and political factors. The field research used both quantitative and qualitative methods to cover a wide range of issues. Among quantitative methods, we used structured and unstructured questionnaires. For quantitative analysis, we used both secondary and primary data collected from the census of India and municipal reports of the office of the Chandernagore Municipal Corporation (CMC). Among qualitative methods, we mostly used informal individual interviews and focused group discussions.

Location as a dominant favourable factor Chandernagore is located in the Kolkata Metropolitan area of West Bengal. The physical location of the city alongside the banks of river Ganga in its deltaic part, and on the newer alluvium geological formation, has facilitated a good supply of surface, subsurface and groundwater for the city. The city has many surface water bodies, especially ponds of different sizes. These ponds are also good recharge points for the subsurface water. In spite of all those favourable physical and environmental conditions, the city is currently suffering from a water shortage. The volume of the shortage is increasing exponentially with the rapid densification of population on the one hand and a rising middle class water-consuming society on the other hand. The present water shortage and the future crisis, leading to unsustainability, are also linked to cultural transformations and consequent changes in water use. Thus, even in the 1990s, ponds in the city were used by different groups of people when the groundwater supply by the municipal corporation was not adequate. In the past, water from the river was used for bathing and washing, which is no longer a common practice among the residents of the city. Given these changes, alongside the sole dependence on groundwater, Chandernagore has become unsustainable in the context of future water supply.

Status of household water supply Groundwater is now the main source of water for all major water uses in India.7 According to a study, nearly half of urban India depends on groundwater.8 Following the same trajectory, the city of Chandernagore has also started depending solely on groundwater, which was not the practice before. Because of poor supply of water from the municipality, residents of the city had in the

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past used water from diversified sources, such as ponds, wells and rivers. However, with the supply of sufficient good quality water from the municipality, residents have now started depending more exclusively on this source. Consequently, other sources of water have been left unused by households. The CMC area can be classified into two zones based on the status of water supply: the old area of the city and a newly added area. The old area of the city, comprising a maximum number of wards (1 to 26), gets a better supply of water provided by the municipal authority.9 The newly added area, however, gets limited water supply. The supply is intermittent, and the hours that water is available vary seasonally in both the old and the newly added area. In summer, the supply hours are higher to meet the increased demand of the city. There are seven reservoirs in the city to store groundwater. Although the city has two surface water treatment plants with a total capacity of 6 million gallons per day (MGD), these are not used because of their higher operation and maintenance costs. One water treatment plant of 1MGD is very old, having been developed during the French colonial period. The other has been constructed in 2009, with a capacity of 5 MGD, with assistance from the central government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. If we look at the history of water use in the city, we see that earlier there were more hand pumps and dug wells, which were in use by households. The introduction of piped water, along with the enhancement of pipelines, led to an improved water supply. In the newly added areas that have not yet received this improved service, the old systems of hands pumps and dug wells are still in use. In the old city area, however, we do not observe any hand pumps now, though there are still some dug wells with limited use. Besides household connections, the city authorities also supply water through roadside community taps from which many people collect water, especially those who do not have a household connection. The total length of the pipeline in the city has been enhanced from 150.11 kilometres in 2000 to 277 kilometres in 2012 (Table 10.1).

Table 10.1 Status of water supply, Chandernagore Attributes

Data

Length of pipeline (km) (2000) Length of pipeline (km) (2012) Number of running pumps (2005) Number of running pumps (2011) Daily water supply (2005) (MLD) Daily water supply (2011) (MLD) Stand post (2005) Stand post (2012) Hand pump (2012) Number of reservoir (2011)

150.11 277 35 43 135 135 1,097 1,152 190 7

Source: Data of 2011 and 2012 from Chandernagore Municipal Corporation and the data of 2005-DDP of the city

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The major problem in the pipeline supply is wastage of water through pipeline leakage. According to official sources, this leakage amounts to almost 20% of water supply. The total official water supply is approximately 56,250 cumec/day. Of this, approximately 11,250 cumec/day get wasted due to leakages in the pipeline. Therefore, the net amount of supplied water is 45,000 cumec/ day. Though the amount of production of water from the surface treatment plant varies, the production of groundwater thus remains more or less the same. If we calculate the gap between the production and net supply of water, the wastage comes to much more than the official record of 20%. Thus the huge wastage of water occurs because of an inefficient supply system. Wastage of water due to leakage in pipelines is very common across India.10 A. S. Jethoo and Naveen K. Gupta have observed that the wastage of water through leakage may sometimes reach up to 70% in developing countries.11 The lion’s share of water in Chandernagore is used for domestic purposes and the rest for commercial use. The per capita water supply has increased from 104 litres per capita per day (LPCD) in 2005 to 135 LPCD in 2011. However, this official information on the amount of present water supply is not commensurate with field data. It has been observed from the field survey that higher income groups (monthly income > Rs 20,000) use 153.5 LPCD and 166 LPCD water in winter and summer, whereas lower income groups use 117.5 LPCD and 123 LPCD water in winter and summer, respectively. This difference in water use occurs as higher income groups have a household connection and can access water easily. In contrast, lower income groups do not have household connections, and they have to collect water from a certain distance, which reduces the level of consumption. Higher income households also use more water-intensive gadgets than the lower income groups. However, on an average there is still a considerable gap between the water service benchmarks recommended by the Ministry of Urban Development, the government of India in 2008 and the actual services provided by the city, except in per capita water supply.

Apartment buildings: a new water user community According to our field survey in 2012, Chandernagore has 98 apartment buildings that are relatively new to the city. These apartment buildings get municipal water supply for about 12.5 hours per day, which is stored in their underground tanks and later pumped to overhead tanks for domestic use. Based on their level of dependency on sources of water supply, apartments can be divided into three categories. The first category includes 23 apartment buildings, which, in spite of having a municipal water connection, depend only on their own deep tube wells, as they get sufficient water from their personal sources. In most cases, these are newly constructed buildings. The withdrawal of water per building is 18,000 litres per day for 75 people on an average. Therefore, the consumption of water per person comes to the tune of 240 LPCD, which is much higher than the city’s average supply. The second category of apartment buildings uses water both from municipal sources and their own sources. The number of such buildings is 15, and the average volume of withdrawal of water for each apartment is 22,875 litres per day. Residents of these apartment buildings use 272 LPCD on an average and belong to the category of highest water users. The third category of apartment buildings, consisting of around 60 structures, depends solely on the municipal supply. The average

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consumption of water in these buildings is 173 LPCD, which is much lower than the first and second categories of apartment buildings. The field data substantiates the fact that dependence on municipal supply cuts down the per person consumption of water. However, it is noticeable that the average time for running the pumps to withdraw the same amount of water by these apartment buildings has increased considerably in the last ten years. In the past, the average time used to run their pumps was four hours. Currently, this has increased to six hours per day. This observation indicates that the yield capacity of deep tube wells has declined considerably, which is also an indicator of steady decline of groundwater sources.

Population and water demand With the increase in population size, demand for water is increasing at a faster rate in almost all cities of India, and Chandernagore is no exception. Most of the water is used for domestic purposes, while an insignificant proportion goes for commercial use (Table 10.2). Therefore, domestic water use has received prime importance in this chapter. Judicious use is only possible by assessing the available usable water, population size and consequent demand. The per capita groundwater withdrawal data of 2005 and 2011 show that the rate of extraction has increased faster than the population growth during the same period. Estimated population size of CMC was 164,557 in 2005, which increased to 166,949 in 2011. Groundwater withdrawal in CMC was 645.32 ham in 2005, which increased to 1,067.625 ham in 2011. Thus, while the population has increased by 1.45%, groundwater withdrawal has increased by 65.44% between 2005 and 2011. This simple calculation shows that the water use has intensified to a large extent in the city in the recent past. Consequently, per capita water demand has increased, which needs to be met by the city government. In water governance, we usually consider the population size of the city without considering the diversified water demands of the households, depending on their financial status and consequent water consumption. To understand the actual pattern of water demand in the city, we conducted a household-level survey on the water use of households under different income groups. Although there are seasonal variations between winter and summer, our field data show that higher income groups consume much more water than those of the lower income groups (Tables 10.3 and 10.4). Among the different uses, bathing stands out as the dominant use in all households.

Table 10.2 Increase in household connections, Chandernagore Year

Estimated household

Household connection

2000 2005 2013

32,360 36,078 42,028

18,023 (55.69%) 20,884 (57.88%) 25,552 (60.79%)

Source: 2000 = ILGUS, 2005 = DDP, 2013 = water supply departments

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Table 10.3 Daily average water use in Chandernagore in winter Cleaning Cleaning Bathing Total Machine Hand Toilet Cooking Drinking Hand Income outsides (litres) washing washing washing houses groups (Rs/ flushing dishes clothes clothes month) Less than 10,000 10,000– 20,000 Greater than 20,000

15

20

3.5

12

12

15

10

30

117.5

15

25

3.5

15

15

18

10

30

131.5

15

25

3.5

10

15

20

10

35

153.5

20

Source: Field survey, January 2012

Table 10.4 Daily average water use in Chandernagore in summer Income groups (Rs/month)

Toilet Cooking Drinking Hand Machine Hand Cleaning Cleaning Bathing Total (litres) flushing washing washing washing houses outsides clothes clothes dishes

Less than 10,000 15 10,000–20,000 15 Greater than 15 20,000

20 25 25

4 4 4

12 15 12

25

12 15 15

15 18 20

10 10 10

35 35 40

123 137 166

Source: Field survey, May 2012

Sustainable water management does not focus only on the present demand but also seeks to forecast future demand in order to develop strategies to cope with this increased demand in future. We tried to estimate the projected water demand with the help of population projection, taking the current rate of population increase as a static variable. Using this method, the projected water demand of the city would be 1,057.88 ham in 2020 and 2,434.2096 ham in 2050 (Table 10.5).

Over-extraction of groundwater and land subsidence Land subsidence is a slow and imperceptible geological process of gradual decrease in the elevation of land surface. It can occur due to many reasons, such as underground mining, extraction of oil, gas and water beneath the surface, natural settlement, hydro compaction and drainage of organic soil, among other reasons. The land subsidence due to over-extraction of groundwater has become a big issue across the world. The lowering of the piezometric level leads to land subsidence.12 The rate of decline of the static water table, the total depth of the aquifer system and the hydrogeological characteristics of the aquifer control the rate of subsidence.13 With an increase in population, the development of real estate, especially apartment buildings, and

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Table 10.5 Projected domestic water demand, Chandernagore. Year

Projected domestic water demand (ham)

2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050

920.6984 1,057.88 1,215.5058 1,396.6161 1,604.7142 1,843.8162 2,118.5441 2,434.2096

Source: Computed by authors

changing lifestyles, the demand for water is increasing rapidly, leading to a substantial burden on the available groundwater resources. Many studies have proved that over-drafting of groundwater leads to land subsidence.14 Expansion and contraction is a regular process of an aquifer skeleton. The balance between hydraulic pressure and inter-granular pressure regulates the mechanism of subsidence. The pumping of groundwater increases inter-granular pressure in geological material, which causes compaction of the concerned material. If the extraction of water is greater than the recharge rate, and it continues for a long period, the inter-granular pressure becomes much higher, which accelerates the process of permanent land subsidence. The rate of subsidence depends upon the underlying basin soil properties, as fine-grained silt and clay compacts more than coarsegrained sediments.15 The effects of land subsidence are always cumulative, and this cumulative effect deforms the water bearing materials permanently, thus negatively impacting the future availability of groundwater. The rate of land subsidence in Chandernagore has been calculated based on the pre-monsoon and post-monsoon static water table (1995–2004) of four observatory wells following Lohman’s equation.16 According to our calculations, the area comes under the over-exploited zone, which means that the groundwater discharge is higher than recharge. This leads to the decline of the static water table, and the decline of the static water table controls the process of subsidence in the area. Thus, high population pressure coupled with high dependence on groundwater poses a serious challenge to the water sustainability of the city.

Irrational approach: ignoring the physical reality At present, there are 43 running pump houses that withdraw water from deep tube wells in Chandernagore in order to supply water to households and commercial establishments of the city. These pump houses do not follow standard norms of maintaining a certain distance between two

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adjacent pump houses. Moreover, if one pump house is abandoned, the new one is being constructed within 50–100 metres of the previous one, which minimises the longevity of the new pump houses. The workers at the municipal level install new pump houses nearer to the abandoned ones to use the already established infrastructure, especially the electricity set up of the previous pump house. This reduces their initial expenditure at the cost of ecological deterioration in terms of aquifer yielding capacity. The average working age of a pump house is approximately ten years, based on its maximum yielding capacity, which gets reduced over the years. The irrational distribution patterns of pump houses have thus been reducing both the working tenure and yielding capacity of pump houses. A pump house has its own radius of influence. Therefore, before going to construct a new one, the radius of the previous one must be identified to enhance the longevity of the pump house and for sustainable groundwater withdrawal. Though rainfall patterns and the area of open surface are factors that control the radius, it is roughly estimated to be around 200–300 metres in alluvial areas.17 The yielding capacity of a pump house is thus reduced over time since construction (Table 10.6). Studying the yield of pump houses in 2011, it was observed that the average yield of the oldest pump houses (1981–85) is the lowest (8,833 gallons/year), whereas the newest (2006–10) produces the most water (19,500 gallons/year). Although the water table rises during the rainy season and falls during the dry season, we observed the overall trend of water table to be declining in the area. The water is withdrawn from a depth of 100 to 135 metres because of the availability of good quantity and quality of water. According to tests undertaken by the water department of Chandernagore, there is less chance of getting a good amount of standard quality water from a shallow aquifer in the area. Besides that, the energy consumption also increases with an increase in the depth of the aquifer, which affects the cost of withdrawal of water highly. The discharge capacity of pump houses in the city varies from 4,000 gallons per hour to 20,000 gallons per hour, depending on the age of construction. The discharge capacity of pump houses decreases with the age of the pump houses. The total supply varies from 50,000 gallons per day to 250,000 gallons per day from one pump house. The total extraction of groundwater thus reaches to 6,500,000 gallons per day or 29,250 cumec per day. Table 10.6 Average yield of pump houses over time, Chandernagore Year of construction

Average age of pump houses (year)

Average yield (gallons/ year)

2006–10 2001–05 1996–00 1991–95 1986–90 1981–85

3 8 13 18 23 28

19,500 14,000 13,500 12,500 10,500 8,833

Source: Computed by authors on the basis of field data from pump houses

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Most of the pump houses supply water to the households directly, as they do not have enough storage tanks. This increases the cost of water to a large extent as the pump needs to be kept running during supply hours.

Surface water Chandernagore is situated on the newer alluvium of the Gangetic delta, on a thick clay layer with an average depth of almost 27.5 metres. This physical set up gives the area the rare quality of retaining a good amount of surface water. There are many ponds of different sizes in the area. Around 8.30 square kilometre area (37.7% of the total) of the city is under surface water bodies. The average depth of the water bodies in the city is 3.33 metres as measured from supervised classification of satellite imagery (November 2011). The amount of annual rainwater directly coming down to the surface water bodies amounts to 1,206.57 ham. The estimated amount of annual renewable surface water from the area of water bodies (8.30 sq. km) and annual range of water level (1.08 m) amounts to 896.40 ham. These ponds, besides supplying water directly to the community, also recharge dug wells round the year. The estimated amount of water demand as per the population size of 2011 amounts to 822.64 ham/year following the standard norm of water supply in class I cities. This chapter argues that water governance in the city should develop surface water utilisation strategies so that a proportion of water demand in the city can be mitigated using this huge amount of surface water.

Dug wells: an alternative source Being located in the Gangetic delta area, Chandernagore is also rich in subsurface water that can easily be tapped through dug wells. The over-dependence on groundwater depletes the aquifer and deteriorates the quality of water. The search for other sources is a judicious decision that is often ignored by both citizens and the city government. In the search for other sources, what is most important is the knowledge of the hydrogeological conditions of the area. In water governance of Indian cities, the concept of conjunctive use of water is still not in practice. Conjunctive use of water has been gaining importance in different parts of the world, as the evolution of conjunctive use and management of ground and surface water offers great potential for increasing water supply security and efficiency for urban water supply.18 It is important to use groundwater and surface water conjunctively for proper management of water resources.19 This chapter also argues that for judicious use of water, apart from groundwater, cities need to look into sources available locally by understanding the local natural conditions related to water availability. In places where the clay layer dominates, the surface gets plenty of surface and subsurface water. The clay layer helps to create artificial tanks, such as ponds and dug wells. This gives a great opportunity to store water in dug wells, which can play an important role in saving groundwater for future. In Chandernagore, 49 (76.5%) dug wells are in working condition at present. The water of the wells is used mainly for domestic purposes other than drinking, which accounts for 59.1% of total

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water use. This water is mainly used for building construction, gardening, drinking and bathing pets. Around 54.5 % of households withdraw water directly from the wells, whereas others use pumps to take water from the dug well and store it in their overhead tanks. This availability of water from dug wells around the year provides households with a good supply of fresh water. The water of most of the dug wells is clean, as every two to three years, the owners add some alum, mainly in the rainy season, or dredge the silt from the well in summer. The use of dug wells is not new here, but the pattern of use has changed over time with enhancement of piped water supply. From the field survey, we found that the 25.8% of dug wells are defunct in the city. These have become defunct between 2000 and 2012. The main reason for this situation is a sufficiently available municipal supply of water, as stated by 64.7% households. Another 29.4% households stated that they dug wells only for the construction of their houses and later abandoned them. Although the water table of dug wells varies from area to area and from season to season, the water is available through the year. The water table of a dug well is directly influenced by the amount of rainfall in the area, domestic withdrawal of water and by evapo-transpiration, as the water table lies in the root zone of local vegetation. It is observed that most areas of the city come under the minimum depth zone. During the post-monsoon season, most of the areas in the shallow water table zone have a depth of 0.75 metre below ground level (mbgl) to 1.25 mbgl. We tried to understand the potential of the dug well sources with the help of a study taking two samples from each of the 33 wards in the city. Water availability of dug wells has been estimated using the Groundwater Estimation Methodology of the Ground Water Estimation Committee.20 The estimated annual availability of water from dug wells in 2011 was 11,89,620 cubic metres or 118.962 ham. The total water demand in the city in 2011 following the standard norm of water supply (135 LPCD) was 822.6412 ham. Therefore, dug wells can supply 15% of the total annual water demand of the city, reducing the pressure on groundwater to a considerable extent. Dug well water is easily renewable from the surface water sources that ensure the net availability of water. We have also seen that the newly added area of the city still depends more on dug well water, as houses here do not get sufficient water from the municipal supply. Thus we see that with the centralisation of water sources – which is groundwater in this city – the diversification of sources is getting reduced.

Pricing of water The 2002 National Water Policy tried to give a holistic view to conserve and preserve water in India. The policy clearly states that to provide efficient water service in a sustainable manner, it should be mandatory that people must pay charges for water use. The basic strategy, as mentioned in the policy document, is to charge the price of water from the middle and upper class, who consume more water. For the poorer sections of society, water will be subsidised. However, this strategy was not a new idea introduced in the National Water Policy of 2002, as it had already been mentioned in the previous National Water Policy of 1987.

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Scholars have argued that water is an economic good, and, therefore, people need to pay for it.21 According to such scholars, with increasing urbanisation, demand for water increases, which adds economic value to water. Lingappam Venkatachalam and Sivaraman Vanathy, for instance, suggested that a proper pricing structure could lead to better management of urban water resources.22 The water supply sector is highly subsidised in urban India.23 Anastasia A. Marteau has shown that the water department of Mumbai operates with a budget surplus from water services.24 Here, the price of water is determined based on the type of dwelling, such as house, block of flats or temporary structure. The water department of Mumbai also considers building materials and the size of supply pipe. The Planning Commission of India has mentioned in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan that it is necessary to pay for water, for recovery of cost and sustainability of the resource.25 In West Bengal, there was no system of water taxation for urban water supply before 2002. The West Bengal Municipal (levy of fee for supply of water) Rules, 2002, framed a basic fee structure, mainly for operation and maintenance costs of the municipalities. However, this structure did not mention a continuous slab structure of domestic water tax norms, which is essential for better governance. The West Bengal Ground Water Resources (Management, Control and Regulation) Act, 2005, did not mention anything on domestic water taxation norms. Due to this lack of uniform norms at the level of the state, city governments have developed their own norms on domestic water taxation. Water taxation has been implemented in Chandernagore since 2004, both for domestic and commercial water use. Domestic water taxation was implemented in 2004 and continued up to 2010. Domestic water taxation was withdrawn in 2010 after the new state government came to power in West Bengal. Initially, households that had metered water connections had to pay at the rate of Rs 3 per month for 1,000 litres of water. Later, it was modified in 2007 to facilitate every household to get 135 LPCD of water (the standard norms of urban supply in India) free of cost. If the amount of water use exceeded 135 LPCD, then the household had to pay Rs 3 per 1,000 litres per month for the extra water. However, as most of the households did not have metered connections, they were charged water tax proportionate to their property tax. The maximum and minimum tax used to vary between Rs 30 and Rs 120 per month. Apartments that install their own deep tube wells have to pay water fees at the rate of Rs 450 per year. This fee is called a tube well license fee. This tube well license fee is determined by the diameter of the pipe of the tube well. The rate of Rs 450 per year is up to the diameter of a 200 mm pipe. With increase in diameter, the charge also increases, following a structure. This fee is currently in use. Commercial tax on water was also implemented in 2004 in the city. Shops or hotels with metered connection pay Rs15 per 1,000 litres/month. However, shops and hotels with a water connection without a metre have to pay water tax at a flat rate, as determined by the city government on the basis of their sales. The flat taxation range varies from Rs 50 per month to Rs 1,000 per month (Table 10.7). Domestic water tax was withdrawn from the list of sources of revenue income in the city in 2010 on the verbal order of the state government. This resulted in tremendous financial loss of revenue

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Table 10.7 Pre-existing structure of water tax, Chandernagore Structure

Amount (Rs/month)

Year

Domestic with metering

Rs 3/1000 litres for more than 135 LPCD Flat taxation based on land value (maximum Rs 120 and minimum Rs 30) Rs 15/1,000 litres Flat taxation based on running of the centre (maximum Rs 1000 and minimum Rs 50) Rs 450/year

2004–2010

Domestic without metering

Commercial with metering Commercial without metering

Apartments with submersible pump

2004–2010

2004–continuing 2004–continuing

2004–continuing

Source: Water Supply Department, Chandernagore Municipal Corporation, 2012

Table 10.8 Domestic water tax, Chandernagore, 2005 Households with water connection in 2005

Percentage of households

Amount of tax (Rs/month)

Total tax (Rs/month)

Total tax (Rs/annum)

20,884

20 20 30 30

10 20 25 50

41,768 83,536 156,630 313,260

501,216 1,002,432 1,879,560 3,759,120 7,142,328

Total Source: Computed by authors on the basis of Chandernagore Municipal data

for the city government. We tried to estimate the loss based on the water tax structure of 2011 – that is, before the water tax was withdrawn. This estimation has been done using the tax structure data and the household connection data from the city government. A number of household connections have been used for the estimation, which was collected from the city authority in 2005 and 2013. It is observed from the estimation that from the households with water connection, the tax collected amounted to Rs 7,142,328in 2005 (Table 10.8). Following the same structure, the city would have received Rs 8,738,784in 2013 (Table 10.9) if the provision for domestic water tax had not been withdrawn. Moreover, the actual amount would have been more than the estimated amount, as the estimation used a flat tax rate, which is lower than the actual levels. The withdrawal of domestic water tax in cities is a bad governance decision, especially in the case of small and medium cities, which receive meagre financial grants from the government. Moreover, these cities do not have much income from their own revenue sources other than property

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Table 10.9 Estimated amount of domestic water tax, Chandernagore, 2013 Households with water connection in 2013

Percentage of households

Amount of tax (Rs/month)

Total tax (Rs/month)

Total tax (Rs/annum)

25,552

20 20 30 30

10 20 25 50

51,104 102,208 191,640 383,280

613,248 1,226,496 2,299,680 4,599,360 8,738,784

Total Source: Computed by authors on the basis of Chandernagore Municipal data

tax. Although targeted with a focus on recovery of cost, water pricing helps the city governments in a number of ways. It makes them financially stronger in their own resource generation and helps in reducing wastage of water. Therefore, the pricing of water in small cities is a matter of significant importance in the functioning of ULB, where there is shortage of adequate funds from the government.

Conclusion The chapter illustrates the importance of a holistic approach to water as an important basic service in Indian cities. By meeting the current demand for water at a cheaper cost, city governments have been aggravating the crisis for the future. Water needs to be looked at as a resource that has both physical and socio-economic aspects, even at the city level. In spite of being located on thick, unconsolidated, newer alluvium, which is a high potential zone for water collection, the city of Chandernagore comes under the over-exploitation zone because of the state’s narrow vision of water governance. The magnitude of over-exploitation of groundwater has been increasing very fast in the recent past. The study recommends that if there is availability of water from different sources such as surface, subsurface and groundwater, water governance must consider utilisation of all the sources instead of using a single source to make the future sustainable. In a region where clay is the dominant geological material with sufficient thickness, water from dug wells can be a good source of fresh water. There are large number of ponds in city that could also help recharge the dug wells through the year. Indeed, irrespective of withdrawal of water from wells, these wells generally do not get dry. Rather than being limited to a narrow focus on demand, supply, institutional arrangements, delivery and cost of water, the chapter also argues that the concept of water governance should look into the physical aspects of water, such as availability and sustainability. Thus we need to bridge the gap between water engineering and water practices in the cities. For that holistic approach, it is necessary to establish a new interdisciplinary engineering sector on water that can train people on technical expertise as well as help them understand the social context.26

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Notes 1 Laveesh Bhandari and Piyush Bajpai, ‘Ensuring Access to Water in Urban Households’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 39, 2001, pp. 3774–8; Abdul Shaban and R. N. Sharma, ‘Water Consumption Patterns in Domestic Households in Major Cities’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 30, 2007, pp. 2190–7. 2 Priya Sangameswaran, Roopa Madhav, and Clifton D’Rozario, ‘24/7, “Privatisation” and Water Reform: Insights from Hubli-Dharwad’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 14, 2008, pp. 60–7; Lalitha Kamath, Malina Ranganathan, and Vinay Baindur, ‘Piped Water Supply to Greater Bangalore: Putting the Cart before the Horse’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 33, 2009, pp. 53–62; Abdul Shaban and R. N. Sharma, ‘Water Consumption Patterns’, pp. 2190–7. 3 www.undp.org, accessed on 15 October 2012. 4 http://worldbank.org/INTENVMAT/.../8GoodGovernance.pdf, accessed on 7 July 2012. 5 Mark Svendsen, ‘Mena Regional Water Governance Benchmarking Project: Concept and Approach Framework’, USAID, 2009, www.watergovernance.org/documents/WGF/ReWaB-files/Water-Gover nance-Concept-and-Approach-Framework-Final.pdf, accessed on 11 August 2012. 6 Lingappam Venkatachalam and Sivaraman Vanathy, ‘Access to Drinking Water in Chennai: An Analysis of Institutional Failure’, in Yves Saillard and Gundappa S. Sastry (eds.), Access to Water in Urban Areas: Indian and French Experiences, New Delhi: Manohar Publication, 2012, pp. 117–40; Anastasia A. Marteau, ‘Diversification of Access to Water in Mumbai’s Peri-Urban Territories’, in Yves Saillard and Gundappa S. Sastry (eds.), Access to Water in Urban Areas: Indian and French Experiences, New Delhi: Manohar Publication, 2012, pp. 91–115. 7 Philippe Cullet, ‘The Groundwater Model Bill: Rethinking Regulation for the Primary Source of Water’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 45, 2012, pp. 40–7. 8 Himanshu Kulkarni and Mihir Shah, ‘Urban Water System in India: Typologies and Hypothesis’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 50, no. 30, 2015, pp. 57–69. 9 That is for 12.5 hours per day. 10 V. R. Reddy, ‘Urban Residential Water in Rajasthan: The Demand-Supply Scenario’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 44–62; G. S. Nathawat, ‘Water Supply in Jaipur: Retrospect and Prospect’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, pp. 159–71; N. S. Vangani and J. Venkateswarlu, ‘Water Supply Problems and Issues in Jodhpur City’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, pp. 218–34; A. S. Jethoo and Naveen K. Gupta, ‘Helpline for Water Leakages: A Solution to Water Crisis’, in Efficient Water Management: Challenges and Opportunities: Proceedings of the India Water Week-2013 Conference, Jaipur, Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India, 2013, pp. 1–6. 11 A. S. Jethoo and Naveen K. Gupta, ‘Helpline for Water Leakages’, pp. 1–6. 12 Prabhas Pande, ‘A Geotechnical Report on the Investigation of Ground Subsidence and Cracks in Farrukhabad District, U.P.’, Geological Survey of India, 1995, pp. 1–8, www.portal.gsi.gov.in/gsiDoc/pub/ NROUP .18754.pdf, accessed on 20 April 2013; Amartya K. Bhattacharya, ‘Hydrogeology and Land Subsidence in Salt Lake City, Kolkata, India’, Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, vol. 13, 2008, pp. 1–14. 13 Malay Ganguli, ‘Groundwater Withdrawal and Land Subsidence: A Study of Singur Block, West Bengal, India’, International Journal of Geomatics and Geosciences, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 465–71. 14 Chieh Chen et al., ‘Correlation Between Groundwater Level and Altitude Variations in Land Subsidence Area of the Choshuichi Alluvium Fan, Taiwan’, Engineering Geology, vol. 115, 2010, pp. 122–31; Paulami Sahu and Pradip Sikdar, ‘Threat of Land Subsidence in and around Kolkata City and East Kolkata Wetlands, West Bengal, India’, Journal of Earth System Science, vol. 120, no. 3, 2011, pp. 435–46.

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15 Joe Gelt, ‘Land Subsidence, Earth Fissures Change Arizona’s Landscape’, Water Resources Research Center, College of Agriculture and Life Science, Arizona University, 1992, https://wrrc.arizona.edu/ publications/arroyo-newsletter/land-subsidence-earth-fissures-change-arizonas-landscape, accessed on 5 April 2012; Mesfin H. Tewolde, ‘Subsidence in Alluvial Soils Caused by Intensive Water Withdrawal’, Seminar in Geomorphology, 2008, pp. 1–13, https://sites.google.com/site/kulfo2002/subsidenceLRfinal.pdf, accessed on 20 October 2011. 16 H. M. Raghunath, Ground Water, New Delhi: New Age International (P) Limited, 2008. 17 H. M. Raghunath, Hydrology Principles, Analysis, Design, New Delhi: New Age International (P) Limited, 2006. 18 Stephen Foster, Frank van Steenbergen, Javier Zuleta, and Hector Garduno, Sustainable Groundwater Management-Contribution to Policy Promotion: Conjunctive Use of Groundwater and Surface Water from Spontaneous Coping Strategy to Adaptive Resource Management, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010. 19 W. Evans and R. Evans, Conjunctive Use and Management of Groundwater and Surface Water, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011–14. 20 Central Ground Water Board, Detailed Guidelines for Implementing the Ground Water Estimation Methodology, New Delhi: D. K. Chadha, 2009. 21 Venkatachalam and Vanathy, ‘Access to Drinking Water in Chennai’, pp. 117–40; Marteau, ‘Diversification of Access to Water’, pp. 91–115. 22 Venkatachalam and Vanathy, ‘Access to Drinking Water in Chennai’, pp. 117–40. 23 B. K. Gupta, ‘Drinking Water Supply in Ajmer’, in M. S. Rathore and V. N. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, pp. 88–94; R. C. Agarwal, ‘Urban Water Supply: Issues and Approaches’, in M. S. Rathore and V. N. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, pp. 63–67; Om P. Mathur and Sandeep Thakur, ‘Urban Water Pricing: Setting the Stage for Reforms’, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, www.nipfp.org.in/newweb/sites/default/files/r2.pdf, accessed on 19 October 2012. 24 Marteau, ‘Diversification of Access to Water’, pp. 91–115. 25 http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/planrel/12thplan/pdf/12fyp_vol1.pdf, accessed on 20 April 2013. 26 Milind Sohoni, ‘World Bank’s Urban Water Report on India: Thinking Backwards’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 47–48, 2012, pp. 22–6.

References Agarwal, R. C., ‘Urban Water Supply: Issues and Approaches’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 63–7. Bhandari, Laveesh and Piyush Bajpai, ‘Ensuring Access to Water in Urban Households’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 39, 2001, pp. 3774–8. Bhattacharya, Amartya K., ‘Hydrogeology and Land Subsidence in Salt Lake City, Kolkata, India’, Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, vol. 13, 2008, pp. 1–14. Central Ground Water Board, Detailed Guidelines for Implementing the Ground Water Estimation Methodology, New Delhi: D.K. Chadha, 2009. Chen, Chieh, et al., ‘Correlation between Groundwater Level and Altitude Variations in Land Subsidence Area of the Choshuichi Alluvium Fan, Taiwan’, Engineering Geology, vol. 115, 2010, pp. 122–31. Cullet, Philippe, ‘The Groundwater Model Bill: Rethinking Regulation for the Primary Source of Water’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 45, 2012, pp. 40–7. Evans, W. and R. Evans, Conjunctive Use and Management of Groundwater and Surface Water, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011–14.

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Foster, Stephen; Steenbergen, Frank van; Zuleta, Javier; Garduno, Hector, Sustainable Groundwater Management-Contribution to Policy Promotion: Conjunctive use of Groundwater and Surface Water from Spontaneous Coping Strategy to Adaptive Resource Management, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010. Ganguli, Malay, ‘Groundwater Withdrawal and Land Subsidence: A Study of Singur Block, West Bengal, India’, International Journal of Geomatics and Geosciences, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 465–71. Gelt, Joe, ‘Land Subsidence, Earth Fissures Change Arizona’s Landscape’, Water Resources Research Center, College of Agriculture and Life Science, Arizona University, 1992, https://wrrc.arizona.edu/publications/arroyo-newsletter/land-subsidence-earth-fissures-change-arizonas-landscape 12, accessed on 5 April 2012. Gupta, B. K., ‘Drinking Water Supply in Ajmer’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 88–94. Jethoo, A. S. and Naveen K. Gupta, ‘Helpline for Water Leakages: A Solution to Water Crisis’, in Efficient Water Management: Challenges and Opportunities: Proceedings of the India Water Week: 2013 Conference, Jaipur, Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India, 2013, pp. 1–6. Marteau, Anastasia A., ‘Diversification of Access to Water in Mumbai’s Peri-urban Territories’, in Yves Saillard and Gundappa S. Sastry (eds.), Access to Water in Urban Areas: Indian and French Experiences, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2012, pp. 91–115. Mathur Om P. and Sandeep Thakur, ‘Urban Water Pricing: Setting the Stage for Reforms’, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, 2003, www.nipfp.org.in/newweb/sites/default/files/r2.pdf, accessed on 20 April 2013. Nathawat, G. S., ‘Water Supply in Jaipur: Retrospect and Prospect’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 159–71. Pande, Prabhas, ‘A Geotechnical Report on the Investigation of Ground Subsidence and Cracks in Farrukhabad District, U.P.’, Geological Survey of India, 1995, pp. 1–8, www.portal.gsi.gov.in/gsiDoc/pub/ NROUPha.18754.pdf, accessed on 20 April 2013. Raghunath, H. M., Hydrology Principles, Analysis, Design, New Delhi: New Age International (P) Limited, 2006. ———, Ground Water, New Delhi: New Age International (P) Limited, 2008. Ranganathan, Malinam, Lalitha Kamath, and Vinay Baindur, ‘Piped Water Supply to Greater Bangalore: Putting the Cart before the Horse’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 33, 2009, pp. 53–62. Reddy, V. R., ‘Urban Residential Water in Rajasthan: The Demand-Supply Scenario’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 44–62. Sahu, Paulami and Pradip Sikdar, ‘Threat of Land Subsidence in and around Kolkata City and East Kolkata Wetlands, West Bengal, India’, Journal of Earth System Science, vol. 120, no. 3, 2011, pp. 435–46. Sangameswaran, Priya, Roopa Madhav, and Clifton D’Rozario, ‘24/7, “Privatisation” and Water Reform: Insights from Hubli-Dharwad’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 14, 2008, pp. 60–7. Shaban, Abdul and R. N. Sharma, ‘Water Consumption Patterns in Domestic Households in Major Cities’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 30, 2007, pp. 2190–7. Shah, Mihir and Himanshu Kulkarni, ‘Urban Water System in India: Typologies and Hypothesis’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 50, no. 30, 2015, pp. 57–69. Sohoni, Milind, ‘World Bank’s Urban Water Report on India: Thinking Backwards’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 47–48, 2012, pp. 22–6. Svendsen, Mark, ‘Mena Regional Water Governance Benchmarking Project: Concept and Approach Framework’, USAID, 2009, www.watergovernance.org/documents/WGF/ReWaB-files/Water-Gover nance-Concept-and-Approach-Framework-Final.pdf, accessed on 11 August 2012.

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Tewolde, Mesfin H., ‘Subsidence in Alluvial Soils caused by Intensive Water Withdrawal’, Seminar in Geomorphology, 2008, pp. 1–13, sites.google.com/site/kulfo2002/subsidence-LRfinal.pdf, accessed on 20 October 2011. Vangani, N. S. and J. Venkateswarlu, ‘Water Supply Problems and Issues in Jodhpur City’, in M. S. Rathore and V. R. Reddy (eds.), Urban Water Management, Jaipur: Rawat Publication, 1996, pp. 218–34. Venkatachalam, Lingappam and Sivaraman Vanathy, ‘Access to Drinking Water in Chennai: An Analysis of Institutional Failure’, in Yves Saillard and Gundappa S. Sastry (eds.), Access to Water in Urban Areas: Indian and French Experiences, New Delhi: Manohar Publication, 2012, pp. 117–40.

11 Making water media in 21st-century South Asia Bishnupriya Ghosh

The skin cracks like a pod. There is never enough water. – Imtiaz Dharker, “Blessing”, Postcards from God, 1997

You swipe your smart water card. There comes the glimmer and gush of the liquid whose safety and sufficiency are no longer guaranteed. The water ATMs of Sarvajal provide some relief to the endemic problem of water shortage and pollution in 21st-century South Asia.1A social enterprise started by Anand Shah, Sarvajal is not a charity. It mobilises local franchises to provide water for 175 households per franchise for a low fee. The enterprise not only keeps costs low but also provides upkeep for water ATMs. As they crop up all over India, the smart card mediates one’s relationship to water. One more step on the pathway to 21st-century smart citizenship (Plate 11.1). The water wars of the late 20th century have prepared us for the transformation of a common resource into a coveted commodity in the 21st century. Stamped and sealed by Goldman Sachs, no less, water is unequivocally “the petroleum of the next century”.2 And so, there is an unmitigated conflict over water: military takeovers of reservoirs, anxious diplomacy over sharing water, big hydroelectric projects laying claim to homes and livelihoods, scientists debating the toxicity of water pollutants, cities going under as urban plans fail to channel flow and corporate giants cutting secret deals to steal groundwater. The stories dot the news. They impel reasoned predictions and forecasts, even dire prophecy. This chapter is not about those macro-scalar water wars. It is about those who make water often at local, modest scale; those who wrest back the common resource from its commodity form; and those who make water media to stem large-scale industrial damage to water systems and waterways. The Sarvajal smart card is water media at the quotidian. Sarvajal (“water for all” in Sanskrit) is a celebrated social enterprise that invests in high-tech, low-cost solutions to water scarcity and privatises water for the economic sustainability of its schemes.3 It represents a larger industrial and financial imperative to manage and monetise water in the face of present and future water crises. As scientific predictions of extreme flooding and extreme droughts in the Anthropocene come true every season in every part of the world, local and national governments, courts at all levels, non-profit and community organisations, corporations and social enterprises seek to

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Plate 11.1 Hindustan Times, Sarvajal Water ATM, 5 November 2015. Source: Photograph © Getty Images

change water policy and to harvest, protect and distribute water resources.4 Almost always, these top-down managerial venture brokers deal with local actors who stand to be most affected by changing water policies or infrastructures. And quite often, the necessary local buy-in emerges from laboured negotiations over more water, better water, well-directed and stored water for both domestic and agricultural use. The success of socially responsible initiatives – financial, industrial, technological, legislative or legal – depends on the local investments in the scheme, or else smart cards would remain just more plastic and court orders formal legalities. Accounts of such endeavours cast local actors as the injured, often plaintiffs in “public interest litigation” over water. Drought- or pollution- or flood-affected populations make appearances as the public, a nomination that occasionally extends to nonhuman agents (fish, microorganisms, water plants) whose existence is under threat. Conversely, researchers of social movements shore up the role the “affected” play as historical agents of the change that they demand. Often, in these accounts, movement leaders, non-profit institutions and non-governmental bodies are the “face” of the people, the mass, the crowd. The “popular” is often the capacious framework that ascribes agency to those who chalk out future pathways for change, eschewing the rhetoric of those to whom change has come.

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In the context of “water democracies” (as Vandana Shiva names them), the popular captures contingent and informal mobilisations around water.5 A popular movement or front comes into view when actors with varying agendas – everything from local representation in determining licensed water use to scientific evaluation of groundwater safety – unify for a specific goal, agenda or platform. While popular struggles often seek hegemony, in that they seek institutional power, these heterogeneous formations are somewhat different from hegemonic populisms that are based on an internal divide between “us” and “them”. The popular with which I am concerned here is an inchoate social formation. Open-ended and virtual, it allows for potential affiliations that keep arriving as the movement grows. This chapter is about the arduous political labour of popular fronts that have been charting future pathways for common access to safe and sufficient water. It is their plans, goals or agendas that social enterprises, nonprofit organisations and courts embrace in their attempts to shape water legislation and policy. More to the point, this exploration is about the “water media” necessary for the constitution of the popular front. Popular fronts emerge when heterogeneous social demands are effectively routed through a single unifying programme/goal/agenda, be that abolishing Coca-Cola from a village, scuttling the building of a dam or diverting common effluent flows. That goal determining agreements on specific paths of action exerts a unifying, often highly symbolic, force over heterogeneous interests. Thus mediation is constitutive of the popular, organising bodies in space. As Ernesto Laclau argues in On Populist Reason, potent symbols that “quilt together” varied social demands into common goals are crucial to the undertaking.6 A slogan, an image, a gesture: an act of mediation that unifies, conceals difference and presents a front against the (often equally iconic) hegemon. Popular fronts in South Asia often plumb the visual domain for their lingua franca in an effort to overcome the challenges of linguistic diversity, especially when fronts move beyond local and regional parameters. Hence, here I focus on visual water media to trace the story of making water in 21st-century South Asia. Three dimensions of water – the logic of quantity (manifest as water scarcity), of quality (evident in pollution) and of directionality (emergent as flood) – make an appearance in three iconic instances of the struggle for safe and sufficient water. These concern the fight over water scarcity in Plachimada, a village in the southern Indian state of Kerala; the struggle over water pollution from leather tanneries in Kanpur, an industrial city in northern India; and the massive mobilisation against 30 dams on the Narmada River in western India. In each case, popular mobilisations have elicited landmark juridical and legislative responses. In this sense, these are exemplary “cases” that are the tip of the iceberg. They function as synecdoche for larger constellations of popular struggles for water safety or sufficiency. The collective heft of these popular struggles has prompted the Indian judiciary to broadly interpret the right to water as a fundamental right: Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the fundamental to life, now implies the right to water.7 So we may regard these struggles as success stories that have gained institutional legitimacy through legal representation. My focus is on the role of water media play in these struggles. What kind of political syntax emerges in these water media? From low-tech choreography of plastic pots to the flash of painfully beautiful photographs, the following sections elaborate on the 21st-century slouch towards a water democracy in South Asia by pursuing water media.

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Drought: the logic of quantity In the wee hours of one morning, April 2002, Plachimada woke to a fracas at the Coca-Cola plant. A few irate denizens of the quiet village in Kerala had blocked the tanker bringing water to the factory. The altercation over water scarcity, over wells running dry and over women trekking 3–4 kilometres per day to fetch water soon blossomed into an everyday affair.8Women, empty colourful plastic pots tucked on hips, began clustering in front of the factory gates. Soon a makeshift shelter would provide shade to a growing roster of protestors led by Mayilamma, an adivasi community leader.9And, gradually, the local protest would mushroom into a large popular front against the role of corporate globalisation in the manufacture of water scarcity. At the centre of the scene, everyday objects were increasingly linked to the iconic redand-white logo of the dark cola: the ubiquitous empty plastic pot, a potent symbol of groundwater loss (Plate 11.2). The Plachimada struggle to oust Coca-Cola, an iconic commodity that had come to signify all commercially marketed colas in India, is a landmark in the popular history of water wars in 21st-century South Asia. In history books, the morning fracas assumed significance because this popular mobilisation was able to sustain contingent alliances between local protestors, regional political parties, non-profit organisations, governing bodies and national and international actors. Moreover, the social movement was instrumental in eliciting the Supreme Court judgement that recognised groundwater as a social asset and instructed local and state authorities to give priority to domestic and agricultural use of groundwater (Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverage Pvtd Ltd. Vs. Union of India, 2005).10 Even in moments of the juridical proceeding when Coca-Cola seemed poised to win the suit, the plant remained closed as a reminder of the broader social impact of the

Plate 11.2 M. Madhuraj, Women Trek to Fetch Water, July 2002. Source: Photograph © Mathrubhumi Daily

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anti-Coca-Cola struggle at the national level. In 2003, when the Perumatty panchayat cancelled the company’s license, Coca-Cola had appealed at the Kerala High Court and won its case, if for a brief moment. But the win had the adverse effect of strengthening alliances around the issue of groundwater distribution. Late in 2003, the panchayat, flexing its avowed localism, resolved to hold a three-day water conference in Plachimada, just as the World Social Forum was set to convene in Mumbai. Activists with diverse preoccupations (anti-hydro-piracy, health and anti-globalisation groups), as well as global environmental groups, converged on Plachimada in 2004, bringing international media in their wake. There they drafted the Plachimada Declaration against all “criminal attempts to marketise, privatize and corporatize water”.11 What was once a local agitation became a 100-organisation coalition. Performances against water extraction in Plachimada, widely disseminated in newspapers, magazines and blogs, soon metonymically quilted together heterogeneous social demands for corporate accountability; for better health; for educating children about bodies, resources and economic justice; for the prevention of resource extraction; and for ecological restoration. Importantly, Coca-Cola sought to exercise its corporate rights not only around water use licensing but also trademark infringement. The water wars ensue over resource extraction and symbolic soft power. Throughout the Plachimada protests, women brought cheap, empty plastic pots to sitins. Demonstrations and marches became indicators of water scarcity and of the rural gendered labour of carrying water from afar. Placed against the resplendent and ubiquitous Coca-Cola billboards, the pots effectively desecrated the iconic logo’s promise of a drink that refreshes. The performances would become the visual grammar of the popular front becoming social movement. The elegant political syntax of pot-and-bottle would become nationally visible when Coca-Cola slapped a suit against internationally renowned photographer Sharad Haksar for his capture of the offending pots marshalled against the Coca-Cola logo.12 Haksar had memorialised the David-and-Goliath battle in a giant (20' × 30') billboard, evocatively titled Thirsty, in Chennai (Plate 11.3). Claiming infringement of its trademark, Coca-Cola demanded an unconditional apology in lieu of damages worth Rs 20 lakh ($46,000). Haksar refused, noting that he had put a disclaimer on his work. “What is depicted in my picture is a very common sight in Chennai, where the photograph was taken. I did not want to make any point against a particular company. It could have been Pepsi or Fanta and still my photograph would hold”, he argued. “I wanted to show the irony of the situation. When there is such acute water shortage, aerated drinks are freely available”. Of course, company officials had actually seen the offending Coca-Cola photograph three months before the sudden cry against infringement. Therefore, the 2004 allegations should be understood as Coca-Cola’s response to its weakened credibility at Plachimada. Haksar had made note of this in his surprised response to the threat. Given Haksar’s credentials as a prize-winning photographer, the incident quickly became national news. As journalists probed further, other unsavoury details about Coca-Cola’s response to Plachimada emerged, fuelling media interest. National newspapers rushed to report Coca-Cola had gone to some lengths to muzzle the press before the Haksar suit: it had slapped a Rs 50 lakh ($1,000) defamation suit against a regional newspaper, Mathrubhumi, which had covered the anti-Coca-Cola campaign for quite a while.13 The lawsuit

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Plate 11.3 Stringer/AFP, Sharad Haksar Coca-Cola Billboard, Chennai, 14 July 2005. Source: Photograph © Getty Images

signalled both the success and reach of the anti-Coca-Cola struggle. Plachimada had come to haunt Chennai, the largest metropolis in south India, with the ubiquitous pots assembled in front of Coca-Cola billboards in that village now iconic of water scarcity. In news report after news report following the Plachimada protests, empty plastic pots would emerge as the visual idiom for water scarcity. Soon Plachimada would become the beacon for other struggles against the corporate giant in Kaladera (Rajasthan), Mehdiganj (Uttar Pradesh) and Gangaikondan (Tamil Nadu), to name but a few. The Haksar billboard affair shows us how local popular water media can become the face of a movement as its images move speedily across multiple media channels. A potent symbol exerts a metonymic unifying force that quilts social demands far beyond wresting water back from a local Coca-Cola plant in sleepy Plachimada.

Pollution: the logic of quality It is an iconic shot of an iconic river that occupies the historical and mythological imagination: the lone boatman plying the great waters of the massive snaking river tumbling into the subcontinent from the Himalayas. Such imagery folds the eschatological place of transit to other worlds into quotidian human activity (fishing, bathing, praying) and nonhuman (silt fish, microorganisms, currents) life on the river.

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In the foreground shimmers white foam, a new agent transforming all relationships in and to the Ganges. We are told these are the effluents from Kanpur’s leather tanneries. Toxicologists tell us it is the level, and not mere presence, of a “poison” (from the Greek “toxicos”) that has adverse effects on living organisms: in this case, exposure to high doses of chromium in waste form present in discharge in agricultural lands and in the Ganges River from 400 tanneries in Kanpur’s eastern districts (Plate 11.4). The story of the Kanpur leather tanneries and their poisonous impact on the great Ganges occupies a central place in the Indian imaginary of water pollution. Unlike the Plachimada water scarcity story, in which a local fragment achieves national significance, the Kanpur water pollution case stands as a paradigmatic instance. Put differently, the fragment is the synecdoche for a large political story. The ninth largest city in India, Kanpur houses 400 tanneries in its eastern districts and employs 50,000 workers. The common effluents discharged from the tanneries contain high doses of mercury, arsenic and hexavalent chromium (Cr VI), known to cause liver failure, lung cancer, kidney damage and premature dementia.14 Not only does the river provide water to 40% of India’s population (around 500 million) across 11 states, passing through 29 cities and 48 towns, and command a formidable cultural imaginary, much like the Nile, the Tiber and the Amazon, but also it was the focus of one of the most ambitious environmental clean-up projects,

Plate 11.4 Sean Gallagher, Boatman on the Ganges Polluted with Effluents, December 2013.

Source: Photograph © Sean Gallagher Visuals Ltd.

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the Ganga Action Plan, initiated under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 and withdrawn in March 2000.15 One of the first Supreme Court judgements around water pollution as ecological damage also concerned the Ganges (M.C. Mehta vs. Union of India, 1985, the “Ganga Pollution Cases”).16 The writs targeted 75 Kanpur tanneries as producers of toxic non-biodegradable waste and the Kanpur Municipal Corporation for negligent oversight.17 Both the scale of the problem and the tax revenue and foreign exchange that the tanneries bring in impedes progress on constraining tannery effluents. Despite juridical directives instruct to reprocess polluted water in Common Effluent Treatment Plants, neither the technological process nor its implementation has yielded successful results.18 The reprocessed water has high salinity and the treatments continue to produce solid waste that, with seasonal rains, finds its way into the groundwater. A parallel effort to establish Chromium Recovery Plants (CRPs) has been equally difficult and expensive. Many of the 225 Kanpur tanneries directed to establish CRPs still fail to comply with legislative and juridical directives. Hence, in 2015, the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board ordered the closing of 98 tanneries for non-compliance; the demand for reprocessing water still remains largely unmet. These stories of legal directive, legislative innovation and administrative implementation conceal the long struggle to hold the leather tanneries accountable for polluting groundwater and the Ganges. Pollution-affected actors, non-profit organisations and their national and international supporters have been mobilising against water for over five decades. Legal activism has followed in the last three. On the one hand, there are popular fronts that articulate a moral agenda of “saving the holy river” as an environmental cause. The purifying qualities of the Ganges water, as well as the river’s capacity to flush waste, if its flow is uninterrupted, are foregrounded as millennia-old natural ecological systems that are now under threat as industrial projects sanction non-biodegradable waste and capture hydroelectric power. One major player is the non-violent Gandhian “Save the Ganga Movement” launched in 1998 that mobilised religious leaders, spiritual and political, scientists, environmentalists, writers and social activists.19 The moral tenor of the movement, including the presence of activist sadhus, made it especially attractive for Hindu right-wing parties, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party to align themselves with the “holy” agenda in the search of soft power.20 Here one element in the chain of alliances constitutive of the popular seeks to speak for all and unifies through the exclusion of “others” (for instance Muslim citizens). On the other hand, Ganges water pollution has been the target of myriad left progressive and secular groups: a non-governmental organisation that has been working on water pollution in Kanpur for the last 15 years, EcoFriends is an exemplary instance. A loose constellation of activists, journalists, scientists and academics, EcoFriends links disparate actors – pollution-affected dwellers on the riverbank, corporate representatives, state authorities (municipal and pollution boards), international organisations (such as the Blacksmith Institute that has been tracking Ganges pollution) and activists – to anti-pollution agendas.21 One could multiply the example, given the huge number of popular fronts that rise and fade around saving this massive water body with its multi-dimensional problems. My point here is that, once again, these mobilisations have been making water for at least five decades, well before the Ganges pollution gained international recognition as the most polluted of the world’s large rivers in 2013 (Bonn Declaration on Global Water Security).

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And so the mythic river entered international media circuits of the 21st century as a water system in crisis. At centre-stage were Kanpur’s leather tanneries, spewing poisonous froth into the waters. The froth, the sludge and their graphic imprint on human bodies become part of the visual record of a river in distress – a potent symbol for mobilising international alliances bringing media capacity, funding and research resources to the regional and national cause. The visual record of water pollution has made repeated appearances in high-quality glossy, evocative and heart-wrenching photojournalism: Kolkata-based Arindam Mukherjee published a 2013 photo essay Slow Poison, which established a narrative of harm by focusing on workers in the factories, effluents in the river and close-ups of skin damage (patches and lesions); one of the chapters in the South and Southeast Asia–based Italian photographer Guilio Di Sturco’s visual mapping of the Ganges from the melting Gangotri glacier to the mangroves of the delta features Kanpur, the town of 400 tanneries, as the place “where the Ganges goes to die” (2008–13), and British photojournalist Sean Gallagher intersperses his 2013 visual archive of water pollution and its effects with stories from Jajmau in east Kanpur, a predominantly Muslim area where many of the small and large-scale tanneries are based.22 Funded by the Pulitzer Center’s Crisis Reporting grants, Gallagher represents activist media makers who are now engaged in gathering visual histories of the river and testimonies from those who eke out a living on its banks (Plate 11.5). But his 2013 Kanpur story is important water media

Plate 11.5 Sean Gallagher, Effluents Gushing into Irrigation Canals, December 2013.

Source: Photograph © Sean Gallagher Visuals Ltd.

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for two reasons. First, the visual record of Jajmau’s suffering complicates the potency of the “save the holy river” slogan. Visceral images of ecological and medical damage from effluents – red water, white gushing froth, feet immersed in both, skin discolorations, a man waist-deep in black sludge – turn the leather tanneries into malevolent icons like Coca-Cola whose desecration unifies popular sentiment. Both expert and non-expert testimonies in Gallagher’s short film, The Toxic Price of Leather (2014), articulate clear pathways (closures, compliance with chromium recovery, fines) as environmentally sound decisions that the state has failed to implement. Rakesh Jaiswal of EcoFriends and Javed Akhtar, a local politician who lost his wife to asthma, have longer interviews. In the Akhtar interview, the fact that (Hindu sympathetic) municipal politicians are willing to let things slide in Muslim-dominant Jajmau is eminently clear. Meanwhile, Gallagher’s captions tell us that, despite all legislation against effluents, Kanpur’s leather exports to the United Kingdom, United States, China, Germany and Italy actually increased by 17% in 2013. The story that emerges is one of cynical profiteering and a biopolitics of “letting die” the disenfranchised citizens of Jajmau. A second reason why the Gallagher film and photo archives are significant in the popular fight against water pollution is the strategic alliance he establishes with non-expert interlocutors through his visual story telling by combining reportage (written captions and essays) and photo assemblages (the photo archives for The Toxic Price of Leather).23 The stories begin in the outskirts of Kanpur, where poisoned vegetables bloom in once-rich farmlands: we were once the “King of Roses”, says Sonalal Yadav, the local head of the farmer’s community, until the levels of chromium in the groundwater reached critical levels. Then came the asthma, the skin conditions, the liver damage, the kidney failures and even death. Such snippets of testimony dot both the photo archive and the pollution landscapes in the film. Ordinary lives and local social demands for clean water make a comeback through the media advocacy of a “foreign” photojournalist, arriving fresh on the scene of a long popular mobilisations against tannery pollutants. Most importantly, as we ricochet between images of polluted water to close-ups of damaged bodies (mostly discoloured feet, but also faces and hands), the political syntax of harm becomes palpable to viewers – those embedded “in” the popular struggles and those captivated by the spectacle of distant suffering. Whichever the case, Gallagher’s focus on the leather tannery as the iconic polluter represents a visual synecdoche for similar situations in other states, most notably the Vellore anti-pollution struggle for the Palar River basin. Further, the water media testimonials disclose public scepticism about legislative and juridical action, since the tanneries continue their assault on water. As citizens of Jajmau offer their desire to make water through embodied gesture and speech, the visual record continues to foreground the will to clean water as basic human survival.

Flood: the logic of directionality The water creeps closer to the chest. Directed by the big dam, it gathers and swells, drowning the riverbank, farmlands, homes. The everyday and the treasured disperse in drift and flow. But the satyagrahis at Domkhedi Village stand firm with the Narmada Bachao Movement’s unforgettable mantra: “We shall drown, but we shall not move”. They appear in the news, a famous image of popular mobilisation against

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Plate 11.6 NewsX channel (“Fighting the Tide”), Jal Satyagraha at Omkareshwar

Dam, 28 September 2012. Source: Frame grab from YouTube post

big hydroelectric projects with big impacts on lives and livelihoods. A broad range of protestors offer audiovisual testimony: documentarians rush to record an ecologic that attends to the natural flow of great rivers whose waters and silt make life possible (Plate 11.6). The visual record of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada Struggle), one of the biggest social movements in India since independence, is formidable. Elsewhere, I have recounted the long political solidarity between documentary filmmakers and the many popular fronts of the social movement. Documentary media advocacy around the movement arises from relationships between filmmakers and protestors harvested and fostered over a number of years. Hence, in this instance, water media makers explicitly attempt to capture what it means to be “affected” by the coming of big dams. From the perspective of those who resolutely stand against the massive industrial capture and redirection of water flow, there is a critique of near-sighted, macro-scalar, “longrange” agendas that misses the real long range of ecologically sustainable plans. Launched against the Indian state (the federal government), regional governments (of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan), corporations (the German Siemens, the American Ogden Energy Group and the Japanese Official Development Assistance, to name a few) and institutions of global governance (such as the World Bank), the NBA is a 33 social movement.24 The movement seeks to curtail the single largest river valley hydro irrigation project in India involving the building of 30 major dams, 135 medium and 3,000 minor dams along the 820-mile Narmada River in western India spanning 4 states. Construction on one of the largest dams, the Sardar Sarovar Project that has evoked virulent opposition, began as early as 1961. But the project gathered speed as late as 1985 when the World Bank agreed to fund it. Proponents of the project argue the dams would bring irrigation, electricity and drinking water to vast populations.

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According to government estimates, 152,000 people would be affected by the project, 37,000 of them indigenous peoples or adivasis, while most other agencies together with NBA documentarians put the count of the dam-affected closer to 400,000. The “NBA docs” (as I shall call them) shot on film and video have played a robust role in garnering global legibility for a series of heterogeneous struggles in the river valley involving heterogeneous actors with multiple grievances, demands and agendas. These include K. P. Sashi and Ratna Mathur’s A Valley Refuses to Die (India, 1988), Ali Kazimi’s Narmada: A Valley Rises (Canada, 1994), Anant Patwardhan and Simantini Dhuru’s The Narmada Diary (India, 1995), Anurag Singh and Jharna Jhaveri’s Kaise Jeebo Re! (How Shall We Survive, India, 1997), Sanjay Kak’s Words on Water (India, 2002) and Franny Armstrong’s Drowned Out (Britain, 2002), along with two shorter videos, Aravinda Pillamarri’s I Will Report Honestly (India, 1999) and Leena Pendharkar’s autobiographical foray, My Narmada Diary (USA, 2002). The documentaries range in their focus from preoccupations with deep ecology (in the Sashi/Mathur film) to shooting one long encounter between the NBA and the state (Kazimi’s footage of an early face-off, December–January 1990). The testimonies featured in these documentaries speak of an “ecologic”: the logic of oikos (or the household) understood as dwelling in an interconnected system (oikonomia or economy) of human and nonhuman relations.25 They offer an ecologic as a polemic against developmental projects undertaken by the state that provide compensation only for the loss of property – if that. They intimate the losses go further, deeper. Some may be tabulated (land, home, cattle, crops) while others remain incalculable (forest, water, community, generational memory, religious practice). Most importantly, the documentarians not only record the testimonies but also attempt to translate that ecologic in their cinematic language. What emerges in their water media is a political aesthetic conceived in solidarity with the aspirations of the protestors. A key strategy in the political aesthetic is to heighten the spectatorial affect suturing the spectator to the river as a place of repose so as to crystallises “our” relation to river ecology (humans, plants, water). A haptic cinema, the NBA docs work at emplacing us “in” the river, “in” the forest. The handheld camera rushing close to plants and the water, often in extreme close-ups, already offers kinaesthetic pleasures of moving in this landscape. We spend much time moving on the river from village to village, the rocking motion becoming haptic grammar as we progress. The filmmakers facilitate further immersion by turning up the volume of the natural world: water as acoustic lapping becomes louder until it surrounds us. The combination of the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic perceptions, as Laura Marks has argued, renders the river intimate, a living breathing organism coextensive with us.26 When spectators connect with the river, when they begin to dwell in the landscape that are marked for disappearance, the reflections of the “damaffected” in testimonies dotting the documentaries begin to make sound political sense. Several sequences illustrate this haptic dimension. One exemplary instance occurs 30 minutes into Sanjay Kak’s Words on Water where we come upon two men winnowing grain in the middle of a soon-to-be-submerged field. The sequence is shot at a low angle, with a full-shot of both men at a diagonal (with one closer to us than the other) swinging a cloth filled with grain between them. The edge of the cloth reaches right up to the camera, out of focus as a blur of showering grain hits the lens. Lulled by the swinging motions of rich harvest, we are caught in motion and

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lulled by repetitive chik-chik of falling grain as the figure closest to us fades into rack focus before the dissolve. A similar sequence in Jhaveri/Singh’s Kaise Jeebo, Re! plunges us into such rhythms of the adivasi world, only this time with fishermen caught in silhouettes as they fling their nets onto the river (the shimmer of net, like the grain, shot in close up), as well as with the ferrymen whose oars we habitually follow into the river. In such immersive cinema, the spectator “shares” the consciousness of the adivasis whose story of social, economic and ecological loss, and the consequent politicisation the documentaries attempt to tell. Emplacing spectators in the river ecosystem, the documentaries ensure what Jane Gaines notes of social change documentaries in general: the incitement of spectatorial “political mimesis” as the basis of solidarity.27

Coda In these scenes, I have tried to illustrate the ecological perspective on water concerns around drought, pollution and flood. The focus on basis logics at the heart of these problems – of quantity (drought), of quality (pollution) and of directionality (flood) – points to the epistemological shift that drives popular struggles over water. As loose alliances coalesce around a particular situation (such the opening of a factory or the building of a dam), water media capture the tension between the industrial rationality of the Anthropocene and the ecological rationality of environmentalism. “Water democracies” are new modes of political organising around a global environmental imaginary. Thus those who seem to resist industrial change, those who appear as the pre-moderns, are in fact those who are the most far-sighted historical agents with stakes in common futures. The water media illuminate memories, dreams and desires as well as goals, plans and agendas, and projects and translates all struggles into global idiom inasmuch as it harvests locally embedded solidarities. From smart card to plastic pot, a possible South Asia flashes upon the inward eye.

Notes 1 ‘Sarvajal Builds Clean Water ATMs in India’, Missions Box, 7 March 2018 (https://missionsbox.org/ news/sarvajal-builds-clean-water-atms-india/), accessed on 15 March 2019 . 2 Ismail Serageldin, the vice president of the World Bank, made the original projection, popularised in the 2008 Goldman Sachs announcement: “At the risk of being alarmist, we see parallels with Malthusian economics. Globally, water consumption is doubling every 20 years. By 2025, it is estimated that about one third of the world’s population will not have access to adequate drinking water”, http://zener gywater.blogspot.com/2008/06/goldman-sachs-water-petroleum-of-future.html, accessed on 15 February 2017. 3 Anand Shah moved to India in 2001 and established the for-profit Sarvajal (one arm of the non-profit, Piramal Foundation) in 2008, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/anand_shah_clean_water_india/2688/, accessed on 15 February 2017. The 20 March 2013 issue of The Economist featured Shah’s enterprise as a high-tech solution (machines hooked to servers via SMS, pre-paid smart cards) to an endemic economic problem, www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/social-entrepreneurs-india accessed on 24 March 2017. 4 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted a litany of adverse water impacts because of climate change that includes freshwater-related risks, a reduction in surface and groundwater resources

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in some regions and intensified “competition for water among agriculture, ecosystems, settlements, industry, and energy production, affecting regional water, energy, and food security”, www.huffington post.com/marc-ross/forget-star-wars-get-ready-for-water-wars_b_9020188.html, accessed on 15 February 2017. See the principles of water democracy in Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005. The implied constitutional right to water was first recognised by the Kerala High Court in 1990 (Attakoya Thangal v. Union of India), followed by the 2004 Plachimada judgement recounted next. Plachimada is a part of the Palakkad district of 2.6 million people, with 64% of its geographical area cultivated for food crops. Within Plachimada, most of the population are landless adivasis who work as agricultural wage labourers. Thus the main indictment against Coca Cola’s depletion of the water table was that the wells ran dry or were filled with milky brackish water unsuitable for drinking, cooking or other domestic use. For more details, see Jananeethi: The People’s Initiative for Human Rights, Jananeethi Report: On the Amplitude of Environmental and Human Rights Ramification, Thissur: Jananeethi, 2003, p. 3. The term adivasi means ‘original inhabitants’, etymologically quite different from the official categories that register these indigenous groups as Scheduled Tribes. One of the best elaborations on the term can be found in David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. M C Mehta v Union of India 2004(12) SCC 118 cited in PN Venugopal, Coca Cola moving out of Plachimada (27 January 2006), www.indiatogether.org/2006/jan/env-cokesaga.htm, accessed on 25 February 2017. The declaration reads, “Water is the basis of life; it is the gift of nature; it belongs to all living beings on earth. It is not a private property but a common resource for the sustenance of all. It is our fundamental obligation to prevent water scarcity and pollution and to preserve it for generations. Water is not a commodity. We should resist all criminal attempts to marketise, privatise and corporatise water. Only through these means we can ensure the fundamental and inalienable right to water for the people all over the world”. Declaration (World Water Conference participants, Pudussery, January 23, 2004). Haksar, who won the 2005 Silver Lion at Cannes, is well known for his stylised ads on fashion, jewellery, cuisine and other consumer goods. The paper remained unfazed, with its managing director (also a member of Parliament), Virendra Kumar, asserting that since the paper does not accept Coke or Pepsi or Palm Oil ads, it is free to campaign on issues of its choice. A 1997 study conducted by the Central Pollution Board on groundwater quality in Kanpur revealed CR VI levels of 6.2 mg/L (where the Indian government places the limit at 0.05 mg/L). ‘The Ganga Action Plan bears no fruit’, The Hindu, 28 August 2004 www.thehindu.com/2004/08/28/ stories/2004082807430400.htm, accessed on 15 February 2017. In the original petition of 1985, Mehta requested the court to order the leather tanneries of the Jajmau district of Kanpur to stop discharging their untreated effluent into the river. He also claimed that the Municipal Corporation of Kanpur was not undertaking treatment of domestic sewage. The petition named 89 respondents. Among them were 75 tanneries of the Jajmau district of the city, the Union of India, the Chair of the Central Pollution Control Board, the chair of the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board and the Indian Standards Institute. A water-intensive industry, even small tanneries (capable of processing 3–4 tonnes a day) use well over 100,000 litres of water daily (equivalent to the household requirement of 2,500 people). The Supreme Court verdict on Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum vs. Union of India Case, 1996, addressing tannery pollution in Tamil Nadu’s Palar river basin is another landmark in judicial activism with

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regard to environmental policy. Once again, the verdict was a response to popular mobilisation channelled through a citizen’s forum. The popular front laid the pathway toward juridical assumption of the polluter-pays and precautionary principles of global environmental nomenclature. The Save Ganga Movement, a Gandhian non-violent movement for a non-violent culture of development, is a campaign of the National Women’s Organization formed by Rama Rauta in 1998. Rama Rauta is also a member of the expert committee National Ganga River Basin Authority, http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/Fight-for-Ganga-continues-from-Kashi-to-Pune/articleshow/13227676. cms?referral=PM, accessed on 9 January 2017. As in Plachimada, there are iconic heroes in the greater struggle: Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand who took sanyas in 2011 (previously known as Professor G. D. Agrawal) went on a fast for a clean Ganges in 2013 (www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/a-call-for-the-ganga/article5192988. ece, accessed on 15 February 2017), while the 34-year-old ascetic, Swami Nigamananda, died in 2011 after fasting for nearly four months to save the river Ganges from pollution (http://blogs.wsj.com/ indiarealtime/2011/06/14/unsung-swamis-fast-leads-to-death/,accessed on 15 February 2017). “We did a study with the Blacksmith Institute, in collaboration with the central pollution control board. We found that the groundwater was very severely contaminated from Chromium VI”, said Satish Sinha, associate director of Toxics Link, a New Delhi-based non-profit organisation, https://pulitzercenter.org/ reporting/india-toxic-price-leather-0, accessed on 12 January 2017. Arindam Mukherjee, ‘Slow Poison’, Galli, 1 December 2013 (www.galli.in/2013/12/slow-poisonarindam-mukherjee.html), accessed on 12 January 2017; and Guilio Di Sturco, ‘Ganges Death of A River’, www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2015/02/giulio-di-sturco-ganges-death-of-a-river/, accessed on 12 January 2017. Gallagher went on to make a short film, The Toxic Price of Leather, http://gallagher-photo.com/environmentalstories/toxic-price-leather-short-film/, accessed on 12 January 2017. The first stirrings of active struggle began in 1978, but these turned into a palpable social movement in 1985 when the charismatic Medha Patkar, a social scientist from Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, started working for mobilisation against the submergence zone in the villages of Maharashtra. Patkar’s urban contacts drew media attention first, and then the participation of city-based non-profit organisations who began disseminating news of the struggle in briefings, newsletters and films, lobbying legislators, collecting funds and organising solidarity events to keep the NBA in the news. The efforts on the part of north-based non-profit organisations pressuring international funding agencies to withdraw aid met with substantial success in 1992, when the World Bank withdrew its support for the Sardar Sarovar Project in 1993. Oecologie was one of the neologisms coined by Ernst Haeckel, a disciple of Darwin, in 1866. A term derived from the Greek oikos, referring originally to family household and its operations, oecologie, for Haeckel, referred to “living organisms of the earth constitute a single economic unit resembling a household or family dwelling”. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Such a conception moves against more romantic separations of dwelling from property, as William Cronon’s breakaway short book from 1983 insisted. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Jane Gaines, ‘Political Mimesis’, in Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (eds.), Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 84–102. See also Thomas Waugh, ‘Introduction: Why Documentaries Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries’, in Thomas Waugh (ed.), Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984, pp. xi–xxvii.

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References Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Declaration (World Water Conference participants, Pudussery, January 23, 2004), Reported in ‘Water is Not Private Property’, The Hindu, 24 January 2004. Gaines, Jane, ‘Political Mimesis’, in Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (eds.), Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 84–102. Hardiman, David, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Jananeethi: The People’s Initiative for Human Rights, Jananeethi Report - On the Amplitude of Environmental and Human Rights Ramification, compiled by the Fact-Finding Team. Thissur: Jananeethi, 2003. Laclau, Ernesto, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005. Marks, Laura, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Shiva, Vandana, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002. Waugh, Thomas, ‘Introduction: Why Documentaries Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries’, in Thomas Waugh (ed.), Show us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984, pp. xi–xxvii. Worster, Donald, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Websites accessed ‘Coca-Cola Moving Out of Plachimada?’ India Together, 21 March 2019 (www.indiatogether.org/2006/jan/ env-cokesaga.htm), accessed on 25 February 2017. Di Sturco, Guilio, ‘Ganges Death of A River’, www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2015/02/giulio-di-sturco-gangesdeath-of-a-river/, accessed on 12 January 2017. ‘Fight for Ganga Continues From Kashi to Pune’, The Times of India, 17 May 2012 (http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/Fight-for-Ganga-continues-from-Kashi-to-Pune/articleshow/13227676. cms?referral=PM), accessed on 9 January 2017. Gallagher, Sean, ‘India: The Toxic Price of Leather’, The Pulitzer Center, 4 February 2014 (https://pulitzer center.org/reporting/india-toxic-price-leather-0), accessed on 12 January 2017. Gallagher, Sean, The Toxic Price of Leather (Kanpur, December 2013), http://gallagher-photo.com/environ mental-stories/toxic-price-leather-short-film/, accessed on 12 January 2017. ‘Goldman Sachs: Water—the petroleum of the future’, Zenergy Water, 5 June 2008 (http://zenergywater. blogspot.com/2008/06/goldman-sachs-water-petroleum-of-future.html), accessed on 15 February 2017. Mukherjee, Arindam, ‘Slow Poison’, Galli, 1 December 2013 (www.galli.in/2013/12/slow-poison-arindammukherjee.html), accessed on 12 January 2017. Ranjan, Anjana, ‘A Call for Ganga’, The Hindu, 2 October 2013 (www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-andenvironment/a-call-for-the-ganga/article5192988.ece), accessed on 15 February 2017. Ross, Marc, ‘Forget Star wars; Get ready for Water Wars’, The Huffington Post, 20 January 2016 (www.huffing tonpost.com/marc-ross/forget-star-wars-get-ready-for-water-wars_b_9020188.html), accessed on 15 February 2017. ‘Sarvajal Builds Clean Water ATMs in India’, Missions Box, 7 March 2018 (https://missionsbox.org/news/ sarvajal-builds-clean-water-atms-india/), accessed on 15 March 2019. Stancati, Margherita, ‘Unsung Swami’s Fast Leads to Death’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2011 (http://blogs. wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/06/14/unsung-swamis-fast-leads-to-death/), accessed on 15 February 2017.

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‘The Ganga Action Plan bears no fruit’, The Hindu, 28 August 2004 (www.thehindu.com/2004/08/28/ stories/2004082807430400.htm), accessed on 15 February 2017. Woody, Todd, ‘How High-Tech is Helping Bring Clean Water to India’, Yale Environment 360, 5 September 2013 (http://e360.yale.edu/feature/anand_shah_clean_water_india/2688/), accessed on 15 February 2017. Woolridge, Adrian, ‘Water for All’, The Economist, 20 March 2013 (www.economist.com/blogs/schum peter/2013/03/social-entrepreneurs-india), accessed on 24 March 2017.

Part IV

Mediations

12 The religious and affective actualities of the Yamuna Conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi Padma D. Maitland*

N

igambodh Ghat, a small stretch of houses and cremation grounds along the river Yamuna in New Delhi, is, for those who visit and write about the city, the stalwart of the city’s ancient traditions.1 There seems to be a general feeling that the Ghat is a place caught up in the cycles of eras past. It evokes a sense of pandits (priests) and sadhus (ascetics) sitting for generations on the riverbank, watching the steady flow of time with the ever-changing currents. William Dalrymple chose to conclude his definitive account of the city at Nigambodh Ghat. For him, the murmur of Sanskrit hymns being recited while devotees pour holy water and milk over sacred lingams (markers of the god Shiva), along with the other daily rituals of priests and mourners, and the architectonics of temples and steps is the record of “the most remarkable Delhi survival of all”.2 It was here that Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, is said to have recovered his memories in the form of shastras (scriptures) that emerged from the river with seasonal flooding.3 The association with Brahma is, for Dalrymple, “a wonderful legend, the mythical story of Delhi’s first birth linked with the undeniable fact of its annual rebirth in the monsoon rains”.4 And it is to Nigambodh Ghat that people continue to return to mark the sacred passages of their lives – from birth to death – proceeding down the steps towards the river’s bank (Plate 12.1). Pilgrims, tourists and mourners alike come to Nigambodh Ghat to remember and to forget. As the major cremation grounds of the city, it is here that people gather to perform the final rites for those who have passed. Others come to the priests living by the river for rituals honouring the passing years and their own duties towards both gods and family. They also come to swim, to perform morning asana (postures; practice) or simply to take a boat ride. Some ghats (landings; bank of steps) are home to pandits. Others are wrestling grounds and cow-shelters (goshala). Yet others house boatmen or flower vendors selling garlands of marigolds and rose petals. While Nigambodh Ghat may have originally referred to a single set of steps descending into the river, today, the Ghat is composed of several smaller ghats, each attached to individual homes and associated with specific families. Ghat number 23 is the largest and most public – the aarthi sthal or ceremonial grounds of the Yamuna in Delhi – used as a kind of community space for daily rituals.

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Plate 12.1 View of Nigambodh Ghat from the Yamuna River, New Delhi, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

Like numerous other holy ghats across India, Nigambodh Ghat draws its significance from its relationship to a river. Holy places known as tirthas or fords are found across the subcontinent.5 They mark places of confluence, where the sacred and the mundane meet along the river. As pilgrimage centres, tirthas are important because they mobilise acts of virtue, enhancing gestures of devotion beyond everyday acts of kindness and carrying them from one side (of existence) to the other. Cremation grounds are often placed by rivers and ghats, a powerful metaphor for the dynamic flux of life and death vividly enacted through ritual and practice. The corpse is burned, the skull broken. Reduced to ash, what was a body is sprinkled into the currents of the river. Pandit Premchand Sharma, one of the oldest residents of Nigambodh Ghat, has spent his entire life by the river, watching the cycles of life and death as they unfold on the banks of Yamuna (Plate 12.2). At 78, he is arguably the most senior resident of a small group of priests who eke out their living there. He grew up at Nigambodh Ghat, was trained there by his father and gurus (teachers) in the art of puja (worship; ritual) and has seen the river and the city change around him: “We have lived here for many generations. So for a long time”. As a pandit (priest), he

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Plate 12.2 Pandit Premchand Sharma, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

performs rituals for a living, acting as an intermediary for visitors who wish to engage with the river through devotional acts and the performance of pujas. I met with him over a series of visits in July 2015 to hear his account of the river and how it has changed over time. He described a life lived in relationship to the flowing patterns of Yamuna. One that has always been intimately linked to the river’s course through Delhi, but recently has had to adapt to the changing religious and physical realities of the water once it reaches Nigambodh Ghat. From its origin at the base of a glacier in Yamunotri, high up in the Himalayas, the river Yamuna carves its route through the northern plains of India. From Delhi, it moves on, flowing into the Ganges where it is joined by the river Saraswati (an allusive river that is believed to exist, but never seen) at the triveni sangam in Allahabad. Together the three rivers then continue on to the ocean. While the water of the Yamuna is certainly sacred, the river’s legend is somewhat sullied by its sensuous curves and close relationship to death. Yamuna is the sister of Yama, the lord of death. The river’s serpentine form is attributed to the Hindu god Krishna’s brother Balaram, who was incensed that Yamuna (the goddess from whom the river gets its name) would not “yield to his lust [so he] dragged her by the hair zig-zag across the plains of Hindustan”.6 For some pujas, water from the Ganges, or ganga jal, is thus still required. It is widely believed that, unlike the Yamuna, water from the Ganges can never be polluted. Absent of any degradation of its own, the

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water from the Ganges washes away the sins of other bodies and substances, liquid or corporeal. A few drops are often enough. For rituals at Nigambodh Ghat, ganga jal, or ganga pani as it is sometimes called, is mixed with water from the Yamuna before being used for ceremonies. Nonetheless, like the Ganges, bathing and drinking the waters of the Yamuna purifies the soul, removing the sins of those living and passed. For those residing by the river, such ablutions form a part of daily life. Ablutions are done in the morning and at night; water is used to clean the body and then offered back to the river (Plate 12.3). Perhaps one reason so many people regularly return to the Yamuna is to witness or to acknowledge change and to see it reflected in the water as it courses through the north Indian plains. Having traversed its way through small and large towns, the Yamuna passes through some of the oldest and densest parts of the city once it reaches Delhi. To travel along the river’s banks is to travel through the sedimentary layers of Delhi’s development: from its earlier mythic origins, through Mughal times, colonial occupation and then the modern development of India. While the banks of the river have moved and shifted over time, the city and its multiple iterations have

Plate 12.3 Resident of Nigambodh Ghat performing

morning ablutions, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

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grown to meet its edges.7 Ghats, temples, farms, factories, mansions and slums edge ever closer to the river and fill the space of the riverbed. “Our family has been here since the Mughal period”, Premchand Sharma recounted as we sat in his house, resting indoors to escape the summer heat.8 We shifted here during the time of the British Raj. When the English built that bridge [the Yamuna Railway or Iron Bridge, 1866], then we moved to this place. Before that we lived further back, by the Hanuman Temple, back by the bypass. It is a very ancient Hanuman Temple, the market Hanuman. That is where the cremation grounds were.

Premchand Sharma’s family traces a genealogy of more than 300 years by the river. In his room, pictures of his parents and grandparents face a small shrine on the opposite wall. The photographs are strung with flowers and hung in a place of honour. The men in his family seem to lead unusually long lives. His grandfather passed away in 1954 at the age of 90, and his father lived to a similarly old age. Premchand Sharma lives with his son, grandson and extended family now. On certain occasions, the house is further crowded with visiting priests who stay for about a week or so while doing pujas by the river. Families visit Premchand Sharma after the cremation of their relatives. They bring the ashes of the deceased in bundles or in pots, and the contents are then cast into the river as part of a ritual ceremony. While he lives next to the cremation grounds, Premchand Sharma’s work is not that of burning bodies. Rather, he performs pujas such as pind daan, rituals that follow cremation and which are said to remove any remaining obscuration or sins. We do puja work here: Kriyakarm [last rights], pind daan [ancestral rites], yog daan [rites of contribution]. We work for those who have passed. People come to us from afar, from the villages, bringing bones, the bones and such of death, for the antim sanskar [final rites]. That is the work that happens here.

The Yamuna charts a balance between death and memory. Because of its association with Yama, it holds a special significance for final rites. The myth of Brahma, the god of creation, and his act of remembrance by the river suggests that recreation, rebirth and memory are also part of the Yamuna’s cycle. As Premchand Sharma further related, This place is called Nigambodh Ghat. Here is where Brahma-ji, lost his knowledge. After performing austerities, he recovered it. That is why this place has the name nigam, which means cycles. Bodh means knowledge. So it is where Brahma-ji got his knowledge back. It is very ancient, this place.

It is a practice kept alive each day through the devotional acts of those who live by and visit the river, saddhus and pandits continuing a tradition of austerities and rituals in the hopes of gaining some form of greater knowledge. The Yamuna is also made sacred by the mythic landscape that it traverses. It passes through the pilgrimage centres of Vrindavan and Mathura, the famous birthplace and playground of Krishna in northern India. The river carries with it the history and sanctity of those places of worship and devotion.

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[The Yamuna] is a very old river. Holy sites like Vrindavan, Gokul, they are on the banks of the Yamuna. It is very beautiful on the banks of the river. It is Yamraj’s sister.

As a young boy, Premchand Sharma had gone on a pilgrimage with his mother to the char dham (four abodes), the pilgrimage centres that mark the four corners of the Indian subcontinent, circumscribing a terrain of countless other sacred spots. Lasting several months, a significant section of Premchand Sharma’s pilgrimage was done on foot. One particularly memorable trip was a hike to Yamunotri, the site from where the river Yamuna emerges. While it may not have changed Premchand Sharma’s understanding of the river, it did change his relationship to it. After making the journey, Premchand Sharma was, thereafter, someone who had visited the major holy sites of India, someone who had made a religious tour of the country. Premchand Sharma’s son and grandson have been unable to make the same trip. It is hard, they say, to find the time and money for such a long journey. The entire family does, however, visit Haridwar or Rishikesh in the Himalayas each year to collect water from the Ganges. “Water from the Ganga will never be dirty”, Premchand Sharma explains. “It can sit in a bottle for ten years. We use water from the Yamuna river and mix it with ganga pani”. Details like this take on a greater significance when juxtaposed with other accounts that relate how bottles of water taken from the Yamuna, while they look clear at first, often turn red by the end of the day.9 During a puja performed by Premchand Sharma, water taken from the Yamuna was clearly tinted black.10 In fact, for the most part, water from the hand pump behind the house is used for pujas rather than water from the river. A few drops of water from the Ganges are enough to prepare the groundwater for ceremonies. And what happens if you run out of water from the Ganges, I asked? “If we run out, ganga pani is available in the market nearby. Ten rupees for a bottle like this”, Premchand Sharma said, showing me a small plastic bottle of water. During the puja I attended, a young couple sat on the steps of the ghat adjoining Premchand Sharma’s house. They had brought food, yogurt, cloth and sweets for the puja as an offering to deceased member of the family. Periodically, the husband would be sent to get a jug of water from the hand pump at the front of the house. The pind daan ritual involved making small round balls of grain that were then offered one by one onto a tray in honour of family members (Plate 12.4). As family names were recited, offerings were placed on top of each round ball: yogurt, black seeds, thread and a red dot placed on each. Flowers were then strung around the balls. Between asking for the names of family members and giving instructions on what to do or say next, Premchand Sharma recited Sanskrit verses. The young couple dutifully performed the actions required of them. At the end of the ceremony, the couple took the tray with all its offerings to the river, throwing the balls into the water one by one, before submerging the tray to let the remaining offerings float away. It seems more is cast into the river than taken from it. Before placing these final gifts into the river, Premchand Sharma instructed the couple to remove the thread holding together a string of flowers. “Otherwise”, he said, “people will fish out the mala [garland of flowers] and resell it”. The small number of houses at the Nigambodh Ghat where Premchand Sharma and his family live comprises a hamlet between the cremation grounds and a nearby temple. It is not far from

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Plate 12.4 Pandit Premchand Sharma preparing for a puja, 2015.

Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

the bus and train terminals, the Civil Lines area and several sports arenas. One can reach the small group of houses by walking through the crematorium or by boat. On a balmy day in July 2015, I walked through the cremation grounds; past the larger-than-life statues of Shiva, Buddha and Indra; and through the smoky clusters of fire pits full of burning logs and bodies. Leaving the main crematorium, I found families sitting, huddled against a concrete wall under high tin roofs, watching the funeral pyres closest to the river. Such cremations can last for hours, and those closest to the deceased will stay until the end. The cremation grounds at Nigambodh Ghat feel new. It is not the electric crematorium built down the road in the 1950s, but, nonetheless, the compound is modern. Rather than pyres, wood is burned in low-built beds that are orderly, and the structures made to house them are of thin industrial material, such as concrete, corrugated tin and small iron beams. From the cremation grounds one can see the river. Along the banks, before the old iron bridge, just beyond a banyan tree dripping its leaves and branches towards the sandy banks and the filmy surface of the water, are a series of ghats, each at a slightly different level. A few boats, painted bright red and blue, are docked there. If one stays long enough, one will see boatmen hopping on and off, sometimes followed by quivering passengers unused to the movement of water (Plate 12.5).

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Plate 12.5 Nigambodh Ghat with the metro rail line in the background, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

There are around 30 houses on the riverbank at Nigambodh Ghat. Each house is narrow and built around a straight pathway that leads to a set of steps descending into the river. A back alley serves to connect the houses and provides public facilities for the residence. When I asked which houses were the oldest, I was told that they were all built at about the same time, but some had decayed faster than others. Even in the summer heat, the compound bustles with life. Children from nearby settlements come to swim and play in the river while devotees stream through the narrow passageways to pay homage to the river. Premchand Sharma’s residence, too, leads straight to the river (Plate 12.6). What has changed in our life? The water has become dirty. Dirty water drains into it. The government gives it no special attention. Earlier, when some government officials came to do their work, they did nothing to clean it up. They made nothing. They should have blocked the drainage from the sewage plants and stopped the dirty water, and made something to treat it, clean it up, before releasing it back into the river. Sometimes during the rainy season, there is a heavy rainfall in the mountains and due to that there is more water which comes and cleans away all of the pollution. Those people who are working on this, they don’t take any initiative, or do anything for the cleaning of the river.

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Plate 12.6 Pandit Premchand Sharma standing in the doorway of his house at Nigambodh Ghat

and watching the Yamuna River, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

It rained some days before, so we already cleaned the ghat by ourselves. But others put everything into river. Those people who work in the city, they put everything into the Yamuna. Walls that are torn down, they put them into the water. Two months earlier they did that. Clay, bricks, and everything, were thrown in.

We walked to the back of the house to see the condition of the family ghat. When the rain comes then everything will be washed away. Sometimes, the rain happens in the winter. Now the winter water is coming. The water is cold. Last time, the pollution had been washed away, but this time there was no heavy rainfall, so it has accumulated.

“Ours was dirty like that”, Sharma said, pointing towards his neighbour’s steps, “like those two are now”. A short walk down river reveals just how much work goes into keeping the steps of the ghat clean. Silt and garbage collect on the riverbank with the ebb and flow of the river. Men with large shovels scrape the sludge back into the river in the morning. In other areas, garbage is left to build up.

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As an index of the moving riverbed, the banks on the opposing side of the river have noticeably reduced over the course of a month. The banks on the side of the Nigambodh Ghat have, in contrast, noticeably built up. A small temple opposite the crematorium, once nestled amidst the river sand and shrubs, sits starkly on a concrete base, the shore having been eaten away by the moving river currents. A man in a makeshift raft paddles softly upstream to collect garbage. Photographs, posters, paper plates laden with candles or flowers and clumps of water hyacinth float by. The water moves slowly, its surface marbled by spiralling eddies of oil and mud. Months later, the ground will once again be reformed on the opposite shore. The remnants of the debris that has accumulated will shift again to be washed downstream or covered over by another wave of silt and garbage. The river floods semi-annually. The worst flood in living memory in Delhi was in 1978.11 While the rising Yamuna is usually contained within the plain of the river, the water occasionally rises above the levies, clogs the sewage lines of the city and seeps into the capital city. Every four or five years, the area floods. It can last a month to a month and half or so; every year, every two years, or three, five. It happened in 2013, but not in 2014. Maybe it will occur in 2015, but it hasn’t happened yet. The future is God’s wish. Every five to ten years, water comes. [The last time] when the water rose, the railways were ruined for 3 kilometres. All the roads were stopped. Water can do anything.

The pandit and his family seem reconciled to the fact that life next to a river means adapting to it. Water rises and recedes. It is the nature of such bodies. When the level of the river rises, the family simply moves onto the roof of their house, living there under tarpaulin sheets until the water subsides. They point with pride to a spot five inches above the doorway saying, “The water was up to here”. Premchand Sharma’s neighbour chimes in, This is our area and we never don’t like it. Weather has no effect. Weather is not a problem. It can be hot or difficult, but it is not a problem. We understand it as god’s gift. You will not find any place like this in India.

Much like the rise and fall of the water level, memories and perceptions of the river ebb and flow. It is widely acknowledged that the river is dirty, but it is hard to decipher if people’s perception of the water is also tainted. Contradictory as it may seem, the Yamuna appears to remain pure in people’s imagination, even if it is widely acknowledged to be polluted. Before the water was clean and thousands of people would come every day to bathe. Even people who lived outside [the city] would come to see the Yamuna. But then when the water became dirty, the government didn’t pay attention. They limited the water. They constructed dams, to stop the water, for people’s drinking water, about 25 years ago. And, they constructed bridges. Before that, the water flowed better. Everything was better. There was no problem. Further up there is another dam, still further down there is another. And now the water stands still. Before it flowed. And so, the water is generally dirty. The water was better when it was running. And then it was stopped. That is what I think.

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Before people used to come and get water from the river in the morning for their cooking. Big, important people would come to bathe in the river. Their servants would come and take water for cooking. That is no longer the case. Do you see anyone here? Who would go in this water? These days, people drink distilled water. Our water is in bottles. Before, in different places, people would build piaos [places for the public dispensation of water] as a religious act. Now it is a business and people sell water. My childhood here was very nice. I went swimming every morning. The family did yoga in the water – water yoga. With my father and uncle, we all did yoga. Everyone did yoga in the water! Every day. Now we stopped because the water is so dirty. But if the [flow of] water increases and the water gets a bit cleaner, then we will be able to start again. Now we are scared to go into the water because of all the waste that is put into it. Sometimes people throw glass and metal into the river, they don’t think that it might hurt someone. If we get hurt or injured, then we will get sick because the water is so polluted. We enter the water now only to clean it, about two hours every day. We go into the water and pull out the rocks and whatever else has been thrown in. That way, those people who want to take a bath can do so. But we don’t go swimming any more these days because you can get quite sick from the water.

Today, the Yamuna in Delhi is shadowed by development. Much of the contaminants flow into the river during its course through Delhi.12 A newly constructed overpass follows the twists and turns of the riverbed. A large coal power plant that supplies Delhi with electricity sits in one of the crooks of its banks. New bridges are built to crisscross the two sides of the river in order to shorten the commute time for the increasing number of residents living and working on both sides of the river. Four dams stop the water in order to feed the city’s demand for drinking water. But who would drink the water? In a recent study on the city’s engagement with the river, it was found that while many residents of Delhi recognised that the city’s water came from the Yamuna, they were unwilling to accept that the water they drank in their homes could be the same water.13 Indeed, there are striking corollaries between the priest who chooses not to see the water as dirty during his daily prayers and the residents of the city who will not admit that their drinking water might be contaminated. It is similarly hard for both sides to acknowledge that their daily practices – of ablutions or offerings, whether by the river or in the bathroom – might in some way contribute to the contamination of the river.14 Divergent accounts reveal different attempts to reconcile the quixotic qualities of the river and insights into its present condition. The Yamuna continues to play an important role as a source of water and raw materials for the city. From providing water to homes to field irrigation and sand for construction, the river remains a constant source of life, material goods and supplies. The riverbed is even an important tract of land, used by many farmers to grow grains and vegetables. The Yamuna’s symbolic role as a river has, however, ceased to be an important part of the city’s life. It is a resource fundamental to urban life, but it is no longer an embedded aspect of the city’s culture.15 As a religious site, the ghats along the river have the capacity to reanimate the river’s fluid presence within the city.16 The flowing mass becomes a river goddess, and the busy interactions of land and water a striking image of the city’s life as simultaneously sacred and profane.

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While the intense delight in the liquescence of the river has perhaps disappeared from Delhi, there are other places where the city’s affective engagement with the joy of moving through water is maintained: the numerous swimming pools scattered across the city. It is interesting to note that a number of men who grew up in Nigambodh Ghat – men who might have otherwise become pandits on the riverbank – have taken jobs as lifeguards in hotels and corporate swimming pools. Premchand Sharma used to swim every day. His father taught him to swim. He was about 5 the first time he went swimming. It was during a flood season when the water of the Yamuna was high. In turn, Premchand Sharma taught his own son to swim, who then taught his son to swim. And now Premchand Sharma’s son Manoj Kumar Sharma is a lifeguard and swim coach. As Manoj Sharma recounted, Yes, I swim. And I teach swimming. I teach swimming to children in the evening. Before the water used to be very clean, then lots of children used to come to learn how to swim. Since they put in the sewers, etc., the water became dirty, and [swimming] stopped. Now people learn to swim at the pools. No one goes in this dirty water. Children shouldn’t go in it now, or they will get sick. You will get sick because the water is dirty. It is Delhi’s sewer water. When the water comes and the water level rises, then the children can start swimming again. When the water was clean, we used to search for money deep down at the bottom of the river. People with money would throw coins and such into the water, and we would fish them out. We got quite a lot of money that way, coins and such.

In some ways, the river’s religious aspects might be heightened by filth. Encountering the mundane can, certainly, heighten a religious experience (Plate 12.7).17 But it is also a condition of Delhi itself. For those who love the city, it is often through its unpleasant underside that feelings of affection are experienced and expressed. When Khushwant Singh, author of Delhi: A Novel (1990), returned to the capital after travelling abroad, he loved the city like and through his romance with a prostitute. As he famously opens his text, I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Bhagmati when I have had my fill of whoring in foreign lands. Delhi and Bhagmati have a lot in common. Having been long misused by rough people they have learnt to conceal their seductive charms under a mask of repulsive ugliness.18

For Singh, his story is one of return, and tellingly, once he is back in Delhi, he quickly returns to Nigambodh Ghat. There, he seems to find some consolation from the chaos of the city in the inevitability of encountering death by the river: That’s Delhi. When life gets too much for you all you need to do is spend an hour at Nigambodh Ghat, watch the dead being put to the flames and hear their kin wail for them. Then come home and down a couple of pegs of whisky. In Delhi, death and drink make life worth living.19

Like Singh’s account of the city, the Yamuna in Delhi is actualised through shifts in perception and through a process of moving towards and away from its banks. The river is clean because it can be so; it is dirty because it has been sullied. We can remember or forget it simply by deciding to travel towards its banks or move away from them. For the pandit who spends his life along

Plate 12.7 Nigambodh Ghat in the evening light, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

Plate 12.8 The Yamuna at night at Ghat 23, 2015. Source: Photograph © Padma D. Maitland

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the banks of the river, there is a sense of moving between two points of observation: the pristine character of the river and its muddied waters. For the priests who live there, the river is too dirty to swim in, but too clean to leave behind. In the evening, candles are lit at the Nigambodh Ghat for evening prayers (Plate 12.8). Flower petals are scattered around lamps and incense. An old priest climbs into a boat to watch the flames from the river. Rituals that started the day now bring it to a close. Groups of men stand by the water to watch the dwindling light, families climb on and off boats for evening tours and wrestlers pray to their gods before sparing matches. The waves of youthful swimmers from nearby settlements, clearly unperturbed by the pollution in the river, send drops of water onto the ghats, the ripples of their strokes pressing gently against docked boats. When I ask Premchand Sharma about meeting again, he replied: “I am almost always here. If I am not at home, then I am on the riverbank”.

Notes * Acknowledgments. Many thanks to Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati for their help in arranging this chapter, to Aviram Sharma for his help researching the water conditions of the river and to the American Institute for Indian Studies for their support of my research. 1 See, for instance, William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, New York: Penguin Books, 1993; Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel, New Delhi: Penguin Group, 1990; Vivek Ranjan Bhattacharya, The Saga of Delhi, New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Company, 1971; Jyoti Hosagrahar, ‘Landscapes of Water in Delhi: Negotiating Global Norms and Local Cultures’, in André Sorensen and Junichiro Okata (eds.), Megacities: Urban Form, Governance, and Sustainability, New York: Springer, 2011, pp. 111–32. 2 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, p. 338. 3 Ibid., p. 330. 4 Ibid., p. 338. 5 For more on tirthas in the landscape of India, see Diana Eck, ‘India’s “Tīrthas”: “Crossings” in Sacred Geography’, History of Religions, vol. 20, no. 4, 1981, pp. 323–44. For a more specific discussion of ghats as tirthas along Ganges, see Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. 6 Singh, Delhi, p. 19. 7 A survey of the collection of maps at the Delhi State Archive dating from 1857 to the 1950 reveals that the course of the Yamuna around Delhi was much less clearly defined than it is today. In earlier maps, several tributaries were drawn within the flood banks of the river. One such tributary forms the edge of what is today Nigambodh Ghat. By the turn of the 20th century, the main artery of the river in the city was clearly defined and began to appear as a single blue vein across maps of the city. 8 Interview with Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi, 5 July 2015. Translation by the author. 9 Peace Institute Charitable Trust, Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Delhiities towards the River Yamuna, New Delhi: Peace Institute Charitable Trust and CMS Environment, 2009, p. 36. 10 Puja performed by Premchand Sharma and witnessed by the author, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi, 7 July 2015. 11 Amita Baviskar, ‘What the Eye Does Not See: The Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 50, 2011, p. 45. 12 Knowledge, Attitude and Practice, p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 36. 14 A recent report mentions that a significant amount of pollution in the river is due to the immersion of idols into its waters: “To immerse puja left overs into flowing rivers is an age old practice. In recent times

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this practice has emerged as a major source of river pollution as often it is not just the puja left overs (flowers, samagri, dust, etc.) but also the polythene and household solid waste which are thus immersed”. Pushp Jain, Sick Yamuna, Sick Delhi, New Delhi: Peace Institute Charitable Trust and CMS Environment, 2009, p. 25. Ravi Agrawal, ‘A River Lost from View’, India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, Spring 2005, pp. 126–34. Baviskar, ‘What the Eye Does Not See’, pp. 45–53. Jonathan P. Parry relates how a confrontation with the mundane in the midst of what is supposed to be a profound experience at a pilgrimage site heightens religious experiences. Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995, pp. 119–22. Singh, Delhi, p. 1. Ibid., p. 12.

References Agrawal, Ravi, ‘A River Lost from View’, India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, Spring 2005, pp. 126–34. Baviskar, Amita, ‘What the Eye Does Not See: The Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 50, 2011, pp. 45–53. Bhattacharya, Vivek Ranjan, The Saga of Delhi, New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Company, 1971. Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Eck, Diana, ‘India’s “Tīrthas”: “Crossings” in Sacred Geography’, History of Religions, vol. 20, no. 4, 1981, pp. 323–44. ———, Banaras: City of Light, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Hosagrahar, Jyoti, ‘Landscapes of Water in Delhi: Negotiating Global Norms and Local Cultures’, in André Sorensen and Junichiro Okata (eds.), Megacities: Urban Form, Governance, and Sustainability, New York: Springer, 2011, pp. 111–32. Jain, Pushp, Sick Yamuna, Sick Delhi, New Delhi: Peace Institute Charitable Trust and CMS Environment, 2009. Parry, Jonathan P., Death in Banaras, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995. Peace Institute Charitable Trust, Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Delhiities Towards the River Yamuna, New Delhi: Peace Institute Charitable Trust and CMS Environment, 2009. Singh, Khushwant, Delhi: A Novel, New Delhi: Penguin Group, 1990.

13 From Bundi to Delhi Water harnessing systems in semiarid regions Asim Waqif

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n 2003–04, the architect and filmmaker Tarun Jayaram was commissioned by the Global Rainwater Harvesting Collective to make a series of documentaries on traditional rainwater harvesting in Rajasthan.1 I teamed up with Jayaram to travel extensively through the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, armed only with a Sony PD150 camera. We also carried photocopies of books from the library, including the Centre of Science and Environment’s Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (1997), a now classic text on water harvesting systems in India.2 We had almost no prior knowledge about our subject and had never made a documentary before. One of the places we visited was Bundi, a small town in south-eastern Rajasthan, where old families still engage in traditional livelihoods. We had access to very little research on Bundi and were somewhat familiar with the baoris (a well that collects groundwater with steps leading to the water level) and kunds (stepped underground tank for collecting rainwater runoff) in the town.3 We commenced our study on Bundi at the office of the State Archaeological Department, which manages the lesser monuments in Bundi, and at the Archaeological Survey of India site office near a stepwell known as Raniji ki Bavdi (the queen’s baori). Our queries led us to about eight to ten baoris. Some of these wells in Bundi were protected, while others were in various stages of dereliction and disrepair. Raniji ki Bavdi, for instance, is completely caged to keep pigeons out. The spectacular tanks of Nagar and Sagar, at the heart of the new market, just outside the main walls of the old city of Bundi, were strewn with trash and even used occasionally as urinals. After three days of shooting, we were at a teashop when a few local residents asked us what we were doing in Bundi. They asked us if we had seen the baori in the adjacent lane. We had not even heard of its existence. They then led us to a tiny, but beautiful, baori with a small idol decorated with vermilion. The water was clean but there were packets of trash strewn around. They also took us to another baori nearby. And then another. It became like a game with each new acquaintance showing us the baori in his neighbourhood. The next day we teamed up with the local residents. We documented a number of wells, stepwells and kunds as well as lakes, dams, beris and some old gardens with complex water harnessing mechanisms.4 Over the course of our study in Bundi, it became apparent to us that there had been an extensive system of dams, canals, filtration pits and overflow ducts connecting the various baoris and kunds in the town. We knew

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our research had been incomplete. A year later, I thus took a class of nine students from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, to document Bundi more thoroughly. We ended up studying, among other things, the structural conditions of water architecture in the region, the condition of water itself, debris or waste in the baoris and kunds and the socio-economic condition of neighbourhoods in the area. We also spoke with local communities in Bundi about their heritage (Plate 13.1). This chapter draws from our experience of engaging with water management and planning in small towns, such as Bundi, situated in the arid and semiarid regions of north India. The information presented here, alongside the images, plans and sections, derives from research on towns in Rajasthan that still retain some evidence of pre-colonial water management infrastructure.5 As one studies the plans of these towns, one speculates on how sensitively the towns have been sited or situated. North-western India typically sees rain for only three or four months of the year. Given such a short period of rainfall, it was important to conserve as much rainwater as possible to take care of the needs of settlements for the rest of the year.6 Moreover, there were also contingencies such as droughts.7 In this sense, many towns appear to have been sited with the potential of tapping large catchments so as to collect as much water as possible for the settlement from its surrounding areas.8 Bundi, for instance, appears to have been designed like a series of interconnected bowls to capture water from its neighbouring areas. In addition, we observed how passive water filtration mechanisms like sedimentation pits and cascades were used in towns such as Bundi to keep the silt out. We also learnt, through our conversations with local communities, that traditionally local potters had been given the right to remove this silt from the pits before the onset of the monsoon. In addition, we also found evidence of the sensitivity of pre-colonial urban design in reducing the speed of surface runoff. At a slower pace, water can seep into the ground, since slowing down the flow allows the water to absorb into the ground limiting evaporation. The earth, for its part, acts like a filter for the water and allows clean rainwater to absorb essential minerals. The extensive, but somewhat derelict, water management infrastructure in small towns such as Bundi, then, can be contrasted with more grandiose colonial and post-colonial town planning measures in cities such as New Delhi, which was the first large-scale city designed by the British colonial administration in a semiarid climatic zone.

Bundi The old fortified town of Bundi, which was reportedly established in the 14th century, has not changed significantly after India’s independence in 1947.9 As we came to learn from our conversations with communities of Bundi and as is visible in the accompanying schematic plan, a new planned town was situated completely outside the old fortified town in the 1960s. In this sense, Bundi is unlike the neighbouring town of Kota, a town that bore the brunt of post-independence industrialisation after 1950. Since development in Bundi was concentrated in the new town, the old town retains at least some evidence of pre-colonial infrastructure. Moreover, there are a

Plate 13.1 Excerpt of research done on Bhavaldi Bavdi, ca. 17th–18th century and Dabhai Kund, ca. 19th century, 2006. Source: Drawing from unpublished report available at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. Photograph © Asim Waqif and students of School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi.

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number of families that have been living in the old town of Bundi continuously over many generations. Some of these families still practice their traditional livelihoods. As can be seen in the schematic plan, Bundi is situated at the meeting point of two watersheds from the hills in the north (Plate 13.2). The north-western watershed was harnessed by various dams and canals before reaching the lake called Nawal Sagar after going through a series of sedimentation pits. Often, these pits had open-able outlets to feed nearby water bodies, such as the Dabhai Kund, by means of channels when there was excessive runoff. The Nawal Sagar itself is at a slight elevation to the main town. Consequently, it maintains a high water table in the town below. Similarly, the north-eastern watershed in Bundi was trapped at the Jait Sagar Lake, which is reported to have been built by Jaita, a Meena ruler, before being allowed to flow through the town.10 Moreover, the channels from the north-western and north-eastern watersheds were interconnected by a large channel that also worked as a moat for the town. This channel was filled up in the 1970s and is now the site of the new Indira Market. Clearly, in the old town of Bundi, considerable emphasis had been given to slowing down water as it flowed downstream. On the one hand, this slowing down allowed the runoff to seep into the ground. On the other hand, the slowing down also helped reduce the erosion of topsoil. The

Plate 13.2 Schematic plan, water harnessing system, Bundi. Source: Drawing by Udit Mittal, commissioned by Asim Waqif. Photograph © Asim Waqif

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fort of Bundi, for its part, has its own independent water harnessing mechanism making it selfsufficient in terms of water. It is said that the three kunds in the fort do not dry up even in severe drought, which may occur as frequently as once in four years.11 Taking a larger and more expansive view, one could see how the entire town of Bundi and its adjoining areas were designed like a series of interconnected bowls to collect as much water as possible, along with the surrounding catchment areas. Moreover, we were told that large parts of the catchment area surrounding the town were protected as royal estates or through religious sanction. Grazing was highly regulated, even restricted altogether in some areas. In addition, the queens of Bundi, from the 17th century onwards, often took the responsibility of providing water to the town’s inhabitants. A number of water structures were built under their patronage. The Bhavaldi Bavdi, for instance, is one such structure that was named after a queen called Bhavaldi. Similarly, the Raniji ki Bavdi means the queen’s stepwell. In addition, a number of rich merchants and landlords built wells as an act of public service. This may have been in keeping with Indic texts that suggest that the building of wells for public use is a meritorious act.12 Be it on account of the patronage of queens or on account of rich merchants and landlords, each neighbourhood in old Bundi had been provided with its own baori. Moreover, we were informed that the management and upkeep of these baoris and wells had been entrusted to the respective local community. This complex system of water management started changing in the 19th century with the introduction of a limited piped water system under the patronage of Colonel James Tod who was briefly a regent to the then Rao of Bundi.13 As the piped system was used through the city, the older systems of harnessing water became derelict and unkempt. The residents of Bundi, we were told, did not have the enthusiasm to walk up and down a flight of stairs to carry water back home when it was available at their doorstep. Today, almost no part of the traditional water harnessing system in Bundi is maintained, with the exception of a few temple complexes. In years of severe drought, the local community, out of desperation, cleans some wells and baoris intermittently. Occasionally a rich devotee organises a campaign to clean a particular well or pond. But, inevitably, the condition deteriorates, and water bodies return to the way they were in a few months. The ownership of most of the public wells has been taken over by the local municipality and the irrigation and archaeology departments of the Rajasthan state. This transference of ownership has also disconnected the local community from the wells. Communities now feel that it is the respective department’s responsibility to maintain and clean water infrastructure. In Bundi, like in most small Indian towns, the local water drainage system has now been compromised by the addition of sewage from both unplanned parts of the city as well as untreated sewage from planned colonies.

Udaipur As is the case at Bundi, it appears that the availability of water was one of the main considerations for siting the town of Udaipur.14 To the west of the town, there are the Aravali hills that have been channelised and dammed at various places to slow down and direct the flow of

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rainwater runoff. Three interconnected lakes at the base of the Aravalis form the western edge of old Udaipur. These lakes, as may be evident in the sectional drawing, are on a slight elevation. In this sense, the water bodies of Udaipur are not entirely unlike the Naval Sagar lake in Bundi, which, as I have noted earlier, was at a slight elevation to the main town and therefore maintained a high-water table in the town below. Water reaches the town from the lakes through the upper aquifer, while residents extract it through wells and stepwells. Except for a few royal retreats, the rest of the older city, we observed, was completely to the east of the lakes and their catchments eliminating urban interference in the water harnessing cycle in the Aravalis to the west (Plate 13.3). Additionally, kunds provided localised systems of harnessing rainwater within the city. Most large buildings, we observed, were equipped with rainwater pipes, drains and channels to divert water to these neighbourhood tanks. In some instances, excess runoff during the monsoon was also fed into stepwells. The skill, as well as the preoccupation with water management, can be gauged by the extravagance of the Saheliyon ki Bari, a water-fountain park built in the early 18th century for women of the royal household.15 Today, only a few kunds and stepwells, mostly those linked to religious or charitable institutions, are maintained. A number of kunds and stepwells have disappeared altogether; they have been

Plate 13.3 Schematic section, water harnessing system, Udaipur. Source: Drawing by Udit Mittal, commissioned by Asim Waqif. Photograph © Asim Waqif

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either filled in or have been built over. Not only have the catchments of the three lakes been severely encroached upon by urban development but also the natural flow of water from the hills to the west has been disrupted. Indeed, there was no water in Lake Pichola a few years back.16 This was superficially remedied by pumping water from another reservoir outside Udaipur.17 Nonetheless, untreated sewage from a large part of the unauthorised encroachments and some part of planned development flows into the natural drainage of the lakes.

Bikaner There are well-defined ways of describing water in Rajasthan. Palar pani, fresh rainwater, is considered the purest form of water and is often used for rituals in temples but is not preferred for drinking as it has not had the opportunity to absorb essential minerals. Vakar pani, groundwater usually from shallow wells or baoris, was preferred for potable use in towns such as Bundi and Udaipur.18 However, the soil around the town of Bikaner in Rajasthan is alkaline and, therefore, the groundwater tends to be brackish. Thus, the town was planned to maximise the collection of runoff water before it was absorbed into the ground.19 The entire town had an extensive rooftop rainwater harnessing system. Each building was equipped with a tanka: an underground water storage tank within the house to collect rainwater from the paved surfaces and roofs.20 This water was channelised into sedimentation pits before being allowed into the tanka. An underground room that provided a cool environment in the hot summer months often flanked the tanka. Often, this room became the hub of activity during the summer as it remained cooler than the rest of the house. Water thus collected was more than enough for the needs of most households. In times of shortage, water was brought from the local well or lake to fill the tanka. It is ironic that while rooftop rainwater harvesting has been made compulsory for buildings with roofs over 100 square metres in large cities like Delhi, in Bikaner, there is a reverse trend in terms of water planning.21 The district and town are relying more and more on large engineering projects like the Indira Gandhi Canal and deep-water wells, without any attempt to conserve rainwater locally. There is already a massive dispute between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan about the sharing of water from the Indira Gandhi Canal.22 It is likely that the water available to Rajasthan will decrease in the future. Deep wells are not viable in the long run as the aquifers are not being replenished and the depth of these wells has been extended repeatedly. In Bikaner, the chance of brackish water with undesirable salts is also much higher in deep wells as higher pressure forces salts to dissolve into the water. There were once over 40 lakes and ponds around Bikaner but only a handful survive.23 The lakes and channels designed to collect rainwater runoff now collect untreated sewage. Extensive encroachment of the catchments and unregulated open pit quarrying has more or less destroyed the larger water management system of the old settlement.

New Delhi Unfortunately, unlike Bundi, Udaipur and Bikaner, much of the traditional water infrastructure in Delhi has been almost completely built over or destroyed in the colonial and the post-colonial

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era. In this sense, it is perhaps not entirely possible to study pre-colonial water management practices in Delhi without speculating. One can, for instance, merely approximate the manner in which the Agrasen ki Baori may have functioned when it was first built (Plate 13.4). There is, however, much to note about the nature of built surfaces and rainwater runoffs in the city’s present-day construction. While engaging with Delhi, it helps to begin by noting that almost all colonial and post-colonial Indian cities primarily use an approach to storm water management that encourages water to flow away from low-lying areas as fast as possible.24 There is no mechanism of slowing down the flow of water or of encouraging water to seep into the ground. In the present, the system concentrates on reducing the accumulation of water in low-lying areas, whereas the traditional system would have tried to trap the water into lakes and ponds. In the present, importance is not given to the collection of water for local use. Such a system of water management that encourages flow might work well in a city like London where it rains intermittently for a large part of the year. In India, with fluctuating rainfall, this system has resulted in the wastage of a precious resource. Going further in this direction, one also observes how there has been an increase in the length of urban roads in India from 252,000 kilometres in 2001 to 411,840 kilometres in 2011. This is an increase of over 63% in ten years. It is also important to note that this statistic does not reflect the widening of roads.25 As more and more surface area has been paved over in the last few decades, there is much more runoff since water cannot percolate through the impervious pavements, roads and plazas. Instead, this water is channelised through pipes, drains and channels to storm water drains that usually connect to the local natural drainage system. Returning to Delhi, then, the Delhi Master plan of 2021 states that 10%–12% of land in the city is to be used for circulation, roads and transport while 8%–10% is for public and semi-public facilities excluding green areas like parks and forests.26 The total road length in 2001 was 28,000 kilometres, which is expected to almost double to 55,000 kilometres by 2021.27 Much of this road area is paved with nonporous materials. Rainfall, therefore, cannot seep into the ground and has to necessarily flow away into storm water drains. The state has no plans of rainwater harvesting, although there are a few instances of community-based rainwater harvesting in localities such as C-block in Defence Colony. For its part, the Ministry of Water Resources does promote rooftop harvesting, especially in tier-one cities, in institutional buildings and housing. This is encouraging. However, very few municipalities are harnessing the rainwater runoff from public land under its management.28 Building on these shortcomings in Indian cities in general, and in New Delhi in particular, one could then imagine a more sustainable model for water management in arid and semiarid parts of India. Rooftop rainwater harvesting is becoming the norm in large-scale buildings in India. In the future, model sustainable cities in arid and semiarid zones, then, could be made to include all private and public built-up land. All buildings could collect rainwater runoff from the terraces and paved areas of their compound, and then filter this water using passive filtration mechanisms before making it seep into the ground through rainwater harvesting pits made for the purpose or even through old existing wells. The landscape design of each compound could encourage surface runoff from green areas to seep into the ground locally.

Plate 13.4 Agrasen ki Baori, ca. 14th century, New Delhi. Source: Photograph © Asim Waqif

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The baori is situated in the midst of the urban-sprawl of Connaught Place in the centre of New Delhi, which is perhaps the most modernised part of the city in terms of urban infrastructure. Almost all the open spaces around Connaught Place are either paved or tarred, leaving very little area for rainwater runoff to seep into the ground. The rainfall thus gets channelised to storm water drains before flowing into the Yamuna. The only significant unpaved area nearby is the playground of the Modern School, but the water absorbed here does not reach the stepwell any longer because of the construction of the underground metro line between them. The image indicates the 1995 level of water in the baori as observed by the author and the 1980s level interpolated from 1980s photographs of the stepwell. No water has collected in the Agrasen ki Baori since 2003.

Similarly, in the city, rainwater runoff from green areas like forest, parks and playgrounds could be contained locally through a network of check-dams, channels, pits and landscaping. Forestry could be managed to minimise erosion of topsoil and to slow down the flow of water so that it has a chance to seep deep into the ground. Grazing of domesticated animals and seasonal agriculture could be encouraged in a controlled manner to keep the topsoil biologically active. The runoff from all paved public lands like roads, pavements and plazas could be channelised to local rainwater harvesting pits. Old baoris, wells and kunds could be used to store rainwater.29 As of now, the water level is very low in the baoris and wells in Delhi; they are dry and often derelict and neglected. Pouring filtered storm water from paved areas into these underground structures would allow the water to seep into the dry upper aquifers. Moreover, the old baoris and kunds could provide a cool underground activity space for communities in the hot dry summer.30 In addition, controlled amounts of water could be let out regularly into the natural drainage system to sustain the local wetland ecology. Such a water harnessing system, at the broadest level, would not be entirely unlike a series of water collection bowls, as is evident in the pre-colonial design of towns in semiarid Rajasthan.

Community management If one looks at the makeup of the Irrigation and Flood Control Department of the Government of Delhi, 310 out of the 350 technical staff are engineers.31 Apart from this, the Department has an administrative staff of 265. It seems that water management is an engineering and administrative exercise to collect, treat and distribute a commodity. Stepping away from the present, however, one notes that in the pre-colonial period, communities often managed water at the local level. Some members of the communities were even paid a percentage of the harvest in exchange for their irrigation services, thus incentivising better water supply.32 Moreover, precolonial communities appear to have been almost intuitively sensitive to what in the present can be called a macro level vision involving soil management, forestry, erosion control, filtration, animal husbandry and waste management to improve overall water retention and quality (Plate 13.5).33

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Plate 13.5 Kabadiwallahs (scavengers) by the Yamuna

River, New Delhi. Source: Photograph © Asim Waqif

There are a number of groups of kabadiwallahs (scavengers) sifting through the waters of the Yamuna for recyclable material. This photograph was taken a few kilometres downstream of Wazirabad Barrage where a major road bridge crosses the river. People throw waste directly from the bridge into the river and kabadiwallahs dive in to retrieve recyclable material. Boats are sacks full of Styrofoam and magnets are dragged at the bottom of the river to retrieve ferromagnetic metal. Plastic waste is often dried on the riverbanks before being sold. Kabadiwallahs have no institutional support and, in fact, have to pay bribes to the police and the municipality to be able to access the riverbanks for retrieving recyclable material.

The transformation of water from a community resource to a commodity can perhaps first be traced to the British colonial administration that replaced community-based institutions with a revenue-based collectorate. The appropriation of riparian rights gave the colonial government control over a multitude of tanks, wells and channels with little experience of regulating them.34

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Waterworks were then defined as either major or minor depending on revenue generated. Work on larger (major) projects was favoured at the expense of smaller systems that were mostly ignored and abandoned. This severely fragmented the overall system of water harnessing. Communities no longer felt responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the local systems. Any sustainable water harnessing plan in the future, then, must take into account ways of integrating community involvement within it.

Long-term planning There is no doubt that we are facing a severe shortage of water in India today. This is likely to escalate in the near future as more and more people migrate to cities. India has poor forest cover overall. Moreover, there is very little attention paid to soil management and erosion control of catchment areas. Analysing New Delhi as an example, one notes how the city is spread over an area of 1,484 square kilometres with an average annual rainfall of 714 millimetres. Put differently, 1,060 billion litres of rainwater per annum falls on an average in New Delhi every year. Of course, one cannot expect each and every drop of water to be saved. But even if 50% of this water were harnessed, it could add a substantial amount to the water needs of the city. It is heartening to see that there is a general recognition for the need for an overall sustainable approach to development. Cutting-edge science is reiterating concepts such as closed-loop systems and local renewable resources. These concepts are inherent in most indigenous technologies. In this sense, I feel there is an urgent need to look at modern and traditional technologies as complementary mechanisms. Both systems need to work together. In this regard, the draft note on Smart City Scheme proposes a dual water supply system for potable and non-potable use and a decentralised sewerage and solid waste management system. These systems can have a very positive impact if implemented well.35 At the same time, we are witnessing a nationalist political revival in India today, and I feel that a sensitive reinterpretation of knowledge about India’s water heritage can become a positive facet of this trend: can we think beyond models from industrialised and post-industrialised countries and envisage Smart Cities that are Indian in essence?

Notes 1 Water Heritage Series is a series of short documentaries on traditional water management in seven cities in Rajasthan, commissioned by the Global Rainwater Harvesting Collective in 2006, www.youtube. com/watch?v=ClrjRB6AQfg&list=PLDmlAzjt5C3EMw6nWDgQA5dX4fdk4WXu6, accessed on 20 March 2016. 2 Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (eds.), Dying Wisdom: Rise Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1997. 3 Baori, also baoli, bavdi, vav: a well with steps leading down to the water level. Often the steps are in the form of a straight staircase. But, often, the steps are also L-shaped or doglegged. A kund is a stepped rainwater collection tank. Unlike a baori, which is a groundwater extraction mechanism, excess runoff from roofs and courtyards is channelised to the kund to save rainwater from flowing away. Often kunds have steps on three sides, while the fourth is a shear drop with a mechanism to haul up water.

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4 A beri is a well constructed just downstream of a dam specifically with the aim of tapping the water from the upper acquifer. Beris are never very deep and are often part of a garden (bagh). 5 The description and interpretation of the water management in Bundi is based on preliminary research undertaken by the author and Tarun Jayaram intermittently between 2003–05 and the author’s experience while trying to start a community-based initiative around the Bhavaldi Baori in Bundi in September– October 2006. Detailed primary research was undertaken by the author with the assistance of nine students of the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi in February–March 2006. 6 Indian Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, Distribution of Rainfall – Rajasthan, www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/distrainfall/rajasthan.html, accessed on 1 July 2015. 7 S. D. Attri and Ajit Tyagi, Climate Profile of India, New Delhi: India Meteorological Department, Government of India, 2010, pp. 97–105. 8 Description and interpretation of the traditional water management systems in Udaipur and Bikaner are based on primary research done by the author and Tarun Jayaram between 2003–05. Further independent fieldwork by the author from 2006–08. 9 The town of Bundi is known to have been founded by Jaita, a Meena chieftain, in the 14th century. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Bundi, Jaipur: Government Central Press, Rajasthan 1964, p. 1. 10 Rajputana Gazetteer, vol. 1, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1879, p. 218. 11 According to data from the Disaster Management and Relief Department of the Government of Rajasthan, www.dmrelief.rajasthan.gov.in/index.php/irrigation-calender/frequency-of-drought, accessed on 30 June 2015. 12 Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat: In Art-Historical Perspective, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1981, pp. 5–6. 13 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, vol. 2, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1997, pp. 504–5 and pp. 551–63. 14 Agarwal et al. (eds.), Dying Wisdom, p. 107. 15 Phillip Davies, Guide to Monuments of India: Islamic, Rajput, European, vol. 2, London and New York: Viking, 1989, p. 396. 16 ‘India’s Palace Lake becomes Palace Mud’, Daily Mail, 15 July 2009, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article1199799/Indias-Palace-Lake-Palace-Mud-drought-takes-toll-romantic-resort.html, accessed on 30 June 2015. 17 ‘Devas project nears end, to fill up Udaipur lakes’, Daily Bhaskar, 12 May 2012, http://daily.bhaskar.com/ news/RAJ-OTC-devas-project-nears-end-to-fill-up-udaipur-lakes-2097775.html, accessed on 1 July 2015. 18 Lyla Mehta, The Politics and Poetics of Water: The Naturalisation of Scarcity in Western India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2005, pp. 174–5. 19 Central Ground Water Body, Government of India, Ground Water Information, Bikaner District, Rajasthan, 2013, http://cgwb.gov.in/District_Profile/Rajasthan/Bikaner.pdf, accessed on 25 May 2015. 20 Agarwal et al. (eds.), Dying Wisdom, p. 109. 21 As per notification issued by Ministry of Urban Affairs in June 2001, rainwater harvesting is mandatory for all buildings with roof area over 100 square metres or plot area above 1,000 square metres in Delhi. 22 ‘Punjab approaches Supreme Court for reallocation of river waters’ share’, The Hindu, 7 February 2015, www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/punjab-approaches-supreme-court-for-reallocation-ofriver-waters-share/article6867049.ece, accessed on 1 July 2015. 23 Agarwal et al. (eds.), Dying Wisdom, p. 109. 24 Nivedita Gogate and Pratap Rawal, ‘Sustainable Storm Water Management in Developing and Developed Countries: A Review’, in Vinu Das and D. K. Ramesha (eds.), 2012 International Conference on Advances in Design and Construction of Structures, Bangalore: ACEE, 2012, pp. 36–40.

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25 Basic Road Statistics of India, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India, 2012, www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/basic%20road%20statistics%20of%20india.pdf, accessed on 1 July 2015. 26 Delhi Master Plan 2021, Statistics, http://delhi-masterplan.com/statistics/, accessed on 25 May 2015. 27 Ibid. 28 Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India, Municipal Water Management, http://wrmin.nic.in/ forms/list.aspx?lid=306, accessed on 25 May 2015. 29 In the late 1960s and 1970s, Bunker Roy, while working in Tiloniya, Rajasthan, diverted rainwater runoff into local wells to the astonishment of local villagers who had only used wells to extract water. But his persistence bore fruit as the local water table showed signs of stabilising. 30 Traditionally, baoris and kunds were active community spaces for women as it was their duty to arrange for water in each household. Local children use baoris and kunds for swimming. 31 Irrigation and Flood Control Department, Government of Delhi, About us, http://delhi.gov.in/wps/ wcm/connect/doit_irrigation/Irrigation+and+Flood+Control/Home/About+Us, accessed on 27 May 2015. 32 Philippe Cullet and Joyeeta Gupta, ‘Evolution of Water Law and Policy in India’, in Joseph W. Dellapenna and Joyeeta Gupta (eds.), The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water, Dordrecht: Springer Academic Publishers, 2009, pp. 157–73. 33 Farhat Naz and Saravanan V Subramanian, Water Management across Space and Time in India, Bonn: Universitat Bonn, 2010. 34 Radha D’Souza, ‘International Law: Recolonising the Third World? Law and Conflicts over Water in the Krishna River Basin’, in Diane E. Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds.), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 243–60. 35 Smart Cities is the new buzzword in town planning policy since the formation of the BJP government in 2014, http://indiansmartcities.in/downloads/CONCEPT_NOTE_3.12.2014__REVISED_AND_LATEST_. pdf, accessed on 5 June 2015.

References Agarwal, Anil and Sunita Narain (eds.), Dying Wisdom: Rise Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1997. Attri, S. D. and Ajit Tyagi, Climate Profile of India, New Delhi: India Meteorological Department, Government of India, 2010. Cullet, Philippe and Joyeeta Gupta, ‘Evolution of Water Law and Policy in India’, in Joseph W. Dellapenna and Joyeeta Gupta (eds.), The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water, Dordrecht: Springer Academic Publishers, 2009, pp. 157–73. Davies, Phillip, Guide to Monuments of India: Islamic, Rajput, European, vol. 2, London and New York: Viking, 1989. D’Souza, Radha, ‘International Law – Recolonising the Third World? Law and Conflicts over Water in the Krishna River Basin’, in Diane E. Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds.), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 243–60. Gogate, Nivedita and Pratap Rawal, ‘Sustainable Storm Water Management in Developing and Developed Countries: A Review’, in Vinu Das and D. K. Ramesha (eds.), 2012 International Conference on Advances in Design and Construction of Structures, Bangalore: ACEE, 2012, pp. 36–40. Jain-Neubauer, Jutta, The Stepwells of Gujarat: In Art-Historical Perspective, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1981.

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Mehta, Lyla, The Politics and Poetics of Water: The Naturalisation of Scarcity in Western India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2005. Naz, Farhat and Saravanan V Subramanian, Water Management across Space and Time in India, Bonn: Universitat Bonn, 2010. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Bundi, Jaipur: Government Central Press, Rajasthan 1964. Rajputana Gazetteer, vol. 1, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1879. Tod, James, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, vol. 2, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1997. Waqif, Asim and Tarun Jayaram, Bundi: Water Heritage Series, 2006, https://youtu.be/ClrjRB6AQfg?list=PL DmlAzjt5C3EMw6nWDgQA5dX4fdk4WXu6, accessed on 20 March 2016.

Websites accessed Central Ground Water Body, Government of India, Ground Water Information, Bikaner District, Rajasthan, 2013, http://cgwb.gov.in/District_Profile/Rajasthan/Bikaner.pdf, accessed on 1 July 2015. Delhi Master Plan 2021, Statistics, http://delhi-masterplan.com/statistics/, accessed on 1 June 2015. ‘Devas project nears end, to fill up Udaipur lakes’, Daily Bhaskar, 12 May 2012, http://daily.bhaskar.com/ news/RAJ-OTC-devas-project-nears-end-to-fill-up-udaipur-lakes-2097775.html, accessed on 1 July 2015. Disaster Manangement and Relief Department, Government of Rajasthan, Frequency of Drought, www. dmrelief.rajasthan.gov.in/index.php/irrigation-calender/frequency-of-drought, accessed on 30 June 2015. ‘India’s Palace Lake becomes Palace Mud’, Daily Mail, 15 July 2009, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-1199799/Indias-Palace-Lake-Palace-Mud-drought-takes-toll-romantic-resort.html, accessed on 30 June 2015. Indian Metereological Department, Distribution of Rainfall – Rajasthan, www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/ distrainfall/rajasthan.html, accessed on 1 July 2015. Irrigation and Flood Control Department, Government of Delhi, About us, http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/ connect/doit_irrigation/Irrigation+and+Flood+Control/Home/About+Us, accessed on 1 June 2015. Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Goverment of India, Basic Road Statistics of India, www.india environmentportal.org.in/files/file/basic%20road%20statistics%20of%20india.pdf, accessed on 1 June 2015. Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India, Municipal Water Management, http://wrmin.nic.in/ forms/list.aspx?lid=306, accessed on 1 June 2015. ‘Punjab approaches Supreme Court for reallocation of river waters’ share’, The Hindu, 7 February 2015, www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/punjab-approaches-supreme-court-for-reallocation-ofriver-waters-share/article6867049.ece, accessed on 1 June 2015. Smart Cities, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, Concept Note, http://indian smartcities.in/downloads/CONCEPT_NOTE-3.12.2014__REVISED_AND_LATEST_.pdf, accessed on 5 June 2015.

14 You always step into the same river! Atul Bhalla

You always step into the same river!

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My work has been an attempt to understand water. How I perceive it, feel it, eat it, drink it, wash in it, bathe in it, swim, wade, sink or will drown in it. How I drench, soak, douse, moisten, quench, dilute, dampen, cleanse, or purify. How I excrete tears, sweat, or urine. How it falls, drops, floods, inundates, levels, buoys, lashes, gushes, swells and ripples. How it exists as fog, mist, cloud, steam, snow, sleet, rain, or puddle. How it contains or is contained. How it is dammed or bottled.

Plates 14.1–14.15 Atul Bhalla, I Was Not Waving but Drowning-II, 2005. Archival pigment

print, 27.94 × 19.05 cm each. Source: Repository: Artist’s Collection. Photograph © Atul Bhalla, SepiaEYE, New York and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

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I immerse myself In history In myth In my own Filth saffron green Or red I reflect my own self black sometimes red streaks of grey the sewage moves to reflect whatever is above sometimes a cloud dark the reflection multiplies some flow back but black hues of black immerse the river the same river water? falls again but flows only off me am I of the same?

You always step into the same river!

You always step into the same river!

When did you last see the yamuna? When did you last touch the yamuna? I walk I walk The yamuna The city The city I walk I walk..................

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23 January 2007 11.30 am palla northern border delhi delhi? sand and sand space mine space flow flow the river dunes fields young wheat flowers marigolds mustard saplings fishermen small boat little catch large hearts and broad smiles great hope reflections clear air water clear mining sand machines across the border, u.p., sky rested

You always step into the same river!

the earth the river me? walk, evening spread, creeping water, level abandoned fields, hope shallow crossings deeper I walk the sun against sucking eucalyptus evening jagatpur 5.30 pm

24 January 2007 jagatpur, 9.30 am labour men women fields fog birds ferry across touch just there paths across through grass marshes, wazirabad breakfast lunch? daal on dung cakes boat across sonia vihar pipes sucking leaking water rest tea on the road the barrage no photo no standing no waiting walk sur ghat wall drain gushes rushes spills

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the yamuna stare walk up to the road down again up again millennium bridge? peer baba gurudwara mandir stink madness forgotten way climb up the road down the yamuna access denied. Again, and again, every time finish the day’s walk majnu ka tila

25 January 2007 10.30 am tibetan market. houses their backs to the yamuna find a house with its front to the yamuna the farmers the rag pickers the forgotten no further a boat slow pace, thick water, black, still birds, death burning dumping wet old railway bridge noise rickshaws pontoon shanti van flyover construction gulls river stopped narrowed access

You always step into the same river!

denied still, but birds still, slow muck wash fields young wheat still grows mustard flowers some marigold dumped carrion dogs fight people sift remains distant non-worried roads traffic noise smoke I.T.O. security identity explanations given call it a day. 4.20 pm

27 January 2007 8.30 am no access to the yamuna walk past noise power station on the road demolished basti at the river bank jumping over barbed wires fog, surreal paths, fly ash sinking ground inlets sewage two birds black water the day very foggy the river through rubble homes abandoned walk the day low visibility.

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no river drain mist path along the river. fly – ash fields desolate walk abandoned

28 January 2007 start again the same place, making our way through fields sewage irrigated under Nizamuddin Bridge two beggars sun home, no way, to the road again to walk to cross the drain up to the road. Delhi Noida Direct Flyway tollway? Ashram? slip down again plastic wages scrap shops river not in sight down again winding path flat global village[?] under the DND jamia

You always step into the same river!

sewage washing cricket death river no access navy training the road again. agra canal. and the bird sanctuary filth you are not allowed inside[?] outside jump over canal works fencing birds pigs okhla barrage call it a day 3.30 pm.

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Part V

Afterthoughts

15 Cosmographia universalis Environmental crisis and the water aesthetics of global South Asia Partha Mitter The dawn of the Anthropocene was a significant moment. [. . .] The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber, or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere [. . .] societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future. – Martin Rees, 20161

The great scientist sounds the global tocsin presenting two stark choices before us, perhaps recalling the well-worn Chinese proverb: every crisis is also an opportunity. Let us consider the present situation. The digital revolution, which has erased distances, has made us historians aware of the interconnectedness of shared histories across the globe, termed variously as world history, international history, global history and transnational or transcultural history.2 During the 19th and 20th centuries, the world colonial order brought about transport and communication revolutions. The spread of Enlightenment values introduced material and human sciences, and a concomitant belief in universal progress as of immense benefit to mankind. The gains become obvious if one were to compare the present with living conditions in the Middle Ages: constantly improving living standards, fall in infant mortality, successful control of pandemics, much improved longevity worldwide and a greater distribution of material benefits around the world (albeit still far from perfect).3 This is surely good news. But the bad news is that the relentless overuse of natural resources has led to their severe depletion and environmental pollution. The bar of global interconnectedness was raised a notch higher at the turn of the millennium with a widespread, impending sense of crisis. Two Nobel Laureates christened the Anthropocene as the latest geological epoch that has witnessed massive human impact on our ecosystem, which may have begun with James Watt’s discovery of steam power.4 The preceding Holocene epoch spanning the long period from the dawn of human history to the scientific age had a much lower and benign impact on the environment, not to mention any noticeable carbon footprint. Dominated by the internet, the ubiquity of contemporary media has left no one in the dark about the debates raging on the ecological crisis. A partisan controversy erupted among scientists, which has filtered down to the laity. There are those who point to the cycles of droughts and floods as a clear warning of inevitable global warming induced by the overuse of fossil fuel. Others

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dismiss such fears as unfounded; they assert that climate change is not necessarily caused by global warming. The other problem, though less prominent in public forums, has also raised deep concerns: the radical depletion of natural resources in the wake of significant population explosion. One may or may not heed Malthus’ dire warning, but the mere fact of exponential population growth has led to a more intense use of natural resources. The whole debate comes down to the following question: how sustainable is our relentless exploitation of planetary resources? The present sense of crisis has galvanised not only natural and human scientists but also creative artists. Historians and art historians have joined the fray, seeking to move out of the comfort zone of a human-centred approach. Even the use of the term “geological” implies that the problem is not confined to humankind. In other words, the crisis can no longer be defined in isolation from the animal, vegetable and mineral world. Historians have begun to relate historical thinking to wider environmental problems, in the process collapsing the Enlightenment distinction between human and natural sciences. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “four theses” have given rise to vigorous debates on the nature of scholarship itself. Chakrabarty questions whether the present human sciences are adequate for understanding the collective agency of humans in the Anthropocene. The crisis of climate change, he argues, cannot simply be reduced to a story of capitalism.5 Art historians have also made visible the environmental implications of art and architecture, literature and other forms of creativity, perorating on the ecological interconnectedness of all beings, the sustainability of the planet, and environmental justice. Challenging anthropocentric humanism, they proclaim the agency and autonomy of nonhuman matter and beings under three headings: new materialism centring on the agency of matter, an object-oriented ontology (inspired by Heidegger’s concept of “things”) and critical animal studies.6 Alan Braddock’s work on the nature/culture dichotomy in American romantic imagination, with particular reference to 19th-century landscape painting, draws our attention to the agency and vitality of nonhuman matter.7 T. J. Demos offers us a historical analysis of the politics of sustainability in contemporary art. The debate hinges on global capitalism that forced massive changes during European expansion, inevitably destroying traditional communities in the process. In 2013, the journal Third Text published a discussion on the politics of art and ecology in India, centring on Ravi Agarwal’s installation and Sanjay Kak’s film that brought out the growing inequality, environmental destruction and displacement of tribal people through unfettered exploitation of resources by multinational corporations in the wake of neoliberalism in India.8 The proponents of aesthetic ecology inject a powerful moral dimension to their opposition by marshalling legal arguments to defend the rights of those who lack the means to resist superior technological and political forces. It is of some significance that the critique of colonialism has now spilled into the biological and natural spheres, taking into consideration the whole of life forms that face extinction from the overuse of the earth’s resources. Indifference to our intimate connection with animals and all other natural forms has dire consequences for our own survival, critics insist. In short, these issues are intimately involved with human relationship to nonhuman life. One of the fast depleting global resources is water, with which this book is directly concerned. Staggering urban development has caused population explosions in global megacities, putting

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intolerable pressure on water supply and creating acute water shortage beyond the wildest dreams (or nightmares) of original city planners. This particular volume, consisting of academic essays with a poetic intervention by an artist, addresses this aspect of the global crisis, with special reference to the Indian subcontinent. Water is without question one of the fundamental environmental issues. Water is the source of life, and not merely human life, but the eau de vie, as it were. A few statistics will not be amiss here. Around 70% of the planet is covered by water, most of it in the ocean.9 Equally, the body holds an astonishing 50%–70% water, according to one’s age.10 An equally extraordinary fact is the intimate connection of water with the growth of human societies. One only needs to remember that the earliest riverine communities, the nucleus of powerful empires, developed on the banks of the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Indus and the Ganges in South Asia and the Yangtze and the Yellow River in China. Equally, over millennia, maritime trade along the great oceanic systems has been the lifeblood of vast continents. An early trading route linked the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea with the Mediterranean, whose antiquity is attested by The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st-century Greco-Roman sailor’s manual.11 The earliest sea routes developed because of their relative cheapness compared to overland routes. Ancient Rome enjoyed brisk trade with India as part of the wider maritime world of the Indian Ocean. The famed Silk Route was an exception, rather than the rule. Maritime trade accelerated in the colonial age, with seafaring vessels connecting East Asia, South and Southeast Asia and Africa to Europe. Early modern colonial empires thus began as a network of coastal outposts linking up parts of Asia and Africa. The Atlantic sea route too opened up with Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. Colonial port cities became harbingers of cosmopolitan modernity: Goa, Batavia, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta and Mexico City, to name a few (Plate 15.1). Historians have constructed spheres of influence and civilisations around the ocean. Fernand Braudel presented his great pioneering work on the Mediterranean as a case of longue durée histories. Quotidian life, he argued, was dominated by issues of livelihood through fishing, wars, maritime voyages and even drowning incidents.12 A number of historians have taken up Braudel’s concept of longue durée, showing, for instance, how Asia could be studied as inextricably linked with the Indian Ocean until such trade was disrupted by European expansionism. Taking a cue from Emmanuel Wallerstein’s world systems, scholars have thus placed the Indian Ocean “world economy” within a wider global framework.13 Kirti N. Chaudhuri’s seminal work, Asia Before Europe, studied the common patterns of history, society, economy and culture of Islam, South and Southeast Asia and China from the perspective of the Indian Ocean. More recently, others have taken up his challenge by proposing an underlying thread of history that owed less to Europe, which had hitherto been the preoccupation of historians.14 Clearly, water, in its different manifestations, has been at the core of life itself, and this volume on liquescence draws our attention to this phenomenon. At the back of their minds, the authors, it seems, are acutely aware of a universal humanitarian crisis and ponder as to how the present impasse came about. The chapters, specialising on the Indian subcontinent, cover a wide variety of themes and ends with the artist Atul Bhalla’s personal engagement with the flowing waters

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Plate 15.1 Hendrick Jacobsz Dubbels, View of Batavia, 1640–76. Oil on canvas, 65.5 ×

84 cm. Source: Photograph © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Acc. No. SK-A-2513

of a great river, Yamuna, as central to his whole being. The contributions can be divided into several broad periods and the themes into broad categories that range from historical studies of water management to the current situation with regard to hydrology in South Asia, alongside some prescriptions for resolving the crisis. Indeed, even though the modern developments make depressing reading, it is heartening to learn of recent interventions. Given our consciousness about the detrimental impact of aggressive human intervention in shaping the natural environment, the significant thread that runs through the chapters in the book is the difference between earlier water usage that was in harmony with nature and its present overuse that compromises ecological balance. Another aspect of the volume is Sugata Ray’s innovative idea for studying the impact of the environment on humans, which takes forward Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of humanistic disciplines. Taking the case of the catastrophes of the Little Ice Age, Ray suggests that an essentially human-centred approach is inadequate for understanding the cycles of draughts and famines that often devastated pre-colonial India and altered the course of history. He seeks to combine

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architecture practice, political governance and natural resource management as an interconnected field, combining the study of pre-colonial water management and aquatic theology in the light of environmental catastrophes. In the past, people have accepted the supra-human power of the environment and respected it. Sugata Ray and Catherine B. Asher focus on the sacramental nature of water in Hinduism and Islam, as well as water’s healing qualities. The Mughal rulers of South Asia, who produced their own versions of riparian architecture, contributed to the continuity of Hindu engagement with water and its sacredness. Several related chapters reiterate the central role of the great rivers of north India, especially the Yamuna, the dark sister of the fair Ganga (the Ganges), famed since antiquity. The connection between aesthetics and ecology becomes evident in chapters on aquatic architecture such as ghats (steps leading down to the river), stepped wells and artificial lakes for communal and royal purposes. The 17th-century Vishram Ghat on the Yamuna in Mathura studied by Ray was an architecture project that focused on darsan or the sacred viewing of the river, taking the environment as manifest divinity in theology. Asher explores parallel ideas of the healing powers of water among Muslims in two popular Sufi shrines: the Shah al-Hamid in the port of Nagore in south India and the Nizam al-Din Dargah in Delhi. In Islam, water’s sacredness springs from its connection with the Zamzam well in Mecca. Wells, reservoirs and baoris (as with the Nizam al-Din Dargah) in India were defined as a saint’s domain. Additionally, prior to colonial rule, over possibly several millennia, water was harnessed for communal usage through the construction of dams, lakes and wells. The Mughal emperors connected north India through hydrological projects and waterways. Water management had its strategic uses as well, as adumbrated by Tamara I. Sears. The important hill fortress of Chanderi, situated at a trading crossroad, was vulnerable to chronic water shortage, while the smaller Kadwaha was more secure with a large artificial lake created by dams. Other secular aspects of water engineering and governance in this book include Dipti Khera’s chapter on the lake city of Udaipur. Maharana Jagat Singh II made conscious aesthetic use of royal spaces such as lake-palaces to combine political power with pleasure. Royal dalliance in water (jalakeli), we know, has long been associated with Sanskrit literature, in addition to being a staple in Indian painting. The Udaipur lake-palace, which combines Rajput and Mughal elements, included impressive courtyards, pools and gardens. Artificial lakes certainly had a special resonance in a desert region like Rajasthan. From the aestheticisation of the environment in the pre-colonial period, how did we get to the present situation? Two chapters deal with the colonial background to our contemporary crisis. Unlike indigenous attempts to establish a mystical link with water, colonial authorities were more concerned with classification and control. The extensive urban planning undertaken by the British Raj fundamentally transformed Indian living conditions, substituting the use of natural water sources by distributing piped water from a central reservoir. Behind this was the colonial mentality that was actively interventionist: a rational and detached scientific study of nature aimed at improving the condition of Indian subjects as part of the Enlightenment optimism about human progress. In a theoretical chapter on colonial governance, Venugopal Maddipati analyses the geological surveyors Stephen Hislop and Robert Hunter’s efforts to impose rational order on the diverse geological formations of central India. With accompanying photographs by the Sri

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Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt, Natasha Eaton unravels the inevitable clash of cultures, large-scale population displacement and change of livelihood that followed European expansion. The decline of the Gulf of Mannar oyster and pearl industry, previously run on traditional lines, led to fishery camps losing their cohesion, Eaton notes. The dawn of independence in 1947 made possible the utopian dream of transforming the Indian environment for the benefit of its citizens. Atreyee Gupta traces the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s ambitious project of transforming India’s economic backwardness. Facing a land with chronic food shortages and devastating floods, Nehru proposed the harnessing of the resources of India’s rivers in service of the nation. The Damodar Valley Project (1948), inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority, was a multipurpose hydro-engineering plan for flood control, economic regeneration and increased food production with a view to achieving rapid economic progress. The World Bank, one of the sponsors, demanded regular reports of progress, which led to the appointment of Sunil Janah by the state. This outstanding photographer developed a very particular kind of documentary aesthetic, which was complemented by Le Corbusier who replicated in India the Tennessee Valley iconography of development. This Nehruvian dream of dragging India into the 20th century was a telling example of modernisation that was to have long-term unforeseen consequences. By the time we reach the end of the millennium, the consequences of relentless environmental exploitation began to unravel. The chapters on contemporary water practices highlight two issues: the present fate of traditional water management systems and the recent water crisis and its intimate connection with the failure of institutional as well as communal management. Renowned as a site for performing Hindu rites of passage, the Nigambodh Ghat on the river Yamuna in New Delhi is a case in point. Padma D. Maitland reminds us that unlike Ganges water, considered to purify the devotee spiritually, the Yamuna is closely associated with death and pollution. Hence the need for priests to perform ritual purification. The lives of the priests who officiate at the Ghat revolve around the river. Modernity, Pandit Premchand Sharma, laments, has wrought havoc in their lives with the effluvia of overpopulated Delhi being constantly disgorged in the river. However, as the chapter suggests, one is not sure if the pre-colonial era was better. The priests’ separation of holy pollutants and present sewage water is symptomatic of a clash of two different concepts of hygiene that contributes to our schizophrenic existence under the shadows of current environmental catastrophes. Another comparison between the old and the new is offered by James L. Wescoat Jr. through cross-cultural comparisons in urban water use, water loss control and demand-management in order to suggest effective remedies. His points of comparison are the Back Bay Fens in Boston and the Barapula Nallah of New Delhi. Each urban configuration is different, he admits, from its headwaters to the city and its long plumes of effluents. However, they share the problems associated with the modern urban waterscape. Increasingly, urban streams came to be associated in the United States with sewers, even as the original meaning of the word nalla as a rivulet morphed into gandah nallah, or dirty open sewer. The shift towards negative connotations of urban streams was most probably associated with sanitation movements in India and the United States. Cities around the world have historically degraded urban streams and are now seeking to restore them.

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Water shortage has become endemic in India as urban population growth is reaching uncontrollable levels, as for instance in Kolkata and its environs. Gopa Samanta and Malay Ganguli focus on a recent water crisis in Chandernagore, a metropolitan suburb that had enjoyed piped water in the 20th century but is now in the throes of an acute water shortage. The authors note that the shortage is not the result of scarcity but because of bad management. While administrators concentrate on water delivery, they do not appreciate the role of the environment. Over-consumption of groundwater has led to the shortage as wells dry up. Samanta and Ganguli urge planners to rethink the need for control through taxation and education. There have been different forms of resistance to the present crisis, including art which could serve as a vehicle for making us aware of the present situation. Asim Waqif presents his documentation of older systems of waterworks in the semiarid region of Rajasthan. The baoris, wells and dams in the region highlight both an ecological aesthetic and a complex engineering system that helped reduce the erosion of topsoil. The introduction of piped water in Rajasthan by the British as part of an overarching urban planning and the excavation of canals since independence have led to the obsolescence of these viable systems. Recent attempts to revive rainwater preservation have had limited success. I would add that while undoubtedly the commodification of water has destroyed traditional infrastructure, the pressures of population in a city such as New Delhi makes the task all the more difficult. However, a judicious combination of modern and traditional technologies could alleviate the problem. I end this overview of the book with a contemporary form of popular resistance that combines new technology with old methods. The Sarvajal (Water for Everyone) Smart Card, which provides a high-tech, low-cost solution to water scarcity, is a popular success story. Bishnupriya Ghosh reflects on the dialectic of urban modernity and popular resistance, presenting us with a survey of the myriad aspects of contemporary water politics. In the case of what the environmental activist Vandana Shiva calls “water democracies”, people gather to campaign against water shortage, water pollution and floods caused by projects initiated by multinational corporations. The campaigners scored a signal success when the Supreme Court of India declared access to water as one of the fundamental human rights. The underlying discourse in the volume, then, is the deterioration of the environment with the growing shortage and pollution of water. The subtext, however, is the significant contrast between the pre-colonial era when limited and unobtrusive, but ecologically efficient, waterworks caused little damage to the environment and the massive changes brought in by British colonial authorities in their effort to provide superior amenities such as piped water and efficient sanitation system to the general population. But as the authors make it obvious, the price of progress has been increasingly unsustainable. The value of the volume lies in its global implications, through a microstudy of a pressing problem. The book aims to relate ecology to aesthetics in the Indian subcontinent, as part of an innovative history of art and architecture. Global warming and ecological crises have alerted us to the human responsibility for the rapid depletion of natural resources. One cannot but admire such penetrating analyses that seriously challenge the politically motivated denial of the disasters ensuing from the overuse of fossil fuels. Catastrophic global warming is forecast as the world’s

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population reaches 8.5 billion by 2030.15 Artists and activists have contributed their own critiques regarding the overuse of natural resources. One widespread solution offered has been to actively campaign for a greater integration of human and natural destinies. Political activists have resorted to a legal challenge to the destruction of the habitat of forest people and fauna by multinational corporations.16 Scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have also made thoughtful contributions, whose call for an end to the separation of natural and human histories has had wide reverberations. His comment that we need to think outside the relatively courte durée of human history to the longue durée of the history of the species, not to mention deep geological time, resonates with academics. In the sciences, Lord Rees has alerted us to the dangers as well as possibilities of the ecological crisis of the 21st century. While I am impressed with the powerful intellectual and political interventions from diverse disciplines, my own worry is as follows: I do not seem to see an explicit consideration of the fact that much of the technological developments since James Watt have been predicated on the premise of scientific determinism, as propounded by Newtonian physics, with the implication that the universe is governed by a set of fixed laws, which will gradually be uncovered as science develops. A deterministic notion of progress lies at the heart of the scientific method. This was substantially modified in the last century by Einstein’s theory of relativity and Quantum Physics and impressively reformulated by Karl R. Popper, the influential philosopher of science. Popper replaced the confidence in the certainty of scientific induction with the idea of the hypothesis that is replaced by the next hypothesis as that particular one is falsified and then discarded. In short, he saw science progressing from one stage to the next through conjecture and refutation.17 While questioning positivism, Popper was nonetheless convinced about the certainty of scientific progress and significantly called his method an evolutionary approach. It is no accident that he acknowledged his debt to Darwin. Admittedly, the driving force of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was not biological determinism, but chance and probability. However, as with that of his contemporaries, Darwin’s intellectual edifice was intensely teleological and shot through with notions of inevitable progress.18 The 18th-century scientific revolution deeply affected the Enlightenment notion of the inevitability of human progress. Conversely, the notion of progress lay at the heart of the scientific method and, in a number of significant cases, the line between pure knowledge and ethics became blurred. I am fully aware that the relentless pushing of the frontiers of scientific knowledge and its application to technology is being questioned in different quarters, including by the sustainability lobby. However, what is often overlooked is the wider question of the scientific method and its dependence on the logic of the situation. It seems to me that one element missing from the whole range of responses to the Anthropocene is a re-examination of the nature of science itself and the ethical issues involved. Scientists themselves are unable or unwilling to raise this question and simply offer anodyne answers. Of course, theoretical scientists may raise the objection that one cannot blame pure sciences for their use in applied sciences that has often led to undesirable consequences. The answer to this is that theoretical and applied sciences are so inextricably conceptually linked that separating them is virtually impossible. Indeed, theory underpins all developments in science. Let me cite two examples of the difficulties in separating progress from ethics, though, of course, there are many.

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The most momentous event in scientific development in the 20th century was the splitting of the atom by Ernest Rutherford and other scientists, which was greeted with universal enthusiasm as a new dawn of humankind. However, such theoretical knowledge inevitably became a tool for building weapons of mass destruction, namely the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. The dropping of two bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed the horrific power of scientific development to cause human suffering. Admittedly, subsequent world opinion turned against repeating such an inhumane act, not least Robert Oppenheimer, its progenitor. The fear of a mutually assured destruction probably restrained the arms race, not ignoring the Peace Movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). But we still live under its shadow.19 An equally problematic advancement in science is genetic engineering. In 2003, the sequencing of the human genome was completed with the promise of eliminating diseases and genetic defects, thereby creating the possibility of physically perfect humans. Previous difficulties with early gene therapy have now been eliminated with a new miracle “molecular scissors” known as Crispr (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats) (Plate 15.2). But the question is: would these advances lead to spectacular human enhancements or more modest cure of diseases? While accepting the benefits of eliminating congenital malformations, are we on the road to a

Plate 15.2 Neuromast and Neuron development of a Zebrafish using

Crispr/Cas9, 2015. Source: Photograph © Ingrid Lekk, Dr Steve Wilson, Wellcome Images

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world of superhumans and subhuman slaves? There are also the ethical issues of bioengineering experiments such as cloning, which can be described as humans playing god. The possibilities are endless, and so are the ethical issues.20 The point of my brief excursus is to bring to attention the relentless progressivism of Western epistemology that permeates the whole of global modernity is in serious conflict with human survival and well-being. There is no space to develop these ideas further, nor am I qualified to offer a solution to these issues. But the point of my rumination is that the preservation or destruction of our environment rests squarely on us humans in our Anthropocene Epoch, and we may have to give serious thought to our priorities. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence takes a welcome step in this direction.

Notes 1 The Institute for Advanced Study cites Martin Rees’ intervention at the International Geological Conference in Cape Town. See Damian Carrington, ‘The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age’, The Guardian, 29 August 2008, www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/ aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth, accessed on 8 July 2017. 2 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Introduction’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. xvii–xx. 3 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York: Viking Press, 2011 is an eloquent advocate of Enlightenment values. Painting a rosy picture of an increasingly enlightened world, Pinker proposes that, despite the recent spate of wars, global violence has declined. His view has been challenged from various quarters. 4 This was popularised by the Nobel Scientist Paul Crutzen in 2000. The Anthropocene or the Age of Humans is supposed to have begun with the Industrial Revolution, when there began an exponential growth in the use of natural resources. For instance, see www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/, accessed on 10 July 2017. 5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 197–222. 6 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms, Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 7 Alan C. Braddock, ‘From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History’, in John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFontaine (eds.), A Companion to American Art, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2015, pp. 447–67. 8 T. J. Demos, ‘The Art and Politics of Ecology in India: A Roundtable with Ravi Agarwal and Sanjay Kak’, Third Text, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 151–61. 9 https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html, accessed on 10 July 2017. 10 Arthur C. Guyton, Textbook of Medical Physiology, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1976, pp. 284, 424. 11 Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. 12 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. 13 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974.

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14 Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empires, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993. 15 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Population 2030: Demographic Challenges and Sustainable Development Planning, New York: United Nations, 2015. 16 International Bar Association Climate Change Justice and Human Rights Task Force, Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption, London: International Bar Association, 2014. For instance, see www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-init-164801414/ and https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html, accessed on 20 July 2017. 17 Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. The issues are complex, and I can only hint at some of them. The ‘truth’ claims of science have been challenged in debates as a clash of rationalities, especially by anthropologists who do not allow a special context-independent status for science. See two important debates: Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell, 1970; Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. 18 Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. See also James Lennox, ‘Darwinism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2017 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/, accessed on 27 July 2017. 19 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. 20 Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

References Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empires, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Braddock, Alan C., ‘From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History’, in John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill and Jason D. LaFontaine (eds.), A Companion to American Art, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2015, pp. 447–67. Braudel, Fernand, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. Carrington, Damian, ‘The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age’, The Guardian, 29 August 2008, www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropoceneepoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth, accessed on 8 July 2017. Casson, Lionel, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Enquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 197–222. Chaudhuri, Kirti N., Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms, Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Demos, T. J., ‘The Art and Politics of Ecology in India: A Roundtable with Ravi Agarwal and Sanjay Kak’, Third Text, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 151–61.

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Doudna, Jennifer A. and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Gould, Stephen J., The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Guyton, Arthur C., Textbook of Medical Physiology, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1976. Hollis, Martin and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. International Bar Association Climate Change Justice and Human Rights Task Force, Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption, London: International Bar Association, 2014. Iriye, Akira and Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Introduction’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. xvii–xx. Lennox, James, ‘Darwinism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2017 ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/, accessed on 27 July 2017. Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York: Viking Press, 2011. Popper, Karl R., Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Population 2030: Demographic Challenges and Sustainable Development Planning, New York: United Nations, 2015. Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974. Wilson, Bryan R. (ed.), Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell, 1970.

Websites accessed ‘How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?’, The USGS Water Science School, Science for a changing world (US Department of the Interior and US Geological Survey) https://water.usgs.gov/edu/ earthhowmuch.html, accessed on 20 March 2019. Joseph Stromberg, ‘What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?’ Smithsonian Magazine, January 2013 www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/20 March 2019.

Index Note: Page numbers in italics denote plates. 48°Celsius Public.Art.Ecology, 2008 xiii, 3 74th Constitutional Amendment Act of India 209 ‘Abd al-Nabi Khan 53 Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1078–1166) 161 Ab’l Fazl (1551–1602) 106; and Akbarnāma 141 ablutions 173, 248, 255 Adventures in Space, ca. 1930s–1940s 100, 101 Aga Khan IV (b. 1936) 147 Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) 147, 161, 177 Agamben, Giorgio (b. 1942) 106 age of water: Girar and faith 126–8; holy time and holy drawing 129–31; religious imagination, Girar 119–33 Agrasen ki Baori, ca. 14th century 269 Ahmad Shahi dynasty 46 Ajmer: Chashma-yi Nur 41; dargah of Muin al-Din 41, 165, 169, 175, 177; Jahangir’s hunting palace 41 Akbar (1542–1605) 46, 47, 106 Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72) 45 Ali, Muhammad (1717–95) 96 Amar Singh II (r. 1698–1710) 70–1 Anglican churches 110 Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Tod) 60–1 Anthropocene: aesthetic and geological imagination xv, 38; changes in water policy 227; collective agency of humans 298; Holocene 297; industrial rationality versus ecological rationality 238; science 304; water related urgency 10 anthropogenic climate change 4 anti-Coca-Cola struggle 230, 231 apartment buildings, new water user community 212–13 architecture: Corbusier and Nehru 200; Jahangir 41; Jagvilasa (Nandram) 68; lime 96; materiality 3; Mughal 47; photography 195; riparian 4, 27, 39, 42, 52, 301; School of Planning and Architecture

261; suvidhi 64; treatises 46; urban water 152; Vishram Ghat 42, 53; Yakṣas (Coomaraswamy) 6 Arnold Arboretum, Boston 152 Asia Before Europe (Chaudhuri) 299 Association for Scientific Photography 189 Aurangzeb (1618–1707) 53, 64 Babur (1483–1530): hydrology 7–8, 19, 27–32, 64; military campaign 20; travels 21–4 Baburnāma (Babur) 8, 19, 20, 25–7, 30, 32, 141 Back Bay Fens, Boston, ca. 1896 137, 137, 144–51, 146, 148, 152 Bacon, Mardges (b. 1944) 199, 201 Bada tekri 120 Bado Mahal, 1746 64, 65, 74, 78 baori (stepwell) 68, 260, 261, 265, 267, 270 Barapula Bridge 146, 147, 150 Barapula Nallah, New Delhi 137, 138, 139, 140; design workshop 145–51 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) 98, 197 battle at Chanderi 20 beach camp population 106 Beas River 141 Betwa River 19, 24, 27, 50 Bhāgavata Purāṇa 43, 51 Bhagwantdas (r. 1573/4–89) 52 Bhakra multipurpose dam 187 Bhatta, Ranchoda 68 Bhavaldi Bavdi ca. 17th–18th century 263, 265 Bhim Singh (r. 1778–1828) 64, 78–80 Billy Hancock 97 blue-green urban infrastructure 136, 144 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 6, 145 bourgeois environmentalism 136 Braddock, Alan 298 Braj 37–9, 42–8, 51–3 Braudel, Fernand (1902–85) 8, 39

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Brihat Samhita 30 British colonialism 8, 95–116 British colonial phobia 104 Bundi 64, 80, 260–74 capitalism 298 central Indian frontier: architecture and water in 19–35 Ceylon Company of Pearl Fisheries Limited 108 Chaitanya (1486–1533) 43, 51 Chakrabarty, Dipesh (b. 1948) 298, 300, 304 Chambal 21 Chandal Math temple, ca. early 11th century 28, 29 Chanderi 19, 22–4, 31 Chandernagore 209–23; apartment buildings, new water user community 212–13; dug wells, alternative source 217–18; groundwater over-extraction and land subsidence 214–15; household water supply 210–12; irrational approach 215–17; location, dominant favourable factor 210; physical reality, ignoring 215–17; population and water demand 213–14; surface water 217; water pricing 218–21 Charles River 144, 145, 148 Chaudhuri, Kirti N. (b. 1934) 299 Chicago River 136 Chiragh Delhi 152 Chota tekri 120 Church of Our Lady of Health, Velankanni 163, 165, 166 Claudius-Petit, Eugène (1907–89) 199 climate change: and Little Ice Age 42; crisis and capitalism 298; early modern period 39; ecologies of water 3–4; geological time 120; intergovernmental panel on climate change 238 commodity, phenomenology 97 common effluents, tanneries 232 comparative international urban water research 139–41 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. (1877–1947) 6, 7, 145 cosmographia universalis 297–306 culching 106–10 Cunningham, Alexander (1814–1893) 147 Cuyahoga River 136 Dalrymple, William (b. 1965) 245 dams: Bhakra 187; Charles River 145, 148; Damodar 187–204; Fontana and Wheeler 185;

Kadwaha 20, 25, 27, 31; Multipurpose dams 187; Narmada Bachao Andolan 10; Omkareshwar 1; Udaipur 67, 68 Damodar Valley 185, 189, 191, 192; Santhal communities of 197 Damodar Valley Corporation 185, 187, 198 Daniel, Valentine E. (b. 1947) 99 Darbar Quli Khan 176 dargah of Muin al-Din, Ajmer 177 dargah of Nizam al-Din, Delhi 174 dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Georgetown, Penang 167 dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Nagore 163 dargah of Shah al-Hamid Nagori, Singapore 168 Deccan geology 120 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95) 98, 99 Delhi: A Novel (Singh) 256 Delhi Master plan of 2021 268 Demos, T. J. (b. 1966) xiv, 298 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) 46 Dev, Bir Singh (r. 1605–27) 46, 50, 52 Dhola Mahal 80 diagram of Damodar Water Control System, ca. 1944 191 Dixon’s Washing Machine 108 Dohmen, Renate 99 drains 143, 147, 151, 265–8, 270 Dreaming, 1933–34 100, 102 droughts: Bundi 265; global drought 8; Little Ice Age 39; logic of quantity 229–31; Jahangir 41; Rajasamand Lake 68; riparian architecture in Braj 42, 50; Shah al-Hamid 162 Dudh Talai 68 dug wells, alternative source 217–18 duty of water 140 Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (Centre of Science and Environment) 260 EcoFriends 233 ecology: 48°Celsius Public.Art.Ecology, 2008 xiii, 3; deep ecology 237; shorescape 110; Third Text 298; wetland ecology 270 ecological frame, theology 50–2, 233 ecological thinking xiv, 3–4, 233, 237 environmental crisis: 216, 235; of global South Asia 297–306 environmental governance 3, 209, 219

Index

environmental humanities 5, 39 environmental think tanks 3 Eocene lake 120, 125, 130 Fatehpur Sikri: Astrologer’s Seat 46–47, 47; Principal Haramsara 49; water channels 64 fetishisation 104 fetishisms 100 Flatt, Emma J. 63 flood: Damodar 185, 191, 192; logic of directionality 10, 235–8; mitigation of hazards 145, 152; “oriental cosmogony” 5; urban flooding 137, 144 Fontana dam 201 Frederick Law Olmsted’s urban sanitary improvement plan 137 freshwater: deposits 120, 122–31; reservoir 145; synthetic 110 Gallagher, Sean 234–5 gandah nullah 136 Gandhi, Rajiv (1944–91) 233 Ganga Action Plan 233 Ganga (Ganges) River 4, 37, 50, 210, 232–4, 247–8, 250, 299, 301 Ganges pollution 233 Gay Abandon, ca. 1940 96 Gell, Alfred (1945–97) 65 geology: and fossils 119; colonial geology 9; Coomaraswamy 6; Deccan 120; MacCulloch 131; Nagpur 126; Principles of Geology (Lyell) 5, 119 Girar hill 119–33; and faith 126–8; religious miracles at 128 Godavari River 124 Goldman Sachs 226 Google NGram search 142 Govind Dev temple, 1590 52 groundwater over-extraction 214–15 Guattari, Félix (1830–1992) 53, 98, 99 Gulf of Manaar 95–116 Haksar, Sharad (b. 1970) 230 Hauz-i Shamsi, Mehrauli, Delhi 172 Hazrat Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Khaki (1142–1236) 126 heterotopias 106 Hindu chromolithographs 98 Hislop, Stephen (1817–63) 119–26, 128–31, 301 Hodgson, Marshall G. S. (1922–68) 53

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holy: baraka 162, 165–7, 173, 176; holy drawing 129–31; holy time 129–31 Hornell, James (1865–1949) 101, 103, 108–10 household water supply 210–12 Hume, Robert E. (1877–1948) 6 Hunter, Robert (1823–97) 119–26, 129–31, 301 Ibn Battuta (ca. 1304–69) 23, 24, 26 Indian Sufi tradition 161–81; Nagore shrines 161–9; shrine of Nizam al-Din Auliya 138, 169–78 Indira Gandhi Canal 267 Indo-Muslim tradition 28, 53, 165 intimate stranger, deep time 119–33 Irwin, John (1917–97) 6, 7 Iskandar in a Ship, Observing Sea Monster, ca. 1600 107 Itutmish (r. 1111–36) 171 Jagat Singh II (r. 1734–51) and kingship 63–4, 77; in Jagniwas lake-palace 61, 62, 63, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76 Jagniwas lake-palace, 1764 60, 61, 62, 63–5, 70, 74, 75, 76, 79; beauty and visuality 77 Jagvilasa (Nandram) 63, 64, 68, 70–4, 77, 78, 81 Jahandar Shah (r. 1712–13) 176 Jahangir (1569–1627) 39, 40–1, 46, 50, 141 Jahāngīrnāma (Jahangir) 40, 41, 64, 141 Jahaz Mahal, Mandu, late-15th century 64 Jai Singh II (1688–1743) 52, 71–2 Jait Sagar lake 80, 264 Jal Mahal, ca. 1734 64 Jal Satyagraha (non-violent resistance relating to water) 1, 3, 236, 236–37 Jamaica Pond 149 Jami mosque, Mathura, 1660–61 53 Janah, Sunil (1918–2012) 192, 193, 197 Jayaram, Tarun 260 jhalra (reservoir) 177 Jones, William (1746–94) 5 Joshi, P. C. (1907–80) 193 Kachhwaha dynasty of Amber 52, 64 Kadwaha: river routes and larger region 20–4, 24, 27; landscape 25–8; temples: 30–3; town planning and history 27–32 Kak, Sanjay (b. 1958) 237 Khizr 173 Khush Mahal 80 Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar (1173–1266) 122

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Kirutuneia, M. 101, 103 Kitson Empire Lighting & Co. 109 Kolff, Dirk H. (b. 1938) 43–5 kunds (stepped underground tank) 260, 261, 270 Laclau, Ernesto (1935–2014) 228 laconic discontents 185–207 lakes: Babur 27–32; Eocene 120, 125, 130; Jait Sagar 80, 264; man-made lakes, Udaipur 68; Nawal Sagar 264; Pichola 60, 64, 68, 77, 78, 81, 267; Rajsamand 68 lake-palaces 60–88; lakes and 65–8; for pleasure 60–5; pleasures, lands and gardens 68–73; poolside pleasures 77–81; sensuous materiality of 61; world of pleasure 73–7 Lake Pichola 60, 64, 68, 77, 78, 81, 267 La Méditerranée (Braudel) 8, 39, 299 land subsidence 214–15 “Las Piedras del Cielo” (Neruda) 111 Le Corbusier (1887–1965) 187, 188, 199–201, 203, 204, 302 legal activism 233 Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95) 129 Lilienthal, David E. (1899–1981) 200 Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon 97 liquid: ammonia 97; Deleuze, Bergson and liquidity 98–9; liquid worlds 4–5; love 37; Tamil poetry 162 Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850) 37–53, 300 Lodi, Sikandar (r. 1489–1517) 42, 43 Lotus-themed reservoir, Bado Mahal 79 Love Canal in Niagara Falls 136 Lyell, Charles (1797–1875) 5, 119 Maathir-ul-umara (Khan) 141 MacCulloch, John (1773–1835) 131 Machla Magra peak 68 Madhya Pradesh 1, 33, 260 Maharaja of Banaras (1855–1931) 52 Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee (MMOC) 145 Malinowski, Branislaw (1884–1942) 97 Malthus, Thomas (1766–1834) 37 Malwa plateau 8, 23 Mami Wata 100 Manaar fishery 108 Manaar pearl fisheries 106

Mandu 23, 63 man-made lakes, Udaipur 68 Manusmṛti (Manu attr.) 5 Man Singh I (r. 1590–1614) 52 Man Mandir, Gwalior, ca. 1500 48 Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324) 105 maritime model 98 Marks, Laura 237 Marx, Karl (1818–83) 96, 97 material transformation 1 Mathur, Shveta 148 Mathura 37–53 Mayamata 30 M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997) 141 Medieval Warm Period (ca. 900–1300 CE) 39 Mishra, Keshavdas (1555–1617) 50 Modi, Narendra (b. 1950) 4 Mohanmandir, 1628–52 64 molecular scissors 305 Morals for the Heart (Sijzi) 173 Muddy River Restoration Project 145 Mughal hydrocultures 7–8, 37, 40–2, 53, 64 Muhammad, Prophet 175 Mukherjee, Arindam 234 Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990) 189 Mundy, Peter (fl. 1600–67) 39 “Nabījī tum bin Mathurā sūnī ” 53 nadis 136 Nagore shrines 161–9 Nagpur 124, 129 nahrs 136 nala 141–3 nallahs 136, 141–3; east and west 137–9; improvement plan 148 Narmada Bachao Andolan 236, 237 Narmada River 228 Narwar 31 Nation, The (Olmsted) 144 National Water Policy 218 Nawal Sagar lake 264 Nehruvian technocracy 185–207 Neruda, Pablo (1904–73) 95, 111 Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi 245–59 Nizam al-Din Auliya (d. 1325) 138, 148, 170–2, 177, 178 Nizam al-Din Auliya shrine, Delhi 138, 169–78

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Norris dam 201 nullah 141–3

public interest litigation 227 Pulavar, Chekuna (d. 1852) 162

oceans: Argentine telepathy 99–105; culching and camp-as-city 106–10; Indian Ocean 3, 162, 166, 299; Irwin 7; “Ocean of Grace” 162; photos of 95–116; Shah al-Hamid 165–6, 169, 170; shark charmer, economy of 99–105; “universal ocean” 5 ocular economies 185–207 O’Hanlon, Rosalind 63 Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822–1903) 137, 143, 144, 152 Omkareshwar Dam 1, 236 On Populist Reason (Laclau) 228 “On the Geology and Fossils of the Neighbourhood of Nagpur” (Hislop and Hunter) 119, 121 Open Hand Monument 204, 205 “Oriental Cosmogony” 5, 6 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (Wittfogel) 140 oysters 111

Raj Singh I (r. 1652–80) 68 Rajprasasti (Bhatta) 68 Rajsamand Lake 68 Ramayana, Udaipur, 1648–52 68, 70 Raniji ki Bavdi 265 right to opacity 106 Rihla (Battuta) 23 riparian architecture 42 river: Beas 141; Betwa 19, 24, 27, 50; Charles 144, 145; Chicago 136; Cuyahoga 136; Damodar 185, 191, 192; Ganga 210, 250, 301; Godavari 124; Muddy River Restoration Project 145; Narmada 228; river routes and larger region 21–4; Sind 24; Yamuna 21, 38

Pahuj River 21 palampore, Coromandel coast 2, 3 Papua New Guinea 100, 111 Parawas 103, 104 Parawa women 110 Pawaya 31 pearl fisheries 95–116 Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, The 299 Physae 124 pind daan (ancestral rites) 250 Pinney, Christopher 98 Plachimada protests 230, 231 Plan of Part of a Pearl Camp at Tondi, 1914 109 Poet Approaches Radha under a Monsoon Sky, The, Udaipur, ca. 1665 66 pollution: 4, 302; control 152; industrial 136; logic of quality 231–5; in Back Bay Fens, Boston 139 Popper, Karl R. (1902–94) 304 Power station turbine hall, Damodar Valley Corporation 195 Prakash, Gyan (b. 1952) 188 Pratap Singh, Tanjavur (r. ca. 1739–63) 164 Principles of Geology (Lyell) 5, 119 “Problems of the Conditions of Parawas” (Hornell) 103

Saha, Meghnad (1893–1956) 187–92, 199 Samarāṅganasūtradhāra (Bhoja attr.) 46 Sangram Singh (r. 1710–34) 64; portraits 68, 69, 71, 72 Saniotis, Arthur 173 sanitation 143 Sardar Sarovar Project 236 Sarvajal (Water for Everyone) smart card 226, 303 Sarvajal Water ATM 227 Save the Ganga Movement 233 Schofield, Katherine B. 61 Science and Culture (Saha) 189, 191 Scott, James C. (b. 1936) 198 sea wives 100 Sectional Elevation of Girar Hill 122 Section of Sitabuldi Hill 124 Shab-i Barat bridge area 150, 151 Shah al-Hamid Nagori (ca. 1490–ca. 1579) 161, 162, 166–70 Shaheer, Muhammad (d. 2015) 148 Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 8, 64 Shahjahanabad 37, 139, 147, 148 Shāhjahānnāma (Khan) 46 shark shaman 100 Sharma, Manoj Kumar 256 Sharma, Pandit Premchand 10, 245–59 shell chucking 108 Shiva, Vandana (b. 1952) 3, 228, 303

314

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Index

Shivprasana Amar Vilas Mahal (Baadi Mahal) 70–72, 71 Shrine of Khwaja Shaikh Fariduddin Mas’ud Ganjshakar, Girar Hill 127 Silence, ca. 1930s–1940s 111 Silver South Indian Charms, ca. 1900 104 Sind River 24 Singh, Khushwant (1915–2014) 256 Singh, Thakur Sirdar 64 Sitabuldi 124 Sitabuldi Hill 120 Slow Poison (Mukherjee) 234 Smart City Scheme 272 Smith, George 120 South Asian water systems 7 South Indian pearl divers 105 Spilsbury, G. G. 124 Strange Décor, 1933–34 100 Sturco, Guilio Di (b. 1979) 234 Sukh Mahal, 1776 64 Suleya 124 sultans of Malwa 30 surface water 217 System of Geology: With a Theory of the Earth, and an Explanation of Its Connexion with the Sacred Records, A (MacCulloch) 131 Taj Lake Palace hotel 60 Taussig, Michael (b. 1940) 97, 105 Tennessee Valley Authority water control system 185, 187 Thirteen Principal Upanishads, The (Hume) 6 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62) 143, 144 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze) 98 Thurston, Edgar (1855–1935) 104, 105 Tiefenthaler, Joseph (1710–85) 52 Timurid garden typology 8 Tod, James (1782–1835) 60, 61, 265 Tomar ruler Man Singh (r. 1486–1516) 46 torana (archway) 43–8, 52 Toteshvara Mahadeva temple, ca. early 11th century 28, 29, 30, 31 Toxic Price of Leather, The (Gallagher) 235 Tranqebar 163, 169 Tughluqs 23, 30, 173 tulabhara ceremony 52

tulabhara torana 43, 46 TVA effect 189 TVA Water Control System, ca. 1945 190 Udai Singh II (r. 1537–72) 67 Udaipur 60; court painters 66; political community 63, 64; urban topography 73 United Nations 3 United Nations Development Programme 209 urbanisation 136 Urban Local Bodies (ULB) 209 urban topography, Udaipur 73 urban water problems 148 urban waterscape research: in India and United States 135–56 Vaishnava aesthetics, 37–42 Vallabha (1478–1530) 42, 43 Vanathy, Sivaraman 219 Vedas 5 Venkatachalam, Lingappam 219 View of Batavia, 1640–76 300 Vishram Ghat 37, 38, 39, 40, 40, 42, 46–8, 52 Vīrsiṃhdevcarit (Mishra) 50 Vrajabhaktivilāsa (Bhatt) 51 Wagner, Roy (1938–2018) 100 Walden (Thoreau) 143–4 Walden Pond 143–5 Wallerstein, Immanuel (b. 1930) 299 water: accretions 1, 3; cosmogony 6; cosmology 6, 48; damage 1; demand 213–14; democracies 228, 303; epistemologies 5; floods 5; framing in Little Ice Age 39–50; histories 3, 32–3; irrigation 8, 32–3; limited commodity 37–53; meanings and powers, Indian Sufi tradition 161–81; pricing 218–21; tax 219, 220; understanding of 277–93; wars 3 water aesthetics: droughts 65; political 237; developmental 185–207; of global South Asia 297–306; Little Ice Age 37–53 water governance: Chandernagore 209–23; in cities 209–23 water harnessing systems: Bikaner 267; Bundi 261–5; community management 270–2; long-term planning 272; New Delhi 267–70; schematic

Index

plan, Bundi 264; schematic section, Udaipur 266; in semiarid regions 260–74; Udaipur 265–7 water media: in 21st century South Asia 226–40; coda 238; drought, logic of quantity 229–31; flood, logic of directionality 235–8; poison, logic of quality 231–5 watershed scale studies 149 Watt, James (1736–1819) 297, 304 Wendt, Lionel (1900–44) 95, 99, 111, 302 Wittfogel, Karl (1896–88) 140

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315

Words on Water (Kak) 237 world of pleasure 63 Yakṣas: Essays on the Water Cosmology (Coomaraswamy) 6, 145 Yamuna River xiii, 21, 38, 50; contaminants 255; religious and affective actualities 245–59; role of 255; and walking 287–93 Zamzam water 163, 175, 176, 301