TY - JOUR
AU - Chattopadhyay, Swati
AB - Abstract This article addresses a methodological problem of urban history faced with the current environmental crisis that urges us to think of humans as ‘geological’ agents. It suggests that the concept of the uncanny that pushes our understanding of spatio-temporality may be a useful device for approaching the methodological need to reconcile what we can and cannot experience/visualize. Viewing the mapping projects around Calcutta in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the lens of the uncanny offers us the possibility of such a reconciliation. It enables us to see the landscape as a product of multiple spatio-temporal modes, and loosens the grip of the current urban vocabulary on our imagination of cities. Our imagination of cities is profoundly circumscribed by the language of urban history and theory. The vocabulary we use – centres and peripheries, city versus country, suburb versus slum – not merely derives from the experience of western cities in the throes of industrialism, but presupposes a certain understanding of history, casts certain values on habitation practices, and relies on a crucial distinction between the human and the natural world. We continue to use this established vocabulary of urbanism, despite decades of empirical research militating against such habits of language. These practices, however, appear to have encountered a historical urgency of planetary proportions. The ‘mega-slum’– massive spatial agglomeration of the world's underprivileged in the periphery of cities – is providing both new visions of mass politics and warning signs about the planet's ecological survival. The central contribution of Mike Davis's book Planet of Slums (2006) is to suggest that this new landscape has planetary and not just global consequences, given that the majority of the world's population live or will soon live in slums.1 In having to reckon with these planetary consequences we are confronted with two sets of issues. First, slums destabilize our understanding of cities and peripheries, showing up the limits of the vocabulary of urbanism; second, existing historical tropes are inadequate for describing and theorizing this phenomenon. This new landscape, the reader of Davis's book is repeatedly reminded, defies our prevalent understanding of centres and peripheries: these ‘hermaphroditic’ landscapes – urbanized villages – have ‘neither traditional cores nor recognizable peripheries’;2‘the suburban zones of many poor cities are now so vast as to suggest the need to rethink peripherality’.3 Slums are seen as self-generating abnormal growth. The hermaphrodite metaphor is telling – they are the perversion of nature's logic that rests on hierarchy and the mutual dependency of opposite forces; refusing containment, they are both disease and disorder. Davis cites other scholars who attest to the gravity of the phenomenon –‘since 1970 slum growth everywhere in the South has outpaced urbanization per se’;4 and ‘if such a trend continues unabated … we will only have slums and no cities’5– giving the impression that slums were, until recently, somehow extra-urban entities, or that there are discernible and desirable patterns of urban growth that are perverted by slums. He quotes Mathew Gandy –‘Lagos does not really exist as a city in a conventional sense: its boundaries are unclear, many of its constituent elements appear to function independently of one another’, and confirms that ‘all the classical principles of urban planning, including the preservation of open space and the separation of noxious land uses from residences, are stood on their heads in poor cities’.6 Such narratives presuppose a certain vision of a city – what a city is and what it ought to be. According to Davis ‘cities in the abstract are the solution to the global environmental crisis: urban density can translate into great efficiencies in land, energy, and resource use’.7 This statement is in the beginning of a section titled ‘Encroaching on environmental reserves’, which goes on to note: Both environmental efficiency and public affluence require the preservation of a green matrix of intact ecosystems, open spaces, and natural services … Sustainable urbanism presupposes the preservation of surrounding wetlands and agriculture. Unfortunately Third World cities – with few exceptions – are systematically polluting, urbanizing, and destroying their crucial environmental support system.8 Following such logic, the city must uphold its stewardship of the countryside by preserving the ‘green matrix of intact ecosystems’ surrounding it. Rather than merely being a hinterland for the extraction of resources and labour, the countryside becomes a protectorate under the benevolent domination of the city. New values are placed into old containers, perhaps unwittingly simulating a long-discarded Nature-Culture dichotomy. Such a comment also throws up a whole series of questions in terms of what constitutes this ‘green matrix of intact ecosystems’– not least because what it means to be green in North America is not the same as what it means to be green in, say, South Asia. And what does it mean to retain an ‘intact’ ecosystem? This characterization carries the strange assumption that such an ‘intact’ entity exists next to any city in the world today. Chuck Peters, curator of the New York Botanical Garden's Institute for Economic Botany, has good advice in this regard. When people suggest that the Botanical Garden's forest (which by a curious coincidence has never been logged) must be returned to uncontaminated eco-origins, he tells them: if you ‘want to put the forest back the way it was 200 years ago … you've got to put the Bronx back the way it was 200 years ago’.9 Davis's concern about the viability of the planet's ecosystem is important, and his championing of the urgency of carbon reduction is laudable. His spatial approach to the city, however, is profoundly at odds with that of climatologists and environmental scientists who have brought to the fore issues of species history (‘human history as part of the history of life on this planet’), the ecological limits to capital and the necessity of a deeper linkage between the human and natural landscapes.10 History, we have been taught, requires some kind of conceptual arrangement between past, present and future. Seen from such a perspective, the anxiety of not being able to visualize the future voiced in Davis's apocalyptic prose, and the simultaneous adherence to an old and tired language of urbanism, suggest that we rethink the idea of the city and its limits. In a recent article entitled ‘The climate of history’, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued for a different kind of history that would assume human beings as ‘geological agents’, not just ‘biological agents’.11 He points out that the Enlightenment separation of human history as distinct from natural history has left historians without the tools and language to deal with the current ecological crisis. Historians tend to think of nature as a silent and passive backdrop – it changes too slowly to keep up with the pace of change in human history. Even environmental historians, he argues, assume that humans are merely biological agents.12 By this he means that it is only since the recent recognition that we are in an ‘Anthropocene age’ that humans have been considered makers of the climate: we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself. To call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to us a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species.13 Chakrabarty argues that our current critiques of globalism are both useful and insufficient. In order to write the kind of history that the Anthropocene age requires, we must place global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans. We need a new kind of ‘universal history’ that retains our postcolonial suspicion of universalist thought. I want to consider the paradox on which such history rests: we cannot have a historical sense of ourselves as geological agents, that is, we cannot have a phenomenology of species, and yet we must have such a history. One way of understanding this paradox is to think of it as a problem of the limits of vision – the need to reconcile what we can and cannot experience/visualize. If we cannot visualize the past, we cannot fathom it within the logic of historical understanding. The question then becomes how, and in what form, does species history enter the particular histories that we must also undertake (and indeed that we are peculiarly trained to practise); what kind of methodological move will allow us to contemplate performing two kinds of tasks that seem mutually irreconcilable? The methodological imperative is deeply tied to the problems of historical scale (time and the rate of change) that Chakrabarty raises, but also to the problem of the unit of analysis – space and boundary conditions – and the limits of our historical language. There is an important corollary here: species history or geological history comes as a particular form of meta-narrative that speaks from the omniscient vantage of science – the narrator disappears, and we are left to consider ‘this is what happened’. It is a form of narrative that many social historians have come to discard in favour of a critical history that recognizes the writing of history as a particular form of rhetorical practice, and insists on articulating the vantage of locution and the grid of power that attaches to it. Their goal is to excavate conscientiously the incompleteness of experience and the limits of historical knowledge. How do we bring these two narrative modes close enough to negotiate their incompatibility? Landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, who directs the Mannahatta Project in New York City, addresses the problem of envisioning history in one particular way, through visual mapping.14 His team is performing a virtual reconstruction of the pre-urban seventeenth-century landscape of Manhattan. His raw materials consist of seventeenth-century Dutch documents, British colonial maps, topographical surveys, fossil evidence, and other biological data, considered in painstaking detail. As Alan Weisman notes in The World Without Us (2007): ‘With each new entry of a species of grass or tree that is historically confirmed in some part of the city, the images grow more detailed, more startling, more convincing … Sanderson has identified more than forty brooks and streams that traversed what was once a hilly rocky island’.15 Sanderson's method is meticulously positivist, consisting of a search for historical clues that would render the total picture. Such a totality, however, is always in abeyance, always susceptible to revision. It is a perpetual work in process, much like the landscape itself. In an article entitled ‘The human footprint and the last of the wild’, Sanderson and his co-authors have reiterated the importance of maps as a pedagogical tool for explaining the human effect on the planet, with the hope of transforming the view of economic systems and political decisions. As they put it: ‘What we need is a way of understanding this influence that is global in extent and easy to grasp – what we need is a map’.16 Seeking to address the problem of scale that belies understanding, they have brought together advanced satellite imaging, G.I.S. technology and detailed geographical data to create a world map that captures the degrees of human influence on the global ecology. The virtual mapping project of Manhattan and the global human footprint map speak the omniscient language of science. Sanderson's view of present-day Manhattan, however, offers something besides this scientific vision. As Weisman explains: Their goal is a block-by-city-block guide to this ghost forest, the one Eric Sanderson uncannily seems to see even while dodging Fifth Avenue buses. When Sanderson wanders through Central Park, he's able to … trace the shoreline of the long, narrow lake that lay along what is now 59th Street, north of the Plaza Hotel, with its tidal outlet that meandered through salt marsh to the East River. From the west, he can see a pair of streams entering the lake that drained the slope of Manhattan's major ridgeline, a deer and mountain lion trail known today as Broadway. Eric Sanderson sees water flowing everywhere in town, much of it bubbling from underground.17 In Weisman's description, Sanderson's view of Manhattan is uncanny – he sees in two registers at once; the past and present are separate, but not quite. The ghost forest comes back to haunt the view of the thoroughly mechanized city in the present; it sprouts when no one is noticing, whispering stories of the past. The familiar city becomes strange, with the introduction of a past we thought was buried under concrete, dead to our sensibilities. These moments of estrangement – the ecological uncanny – that force us to see in more than one spatio-temporal mode at once inflect our perception of the future, and may turn out to be an important move towards questioning the certainty and obviousness of our present conception of cities. How do we mobilize this sense of the uncanny as a methodological imperative, without paying allegiance to a discursive haunting in which the old language of urbanism disables our capacity to see the past or the present? The uncanny carries several different connotations in Sigmund Freud's work. One is simply the unwilling return to a strange place, producing an unwanted familiarity. Freud used as an example his own wanderings through the deserted streets of an unfamiliar provincial town in Italy. He found himself in a narrow street in the red-light area of the town. He hastened to leave at the next turn, only to find himself back in the same street. He hurried once more, only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths to the same place.18 This involuntary return to the same situation is similar to the discursive haunting of the language of urbanism that I mentioned above. The uncanny is also, in its most commonly used meaning in cultural theory, ‘nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression’.19 He notes that the unheimlich is frightening, not simply because it is not known, ‘opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar”, “native”, “belonging to the home”’,20 rather because the unfamiliar is made strangely familiar, or the familiar is made strangely unfamiliar, thus unsettling linear conceptions of space and time: ‘heimlich, is a word, the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it coincides with its opposite unheimlich’. Elsewhere, explaining British colonial representations of the Indian landscape, I have argued that the modes of representation pursued by colonial painters and writers produced an uncanny effect. The European practice of utilizing familiar metropolitan aesthetic and linguistic concepts, such as the picturesque, to describe the colonial territory, with the objective of reading ‘difference’ in the unfamiliar object of discourse, generated narratives that were shot through with ambivalence. The barely concealed tropical anxiety of having to locate oneself in the colonial territory erupted in the text as an unforeseen effect of the process of representation.21 It was an unexpected outcome of repressing one's identification with the native, a disavowal of recognition. Could it be possible to read such moments of textual disjuncture, the slippage between desire and experience, between representational mastery and the inadequacy of the representative strategy, between the empirical and the rhetorical, as productive moments for eliciting a different kind of history?22 In the remainder of this article, I would like to think through this problem by discussing the city-periphery relation in Calcutta between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a specific articulation of the problem of visual representation. The city's eastern fringe, currently centred around Dhapa, is, in Mike Davis's description, a ‘garbage slum’.23 It is also a Ramsar site, a protected wetland of international importance, one that is continually encroached upon by planned suburban township development.24 Initially created as a spill-over basin of the Bidyadhari river, the current East Calcutta wetlands encompass an area of approximately 12,500 hectares. The practice of dumping the city's garbage since the second half of the nineteenth century altered the ecology of this basin. One of the local fish farmers started experimenting with garbage as a substrate for fish farming in 1928–9.25 Now the area includes over 350 fish farms, locally known as bheris, within the designated conservation area. It is the world's largest waste-water ecosystem, sustaining successive resource recovery practices in the form of garbage-vegetable farms, wastewater-fed fishponds, paddy fields using fishpond effluent, and sewage-fed brackish-water aquaculture.26 For a better understanding of this fringe area of the city, I found it useful to return to its making as a colonial landscape. The conceptual, logistical and technical difficulty that this land posed to colonial authorities, surveyors and engineers has produced the two kinds of narratives to which I have referred above: the scientific narrative of maps, infrastructure and sanitation; and the uncanny narratives that halt at the threshold of the visible world. Primarily a story of map-making, it is also about locating navigable channels, drainage and canal construction, defining city boundaries, recalcitrant peasants, and the limits of metropolitan discourse. At its centre was a deep problem that troubled British colonial administrators: the city leaked. It could not be bounded, protected and marked off from the countryside in any pragmatic way. Every attempt to define the city's boundaries seemed to cause conditions of permeability to proliferate. No cartographical description or infrastructural intervention seemed to stabilize the notoriously changing natural or geophysical conditions of the region. I wish to focus on this problem of description that precipitated notions of the city's reach and extent. The Bengal delta has undergone massive changes in its land and river formation within recorded history. Once-important ports have literally ‘dried up’ and become reduced to small villages or provincial towns because of the changing course of rivers. When the merchant-hero of Manasa Vijaya, Bipradas Pipalai's late fifteenth-century ode to the snake goddess Manasa, sailed down the Hooghly, Saptagram was the most important port in lower Bengal.27 On his voyage out to the sea, he came across a string of settlements in the vicinity of present-day Calcutta: Tribeni, Kumarhatta (Halishahar), Hugli, Rishira, Konnagar, Sukchar, Kotrang, Kamarhati, Ariadaha, Ghusuri and Chitpur, with the ‘Sarbamangala Devi’ temple. At Betor, known for its market and temple, his men made their midday meal. On the east bank were Kalikata, Dhalandi and then Kalighat, followed by Churaghat, Joyadhuli, Dhanasthan and finally Baruipur.28 These settlements were close to the river, the main communication route until the mid nineteenth century, and owed their existence to their status either as holy places or as trading centres. The settlements on the east bank were surrounded with dense forest and marshland that extended through the deltaic Sunderbans to the Bay of Bengal. The land was vulnerable to inundation at high tide and during the rains. The population of the lower delta mostly consisted of low-caste fishermen, hunters and wood-cutters, with a meagre amount of agriculture. The snake goddess was worshipped by these low castes. The many versions of the Manasa poems, collectively referred to as Manasa Mangal Kavya, narrate the tale of the local subaltern goddess's struggle with a powerful merchant, whose sons she kills and ships she sinks, until he agrees to worship her alongside elite deities. The Kavya has been understood in the history of Bengali literature as signifying the changes in the socio-political structure of Bengal with the advent of Muslim hegemony.29 In British colonial narratives it remained an often silent source on the pre-1650 geography of Bengal.30 In the early seventeenth century the rivers Nadia, Jamuna and Saraswati began silting up, depleting Saptagram of its trade potential, and creating dry alluvial stretches fit for habitation and cultivation. More water was forced down the Bhagirathi or Hooghly, deepening and widening the river in its lower reaches. These riverine changes forced the traders to move from Saptagram to the vicinity of Calcutta.31 The cotton trade of this region of the Hooghly river picked up, drawing larger number of settlers and creating more substantial settlements on the high spots or dihees on the riverside. By the late seventeenth century, the Adiganga (the old channel of the Bhagirathi or Ganga) had receded from the vicinity of Chowringhee to Kalighat through Bhowanipur, all localities referred to as suburbs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Creeks marked the boundaries of the villages of Sutanuti, Govindapur and Kalikata, the three villages that would come together as Calcutta. Fishermen used these creeks to move from the river to the inland dihees and to anchor their boats at night.32 Place names such as Nikareepara and Jelepara, referring to fishing villages in the immediate outskirts of the city, survived in maps two centuries later, as have place names with suffixes of ghat (stepped landing), char (sand bank), danga (bank) and pukur (pond). By the time Calcutta was ‘founded’ in 1690 as a walled city, the natural features of the surrounding countryside had already been affected by human intervention.33 When the palisaded city, meant for its Christian population, was destroyed in the mid eighteenth century, the colonial authorities chose to abandon the idea of walled protective enclosure for the settlement, relying on the firing range of the ninety-nine cannons mounted on the newly built Fort William to keep it safe. The Circular Road built along the defensive line of the Mahratta ditch became a de facto boundary. Buildings proliferated outside this boundary creating a landscape of orchards, garden houses, rice fields, ponds and marshes. Conversely, vegetation and water bodies, both natural and artificial, abounded within the town proper. Mark Wood's 1784 map makes scarce distinction between city, suburb and country (see Figure 1).34 The only significant clearing in the map is the firing field around the fort. In the final years of the eighteenth century the town remained a defensive locale, with its boundaries marked by military objectives. It was not until 1794 that the limits and boundaries of the town and suburb were clearly delineated for jurisdictional purposes of law and order, and revenue.35 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of ‘Survey of the country on the banks of the Hooghly river extending from the town of Calcutta to the village of Ooloobareah, 1780–4’, by Captain Mark Wood. Source: J. Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces. A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690–1858 (1990) p. 47. © British Library Board, K Top.cxv 37. The salt lakes and marshes to the east of town were considered by colonial authorities to be a natural barrier to habitation and therefore city expansion. This perception ran counter to the need to connect the outgoing ocean trade of Calcutta with the up-country trade on which the prosperity of the town depended. It was also contrary to the evidence of occupation by the local people, who fished, farmed and lived in populous villages, as it contradicted the revenue arrangement made by the Permanent Settlement with the zamindars of these villages.36 At the same time, the fact that the bank of the Hooghly river was several feet higher than the lake bed meant that the natural drainage of the city was directed towards the eastern lakes. Once this landscape and its hydrological properties were passed through a colonial lens, it produced an image that was quite different. The expansive demands of a mercantile empire, the scientific resources of the colony, the extant rights of the populace and metropolitan landscape aesthetics came together in contradictory ways to produce the impression of the city and the surrounding countryside in the early nineteenth century. British colonial reading of this landscape proceeded from certain assumptions about health, natural beauty and productive capacity that shaped the technological interventions designed to mitigate the seeming obstructions to occupation that the land offered. The proximity of the dense marshy ‘jungles’ of the Sunderbans, referred to as wastes, mingled with the idea of the marshes of the salt lakes – the salt lakes indeed merged with the jungles – to generate the perception of a colonial settlement beleaguered by a hostile Nature. Perpetuating one of the most resilient lores of early colonial settlement, in 1727 Alexander Hamilton described the locality around the newly founded city of Calcutta as follows: one could not have chosen a more unhealthy place on all the river; for three miles to the north-eastward, is a salt-water lake that overflows in September and October, and … a prodigious number of fish resort thither, but in November and December when the floods are dissipated, those fishes are left dry, and with their putrefaction affect the air with thick stinking vapours, which the north-east winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly mortality.37 There is no evidence that annually the tides left a lake-bed full of rotting fish. The patterns of inundation varied from year to year. Nevertheless, several generations of colonial administrators set out to challenge and control the unwholesomeness of the surrounding country that seemed ill-matched to colonial perceptions of a good landscape. Hamilton's death-by-stink theory was reiterated for two more centuries, albeit in a slightly different version. The mortality was deemed to be the result of ‘noxious exhalations’ rising from the salt lakes. Writing in 1821, James Johnson, a surgeon, claimed that nature in Bengal produced an ‘inexplicable something’ that gave rise to peculiarly tropical ailments: ‘noxious exhalation was liable to be concentrated … when it was detained among woods and jungles.’38 When James R. Martin published his Medical Topography of Calcutta (1836), he aligned three distinct problems – the lakes and marshes as an unwholesome presence close to the city, the city's defective drainage and the native habitations of the poor – into one package of sanitary reform.39 For Martin, there were several prime considerations in improving this intrinsically unhealthy landscape. Land had to be cleared of vegetation, the ground had to be properly drained and water bodies – both tanks within the limits of town and suburbs, and the salt lakes – had to be filled up, ‘leaving none of the characters of marsh’ in it.40 Two of these objectives could be combined, although drainage was more important than clearing vegetation. The ground water of the town, as well as the river water, could be channelled to drain into the salt lakes. The river would then leave a succession of silt deposits and gradually fill the lake. By emphasizing the effect of topography on disease, medical authorities such as Martin made themselves indispensable to the colonial project of exploring, mapping, surveying and controlling space. In his assessment, native habitation was as dangerous as the surrounding marshes. Nothing proved it more forcefully than the ‘villainous smells’ that arose therefrom. The irregular pattern of native houses and streets indicated the native's reluctance to fight natural conditions and signalled a deeper problem of corrupt morals. Martin was the first directly to relate the habitation of the poor in the city and suburbs to its climatic and topographical defects. His work would be taken up, immediately following its publication, as the basis for sanitary reform that resulted in the alteration of the city's drainage pattern, the removal of bustees (poor tenanted habitation) from the city proper, and the filling in of tanks en masse. Between 1850 and 1901 at least 1,017 of 1,043 tanks had been filled in.41 Most importantly, for the remaining three-quarters of a century his Medical Topography would be the primer for the discourse on slums, long after the acceptance of the germ theory of disease by the medical establishment. If between Hamilton in 1727 and Martin in 1836 the parameters of topographical discourse on Calcutta were set, the work of several surveyors from 1760 to 1830 bears witness to a more complicated attitude towards the landscape. Specifically, in the survey efforts of Robert Hyde Colebrooke (1762–1808) and Thomas Prinsep (1800–30), surveying, mapping and representation of topography retained other possibilities. Colebrooke spent thirty years in India as a surveyor, and served as surveyor-general between 1794 and 1807. Thomas Prinsep arrived in India at the age of eighteen and honed his surveying skills in the Sunderbans between 1821 and 1824. He was appointed the superintendent of canals in Calcutta at the age of twenty-six. Some of the most important surveys of the region between 1760 and 1830 were made in search of a year-round navigable route from Calcutta to the upper provinces, because for seven months of the year, navigation was only practicable by the dangerous route through the Sunderbans. James Rennell's survey of 1764–5 had failed to produce any such alternatives.42 Later surveys were intended to ‘discover’ new routes and, more importantly, to ascertain the viability of making existing channels navigable throughout the year through artificial means. In 1795, Colebrooke surveyed the Jamuna and ‘found it unsuitable’, but suggested that if a cut, twenty-feet wide and fifteen-to-twenty-feet deep, was made between the Churni and the Jamuna, to avoid the part where the Churni became impassable, then 155 miles on the route through the Sunderbans could be avoided.43 This proposal was rejected when James Rennell opposed it: ‘Nature seems to have adjusted matters very nicely, in respect of the capacity of river beds and their levels … any tampering with them in delicate cases (particularly where there is so great a periodical swelling [in volume] and velocity of current) may be productive of much mischief.’44 Colebrooke was just beginning to learn about the rivers of this region. He undertook another survey up the Ganges from the Jalangi river to Bhagalpur, with the object of predicting the future course of the river, ‘by observing the Direction and Rapidity of the current, and the nature of the Banks, Islands, and Shoals, to form some probable conjecture as to the changes which are likely to ensue’.45 After all, without an accurate idea of the river's course and depth, no work of canal building could proceed successfully. An account of this survey starkly noted the degree to which the river ‘encroaches’ on the habitations on its banks: I have seen whole villages thus deserted, the inhabitants of which had rebuilt their huts on safer spots inland, or had removed entirely to some neighbouring village or town. The Topography, I might almost say Geography, of a large portion of the country, will be liable to perpetual fluctuation from this cause; as the face of the country is not only altered by the rivers, but the villages are removed from one side to the other; some are completely destroyed, and new villages are continually rising up in other spots.46 Colebrooke became obsessed with documenting these changes in the river, and encouraged others to do so. He received the following note from Thomas Wood in 1798 after a journey up the river following the rainy season: Here I am at length arrived after a pretty favourable passage considering the season of the year. Though I most fully intended to have at least attempted what you recommended, a sketch of the river from Colgong upwards, yet I am sorry to acquaint you, it was completely out of my power … even with Rennell's map of the river, I could not make out where I was. I had not the smallest idea of what the Ganges is during the rains, until now that I have seen it, and though I have repeatedly gone up and down at other seasons, believe me, I could not have known it for the same river.47 Such reactions were entirely typical and applied to all river routes in the lower Gangetic region. The pilots who normally surveyed the Hooghly were told ‘No plan, however accurately taken, of the Navigation in and about the entrance of this River should be depended upon for any period, by reason of the very frequent alteration in the various Channels and the Sands shifting’.48 But that did not lessen the demand for maps; the fickleness of the geography required more frequent surveys. For surveyors such as Colebrooke the riverine landscape became a source of perpetual mystery that needed unlocking; perhaps more surveys and precise documentation would help him to get a better grasp of the shifting geography.49 Interestingly, in the Historical Records of the Survey of India, R. H. Phillimore noted that Colebrook's journals ‘were often written in pencil, most untidy, and full of corrections … They are mixed up with the traverses of rivers and cross country routes, and besides frequent rough sketches of the route, often contain clever pencil sketches of boatmen or scenery’.50 For the most part river surveys hugged the bank; surveyors rarely ventured into the countryside.51 Survey records are replete with complaints, particularly from the revenue department, about the failure to deliver information beyond the screen of the river banks.52 But the river itself became the source of endless aesthetic fascination. It was customary to have sketches of the river banks drawn to complement the maps, and as the main mode of transportation until the eighteen-fifties, river travel produced some of the most memorable paintings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.53 Often, as in the case of Colebrooke's survey of the Churni river, the sketches were aesthetic gestures as well as aids in ‘laying down’ the work (see Figure 2).54 For the surveyors the images anchored the memory of the survey on momentarily solid ground. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide R. H. Colebrooke's sketch of the Churni river. Source: R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (4 vols., Dehradun, 1959), i. The edges of the river were all important; it was the frequent and unpredictable changes in these edge conditions that produced cartographical anxiety. On his route through the Sunderbans in 1807 Colebrooke noted: A little way further … the bank was covered with trees and bamboo which appeared to have been recently undermined and fallen into the river. The breadth of the river appeared to be much greater than it is represented in Major Rennell's maps and in other respects I could trace no semblance … Besides Gwalpara I only found one place in 20 miles that corresponded with Major Rennell's map, and that in name only, for it was inserted on the wrong side of the river, but this might have been owing to the removal of the village from one side to the other, as is frequently done in consequence of the encroachments of the river, and not to any mistake of the surveyor … Having surveyed this part of the Ganges in 1797 I was astonished to observe the alterations in the formation of the sand which had taken place … Several islands raised considerably above the surface of the water, upon which cattle graze and corn is sown, now occupy the space of the river … which earlier was at least 30 feet deep.55 The river's transformation placed the surveyors' methods and reputation at risk. During Colebrooke's long career in India, much of which was spent mapping the Ganges, maps had become not so much stable representations of geographical features, but a way of exploring the country, with all the contingencies involved in moving through a landscape that has the capacity to surprise even a knowledgeable person; the surveyor's familiarity with the land was always on the verge of being undermined by forces that no empirical method seemed adequate to capture. Phillimore, seeking to explain Colebrooke's untidy and seemingly disorganized journal entries, noted that perhaps they were meant to be fair copied later.56 Perhaps not. The information that Colebrooke was collecting could not be given any tidier form without foreclosing its empirical validity; it was the cross-hatching of river traverses and cross-country routes, and the incomplete layering of information that constituted the tangled web of knowledge. The contours of the geography he was mapping could only be comprehended as the cumulative work of many years, perhaps many generations. His immediate concern of not being able to locate stable features was shadowed by the recognition of a much longer history of geographical or geological change that was beyond easy grasp. Yet, it was only against this longue durée that all of his small contingent mappings could gather meaning. The sketches that he produced alongside the maps were personal imprints on this larger geographical narrative that neither began nor ended with him. The survey was given a distinctly singular, autobiographical frame that far exceeded the role of maps as topographical simulations. By repeatedly retracing his steps over survey routes taken earlier and narrating his experience of the unfamiliarity of the familiar, he allowed the maps that as representations are frozen in time to be infected by a non-linear temporality. These idiosyncratic marks introduced an open-endedness to the maps, a possibility that would soon be foreclosed by trigonometric surveys. The recognition that this mobile landscape was difficult to ‘map’ lasted well into the second half of the nineteenth century, as did the tacit understanding that there is a long recorded history of changes in the land. Both are prominent themes in James Fergusson's essay ‘On recent changes in the delta of the Ganges’ (1863) and William Hunter's Statistical Account of Bengal (1875–8).57 The difference is that for Fergusson and Hunter the mobile land, even if it confounded surveyors' efforts, could be captured through mathematical techniques and distilled into an object of theory. A linear relation between past, present and future was on offer as a basis of scientific knowledge. Fergusson's interest in the changing course of rivers was connected to his enthusiasm for archaeology; an explanation of the rise and fall of towns in the plains was rooted in an understanding of the riverine geography. Towns and settlements not merely flourished and declined with the vagaries of the rivers, but they appeared mobile, making it impossible to represent their location accurately on a map: the city of Serajgunge – the largest and most important mart in that part of the country – is somewhere in the neighbourhood now, but not where marked on the map, of course, and it is annually obliged to accommodate itself of the vagaries of the stream, and change its locality. It may be ten miles up the stream, or ten miles further down, or five miles further east and west, but is somewhere thereabout.58 If the spatial mobility of the delta demanded adding a temporal dimension to the surveyor's project, destabilizing the fiction of nature as static and time as linear, Fergusson refused to make such allowance. For him, the open-ended spatio-temporality of these changes, which meant that neither location nor the extent of a settlement could be stated with accuracy, required a different analytical move, external to the specificity of the locale – it necessitated a leap into theory as an abstraction from the work on the ground. As an entrée into the geographical questions he raised, he cited his first-hand knowledge of the rivers during his five years' stay in India.59 One's physical acquaintance with the object of knowledge had to be cited as a source of empiricist authority, and at the same time the limits of empiricism in the colonial territory had to be invoked.60 It is not a coincidence that Fergusson began a discussion of the changing course of the rivers in the Gangetic plain with a theoretical model of the course of rivers, citing examples from across the world, before entering into the specifics of the waterways under discussion. Without this larger theoretical armature, his specific geographical data would not hold water, so to speak. For Colebrooke, this foreclosure was not available within his mode of investigation, which remained fundamentally exploratory.61 The larger scale of history was only a reminder of the difficult specificities of the mapping project at hand.62 The larger geographical or geological history was a hovering presence in his surveys; he had, it is tempting to believe, learned to see in two spatio-temporal registers at once. Thomas Prinsep's dual vision worked along different lines. Like Colebrooke he frequently painted during his survey work. Shortly before he died in 1830, he undertook a series of eighteen watercolours on his way up the Ganges. While river views were popular, Prinsep was the only one who painted the Salt Water Lake. The watercolour is the most accomplished depiction of nineteenth-century Calcutta and, like Colebrooke's sketches, it speaks of a sensibility in excess of the desire for accurate topographical depiction (see Figure 3). The lake is shown in the brooding calm of a late afternoon. A narrow channel in the middle acts as the path of navigation among low-lying, partially submerged land. Several boats of various sizes and descriptions populate the picture. We can discern fishing activity from fishing platforms on the left and fishing lines from the boats at anchor. Prinsep is at pains to catch the delicate play of light on the water. The lake stretches to the horizon. This is not only the sole depiction of the salt lake but also the only image that assumes its vantage on the city's eastern periphery and looks towards the city. Except Calcutta is nowhere visible; it has disappeared in the vastness of the fringes. The non-visibility of buildings is not a painterly conceit. It is in keeping with commentaries of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Calcutta residents who noted that from the roof terrace of houses in Chowringhee (at that time on the eastern edge of the city) one had an unobstructed view of the lake for miles. Those two-storey houses in the suburbs would get lost in the vast horizon. The aesthetic preoccupation of this image was also not entirely exceptional; the view of the lake was a real estate selling point in the city.63 Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Prinsep, Salt Water Lake, 1828. © British Library Board, WD 4193. But was it a lake? Colonial documents sometimes describe this water body as a lake, and sometimes as lakes, in the plural. There does not seem to have been any clear agreement on the boundaries of the lake(s), or whether to consider it one water body or several. Prinsep designated the lake as consisting of three parts, two northern portions above and one southern portion below the channel that cut across the expanse of the water body. Together they formed, for the greater part of the year, a vast stretch of water connecting surrounding jheels (shallow lakes), nullahs (drains), khals (canals) and creeks that ultimately flowed into the Sunderbans. In the early nineteenth century, surveyors noted that the lake itself was thirty-six square miles. By the time Prinsep began his survey he recorded only eighteen square miles.64 How these surveyors calculated the area of the lake is not clear; one had to decipher a boundary before it could be calculated, and given that the contours of the partially submerged land that worked as boundaries changed with the season and with the tides, the calculation had to be both somewhat arbitrary and geared to the interest of visual coherence.65 In Bengali parlance a much finer distinction was made between the different water bodies that collectively formed this basin: jheels, beels, bilan, nayanjali, doba, pukur, dighi– all of these terms have survived in present-day usage.66 It is important to note that all but the first of these refer to human-made water bodies. The term lake did not seem to fit. In 1936 Ranald Martin lamented the absence of recognizable landscape features in this part of the country: ‘there are not any lakes in Bengal resembling those of Scotland, or Canada’. Rather there ‘is a profusion of extensive jheels, which may be either denominated shallow lakes, or deep morasses’.67 If Martin denigrates the outskirts of the city on comparative aesthetic lines, Prinsep's painting aestheticizes this much-maligned landscape. The channel in the centre of the image allows the viewer to enter the picture and, as a discernible pathway through the lake provides a means to view and to comprehend this vast incongruence. This channel would show up as the most recognizable feature of the map of the suburb prepared under his supervision. Looking at this painting, it is difficult to comprehend that, at about the time it was completed, Prinsep was strenuously arguing for the lake to be drained to reduce its unhealthiness. There is a striking dissonance between the painting and his technical evaluation of the lake. Prinsep began his memorandum on the Salt Water Lake by noting its insalubrity and that it ought to be ‘recovered’ for cultivation. He offered a long preface to his recommendations: The inhabitants of the Factory of Calcutta might with some reason have looked for security in the proximity of an immense impenetrable morass upon their flank, and a defence against cavalry marauders would endeavour with jealous care to preserve it in the state it was. But the residents in the capital of an empire which has no enemy in the field within 1500 miles must view it in a different light. Health and appearance have long taken the place of security and defence as objects to be kept in view in the local improvements of the city and vicinity, and there is only one way of accounting for the subject having escaped attention which offers any possibility of truth. It would seem that the idea of the lake being necessary to the military defence of the city has been succeeded by an impression, not altogether unfounded and which appears yet to be rather generally entertained, viz. that the existence of this salt marsh in its present state is indispensable to the perfect drainage of the city.68 He suggested that only the turbid water of the Hooghly be allowed into the lake, ‘bunding’ out all other tidal and surface influx from the surrounding jheels and creeks, thereby expediting the silting up of the lake already in process, as evidenced by the ‘rapid increase of vegetation upon its surface’.69 Prinsep's memorandum was accompanied by a set of six maps of the suburbs, based on surveys executed between 1826 and 1828. The maps show the land from the east of the Circular Road that girded the city (see Figures 4, 5, 6). At the bottom of the map in Figure 6 is an inset of the canal system that stretches between the Hooghly and the Jamuna rivers. The maps show the city edges leading into a stretch of ground, dotted with tanks and buildings for about two to three miles – the broadest stretch next to the Baliaghata canal, with more houses below the Narkeldanga Road and towards the south. Beyond these are rice fields that give way to salt lakes cut across by khals, dotted with salt works and salt golas. The three sections of the lake that Prinsep referred to in his memorandum appear separated by partially submerged land and the channel marked ‘passage through the lake’. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of ‘Map of the suburbs of Calcutta east of the Circular Road from Baranagore to Balligunge including Dum‐dum, the Circular Canal, the Salt Water Lake, and on a smaller scale the whole line of Eastern‐canal to the Eeshamuttee river’, by Captain Prinsep, 1830. © British Library Board, I.O.R., X/1213. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of the ‘Map of the suburbs’, by Captain Prinsep, 1830 showing the channel through the lakes. © British Library Board, I.O.R., X/1213. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of the ‘Map of the suburbs’, by Captain Prinsep, 1830, showing the inset map of the canals. © British Library Board, I.O.R., X/1213. The inset map of the canal system is key to understanding the reason for surveying the eastern suburbs. For Prinsep the area between the Hooghly and the Jamuna was a coherent spatial unit – the true extent of the city. The inset map was meant to indicate the larger region and topographical conditions on which the question of inland navigation rested, and that the fate of the canal system was tied to the drainage system of the city and the lake: ‘I had purposely connected the present scheme (of draining the salt lakes) with the canals now carrying on’. Yet, he hedged: ‘upon mature consideration, I can see no reason why any alteration in those canals should be necessary’ if the new channel through the lakes worked both for drainage and navigation.70 He had changed his mind about the kinds of link one could suggest between the city and the Sunderbans. Prinsep was trying to weave together into a visual whole the different types and levels of information he had gathered while working on the survey of the Sunderbans, his canal-building effort at the mouth of the Jamuna at Hoseinabad, and the survey of the suburbs. The armature that holds the map together is the channel through the lake, executed in the manner of a river route; to this he adds other topographical information as a fill-in. The texture of the ubiquitous rice fields provides the means to distinguish the features of the lakes and canals. The armature does not so much clarify as suggest the difficulties of extending a regularly dimensioned channel through the lakes and inland. Instead of a clear line of canal between the Hooghly and the Jamuna we find a web of lines almost too difficult to follow, as the passage leads eastwards. The winding khals and channels further east are reminders of the slow passage and the difficulty of claiming a year-round route across this tract of the deltas. Fragments of the landscape and a series of contingencies, human and natural, haunt the future of the expanding canal system, holding it in a state of uncertainty. Prinsep had taken up his predecessor's canal-building project at Hoseinabad. The project stalled: it ran over budget, the coolies deserted, the work was not finished, and he risked salinizing the sweet water of the river by allowing the salt water from the lakes to enter it.71 The work started a slew of protests from the landlords and villagers whose agricultural land and drinking water supply was threatened.72 Prinsep had tried to ‘improve’ on the methods used by the local landlords to dig canals, and could not fathom why his improvement did not work.73 If drawing and mapping are methods of controlling the land, making the land into landscape, Prinsep's survey could be seen as a means of gaining visual control over the land that so haunted him. Perhaps it was the quality of soil that delayed construction, perhaps it was the coolies who were obliged to work on the canal. There is a palpable anxiety of failure and betrayal in his memoranda to the authorities, as if there were some unspoken conspiracy at work in the attitude of the zamindars and recalcitrant peasants.74 When surveying the Sunderbans he had relied on the local woodcutters' and fishermen's knowledge of the rivers; he had used the names they suggested, rather than those mentioned by the zamindars.75 Now his surveying experience seems to have failed him. It did not translate into knowledge with which he could intervene and shape the land. There appeared no clear transition from map-making to canal-building, from describing and gathering data to physically altering the land. The technological interventions he proposed were troubled by the recognition of the strength of the natural and human relations that had congealed in the existing terrain, namely the local population's ability to adapt to the mobile land. Prinsep's most important contribution to the geographical discourse of this region was to bring the weight of the periphery, where he toiled most of his brief career, into the centre of the visual imagination of the city, disabling the idea of a city as a coherent bounded entity. Although his ‘Map of the suburbs’ maintains a nominal distinction between ‘city’ and ‘suburb’, the suburb being rendered in more detail, by repeatedly emphasizing the links that the city had to establish with the lakes and tract on the east he collapsed the city-periphery relationship. The drainage of the city, the unwillingness to invest in an underground sewer grid and the fear that the city might itself be prone to high tidal waves, generated innumerable suggestions and debates about embankments, canals and drainage channels. Two decades of debate had one common theme – all of these initiatives were products of the tremendous anxiety of literally living on unsure ground. In 1837, based on Prinsep's plans, T. Smith, a junior member of the medical board, suggested to the municipal enquiry commission that the Salt Lake should be drained into the Hooghly, and warped by creating an embankment around it, leaving along one of its edges a single straight canal.76‘There should be no stagnant water whatever’ within the city and suburbs, he wrote, and ‘all the marine jungle should be entirely rooted out’ to make the warped lake fit for the cultivation of cash crops such as indigo, cotton and sugar.77 Smith insisted that the lake could be bought from the zamindars who derived a profit from it, but clearly there was disagreement about the extent of the rights for which the landholders paid revenue to the government: ‘It is necessary to remark that the Salt-water Lake has been disposed in perpetuity … There is doubt whether the land as well as the water and the right of fishery belongs to the Zemindar or to the Sirkar, – the right is about to be tried.’78 The rationalization of the landscape, Smith argued, ought to proceed on terms that were favourable to the British, and if the government was unwilling to undertake the reclamation of the lake, it should ‘permit individuals, including their servants, to embark their money in the work’.79 The 1857 Drainage Committee Report found an average two feet rise in the level of the lake in the preceding two decades. The decrease of the lake area and the practice of allowing river tides into the canals that drain into the lake had pushed up the water level. The committee reached three remarkable conclusions. First, in view of native proprietors reclaiming land from the lake, an effect of the ‘extension of the Town of Calcutta’ in that direction, it found it advisable to bring the lake and the channels within the jurisdiction of the municipality, ‘to fix within proper limits the free ingress of the River Tides through the Canals and to check the further restriction of the area of the Salt Water Lake’. Second, it claimed, for the first time, that no ‘insalubrious effect’ was produced because of the proximity of the town to the lake. And third, it decided that the main channel through the salt lake was ‘well adapted for the purpose of an out-fall or receptacle for the whole drainage of Calcutta; if sewerage were thrown into it, it would be removed with certainty and rapidity in the tidal waters’.80 This gave rise to the drainage scheme that was started in 1859. Its objective was ‘the conveyance, by a series of five parallel conduits, of all the drainage and sewage of the town eastwards’, even though steam pumps had to be employed to effect this transfer of waste to the fringes.81 The lake became a dumping site at the very moment it was declared not injurious to the health of the city's inhabitants. It was only when the ‘fringes’ were jurisdictionally brought within the city as a coherent entity that the outlying areas became truly peripheral. The periphery is not that which is merely outside bounds; it carries the connotation of diminished value relative to the centre. The lake, viewed by British medical and engineering authorities as an unhealthy ‘morass’, was nevertheless brought under the regime of the Permanent Settlement for revenue purposes. The local people used the water bodies and land for rice cultivation, vegetable farming, fisheries and reed collection, these activities being adjusted to the seasons and the changing conditions of inundation. It was the increasing consolidation of the city as a centre of economic power in the nineteenth century, the prevailing metropolitan view of an ordered, healthy city, and the privileging of the ideas and needs of the city's colonial residents that drove the colonial argument for the canal system, drainage and sewage system, thereby creating a ‘waste land’ out of productive surroundings. Nowhere does this forced centricity and desire to define a sphere of influence show up more saliently than in Tassin's ‘A new map of the country fifty miles round Calcutta’ (1836). In the map Calcutta is visually posed as the central geographical figure in a countryside bounded by a completely arbitrary spatial frame (see Figure 7). Figure 7. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A new map of the country fifty miles round Calcutta’, by J. B. Tassin (1836). © British Library Board, I.O.R., X/1215. And yet, even in this process of centring the city, the notion of peripherality worked in contradictory ways. While administrators wanted part of the lake area brought within municipal jurisdiction, most of the lake remained outside the city's reach, and tracts of similar land to the north and north-east were left out of city bounds on financial grounds – they would not generate enough revenue to be worth being included within the Calcutta municipality.82 The information with which surveyors such as Colebrooke and Prinsep supplemented their maps, straining against scale and format of representation, was considered peripheral by others because it could not be seamlessly assimilated within the colonial scientific logic. The mobile characteristics of the land were left out of colonial maps because these characteristics could not be apprehended by the mapping techniques. Nature did not change too slowly relative to human history and technological capacity; it changed too fast. The marginalized inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, on whom the colonial state depended for labour and knowledge of the land, remained beyond the disciplinary reach of the colonial state. The knowledge systems that were pushed to the periphery of metropolitan knowing came back to haunt the process of creating an infrastructure of improvement, and continue to do so today. It is deeply ironic that the lake made into a waste land was reclaimed for productive purposes within less than a century, by extending and adapting the knowledge systems that had survived the colonial interregnum. It is also precisely this track of peripheral knowledge that allows us to see in two spatio-temporal registers at once, and to recognize moments when the language of urban planning loses its descriptive and prescriptive force, and the fiction of a city as a coherent entity – a thing – begins to unravel. Footnotes * This article is a revised version of the plenary lecture delivered at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians on ‘Cities’, University of London, 2 July 2009. I would like to thank Jeremy White for his close reading of earlier drafts of this article and critical suggestions, Andrew Cook for his generosity in sharing his bibliography on embankments and the problem of the salinization of river water in the Gangetic plains, and Jennifer Howes for enabling me to obtain permission to reproduce the images from the British Library. 1 M. Davis, Planet of Slums (New York, 2006). 2 Davis, p. 9. 3 Davis, p. 37. 4 Davis, p. 17. 5 Davis, p. 18. 6 Davis, p. 129. Mathew Gandy raises the issue of description explicitly, and provides a useful critique of Rem Koolhaas's analysis of Lagos (see M. Gandy, ‘Learning from Lagos’ , New Left Review , xxxiii (MayJune 2005 ), 36 – 53 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). 7 Davis, p. 134. 8 Davis, p. 134. 9 Cited in A. Weisman, The World Without Us (New York, 2007), p. 29. 10 This does not necessarily contradict the idea of ‘nature’ being profoundly human made, as put forward by scholars such as Bruno Latour (B. Latour, The Politics of Nature, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)). 11 D. Chakrabarty, ‘The climate of history: four theses’ , Critical Inquiry , xxxv ( 2009 ), 197 – 222 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 12 One could argue that the work of some environmental historians, such as William Cronon, has already charted a ‘geological’ approach (see W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)). Also useful in this context is Richard Grove's discussion of the colonial origins of global environmentalism in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995). 13 Chakrabarty, pp. 206–7. 14 The Mannahatta Project <http://www.themannahattaproject.org> [accessed 2 Oct. 2009]; E. Rothenstein, ‘Manhattan: an island always diverse’, New York Times, 3 July 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/arts/design/04manhatta.html> [accessed 2 Oct. 2009]. 15 Weisman, p. 22. 16 E. W. Sanderson, M. Jaiteh, M. A. Levy, K. H. Redford, A. V. Wanneboand G. Woolmer, ‘The human footprint and the last of the wild’ , BioScience , lii ( 2002 ), 891 – 904 , at p. 892 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 17 Weisman, pp. 22–3. 18 S. Freud, On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York, 1958), pp. 143–4. 19 Freud, p. 148. 20 Freud, p. 124. 21 S. Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (2005), pp. 31–3. 22 For a discussion along similar lines on history and theory, and the uncanniness of historical practice, see A. H. Miller, ‘Prosecuting arguments: the uncanny and cynicism in cultural history’ , Cultural Critique , xxix ( 1994 –5), 163 – 82 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 23 Davis, p. 47. 24 D. Ghoshand S. Sen, ‘Ecological history of Calcutta's wetland conversion’ , Environmental Conservation , xiv ( 1987 ), 219 – 26 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; K. Dasgupta, ‘A city divided? Planning and urban sprawl in the eastern fringes of Calcutta’, in Indian Cities in Transition, ed. A. Shaw (Hyderabad, 2007), pp. 314–40; S. Chattopadhyay, ‘“Bourgeois Utopias”? The rhetoric of globality in the contemporary suburban landscape of Calcutta’ (Center for East and South East Asian Studies, Working Papers in Contemporary Asian Studies, Lund, 2009); see also the discussion on environmental litigation in H. Dembowski, ‘Courts, civil society and public sphere: environmental litigation in Calcutta’, Economic and Political Weekly, 9 Jan. 1999, pp. 49–56. 25 D. Ghosh, ‘Wastewater-fed aquaculture in the wetlands of Calcutta – an overview’ (Proceedings of the International Seminar on Wastewater Reclamation and Reuse for Aquaculture, Calcutta, 6–9 Dec. 1988). 26 Ghosh. 27 Bipradas Pipalai, Manasa Vijaya (1498). 28 A. K. Ray, A Short History of Calcutta (1902; repr. with an introduction by N. R. Ray, Calcutta, 1982), pp. 17–18. 29 See P. K. Maity, Historical Studies in the Cult of the Goddess Manasa (Calcutta, 1966); W. L. Smith, The One-Eyed Goddess: a Study of the Manasa Mangal (Stockholm, 1980); A. Bhattacharya, Bangla Mangalkavyer Itihas (4th edn., Calcutta, 1964). 30 E.g., J. Fergusson, ‘On recent changes in the delta of the Ganges’ , Quarterly Jour. Geological Soc. of London , xix ( 1863 ), 321 – 54 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . It was A. K. Ray who first explicitly acknowledged this source in his essay published in 1902. 31 Ray, pp. 30–1. 32 Ray, p. 31. 33 The list of towns prepared in 1714 that the East India Company ‘wished the Mogul to grant them in his Phirmand’ included the names of 38 ‘towns’ situated around the three it already owned –‘Sootaloota, De Calcutta, Gobindapoor’. The list included several place names that had survived since medieval times, despite the changing course of rivers in the region ( C. R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal , ii ( 1900 ), 172 – 4 Close ). 34 ‘Survey of the country on the banks of the Hooghly river extending from the town of Calcutta to the village of Ooloobareah, 1780–4’, by Captain Mark Wood. See detail of map in J. Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces (1990), p. 47. 35 ‘Proclamation Fixing the Limits of the Town of Calcutta, Issued by the Governor General in Council on the 10th Sept. 1794’, included in Ray, pp. 116–20. 36 The Salt Water Lake ‘has been disposed in perpetuity, paying a rent of about 4,000 Rupees to Government’ (T. Smith to W. C. Hurry, secretary to the municipal enquiry committee, extract from a minute by the governor-general in the financial and revenue department, 2 Feb. 1830, in the Second Report of the Committee upon the Fever Hospital and Municipal Improvement (Calcutta, 1848) (hereafter Fever Hospital Committee Report), p. 236). Thomas Prinsep, in an 1830 memorandum, noted that for the whole lake the perpetual settlement estimate was 1,000,000 Rupees and that the western part of the lake would be worth 30,000 Rupees (‘Memorandum on the Salt Water Lake’, Fever Hospital Committee Report, p. 252). 37 A. Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, ii (Edinburgh, 1727), p. 7. 38 Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p. 63. 39 J. R. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, 1936). 40 Martin, p. 69. 41 Ray, p. 125. 42 R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (4 vols., Dehradun, 1959), i. 63. 43 Phillimore, i. 63–4. 44 Phillimore, i. 64. 45 Phillimore, i. 64. 46 Phillimore, i. 64. 47 Phillimore, i. 65. 48 Phillimore, ii. 12; see also Garstin (Phillimore, ii. 20) and Colebrooke (Phillimore, ii. 23), the latter noting that he found his own maps of the river useless 10 years later. 49 Colebrooke was very particular about the precision of surveys (see his comments on field books in Phillimore, ii. 197). 50 Phillimore, ii. 327. 51 Surveyors such as William Morrieson who mapped the Sunderbans, produced maps in which both their boat routes and foot routes were clearly delineated to provide a sense of how they moved through the landscape and the kind of information they were able to procure (see British Library, India Office Records, Maps, X/1263). In this context, see David Arnold's comment on the ‘limitations’ of Rennell's survey (D. Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze (Seattle, Wash., 2006), p. 115). 52 In 1802, Thomas Robertson was given the following instruction for surveying the Sunderbans: ‘In conducting this survey it will be necessary that you should occasionally leave your boats and travel by land, particularly in the Comillah and Chittagong districts’ (Phillimore, ii. 13). 53 Some of the most important paintings being those by Thomas and William Daniell, Ozias Humphrey, Thomas Prinsep and William Clerihew. 54 Phillimore, ii. 199. 55 Phillimore, ii. 387. 56 Phillimore, ii. 387. 57 Fergusson; W. H. Hunter, Statistical Account of Bengal, i (1875; repr., Delhi, 1973). 58 Fergusson, p. 334. 59 Fergusson, p. 322. 60 Fergusson poured scorn on the method he described as ‘dropping buckets from the sides of Budgerows’ to ‘gauge the growth of continents’, preferring mathematical extrapolations based on occasional surveys of rivers (p. 351). Needless to say these mathematical/theoretical imaginations were greatly influenced by the ‘success’ of trigonometric methods of mapping, exemplified by the work of William Lambton and George Everest (see M. H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: the Geographical Construction of British India 1765–1843 (Chicago, Ill., 1997)). 61 It is useful to read Colebrooke's survey records with the insight offered by Paul Carter's analysis of Captain Cook's journals and Cook's idiosyncratic naming of places (P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Chicago, Ill., 1988)). 62 Apparently, Colebrooke was fascinated with the scientific possibilities of Lambton's trigonometric survey (see Phillimore, ii. 386). He did not live long enough for us to know how he would have reconciled such a method with his own. 63 ‘Advertisment of House in Chowringhee’, in W. S. Seton Kerr, Selections from Calcutta Gazettes (5 vols., Calcutta, 1864–9), v. 567. 64 Prinsep, ‘Memorandum on the Salt Water Lake,’ p. 248. 65 The Report of the Committee on the Drainage of Calcutta (Calcutta, 1857) (hereafter Report on the Drainage of Calcutta), app. iii, noted that ‘The Salt Water Lake consists of a low inland basin situated two miles to the East of Calcutta, traversed by a deep main Channel, which runs from Dhapa in a South-east direction towards Mutlah, and is 106 miles in length to the Sea’. 66 The Report of the Assistant Director of Fisheries (26 Aug. 1999). 67 Martin, p. 90. 68 Prinsep, ‘Memorandum on the Salt Water Lake’, p. 245. 69 Prinsep, ‘Memorandum on the Salt Water Lake’, p. 249. 70 Prinsep, ‘Memorandum on the Salt Water Lake’, p. 251. 71 Salt water getting into freshwater channels was a recurring concern in the Lower Provinces – communications in the revenue department between 1832 and 1846 repeatedly refer to this problem (see, e.g., Brit. Libr., I.O.R., Bengal Revenue Department Collection, proceedings relating to embankments in Bengal 1846, F/4/2216, no. 109869). 72 ‘The Humble Petition of Kaleenauth Roy, &c. &c. Talookdars Purgunnah Augur Parrah, Myehattee, &c. in the Jurisdiction of the 24-Pergunnahs, 11 Joistha 1235, Bengal’ (translation) (Fever Hospital Committee Report, app. H, p. 170). 73 Memorandum by T. Prinsep, superindent of canals, 22 Aug. 1828 (Fever Hospital Committee Report, app. H, pp. 99–100). 74 T. Prinsep to Major J. N. Jackson, Hoseinabad, 3 May 1828 (Fever Hospital Committee Report, app. H). 75 Phillimore, iii. 141. 76 T. Smith to W. C. Hurry (Fever Hospital Committee Report, p. 235). 77 T. Smith to W. C. Hurry (Fever Hospital Committee Report, pp. 235–6). 78 T. Smith to W. C. Hurry (Fever Hospital Committee Report, p. 236). Sirkar refers to the East India Company's government. 79 Fever Hospital Committee Report, p. 236. 80 T. Smith to W. C. Hurry (Report on the Drainage of Calcutta, app. iii, p. iv). 81 Ray, p. 168. 82 Report of Committee Appointed by the Government of Bengal to Prepare a Scheme for the Amalgamation of the Town of Calcutta with the Urban Portions of the Suburbs (Calcutta, 1885), p. 12. © Institute of Historical Research 2010 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © Institute of Historical Research 2010
TI - Cities and peripheries
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2010.00543.x
DA - 2010-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/cities-and-peripheries-cnj69dj2d4
SP - 649
EP - 671
VL - 83
IS - 222
DP - DeepDyve
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