All Events / Global Asia Colloquium, Workshop 

Building Between Land and Sea: Nature, Infrastructure and Development in South Asia

On 1 Feb, 4-6:45, we meet as usual in Room 701, King Juan Carlos Center, 7th Floor, 53 Washington Square South, with wine and cheese!

COME ONE AND COME ALL !!!

This Colloquium will be a research workshop with papers to read in advance, featuring short presentations on dissertation research by Devika Shankar (Princeton), Chandana Anusha (Yale), and Ayesha Omer (Steinhardt), with discussion led by Jerome Whitington (Gallatin).

Building Between Land and Sea: Nature, Infrastructure and Development in South Asia

Focusing on distinct trade and energy development projects from across South Asia, this workshop will examine the ways in which infrastructure networks have shaped and been shaped by dynamic coastal and desert ecologies and shifting political configurations. While probing the nature of technological interventions attempted and executed through these projects, this workshop will also shed light on the commercial and financial linkages underpinning these interventions. At a time when infrastructures have increasingly been at the center of concerns surrounding climate change, this workshop utilizes close case studies to illuminate new forms of political and economic power that are emergent in projects with uncertain physical and political boundaries.

Here are abstracts: 

Devika Shankar. “A Coast of Curiosities: Changing Perceptions of Nature and the Development of Cochin’s Harbour (1860-1900)   

The story of Cochin’s emergence as the last major port in British India in 1936 has come to be told, like most narratives of port development, as a simple tale of technology’s triumph over nature. But the controversial decision to open up Cochin’s harbour through a grand harbour development project was taken after more than half a century of prolonged discussions focused on the port’s unique and anomalous environment. As the only natural harbour on the Malabar coast, Cochin derived much of its importance from its physical environment.  In the late 19th century, Cochin’s dependence on its natural environment increased following the discovery of a mudbank next to the harbour. This mysterious mudbank, which could remarkably calm choppy waters during the monsoons allowed Cochin to emerge as an all weather port for the very first time. Simultaneously, however, Cochin’s very existence began to be threatened when coastal erosion started inexplicably assuming unprecedented proportions around the harbour. How did these conflicting perceptions of Cochin’s physical environment—at once both advantageous and menacing—critically affect the port’s commercial fortunes? Through a focus on the hopes and fears generated by two very different environmental factors—the mudbank with its tranquilizing properties on the one hand, and the ever-encroaching sea on the other—this paper will examine how changing perceptions of nature affected the conceptualization of the port’s built environment in the last decades of the 19th century.

Chandana Anusha, “The story of a piece of land:  Port-led changes in the Gulf of Kutch, Western India”

PV is a piece of agricultural land next to a recently built highway which connects one of India’s largest ports to national networks of commerce. In this paper, I explore three main relationships that converge on PV: the relationship between freshwater and seawater, farmers and graziers,  agriculture and the port. What stimulates the cultivations on PV today?  What motivates their consequent degeneration? Is it the lack of water or the paucity of labor that dictate the state of affairs on this piece of land?  In seeking out answers to this chain of questions, I follow how issues of labor and water are discussed, negotiated, and enacted by a range of actors implicated in using agricultural land. The interactions between the cast of characters illuminate the aspirations and anxieties of contemporary coastal life,  but also interpenetrations between farming and industry, grazing and orchards, family and paid labor. Connections between the accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of virtue come alive when we consider how people deal with changes in the coast in its latest encounter with wider historical forces.

Ayesha Omer, “Coal Ground”

This chapter analyzes the formation of China’s coal energy infrastructure in Pakistan’s Thar Desert, as part of China’s global infrastructure project called the “New Silk Road.” This infrastructure comprises an open pit coal mine and thermal power plant that traverses indigenous lands and life worlds of the Thar Desert. My analysis takes up the ground of this infrastructure—literally, the coal and its related cultural, economic, political, and ecological situations—and examines how the ground is transformed into distinct mediated objects through a series of technological processes of tests, drilling, analyses, surveys, and maps. These mediated objects, and the “coal data” they generate, afford particular “objective” representations of the ground. It is upon such mediated constructions that infrastructures are advanced, particularly under logics of progress for the nation state. However, Thar’s indigenous communities have resisted the mediated representations of the ground as coal data and its associated coal infrastructure. They have enacted a historic protest and long march, including hunger strikes with an unprecedented participation by women, and filed a case in the High Court, in order to protest the poisoning of their agricultural farmlands and the eventual displacement from their homes. Through these mediated constructions of Thar’s land as coal data, and the indigenous movements against coal mining, the ground of the Thar Desert is being reconfigured and reproduced as—what I call—a coal ground.

 February 1, 2019 

Time: 4-6:45 PM

Location: King Juan Carlos Center

Global Asia Program