1988 stamp celebrating Bhakra Nangal Dam. Source: Wikimedia Commons

PUBLICATIONS

“A Cohort of Their Own: Indian Hydraulic Engineers as Interlocutors of Dams and Development,” in Vincent Lagendijk and Frederik Schulze (eds.), Dam Internationalism: Power, Expertise and Technology in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)

In this chapter, I use the lens of dam internationalism—the global and international currency that large dams gained and maintained — to argue that world expertise and mobility were not new to in both colonial and postcolonial India. Rooted in colonial engineering bureaucracies and education apparatus that were increasingly Indianized toward the end of the colonial era, I use the twin lenses of education and self-perception, to show the antecedents and effects of Indian engineers’ global expertise and mobility as technological interlocutors between empire and nation-state, as well as between the developed and developing worlds. Post–Second World War modernities created greater opportunities for Indian engineers to internationalize their expertise as equals to Western engineers and not just as colonial subalterns.

Sedimentation and dredging are two sides of the same coin; dredged landscapes are sediment landscapes, especially in the Great Lakes. Confined Disposal Facilities (CDFs) dot the Great Lakes landscapes as nearshore, onshore, offshore, submerged, and island sites. One specific sediment landscape, the Crystal Bay and Crystal Island in the lower Detroit River, was created out of material dredged to make a more efficient shipping channel. In the 1970s, there was a proposal to further augment the dredged landscape and open Crystal Bay and Crystal Island to public use. The move was met with stiff resistance in Canada, where the island and bay had ironically become a sentimental symbol of ‘nature.’ The bay and island are also bi-national, straddling the international border between the United States and Canada, and thus make dredged landscapes an issue of international diplomacy. Through the experience of the Crystal Bay and island, this paper argues that understanding the socio-political histories of these sediment landscapes is imperative to better understanding the entanglement of science and technology, with river systems and social dynamics.

This paper examines garbage dumping as a transboundary water conflict that brought to the surface issues of federalism as it did territorial sovereignty by examining a garbage trial in the town of Amherstburg, along the Detroit River. By following the garbage trial and its aftermath, this paper shows how garbage became a local, federal, and transboundary issue, all at once thus exposing the interstitial space that garbage occupies. In so doing, it expands our understanding of garbage, pollution, and their evolution as binational issues between the United States and Canada before the formation of the International Joint Commission.

Dredging, this paper posits, is an act of claiming territory through ‘improvements.’ Using the Detroit River in the late nineteenth century as a case study, I contend that dredging involves a process of making place —both physically as dredge spills created new territory, and in imagination as dredging helped promote state sovereignty. This paper shows that dredging exposes the complications of boundary making, territorial control, and commerce. I examine dredging in the Detroit River from 1870 to 1905 for two reasons. One, dredging did not actually begin in the Great Lakes until the second half of the nineteenth century. Two, the possibility of railroad development brought together the shipping industry in their attempt to wield their substantial economic and political clout to stop railroads in their tracks by ‘improving’ the channels through dredging as an important strategy.

Unlike any other technological artifact, large dams are unique stamps of human technological superiority over nature. Large dams however, have been analysed and critiqued in detail from various angles. Despite their seemingly apolitical nature, large dams are wired politically. Investigating the process of their assembly reveals a whole gamut of ideas—modern water, expert control and national space—that are stitched together to yield a hydraulic bureaucracy. In my paper, I draw upon engineering narratives to understand the rationale for technology-transfer in an overtly apolitical fashion.

Other Writings:

“Playing to Pay Attention: Homesteaders and Materialities,” Network in Canadian History and Environment(July 3, 2024)

“Looking for Locherville,” Contingent Magazine(November 4, 2020).

“Twice Removed: Environmental History and the Canada-U.S. Border Through an Outsider’s Eyes,” Network in Canadian History and Environment (December 1, 2020).

“Problems of Place: When A Place Chooses You,” Environmental History Now: A Platform on Representation, Engagement, and Community(September 20, 2019).