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Papers by Rohan D'Souza
Environmental History, 2022
Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States. By Julie E. Hughes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 320. ISBN 10: 0674072804; ISBN 13: 978-0674072800
International Journal of Asian Studies, Jul 1, 2014
Book Review: Unruly Hills: Nature and Nation in India’s Northeast
Organization & Environment, Mar 1, 2012
system we have now obscures the lives of animals in research. It is significant that Rudy was not... more system we have now obscures the lives of animals in research. It is significant that Rudy was not allowed to visit any research facilities, but she was welcomed into the local farms, zoos, sanctuaries, and homes where people had exotic pets. This illustrates how alienated we are from animals who are pressed into research service for us. Perhaps, if researchers did care for their own animals, rather than using lab assistance, then the nature of the research would change. Last year, at the local elementary school science fair, a fourth grader presented his experiment with a rat. Walking up to his poster board, I cringed at the photo of a rat, brown and shiny, running through a maze. However, in reading the boy’s synopsis, I learned that the rat consistently chose him over food. The second photo showed the boy smiling with his rat on his shoulder. And that, I think, is the transformative power of love. Kathy Rudy’s book is refreshing. It is a book that shows us how to see and live differently rather than just how to think differently. I would recommend this text for anyone wishing to engage in the dialogue about how to make the lives of our fellow animals better.
Routledge eBooks, Dec 24, 2021
Social Change, Jun 1, 2003
Tropical Pioneers is undoubtedly a classic in environmental history. James Webb has masterfully d... more Tropical Pioneers is undoubtedly a classic in environmental history. James Webb has masterfully described the drastic ecological transformation of the biologically rich and diverse tropical rainforests in Sri Lanka, brought about by British colonial rule. His weave of history and ecology is striking because it runs against the grain of standard "watershed" narratives; in which environmental change or disturbance is often described as being caused to an essentially stable and pristine landscape. Tropical Pioneers reveals Sri Lanka's forest ecology as having been worked on by human agency for millennia. During the first millennium B.C. itself, iron implements in combination with the use of fire, had enabled human groups to practice slash-and-bum agriculture or chena, which in turn produced distinct ecological changes such as the growth of secondary and scrub forest. The gaur (BOS gaurus) was, in fact, uniquely adapted to these disturbed forests and thrived in the habitats created in the aftermath of chena cultivation. Waves of floral and faunal immigrants from the South Asian mainland also added to the influences shaping Sri Lanka's distinctive ecology.
Production of the River
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
American Scientist, 2022
At the heart of Water Always Wins lies the notion of what Gies refers to as “Slow Water.” In cont... more At the heart of Water Always Wins lies the notion of what Gies refers to as “Slow Water.” In contrast to the dominant engineering approach, in which water is reductively viewed as a physical quantity that can be detached from ecological settings and shuffled around at will, the Slow Water movement maintains that natural flows of water are inextricably embedded within ecological relationships.
Environmental History of South Asia in the Time of Hindutva
Environmental History, Sep 21, 2022
Capitalist Property and the ‘Calamity of Season’
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Delta in the Commodity-form
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Strategic Analysis, Feb 9, 2017
Studies in History, Aug 1, 2004
This article will argue that colonial rule had to simultaneously alter both agrarian society and ... more This article will argue that colonial rule had to simultaneously alter both agrarian society and Nature in order to implant the Company zamindari system in deltaic Orissa. This led the colonial government to recast the previously flood-dependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape. Which in turn, I argue, led to the rupture of land, in hitherto unprecedented ways, from its previous ecological weave with the deltaÌs hydrology. In effect, colonial rule could enforce its distinctness as a social and economic relation only by correspondingly instituting a new ecological context. Central to the colonial revenue strategy was the attempt to institute capitalist private property, which compelled them to treat land as an economic form, a rent-seeking alienable commodity and as a monopolized means of production. This sharp departure from the previous revenue practices in the region furthermore caused them to adopt formal and rigid administrative routines for enforcing a standardized rental instalment. Thus, the CompanyÌs taxing inflexibility was not spurred only by its rapacious Îrevenue hungerÌ but significantly because it was integral to realizing its particular mode of colonial appropriation.
Re-imagining the Northeast in India, again
Routledge eBooks, May 11, 2018
Embankments and its Discontents
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Nationalism and Big Dams: Making Modern India with Flood control
For several decades following 1947, the modern large dam in India presented itself as a political... more For several decades following 1947, the modern large dam in India presented itself as a political conundrum, often voiced in strange, contradictory tones. In an oft-quoted speech in July 1954 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister (1947–64), likened the large dam to a “modern temple.” Later, in a less remembered speech before a gathering of engineers and technocrats in 1958, Nehru, as if in contrition, bemoaned the quest for big dams as a “disease of gigantism.” Nehru’s contradictory views were, perhaps, understandable for the times. The post-Second World War denouement was unprecedented in several ways. It was a period that left unquestioned the idea of progress, insisted upon the supreme belief in development, inculcated faith in modern technology, and advocated an unwavering confidence in positivist science.
The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. By Dilip da Cunha
Environmental History, Oct 1, 2020
“Source to Mouth”
Routledge eBooks, Sep 2, 2022
South Asian Studies, 2020
Environmental History, 2022
Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States. By Julie E. Hughes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 320. ISBN 10: 0674072804; ISBN 13: 978-0674072800
International Journal of Asian Studies, Jul 1, 2014
Book Review: Unruly Hills: Nature and Nation in India’s Northeast
Organization & Environment, Mar 1, 2012
system we have now obscures the lives of animals in research. It is significant that Rudy was not... more system we have now obscures the lives of animals in research. It is significant that Rudy was not allowed to visit any research facilities, but she was welcomed into the local farms, zoos, sanctuaries, and homes where people had exotic pets. This illustrates how alienated we are from animals who are pressed into research service for us. Perhaps, if researchers did care for their own animals, rather than using lab assistance, then the nature of the research would change. Last year, at the local elementary school science fair, a fourth grader presented his experiment with a rat. Walking up to his poster board, I cringed at the photo of a rat, brown and shiny, running through a maze. However, in reading the boy’s synopsis, I learned that the rat consistently chose him over food. The second photo showed the boy smiling with his rat on his shoulder. And that, I think, is the transformative power of love. Kathy Rudy’s book is refreshing. It is a book that shows us how to see and live differently rather than just how to think differently. I would recommend this text for anyone wishing to engage in the dialogue about how to make the lives of our fellow animals better.
Routledge eBooks, Dec 24, 2021
Social Change, Jun 1, 2003
Tropical Pioneers is undoubtedly a classic in environmental history. James Webb has masterfully d... more Tropical Pioneers is undoubtedly a classic in environmental history. James Webb has masterfully described the drastic ecological transformation of the biologically rich and diverse tropical rainforests in Sri Lanka, brought about by British colonial rule. His weave of history and ecology is striking because it runs against the grain of standard "watershed" narratives; in which environmental change or disturbance is often described as being caused to an essentially stable and pristine landscape. Tropical Pioneers reveals Sri Lanka's forest ecology as having been worked on by human agency for millennia. During the first millennium B.C. itself, iron implements in combination with the use of fire, had enabled human groups to practice slash-and-bum agriculture or chena, which in turn produced distinct ecological changes such as the growth of secondary and scrub forest. The gaur (BOS gaurus) was, in fact, uniquely adapted to these disturbed forests and thrived in the habitats created in the aftermath of chena cultivation. Waves of floral and faunal immigrants from the South Asian mainland also added to the influences shaping Sri Lanka's distinctive ecology.
Production of the River
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
American Scientist, 2022
At the heart of Water Always Wins lies the notion of what Gies refers to as “Slow Water.” In cont... more At the heart of Water Always Wins lies the notion of what Gies refers to as “Slow Water.” In contrast to the dominant engineering approach, in which water is reductively viewed as a physical quantity that can be detached from ecological settings and shuffled around at will, the Slow Water movement maintains that natural flows of water are inextricably embedded within ecological relationships.
Environmental History of South Asia in the Time of Hindutva
Environmental History, Sep 21, 2022
Capitalist Property and the ‘Calamity of Season’
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Delta in the Commodity-form
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Strategic Analysis, Feb 9, 2017
Studies in History, Aug 1, 2004
This article will argue that colonial rule had to simultaneously alter both agrarian society and ... more This article will argue that colonial rule had to simultaneously alter both agrarian society and Nature in order to implant the Company zamindari system in deltaic Orissa. This led the colonial government to recast the previously flood-dependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape. Which in turn, I argue, led to the rupture of land, in hitherto unprecedented ways, from its previous ecological weave with the deltaÌs hydrology. In effect, colonial rule could enforce its distinctness as a social and economic relation only by correspondingly instituting a new ecological context. Central to the colonial revenue strategy was the attempt to institute capitalist private property, which compelled them to treat land as an economic form, a rent-seeking alienable commodity and as a monopolized means of production. This sharp departure from the previous revenue practices in the region furthermore caused them to adopt formal and rigid administrative routines for enforcing a standardized rental instalment. Thus, the CompanyÌs taxing inflexibility was not spurred only by its rapacious Îrevenue hungerÌ but significantly because it was integral to realizing its particular mode of colonial appropriation.
Re-imagining the Northeast in India, again
Routledge eBooks, May 11, 2018
Embankments and its Discontents
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2006
Nationalism and Big Dams: Making Modern India with Flood control
For several decades following 1947, the modern large dam in India presented itself as a political... more For several decades following 1947, the modern large dam in India presented itself as a political conundrum, often voiced in strange, contradictory tones. In an oft-quoted speech in July 1954 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister (1947–64), likened the large dam to a “modern temple.” Later, in a less remembered speech before a gathering of engineers and technocrats in 1958, Nehru, as if in contrition, bemoaned the quest for big dams as a “disease of gigantism.” Nehru’s contradictory views were, perhaps, understandable for the times. The post-Second World War denouement was unprecedented in several ways. It was a period that left unquestioned the idea of progress, insisted upon the supreme belief in development, inculcated faith in modern technology, and advocated an unwavering confidence in positivist science.
The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. By Dilip da Cunha
Environmental History, Oct 1, 2020
“Source to Mouth”
Routledge eBooks, Sep 2, 2022
South Asian Studies, 2020
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41(30), 2004
It is ironic that a book that directs so much of its polemical fire against postmodernism and pos... more It is ironic that a book that directs so much of its polemical fire against postmodernism and post-colonial theory describes itself as a project to think 'beyond' nationalist frames. Beyond, after all, is neither a completely new space nor an abandonment of the old. As something between and betwixt, slippery and shifting, the term beyond is the characteristic trope of the times that the prefix 'post' seeks to capture. But Sarkar uses it more restrictively as a critique of nationalism, including its Hindutva version. This is effective, but it does not reach the heights promised by the title. The book is not without merits, the chief one being the glimpse it provides of what troubles Sarkar.
Water Alternatives , 2021
A review of the Review of "The nature of disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River flood", Cambrid... more A review of the Review of "The nature of disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River flood", Cambridge University Press, 2018, by Chris Courtney, Water Alternatives,
Book Review of Jared Diamond's Collapse
Commonwealth Forestry & Environmental History , 2020
Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in... more Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in which we think about environmental politics and human history. Intense discussions have already begun over whether we need to reconsider what we understand by the term 'environmental change' and if humans have truly become a 'geophysical' force. How should we recast our understanding of the planet's varied environmental pasts in order to make sense of the Anthropocene present? This collection of nineteen essays on forestry and environmental change in the erstwhile colonies of the British empire builds on Richard Grove's quest for achieving a 'global synthesis' as efforts toward writing environmental histories on a planetary scale.
• ‘Hindutva and the Political Citizen: Unmaking Higher Education in Modi’s India’ in Imtiaz Ahmed and Liyan Zhang (ed.), Innovation in Education, Pathak Shamabesh: Bangladesh, 2021, pp. 23-52. , 2021
While vigorous attempts to choke student politics and throttle academic freedom in public univers... more While vigorous attempts to choke student politics and throttle academic freedom in public university campuses have become almost a signature feature of the Modi government, one must, nonetheless, also not lose sight of the fact that the BJP led ruling dispensation has also been energetically pushing a slew of neo-liberal inspired measures to undermine the public funding and commitment to higher education. Though the neo-liberal turn was not initiated by the Modi government, efforts to intensify market logics, competitive behaviour and enable private investments in higher education has been moving at a fairly clipped and intense pace under his regime.
And it is within this growing stride of India’s evolving neoliberal turn that one can begin to connect the dots that link Hindutva’s obsession with finding anti-national’s in colleges and universities and the Modi government’s remorseless efforts to gut public higher education. After all, any serious attempt at ending deliberative and participative democracy greatly hinges on the ability of those in power to turn education into a form of exceptional privilege instead of a right that anchors the idea of the political citizen.
Drowned and Dammed comprehensively reconsiders the debate on the colonial environmental watershed... more Drowned and Dammed comprehensively reconsiders the debate on the colonial environmental watershed and its hydraulic legacy. It also questions the enthusiasm for flood control in post-independent India.
UN Chronicle, 2012
Soaked as we are in anxieties about climate change, the great flood in the Book of Genesis offers... more Soaked as we are in anxieties about climate change, the great flood in the Book of Genesis offers a defining metaphor. Nature, in this mythological account, plays out as vengeful disaster. The Ark, on the other hand, is a technology that can mitigate and ultimately save lives while Noah, the patriarch, embodies prescient policy. The story of the great deluge, however, for all its compelling elements, gets one aspect of the plot wrong-the idea of the flood itself as always being an overwhelmingly calamitous event. Historically, flooding has invoked and spurred an altogether different social and political imagination, in which seasonal inundations have been celebrated for their ecologically renewing and economically beneficial properties. The regular flooding by the silt-laden waters of the Nile, for example, has long been recognized for having sustained and enabled Egypt's ancient civilization of the Pharaohs. South Asia is replete with many similar experiences and it has recently been argued that much of the sprawling Ganga-Meghna river system that courses through eastern India and what constitutes Bangladesh today was tapped by generations of cultivators to create a robust flood-dependent agrarian regime. William Willcocks, the much celebrated hydraulic engineer of the British Empire, termed this unique agrarian arrangement as "overflow irrigation." In Willcocks' assessment, a large network of such "over-flow canals" irrigated almost 7 million acres of land in these deltas. These broad and shallow inundation canals were, he surmised, designed to siphon off the crest waters of the flooding rivers, which were silt-laden and also carried rich, fine clay. These canals were, furthermore, long and continuous and ran almost parallel to each other. The most striking feature of flood or overflow irrigation, however, was its importance as a fertilizing agent and not merely as a source for water. Willcocks argued that the "rich red water of the river and the poor white water of the rainfall", in fact, had to be combined in order for agrarian production to be sustainable and successful. If your rice fields have been irrigated by rain water alone, they are weak and cry for irrigation in October with excessive and costly supplies of poor river water. If, however, you have irrigated your rice fields with rain and river water mixed together in the early months of the monsoon when the river water is rich and full of mud, you so strengthen the plants of rice that they resist the hard condition of an early failure of the monsoon in a way rice irrigated by rain water alone has no knowledge of. River water in the early months of the floods is gold. Examples, however, also abound of other farming communities that perceive silt as being vital to agrarian production, especially in the case of rice cultivation. In the Yangtze delta in China, cultivators have long considered the deposition of a thick layer of "steamed cake silt" (Cheng ping yu) by the rivers as being of utmost importance. British scientist Joseph Needham concluded that it was only through the constant renewal of the soil by silt that the "permanent agriculture" of China was made possible, which involved intensive cropping without recourse to mineral fertilizers. It was, in fact, a general practice amongst cultivators in the Yangtze delta to regularly tap seasonal inundations for silt-laden water, and instances have been recorded of embankments being frequently cut to divert muddy flows onto agricultural land.