The mangroves and the empire: Wetlands and the "ontological endeavour" of conjuring "dry" land for colonial border-making in Bengal (and beyond)

(Originally written and posted informally elsewhere on 7 August 2023.)

About the world(s)-altering power of “legal fictions of property” and conjuring of laws in British imperial attempts to control the monsoon-flooded rivers and deltas of Bengal, described in Debjani Bhattacharyya’s work (Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta, 2019). Kind of an illustrative microcosm not just of British rule in South Asia, but also of imperial attempts to control ecology, wealth/property, and imaginations generally.

In deltas, shorelines, seasonally-flooded rivers and riparian wetlands, mangrove forests, etc., there may not be clear distinctions between “land” and “water”. The boundaries might change every year, every season, depending on tide, floods, etc. So, if empires like Britain or the United States are to control such a place, there are (at least) two challenges here. One challenge is material, physical. The other is ontological, imaginative, etc., or whatever.

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The material or physical challenge:

How does the empire tax or administer properties if the property changes seasonally depending on rivers, floods, precipitation, etc.? How does the empire “manage” local social/financial conditions if there isn’t clear recognition of a stable title, landlord, authority figure? Where is the solid property boundary that can facilitate ownership transfer, zoning, revenue collection, etc.? How does the empire force people into industrial or plantation labor if the empire can’t use the threat of home-loss or job-loss to coerce local people? How does the empire install development projects or extractive industries, like roads, bridges, monoculture/plantation fields, etc., if the land and water are in motion, fluid, changing? An “economization of space” inducts this land into the calculus of British/European administrative land-use regulations; this is part of why “The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India” in 1802 was so significant, and why European cartographers from Spain in sixteenth-century Peru to the US and Britain in the 1890s were critical to empire. They made “new worlds” knowable, bringing people/place/space “into being as objects of knowledge.”

The imaginative challenge:

Part of the empire’s power comes from its ability to conquer the imagination, to capture the future, to insist that there is no other way, there are no other options. Empire is inevitable. And the empire insists that borders are real, definite, strict. But how can you believe the empire’s claims about strict boundaries, about the inevitability of their future, when you can clearly see an alternative, when you are encounter ecosystems where land and water are in a kind of dance, impermanent? The empire doesn’t appreciate physical, material challenges. But the empire especially doesn’t want any imaginative challenges. If you can identify other ways of being, you undermine the empire’s claim to inevitability. In a way, a river or a delta or an estuary, they are a provocation; as if they were alive, agents themselves.

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A summary of this conundrum, from Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl:

‘[T]his tropical coastal ecology is a site of continual refiguration: neither sea nor land, neither river nor sea, bearing neither salty nor fresh water […]. The Sundarbans covers an area of 10,000 square kilometers of intertidal zones between parts of southwestern Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. The largest mangrove forest in the world […]. As a landscape, the Sundarbans is marked by unfixity, since its intertidal nature places it between appearance and disappearance – with islands being submerged overnight. […] [T]heir porous quality does not allow for clear border-making. [...] [W]e are met with the trembling instability of borders. [...] [H]ere the coastline becomes indiscernible as a single entity. The legal vexations of such amphibious and obtuse terrain become pronounced in sea-rights cases, wherein border-making becomes the necessity of tenure.’ [”Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality.” e-flux Journal Issue #45. May 2013.]

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So, those “legal vexations”, “wherein border-making becomes the necessity of tenure [ownership]”? That’s what Bhattacharyya discusses, how laws become “technologies of property” in Bengal.

Basically, Bhattacharyya describes “the legal processes through which the mobility of the landscape was accommodated into the architecture of ownership” (p. 77); “drying a tidal landscape was as much an infrastructural project as it was an ontological endeavor in producing a dry culture with colonial law as its handmaiden” (p. 83)’ “the materiality of the paper” functioned as “a legitimizing object of modern property” (p. 100); the British/US/imperial imagination of rivers were “characterized by a cartographic-mindedness that captures and fixes the spatial mobility. The colonial journey is one of reterritorialization that involves mapping, measuring and fixing” (p. 122).

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In the tags of my post, I mentioned that the “legal engineering to conquer rivers in Bengal” is also the focus of two other scholars who examine the relationships with water, the creation of private property, and the power of colonial law-making in Bengal:

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Rohan Ignatious D’Souza.

D’Souza authored Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (1803-1946), which provides nice coverage from the East India Company, through the Mutiny and nineteenth-century expansion of finance and plantations, into modernist development of the twentieth century.

And I think Lahiri-Dutt sums up this whole situation nicely:

‘Traveling through Bengal in the eighteenth century, […] [travelers] saw a highly sophisticated water-based economy – the blessing of rivers […]. Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at stabilizing lands and waters, at creating permanent boundaries between them, [...] in a land of shifting river courses, inundated irrigation, and river-based life. Such a separation of land and water was made possible not just by physical constructions but first and foremost by engineering a legal framework. […] BADA, which stands for the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act, a law passed by the colonial British rulers in 1825 […]. Nature here represents a borderless world, or at best one in which borders are not fixed lines on the ground demarcating a territory, but are negotiated spaces or zones. Such “[...] spaces” comprise “not [only] lines of separation but zones of interaction…transformation, transgression, and possibility” […]. Current boundaries of land and water are as much products of history as nature and the colonial rule of Bengal played a key role in changing the ideas and valuations of both. […] [R]ivers do not always flow along a certain route […]. The laws that the colonial British brought to Bengal, however, were founded upon the thinking of land as being fixed in place. […] To entrench the system, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars (or landlords) “in perpetuity” – meaning for good. The system was aimed at reducing the complexities of revenue collection due to erratically shifting lands and unpredictable harvests in a monsoon-dependent area […]. From a riverine community, within a hundred years, Bengal was transformed into a land-based community.’ [”Commodified Land, Dangerous Water: Colonial Perceptions of Riverine Bengal.” RCC Perspectives, no. 3. 2014.]

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Part of Bhattacharyya’s take on it is that she focuses on what was lost, not just in terms of physical landscape, material accessibility, etc., but also what was lost emotionally. She describes this process of British rule in Bengal “a history of forgetting”. She says: “And because we forget, it is harder for us to imagine alternatives”.

British legal maneuvers to strictly define borders between land and water achieved several things: Yes, faced with frequent seasonal/annual changes of where shorelines and islands, etc., were located, part of the benefit of this legal defining and clarification of solid land was allowing the empire to map and administer stable segments of property for purposes of taxes, records, and development projects (roads, bridges, canals, etc.). This “permanence” of property then allowed for the opening of the door to financialization, so that investors in London or Calcutta could participate in financial speculation on the real estate market.

Another benefit was the installation of “private” property and strengthening the power of landlords, enforcing a social hierarchy, detaching poorer people from land access, resulting in conditions of indebtedness. Of course, the precarity of debt and lack of access to land then essentially forced poorer people into wage labour, factory work, plantations.

After all, Britain needed laborers to staff its expanding and notorious Assamese tea plantations. And the empire did this repeatedly elsewhere, too: Alienated people by using legal frameworks to force them into debt or homelessness, and then using those alienated people to work in terrible industrial conditions, often far away from their homes. Just as earlier nineteenth-century metropolitan London staffed its factories with indebted and impoverished people from elsewhere in England or perhaps Ireland, Britain staffed its Assameses tea plantations with poor people from elsewhere in South Asia, and Britain staffed its plantations and infrastructure projects in Malaya with “coolies” and convicts from Bombay. But especially in the nineteenth-century, especially in South Asia, Britain infamously pursued “the sanctity of the contract”. They used signatures, paperwork, debts, banking, fingerprinting, photography, filing cabinets, data-banks: Ways to tie individual people--and property--to The Contract. The “materiality of paper” a kind of “sorcery of modernity.” It’s remarkable, looking over late eighteenth-century documents, that Britain could trace the physical movement and life-histories of so many people, long before electronics. That records-keeping would come in handy for policing border-crossing and international mobility of colonial/radical/racialized subjects in the Gilded Age and New Imperialism(s) of the 1870s-1920s.

Outside of these material consequences, there is also the insidious lasting devastation of alienation itself. Emotionally. The river, the delta, the ecosystem that you know and love, is not accessible to you. When you’re sent away as a convict or contract laborer, you also lose access to your friends. And so the empire’s definitions and traditions are made resolute, the only possible future.

But the river says otherwise.