#ive read bhattacharyyas book and her focus on the lethal power of property laws and legal engineering in bengal

[fatehbaz]

In this remarkably rich account of land and profit-making in colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata), Debjani Bhattacharyya traces the transformation of marshes, bogs, and muddy riverbanks into parcels of fixed, bounded, and alienable property under British colonial rule. Framed evocatively as a “history of forgetting” (6), Bhattacharyya details the everyday enactments and contestations of imperial power undertaken by colonial officials and merchants, hydrographers, Indian property owners, urban planners, surveyors, and speculators between the 1760s and 1920. Over this period, the fluid and culturally multivalent spaces of the delta were translated and transformed into “dried urban landscapes of economic value” (12). [...] [T]he economization of space was so encompassing that earlier ways of understanding and inhabiting the delta’s shifting lands and waters were [obscured] [...].

The British thus had to produce landed property both conceptually and materially in a process that proceeded through two entangled registers of power. The first was the legal register, which translated shifting and indeterminate aqueous spaces into apparently solid landed property through modes of legal classification and arbitration. The second register of power concerned hydraulic technologies of drying and draining the landscape (10), which materialized these legal categorizations in the production of urban space. 

By the early twentieth century, these “technologies of property” (5) had produced new lines between land and water in the city and rendered its fluid ecologies, such as marshes and bogs, as valuable “land-in-waiting” (172) for property development and financial speculation. [...] 

[T]he delta’s fluid ecology emerges at times as a limit on the property-making activities of the East India Company and the British Crown [...]. Bhattacharyya’s account highlights the mobility of the delta’s fluid landscape, with water, silt, and mud taking on agentic roles and shaping historical trajectories. [...] [Bhattacharyya] provides a fascinating account of the meanings of rivers and other watery spaces in Bengali cultural life, drawing on folk songs, poetic genres such as the maṅgalkāvya, storytelling, and forms of artistic representation such as painted narrative scrolls. [...] Bhattacharyya recovers forms of relationality and claim-making in the fluid deltaic environment that exceed the representations of colonial cadastral surveys and revenue records. [...] 

[H]owever, Calcutta became increasingly disconnected from its watery past. [...] [There was an] increasing entanglement of the urban land market with infrastructural projects to dry land and control water. These included the excavation of an extensive network of canals; the construction of docks in Khidderpore and the draining of the Maidan [...]. A collective amnesia about Calcutta’s fluid ecologies set the stage for the emergence of a speculative real estate market by the beginning of the twentieth century [...]. This period saw Calcutta’s remaining wetlands and marshes rendered as “land-in-waiting for property development” (169) in a process that continues to the present day.

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All text above by: Calynn Dowler. “Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta.” Asian Ethnology Volume 80 Issue 1. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]