In preparation for class...
The major theme I'll be sharing in my discussion of the Bengal delta are the ongoing consequences of viewing a landscape in a certain way. I'd like to draw out the implications a state, bureaucratic, and imperial vision of the Bengal delta which continues to insist on seeing wet spaces and dry spaces as fundamentally distinct. This, as you already know from the readings, has huge consequences in a space where, ecologically, this distinction has and continues to be less than clear. I'll elaborate that in detail in class. But what I plan to do here is:
- To give you a sense of the landscape and what it looks like.
- Preview some of the processes of separating the wet from the dry that are going to figure in my discussion.
The Bengal Delta. Note that the India-Banlgadesh border runs directly through the delta region. The location of Gabura (an island where I do much of my research) is marked in red.
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Landsat 7 image of the Sundarbans, the world's largest remaining mangrove forest. The dark green is the forest. The white is silt washed down from the Himalayas and into the bay of Bengal (NASA)
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Climate Change
Perhaps the thing that the delta is currently most famous for is as a ground-zero of climate change. The devastating effects of climate change in the delta include increased frequency of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal; soil salination and decline of drinking water, both of which have a huge impact on peoples livelihoods and lives; and sea level rise. All of this leads to a future that many fear will be marked by massive population displacement, as dramatized in the video attached below (video source, The New York Times. "Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land." March 26, 2014.
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Embankments
A lot of what I'll be talking about are the ongoing consequences of building embankments around many of the islands that make up the delta. This is a practice that dates back to colonial times, but really picked up speed in the 1950s.
The basic idea of embanking these islands is that you can build protective infrastructure that will keep water in its place (in the rivers) and to create dry land, where people can live and grow rice. In other words, the embankments are technologies designed to facilitate massive landscape transformation with the goal of maintaining the absolute distinction between wet and dry space.
Embankments have a somewhat sordid history, which I'll explore more in class and which Lahiri-Dutt outlines in her piece. But due to a combination of neglect and a set of unforeseen historical developments, these embankments have become instruments in the slow degradation of island environments.
To give you a sense of what this looks like (and what these island environments look like more broadly). Please take a look at the following video, shot by me using a GoPro, while riding on the back of my research assistant's motorcycle.
I'll return to this footage in class, but as you are watching, the interior of Gabura is on your left. The outside is on your right. This footage was shot over the course of a day. When you see land on the right, that's at low tide in the river. In other words, everything on the right floods at high tide and is exposed and vulnerable to any sort of storm. Most of the interior shots that do not feature buildings are of shrimp ponds for brackish(salty)-water shrimp aquaculture. The shrimp are all for the export market to places like the US, Europe, and East Asia.
The basic idea of embanking these islands is that you can build protective infrastructure that will keep water in its place (in the rivers) and to create dry land, where people can live and grow rice. In other words, the embankments are technologies designed to facilitate massive landscape transformation with the goal of maintaining the absolute distinction between wet and dry space.
Embankments have a somewhat sordid history, which I'll explore more in class and which Lahiri-Dutt outlines in her piece. But due to a combination of neglect and a set of unforeseen historical developments, these embankments have become instruments in the slow degradation of island environments.
To give you a sense of what this looks like (and what these island environments look like more broadly). Please take a look at the following video, shot by me using a GoPro, while riding on the back of my research assistant's motorcycle.
I'll return to this footage in class, but as you are watching, the interior of Gabura is on your left. The outside is on your right. This footage was shot over the course of a day. When you see land on the right, that's at low tide in the river. In other words, everything on the right floods at high tide and is exposed and vulnerable to any sort of storm. Most of the interior shots that do not feature buildings are of shrimp ponds for brackish(salty)-water shrimp aquaculture. The shrimp are all for the export market to places like the US, Europe, and East Asia.
Beyond Embankments
Just looking at embankments only tells part of the story of this landscape. There are a number of other elements I'd like to discuss that all are related to the problem of imagining a space where wet and dry can be separated. Rather than go too far into these dynamics here, I want to simply show you what these things look like. The photos below document some of the effects of:
- River bank erosion
- Dredging that tries to combat increasing rates of siltation in rivers
- Mangrove conservation
- Shrimp aquaculture and crab farming
