Event — IIAS Lunch Lecture

Soaking Ecologies: swamps, law and the East India Company in Bengal

The ecologically unstable landscape of the Bengal delta created havoc for Benjamin Lacam’s project to build a harbor. His failed infrastructural venture to connect Calcutta to the delta brings to light the entangled relation between property, environment and law. A presentation about the formation of land rights in this Indian delta area by Debjani Bhattacharyya. Lunch is provided.

The depth of the water in the Bengal delta was in seasonal flux, a fact which thwarted attempts at cadastral surveys, produced inaccurate navigational charts, and created havoc for Benjamin Lacam’s project to build a harbor. His failed infrastructural venture to connect Calcutta to the delta brings to light the entangled relation between property, environment and law. Lacam’s project was undone by tidal delta and the swampy nature of the landscape.

In this presentation, Debjani Bhattacharyya will argue that the amphibious territories of marshes, swamps and shoals indelibly shaped colonial legal history, destabilizing the bifurcated scholarly project of land-centered and maritime understandings of global legal thought. Swamps and land-water admixture, which make up a vast expanse of the Bengal Delta where the East India Company settlement took root in the eighteenth century, threatened to became spaces of jurisdictional vacuum within the Company’s emerging legal architecture of occupation.

Through a case study of an unsuccessful project of harbor construction in the Sagar Islands of the Bay of Bengal, -which ended up as a thirty-year legal case beginning at the Mayor’s court in Calcutta and settled in the metropolitian courts of London (1770-1803)-, Debjani will show how these amphibious zones enabled multiple and ad-hoc conceptions of legal authority to take root.

The legal debate proceeded primarily along three lines: 1) the question of whether geography can serve as effective legal evidence; 2) ecological variability and the limits of hydrographical instruments, and 3) human integrity in an inscrutable and mobile landscape. The controversy surrounding Lacam’s harbor precipitated river and land surveys from 1790 to 1820, resulting in the formation of new legal categories to arbitrate in this ecologically unstable landscape. This new legal framing of land and river meant that these spaces, perceived as indeterminate, came to be governed by the “emergency” provisions embedded within colonial law. 

Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya (db893@drexel.edu) is an affiliated fellow at IIAS and Assistant Assistant at the Department of History, Drexel University, USA.

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About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every month, an IIAS researcher or visiting scholar will present his or her work-in-progress in an informal setting to colleagues and other interested attendees. IIAS organises these lunch lectures to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas.