Unruly Landscape, Fluid Geographies

This chapter explains how the British officials learned about the intricacies of coexisting with water. Along with ecological impacts, human interventions too wrought changes that called for regulation and corrective measures. This state intervention began through a complex as well as difficult redesigning of the floodplain landscape. The utilitarian and cultural imagination of the Assamese peasants hardly distinguished the islands of the river from that of the vast stretches of sandy riverbanks. Both were inseparable. Nineteenth-century Assamese lexicons described both as chapori. A cartographic division of this riverine geography began to take shape in the legal and revenue parlance of the British officials in Assam. Familiar with the vocabulary of Bengal, the British officials began to make a distinction between the two; the islands came to be mentioned as chars while the river banks were described as chaporis. The chars were looked down upon as the unfortunate geographical extension of the chaporis.

Redesigning an Enigmatic River

This chapter recounts how the East India Company (EIC) officials embarked on their journey to Assam in the late eighteenth century and how they realized that the river could become a trusted ally of the British Empire. Knowing the river became an utmost necessity. The task of assembling practical knowledge about the river was put in place. As the imperial juggernaut gathered steam over the latter half of the eighteenth century, the needed to optimize economic and political benefits from the Brahmaputra. This led to an intensification of interest in the upper reaches of the river. The British colonialists saw the river’s eastern course as a big window to a wider world of trade and commerce. This chapter further tells one how several eventful journeys and surveys were undertaken in a bid to find the source as well as the course of the river to further British economic and political interests.

Reining in the Unquiet River

This chapter tells how floods increasingly came to be viewed as posing a danger to the general well-being of Assam and the government was seen as a controller of floods. River embankments came to dot Assam’s landscape, leading to a reconfiguration of the floodplains or rearrangement of human settlement patterns. This ensured a new form of relationship between the river and the people around it. With rivers and floods beginning to be viewed as subjects to be tackled via specialist expertise, civil officials gave way to engineers. This chapter also tells how the era of technocrats, engineers with extensive power, had begun.

The River and Its Floodplain Environment

This chapter recounts the birth of a river and growth of a floodplain. Drawing from the geological, hydrological, and biological sciences and other similar works, the chapter narrates the river’s early geological history, the life and times of its waters, sands, soils, climate, monsoon, etc. While recounting these dynamics of the river, the chapter asks questions such as: Where do the Brahmaputra’s waters arise from? How does the sand move? Is the life on the land surrounding the river dependent on the latter? What happens when the river receives more water than it can carry? The chapter claims that an understanding of this deep history of the river is essential for a sense of the long, turbulent times the river has undergone and will experience in the future.

The Nation’s River

This chapter explains how the nineteenth century saw the emergence of many ideas related to meaningfully transforming the Brahmaputra to serve the government and the country. Experts toyed with ideas on how to tame the river. If other rivers of the world could serve the cause of the governments of the countries through which they flowed, why should the Brahmaputra not be trained in similar ways? It was only a matter of the appropriate calculations and necessary engineering works. What was called for was a plan for the river’s regulation to achieve the desired goals. The river, despite its erratic temperament, was bound to behave according to the rules thus framed. After two centuries of political, economic, intellectual, and bureaucratic negotiation, the river has become part of India’s national imagination. India’s stake in the Brahmaputra is now firmly established.

In the Time of Earthquakes

Do earthquakes shape the river and its history? This chapter discusses long-term impacts of the earthquakes, including alterations in the courses of rivers, drainage systems, sedimentation levels of riverbeds, or levels of the floodplains, and changes wrought in the peasant economy. Earthquakes are among the significant long-term drivers of environmental changes. Geologists studying the Brahmaputra Valley agree that earthquakes essentially redesigned the landscape of the region. Unlike the previous earthquakes, the ones in 1897 and 1950 are well documented in archives. The records offer convincing proof of the centrality of earthquakes in changing the environmental fate of the river. These two earthquakes repeated the actions of earlier tremors, once again overhauling the physical history of the river and the surrounding landscape.

The Ebb and Flow of Riverine Pursuits

This chapter describes how the river opened up ecological spaces for humans, plants, and animals to survive in. The river itself, its banks, floodplains, and grasslands were home and habitat to an array of life forms. Domesticated animals grazed on the floodplain; folklore involving the swamps, high grass savanna, and short grasslands indicate the presence of vast pastures. Monsoons and floods shaped lives and livelihood patterns in specific ways. The chapter further narrates how the river—full of water, mud, silt, and powerful currents, and blessed by a long spell of monsoon and a vastly expansive floodplain ecology—was home to a range of complex yet interlinked artisanal activities.

Life in a Floodplain Environment

This chapter narrates the growth of human settlement in a floodplain environment. This chapter suggests how the Brahmaputra’s wayward course had militated against any great permanent settlement for centuries. This chapter discusses how the river became receptive to human actions and its floodplains began to be settled. From the first millennium CE, people living in the Brahmaputra valley tried to bring the floodplains under control by introducing cultivation and converting floodplains to agricultural fields. To live in that landscape, they needed to familiarize themselves with the river and its floods. This chapter also shows how the absence of agricultural fields by the river until as recently as a century ago was the hallmark of the floodplain.

Jute in the Floodplains

This chapter explains how jute came to symbolize the British imperial conquest of the Brahmaputra’s floodplains. The imperial government succeeded in bringing hundreds of thousands of people from the Brahmaputra’s downstream to be resettled on the upstream of the Brahmaputra. The swampy floodplains, hated by the imperial rulers in 1850s, were now under their control. This was land that was newly occupied. The Brahmaputra’s floodplains, by the mid-twentieth century, were bustling with human action. Human labour and modern capital had collectively shaped the river’s floodplains into a permanent habitat for a new crop and millions of people as reeds were replaced by jute. What drove the continuous production of jute was the power of the floods which regularly replenished the floodplains. But it also became vitally important to protect the plant from long spells of submergence. This was the trigger for the massive building of embankments along the Brahmaputra in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tea Plants Move to the Uplands

So far, the history of tea in Assam has largely consisted of the history of labour and capital. These two powerful categories of historical investigation illuminate the complexities surrounding imperial polity and economy of tea. What has remained unexplored is the role played by the Brahmaputra in the making of tea plantations and the environmental outcomes of the industry. The environmental questions include the consequences of the massive forest clearances and of the ascendancy of this domesticated plant over the existing wild plants. Could this newly introduced domesticated plant withstand the attacks of insects or pests? And, finally, can we say the river was instrumental in bringing about these big transformations? This chapter seeks some answers to these questions by describing the role played by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries in this history of tea and the ecological transformation of the plant.