Debjani Bhattacharyya - Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta

Lekh

In the 22nd episode, I speak to Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies, Drexel University and soon to be Professor and Chair of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zurich on her recent book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The conversation begins by asking Bhattacharyya about how she arrived at this topic and issue before moving to understand how historians and histories covered Calcutta’s origins. Next, we unpack how British officials used legal and technological instruments to transform Calcutta's marshes and bogs to landed spaces that could be used for economic purposes including financial speculation. Bhattacharyya also elaborates on one particular event involving Benjamin Lacam who brought a case against the East India Company in 1777 alleging that the company cheated him of profits by canceling his land grant which laid bare the challenges in the nature of colonial knowledge about Calcutta's fluid landscape. Bhattacharyya explains why she engaged with and incorporated vernacular representations of riverine spaces and how locals in Calcutta imagined and inhabited these spaces. The book's importance to contemporary debates stems from the ongoing impact of climate change to cities like Calcutta and the inability of officials to grasp the history of Calcutta's founding. The conversation ends by asking Bhattacharyya how she see's her work alongside recent books on South Asian rivers and waters, her ambitious next work covering the Indian Ocean and what she hopes to accomplish through her new chair in Zurich.