ChapterOne
Simplifying Embankments
Images of Bangladesh as a climate change victim frequently circulate in the news. It was with the cyclones Sidr (2007) and Aila (2009) that significant international attention was directed toward Bangladesh as a climate hotspot. A decade later, Bangladesh escaped the disastrous wake of cyclones Fanni (2019) and Amphan (2020). The country’s low-lying topography is cast as particularly vulnerable to global warming: the frequency of tropical storms and tidal surges is expected to increase, and sea levels are projected to rise (Nikitas 2016). Alarming images (fig. 1.1) have been pivotal in attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in development funding toward climate change adaptation and mitigation (Global Climate Change Alliance+ 2012).1
However, completely eliminating flooding in Bangladesh is undesirable since floods are entwined with the livelihoods of people living in the delta (Zaman 1993, 987). Despite well-meaning intentions, the way the Western press uses images like the one in figure 1.1 conflate beneficial monsoon floods with sea-level rise, portraying floods as being caused solely by climate change. The narrative that floods result in climate refugees ignores the fact that there are three types of floods in Bangladesh: borsha (annual monsoon rains), bonna (irregular destructive floods in the wake of cyclones, tidal surges, and storms), and jalabaddho (waterlogging, drainage congestion). In a natural environment without any artificial infrastructure, the borsha rainwater merges with the silt-laden river water to deposit silt on the floodplains. The silt raises the land levels and promotes processes of organic decomposition that make the deltaic lands fertile. These inundated wetlands are the breeding grounds for hundreds of spawning fish species and help irrigate aman dhan (rice planted during monsoon season). In view of this, the narrative that all floods must be prevented is highly problematic.
For instance, permanent flood-protection embankments (dikes) obstruct the process of monsoon borsha flooding. The construction of these embankments in the 1960s resulted in preventing the 1.5 billion tons of sediment that pass through the Bengal delta each year from being able to deposit on the floodplains during the monsoon. Instead, the silt clogs up the rivers and raises the riverbed levels outside the embanked floodplain (Brammer 2014; Hossain et al. 1987). This difference in elevation traps the heavy monsoon rainwater inside the embankment, as it can no longer drain out to the rivers. The ensuing congestion leads the water to stagnate and ruins crops in the type of flood referred to as jalabaddho (Iqbal 2010). Figure 1.1 is a typical image of jalabaddho during the monsoon, when water is unable to drain out through an embankment and back into the river—this is known as waterlogging or drainage congestion. Thus, the complexity of the local ecology and the distinctions between borsha, bonna, and jalabaddho floods are lost in portrayals of Bangladesh as a climate change victim.
Figure 1.1. Image accompanying a Huffington Post article on 28 January 2016, with the headline “Haunting Photos Show Effects of Climate Change in Bangladesh” and the tagline “The number of climate change refugees in Bangladesh is expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades.” Photo courtesy of Probal Rashid.
The World Bank is spending US$400 million on a project to build wider and higher flood-protection embankments based on a project rationale that this constitutes climate change adaptation. The logic is that (1) sea levels will rise and cyclones will increase in frequency and intensity; (2) this will lead to devastating floods and salinity in Bangladesh; and (3) the best way to protect Bangladesh is to build larger embankments (World Bank 2012). By rearranging events to alter expectations of causality, the World Bank is in effect reinforcing a climate reductive narrative as it does not engage with past experiences of how flood-protection embankments worsen siltation and exacerbate damaging bonna and jalabaddho floods.
In Bangladesh’s southwest coastal zone, embankments were built long before climatic change was identified as a problem and were not initially tied to preventing floods. The colonial state shifted from viewing floods as fertile inundations during the East India Company regime to viewing them as damaging under the British Raj. Today, external development agencies equate floods with rising sea levels. Attention to shifting portrayals of floods contribute to debates on colonial water management and the problems of imposing land-water dichotomies through statecraft.
For example, the very first embankments in the Sundarbans mangrove forest, in what is now the southwest coastal zone, were not built to stop floods but were entwined with processes of deforestation to expand arable land. Each year, temporary earthen embankments were constructed after the monsoon to protect against saltwater intrusion from the Bay of Bengal in the dry season. This helped to prevent paddy fields from reverting back to mangrove forest. The change from salinity protection during the East India Company regime to flood protection during the British Raj coincided with the creation of a centrally administered colonial state. The official colonial narratives shifted from lauding borsha floods as a blessing of fertility for Bengal to portraying all floods as damaging and that needed to be dealt with technically through impenetrable and permanent embankments. This shift was motivated by centralizing maintenance costs and strategic military and economic gain, but was also contested by dissenting voices within the colonial apparatus.
Finally, the construction of permanent flood-protection embankments after the colonial period through the Coastal Embankment Project (1960s–70s) and the Flood Action Plan (1990s) illustrates how narratives of improvement, whether through railways, flood protection, or climate change adaptation, have the potential to enable simplification in ways that increase the financial interests of particular actors, both within state administrations and within international organizations. The current reading of coastal Bangladesh as requiring higher and wider embankments is unsustainable as it ignores how such infrastructure exacerbates siltation and increases flood risks. Climate change in Bangladesh is often reduced to rising sea levels causing floods, but floods in Bangladesh are not just about rising sea levels (Auerbach et al. 2015; Brammer 2014).
Deforestation and Embankments as Salinity Protection (1770s–1850s)
Embankments were constructed long before climatic change was identified as a problem for Bangladesh, and they were not originally intended to prevent floods. Instead, the earliest recorded forms of embankments in Bengal were built to protect newly created arable land—made by clearing coastal mangroves—against seasonal salt tide-water incursion. In order to comprehend the complexities of different types of floods in Bangladesh, it is important to understand the history of embanking the Sundarbans forest in Bengal and how it was interlinked with the deforestation of these mangrove wetlands.
The Bengal delta is formed by the confluence of the Ganges (Padma), Brahmaputra (Jamuna), and Meghna rivers. Each year, the monsoon borsha rains cause the rivers to flood the deltaic plains, depositing fertile silt and creating new land. The enormous volume of rainwater, combined with Himalayan runoff, also results in a freshwater surge through the delta that flushes out the residual salinity from the dry season. Before it reaches the ocean, the delta meets with the Sundarbans, the largest remaining mangrove forest in the world, which once covered the entirety of the delta. The forest grew on the land created by the silt carried from the Himalayas and by the saline tides of the Bay of Bengal. The mangroves form a unique ecosystem rich in fauna and flora and embody the entanglements of land and water, soil and sea, with their roots in the water and their trunks emerging from the silted earth. The forest protects people and land from the ravages of the ocean, saline tidal inundation, and occasional cyclones that cause tidal surges (bonna): they are a fluid boundary between arable, habited settlements and the Bay of Bengal. But as humans cut down the forest to expand arable land, they replaced this natural barrier with artificial earthen dikes to protect crop yields from the brackish tidewater of the Bay of Bengal.
The deforestation of the Sundarbans predates British colonialism. From the early Turkic sultanate (1204–1576) to the end of the Mughal period (1576–1765) the Sundarbans was perceived as a frontier pushing steadily southward, closer and closer toward the Bay of Bengal through the “reclamation of jungle” (Eaton 1993). Deforestation was part of “reclaiming” and converting “wild jungle” into arable land for “human civilization.” Turkic officers in the Bengal Sultanate, later seen as Sufi saints (pirs), played a pivotal role in converting the jungle to paddy fields and converting Bengalis to Islam. This is symbolized through the local legend of the pir Badi Ghazi Khan who fought the tiger demon Dakshin Ray of the Sundarbans, creating an imagery of Islam mastering the forest through the struggle against tiger and tree (Eaton 1993, 9).
From the late sixteenth century onward, the Mughals continued the practice of converting forests to farmland, with the primary objective of extending rice cultivation for land revenue collection. They actively encouraged peasants to cut down more forest to expand arable land. As the population increased, the need for more farmland was sustained through encroaching on the Sundarbans (Singh 1995). Forest clearance for the expansion of agriculture and crop production was pursued under both Muslim regimes, but, unlike their predecessors, the Mughals did not actively promote Islam in Bengal (Eaton 1993; Van Schendel 2009).
Deforestation under the East India Company
The Mughal rule of Bengal effectively ended with the 1757 “Battle” of Plassey when the East India Company forced the Mughal-appointed Nawab of Bengal to give up his territory. Bengal thus became the first part of the Indian subcontinent to be colonized by the British. Under Company rule, the Bengal region saw a decline in its existing textile industries and trade-based prosperity (H. Hossain 1988). By 1765, the Company, under Sir Robert Clive, formalized its control by seizing revenue collections rights for Bengal and Bihar from the severely weakened Mughal emperor. Subsequently, the Company commissioned Major James Rennell to survey its new territories. Information was collected from 1764 through 1773, resulting in the Bengal Atlas (Rennell 1779a). In one of the journals from this survey, Rennell’s surveyor Martin describes the Sundarbans as an unpopulated forest with economically valuable salt production (Phillimore 1945, 1:50–51).2 Fleets of boats transported salt produced in the Sundarbans to Calcutta and Bihar via the small port of Culna situated at the northern boundary of the Sundarbans forest (La Touche 1910), as illustrated in Rennell’s (1779b) A Map of the Sunderbund and Ballagot Passages (fig. 1.2).3 Today, Culna has become the divisional city of Khulna, a large industrial urban hub.4 When the East India Company first seized the right to collect revenue in Bengal and Bihar in 1765, the unpopulated Sundarbans mangrove forest was used for profitable salt production, in which the Company’s Salt Department upheld a monopoly and kept their headquarters in Culna (Phillimore 1945, 1:50–51).
By the 1770s and 1780s, there was increasing tension between the Salt Department and the Magistrate—a rival Company faction. Magistrate Henckell’s work entailed administering justice in Jessore and curbing the violent oppression and use of slave laborers in the East India Company’s Salt Department (Westland 1871). In addition, Henckell’s own interest in forest clearance was at odds with the work of the Salt Department, as he belonged to the group of Company men interested in bringing the “waste lands” (Sundarbans forests) into “cultivation”—that is, cutting down mangrove forests and turning them into farmland for revenue.5 Henckell, who was also a European zamindar (landlord), turned a forested area into arable land with 150 leases from 1784 to 1800, naming it Henckellganj. It became the most well-known reclamation of the Sundarbans (Lahiri 1936; Westland 1871, 137).6 Unsurprisingly, Henckell’s work, both in terms of forest clearance and administering justice, was actively resisted by the dominant salt monopoly actors in the Sundarbans as it encroached on their territory both physically and judicially (Lahiri 1936).
Figure1.2. Map by James Rennell of the Sunderbund and Ballagot Passages, 1779, showing that the boundary of the Sundarbans was once Culna, now Khulna city. © British Library Board (Rennell map25.b.8).
The violence of the salt monopoly was part of the larger problem of overtaxation. Such an extraction of surplus contributed to the Great Famine of Bengal (1769–73), where 10 million people—one-third of the Bengali population—died (Sirajul Islam 1997).7 Poor governance, monopolies, greed, and exploitation characterized Company rule (Ranajit Guha 1963, 13). It has long been debated whether overtaxation was the result of greed alone (Bolts 1772), or an overly complex Mughal revenue collection system (O’Malley 1925; Hill 2008; Iqbal 2010; Ludden 1999). Under Mughal rule, the emperor owned all land. Rather than collecting a fixed sum each year, the emperor’s nonhereditary and appointed governors collected a share of the annual yield. This allowed for flexibility in revenue collection as it took into account variable harvests and the fact that land erodes each year because of meandering rivers (Iqbal 2010). The Mughal system of land tenure and revenue collection in Bengal mystified East India Company officials with its intricate customary rights and obligations in Persian script; they found it too complex to interpret in Western terms (Ranajit Guha 1963, 13).
The Permanent Settlement Act: Accelerating Deforestation
In his History of Bengal under British rule, the British civil servant Lewis S. S. O’Malley (1925) suggests that Lord Cornwallis imposed a British-style land-tenure system—the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793—because of this inability to understand a fundamentally different land-revenue system. The Permanent Settlement determined fixed revenues based on the boundaries of 1793 for tributes, rents, and services of rajas, zamindars (landlords), and other landholders. While Mughal emperors could award and take away official positions and titles, the Permanent Settlement Act instead established hereditary “private proprietary rights” based on British ideas of landowning estates and aristocracy. This resulted in the creation of a new tax-paying landlord class, the zamindars, who became full owners of the land with the right of inheritance and sale where none had previously existed, forming a radical break from the Mughal land-tenure system (Ranajit Guha 1963; Scott 1998, 48).8
James C. Scott (1998, 48) argues that this new system was based on a completely different social and ecological context with no regard to local knowledge and practice, and was imposed as a means of simplifying the functions of taxation for the benefit of the colonial administration.9 However, archival sources from this time show how Cornwallis’s insistence of giving proprietary rights to zamindars stemmed from his conviction that the prosperity of the country depended on the existence of a class of landed proprietors (O’Malley 1925, 258). While Cornwallis disregarded local knowledge and practice, the Permanent Settlement Act was contested and opposed by Sir John Shore and several directors of the Company, and condemned by the subsequent administrations of Warren Hastings and Lord Metcalfe (O’Malley 1925, 261–71). This highlights that the interests of the state and capitalists did not envisage a similar or uniform agenda of simplifying taxation.
The Permanent Settlement failed to consider variable, weather-dependent crop yields or the loss of land to riverbank erosion that is so characteristic of the Bengal delta (Iqbal 2010). Because of the meandering of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers, several thousand hectares of floodplain is subject to erosion each year along 2,400 kilometers of riverbank (F. Islam and Rashid 2012). This is a feature of the delta that contributes to its ever-shifting land-waterscape. As the meandering rivers eroded riverbanks, many of those holding titles to such land were unable to pay the fixed revenue based on the 1793 boundaries and went bankrupt (Iqbal 2010). Indeed, those landlords who did not pay the revenue owed risked losing their estate (O’Malley 1925, 275).
The Sundarbans region was not included in the Permanent Settlement Act as an incentive to zamindars to reclaim the land from “jungle” that had spread since the famines of the 1770s. Coupled with the overwhelming tax burden of the new zamindari estates, these fixed boundaries provided a strong incentive to escalate the conversion of Sundarbans forest into arable land free from additional tax burden (O’Malley 1925, 258). From the 1780s onward, the southwest Sundarbans of Jessore and the 24 Parganas saw increased deforestation as their borders expanded southward (Hunter 1875a). While Khulna was the boundary to the Sundarbans in 1779, much of the forest was cultivated by 1812. Extended forest clearance is seen in Hugh Morrison’s (1828) Continuation of the Survey of the Sunderbunds where settlements and cultivated lands that correspond to contemporary villages in Nodi are seen.10
The transformation of the Sundarbans increasingly became a Government of Bengal priority as the Company administration awarded grants to bring the “wastelands” into cultivation. The Company’s revenue officials designed incentives for landowners to maximize the rate of transformation of wetland forest to taxable agricultural land. These included land grants, tax incentives, cadastral surveys, and subsidized irrigation (Iqbal 2010). However, archival records from 1830 indicate how high revenue demands of cleared land resulted in an unintended effect of accelerated deforestation of areas not authorized by existing grants and where colonial administrators struggled to obtain revenue from lands “brought into cultivation” beyond the size awarded in formal grants.11 For example, revenue collectors of Jessore found that “large tracts of land in the Sunderbunds exceeding the quantity specified in the grants of the several Talukdars [landholders], have been brought into cultivation for which no revenue is paid. . . . It would appear that 25,000 beegahs of land have been brought into a productive state . . . the original grant for which was about four hundred beegahs.”12
The more land was liable to pay revenue, the more it was cleared to avoid such revenue collection. The deforestation of the Sundarbans thus continued to accelerate at a rapid pace. In the 1840s, twenty thousand acres in the “Backergunge Sundarbans,” east of Khulna, was cleared by the Morrells into Morrelganj (Bengal Revenue Board 1836, Paragraph 147, page 17C). Gastrell (1868)—a revenue surveyor—notes how the swamps from Rennell’s 1779 Bengal Atlas are dotted with villages and converted into “first-rate rice lands.” However, he warns against extended cultivation: “Care should . . . be taken eventually to preserve a broad belt of forest between the clearings and the bay, to protect them from the encroachments of the sea during the storms” (Gastrell 1868, 25).
Gastrell’s warning was not heeded. Two thousand square kilometers of land—70 percent of the Sundarbans—was cleared between 1830 and 1873 (Richards and Flint 1990). Figure 1.3, the 1874 Map of Jessore District, shows how Khulna is no longer the frontier of the Sundarbans as it was in 1779 (Thuillier 1874). The many place names on the map—so many that they are barely legible—illustrate how this vast deforestation led to both cultivation and habitation, while leading to settlements closer to the storms arising from the Bay of Bengal with less forest cover as protection.
John F. Richards and Elizabeth Flint (1990, 17) claim that “land-hungry peasants strove to transform the native tidal forest vegetation into an agro-ecosystem dominated by paddy rice and fish culture.” However, this is a simplified explanation, as colonial revenue officers actively encouraged cultivators to deforest the Sundarbans—Cornwallis himself excluded the Sundarbans from the Permanent Settlement to incentivize zamindars to “reclaim the jungle” and expand arable and revenue-generating land (O’Malley 1925).
Figure1.3. Map by H. L. Thuillier of Jessore District, 1874, showing the boundary of the Sundarbans in 1779 versus the boundary in 1874. Many place names litter the map, showing how the area has become more populated. © Britsh Library Board (Thuillier, IOR/X/1176).
The 1830s cadastral surveys of the Sundarbans, together with high tax demands, motivated cultivators to exceed the boundaries to avoid financial pressure. However, with the next cadastral survey their tax burden increased yet again. As a result, they continued to exceed the official boundaries to enjoy tax-free yields, exemplifying how the production of capital necessitates the production of new spaces. William Hunter (1875b, 183) proposed further “reclamation” of the Sundarbans and the Government of Bengal Large Capitalist Rules (1879) continued such encouragement by providing financial incentives for doing so. This included, for example, nineteen years of revenue-free cultivation of reclaimed lands (Lahiri 1936, 114–15). The colonial enthusiasm for deforestation and embankments persisted into the twentieth century, with the Census of India reporting: “There is an immense quantity of fertile land waiting the axe and the plough. The jungle is steadily being pushed back, and every year more land is being brought under cultivation” (1902, 74).13 These colonial preferences undermine Richards and Flint’s claim that “land-hungry peasants” were exclusively to blame for the rapid deforestation of the Sundarbans.
Converting Sundarbans to Paddy Fields
The British colonial administration actively promoted deforestation of the Jessore (Khulna) Sundarbans for the expansion of arable land.14 This coincided with the most rapid destruction of the Sundarbans that Bengal had experienced until that point (Gadgil and Guha 1992; Richards and Flint 1990; Sivaramakrishnan 1999). By the end of the 1920s, the Khulna District had a considerable permanent population, while the “reserved forests” established in 1875 had now been converted to agricultural land (Census of India 1933). This change is clearly visible in H. D. Ryder’s (1929) map—based on a survey from 1922 to 1924—that is dotted red with homesteads and settlements now increasingly positioned at the banks of the rivers amid yellow-colored cultivated lands. The once “wild jungle” depicted in Rennell’s 1779 map had turned into tamed, cultivated land, where embankments—raised sea walls shown in black dashed lines—are for the first time visible in what is now Nodi.
Although the conversion of forest into arable land can be seen as a continuation of a practice dating back to the Turkic Sultanate and Mughal rule (Eaton 1990), the rapid pace of British deforestation (1765 to 1947) entailed the establishment of new arable lands and settlements into increasingly low-lying parts of the southern Sundarbans subject to the salt tides of the Bay of Bengal. A great part of converting Sundarbans forest into arable land required the construction of bandhs (bunds), small earthen dikes adjacent to rivers that protected rice fields from saline tidewater during the dry season (Lahiri 1936, 39). Bandhs were not built to prevent floods; on the contrary, cultivators purposefully breached them each year to enable monsoon borsha floods, in order to reap the benefits of irrigation and silt deposition. The early colonial administration in Bengal lauded borsha floods as a “blessing of fertility.” Rennell (cited in La Touche 1910, 27) and Gastrell (1856) describe how monsoon “inundations” were a natural part of the landscape that deposited nutrient-laden silt from the rivers. These processes were key to the fertile lands of Bengal.
The much larger volumes of water toppled over the bandhs in the newly cultivated Jessore Sundarbans: “In the same trace, during the season of rain, a scene presents itself, interesting by its novelty; a navigation over fields submerged to a considerable depth, while the ears of rice float on the surface. Stupendous dykes, not altogether preventing inundation, but checking its excesses” (Hamilton 1815, 119). These dikes were not fully impenetrable, and this permeability allowed fertilizing substances, consisting of dissolved clay and calcareous matter, to deposit on the land (Hamilton 1828, 118). Various colonial accounts during Company rule lauded “inundations” for the “deposition of fertile silt” rather than describing floods as something that need to be prevented.
After the monsoon, cultivators repaired the bandhs to prevent brackish tidal water from spilling into arable land during the dry season (starting in January), when freshwater recedes upstream. Such bandhs enabled colonial civil servants like Henckell and the Morrells to convert the “salty marshes” of the Sundarbans into arable paddy land (Hunter 1875a; 1875b; Lahiri 1936; Westland 1871). Without annual repairs of the bandhs, the salinity could ruin crops, and thereby risk the reversion of the deforested lands back into mangroves (Hunter 1875b, 183). The necessity of salt-water-prevention bandhs made the British deforestation of Sundarbans mangroves in the Bay of Bengal different from deforestation processes elsewhere in British India (Cederlöf 2008; Ramachandra Guha 1991; Sivaramakrishnan 1999).
The British Raj (1850s–1947):Centralizing Administration, Simplifying Nature
During the East India Company rule of India from the 1770s to 1870s, the responsibility to erect and maintain bandhs belonged to the holder of the grant (pottak) to “reclaim” forest into land. In principle, the cost of erecting and repairing embankments was to be borne by the individual zamindars and tenure holders, but in practice it was borne by whoever was cultivating the soil as they needed to ensure that bandhs were in a condition to stop saltwater intrusion during dry season.15 Thus, the construction and repair of earthen embankments was decentralized with no state compensation (to the cultivator).16 W. A. Ingles (1911, 46–47) in his review of embankment policy and legislation in Bengal, suggests that the laws under the Company “were so elaborate that they were unworkable—and were thus often uncompensated”: the decentralized construction and repair of embankments resulted in little to no state compensation to the cultivator.
Irrigation and its maintenance were thus predominantly neglected under Company rule (Mosse 2003; Washbrook 1988; Willcocks 1930). This formed part of a wider negligence of Moghul-era public work institutions that carried out irrigation maintenance and tank excavation (Mosse 2003) as well as overseeing grain reserves (Sirajul Islam 1997). In South India, this ultimately led to the decline of water bodies and grain reserves. Neglected canals and tanks silted up, and the depletion of grain reserves resulted in several incidences of famine (Mosse 2003).
Others further suggest that the colonial British administration bounded rivers to separate them from land in riverine Bengal (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2007), using cartography to separate water from land with lines (da Cunha 2018). “Colonial capitalism” is interpreted as viewing rivers as destructive and in need of control (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013; D’Souza 2006).17 However, the East India Company’s lack of interest in repairing and maintaining these bandhs reflects a greater acceptance of various forms of wetness: of shifting rivers, canals, wetlands, marshes, and rains, evident in pre-1850 colonial maps. My own archival research of the East India Company showed great levels of detail of the fluidity and complexity of Bengal, particularly in maps of steamer routes and of settlement maps. Like historian Debjani Bhattacharyya (2018, 37), I did not encounter the well-known narratives of colonial fixities within the archive but stumbled onto flows, movements, and circulations of tides, rivers, inundations, and rains. In a temporal shift of perspective on floods in colonial Bengal, a decentralized Company rule cast floods as blessings, and the centralized rule of the British Raj later cast them as damaging.
This shift away from lauding borsha inundations as a blessing of fertility for Bengal in the Company period (Gastrell 1856) to a narrative of all floods as damaging to life and property in the British Raj period, is arguably connected with the replacement of temporary earthen bandhs with what Willcocks (1930, 23–24) refers to as permanent “watertight” embankments. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a response to Company malpractice and incompetence. This uprising by the colonized Indians prompted the military intervention of the British Crown—which then took over the control of India from the East India Company in 1858, resulting in the creation of the British Raj. In contrast to the decentralized approach of the Company, the British Raj established various departments and institutions to centralize its rule over India, creating the Indian Civil Service (Mosse 2003, 246). Centralized management entailed that the colonial state took charge of the costs of annual repairs of bandhs, which were breached each year. The Indian civil servant James Westland (1871) lamented: “Much money continued to be spent upon the [maintenance of] embankments.” To justify such expenditure, the official colonial narrative under the British Raj emphasized that it was the state’s responsibility to protect “life and property” from damaging floods.18 Compared to Company portrayals of beneficial inundations, this later narrative casts the monsoon borsha as destructive and causing breaches in order to justify extensive and centralized maintenance expenses on embankments.
As these lower earthen bandhs broke easily and required considerable repair each year, the colonial administration designed and constructed higher and more permanent watertight embankments along rivers to prevent wholesale breaches to “protect subjects” (Willcocks 1930, 23–24). Watertight embankments were cast as “better” than local earthen bandhs. This new type of embankment, easier to control and requiring fewer repairs, was promoted as a scientific technology that would modernize Bengal (Willcocks 1930). In contrast to the permeability and impermanence of bandhs, the new British design of watertight embankments obstructed flooding during the monsoon, thereby hampering irrigation required for paddy cultivation.
William Willcocks, in his study of the earliest watertight embankments in the north-central and western parts of Bengal since the 1840s, points out that zamindars and their tenants secretly cut and made breaches (kanwaz) to the Damodar embankment in the Ganges River floodplain to facilitate flooding: “It never seems to have struck anybody that the breaches were made secretly by the peasantry for irrigation. And yet it ought to have been evident that forty or fifty breaches in a heavily embanked river of inconsiderable length in a single year could not possibly have been made by the river itself; for one or two breaches eased the situation” (Willcocks 1930, 22–23). The way in which zamindars and their tenants resisted the colonial invention of watertight embankments highlights how these centrally planned colonial embankments did not consider the complex hydrological and ecological processes of a deltaic floodplain with its many meandering rivers and the seasonal variation of tidal inundation filled with salt and silt came to be simplified in the bureaucratic shift toward watertight embankments.
The creation of watertight embankments under a centralized colonial state gives credence to James C. Scott’s (1998, 4) theory that many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have failed because of the combination of four factors: state simplification as part of administrative ordering to make both society and nature legible; high-modernist ideology based on the belief of the superiority of Western science and technologies; the collusion of the state with capitalist interests legitimized through high-modernist ideology; and a weak civil society unable to resist these plans. This new type of embankment, easier to control and requiring less repairs, simplified the dynamics of floods and monsoons. The British Raj promoted watertight embankments as a scientific technology that would modernize Bengal—highlighting how state simplification and high-modernist ideology are entwined. Furthermore, this new infrastructure was tied to considerable capitalist interests working together with the colonial administration to expand profitable roads and railways in Bengal, which were used for colonial extraction.
While we can certainly see how embankments correspond with the first three elements of Scott’s theory—simplification, modernization, and promotion of capitalism through collusion with state-cum-colonial administration—archival resources provide little information on the extent or form of civil-society resistance in this period. In addition, Scott’s theory of state simplification fails to capture the diverging, and often conflicting, interests and agendas of the colonial state apparatus. Just as the Permanent Settlement Act was contested within the Company state, so was the introduction of watertight embankments in the British Raj. For example, the Military Board vocally criticized attempts to embank the Orissa delta in the 1840s and sought to dismantle existing embankments in order to end the rising spiral of expenditure on repair and maintenance, while the Revenue Department was opposed to this (supposedly out of fear of litigious claims by cultivators and landlords) and instead sought to control rivers through embankments (D’Souza 2006, 44). Rohan D’Souza (2006, 121) argues that “it [colonial capitalism] sought to bound the delta into the commodity-form in hitherto unusual ways and in unknown realms in order to once again establish its dominance over the rivers.” This idea of a uniform and hegemonic colonial state actor is contradicted by the conflict between the Military and Revenue boards, instead highlighting internal divisions within the state.
By disregarding knowledge on the complexity of the delta and the importance of monsoonal floods, the continued construction of watertight embankments prevented the monsoon floods from inundating the land with silt. However, schemes of improvement do not only fail because of the state and capitalist interests colluding to use high modernist ideologies to promote their interventions. Rather, the state is composed of actors with diverging agendas and beliefs that ally with capitalist actors with specific interests. In this case, the voices of colonial officials who understood the benefits of floods and siltation were undermined in the bureaucratic push toward a model of embankments that was seen as a means to maximize revenue, legitimized through the colonial state’s self-appointed obligation to “protect life and property.”19
Railways and Their Environmental Legacy
The centralized expansion of watertight embankments was interlinked with the expansion of colonial railways. These were portrayed as a colonial exemplars of progress and modernity in contrast to the traditional waterways of Bengal. Watertight embankments and railway bridges were built across the many crisscrossing rivers of Bengal and facilitated the construction of colonial railways and roads atop them, simultaneously enabling considerable capitalist interests to extract resources from its colonized territories. This infrastructure divided the delta into “innumerable compartments” as a means to control nature and floods (Iqbal 2010, 15). This process of simplification, high modernist ideology, and collusion with capitalist interests was to have wide-ranging ramifications that we still see today: worsening siltation and drainage congestion upstream as the fluid nature of waterways was hindered.
Many archival documents are concerned with logistics and matters related to revenue and communications—essential for the expansion and functioning of an extractive colonial capitalist economy. Prior to 1850, there were no railways and few roads in Bengal. In 1802, there were only twenty miles of road in Jessore and water transport was preferred to land carriage (Bentley 1925). In 1875, riverine traffic was extensive in the 24 Parganas and Jessore districts with boat routes connecting all of Bengal (Hunter 1875a); Khulna was an important river route and export goods center for the Sundarbans (Iqbal 2010). Traditional waterways were affordable and accessible to local people; it was the main mode of transport. Boats and river traffic were so well developed that there were a considerable number of people living on boats, making it difficult for census enumerators to estimate the size of the population (Census of India 1883).
Sir Arthur Cotton was a famous British irrigation engineer with five decades of experience on irrigation systems in India, including restoring Mughal irrigation works such as the Godavari Canal System. In 1872, he proposed a scheme for navigable canals that was submitted to a Parliamentary Committee in London. He argued that India “demanded water carriage,” adding that it was considerably more cost-effective than railways and that the preference for railways comes from “utter ignorance of India and her needs.” However, Sir Cotton’s scheme was rejected because of the opposition of vested railway interests (Majumdar and Datta 1970, 863), who were involved in considerable financial malpractice in the expansion of colonial railways (Sweeney 2015). Capitalist interests in London thus worked together with the colonial administration to harness “high modernist ideology” to expand railways in a way that undermined the strong objections of colonial officials with local knowledge, such as Sir Cotton.
The ideology of railways as bringers of modernity was powerful. It left a postcolonial legacy in which the British Raj is perceived to have “modernized” India, and in which the sites of the railway became nodes for the expansion of “modern institutions, including law, bureaucracy, police, schools, the military, science, industrial technologies, and nationalism” (Ludden 1999). Railways not only connected ports to interior centers along lines of commercial investment and resource extraction, enabling the transportation of export goods (Ludden 1999, 180), they also played an important role in transporting landless wage laborers (former peasants adversely affected by the overextraction of agricultural surplus by elites) to wherever there was a labor shortage in the colonial economy (Van Schendel 1981, 288). Railways also facilitated the export of grain out of Bengal. Though the Indian Famine Commission further justified railways as a means to combat famine, its report has a note of a Bengali landlord pleading to restrict exports of grain during the famine when food prices rise beyond a certain point and that landlords need grain and silver to assist their tenant farmers with cultivation.20 Grain exports played an important role in famines in India during the Victorian period (Davis 2007).
Railways also served a military purpose. In 1853, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie argued that building further railways “would enable the Government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point, in as many days as it now requires months, and to an extent which is at present physically impossible” (Headrick 1988, 63; Kaijser, van Der Vleuten, and Högselius 2016, 189). After the Indian Rebellion against British rule in 1857, building railways became a high priority for the Raj. By 1872, Britain had built more than eight thousand kilometers of railroads in India (Headrick 1988, 65). A significant quantity of resources was shifted toward the expansion of the railways to replace waterways as the main mode of transport. Between 1872 and 1881, 845 kilometers of railways were constructed in Bengal and Bihar alone. Railway construction commenced in the deltas of East Bengal in the 1890s, and by 1925 there were 4,828 kilometers of railways in Bengal (Bentley 1925, 27–33).
The expansion of railways in India may have supported colonial economies and military power, but it had several negative consequences for the ecology of the Bengal delta. First, the prioritization of funds toward railways resulted in the neglect of inland navigation, as Cotton had warned. Second, embankments that were secure against breaching stopped the annual monsoon borsha floods from depositing their fertile silt on the floodplains “and in consequence flood water was shut out from the country, the natural system of deltaic irrigation was interrupted, drainage was impeded, and the network channels which used to be formerly fed by the silt water from the great rivers became silted up and in many cases entirely destroyed, rendering boat traffic difficult and in many cases impossible” (Bentley 1925, 20). The colonial administration was aware of how embankments built parallel to rivers create considerable problems with engineers cautioning that embankments should not be constructed until their effects on the regime of the rivers have been fully considered (White 1909, 34).
Again, such warnings were not followed. By 1921, the delta is described as thoroughly embanked and suffering from siltation. Because of vast amounts of sediment in the rivers, many of these water bodies were rapidly filling up with silt, some becoming completely dry during the summer (Census of India 1923). The once great Kabadak River no longer received fresh water from the Ganges as its tributary had silted up. In embanked areas, the silt-laden river water, once able to inundate and deposit on the vast floodplains, was now confined to the rivers. This resulted in silt depositing on the riverbeds rather than on floodplains (Census of India 1923). A decade later, this region was described as consisting of dead or dying rivers (Census of India 1933, V; VI:10). As the waterbodies were filling up with silt, they could no longer retain the same amount of monsoon rain. Instead, the rainwater was trapped inside the embanked floodplains, unable to drain into the rivers because of the elevation difference between land and the raised, silted riverbeds outside. This came to be known as jalabaddho floods (waterlogging). By the 1920s, embankments contributed to longer and deeper lasting jalabaddho floods that spoiled aman paddy and disrupted natural fisheries (Bentley 1925, 33).
Ignoring Critics and Lessons from the Past
The accounts of the state of the delta as described in the Census of India reports (1923; 1933) mention “floods” as increasingly damaging to “life and property.” While early colonial accounts such as that of Rennell and Gastrell in the eighteenth and nineteenth century mention monsoon “inundations,” these later reports do not distinguish between beneficial borsha floods and damaging jalabaddho floods caused by the disruption of drainage in the delta. The shift from perceiving the annual inundation of silt as a blessing to flooding as a damaging event is interlinked with the colonial government’s objective of centralizing its control over rivers and embankments so as to expand railways, while reducing annual maintenance costs.
Despite dissenting voices warning of the negative ecological effects of compartmentalizing a hydrologically active delta, the construction and expansion of watertight embankments continued. This may serve as an example of how an “armchair” imperial science preferred to maintain its ignorance of local knowledge and needs (Mosse 2003, 246). The certain coalition of actors within the centralized colonial administration imposed such infrastructure despite its inappropriateness for a delta best suited for waterways. These colonial watertight embankments were predecessors to current technological interventions, which repeat past mistakes and exacerbate environmental damage.
The 1960s Coastal Embankment Project and “Development”
The Sundarbans region south of Khulna did not form part of any railway route essential for the colonial state. Despite several legislative attempts to include the region’s embankments within centralized management beginning in the 1870s, they were mostly left alone under the British Raj.21 Thus, the Sundarbans embankments remained earthen bandhs that cultivators breached during the monsoon and then repaired during the dry season. Because of state neglect, the responsibility of these repairs fell under various constellations between zamindars, tenure-holders, under-tenure holders, and tenant farmers (Das Gupta 1935; Ingles 1911; Lahiri 1936). Rai Shaheb Anil Chandra Lahiri suggests that such a decentralized approach was negative. He describes how under-tenure holders purposefully neglected preemptive embankment repairs, instead relying on their poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers to repair the breaches of the embankments prior to the dry season—which they were forced to do if they wanted to ensure a good harvest. He highlights the short-termism of this approach as the cultivators’ finances were not sufficient to do more than patch the embankment, with the consequence that the gradual deterioration of the embankment over time culminated in a rapid and complete collapse (Lahiri 1936, 143).
In contemporary accounts, government embankments are seen as not having existed in the Sundarbans until the Coastal Embankment Project (CEP) of the 1960s (Brammer 2004; Elahi and Rogge 1991; M. Zaman 1993). Oral histories of the coastal zone instead refer to zamindars maintaining temporary, low earthen embankments and aushtomashi bandhs (eight-month embankments), allowing for overflow irrigation, until the partition of India in 1947. In contrast to Lahiri’s account, such histories retell a story of cooperation and coordination of work. Sadhu Kaka, an eighty-five-year-old farmer in Nodi, describes the aushtomashi bandhs of his childhood as small temporary earthen dikes made with the excavated soil on the side of the floodplain. After the harvest of aman rice in mid-January, the zamindar coordinated the construction of these bandhs with villagers—with four to five people from each household working together—on the sides of the river to protect against saline incursion from the Bay of Bengal during the dry season. In mid-August, they breached the bandhs along the various canals connected to the river to facilitate monsoon borsha floods of rain mixed with sediment-laden river water to irrigate paddy fields. This system prevented saltwater intrusion in the dry season, while allowing for fertile silt inundation in the monsoon season beneficial for agriculture.22 Sadhu Kaka and many of my interlocutors depicted this as a dynamic system adapted to the active flows of the delta. The continuation of aushtomashi bandhs in this area highlights how local ways of organization continued in some places despite attempts at colonial centralization.
The Effects of 1947 on Bandhs and the Cold War Context of Structural Engineering
The Partition of 1947 separated Bengal and the Sundarbans into India and East Pakistan. Many Hindu landlords in Khulna migrated to West Bengal and the zamindari system was formally dismantled through the 1948 East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act (Lewis 2011, 60–61). This fracturing of the subcontinent severely fragmented the existing institutions and administrative capacity of what is now Bangladesh. The resulting postcolonial borders of partition were haphazard. For example, during my research at the National Archives of Bangladesh in Dhaka, I found several letters from both Hindu and Muslim civil servants prior to the announcement of the 1947 Partition borders explicitly requesting that they remain in Calcutta.23 Nevertheless, civil servants were transferred to Dhaka, where they expressed dismay at the lack of printing facilities and institutions to take over.
The Home Department officer Motahar ul-Huq (1957) in a survey and settlement report on the Khulna Sundarbans from 1947 describes a land in chaos. Many of the British civil servants had retired or simply left: the colonial irrigation office and its revenue funds had all but disintegrated. The East Pakistan side was now understaffed with little institutional capacity.24 The combined gap left behind by zamindars and colonial irrigation officers coincided, or resulted in, the neglect of bandhs that by the 1950s were in a severe state of disrepair. Extensively broken embankments caused saltwater intrusion during the dry season and reduced crop yields; Huq proposed that the Irrigation Department should take responsibility for the embankments to prevent salinity intrusion and to ensure the agricultural productivity of the land (M. Huq 1957).25
The publication of Huq’s report overlapped with the floods of 1954, 1955, and 1956 that led the US-funded United Nations study (under the name Krug Mission) to recommend government intervention in flood protection. This resulted in the creation of a state engineering agency to overtake water management responsibilities in what was then East Pakistan (United Nations 1957). The Krug Mission advised that large-scale embankments based on Dutch dikes be constructed to “control damaging floods.” In 1961, the newly created East Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (EP-WAPDA) received funding from USAID (Chadwick and Datta 2003) and the World Bank (M. R. Islam 2006) for the Coastal Embankment Project (CEP), which commissioned the newly created irrigation agency—now known as the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB)—to construct four thousand kilometers of embankments and 136 polders across the entire coastal belt of Bangladesh (FAO 1985). In the southwest region alone, the project constructed 1,566 kilometers of permanent embankments and 282 sluices. The immediate impacts were seemingly positive: from “only” being able to harvest paddy during the monsoon season, the local population were able to cultivate multiple crops per year (Firoze 2003; M. Hossain, Islam, and Saha 1987).
Hanlon et al. (2016) highlight how the Krug Mission was promoted by US interests26 and suggest that technical assistance to (East) Pakistan was politically motivated because of its importance during the Cold War.27 These geopolitical motivations were entwined with an ideology of development, the latest form of ideas of progress and modernity imposed on Bangladesh since the colonial era to justify interventions in environment and society. Many former colonized states sought to “catch up” with the “developed” world (Gupta 1998). The Bretton Woods Institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were officially created to facilitate the “development” of “underdeveloped” postcolonial societies, an ideology that helped secure strategic alliances through “technical assistance.” As part of this paradigm, Western donors cast modern technology and engineering works, agricultural productivity, urbanization, and industrialization (or high-modernist development ideology) as essential components in the road toward development. The 1960s Coastal Embankment Project (CEP) was thus part of a global process of promoting state-led development through large-scale infrastructure projects in newly independent Third World countries. The ideology of essentially Eurocentric development entailed technical assistance for a capital-intensive project that employed mainly foreign engineering consultants unfamiliar with Bangladesh: Dutch-style polders were a technical solution detached from local ecology and the active hydrology of a dynamic delta with considerably higher rates of sedimentation than European deltas such as that of the Rhine (Hanlon 2020).
Extending and Worsening Deltaic Siltation
As with the watertight railway embankments of the British Raj, the CEP embankments extended the obstruction of floods to the coastal region. This resulted in a situation where over one billion tons of sediment, carried annually from the Himalayas, could no longer be deposited across the coastal region during the monsoon borsha inundation. The embankments confined the sediment to the rivers, silting up water bodies, raising riverbed levels, and reducing water-retention capacity in the coastal rivers and canals. Furthermore, the CEP embankments were built in such a way that they only have a few sluices connecting canals to the rivers, resulting in many of the canals being cut off from their water sources and disappearing (M. Hossain, Islam, and Saha 1987; Iqbal 2010). In a conversation I had with Sadhu Kaka, he recalled the changes since the construction of the CEP embankments: “This area was once filled with rivers and canals. If we wanted to go anywhere, we went by boat. It took only an hour get to Shobuj town and everyone had their own nouka [boat]. Due to these government roads/embankments, our canals have silted up and there is no longer any water transport between the villages and towns. This was better than road transport—they are useless during the monsoon as we are stuck up to our knees in mud.”
The CEP was implemented under Pakistani top-down rule. In 1971 East Pakistan fought West Pakistan in a nine-month liberation war. The newly created state of Bangladesh arose in a context of civil war and collective trauma with widespread societal effects. An estimated three hundred thousand to three million people died during the war and two hundred and fifty thousand women were raped. In addition to the violence, torture, murder, and rape characterizing the war of West and East Pakistan, the Pakistani army targeted and killed thirty-five thousand Bengali intellectuals, leaders, and students beginning on 26 March, many of whom were Hindus (Lewis 2011). From an administrative perspective, the country found itself without many of its intellectuals and experienced civil servants, while most of the administrative records from Calcutta remained in West Pakistan.28 Bangladesh needed to create a new civil service after having lost a considerable degree of institutional memory and experience. Many of Bangladesh’s state institutions were, quite understandably, fragmented and weak.29
Figure1.4. Silted-up river turned into a canal, 2014. Photo by author.
Figure1.5. Embankment and raised banks due to siltation, 2014. Photo by author.
By the time of its independence in the 1970s, Bangladesh’s rivers had increasingly silted up. Forty-five miles of the Gorai—a main freshwater tributary of the Ganges—was unfit for navigation, while many reaches of the distributary rivers were also no longer navigable (Government of Bangladesh 1976, 3–4).30 The once great Bhadra River, where large steamers once passed, was now a silted canal referred to as the Dead Bhadra (Dewan, Mukherji, and Buisson 2015).
Figure 1.4 shows how the Bhadra “river” has silted up to no more than a canal, and the land inside the CEP embankment built in the 1960s and ’70s is lower than the bank outside the embankment that is raised through annual silt deposits.
Not only did the obstructed floods cause siltation of water bodies, but by depositing on the riverbeds outside the embanked floodplain it raised the water level outside the polder to be higher than that inside (fig. 1.5), trapping water inside the embankments and leading to drainage congestion (FAO 1985). The problems of the northern tracts of previously embanked Bengal in the 1880s had finally reached the coastal Sundarbans. The CEP embankments extended the problem of jalabaddho floods to the southwest coastal region as water was unable to drain out from inside the embanked floodplain out to the river. By the 1980s and 1990s jalabaddho resulted in more than one hundred thousand hectares being permanently flooded, inhibiting cultivation, damaging crops, and preventing crop rotation (Adnan 1994), taking a much more dangerous turn than monsoon borsha floods (Iqbal 2010).31
It was perhaps unsurprising that local people in some places continued the practice described by Willcocks (1930) of intentionally breaching parts of the embankments through what Sklar and Dulu (1994) refer to as “public cuts,” which are used to drain the fields of stagnant water. This may refer to jowar-bhatar khelano (free play of tidal flow)—a concept used by local people to remedy jalabaddho floods and which became institutionalized as Tidal River Management (TRM). This bottom-up grassroots movement was gradually taken over by the Bangladesh Water Development Board—funded by the Government of Bangladesh and the Asian Development Bank in a project known as the Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation Project—which ignored local solutions in favor of top-down and structural engineering solutions (Dewan 2012, 20–21).
The problems of jalabaddho floods in the 1980s were further exacerbated by low-frequency damaging bonna floods related to tidal surges and cyclones. These brought international attention and significant funds for flood protection in Bangladesh mainly through the Flood Action Plan (FAP; Adnan 1994). The FAP consisted of several donor-funded studies on how Bangladesh could best manage floods. Like climate change today, flood protection was at the receiving end of a significant portion of Bangladesh’s development funding. Large-scale and high-tech flood protection projects, supported by donors like the World Bank, the Netherlands, and relevant state agencies, favor capital-intensive and technical solutions. The Ershad regime was enthusiastic over the prospect of expanding large-scale flood control and irrigation embankments as it provided a “lucrative” opportunity (Shaw 1992).
However, the existing CEP embankments had proven ineffective when it came to controlling floods, worsening sedimentation and jalabaddho instead. This motivated Bangladeshi civil society to come together to protest against the FAP as they expressed doubt that similar investments would prove more effective.32 Strong civil society protests, combined with the endorsement of an independent review team funded by the UN and the Norwegian government, ensured that the Flood Action Plan was not implemented—illustrating the competing interests and activities of the diverse actors and donors active in Bangladesh’s development industry (Wood 1999).
The Coastal Embankment Project, the Flood Action Plan, and the Coastal Embankment Improvement Project highlight the ways in which donors such as the World Bank engage in the same type of “simplification” as the colonial state of the British Raj: both maintain ignorance of complex ecological contexts and the ways in which embankments exacerbate siltation. The CEP, the FAP, and the CEIP are internationally funded and capital-intensive projects using “modern” technologies and highly paid Western experts that downplay the expertise of local Bangladeshi scientists. James C. Scott (1998) argues that state officials collude with capitalist interest to bring high modernist ideas into being. From railways to the CEIP, these large-scale, capital-intensive infrastructure projects provide lucrative opportunities (Shaw 1992) and bring various coalitions of capitalist interests and state officials together to implement these designs. However, though these ideas of “state simplification” and “high modernist ideology,” state collusion and a weak civil society, may fit the examples in this chapter, there are also limits to Scott’s theory.33 The disputes between the Company Salt Department and the Magistrate, the Military and Revenue boards, Cotton’s critique of railway expansion in Bengal and Ingles’s warnings about embankments, and the protests against the Flood Action Plan highlights how there are often competing knowledges in the field of “development,” where some narratives are better at harnessing support than others by furthering economic, (geo)political, or administrative agendas. Narratives of improvement, whether through railways, flood protection, or climate change adaptation, have the potential to enable simplification in ways that increase the financial interests of particular actors, both within state administrations and within international organizations.
Development schemes do not fail only because the state and capitalist interests collude to use high modernist ideologies to promote their interventions. Rather, the state, as well as the World Bank, are composed of actors with diverging agendas and beliefs who ally themselves with capitalist actors with specific interests. Thus, the prevailing dominant narrative represents the outcome of internal organizational struggles regarding what is accepted as knowledge or science. This is particularly relevant today since state simplification can be combined with climate reductionism to put forth interventions that might be at odds with local experience and knowledge, such as the construction and maintenance of embankments. Though using climate change allows for connections between ideas and events to justify project funding, it creates expectations of causality that do not match the current physical realities. This highlights the importance of looking at the actors and networks shaping—and contesting—specific (water) interventions, including that of flood-protection embankments.
Conclusion: How Simplification Exacerbates Climatic Vulnerability
Embankments were built long before climatic change was identified as a development problem for Bangladesh. Deforestation of the Sundarbans was different than elsewhere in British India as the lands cleared for rice cultivation required temporary earthen embankments. These were constructed in the dry season to stop saline tidewater from ruining crops. Cultivators then breached these embankments during the monsoon to facilitate borsha floods that inundated the land with silt-laden river water mixed with rain. The silt fertilized the soil and naturally raised land levels, while the floods irrigated the rice fields and provided a breeding ground for fish.
However, the annual cost of repairing these breaches before the start of each dry season was high. The British Raj’s push for centralized administration and reducing annual maintenance costs saw a shift toward watertight embankments that stopped the borsha floods. Over time, such embankments paved the way for roads and railways to replace the water carriage that was once so characteristic of the Bengal delta. These watertight embankments, based on “imperial science,” prevented floods and thereby confined the silt to the rivers and raised riverbed levels, so that the rainwater during the monsoon could no longer drain into the river—causing damaging jalabaddho floods (waterlogging). Over the years, such silt filled many rivers and canals, causing them to disappear. The East India Company’s view of silt and monsoon borsha floods as a blessing of fertility was superseded by the British Raj viewing all floods as damaging to life and property. However, despite continuous dissent at the expansion of embankments and their negative ecological consequences for Bengal—from the Military Board in Orissa and Sir Arthur Cotton to Bentley, Willcocks, Lahiri, and White, among others—colonial embankments went from being viewed as protection against floods to their current status of protection against climate change, despite centuries of experience that indicates how such infrastructure exacerbates jalabaddho floods.
Capital-intensive embankment infrastructure ignored voices about the complexities of local history and ecology, from colonial railway embankments to the postindependence World Bank–funded Coastal Embankment Project and the Flood Action Plan. This is currently the problem with the World Bank–funded Coastal Embankment Improvement Project, which does not explicitly engage with the historical experience of how flood protection exacerbates siltation, waterlogging, and rising riverbeds. A project narrative built around the idea that only climate change causes flooding—while not acknowledging the ecological complexities of different types of floods and how embankments exacerbate them—is arguably an example of “climate reductionism” (Hulme 2011). Climate change as an idea thus rearranges events to create expectations of causality that legitimize particular development interventions (Mosse 2005), and climate reductionism can be harnessed in ways that enable narratives suited to specific economic, political, or administrative goals—in this case, building more embankments.