South Asian Studies Colloquium Series: Fluid Histories: Law and Geology in the Bengal Delta, Debjani Bhattacharya

This talk will discuss a failed late eighteenth-century infrastructural venture to connect Calcutta to the Bengal delta where the depth of the water was in flux and the coastline mobile. By studying this unsuccessful project of harbor construction, which ended up as a thirty-year legal case from 1770 to 1803 beginning at the Mayor’s court in Calcutta and settled in London, this talk will ask in what manner legal debates about the amphibious spaces of marshes, sandbanks and the tidal landscape might have shaped the development of colonial geology and science of tides.