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Outline:  River control in South Asia, especially from the nineteenth century, rested on the confidence of prediction. In such a reckoning, harnessing vast flowing rivers could be achieved because their average behaviors and statistical regularities enabled manipulation. In the context of a warming world, however, the hydrosphere no longer offers previous predictabilities. The inevitable ‘loss of control’ has, in fact, in recent years, forced a conceptual churning over the very idea of the river itself. And at the heart of this urgency to rethink the meaning of flows is the re-discovery of the centrality of the notion of the flood pulse. The talk will explore not only how environmental historians and the environmental humanities are building on a biological critique of the volumetric channel but, critically as well, unsettling the notion of the river itself.

Speaker bio: Rohan D’Souza is Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University).  He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and has jointly edited  (With Deepak Kumar and Vinita Damodaran) The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011); and  ( with Vinita Damodaran) Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand (2020).