[Reader-list] CHS Seminar, October 9

[Tanveer Kaur]

Centre for Historical Studies

School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Invites you to a lecture



The Pollution of a Sacred River: The Ganges in the Nineteenth Century

by Awadhendra Sharan



Wednesday, 9 October 2013, 3.00 pm

Centre for Historical Studies Committee Room



Sometime around the 1890s, after the first modern waterworks had been put
in place in the cities of colonial India, authorities began to worry about
the flow away of urban waters, carrying along with them domestic and other
wastes. Colonial policies in this regard, I suggest, spoke to a fairly
global conception of water bodies and their capacities to act as sinks,
viz. a controlled use of receiving waters as part of waste treatment and
disposal structures, based on their assimilative capacity. But this global
conception was marked by difference, both with respect to the degree to
which harms were perceived, and also the extent to which necessary
expertise, technologies and resources were made available to deal with such
harms.  It was a well-established sanitary axiom, the Sanitary Commissioner
to Government of India proposed in 1901, that sewage should not be
discharged into a river, but this rule, he observed, must be interpreted
with ‘discretion’ and with ‘due regard to the circumstances in each case'.
My presentation shall focus on the ‘circumstance’ of one such case, that of
the river Ganges in its relationship to the towns of North India, during
the period 1890s to 1910s, focusing on four key sets of differences: (a)
the idea of *natural* difference; (b) the thesis of *cultural* difference;
(c) *knowledge* difference; and (d) the idea of *legal* difference.



Awadhendra Sharan is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi. His forthcoming book (OUP, Delhi), *Nuisance, Pollution
and Urban Dwelling in Modern*, examines several interrelated issues
concerning urban environment: water purity and sanitation, nuisance and
traditional trades, congestion and pollution and toxicity, combining
extensive archival research with a study of contemporary sources. He has
published papers in various academic journals and his current research is
focused on *Economies and Cultures of Waste and Pollution in Colonial India*.
 In addition, Sharan has initiated a new research project on *Urban
Infrastructure in India*.



-- 
Tanveer Kaur
Programme Coordinator
Sarai-CSDS
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054