A Biography of the Brahmaputra: Arupjyoti Saikia Discusses the Life of a River

How does one write the life of a river?  This question was one that Arupjyoti Saikia brought to the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, where, as program fellow from 2011-2012, he worked on constructing an environmental biography of the Brahmaputra River. An Associate Professor of History in  the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Arupjyoti has written extensively on the environmental history of Assam, including: A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Modern Assam (Routledge, forthcoming 2012) and Forests and Ecological History of Assam: 1860-1900 (Oxford, 2011).

Reflecting on his year at Yale, Arupjyoti observes that he arrived at Yale with the idea of writing a book on the Brahmaputra within the larger context of the environmental history of Northeastern India.  Over time, however, the river has become the essential focus of the project.  Participating in several courses offered at Yale, helped both to reframe and focus the project. James C. Scott’s course “Rivers: Nature and Politics”, encouraged Arupjyoti to think about the human and scientific dimensions of the Brahmaputra, while a graduate seminar on South Asian studies and the interdisciplinary course “Agrarian Societies” helped to reframe and rethink environmental history of the Northeast while also placing the specific history of the Brahmaputra in larger regional contexts within the subcontinent and comparative contexts across the world.  To develop the project, Arupjyoti also worked intensively in Yale’s extensive library collections on 18th and 19th century India in the areas of colonial science, geology, and geography, as well as the Map and digital collections.  Beyond Yale, he has had the opportunity to present his work at UCLA and the University of Chicago.

A regular participant in the weekly colloquium offered through the South Asian Studies Council, and its graduate student Brown Bag series, Arupjyoti notes that Yale’s strength in South Asia enabled him to understand the region in broader, more dynamic ways.  He observes that in recent times environmental history of South Asia has fast moved beyond the early stage of development, where much focus was placed on colonial forestry and delimited by political boundaries. Yet, there is scope, he emphasizes, to think about environmental history in more expansive ways – in other land and waterscapes such as rivers and mountains – and to write larger ecological histories not bound within political borders. Increasing environmental conflicts in the near future, he contends, will make environmental history more relevant in South Asian societies.  

As he prepares to depart New Haven, Arupjyoti reflects that upon his return to Assam he will undoubtedly see the life of the Brahmaputra in a new light – as no longer a river of Assam, but an international river, whose story unfolds not only through the people who have relatively recently settled on and near its banks, but on a far larger set of forces that have shaped river life.