Iftekhar Iqbal Discusses Imperial Waterspace in India and China

The South Asian Studies Council welcomes to is Colloquium Series Iftekhar Iqbal, an Associate Professor of History at Dhaka University and Georg Forster Fellow (2012-13) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Humboldt University. Professor Iqbal will deliver a talk based on recent research titled: “From Mumbai to Shanghai: Imperial Waterspace at the Crossroads of India and China”.

4.30pm, April 10 · Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

With the tightening of British imperial grip in the eastern coast of China and Myanmar in the course of the nineteenth century, the issue of connecting India with China through its southwestern regions became a major agenda. Both the waterways and the railways were considered capable of facilitating these connections. Although such possibilities withered in the early twentieth century, ideas and efforts in this direction left a lasting testimony to imperial engagements with transnational waterspace, while also foreshadowing significant points of departure for postcolonial India’s own experiments with the same. Drawing examples from the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, and Yangtze, among other neighboring rivers, the talk will trace the emergence and decline of the idea of the river as connecting lines between India and China. In his talk, Professor Iqbal will argue that in the failed process of imagining the river as connectors of disparate regions, the river assumed as much historical agencies as the Indian Ocean and the Zomian mountains.

Professor Iqbal recently published The Bengal Delta (Palgrave, 2010), which examines the political-ecological dynamics of the region in colonial times with a focus on agrarian economy and well-being. The book received Honorable Mention by the inaugural Bernard S. Cohn Prize Committee of the Association for Asian Studies. As a Georg Forster Fellow (2012-13) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Humboldt University, he is working on a project “Rivers and trans-regional integration: environment, culture and communication across the Eastern Himalayan-Tibetan Watershed, 1840-1947”. In this project Professor Iqbal will focus on the modern history of Yunnan, Myanmar, Assam and Bengal with a view to situate trans-regional forces of ecology in the territorially-bounded development practices of the nation-state.