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Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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Welcome everyone to today's episode of New Books Network. I am Origno, your host. I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan working on sovereignty and Empire in the early Colonial period. Today, as guest we have Professor Devika Shankar who will be talking about her new book, an encroaching sea. Dr. Devika Devika Shankar is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Her research interests primarily lie in the fields of environmental history, economic history, and science and technology studies. She received her PhD in history from Princeton in 2019. She also holds degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and the University of Delhi. Dr. Shankar's current research project focuses on the Port of Cochin on the southwest coast of India and examines how growing environmental concerns generated by the port's shifting coastline and intersected with visions for its development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ensuring how rising environmental instability became a catalyst for an ambitious port development project under colonial rule. This project points to longer and more complex histories of austerity and the impulse to turn disasters into opportunities for development. Professor Shankar has published in journals such as the Competitive Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies, Past and Present Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Indian Economic and Social History Review. She teaches environmental History, Commerce and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, Environment and Infrastructure in Asia, and the History of the Making of Modern South Asia. And on that note, please welcome Professor Shankar.
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C
Thank you so much. Original for the very comprehensive introduction. Thank you.
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B
Thank you. Thank you for being here. So we'd like to begin with knowing a little more about how this book came together from your training in jnu, Princeton and teaching at Hong Kong. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
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C
So, yeah, thanks for giving me a chance to sort of look back. It's always nice at the end of a project to sort of, you know, look back at how it began. So my sort of academic journey in many ways really began in JNU. That's when. When I started in JNU, I did a master's in MPhil. I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to continue with history. So I think the time there was really critical for me to sort of decide that this is what I wanted to do. But this project that eventually became this book really began during my PhD when I was in Princeton. And I should confess, this is I there. There were a few twists and turns along the way. I apologize if it's a little convoluted and long winded, but when I first decided to. When I started my PhD, I had a very different project in mind. So I didn't set out to work on Kochi. I didn't set out to work on the questions that I became interested in. My original intention was to work on Delhi. So I had done an mphil on the railways in Delhi and the transformations in Delhi following the entry of the railways. And I'd wanted to sort of take that project forward. And I wanted to look at the acquisition of religious spaces for public works projects in and around Delhi. So that was my original plan for the PhD. But one of the good things with the American PhD is of course, that you don't start with research. So I had, you know, you get two years when you're just doing coursework. And I had a chance to read widely during that time. I had a chance to do a lot of different kinds of courses. And I think within a year or so of that, I increasingly began to feel sort of dissatisfied with this original sort of project that I had intended to work on. And I'd been doing a lot of courses on the Indian Ocean. So my sort of interest started drifting in that direction. So eventually, by the end of my coursework, I had to submit a prospectus. But even then I wasn't really. So I decided to abandon Delhi and I decided to sort of shift my focus to the port of Calicut or Korakod in southern India. So originally when I went, when I started my archival research, at that point I still thought of myself as an urban historian, or I thought that urban history is what I was interested in. So I had wanted to. When I started archival research in 2014, the project I had in mind was a sort of urban history of Korokot. So Koricode is of course, most famous for being the place where Vasco da gama arrives in 1498. And what I wanted to do was to sort of explore its transformations in the 18th century as a window into wider transformations in the Indian Ocean economy. So I went to the. So my first sort of archival trip was to the Kerala State Archives branch in Korakod. And I was looking at a lot of revenue records, I was looking at a lot of trade reports. And increasingly, I think fairly soon I began to feel like I wasn't really getting excited by this material. I also began to feel like I wasn't the right person for this sort of a project which was very much sort of turning into an economic history project. And during that time when I was looking at the revenue records at the Korikod archives, I began to sort of notice these more interesting looking index entries, not to do with Calicut, but to do with Kochi. And these index entries were titled things like Encroachment of the Sea, Cochin and Danger. And mostly because I didn't really have much else to do in Koricode for the four months that I was there, I started requisitioning these documents out of interest. But the more I sort of started looking at this material, most of this material that I looked at, the early material, was on coastal erosion. I at this point didn't know anything about coastal erosion. And today it's once again become an issue that's become quite important around Kerala. But at the time I hadn't really read much about it, but I was really fascinated by the sort of discourse of nature or discourse around nature that was building or that I was seeing in the records that I was finding. I had done a few courses on the history of science and I think. So that is where my initial sort of interest was. And so I think over time, sometime during those four months, I decided to sort of again abandon my sort of project on Calicut. And to shift my focus to Kutchi. So I think my sort of. This project first began in the archives, really, and it began out of just this accidental sort of discovery of these documents or on coastal erosion. So when I first decided to work on Cochin, I was still not sure exactly what I was going to do. I sort of had a sense that I was interested in this sort of way in which the environment was being studied, the way in which it was being written about in colonial accounts. But I still didn't really have much clarity on where this was going to go. But that only really happened later, I think as I started reading more, I wasn't really an environmental historian at all. So I started reading, you know, and reading a lot of secondary literature at this point also helped. And from that period onwards, I think my interest increasingly started drifting towards the Kochi harbour itself and how these environmental transformations sort of connected with or how the relationship between that, between the sort of changing coastline and the technological interventions that were being executed in and around the harbor. So, yeah, I think that that's how the project really began. And over the years it sort of, first during my PhD and then since once I started turning this into a book, I think it's changed quite a bit from how it began. But I think that initial focus on the harbor, which I sort of got to fairly early on in my initial archival trip, that's sort of state and that's given me the sort of focus around which I've explored various other sort of questions.
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B
Thank you for that fascinating story. And I, I'm. We're. We're really lucky to that all the index entries kind of landed somewhere and, and you were able to explore. That is. That is really amazing to hear. So that brings us to the question of what makes Kochi or the Cochin port such an important part in your book.
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C
So, so the way in which I moved from thinking that there's something interesting happening around the coastline to really focusing on Kochi had a lot to do with some of the conversations I had at the Korikod Archives. So I should take this opportunity to say that the Kerala State Archives, all three branches, I worked in the three branches at different points of time. All three of them are really amazingly well run instit and they have very well informed archivists. And I really benefited from that sort of wealth of knowledge that people had there about the sources. So what began to happen was that when I started requisitioning more and more documents on Kochi, the head archivist of the Korokode Archives at that time Majeet sir, who was just incredibly knowledgeable, he told me, well, if you're looking at Kochi, you must look at this bundle of files that we have have on the Kutchi harbor project. So the Kochi harbour project is the main sort of port development project that's executed in Kochi around from 1920 onwards. And it's what allows Kochi to become a major port at the time of India's independence. So this. So I started. So initially, when he sort of drew my attention to these documents, I wasn't really that interested because I was expecting to find a lot of really boring material on various sorts of financial considerations to do with the project. The little that I knew about the Kochi harbour project at that time was that it was really driven by naval concerns. So Kochi does eventually become a naval base after the Second World War. So the little that I knew was that the navy had played an important role. So I was sort of expecting to find material on this sort of stuff. But when I did eventually look at these records, that is not what I was finding at all. Instead, a couple of things I wasn't expecting to find in a bundle of records to do with a port development project kept coming up. One of them was coastal erosion. So I'd been reading about coastal erosion in the late 19th century. And when I started looking at these records, I realized that coastal erosion had intensified and worsened considerably on the eve of the execution of the Cochihaba project. So the sort of question that I began to get interested in at that time was why is it that a period of ecological anxiety. By this point, a lot of what I was reading was colonial officials expressing grave concerns about whether the port would be stable for much longer. The future of the port of Kochi. But at the same time as these questions were being raised, they also then decide shortly afterwards to embark on this very ambitious sort of poor development scheme. So I became interested in this connection between ecological anxiety and development usually. And the few sort of classic environmental histories that I'd read were largely. Would largely talk about ecological anxiety and ecological crisis as a consequence of development projects. So you first have a development project and that makes something worse. Here was a sort of situation where it seemed like you had a disintegrating coastline, you had a lot of anxiety about what was going to happen, and that becomes a sort of context or an opportunity for a development project. So that's one thing I wanted to explore. The second thing that I began to see in these records was a lot of references to the princely states of the region and it began to become very clear that this poor development scheme, which I had always just thought of as any other colonial state led development project, was very much sort of driven not just by the colonial state, but by these princely states, especially the Cochin state as well. And so when I started getting interested in these questions around Cochin, the port, firstly, my attention started drifting towards the harbor and the port. And the more I started reading this material, the more I began to think that what was happening around the Port of Kochi would allow me to think differently about certain important issues that environmental historians and legal historians or historians of princely states have looked at. Because what I was finding around the port of Cochin seemed to be a little different from my understanding at that time of the way in which the relationship, as I said, between environmental change and development had been understood, the way in which the relationship between princely states and British India had been understood. So the Port of Cochin, for me became a way for to explore these wider sort of issues in environmental history and in legal history.
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B
Thank you for that. Speaking of the ecological, and there's so much of it in the book, but it's also a book about development, capitalism, sovereignty, international law. So amid, amidst all of them, what is for you the ecological turn that you use to do a history of all of it together? How do you, how do you deploy this method?
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C
So for me, the it. So it's again, not something that I set out to do, but it was something that grew out of once I started looking at Kochi. So as I mentioned, I looked at infrastructure and I looked at many questions around development earlier in my mphil when I looked at the railways coming into Delhi. And now I'm embarrassed to admit it, but, you know, you wouldn't find the term environment anywhere in that dissertation if you were to dig it up. Because I never really thought about the environment at all, or I wasn't really thinking about it at all at the time. But when I started working on Kochi, and the more I started looking at the POD development project, I realized that I think the environment is important in any sort of space and in any sort of development project. But along sort of dynamic coastlines, the environment is just absolutely impossible to ignore. And it's something, whether you set out to or not, it's something you have to engage with. And so for me, initially it grew out of that. You know, I was just seeing references to the coastline everywhere. But I think doing that and sort of engaging with that more explicitly then made me realize just how the traditional way in which we've studied port Cities or the way in which. And I've gained a lot from the rich sort of literature on port cities across the Indian Ocean. But the environment doesn't really figure that prominently or hasn't till very recently. I mean, now with Deepjani Bhattacharya's work and a few others, we are beginning to move. Or that was one of the first books that really sort of emphasized the environment. But otherwise there have been such a rich sort of literature on port cities across South Asia and elsewhere. But the environment was never really taken that seriously. Whereas I think one of the things that this turn towards ecology has done is to make us realize just the new kinds of questions that you can raise or how you can think differently about political changes taking place in these areas, about urban transformations. You can't really understand certain urban transformations in places like Bombay without really engaging with the environmental context in which this is happening. The environmental changes that are shaping these urban transformations, but are also then these transformations are completely remaking the environment. So for me, I think now, and one of the things that has happened, especially in the last 10, 20 years, given the concerns around climate change, et cetera, is that now we've become more sort of, I think in every field we've become a little more sort of attentive to ecological issues and ecological transformations. And I think that that is something that is here to stay. I don't think that. I think one of the good things is that, you know, there are many turns in history. But I think one of the things with the ecological turn is that I think it's going to be hard to go back. And I think that's a good thing. I think the environment is something that now, whether you're studying capitalism, whether you're studying technology, it will be hard to think about these things without taking the ecological, ecological forces seriously.
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B
Indeed, that has been a significant turn. And you do it in such novel ways in your book. So why does the ecological history of mid 19th century to the early 20th become important? And you sort of do your kind of distributed chapters in a particular way. Could you just tell us briefly the time? Why the time period and the chapterization?
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C
Right. So the 19th century. I start with the 19th century partly because that's when I began. That's the first sort of issues that I became interested in. It was from the mid19th century, resources from that period. And one of the things that I noticed then was that there was suddenly in that period a real surge in interest in Cochin's environment. And so one of the first things I explore in the book is why. Why is it that, you know, coastal changes have been taking place for a long time. These are not just happening suddenly, but suddenly the environment, Kochi's environment becomes an object of scientific curiosity in a certain sense. And so one of the first things that became important for me to do was to contextualize that, to think about the economic, social and political reasons why suddenly there's this growing interest in and concern about Kutchi's environment as far as the Sport Development Project is concerned. And this is a question that I have been asked a few times and I think it's an interesting one, which is, if you're looking at the Sport Development Project that begins in the 1920s, why are you going back so far back? And I think part of the reason it was important for me to go back was because the general sort of, as I said, there's been some very interesting and very important work that's been done on fluid environments and on environmental change in South Asia and elsewhere. And I've gained a lot from engaging with this literature. But there's almost a sense that you get in this literature that as soon as there is any sort of big environmental shift, the colonial state is trying to fix it. Right. So the technological fix that the colonial state tries to bring in. Because the 19th century is of course, a period when there's great sort of overconfidence in technology's ability to control nature. And that for various reasons, whether it's economic reasons, political reasons, there is this sort of almost reflex action that the colonial state sort of will start through which the colonial state intervenes in dynamic environments. But that is not really. That didn't quite fit with what I was finding in Kochi. Yes, there is. The colonial state at certain points does intervene in certain ways. And that is guided by all sorts of factors. But I also wanted to draw out the longer history to show that there are various sorts of. That once we stop assuming that the colonial state would immediately intervene, you can ask the question, okay, why does it intervene now? What is changing now that is forcing it to intervene? What are the factors that I'm compelling it to move in certain directions? So I think that longer history was important for that reason. And I think it allows me to explore this question of why the colonial state intervenes when it does, rather than taking that intervention for granted.
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B
Definitely. That's such an interesting point in the entire book about neglect and intervention. And I think the next question sort of pertains to that. How do we understand the colonial and maybe the post colonial states? Anxiety. And you do it. And you've read through the sources about on anxiety over nature through neglects, interventions and disaster profiteering.
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C
So I think that that is that when I look at, or as I said, one of the first major questions I got interested in is this question of why do periods of anxiety around the environment lead to certain kinds of interventions? And there the question I got interested in is what kind of intervention is the state sort of choosing? It could choose and all of these could be destructive. It could. When you have a problem like coastal erosion, when you have an eroding coastline, you could invest in coast protection measures. And that is something that has been done in various places too, with disastrous ecological consequences as well. But in this particular case, the intervention takes the form primarily of a Poor development scheme. And so that is what I was interested in, which is what are some of the financial logics, et cetera, that are forcing or that are encouraging the colonial state, and eventually also the post colonial state, to choose certain kinds of profit oriented interventions to deal with a changing coastline. And so in the case of the Kochi harbour project, I sort of argue that there are two reasons why this decision is taken in the 1910s. One of these is that in a context like the colonial state, where you don't really have coastal erosion is a different kind of environmental disaster, so to speak, than say floods or other such sort of events that are obviously very destructive and force some sort of intervention. In the case of coastal erosion, because the effects are slower, there's a certain way in which the state can afford to sort of think about the various options, et cetera. And in that context, what becomes clear is that in a place like Kochi, because Kutchi is not Bombay, Kochi is not Calcutta or Madras, it's not an extremely important port to the British. So in a context like that, there is just no money within the sort of financial structure of the colonial state for what could be referred to as simply protective works, because these works have to be financed by the Madras government, which is the provincial government. But in the sort of context that we're talking about in the colonial period, those sorts of interventions are very hard to finance. Now in such a context, when you have this problem becoming more and more grave, more land is being lost. And now the port itself, up until the early 1910s, most of the land that was being lost was in the surroundings. It wasn't around the harbor itself, it was in the surroundings. The harbor wasn't really getting affected. By the 1910s, that begins to change. You begin to see increasing siltation within the harbor. The port is getting affected. And at that point, when some form of intervention becomes almost necessary, the colonial state, I argue, chooses to intervene through a profit oriented scheme, which is that you sort of get money for, or you're able to. You sort of recast this sort of project as a productive investment. That is an investment that can fetch return on investment. You can borrow money in those cases. And so that is one of the reasons why an increasing sort of problem of coastal erosion is dealt with in the way that it is. The other sort of reason is, of course, is something, is the other thing that I explore in the book, which is the increasing sort of assertion of princely state sovereignty by the. Or increasing assertion of sovereignty by the princely state of Cochin. So during this Period under these sorts of financial and political pressures. I argue that a profit oriented development scheme makes much more sense in the context of colonial India than simply investing in protective works would, for instance. And once such decisions are made, once you have a massive board development scheme, then that has its own logic, right? In Chinese environmental history in particular, there's this idea of a technological lock in. Once you sort of like invested in one set of technologies, you have to then expend more resources to sort of preserve those technologies because you've spent so much effort and money in them. And so in a sense I felt like what you see in the post colonial period is an example of that, which is that once you've had this, the post colonial state also follows a fairly similar sort of logic. And on top of that, once you have a big pot and once you've invested so much, it's very hard to then say, okay, we'll just let this go, then all your investment keeps getting funneled more and more in that direction.
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B
Certainly this, this is, I mean, the financial and technological histories as rich and driving all of this was this original notion of encroachment and that discuss a little bit. So could you tell us that before we got to the profit oriented, technological, necropolitical like state, where, whatever you may, how do you. The way you use encroachment or encroaching as a way of moving away from discussions of demarcating land from sea and as a way of giving water its due agency. And that you note that something that comes quite naturally to aqueous communities across space and time. How do you do this? Encroachment and the agency to water, the.
- [32:11]
C
Encroachment sort of, for me became so encroachment was one of the first sort of terms that came to me because as I said in the index entry is that I started looking at the word that was often used was encroachment of the sea. So that was the phrase that was often employed to refer by colonial officials, to refer to coastal erosion. And encroachment for me was interesting because again, encroachment sort of raises various questions. And this is something that other historians, geographers, etc. Have dealt with. This question of the potency of the term encroachment, in a sense it signals certain things that you see something as an intruder that is sort of encroaching into something that is more valuable. And so it's not a neutral term. It is one that has certain kinds of effects. And I wanted to explore that especially because When I wrote this book or when I first wrote this PhD the two elements of it, which is the princely states and their assertion of sovereignty and the sort of anxiety surrounding water, I really struggled to bring them together. Even though from the very beginning in my mind they were completely interconnected in my writing. I found it hard to find a way of blending the two together in a way that would actually really highlight the interconnections between the two. For me, you can't understand the princely state's assertion of sovereignty if you separate it from the sort of ecological context of this very fluid environment. In the same way, the fluid environment and the anxieties that it generates is partly also shaped by the political landscape that we're talking about. But I was finding it hard to bring the two together. I still don't know if I've managed to do it as well as I would have liked. But I think encroachment for me became a way of bringing the two together. Because encroachment is an important term, as I said, in terms of the anxiety surrounding water. But encroachment is also an important term as far as princely states are concerned. This constant sort of fear of encroachment of colonial authority into princely state affairs, et cetera. And so it sort of like gave me a way of thinking about how this word, you know, allows us to think about, but also then problematize this idea that one side was encroaching on the other. Because in what you see in Cochin is you see that while land is obviously being in the colonial imagination, being encroached upon, you also see a lot of land that's sort of encroaching into the sea, as it were, through reclamations, et cetera. And they're all sort of connected processes. In the case of the princely estate, the general sort of anxiety and what a lot of people have written about is of course, the colonial state encroaching into the sovereignty of princely states. But in Kochi, one of the most sort of important developments is that the princely state of Cochin itself begins to make really interesting claims on the harbor of Kochi. And so I argue that encroachment sort of makes certain processes seem like a one sided process when they're actually much more when they are not. And so we need to sort of look at these issues together and look at the sort of, you know, processes through which they come together in the 20th century to allow for a port development project to be executed in and around 1920.
- [36:09]
B
Certainly, I just want to go back to a small point Here. And I wonder if you're thinking through this, the notion of the water and its agency and the way it comes out of interactions with local community. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
- [36:28]
C
So the issue of water and its agency became sort of of interesting to me because, you know, today, now there's so much sort of, or in the last few years there's been an academic interest in these questions of agency etc, right? What who has agency? And this post humanistic turn has been very important in that regard. But when I was all this, you know, when I was looking at late 19th century stuff or late 19th century material, what was interesting to me was that colonial officials were constantly talking about water as an agent and they were constantly talking about the agency of water and as a very powerful sort of agent. And I wanted to sort of emphasize that to show that there was a certain that again, going back to something that I mentioned earlier, there are a few exceptions, there are some notable exceptions to this. But by and large, there is this sort of tendency in environmental history to often sort of attribute certain kinds of interventions by the modern state to a certain kind of hubris and to a certain kind of confidence in technology's ability to master nature. And this is definitely true. This is undeniable. And there are so many illustrations of this. At the same time, what I wanted to sort of emphasize is that this is there were also environments that generated a huge amount of anxiety for different reasons. And even in those contexts where you had a lot of uncertainty about an environment that was still leading to certain kinds of interventions. And so what I sort of try and argue is that once you start sort of looking at how these sorts of interventions are executed in the context of growing anxiety about environments, it allows us to see that you don't need. Yes, you know, a lot of, there was definitely a lot of scientific hubris, etc, but that even when especially. And this is something that we are seeing now as well in an era of climate change, even when you have, you know, recognition of problems, you know, despite. Even if you, you know, if you just, if you sort of, you know, move away from climate change deniers, etc, but even in a context where many people and many sort of scientists accept that there is a very serious problem that we are facing today that isn't really leading to certain kinds of a move away from certain kinds of technological interventions, it is in fact giving greater sort of, it is in some ways potentially leading to a doubling down on certain kinds of interventions. And so what I wanted to show through that whole section on waters agency. And the anxiety that it creates is that even in those sort of contexts, the question of intervention, you know, then you need to. Then you need to ask the question, if you are so worried about this environment, what kind of interventions are you going to use to control it? And I think in the Kutchi context, what becomes clear is that despite this anxiety, you have very sort of ambitious technological interventions that in many ways a lot of people already by the 1920s are saying that this is going to make things worse, but they still do it. And I think that that is something to. That is what I wanted to emphasize.
- [40:45]
B
Thank you. Thank you for indulging in that very provocative statement that you made. But this book is also about princely states. So I'd like to ask how did fluidity, both of political economy and geography contribute to making Cochin exceptional compared to Hyderabad, Baroda or Travancore?
- [41:09]
C
So that's a sort of important question for me and something that I sort of explore in my book, which is that Cochin, the state, the Cochin state is a really small state, but it's able to put, you know, fairly exceptional kinds of pressure or, you know, mount certain kinds of fairly extraordinary claims in the early 20th century. And the question then was, why is it able to do this? And how does the turn of events at Kochi then allow us to think differently about the princely states? So Kochi is definitely exceptional in various ways. And the environmental sort of difference is, I think, really central. And this is something that various historians of princely states have briefly mentioned, which is that most princely states, and this is true Travancore, apart from Travancore, of course, most of these big princely states that have dominated the scholarship on princely states were sort of land bound. They were not coastal states. And there were, as historians have pointed out, there were 500 odd princely states in India of all shapes and sizes during the colonial period, but out of them only 14 had a coastline. So it was quite rare to be a coastal princely state. So various historical reasons. And the Sukuchin state was a coastal princely state, but more importantly, it sort of surrounds a British port on three sides. So this is very unusual in the Indian context, where you have a British port that is almost entirely surrounded by a princely state. And this is really essential for understanding some of the claims that the Cochin state is able to make in the 20th century, because this environment is also very fluid. And one of the points that I make or one of the issues that I explore in the book is the way in which claims over water Begin to be made in the early 20th century. And that there are certain question marks over the kinds of claims that one can make over water. That create opportunities for the Cochin state. So if this was a very different environment, this would not have happened. So I think that the Cochin case is quite exceptional. And the geography and the environment is really central to that. To that exceptionality. At the same time, what I try and argue in my book Is that the scholarship on the princely states has, Through a focus on certain large states, Various generalizations have been drawn on princely states and their relationships with. And the relationship between princely states and British India. But what I try and highlight is that. That the exceptionality of Cochin sort of forces us to sort of revisit some of these generalizations. Or to at least sort of complicate them a little bit. And to think about why is it that in certain periods. And I think the periodization is also very important. I talk about the way in which the princely state of Cochin Is able to use international law in the 1910s. To make certain claims over the water surrounding the harbor. But I think one thing that needs to be emphasized Is that this could have only happened during that time. The princely state would not have been able to make these claims and be taken seriously in the late 19th century. And that is because international law, in many ways is ultimately the sort of political context is very important. So the claims that are being made by the Cochin state Have a lot to do with the fact that Biden 1910s, the British, are reliant on princely states in certain ways. They don't. This is a period of increasing nationalism. They are sort of becoming more and more. They don't want to upset princely states, Especially on certain sort of questions of sovereignty that are becoming very sort of. That these states are very sensitive to. And in that context, international law becomes one of the tools that the princely states are able to make or able to use to make certain kinds of claims. So the geography is very important. So is the time period for the sort of assertions that the princely state makes.
- [46:00]
A
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- [47:14]
B
Effy and speaking of, I think you brought us to the very interesting topic of sovereignty and within all this, the politics of commerce finance. Princely state Cochin exerts a unique kind of sovereignty. One, through the use of international law, as you mentioned, and second, through sort of a fiscal negotiation where it pushes a sort of a model of federation. When it was discussed in a different context in central the British Indian states. We'd like to know a little bit about this very marginal but yet interesting deployment of sovereign assertions.
- [47:56]
C
So the question of sovereignty is of course really central to my book and in the 20th century. And what I try and do is that this period, and this is something I'm not the first one to say this. And increasingly now there have been a number of historians working on different princely states who've started looking more carefully at questions to do with federation. For instance, to think about how our princely states, many of these things have been studied before this from the colonial state perspective, but now to think about what are princely states really trying to do at this time? How are they imagining the period after the 1930s, etc, what do they think that they can sort of what kind of political power can they hope to have in this period where so much is changing in terms of the political landscape and various kinds of political reforms are being discussed. And I think that that Cochin and the Cochin Harbor Project for me provides a sort of interesting case study from which to look at these bigger questions that are happening at the all India level. Because one of the interesting things with the Cochin harbor project is that as you mentioned, so in the 1910s, the Cochin State starts sort of using international law to try and become assert rights over certain waters surrounding the port of Cochin. And through that it creates enough complications for the Cochins for the colonial state that by the 1920s, the colonial state allows for the port for the Princely state and then eventually Travancore to become a partner in the Kochi harbour development project. But this is also useful for the colonial state because then the princely states can finance the sport development scheme. So the Cochin state becomes very sort of involved with the port development scheme from this period onwards. Now, the 1920s and 30s are of course, as I mentioned, a very interesting sort of or very interesting decades. This is when as far as political reforms are concerned. This is when various sorts of important reforms are being discussed. And what I wanted to do was to use the Cochin State sort of involvement with the port of Cochin to think about what is a state like Cochin trying to do. It's spending a huge amount of money in financing this port development scheme. And why is it so sort of hell bent on asserting these sorts of what might seem like fairly nominal sort of powers over the port. And I think for me, the more I started looking into it, the more I began to see just how important the federation was to the princely state of Cochin during these negotiations. Tej Bahadur Sapru, who is a very important figure at the all India level as far as federation negotiations are concerned. He is the lawyer for the Cochin state during the negotiations around the Cochin harbor project. And he keeps bringing up the question of federation. Every time there's a disagreement between the Kochin state and the government of India and the Madras government, he keeps saying, well, but you know, you have to. Princely states are important. This is a period when we're talking about federation. So this is the context in which these negotiations have to. Over the Cochin port have to take place. And so I think for me, the Cochin, on the one hand, this context is really essential, as I mentioned, for understanding the kinds of claims that the Cochin State is able to make or the Cochin state tries to make at this time. At the same time, I think the claims that the Cochin State makes and what it does during. Through its involvement with the Cochin harbor project also then I think provides a useful sort of way of looking at these wider changes that most historians have largely looked at in terms of intellectual sort of debates, legal issues, etc. I think this is a interesting case study and an interesting sort of example of a state in the 1930s at a time when it really wants to join the federation, seeing how can it leverage its position best, how can it sort of make sure that if it joins a federation, it joins it from a position of strength. And the Cochin port development project, I argue, becomes really central to the Cochin State's political ambitions during that time. So it's A useful way of looking at these wider political questions certainly.
- [52:57]
B
And yet there's a moment of loss and all this. And in reading the book one feels like the Cochin. The centrality of the Cochin State in understanding the erosions and the natural features that comes with the port as well as the assertions of sovereignty kind of stay central. And with the post colonial period we have a different idea of the Cochin port growing which kind of takes away the Cochin State out of the equation. And we have a naval base, we have a tourist spot, we have a natural port you mentioned and we have an engineering marvel. None of which was true in the making of the Cochin port. So in the modern, modern memory, why does the Cochin state disappear in. In the making and understanding of the. Of the Cochin port?
- [53:50]
C
That's an interesting question. I think that, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with the. The way in which the port and the port development project has been memorialized. I think Bristow and I argue that the chief engineer, Robert Bristow and Ro Bristow is sort of almost a household name in Kerala. So even a lot of my relatives and you know, neighbors would know of Bristow. So if I say I was working on everyone like oh, you're working on Bristow. So he's become the sort of figure associated with the port development project. And that has to do with. He wrote these memoirs called the Cochin Saga that became quite popular. There's a museum in the Cochin in Kochi which you can go to. It's the Fortress Museum I think it's called and it's again very much centered on Bristol. And so I think this was something that was quite common in a lot of development projects executed during the colonial period that you'd have these larger than life chief engineers who become or who become larger than life and they become the sort of primary figures associated with the project. And I think that really happens with, with the Kochi harbour project for various reasons. I think when I first started working on Kochi I was directed towards an mphil thesis that had been written in JNU on the Cochin pod development by someone called Justin Matthew. And he has this very interesting. He sort of engages with this question in a very interesting sort of manner about why. And he looks at various reasons why in the 1960s and 70s this sort of idea of the Cochin pot development project as an engineering marvel becomes useful for the pot trust in a period of increasing sort of problems, et cetera. And so this mythology begins to be created and as that mythology begins to be Created everything else, you know, as with all these sorts of narratives, everything else then sort of falls to the wayside. And that's what really happens. I think that as you begin to see a narrative take shape that is completely centered on Bristow and Willingdon and these are the colonial state sort of figures that are given prominence of that narrative, the Cochin State, you know, that would, you know, these sorts of mythologies, they are partly. They are powerful because they tell very simple stories. You know, it's one person sort of fighting against everything to sort of make. Make something happen. But that. That allows them to, you know, that does give these narratives a certain kind of power. But that also then means that everything else sort of falls away. And I think that is what has happened. The Cochin State, what I try and argue in my book is absolutely central and that without the Cochin state and its decision to finance the poor development scheme in the 1920s and 30s, this project would have most likely been abandoned. Because there are many or many development projects that are initiated during this period. The most notable of which, which I mention in my book, but which I've sort of explored in a different article, was the attempted development of Tutukudi or Tutukorin. And this is a parallel port development project. So when the decision to develop Kochi is taken, the decision. It's also decided that Tutukuri will also be developed. And both of these projects are entrusted to Bristol. So Bristow is the chief engineer of both of these projects. In the case of the Tutukuri project, it starts, but within five, six years it's abandoned the dredger. Much like what happens in Back Bay in Bombay, the dredger can't quite. The dredger doesn't quite work in the way that it's supposed to. And eventually, after a huge sort of uproar in the 1920s, this project is abandoned. And so in Tutukudi, Bristow. I don't know if anyone remembers Bristow anymore, but at least in the 1920s, he was a much sort of hated figure in Tutukudi because he was seen to be someone who really bungled up this project. But the big sort of difference I argue between the two projects was the Cochin state state and it's actually the princely state, which was up until this period seen as a liability, which is that there was the sense within the colonial administration that running a port or having a development scheme involving princely states and Madras government, government of India, will be too unwieldy, will be too complicated. But Actually it's the involvement of the princely state that in many ways, according to me at least it's not the only factor. But it is a really important factor to understand why this project is completed in the way that it is and why this project takes the shape that it does. Because the princely state is a very active sort of participant in these negotiations at this time, certainly.
- [58:59]
B
Well, thank you for that. And I just want to add that I think I've seen the Willingdon dredgers anchor at the. At Fort Code and when you talked about the treasure.
- [59:10]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's there and it's sort of. The Bristow is a very sort of celebrated figure in Kochi at one of the things I was a little, you know, I don't want this one of the things that I wanted to do with this book because sometimes now when I tell people this book or talk about this book, people say, oh, you're just trying to say Bristow was bad. And you know, actually everyone thinks Bristow was great. But, but it's in some ways my, my intention is to say that I think just focusing on Bristow or focusing on certain kinds of interventions just, you know, in a sense it makes us ignore a lot of the other stuff. So it is not to say that Bristow and his interventions were unimportant or that any of these things did not matter, but that they were not the only things that made the harbor development project happen or they were not the only things shaping the board development schemes.
- [60:08]
B
Definitely. Before we conclude, I want to know about the photographs. Tell us a little bit about how you were chasing the mud banks. And that's quite interesting. And it's just there, here and there.
- [60:18]
C
But so the mud bank is this sort of phenomena. So it's one of the first things I started reading about when I started reading about coastal erosion. As I mentioned, when I started looking at mid 19th century stuff, suddenly there was a lot of interest in something called a mud bank. And this mud bank seemed to be, at least from colonial sources, it seemed to be this incredible sort of natural phenomena where parts of the sea around this coastline would just become completely still during the monsoon months when the sea is otherwise very stormy. So if any of you, if anyone has sort of gone to Kerala during the monsoons, you'll know just how choppy the sea can be. But during that time and because of that till the. In the 19th century, trade used to come to a halt during the four months of the monsoon because the coast you couldn't really approach the coast. But this mud bank would just suddenly emerge. It's for a four kilometer stretch or so, the sea would become completely calm. So I was reading all this sort of really incredible sort of descriptions of this phenomenon. So I was hoping that I would see it and I wanted to see it for myself because I'd just been reading so much about it. So I tried. I sort of like went on this hunt for this mud bank for a few couple of years because the mud bank, now it's known as chadhara in Kerala and it's sort of. It's a seasonal phenomena, but many people have, many. There have been a lot of scientific investigations that have been conducted to figure out why this happened. It's also something that has apparently now in the last few years, it's become less sort of pronounced. So the. It's not. It's become more erratic. It's not the season as still. And one of the interesting things with this phenomena is that in local sources, most people associate chagra with fish. Because one of the, of the many incredible things about the mud bank, one of them is that firstly, if the sea is calm, you can go and fish in a way that you can't otherwise. But the, the mud bank was also associated with a high sort of concentration of fish. So for some reason, and these are among the things that scientists have tried to study, why is it suddenly that a lot of fish seem to congregate in mud banks? So in local sources mostly, and you know, people understand chagra through fishing, whereas in colonial sources it's almost entirely through a focus on how it helps navigation. So I started going on this hunt for the mukbang, which was not a bad thing to do because it's always nice to go around the Kerala coast. So. But this was my excuse to sort of spend a lot of time in the summer just going to different parts of the coastline. And I finally did, did see one in, I think it was 2017. I've forgotten. I spent two, three years sort of looking for one. And you know, you'd start hearing these rumors. So I would ask people and people would say, we've heard there's a mud bank that might come. But eventually I did find one. And it was, it is quite incredible because you're sort of driving down the coast and the sea is very choppy and you suddenly reach this bit of the sea, the beach, where it's just completely calm. It looks like some sort of placid lake. And so it's a really. And so then you really Understand why, you know, people were gushing about this and writing about how incredible this was. So I was lucky that I was able to see it. And. Yeah, so most of those photographs, those photographs I was able to take during these trips when I went back to sort of find this mud bank. So, yeah, and then the other photo, I mean, some of the others that I took more recently because now one of the things that has happened is very recently tetrapods have started lining the coastline. There has been. I don't know if I have time to go into this, but coastal erosion, as I mentioned, has once again become a big issue. It's become a very big political issue. Some very interesting agitations have begun to emerge around this problem of coastal erosion because people are just losing their lands, they're losing their houses and coastal erosion has worsened. The Adani port in, further south in Virinium has, has really been seen as a catalyst for worsening coastal erosion in these regions. And so people, coastal communities have sort of started organizing in really interesting ways. And so under pressure now, after a long time, the government has started investing in coast protection work. So one of the big sort of demands of coastal communities was we want coast protection works. Now these coast protection works, many environmentalists will tell you these are terrible. You shouldn't be putting tetrapods. This is going to make the situation worse. But for coastal communities who are losing their lands, et cetera, they've been seeing a lot of money being funneled into ports. They've been seeing a lot of coast protection just around Kochi, even as their lands are becoming more, have become more and more vulnerable. So now you see these huge. Under increasing pressure. So this political agitation has sort of forced the state's, the government's hand and they've. Now you see this line of tetrapods all over parts of the coastline close to Kochi. So that's something that I saw just before I wrote the book. I'd gone to Kerala while driving down. I just. It's quite, it's just a very long line of tetrapods and it remains to be seen what sort of effects this has in the following years.
- [66:30]
B
That's fascinating. Yeah, thanks for sharing. Just one last question before we conclude. So what's the next project that you're thinking about and working on right now?
- [66:41]
C
So I'm not sure yet. I have a couple of projects that I'm thinking about, have been enjoying not having a book to sort of a book is, can be very daunting and it can feel like it takes up the sort of it's a long sort of project. So I've been enjoying sort of wrapping up a few smaller projects here and there. But for the next project, there are a couple of things that I've been thinking about. One is, as I said, I've become interested after looking at Tutukuri, I've become interested in abandoned projects, so infrastructure projects that begin but don't quite make it. And I've been interested in the Park Strait and the Gulf of Mannar, so the waters between India and Sri Lanka, where there have been a spate of such sort of projects, Tutukudi being just one of them, which is that projects that begin from. And this is true from the 19th century, that begin and that attract a lot of attention, but for different reasons, don't quite get completed. The most recent example of this is the Setu Samudram project, which has now been abandoned because of religious sort of assertions on the part of the Hindu. Right. So you have this idea. So what I wanted to sort of do is to look at why these waters have firstly attracted this kind of these very grand sort of technological or infrastructural visions and why many of these visions haven't really materialized. So that's one project. The other one is I've become interested in salt. And I want to sort of do. I don't know how feasible this is, but at some point I want to. I'm interested in doing a sort of commodity history of salt. It's a sort of. It's a coastal commodity and sort of write about the sort of changes, you know as a coastal commodity, how salt sort of reshapes various sorts of various political and social and environmental forces in India in the 19th and 20th century.
- [69:05]
B
That is fascinating to hear, and we'd love to read more of all of those when they come out. Thank you so much for telling us about this wonderful book and your future projects.
- [69:19]
C
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.
- [69:22]
B
I'm glad. Thank you so much for your time.
- [69:39]
A
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