You are invited to a Cultural and Historical Geography Research group seminar by Aditya Ramesh, ESRC postdoctoral fellow, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, on the 6th February.
Aditya’s talk is titled: ‘The urban Anthropocene: flows, blocks and scarcity in 19th century Bangalore
Time: 3.30 pm
Venue: G10 Drummond Library, University of Edinburgh, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH11LZ
Aditya’s doctoral research focused on how colonialism produced large multipurpose reservoirs in south India, and their effects on economy and society. His new project looks across cities in the global south, especially Chennai and Bengaluru, to understand how multiple ecologies, such as land, water and air, were crucial in both urban and broader planetary transformations. In October 2020, Aditya will join the History Department at the University of Manchester as a Presidential fellow.
Abstract:
In 1894, the city of Bangalore, today known as the ‘silicon valley’ of India, got its first piped water system which transported water from outside into the city limits. This paper investigates the genealogy of urban water supply, tying scarcity to concerns that first surfaced in the nineteenth century, such as water quality and public health. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medical officers were anxious about the quality of water that army men consumed. In the 1860s, colonial scientists and medics conducted a series of experiments, including chemical analysis of water around the cantonment area and installing sand filters, in an attempt to separate cantonment water from native water sources. Local sources of water, such as the Ulsoor Lake were abandoned owing to their ‘insanitary conditions’. However, due to ‘contaminated ground water’ from Dhobi (washer men) wells, inevitably mixing with groundwater in the army wells, filtered using sand, colonial officials believed that there was little effect. From the 1870s to the 1890s, two important events shook the city. First, a major famine affected south India in the 1870s, leading to mass migrations into the Bangalore. However, the famines also exposed the fragile nature of water supply in the city, with both the cantonment and native town experiencing shortages. In the 1890s, a plague struck Bangalore city. The plague infiltrated the spaces of the city, including the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods, tanks and the home. Furthermore, the plague, through fleas, rodents, dogs and waterbodies, eventually found its way to the human body. While some medical officers spoke of ‘rewilding’ lakes with plants and birds, a consensus emerged that exposed water within the city, and its porous nature was leading to disease. Due to this porosity, colonial engineers argued that extracting drinking water from water bodies within the city would prove a failure. This, coupled with the emerging threat of water scarcity, led engineers to design the first scheme to calculate the water requirements of the city and draw water from outside the city limits, and eventually construct the Hesserghatta reservoir. This paper therefore argues that the Anthropocene is not simply a geological epoch, but acts embodied in everyday human, non-human and infrastructural life in the dense cities of the global south.