Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim
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13th March 2025
Thursday 5.30 pm IST
Respondent: Deepa Ramaswamy
(University of Houston)
<Recording Link>
Thursday 5.30 pm IST
Respondent: Deepa Ramaswamy
(University of Houston)
<Recording Link>
The Making of Dry Ramna:
The New Civil Station of Dacca, 1880-1911
Labib Hossain (Miami University)
Top: Joseph Scott Phillips's painting of Ramna Kali Temple, showing the mound and the surrounding landscape, 1833;
Middle: Government House under construction, 1907;
Bottom: The Government House and the elevated site after its completion, Dacca, 1909
(British Library)
Urban development received a massive boost after the Bengal Partition of 1905, when Dacca became the provincial capital of the Eastern Province under the British colonial administration. For Dacca, the new capital status resulted in an elaborate campaign of construction to accommodate new administrative buildings and ceremonial landscapes in the Ramna Area. By that time, with the application of a ‘trenching system’, Ramna was already prepared as high and dry ground, ready for the construction of buildings. The Indo-Saracenic style used for these public projects was a combination of Gothic and Mughal styles, which, as historians have argued, sought to pacify the growing agitation of the anti-colonial and nationalist movements by promising them a sense of ownership, albeit it a false one. But historical and religious style were not the only means of architectural consensus and pacification. It was also about cultivating the desire of being modern where the dry and high grounds free of germs, corpses, dampness and any uncertainties had been acquiring such consensus through the discursive transformations. Focusing on building as a technique of land-making, as opposed to an object in the landscape my presentation will foreground the way the language of dryness became concretized and was expressed in the new civic structures and symbolic public spaces.
The New Civil Station of Dacca, 1880-1911
Labib Hossain (Miami University)
Top: Joseph Scott Phillips's painting of Ramna Kali Temple, showing the mound and the surrounding landscape, 1833;
Middle: Government House under construction, 1907;
Bottom: The Government House and the elevated site after its completion, Dacca, 1909
(British Library)
Urban development received a massive boost after the Bengal Partition of 1905, when Dacca became the provincial capital of the Eastern Province under the British colonial administration. For Dacca, the new capital status resulted in an elaborate campaign of construction to accommodate new administrative buildings and ceremonial landscapes in the Ramna Area. By that time, with the application of a ‘trenching system’, Ramna was already prepared as high and dry ground, ready for the construction of buildings. The Indo-Saracenic style used for these public projects was a combination of Gothic and Mughal styles, which, as historians have argued, sought to pacify the growing agitation of the anti-colonial and nationalist movements by promising them a sense of ownership, albeit it a false one. But historical and religious style were not the only means of architectural consensus and pacification. It was also about cultivating the desire of being modern where the dry and high grounds free of germs, corpses, dampness and any uncertainties had been acquiring such consensus through the discursive transformations. Focusing on building as a technique of land-making, as opposed to an object in the landscape my presentation will foreground the way the language of dryness became concretized and was expressed in the new civic structures and symbolic public spaces.
Thinking Like a River:
Water, Land & Labor in Colonial Punjab (1849-1920)
Javairia Shahid
(Columbia University)
During the pivotal decades spanning India's subjugation to the British crown in 1857 and its eventual partition in 1947, the arid wastelands of Punjab underwent a profound transformation under the sway of colonial governance and economic imperatives. Once inhospitable desert wasteland, these lands were transfigured into fertile fields dedicated to the cultivation of lucrative cash crops (sugarcane, wheat & cotton) and the mobilization of labor.
British engineers and planners, discerning India's hydrological challenge not as one of water scarcity but of its erratic abundance at the wrong time, embarked upon a monumental endeavor to tame the Indus. Their ambition was succinctly articulated by Geoffrey de Montmorency, Governor of the Punjab from 1928 to 1933, who envisioned nothing less than to "make the desert bloom." The solution they proposed: perennial canal irrigation and alluvial planning—a strategic approach to reining in Punjab's tumultuous environment by orchestrating land utilization in harmony with the rhythms of irrigation and water management, negotiated against the caprices of rivers, rainfall, and soil. My dissertation project traces the intricate web of transformations wrought by this endeavor in the Chenab Canal Colony. Here, I examine how the architecture of mandi towns served as the nexus for the convergence of imperial networks spanning the Indian subcontinent, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean world, between the dynamics of extraction between colonial power and the indigenous knowledge and labor. By shifting the focus from notions of improvement to considerations of depletion, this project reconfigures our understanding of water, land & labor and their intrinsic value within the imperial paradigm.