Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim
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Landscape, Ecology and Environment
08 October 2026, 5.30 pm IST

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 Ishita Sharma
(TU Delft)
Thomas Oommen
(University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

 Sonal Mithal
(CEPT University)


Circulations of Sweet and Salt
 






The borderlands of Kutch and Sindh, between India and Pakistan, consist of watery terrains shaped by multiple rivers, the Arabian Sea, and the salt marshes known as the Rann of Kutch. Different varieties of grass, marine organisms, camels, soils and waters compose these geographies, moving across territorial and administrative classifications of the nation, state and district. The rann, its inhabitants and its intertidal vocabularies are a useful prism through which to think about other landscapes and geographical classifications that permeate both colonial and postcolonial worlds, such as the wilderness, forest, desert and marsh or the mangrove. In Kutch, geological and ecological actors, community histories, vocabularies and ways of navigating these submerged grounds point to alternatives in how these geographies are perceived, placing movement, circulation and a shifting ground as constitutive characters of the region. Thinking with the Surajbari prawn and the Kharai camel, the research questions dominant forms of oppression and marginalisation, demonstrating the difficulty in framing environmental or ecological issues without taking into consideration labour, emotion, and intimacy as crucial components of the relationship between people, animals and the ground.





Monsoon Modernities: Prawns,  Plankton and Developmentalism
on the Malabar Coast of Kerala ca.1950-70





How do we look at oceanic life like plankton, prawns, alongside buildings and documents as archives to read a littoral modernity? I look at two projects focused on the ocean from the period between 1950 and 1970. First, an early and outlying moment of the new Indian nation-state when it looked at the Malabar Coast of Kerala through the prism of community development, and later "ocean development." The second, from the 1960s when mapping the Indian Ocean became a proxy for both global North-South co-operation and planetary exploration, leading to contemporary scientific understandings of climate change. I investigate both moments and the artefacts it generated – to explore how newness enters littoral locations like the Malabar coast and what it can tell us about the entanglement of Third World labor and North-South Politics in the production of the Indian ocean as an object of planetary scientific knowledge.