India is facing a river pollution crisis today. The origins of this crisis are commonly traced back to post-Independence economic development and urbanisation. This book, in contrast, shows that some important early roots of India’s river pollution problem, and in particular the pollution of the Ganges, lie with British colonial policies on wastewater disposal during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Analysing the two cornerstones of colonial river pollution history during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the introduction of sewerage systems and the introduction of biological sewage treatment technologies in cities along the Ganges – the author examines different controversies around the proposed and actual discharge of untreated/treated sewage into the Ganges, which involved officials on different administrative levels as well as the Indian public. The analysis shows that the colonial state essentially ignored the problematic aspects of sewage disposal into rivers, which were clearly evident from European experience. Guided by colonial ideology and fiscal policy, colonial officials supported the introduction of the cheapest available sewerage technologies, which were technologies causing extensive pollution. Thus, policies on sewage disposal into the Ganges and other Indian rivers took on a definite shape around the turn of the 20th century, and acquired certain enduring features that were to exert great negative influence on the future development of river pollution in India. A well-researched study on colonial river pollution history, this book presents an innovative contribution to South Asian environmental history. It is of interest to scholars working on colonial, South Asian and environmental history, and the colonial history of public health, science and technology.

This important new study investigates the competing demand for water in the Bhavani and Noyyal River basins of south India from the early 19th century to the early 21st century from a historical perspective. In doing so, the book addresses several important questions: * Did policy-makers visualise the future demand while diverting water from distant places or other basins? * Was efficient use ensured when the water was diverted or was it diverted in a manner that resulted in pollution and serious damage to the entire river basin? * Were natural flows taken care of in order to preserve the ecology and environment? * What were the factors that aggravated the competing demand for water and what were the consequences for the future? In the context of the current discourse on the competing demands for water, this book takes the debate forward, expanding the horizon of environmental history in the process. Until now, agriculture, industry and domestic water supply and their consequences for ecology, the environment and livelihoods have been given scant attention. Velayutham Saravanan's comprehensive account of both the colonial and post-colonial periods corrects this shortcoming in the field's literature and gives a holistic understanding of the problem and its full historical roots.

Environmental Issues in India: A Reader brings together 33 essays by seminal environment scholars, thinkers and activists from within India and abroad. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: the first three explore the pre-colonial and the colonial contexts, and move on to independent India. The last two sections examine environmental movements and how India relates to global environmental concerns. This book will provoke, educate, stimulate and inform the lay reader and specialist alike. Students will especially enjoy the diverse sample of lucid essays by some of the best-known names in the field. Anyone keen to know more about the why and how of India’s environment will find this volume an invaluable resource.

"Toxic Histories combines social, scientific, medical and environmental history to demonstrate the critical importance of poison and pollution to colonial governance, scientific authority and public anxiety in India between the 1830s and 1950s. Against the background of India's 'poison culture' and periodic 'poison panics', David Arnold considers why many familiar substances came to be regarded under colonialism as dangerous poisons. As well as the criminal uses of poison, Toxic Histories shows how European and Indian scientists were instrumental in creating a distinctive system of forensic toxicology and medical jurisprudence designed for Indian needs and conditions, and how local as well as universal poison knowledge could serve constructive scientific and medical purposes. Arnold reflects on how the 'fear of a poisoned world' spilt over into concerns about contamination and pollution, giving ideas of toxicity a wider social and political significance that has continued into India's postcolonial era"--

This longue durée survey of the Indian subcontinent's environmental history reveals the complex interactions among its people and the natural world.

With a special reference to Kolkata and Mumbai, India.

This article has developed from a desire to develop a theoretical position for “Nature” in the context of modernity. It argues that the near-total absence of theories of nature in modern Western social thought stands in stark contrast to the remarkable extent to which nature has assisted and indexed the rise of modernity itself. This historical-theoretical imbalance has had grave social consequences, and it calls for an urgent reintegration of nature in theoretical discourses. The recently emerging genre of “environmental history” has carved a small but significant niche for itself in this direction. Some exciting literature has been produced that addresses itself to the task at hand. It is interesting to note that even though, as a discipline, environmental history registers its rise in the West, particularly the United States in the early 1970s, most of the radical environmental histories that are being written today emanate from the “peripheral” zones of the global political economy. While the peripheries have been severely exploited for their raw materials and natural products in the international division of labor since the beginnings of the modern world-system, it is also strangely not coincident that in the cultural division of labor, so to speak, these peripheries have been seen as part of the wild, natural world, whereas the core, Western regions have portrayed themselves as bearers of civilization and cultural advancement. Thus, it is appropriate that some of the radical environmental histories have committed themselves to analyzing the environmental impact of colonialism on peripheral societies. I would like to propose the term environmental colonialism as a metaphor and point of departure through which I will locate and critique practices and structures of colonial-capitalist-modernity over the last five hundred years, along with the different strategies, discourses, and narratives employed to enact environmental colonialism in different parts of the earth.