Water Histories of South Asia

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His research focuses on the intersections among early modern and colonial artistic cultures, transterritorial ecologies and the natural environment. His publications include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019); Ecologies, Aesthetics and Histories of Art (coedited, 2019); and essays in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art History and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.Venugopal Maddipati is Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. His research focuses on geological thinking, architectural history and ecological histories. His publications include Gandhi and Architecture Against History: The Contemporaneity of Low-Cost Housing (forthcoming) and essays in journals and books, such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Sarai Reader 09; Simon Starling/Superflex: Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests; and LA, Journal of Landscape Architecture.

‘This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.’Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India

• Foreword 1. Introduction: The Materiality of Liquescence PART I. Vision and Space, ca. 1500–1750 2. The Shape of Babur’s Lake: Architecture and Water in the Central Indian Frontier 3. Water is a Limited Commodity: Ecological Aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614 4. Lakes Within Lake-Palaces: A Material History of Pleasure in 18th-Century India PART II. Surface and Depth, ca. 1750–1950 5. Photos of the Ocean: Pearl Fisheries, British Colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar 6. Deep Time as Intimate Stranger: The Age of Water in the Religious Imagination at Girar, 1855 7. From Nallah to Nadi, Stream to Sewer to Stream: Urban Waterscape Research in India and the United States PART III. Materiality and Infrastructure, ca. 1950–2015 8. Water: Its Meanings and Powers in the Indian Sufi Tradition 9. Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy 10. A Critical Look into the Existing Practice of Water Governance in Cities: The Case of Chandernagore 11. Making Water Media in 21st-Century South Asia PART IV. Mediations 12. The Religious and Affective Actualities of the Yamuna: Conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi 13. From Bundi to Delhi: Water Harnessing Systems in Semiarid Regions 14. You Always Step into the Same River! PART V. Afterthoughts 15. Cosmographia Universalis: Environmental Crisis and the Water Aesthetics of Global South Asia