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ABSTRACT
Irrigation projects implemented by British colonial engineers transformed environment, economy, and society in the Indus basin during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to constructing canals, headworks, and distributaries, colonial officers designed new cities to facilitate administration and global commerce in South Asia’s frontier areas. By the 1920s, canal development had formally reached India’s princely states and decades of town and regional planning experimentation yielded reproducible planning codes and development strategies that balanced competing impulses. Sriganganagar (Ganganagar), a city of some 250,000 on Rajasthan’s northwestern border with Pakistan, illustrates these development schemes, the nexus of town and regional planning in colonial India, and its enduring influence on South Asia’s linked urban and regional systems. Like the goddess river with which it shares its name, Ganganagar took many differing forms through its planning and development: as a place of celebration, of production, of modern technological achievement, of ecological and social transformation, of expanding state power, and of ethnic division, imperialism, and repression.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Jacob Louis Stock is a planner and historian living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has worked as a planner and urban policy researcher in the United States and India. His personal research interests concern the intersections of regional infrastructure development, urbanization, and social change in colonial and contemporary South Asia. Jacob is a former Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow in Hindi and recipient of the Thomas W. MacKesey Prize from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Jeffrey Mark Chusid is a preservation architect and planner, and an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He has consulted on preservation policy, natural and cultural resource conservation, and urban design for communities including Shanghai; Sevastopol, Ukraine; Levuka, Fiji; and Bastrop, Texas, as well as museums in California, Texas, and New York. Chusid’s research, teaching, and writing have focused on the fate of historic resources in areas of cultural exchange and conflict, the conservation of modernist architecture and planning, especially in the US and India, and sustainable development using historic sites and communities. His book, Saving Wright (Norton 2011), won the Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.
Notes
1 Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, 129.
2 Agnihotri, “Ecology, Land Use and Colonization,” 38–39.
3 Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, 155.
4 Home, Of Planting and Planning, Second Edition, 136.
5 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner for 1943–1944,” 50.
6 King, Colonial Urban Development, 35.
7 Heitzman, “Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia: 1800–2007,” 21.
8 Ibid, 29.
9 Scriver, “Empire Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” 91.
10 Heitzman, “Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia,” 21.
11 Ibid, 16.
12 King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy, 7.
13 Ibid, 23.
14 Heitzman, “Middle Towns to Middle Cities,” 22.
15 Grewal, Colonialism and Urbanization in India, 95.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid, 97.
18 King, Colonial Urban Development, 35.
19 Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 103.
20 Ibid, 147.
21 Ibid, 163.
22 Grewal, Colonialism and Urbanization in India, 99.
23 Makhma Khas, “Settlement Report Rough,” 48–49.
24 Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 97.
25 Ibid.
26 Makhma Khas, “Settlement Report Rough,” 36.
27 Ibid, 161–162.
28 Beazley and Puckle, The Punjab Colony Manual, 258.
29 Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 103.
30 Dane, “Discussion,” 620.
31 Douie, “The Punjab Canal Colonies,” 611.
32 Rudkin, “Forecast Report of the Sutlej Valley Irrigation Project for Bikaner State,” 614.
33 Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 164.
34 Ibid, 2.
35 Ibid, 164.
36 Ibid, 166.
37 Ibid, 2.
38 Douie, “Punjab Canal Colonies,” 616.
39 King, Colonial Urban Development, 35.
40 Beazely and Puckle, The Punjab Colony Manual, 263.
41 King, Colonialism and the World Economy, 96.
42 Beazely and Puckle, The Punjab Colony Manual, 265.
43 Rudkin, “Forecast Report,” 6.
44 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner for 1917–1918,” 22.
45 Rudkin, “Forecast Report,” 8–9.
46 Ibid, 10–12.
47 Ibid.
48 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration or Bikaner State 1924–1925,” 39.
49 Ibid, 34.
50 Scriver, “Empire-Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” 91.
51 Ibid, 84-85.
52 Beazely and Puckle, The Punjab Colony Manual, 257–258.
53 Grewal, Colonialism and Urbanization in India, 105.
54 Scriver, “Empire-Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” 91.
55 King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy, 54.
56 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner State 1926–1927,” 56.
57 Ibid.
58 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration 1926–1927,” 56.
59 Bikaner State Public Works Department, “Gang Canal Opening Celebrations October 1927.”
60 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration 1926–1927,” 13–14.
61 Ibid, 14.
62 Ibid.
63 King, Colonial Urban Development, 35.
64 Beazely and Puckle, The Punjab Colony Manual, 257–258.
65 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner 1929–1930,” 48–49.
66 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner State 1928–1929,” 28.
67 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner State 1927–1928,” 41–42.
68 Ibid, 42.
69 Government of Bikaner, “Report on the Administration of Bikaner State 1942–1943,” 20.
70 Sehgal, Rajasthan District Gazetteers, 111.
71 Sharma, in discussion with the author.
72 Gordon Cullen, The Ninth Delhi, 13.
73 Ibid.
74 Staff, “India Records Hottest Day Ever.”
75 Nathawat and Maina, “Irrigation and Human Settlements in Sri Ganganagar,” 271.