A Monsoon River and Its Humans the Karnaphuli in India and Bangladesh

This paper considers a single river in one of the wettest corners of Asia. It explores changes in a “hydrosocial universe” over two centuries by tracing how flowing water, human societies, abiotic substances (water, silt, and rock), and a range of organisms (microbiota, fungi, plants, and nonhuman animals) co-evolved. The Karnaphuli river shaped not only physical landscapes, but also, crucially, the political, cultural, and economic histories of human societies. We need a water optic in writing these histories.

This chapter argues that the Karnaphuli waterscape, which is entirely dependent on the South Asian monsoon, is divided into four distinct eco-cultural zones that responded differently to imperial warfare, ecological invasion, cultural innovation, and border making – as well as to post-colonial dam building, industrialization, and pollution. In the process, power shifted away from local rulers to far-off state elites and economic agents. And as humans increased their power over nonhumans, the ecosystems of the Karnaphuli suffered accelerated degradation. Human power remade water – but the hydrosocial pendulum has started swinging in the opposite direction. Today the Karnaphuli is remaking human society in unfamiliar ways as it becomes a growing threat to those who depend on its increasingly toxic liquid contents.

This chapter considers how different groups of people have imagined and used the Karnaphuli river, which flows from the Indo-Burma Mountain ranges to the Bay of Bengal. Ancient and monsoon-fed, it has evoked quite diverse imaginations among precolonial and colonial-era inhabitants, European missionaries and administrators, and contemporary policy makers and environmentalists. How have these visions shaped (and at times distorted) the river? How has the river shaped these visions?