Embankments and Inundation in Bengal: An Early Colonial Transition

In a tropical monsoon country like India, embankment construction is a particular kind of necessity, an obligation imposed by nature. It is a defence against depredation caused by the force of water for which collective action was necessary. What necessitated dams or dykes to be built was the seasonal volatility of the rivers, especially the Ganges or Brahmaputra, which were significant because of their size. Embankment construction was thus a major public work activity in an era when such undertakings by the state and society were limited by financial resources and the availability of expertise. But there was a difference in approach to embankment construction and the state support given to such public enterprise, over time. While the eighteenth century had a positive approach and did not see the embankments as mere physical structures designed to cope with floods but as organic parts of tracts of land, the nineteenth century experts tended to view embankments as hindrance to natural irrigation and the cause of rather than the remedy to violent inundations. This was the opinion of experts with greater knowledge and resources at their disposal. Nineteenth century experts on embankment maintenance regarded the Permanent Settlement as the benchmark of the early colonial state’s decisive intervention in this respect and thought that the obligation of previous governments to maintain embankments should be taken as of practically no significance at all. The settlement of the character of the Permanent Settlement ‘must obviously change the whole nature of such obligations’. This article does not agree with this point of view. The article looks at the nature of this important public work activity with focus on its history in the second half of the eighteenth century and also examines how the nineteenth century experts historically reviewed the necessity of embankments as those had existed in the past.