Debjani Bhattacharyya
Biographic Data
| ID | 1078751 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debjani Bhattacharyya |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debjani |
| FAMILY NAME | Bhattacharyya |
| SIGNATURE | BHATTACHARYYA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Drexel University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7562-9247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1928 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Afterword
The articles in the special section “Materializing Land” return to the vexed question of land at a time when the global consolidation of land into a few hands is rising staggeringly, accompanied by the hydra-headed process of land financialization and assetization across the globe. Taking its lessons from the contemporary moment, the special section plumbs land's deep historiography in order to read land against the multiple containers through wh…
Afterword
If one were to chart the momentous transformations that South Asia witnessed in the twentieth century, the sea and its coasts would be an essential cipher. The geopolitical, socio-legal, and economic transformations over the past century in South Asia are a seaborne phenomenon, among others. This backdrop often remains suppressed when sketching its contemporary history. As this afterword details, the special section “Port Environments in South As…
India’s New Water Works
In India, water infrastructure has long been central to state building. Rather than redistributing power, recent market liberalization measures have reproduced inequalities
From Memories to Forecasting: Narrating Imperial Storm Science
Throughout the nineteenth century, shipwrecks during tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean resulted in extended legal battles in the Marine Court of Enquiry in Calcutta. This chapter explores how cyclones became an object of scientific curiosity at the intersection of the imperial legal world and marine insurance. It explores the court records, consisting of legal depositions about the wrecks by mariners and insurance agents, ships’ logs with bar…
From the globe to the planet? New challenges of global and environmental history
Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800
Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from ge…
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
The Indian City and its 'Restive Publics
How do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making wor…
A River Is Not a Pendulum: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides
This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments …
Speculation
From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article si…
Craig Jeffrey. Modern India: A Very Short Introduction
It is a feat to condense the history of India into a snappy pocket-size book. Craig Jeffrey’s vividly and lucidly written Modern India: A Very Short Introduction accomplishes that goal. Drawing upon a wide body of texts ranging from history and anthropology to sociology and political science, Jeffrey’s book offers a tour de force reading of three hundred years of India’s political and social history in an attempt to answer the question of why Ind…
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete ca…
Discipline and Drain: Settling the Moving Bengal Delta
The codification of property laws in colonial India and the British encounter with the fluidity and 'capriciousness' of the tidal landscape took place simultaneously. While we know that the movement of the tidal rivers in the Bengal Delta followed by land subsidence and formation of new alluvion affected how revenue was extracted for the English East India Company, we know barely little about how the ecological specificity of the Gangetic plains …
Provincializing the history of speculation from colonial South Asia
This article proposes that South Asia has produced rich histories of economic practices understood variously as hoarding, speculation, and extortion. This essay frames the discussion of speculation in South Asian history along these three axes. First, it puts the term speculation under scrutiny to look at its changing meanings within the colonial and metropolitan context in order to assess how the term enters the colonial archive of law and finan…
Discovery of India(s): Resisting the National Biography
The four essays in this special issue focus their attention on excavating particular strands within Indian historiography that look askance at the existing schools of thought be they nationalist, Marxist, or subaltern. However, this is not a project of recovering the forgotten or arranging these events into a long shelf of fragments that disrupt the unified history of the nation-state; rather it is a project of discovering various moments that we…
Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal
The movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that aro…
Arbit
Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta
Following World War I Presidency towns in British India witnessed a sudden, abnormal rise in housing and rents, resulting in heated debates about the relation between municipal governance, the market, and private capital. By studying this particular moment, Bhattacharyya's article uncovers the emergence of a housing and rent market in Calcutta predicated on notions of housing rights as an outgrowth of worker protest and militancy, on the one hand…
Date of the Subhasitavali
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A River Is Not a Pendulum: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides
This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments …
Discipline and Drain: Settling the Moving Bengal Delta
The codification of property laws in colonial India and the British encounter with the fluidity and 'capriciousness' of the tidal landscape took place simultaneously. While we know that the movement of the tidal rivers in the Bengal Delta followed by land subsidence and formation of new alluvion affected how revenue was extracted for the English East India Company, we know barely little about how the ecological specificity of the Gangetic plains …
Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal
The movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that aro…
Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta
Following World War I Presidency towns in British India witnessed a sudden, abnormal rise in housing and rents, resulting in heated debates about the relation between municipal governance, the market, and private capital. By studying this particular moment, Bhattacharyya's article uncovers the emergence of a housing and rent market in Calcutta predicated on notions of housing rights as an outgrowth of worker protest and militancy, on the one hand…
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
The Indian City and its 'Restive Publics
How do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making wor…
Date of the Subhasitavali
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta
Following World War I Presidency towns in British India witnessed a sudden, abnormal rise in housing and rents, resulting in heated debates about the relation between municipal governance, the market, and private capital. By studying this particular moment, Bhattacharyya's article uncovers the emergence of a housing and rent market in Calcutta predicated on notions of housing rights as an outgrowth of worker protest and militancy, on the one hand…
Arbit
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete ca…
Discipline and Drain: Settling the Moving Bengal Delta
The codification of property laws in colonial India and the British encounter with the fluidity and 'capriciousness' of the tidal landscape took place simultaneously. While we know that the movement of the tidal rivers in the Bengal Delta followed by land subsidence and formation of new alluvion affected how revenue was extracted for the English East India Company, we know barely little about how the ecological specificity of the Gangetic plains …
Provincializing the history of speculation from colonial South Asia
This article proposes that South Asia has produced rich histories of economic practices understood variously as hoarding, speculation, and extortion. This essay frames the discussion of speculation in South Asian history along these three axes. First, it puts the term speculation under scrutiny to look at its changing meanings within the colonial and metropolitan context in order to assess how the term enters the colonial archive of law and finan…
Discovery of India(s): Resisting the National Biography
The four essays in this special issue focus their attention on excavating particular strands within Indian historiography that look askance at the existing schools of thought be they nationalist, Marxist, or subaltern. However, this is not a project of recovering the forgotten or arranging these events into a long shelf of fragments that disrupt the unified history of the nation-state; rather it is a project of discovering various moments that we…
Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal
The movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that aro…
Speculation
From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article si…
Craig Jeffrey. Modern India: A Very Short Introduction
It is a feat to condense the history of India into a snappy pocket-size book. Craig Jeffrey’s vividly and lucidly written Modern India: A Very Short Introduction accomplishes that goal. Drawing upon a wide body of texts ranging from history and anthropology to sociology and political science, Jeffrey’s book offers a tour de force reading of three hundred years of India’s political and social history in an attempt to answer the question of why Ind…
The Indian City and its 'Restive Publics
How do we write about cities in a world of deepening inequality, real-estate geopolitics, and the planetary water crisis that is unfolding in parts of Asia and elsewhere? Indian urban studies, which began to gain ground as a legitimate subject of scholarly enquiry two decades ago, has now emerged as a site to study political society, state-making, and citizenship, and to offer rich accounts of how post-colonial urban governance and law-making wor…
A River Is Not a Pendulum: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides
This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments …
From Memories to Forecasting: Narrating Imperial Storm Science
Throughout the nineteenth century, shipwrecks during tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean resulted in extended legal battles in the Marine Court of Enquiry in Calcutta. This chapter explores how cyclones became an object of scientific curiosity at the intersection of the imperial legal world and marine insurance. It explores the court records, consisting of legal depositions about the wrecks by mariners and insurance agents, ships’ logs with bar…
From the globe to the planet? New challenges of global and environmental history
Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800
Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from ge…
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
India’s New Water Works
In India, water infrastructure has long been central to state building. Rather than redistributing power, recent market liberalization measures have reproduced inequalities
Afterword
If one were to chart the momentous transformations that South Asia witnessed in the twentieth century, the sea and its coasts would be an essential cipher. The geopolitical, socio-legal, and economic transformations over the past century in South Asia are a seaborne phenomenon, among others. This backdrop often remains suppressed when sketching its contemporary history. As this afterword details, the special section “Port Environments in South As…
Afterword
The articles in the special section “Materializing Land” return to the vexed question of land at a time when the global consolidation of land into a few hands is rising staggeringly, accompanied by the hydra-headed process of land financialization and assetization across the globe. Taking its lessons from the contemporary moment, the special section plumbs land's deep historiography in order to read land against the multiple containers through wh…
Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Colonialism (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Economy (6 works) · Geography (6 works)