“Source to Mouth”

In early 1919, C. Addams Williams, then superintendent engineer in the Bengal Public Works Department, published an intriguingly titled History of the Rivers in the Gangetic Delta (1750–1918). Intriguing, because colonial engineers in the service of the British empire’s humid, tropical, monsoon drenched and riverine province of Bengal were mostly in the habit of submitting reports, documentary compilations and detailed notes. On closer inspection, however, as this essay will conclude, engineer Williams’ turn to the form of the historical narrative proved critical to reimagining the environmental scale of the delta: tracking the relationships between human intervention and geological process to assemble the Bengal rivers, the alluvial plains and the coasts as a single coherent and interdependent ecological unit. An environmental history of the Gangetic delta, in other words, revealed the latter as a vast collection of diverse, yet intertwined, ecological niches. In effect, with the shift from colonial documentation to historical change Williams was enabled to make an even more compelling appeal for a centralized technical organization that was expert-driven and that could urgently call for dispensing with the “chaos of local hydraulic interventions” and decentralized administrative decision-making when managing the delta’s waters.