Presentation short abstract

Examines how colonial transportation in nineteenth-century Assam redefined the relationship between land and water, reshaping hydrological knowledge and mobility regimes.

Presentation long abstract

In nineteenth-century Assam, colonial interventions in transportation profoundly reconfigured the relationship between land and water. The British administration’s emphasis on constructing and repairing pre-colonial road networks introduced new logics of connectivity that increasingly marginalized riverine mobility, which had long been integral to indigenous systems of exchange and communication. The subsequent introduction of steamboats on the Brahmaputra and its tributaries marked another decisive shift in the region’s transportation framework. Operating alongside traditional native boats (nao), these steam vessels facilitated the expansion of colonial trade and extraction, integrating Assam more closely into imperial commercial circuits while simultaneously transforming local economic structures, labour relations, and social hierarchies.

This paper examines how such infrastructural and technological transformations produced not only material changes but also epistemic separations between surface and subterranean waters. Drawing from archival records, administrative reports, and local accounts, it traces how road-making projects and navigational surveys reframed hydrological landscapes as obstacles to be crossed rather than as interconnected systems of flow. By situating Assam’s transportation history within the broader politics of hydrological governance and through comparative insights from other colonial provinces such as Odisha and Bihar, this paper argues that colonial mobility regimes reinforced the conceptual and administrative divisions of land and water, shaping the contours of postcolonial infrastructures and environmental management in enduring ways.