Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the legacy of control over River Adi Ganga,Kolkata, linking colonial science to contemporary statemaking and the exclusionary narratives of development that reinforced class hierarchies, which require a reimagining of inclusive urban water governance practices in the global South

Presentation long abstract

The River Adi Ganga in Kolkata, a historic channel of the Bhagirathi-Hooghly and a 'sacred space' or tirtha— has recently been a target of selective "revival" under Kolkata’s urban development agenda, a profound act of state-making, drawing its roots from colonial tools of control. Transformed from a once vibrant and sacralized waterway, into a neglected sewer choking under urban hubris— the Adi Ganga is not a dead river but remains a potent hydrosocialscape where histories of power, erasure, and resistance are sedimented.

This paper explores the role of colonial hydraulic interventions on South Asian environment and society beyond the technical fixes, but as oppressive apparatuses that imposed a modern, sanitized, and commercially legible order upon a complex waterscape central to local ecology, pilgrimage, and vernacular lifeworlds. It also sheds light on the post-colonial legacies of the Adi Ganga in the city, exploring the role of governance discourses of "pollution," "encroachment," and later, "heritage revival," in systematically reinforcing caste and class hierarchies and criminalizing vulnerable communities. This paper also highlights the need for subaltern strategies of resistance and remembrance, in mobilizing alternative hydrosocial imaginaries for the Adi Ganga, using old maps, vernacular literature, pilgrimage routes, and oral histories—to materially and discursively reclaim the river. These acts of hydrosocial counter-mapping, challenge the state’s fragmented, amnesiac governance and assert the Adi Ganga’s continued socio-ecological vitality, thus demonstrating how a "lost" urban river remains a critical site for contesting dominant development paradigms, and reconstructing more inclusive and 'just’ hydrosocial futures in South Asia.