Paper short abstract:

Indian hydro-engineers enjoyed a great deal of mobility within and outside the British Empire. Drawing upon their engineering education, experience, and expertise in driving hydraulic modernity, I will show how knowledge sharing about large dam projects was a means of legitimacy for hydro-modernism.

Paper long abstract:

Indian hydro-engineers enjoyed a great deal of mobility within and outside the British Empire. After independence, Indian hydro-engineers developed and disseminated their hydro-modernism in India and the Global South, surveying, and consulting with countries about their large infrastructural projects, especially dams. Indian engineers occupied an interstitial space—experts who were not colonizers—one that they used to their advantage. Yet, there remained questions from inside and outside the water bureaucracy about how and why these dams were justified, given the lack of reliable data. Using persistent questioning of these modern water management schemes from activists and insiders alike which began in the 1950s, I will show how India’s hydraulic bureaucracy survived and evolved. Drawing upon their engineering education at the cusp of independence, experience, and expertise in driving hydraulic modernity within the British Empire, post-independence India and the Global South, I will show how knowledge sharing about large dam projects was a means of legitimacy for hydro-modernism. This was especially true through and after the 1970s when the ecological and social effects of hydro-modernism were writ large, spawning activism such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Knowledge sharing about large infrastructural schemes, especially in trade publications like the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, propagated and legitimized the hydraulic bureaucracy. In bringing out these perspectives, I argue that the currency of hydro-modernism was knowledge sharing.