Download or read book Water Histories of South Asia written by Sugata Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water’s artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present. This is one of the first books on South Asia’s art, architecture and visual history to interweave the ecological with the aesthetic under the emerging field of eco art history. The volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers of art history, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, urban studies, architecture, geography, history and environmental studies. It will also appeal to activists, curators, art critics and those interested in water management.
Download or read book Water Architecture in South Asia written by Julia Hegewald and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water architecture in South Asia represents some of the most beautiful and spectacular building achievements of the region. This study provides a holistic approach to the subject, suggesting common links and regional contrasts between types of water structures and their contexts, with a comprehensive interpretation of the history and meaning of water architecture in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Five types of water structures are identified. Their development is traced from simple to more complex forms, considering how these accommodate secular and religious functions, and present expressions of sacred and royal authority. This publication is the first reference work on the subject. Many of the structures discussed and illustrated here have never been published before. Its comprehensive approach will have a wide relevance for other South Asian disciplines.
Download or read book Climate Change and Water Resources in South Asia written by M. Monirul Qader Mirza and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the most pressing water resource issues in South Asia, particularly in relation to climate change and variability. This is a region characterised by abundant water during the monsoon, when devastating floods occur, and by scarcity of water and droughts during the dry period. These extreme events often cause substantial damage to
Download or read book Riverine Neighbourhood written by Uttam Kumar Sinha and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rivers are the most visible form of fresh water. Rivers are ancient and older than civilizations - a "mini cosmos" spawning history, tales, spirituality, and technological incursions. Flowing rivers are the largest renewable water resource as well as a crucible for both human and aquatic ecosystems. This volume explores rivers and the role they play.
Download or read book Unruly Waters written by Sunil Amrith and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas -- and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Asia's past and its future.
Download or read book Lines in Water written by Eliza F. Kent and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When asked to distinguish between different faiths, Mughal prince Dara Shikoh is said to have replied, "How do you draw a line in water?" Inspired by this question, the essays in this volume illustrate how ordinary people in South Asia and the diaspora negotiate their religious identities and encounters in creative, complex, and diverse ways. Taking the approach that narratives "from below" provide the richest insight into the dynamics of religious pluralism, the authors examine life histories, oral traditions, cartographic practices, pilgrimage rites, and devotional music and songs. Drawing on both ethnographic and historical data, they illuminate how, like lines in water, religious boundaries are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and permeable rather than permanently fixed, frozen, and inviolable. A distinct feature of the volume is its proposition of a fresh and innovative typology of boundary dynamics. Boundaries may be attractive or porous, firmly drawn or transcended. Attractive boundaries invite confluence while affirming the differences between self and other, whereas permeable boundaries facilitate exchanges that create new identities and in turn form new lines. Although people may recognize the significance of religious borders, they can choose to transcend them. Throughout this volume, the authors highlight the fascinating range of South Asian religious and cultural traditions.
Download or read book Dirty Sacred Rivers written by Cheryl Colopy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage channels for a burgeoning population. To tell the story of this enormous river basin, environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy treks to high mountain glaciers with hydrologists; bumps around the rough embankments of India's poorest state in a jeep with social workers; and takes a boat excursion through the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests at the end of the Ganges watershed. She lingers in key places and hot spots in the debate over water: the megacity Delhi, a paradigm of water mismanagement; Bihar, India's poorest, most crime-ridden state, thanks largely to the blunders of engineers who tried to tame powerful Himalayan rivers with embankments but instead created annual floods; and Kathmandu, the home of one of the most elegant and ancient traditional water systems on the subcontinent, now the site of a water-development boondoggle. Colopy's vivid first-person narrative brings exotic places and complex issues to life, introducing the reader to a memorable cast of characters, ranging from the most humble members of South Asian society to engineers and former ministers. Here we find real-life heroes, bucking current trends, trying to find rational ways to manage rivers and water. They are reviving ingenious methods of water management that thrived for centuries in South Asia and may point the way to water sustainability and healthy rivers.
Download or read book A World of Water written by Peter Boomgaard and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water, in its many guises, has always played a powerful role inshaping Southeast Asian histories, cultures, societies and economies.This volume, the rewritten results of an international workshop, with participants from 8 countries, contains 13 essays, representing a broad range of approaches to the study of Southeast Asia with water as the central theme.
Download or read book Droughts and Integrated Water Resource Management in South Asia written by Jasveen Jairath and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Droughts have formed an inseparable part of South Asian history and culture, with tragic consequences for a region that houses the greatest number of the world’s poor. However, this volume challenges the popular conception of drought, which is presented as an absolute shortage-scarcity with respect to an implicit understanding of the sufficiency of water. It highlights the fact that while available water supplies may be a given quantum, droughts are differentially experienced, politically inspired and socially constituted. It emphasises that the relative water scarcity needs to be appreciated, and argues that water scarcity means different things for diverse constituencies of water users. Policy prescriptions based on definitional premises will be flawed, as a misrepresentation of drought as merely water scarcity serves a political agenda. The editors and contributors of this volume critically evaluate the concept of drought, the way it is defined, its origin/derivation, and the purposes/interests it serves. This book is broadly divided into three major sections: the thematic section, country overviews, and case studies. Through these, it attempts to: - Understand the concept of drought. - Map diversity in drought situations across South Asia. - Identify responses to drought. - Outline viable options for more integrated approaches to drought policies and mitigation strategies. - Initiate a process of dialogue on a more comprehensive public policy for drought management. Comprehensive, thought-provoking, informative, and featuring new research data, this collection will provide policy makers and professionals with the opportunity to discuss and debate policies for sustainable livelihood support systems and drought management. It would also be an invaluable source of information for students and teachers working in the fields of Water and Natural Resource Management, Environmental Planning, Agricultural Economics, Rural Development, Public Policy and Public Administration.
Download or read book Taming the Anarchy written by Tushaar Shah and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1947, British India-the part of South Asia that is today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh-emerged from the colonial era with the world's largest centrally managed canal irrigation infrastructure. However, as vividly illustrated by Tushaar Shah, the orderly irrigation economy that saved millions of rural poor from droughts and famines is now a vast atomistic system of widely dispersed tube-wells that are drawing groundwater without permits or hindrances. Taming the Anarchy is about the development of this chaos and the prospects to bring it under control. It is about both the massive benefit that the irrigation economy has created and the ill-fare it threatens through depleted aquifers and pollution. Tushaar Shah brings exceptional insight into a socio-ecological phenomenon that has befuddled scientists and policymakers alike. In systematic fashion, he investigates the forces behind the transformation of South Asian irrigation and considers its social, economic, and ecological impacts. He considers what is unique to South Asia and what is in common with other developing regions. He argues that, without effective governance, the resulting groundwater stress threatens the sustenance of the agrarian system and therefore the well being of the nearly one and a half billion people who live in South Asia. Yet, finding solutions is a formidable challenge. The way forward in the short run, Shah suggests, lies in indirect, adaptive strategies that change the conduct of water users. From antiquity until the 1960‘s, agricultural water management in South Asia was predominantly the affair of village communities and/or the state. Today, the region depends on irrigation from some 25 million individually owned groundwater wells. Tushaar Shah provides a fascinating economic, political, and cultural history of the development and use of technology that is also a history of a society in transition. His book provides powerful ideas and lessons for researchers, historians, and policy
Download or read book Modern South Asia written by Sugata Bose and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging survey of the Indian sub-continent, Modern South Asia gives an enthralling account of South Asian history. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of understanding of the social, economic and political realities of this region. This comprehensive study includes detailed discussions of: the structure and ideology of the British raj; the meaning of subaltern resistance; the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste class, community and gender; and the state and economy, society and politics of post-colonial South Asia The new edition includes a rewritten, accessible introduction and a chapter by chapter revision to take into account recent research. The second edition will also bring the book completely up to date with a chapter on the period from 1991 to 2002 and adiscussion of the last millennium in sub-continental history.
Download or read book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America written by Vivek Bald and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Water in South Asia written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book South Asia written by Christopher V. Hill and published by ABC-CLIO. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a chronological study of South Asia that emphasizes the effect of humans on their environment, and in return the influence of nature on the evolution of human society. Ranging from prehistory to the present and encompassing the whole of South Asia, this volume in ABC-CLIO's Nature and Human Societies series offers the first chronological history of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka from the perspective of the crucial reciprocal relationship between humankind and the environment. South Asia: An Environmental History shows how the civilizations of this geographically diverse region were formed (physically, ethically, and culturally) by their interactions with the environment—a relationship with particularly strong social and spiritual dimensions because of the interdependence of the predominantly agrarian population and the land. Specific topics range from ancient irrigation techniques and peasant adaptation to the environment, to the impact of imperialism on nature, the effect of post-colonial technology on contemporary life, and the enduring influence of religion on the way South Asian societies address ecological issues.
Download or read book Contested Waters written by Amit Ranjan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-09-02 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines India’s transboundary river water disputes with its South Asian riparian neighbours — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. It explores the history of disputes and cooperation over the transboundary river water in this region as well as discusses current disputes and future concerns. It analyses how and why existing transboundary river water sharing treaties between India and its South Asian riparian neighbours are confronted with challenges. The book indicates that India’s transboundary river water disputes with its South Asian riparian neighbours are likely to escalate in coming years due to the widening of the demand¬–supply gap in the respective countries. It further shows the impact of bilateral relations on the resolution of transboundary river water disputes, even as cordial relationships do not always guarantee the absence of river water disputes between riparian states. The book looks at some key questions: How political are India’s transboundary rivers water disputes in South Asia? Why do the roots of India’s river water disputes with Bangladesh and Pakistan lie in the partition of the British India in 1947? Why are there reservations against India’s hydroelectricity projects or allegations of water theft? Is it possible to resolve transboundary river water disputes among these South Asian countries? This book will greatly interest scholars and researchers working in the areas of river management, environmental politics, transnationalism, water resources, politics and international relations, security studies, peace and conflict studies, geopolitics, development studies, governance and public administration, and South Asian studies in addition to policymakers and journalists.
Download or read book Informing Water Policies in South Asia written by Anjal Prakash and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes water policies in South Asia from the perspective of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It seeks to address the problems of water scarcity, conflict and pollution resulting from the gross mismanagement and over-exploitation of this finite resource. Highlighting the need for IWRM in mitigating abuse and ensuring sustainable use, it discusses issues relating to groundwater management; inter-state water conflicts; peri-urban water use; local traditional water management practices; coordination between water users and uses; and water integration at the grassroots level. With case studies from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, the innovative, painstaking and transnational researches presented in the volume deal with questions of equity, gender, sustainability, and democratic governance in water policy interventions. It will interest researchers and students of development studies, environmental studies, natural resource management, water governance, and public administration, as also water sector professionals, policymakers, civil society activists and governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Download or read book Blood and Water written by David Gilmartin and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is a history of the political and environmental transformation of the Indus basin as a result of the modern construction of the world's largest, integrated irrigation system. Begun under British colonial rule in the 19th century, this transformation continued after the region was divided between two new states, India and Pakistan, in 1947. Massive irrigation works have turned an arid region into one of dense agricultural population, but its political legacies continue to shape the politics and statecraft of the region"--Provided by publisher.
