Event
Water, Crop and Labor: The Making of the Modern Kaveri Delta
Measuring Land, Measuring People: Rewriting the History of Mathematics in South India
The Kaveri Delta witnessed substantial changes during the colonial, post colonial and recent
‘climate change’ dispensations. We present important aspect of these changes in the longue duree history of the landscape and working people. We show how the various planning exigencies and calculative regimes reflect the shifting priorities of the state, and how the the engineer, the rice farmer and the landless working women shaped and altered the value of rice, water and labor, differently. In the era of contemporary climate adaptation financing, we see yet another instance when the same landscape is subjected to technocratic engineering practices, facilitating a coercive apparatus of extraction while making particular working people’s lives and labour dispensable.