[INDOLOGY] GCSAS Lecture Series: Perpetual Fluctuation: The Rivers of Bengal as Historical Agents, 1750–1800 (Eduardo Acosta)

[Akshara Ravishankar]

Dear all,

We are excited to announce the annual online lecture series organized by
the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies, which will run from *March 11th
to May 27th 2026.* This year’s theme is “More-than-Human South Asia:
Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and Senses.” The full programme is attached
and can also be found here
<https://www.india.ugent.be/2026-gcsas-lecture-series-more-than-human-south-asia2/>,
along with registration links.

Do also join us for the inaugural lecture of the series which is entirely
online at *5 pm CET, Wednesday March 11th, 2026. * More information is
attached, and you can register here
<https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/bf1b6f63-52e5-4fa9-9c38-c6a1f789e2ff@d7811cde-ecef-496c-8f91-a1786241b99c>
.

Title: Perpetual Fluctuation: The Rivers of Bengal as Historical Agents,
1750–1800

Speaker: Eduardo Acosta (Department of History, Stanford University)

Abstract:

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Bengal's rivers were shifting
as they always did. Channels silted, flooded, and abandoned their courses
with a regularity that confounded European surveyors and indigenous
observers alike. This paper argues that the instability of Bengal's
landscape did not merely complicate the colonial project of cartographic
knowledge: it actively shaped the epistemological frameworks through which
that knowledge was produced. Drawing on manuscript surveys, correspondence,
and published geographical treatises, I examine how EIC surveyors, most
prominently James Rennell, developed ways of thinking about landscape as
dynamic and historically legible rather than fixed and mappable in any
final sense.

This challenges a dominant scholarly narrative that treats colonial
cartography as a technology of territorial mastery and epistemological
closure. I show instead that surveyors in this period operated within
plural epistemological traditions, blending classical geographical
reasoning with empirical observation of environmental change; and that
Bengal's rivers were active participants in that process, not merely its
objects. In recent years, environmental historians and scholars of the
nonhuman turn have argued for rivers as historical agents in their own
right. My research complicates this by showing that the historical agency
of Bengal's rivers operated not only through the physical transformation of
landscapes but through the transformation of the intellectual frameworks
used to understand them. That is, that rivers shaped how people thought
about history itself, and not just the ground beneath their feet. Finally,
the paper suggests that this geographical knowledge was never the product
of a single tradition: classical European, Islamicate, and indigenous
frameworks all left their mark on how Bengal's unstable landscape came to
be understood, and on the colonial archive it generated.

Hope to see many of you online soon!

Warmly,

Akshara Ravishankar
Sara Mondini
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