In this contribution to the “Ways of Water” series, Debjani Bhattacharyya examines how the tides of the Hooghly River in Kolkata have been visually represented historically. In doing so, she makes a larger point about how cartographic images of the intermingling of rivers and cities fix this relationship in time and space. Bhattacharyya contrasts representations of the Hooghly in maps with those in almanacs, which capture both the temporal and cosmological meanings and practices as experienced by Kolkata’s residents under colonial rule.
Debjani Bhattacharyya
Debjani Bhattacharyya is an associate professor of history at Drexel University and the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) which received the 2019 Honorable Mention for the Best Book in Non-North American Urban History. Her writings have appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Economic and Political Weekly.