Monsoon challenges and colonial interventions: water management, drainage and public health in nineteenth-century Calcutta, India

This paper discusses the nexus between the ecology of the monsoons, colonialism, and nineteenth-century Calcutta (modern Kolkata) and its public health infrastructure. Calcutta was both a riverine city and one plagued by seasonal flooding, waterlogging, and epidemic disease as the administrative capital of British India. Based on the history of the colonies, reports from local municipalities, engineering surveys, and the works of environmental and medical historians, this article argues that British activities in drainage and water management were neither consistently rational nor primarily humanitarian. Instead, they were a mirror of the racialized spatial logic of colonial urbanism, fulfilling commercial interests and having highly disproportionate effects throughout the capital's social geography. The paper follows the development of drainage programmes, the municipal public health programmes in Calcutta, and the disputed definitions of the monsoon in colonial and aboriginal imaginations, and concludes that these attempts to intervene in the urban space still resonate to this end.