Living with Water: Peoples, Lives and Livelihoods in Asia and Beyond

Contents: Part- I: Thinking About Water. 1. The land yields to the sea: The possibilities of ocean history/Ryan Tucker Jones. 2. Water and history: Some skeptical notes/Michael N. Pearson. Part- II: The Coast and the Interior: Upstream/Downstream Linkages. 3. A littoral space: making a case for the Southern Deltaic Region of Bengal/Shatarupa Bhattacharyya. 4. Water, water bodies and waterscapes in early medieval South-Eastern Bengal and Assam: a view from epigraphs/Suchandra Ghosh. Part- III: Landscape, Perception, Mores. 5. Riverine waterscape and cultural landscape in Bengali folklore and literature/Sumanta Banerjee. 6. The River: yearings and warnings/Rimli Sengupta and Soumya chakravarti. 7. 'Oh My River with deep Water, I Am Floating on Your Water, Ever Since my Birth': Non-Western perspectives on Reconfigurations of the Embodiments of water and Landscape with Special Reference to Contemporary Archaeological Discourses/Swadhin Sen and Wahid Palash. Part- IV: Water and History. 8. Imaging and managing water in Peninsular India/Radhika Seshan. Part- V: Water and People. 9. Bonbibi and Kali in Rival Riverine Chronicles from the Sundarbans/Annu Jalais. 10. Stone Tidal Weirs Rising From the Ruins: Cultural Scenes from the Seascapes of the Pacific Islands/Cynthia Neri Zayas. Part- VI: Water as Archive. 11. Ptolemaic perspectives: Rivers, Lake and Seas in Asia/Rila Mukherjee.

Living with Water: Peoples, Lives and Livelihoods in Asia and Beyond examines the relation between water and human history through the prism of archaeology, ethnography, history, maritime anthropology, literature, sociology and musicology. Moving away from traditional themes of maritime history such as oceanic trade, migration, slavery, piracy, shipping and port-to-port linkages-and from the generic themes of maritime contacts and market exchanges, of cultural contacts and technology transfers, and of collaboration versus military conflict-the volume focusses instead on human-water interaction in history. We present different types of archives facilitating a history of water with the aim of widening the scope of water histories. Water histories have the potential of bringing remote, marginal histories to the centre of historical research. As Harlaftis (2010) and Grafe (2011) have noted, such histories provide a tool for linking the local and the regional with the global, and also provide the possibility of comparing the various scales or levels of water's interaction and intervention with peoples' lives. The spatial extent of the volume is Russia, Bangladesh, India (Assam, Bengal, the Tamil country) and the Philippines.