ACME 

Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical approach to hybridity, a flexible or “wet” theory that does not pretend to be universal, that can accommodate flux, and that is contextualised in locational terms and comfortable with empirical facts. More specifically, it argues for reconsideration of one of the foundational binaries, that of land and water, within the rubric of hybrid environments. The paper suggests that it is possible, thinking through the historical production of water/lands, for geographers to move beyond what has become an indissoluble dichotomy. To make these points, it takes readers to the floodplains of Bengal, which have conventionally been seen as products of fluvial action, and shows the critical roles played by colonial (and postcolonial) interventions – including changes in land tenure and revenue collection – to have produced hybrid environments that can potentially destabilize the conventional water-land binary characterised by their uncertain existence, their indeterminacy, and their fluid liminal presence as ambiguous temporal, cultural, and political geographies. 1 Published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. 2 This paper aims to extend the theoretical possibilities of my 2013 book, written jointly with Gopa Samanta and titled Dancing with the River: People and Lives on Chars in South Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press. Some sections quote significantly from that book, particularly the discussion on hybridity theory in Geography and the colonial history of land and water management in South Asia. Beyond the water-land binary in geography 506 ... apparent hard edges are the historical product of a determined effort to imagine lines where none exist and then to make them survive in the face of an aqueous terrain which constantly defeats their materiality. Appadurai and Breckenridge (2009, 1) Introducing wet theory In this paper, I argue that we geographers should move away from the idea of dry land, AKA terra firma or solid ground, to allow more fluidity in speaking of hybrid environments. Historically, esteemed geography scholars have understood and explained land by excluding water; the common idea of land is best expressed in the Oxford Dictionary’s definition: “land” is something that exists in opposition to water; that is, “the part of the earth’s surface that is not covered by water”, meaning that land excludes swamps, estuaries, tidal areas, lakes, ponds, and streams. Sauer in 1925 described land as “a unit of geography” (Sauer, 1925, in Leighly, 1963, 321). Equivalent terms, “area” and “region”, gave rise to the place facts of geography; thus, landscape became a recognizable entity with definite limits leaving the waters beyond them. The legacy of valorizing land in geographical studies as an area of ground, the basis for all human activities, might have begun earlier than Sauer; the instructions of classical geomorphologists such as W. M. Davis (1900) on the “content” of geography underlined the complete separation of the lands from waters. Even Hartshorne’s (1939, 150) ideas of landscape (as the “appearance of a land as we perceive it”) privileged land. Geographical metaphors are generally associated with land: territory, field, place, horizon, soil. Like the traditional categories offered by political geographers – frontiers, boundaries and borders, rim lands, and peripheries – land and water have definitely and absolutely been established as two completely separate entities. This led to what Leopold and Schwartz (1989) describe as the “Abrahamic conception of land” that lays before humans a vast expanse of nature to exploit for their sustenance. The post-enlightenment rational need for removing ambiguities sealed the dichotomy but also associated the categories with usefulness or the lack of it; Domonoske (2012, 4) considers this “Water-Land associated with NothingSomething” as expressing a division between enchanted pre-modernity and the disenchanting Enlightenment, putting land, man, and rationality against water and its peoples. The very process of “reclamation” of land became one where human beings converted the useless watery land into solid ground. The implied dichotomy or a blurred partition also disguised a conflict between water and land – in 3 See http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/land (viewed on 11 August, 2014). 4 Hartshorne (1939, 152) further pointed out that the appropriate meaning of the term would be “the section of the earth surface and sky that lies in our field of vision as seen in perspective from a particular point”. However, he insisted that the term “landscape” could not be given a clearly fixed and defined meaning (Olwig, 2003, 875). ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2014, 13 (3), 505-529 507 particular, the struggle between silt, or fine soil, and water because silt is perceived to pollute the clear and clean water, and impede the flow of rivers. This paper challenges this separation by extending the idea of hybrid environments beyond not just the nature-culture binary but beyond the deeply entrenched water-land dichotomy, thereby reconceiving both as environments that have the potential to critique standard cultural dichotomies. It engages with a kind of hybrid environment not fully dealt with yet by geographers: where not only the binary division of nature and culture breaks down, but where land and water are also inseparable, giving rise to a nebulous and fluid environment. Thinking of hybridity in this manner turns it more fully into what Appadurai and Breckenridge (2009) outline as “wet theory”; that is, a flexible theory that is able to accommodate messiness and contextual variations. For geographers, thinking of hybridity as fluid and transient can help to relinquish the notion of permanence in land (and landscapes) and bring to the fore the constant negotiations between the land and waters – the seas, rivers, and lakes that geographers have long constituted as lying outside the terra firma. Wet theory does not need to rely on a “hard edge” – that is, the clean division in the sciences between land and water created in order for accurate measurement, planning and control – and can allow us to rethink lands as spongy and aqueous, and as uncertain and fluid. The examples I provide demonstrate that hybrid water/lands are not only coproduced by nature and culture, but constitute a blend of water and land where the two are merged with each other imperceptibly and changeably. To justify my case, I take readers to the Bengal floodplains. If one flew over Bengal during the monsoon months, the entire terrain would appear as covered in a thin film of water. Conventional geographical wisdom would suggest that this is what floodplains look like, but does not explain why in Bengal, still described in most geographical books as a riverine land, rivers and their floods came to be constructed as an enemy. The sight of a land soaked in water would be a starting point in questioning the boundaries between land and waters that conventional geographical training might have created. Hybridity in this paper constitutes an attempt to elucidate the environment in the lower Gangetic delta, a densely peopled riverine plain that is part land, part water, but is neither in its entirety. In thinking about such environments, the theoretical lens of hybridity is useful in that it allows one to question the water-land binary in geographical studies. Scale is significant, and I illustrate Bengal as a whole as one big aqueous and shifting terrain and rivers, with more contextual reference to the Sundarbans (the mangrove delta), the 5 Reynard (2013, 41) thinks that environmental historians, on the contrary, have put water at the centre of their debates: “Environmental historians interested in the impact of natural forces, be they, to human eyes, catastrophic or simply erratic, have often turned to contexts where water is at work.” 6 A point of note is my treatment of Bengal as one geographical unit regardless of its political boundaries. Bengal was partitioned in 1947 to comprise two countries, India and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Despite this division, Bengal remains physically and culturally one entity, and I refer to this entity unless specifically mentioned otherwise. Beyond the water-land binary in geography 508 haors and the chars. By alternating between different geographical scales – from the breadth of the delta mouth to the microcosmic worlds of silt islands or chars that lie within the riverbeds – the concept of hybridity is able to emphasize that besides natural ecological processes, humans have historically played a critical role in the construction of these environments. At the macro scale, I focus on the Bengal delta as a whole, then zoom in on the Sundarbans – the mangrove delta; the haors – the vast bowl-like depressions in eastern Bangladesh; and the chars – river islands, which are also called “charbhumi” or char-bada jami (bhumi and jami are both “land” in Bangla). I show how this aqueous land is more than a product of fluvial action, and how colonial interventions – including changes in land tenure and revenue collection – and postcolonial dam-building coproduced this hybrid environment. To move beyond the foundational geographical binary of land and water, I consider the ways in which history shaped and intertwined human lives, lands, and waters at different geographical scales. Bengal is where the demarcation between land and water is neither well-defined nor permanent. The Sundarbans, the haors and the chars, are neither fully land, nor entirely water, and certainly not a specific combination of the two; they open the space for thinking about hybridity in a new way that is robust enough to take us beyond thinking of land and water as two rigid and indissoluble categories. Together, these malleable environments that combine and confuse water with land present em