Description:

Speaker - Sunil Amrith, Harvard University, History,

Abstract - Earlier this summer, the south Indian metropolis of Chennai came close to running out of water. At the same time, great expanses of the western coast of India lay underwater, with tens of thousands of people displaced by flooding. One of the most fundamental shifts over the past half-century is the coming together of the monsoon’s natural and human history, reflected in mounting evidence that human activity is reshaping the monsoon, making it more erratic and more extreme. Moving from the history of Indian meteorology to broader economic and political debates about water, I shall argue that water has been central to different conceptions of India’s freedom and India’s future.

Biography - Professor Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His research is on the trans-regional movement of people, ideas, and institutions. Areas of particular interest include the history of public health and poverty, the history of migration, and environmental history. His most recent work has been on the Bay of Bengal as a region connecting South and Southeast Asia. He has a PhD in History (2005) from the University of Cambridge, where he was also a Research Fellow of Trinity College (2004-6).