Meenakshi A

There are no materials as constitutive of our built environment today as cement, and few as consequential. Drawing upon the interconnected fields of material history, history of science and technology, and infrastructural history, this study traverses the changing materiality of cement in its relationship with engineers, manufacturers and the built environment in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. The study begins by complicating the narrative that cement and concrete were inventions perfected in and diffused from Europe. The first chapter discusses the proliferation of sites across global networks of engineering and empire where experiments on multiple kinds of cements were conducted in the nineteenth century. It studies how the body of technical literature on cement which was consolidated and circulated in this period was replete with narrative elements based on the interactions between cementitious materials and colonial engineers on the ground, and their concerns over the shifting equilibrium between quality, accessibility, cost, scale, efficiency, and aesthetics.
Against this background of cement’s polysemic materiality, the second chapter takes up the story of Portland Cement- the most commonly used artificial cement today. It examines how Portland Cement came to be industrially manufactured and mediated by processes of standardization and codification in early-twentieth century India. It looks at the industrial and technological rhetoric that endorsed it under labels of modernity and progress, as well as the resistance it faced. One of the consequences of recasting cement, and by extension concrete, as a distinctly 'modern' material was the emergence of a construction paradigm founded on the notion of ‘expertise’. The final chapter considers three infrastructural contexts in the first half of the twentieth century, to investigate the aspirations, manifestations, and the limits of this paradigm. It explores the construction of the first entirely concrete dam at Mettur by the Madras government in the 1920s, the cement industry’s drive to build concrete villages for India’s post-war development in the 1940s, and the crusade for concrete roads in India between the 1920s and 1940s. In one way or another, all three projects remained unrealized. These early ‘failures’ are revelatory of both the hybridity that continued to challenge this new paradigm, and the place which this material came to occupy in conflicting visions of the future. By following the story of cement, thus, this dissertation attempts to unpack the evolving relationships between material and human agencies in the process of imagining, engineering, and fabricating our built environment.

For centuries, the Kaveri  has been at the centre of river-sharing conflicts in South India. This paper traces the numerous technological, political and legal mediations of the flow of the river in the longue durée, to weave together the many layers of hydropolitics that have historically enveloped it. Against the background of the rich field of water and river histories of South Asia, the first section explores the historical connections between the river, irrigation and state power, signaling towards extended and textured histories of conflicts and engineering through which the river was politically shaped. The latter section considers the case of the Cauvery Power Scheme, to examine how new articulations of the river’s potential became grounds for the unfolding of colonial politics in the early Twentieth century. Together, the two parts of this article attempt to chart the intricacies of engineering interventions and conflicts as well as the changing epistemological frameworks that have shaped the river historically