Watch Here: https://youtu.be/IBqzX7yL0H0

Until the 1980s, water featured relatively little in discussions of India’s relations with China. This talk delves into the history of that transformative decade of the 1980s, when first China and then India developed ambitious plans to dam the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers, giving rise to new fears of future water conflicts. It seeks to situate those transformations in longer historical trajectories, going back to the mid-twentieth century. Our ways of envisaging the problem of shared water continue to be constrained by the models and choices made at the moment when China and India began their ascent to global economic power.

Speaker

Sunil Amrith

Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History

Yale University

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities.

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Discussant

Sophia kalantzakos

Global Distinguished Professor, Environmental Studies and Public Policy

New York University

Sophia Kalantzakos is Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University and a long-term affiliate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on resources and power; on new spatial imaginaries that reflect the changing ways that we think of global space and interdependence; and on the new emergent patterns and avenues of possibilist thinking as a way of re-imagining geopolitics for the 21st century.

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