Kamini Masood

“Troubled Waters” is an innovative interdisciplinary project that integrates methods in climate science and historical research to examine the ways in which natural environment impacted and illuminated the political and social ‘crises’ of the long eighteenth century, 1707-1849, in the Panjab under the late Mughal and Sikh empires. It traces the contours of the labile relationship between the natural world, the polity, and the ‘space’ of empire. Reframing this tumultuous moment as a question of environmental history, this project argues for the significance of studying the environment as a critical mediator in social and political configurations. Through a broad range of sources, it interrogates the ways in which natural disaster informs, shapes and constrains the actions of a variety of historical actors, and highlights how space is imagined, organized and narrativized by various political entities in pre-colonial Panjab.