Changing River Courses in North India: Calamities, Bounties, Strategies—Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Disaster is a multidimensional social phenomenon. Scholars, cutting across different disciplines, have yet to reach a common understanding or a consensus on the definition of disaster. To understand natural disaster and catastrophe, this article will study the nature of changing river courses and their impact on the environment and on human-environment relations. It will focus on the corrosive power of rivers, the destructive as well as beneficent effects of their impetuous trajectories and the social implications of this process. Our analysis is based on a case study of one of the major river systems in South Asia, i.e. river Ganga (Ganges) and its tributaries in north India.