speaker: Sunil Amrith (Yale University), discussant: Sophia kalantzakos (NYU)

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.