WATER, DROUGHT AND SOCIETY IN COLONIAL BUNDELKHAND: A HISTORICAL STUDY

Abstract

Water, or rather its scarcity, has shaped the history of Bundelkhand more decisively than almost any other single factor. This paper examines the region's long relationship with water as a socio-ecological resource, tracing the shift from the decentralised, community-anchored tank-and-well regime built up over centuries by the Chandela and Bundela rulers to the centralised, revenue-oriented hydraulic interventions of British colonial administration. Drawing on District Gazetteers, the reports of the Indian Irrigation Commission of 1901–03, epigraphic and archaeological literature on Chandela hydraulic works, and the broader historiography of Indian irrigation and common-pool resource governance, the study reconstructs three case studies: the great tank complex built at Mahoba between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the colonial-era Betwa Canal system anchored on the Parichha and Dhukwan weirs, and the persistence of well irrigation and small-scale water management in the vast tracts the canal never reached. The paper argues that colonial hydraulic policy, concentrated on a small number of technically impressive but narrowly targeted engineering works, effectively bypassed and allowed to decay the older decentralised tank system on which the great majority of Bundelkhandi cultivators had depended, and that this reallocation of hydraulic priority left the region structurally exposed to the very droughts that fed its recurrent famines. Read alongside Wittfogel's hydraulic-society thesis and Ostrom's theory of commons governance, Bundelkhand's experience illustrates how a functioning common-pool institution can be undermined not by overuse but by administrative neglect and the diversion of investment elsewhere. The paper closes by tracing a direct historical line from this colonial-era neglect to Bundelkhand's well-documented twenty-first-century water crisis and the contemporary movement to revive traditional water harvesting.