Understanding Colonial Rule through Water: The Story of the Sukkur Barrage

 

Me

I am the Sukkur Barrage, a colossal structure of stone, steel, and concrete that stretches across the mighty Indus River in Sindh. My story is often told as a triumph of engineering, a marvel that brought life to a "barren" land. But as you read, you will come to understand that my existence, from my very conception to my ongoing life in postcolonial Pakistan, is deeply intertwined with power, ideology, and transformation. I am a monument, yes, but also a witness to colonial ambition and its enduring aftermath.

 

My Grand Purpose: More Than Just Water

Who am I, and why do I stand here? I was completed in 1932, an engineering feat hailed as among the most ambitious undertakings of British India. I was celebrated in nationalist and technical discourses as a marvel of irrigation and modern infrastructure. But I was never a neutral technological intervention. From my very beginning, I was deeply embedded in the colonial state's ideological, political, and economic ambitions. My purpose was part of a larger imperial project of environmental mastery, economic extraction, and territorial control.

My very being embodies colonial modernity, where science, empire, and nature were co-constitutive. The British administration planned and built me to transform the ecology of the Indus basin into a productive space for revenue generation and political consolidation. The vast canal network that emanated from me brought over 7.5 million acres under irrigation, fundamentally altering Sindh's hydrology, agrarian economy, and social relations.

 

My Colonial Birth: From Wild River to Disciplined Flow

How was I first imagined, and by whom? For centuries, the Indus River was central to the livelihoods, beliefs, and seasonal rhythms of local populations. But the British colonial gaze reimagined the Indus as a wild and wasteful force, needing containment and discipline. My creators, British engineers and administrators, framed their intervention in terms of rationality, efficiency, and civilization, aligning with the larger imperial narrative of bringing order to "backward" regions. In their eyes, I was a tool of political economy, intended to secure control over Sindh, stimulate agricultural surplus, and facilitate British geopolitical interests in the northwest frontier.

The idea of large-scale irrigation in British India, which led to my existence, was not simply a response to environmental constraints. It was part of a political project of colonial consolidation, land commodification, and territorial control. The British developed their full-scale model of canal irrigation in Punjab, particularly after its annexation in 1849. There, canals became a critical means for expanding state power in newly conquered areas, and they even helped create a class of loyal agriculturists. The Indian Irrigation Commission declared in 1901 that "No Government can be considered to have fulfilled its responsibilities unless it has taken every measure to develop the irrigation resources of the country under its charge". This ideological commitment formed the backdrop for my "birth" in Sindh.

Sindh, annexed in 1843, was described in colonial writings as "barren," "sleeping," or "unproductive," awaiting transformation through British technology. The Bombay Presidency Gazetteer of 1907 even called Sindh "a land whose agricultural possibilities lie dormant beneath the sands, yearning for the vivifying touch of perennial waters". This framing exemplified colonial environmental orientalism, representing the colonized environment as passive and in need of "white savior intervention". My creators believed that by harnessing the Indus through my permanent structure, they could simultaneously:

• Boost agrarian revenue.
• Reduce famine risk.
• Diminish seasonal migration.
• Disempower local chiefs and tribes.
• Integrate Sindh into the imperial economy.

 

My Conception and Creation: A Dream Made Concrete

What debates surrounded my birth, and who brought me to life? My construction was not an abrupt decision; it was the culmination of nearly 80 years of evolving British interests and engineering debates in Sindh. Early visions in the 1850s were set aside due to technical uncertainty, fears of flooding, limited financial resources, and the political instability of Sindh after its conquest. Sindh, under the Bombay Presidency, often received less attention and development funds compared to Bengal or Punjab.

However, by the late 19th century, the success of Punjab’s canal colonies provided a model for replication, and the 1901 Indian Irrigation Commission highlighted Sindh as an area with high untapped potential. My fame grew. A British representative declared: "Where the Indus has been disciplined, the soil has flourished and loyalty has followed. What remains in Sindh is not an engineering question but one of administrative will". This framed me as part of a broader imperial strategy to develop Sindh's "wastelands" and integrate it into the Raj.

Despite increasing enthusiasm, I remained on the drawing board for two more decades due to massive cost fears (initially estimated at Rs. 18 crore) and technical difficulties. But following World War I, the colonial state, shaken by unrest, decided to invest more in infrastructural projects to stabilize frontier regions. Sindh, with its strategic location, became a prime candidate.

In 1923, the Government of Bombay formally approved my construction, largely due to the efforts of Sir Arnold Albert Musto, Chief Engineer of the Bombay Public Works Department. Musto, often hailed as my architect, combined technical expertise with an imperial mission. His detailed engineering blueprint proposed a massive weir across the Indus, with seven canal off-takes to irrigate an estimated 7.63 million acres. I was designed to be constructed using reinforced concrete, a relatively new material in India, with a length of 4,881 feet, 66 gates, and a regulating system.

My construction began in 1923 and lasted nearly a decade, employing more than 25,000 workers under British and Anglo-Indian supervisors. I was completed in 1932 at a final cost of Rs. 20.6 crore, making me the largest irrigation work in the British Empire at the time. My inauguration in January 1932 was accompanied by elaborate ceremonies and imperial propaganda. British newspapers called me "the crown jewel of India’s irrigation," and The Times of India declared: "No greater work has ever been undertaken in Asia by the hand of man… The Raj has tamed the ancient Indus". This rhetoric, however, obscured the displacements, local tensions, and ecological transformations I would ultimately produce.

 

My True Identity: An Instrument of Empire

Was I merely an engineering feat, or something more? I was not merely a response to hydrological challenges or a display of engineering prowess. I was a strategic intervention deeply rooted in the political economy of colonial rule. For the British, controlling the Indus through my massive irrigation scheme allowed for the transformation of Sindh’s marginal status into a profitable, governable, and loyal territory. I represented a fusion of infrastructure and ideology, channeling not only water but also imperial power.

My creators regarded irrigation as a means to extend control over peripheral regions. In Sindh, where tribal communities and powerful landlords retained autonomy, water governance offered a way to bypass traditional authority and insert a new bureaucratic order. As David Gilmartin observes, I was "a project of rule" where hydraulic power became synonymous with state power. Through my infrastructure, the British could:

• Impose water regulation systems that tied cultivators to state-managed canals.
• Monitor settlement and movement through the canal inspection system.
• Create dependencies on irrigation water, which could be expanded or withheld.

 

This established what scholars term a "hydraulic bureaucracy," a centralized administrative apparatus that used water as a tool of compliance and control. The Sindh Irrigation Department, reorganized after my completion, became a massive employer, controlling water distribution, gathering intelligence, and managing disputes, effectively replacing customary systems with colonial legal codes.

My core economic motivation was to convert "waste" land into revenue-generating cultivated land. Colonial surveys identified over 8 million acres in Sindh as "potentially cultivable," and by introducing controlled canal irrigation, the British aimed to:

• Dramatically increase land revenue assessments.
• Stimulate the production of cash crops, especially cotton, wheat, and sugarcane.
• Attract settlers and laborers from other parts of India to cultivate new lands. Revenue reports show that within a decade of my completion, land revenue from irrigated areas in Sindh increased by over 80%. Additionally, canal water charges were levied as a form of colonial rent-seeking. My influence led to a new agrarian elite, as large landlords gained power through preferential water access.

 

Furthermore, Sindh’s location on the northwestern frontier meant it had strategic military importance. I, and the resulting canal colonies, were seen as tools to pacify and stabilize the frontier. My new command areas were imagined as buffer zones, populated by state-dependent cultivators less susceptible to tribal rebellion.

From the 1920s onward, I was part of a broader rebranding of British rule through developmentalist rhetoric. I was portrayed as a benevolent gift of empire, a symbol of rationality, modernity, and improvement. Official publications boasted, "Where once was desert and despair, now grow the golden fields of cotton and wheat. The British hand has delivered Sindh from the tyranny of drought". These narratives, however, contradicted the coercive practices and social dislocations I produced.

 

My Gaze: The Science of My Being

How did colonial science understand me, and what did it overlook? In its natural form, the Indus was a braided, meandering, and seasonally shifting river, and local communities adapted to its unpredictability. But my creators found this dynamism threatening; it defied administrative predictability and resisted commodification. To render the river governable, they initiated a massive project of hydrological mapping starting in the 1860s. By the 1880s, the Indus was divided into discrete zones, marked by precise measurements. One engineer noted in 1897, "No river in the world has been so closely watched, measured, and recorded in recent decades as the Indus. Her mystery must be dissolved before she can serve the purposes of civilized agriculture".

The act of measuring and modeling the Indus was not only technical but ideological. It reflected the colonial state’s desire to "see like a state"—to impose grids of order upon the flux of life and nature. Hydrology became a language of control, conceptualizing rivers in terms of cusecs, head discharge, and command area. These terms excluded the cultural, religious, and social meanings of water, emphasizing quantification and efficiency instead. Indigenous knowledge systems, like Sindhi water-sharing customs (warabandi), were displaced by bureaucratic regulation. As historian Rohan D’Souza notes, "British hydraulic engineering was a project of elimination—of eliminating uncertainty, community-based water practices, and nature’s autonomy".

By the time Sir Arnold Musto proposed my final design, British hydrological models of the Indus were among the most sophisticated in the empire. My design incorporated features like scour sluices to manage sediment-heavy floodwaters and gauge stations to record water levels, which were telegraphed to the Irrigation Commissioner’s office for real-time regulation. The Indus became a monitored river, its pulse recorded in colonial ledgers.

The narrative of my hydrological conquest was also gendered. British engineers were celebrated as "conquerors of chaos," linking technical mastery with masculine imperial virtues. The Institution of Civil Engineers praised me in 1933 as "A monumental demonstration of Anglo-Saxon resolve and engineering genius, made doubly admirable by its triumph over the unruly feminine caprice of the Indus".

Despite this scientific sophistication, my models were selective and politically biased. Colonial hydrology ignored or dismissed:

• Local floodplain knowledge.
• Traditional sediment management systems.
• Ecological feedback loops.
• Indigenous mechanisms of disaster response. This created "technocratic blindness," where engineering certainty masked political and ecological complexity. Problems like siltation, salinization, and waterlogging, which emerged prominently by the 1950s, were not anticipated because they lay outside the narrow purview of colonial hydrological science. My construction was made possible by a deep restructuring of knowledge, transforming a complex hydrosocial system into a mechanized flow regime.

 

My Hand: Reshaping Sindh's Society

What kind of social world did I create? My construction and operation marked a turning point in the social, economic, and demographic history of Sindh. By redirecting the Indus through a rationalized network of canals, I did not merely irrigate land; I reshaped rural life, transformed patterns of labor and settlement, and restructured agrarian hierarchies. My seven canal off-takes, including the Nara, Rohri, and Khairpur Canals, brought roughly 7.63 million acres under irrigation. This radically altered existing cultivation modes that depended on floodwater.

With assured irrigation, colonial officials began revenue settlements that favored large landowners, many of whom were feudal sardars or tribal elites allied with the British. A new agrarian elite emerged, gaining access not just to land but also to the water flowing from me. These landlords became intermediaries between the state and the peasantry, controlling water access through informal power and influence. Under the Bombay Land Revenue Code, these elites accumulated land, while tenant farmers (haris) became more dependent and precarious. My irrigation did not democratize land but "consolidated a hierarchy that survives well into the postcolonial state".

My transformation of agriculture also changed labor systems. Prior to me, many Sindhi peasants were semi-nomadic; with canal irrigation and cash crops, labor became more settled, bound to fixed planting cycles and irrigation schedules. During my construction, an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 workers, often poorly paid and temporary, faced harsh conditions, including outbreaks of malaria and cholera. The colonial record, however, downplayed these disruptions.

I also introduced a complex bureaucracy that extended deep into rural life. The Sindh Irrigation Department deployed canal officers, patwaris, and daroghas to regulate water release, record land rights, monitor compliance, and manage disputes. This served both administrative and disciplinary functions, where the state claimed benevolence through water delivery but used it to enforce loyalty.

My economic transformation also had gendered and caste-based dimensions. Women's traditional roles in seed saving and water management diminished. Marginalized communities, such as Dalits and migrant laborers, were often forced into landless agricultural labor, lacking secure water access and vulnerable to debt bondage.

The command areas I created led to new settlement patterns, with towns like Sukkur, Rohri, and Khairpur growing rapidly. However, my ecological consequences were immediate and severe: over-irrigation and poor drainage soon led to waterlogging and salinization. By the 1940s, British officials acknowledged that over 15% of canal-irrigated land in Sindh was becoming unproductive. Traditional flood-based wetlands and fish habitats were also disrupted, reducing biodiversity and eliminating customary livelihoods like fishing.

 

The Whispers I Could Not Silence

Were my effects always welcomed, or were there dissenting voices? Colonial engineering reports often framed the people of Sindh as passive recipients of British development. Official documents even described me as "universally welcomed by the Sindhi peasantry". However, such claims should be treated with skepticism; the colonial state often constructed myths of native acquiescence to justify its actions. The overwhelming silence in formal records on resistance does not mean it was absent; it reflects a form of colonial epistemic violence, where voices not conforming to imperial categories were deemed unimportant or invisible.

Despite the archival silence, fragmentary accounts suggest I did provoke anxieties and localized resistance. Villagers near Rohri and Ghotki reportedly opposed the seizure of their lands for canal construction. Fishing communities in the Indus Delta petitioned against new irrigation patterns that cut off access to seasonal wetlands and reduced fish stocks. Sindhi-language newspapers occasionally published subtle critiques of land grants to feudal elites.

Oral histories collected by later Sindhi historians remember my era with mixed emotions: awe at the engineering, but bitterness over water monopolies, forced labor, and dispossession. One elderly peasant in a 1975 oral history project remarked, "The water came, but it came to the doors of the rich. For us, it was a rope to tie us to the landlord’s will".

Some opposition also came from religious leaders and tribal chiefs who feared increased state intrusion, though they were often neutralized through co-optation. Sufi shrines and Pirs saw their influence diminish as state-managed irrigation rose, and the displacement of sacred water sites prompted quiet cultural resistance. While there is no evidence of organized rebellion, this may be due to structural conditions like high illiteracy, lack of political representation, and suppression of speech.

Indigenous voices were marginalized for several reasons:

• Language and Bureaucracy: Official records were in English, and complaints had to be submitted in formal ways, reducing accessibility for peasants.
• Technical Rationality: Colonial hydrology privileged numbers over narratives; a peasant's account held less authority than an engineer's chart.
• Power Hierarchies: Local elites often aligned with the state, benefiting from land grants.
• Censorship and Control: Newspapers and public meetings were tightly monitored.

 

My history is not just about engineering; it is also about silenced resistance and invisible suffering.

 

My Life After Empire: A Legacy of Contention

How did I fare after the British left, and what new conflicts arose around me? Though conceived under colonial rule, I left behind a legacy that profoundly shaped the political economy and inter-provincial tensions of postcolonial Pakistan. As the first and largest of my kind in South Asia, I became a template for state-centered hydraulic engineering, and my embedded power structures outlived the Raj.

At Partition in 1947, the bulk of the Indus basin's barrage and canal infrastructure, including myself, remained in Pakistan. Sindh found itself dependent not only on the Indus's flow from upstream but also on the bureaucratic structures inherited from British rule. The centralized, technocratic irrigation regime was retained almost wholesale, ensuring that the logics of colonial hydrology remained foundational in Pakistan’s water governance.

A new anxiety emerged with the creation of Pakistan: the Centre’s growing influence over water allocations. I became a flashpoint in these emerging water politics, with Sindh’s political leaders raising concerns that:

• More water was diverted upstream.
• My original design capacity was being undermined by reduced flow.
• Colonial canal allocations, never democratically negotiated, now served as tools of postcolonial inequality. These grievances were often framed in ethno-nationalist idioms, with Sindh seen as a victim of internal colonization.

 

In 1960, the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan divided the rivers, assigning the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan. While this secured my access to the Indus, it also required Pakistan to build new replacement canals, expanding Punjab’s control over river flows. For Sindh, this meant greater dependence on inter-provincial canal agreements still based on colonial-era rules, deepening the perception of structural imbalance.

After decades of dispute, Pakistan’s provinces signed the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord, but Sindh’s politicians argue that it is routinely violated, especially during low-flow periods. New mega-projects like the Greater Thal Canal threaten to reduce flows to my command areas. Even the Kotri Barrage, downstream from me, receives inadequate water, endangering deltaic livelihoods and biodiversity. My design, focused on maximum extraction, had no ecological safeguards, a neglect that persisted into postcolonial planning.

I also institutionalized a model of technocratic, top-down water planning that continues to dominate Pakistan’s development discourse. Major water decisions are made by engineers and bureaucrats, rarely by farmers or local communities. This echoes "colonial hangovers in postcolonial statecraft"—the tendency to solve socio-political problems with infrastructural fixes, ignoring deeper questions of justice. When Sindh’s canals run dry, the solution offered is often another barrage, rather than revisiting the colonial origins of unequal water distribution.

 

My Shadow: The Wounded Delta

What was my greatest, unintended ecological cost? While I was celebrated as a symbol of colonial engineering, my long-term ecological consequences were catastrophic, especially for the Indus Delta. Before my operation, the Indus regularly flooded its deltaic plains, bringing freshwater and silt that nourished mangrove forests, supported fishing, and replenished aquifers. After my operationalization in 1932, massive quantities of water were diverted upstream, a process intensified by subsequent barrages.

As a result, downstream flow to the Indus Delta drastically decreased. The average freshwater flow below Kotri declined from 150 MAF/year in 1950 to less than 20 MAF/year by the 1990s, often reaching zero in dry periods. This decline had dire consequences for:

• Mangrove ecosystems, which depend on brackish water balance.
• Deltaic agriculture, requiring a specific salinity range.
• Estuarine fish populations, which breed in freshwater-saltwater transition zones.

 

The Indus Delta once hosted the largest arid-zone mangrove forest in the world, spanning over 600,000 hectares in the early 20th century. Today, less than 100,000 hectares remain healthy, and large portions are degraded or desertified. Mangroves are natural coastal buffers, nurseries for marine life, and carbon sinks. My reduction of freshwater flow allowed seawater intrusion as far as 100 kilometers upstream, destroying vegetation and threatening inland aquifers. A Sindhi fisherman lamented, "The sea has swallowed the land where our fathers sowed rice. The water is no longer sweet, and the trees have died".

The most severe human impact has fallen on deltaic communities, many of whom are fisherfolk and rice cultivators. As these ecosystems collapsed:

• Fishing yields dropped by over 75% between 1950 and 2000.
• Saltwater intrusion made paddy cultivation impossible in large areas.
• Thousands of delta dwellers migrated inland. By the 1990s, this was being called "ecocide"—the systematic destruction of a riverine ecosystem for upstream agricultural and urban expansion.

My design, like most colonial hydraulic projects, had no ecological safeguards. British engineers focused on maximizing diversion and irrigation efficiency, with no concern for environmental flow requirements, sediment transport, or long-term aquifer health. This "colonial blindness" to ecology was passed on to postcolonial planners.

The environmental crisis of the Indus Delta is not merely a colonial legacy; it is also a product of postcolonial neglect. Even after alarming signs emerged, successive governments prioritized upstream dams and canals. Though Pakistan’s 1991 Water Apportionment Accord allocated 10 MAF/year as the "minimum flow below Kotri," this target is frequently violated. Experts argue that the technocratic, extractivist water model created under colonialism continues to dominate Pakistan’s water planning, focused on control, not regeneration.

Despite the devastation, local communities and NGOs have resisted, raising awareness and demanding legally mandated environmental flow guarantees and delta restoration. As a social activist said, "The Indus is a living river only when it meets the sea. To starve the delta is to kill the river’s soul".

 

My Enduring Story: A Monument of Power

What deeper truths do I embody, even today? My story is not just a tale of engineering achievement; it is a revealing window into the broader ideologies, structures, and consequences of colonial rule in South Asia. I was an expression of colonial rationality, technocratic domination, and the will to reorder nature and society through infrastructure. Still in operation today, I stand as a monument to the material and epistemic power of the British Raj, a power that endures in concrete and institutional legacies.

I was a classic instance of "colonial governmentality," exercising control through seemingly benign, rational systems. By managing the Indus’s flow, my creators restructured agricultural production, class relations, landholding patterns, and labor regimes. Through the irrigation bureaucracy, they entrenched systems of surveillance, taxation, and discipline, binding peasants to land, elites to the state, and nature to imperial command. The river was made to flow according to colonial time, bypassing the rhythms of community, ritual, and ecology.

Colonial hydrology, as deployed in my construction, privileged abstraction over experience, expertise over tradition, and extraction over reciprocity. It systematically silenced indigenous voices, erased alternative water knowledges, and ignored the ecological wisdom embedded in local practices. Yet, resistance persisted—in the petitions of fishermen, the memories of displaced farmers, the rituals of water shrines, and later, in postcolonial demands for justice.

The end of empire did not end the logic of colonial water governance. The post-1947 Pakistani state inherited me and my structures, but not their critical interrogation. Bureaucracies like WAPDA, policies like the 1991 Water Accord, and practices like the prioritization of mega-projects all stem from the same colonial matrix of control. I remain at the heart of inter-provincial conflict, deltaic degradation, and class inequality—a constant reminder that infrastructures are not neutral; they carry histories, politics, and ideologies within their gates and canals.

If there is a lesson in my history, it is that any future of water governance must unlearn the colonial paradigm. It must center justice, ecology, community participation, and a recognition that rivers are more than channels for extraction—they are lifeworlds, cultural anchors, and ecosystems deserving care and respect.

I am not merely a piece of infrastructure; I am a living archive of empire. To study me is to confront the intimate link between colonial ambition and hydraulic modernity, and to understand how rivers were turned into tools of rule. But it is also to recognize the resilience of communities, ecologies, and histories that continue to resist being submerged. My history narrates the unfolding of empire in mud, brick, water, and silence.