Colonial Hydrologies and Local Ecologies: An Ethnographic Study of the Beas River Region in Punjab, Pakistan

Hamid Nazir , Pintu Kumar Mahla 

The disappearance of the Beas River in Pakistan's Punjab, completed by a natural migration of the river's channels between 1750 and 1800, predates colonial hydraulic intervention, the partition of 1947, and the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. Each successive political and infrastructure development has not caused the river to disappear, but has gradually formalized and deepened it, removing any institutional path to ecological recovery. This article draws on three phases of longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2019 and 2025 in four villages in the Kasur-Chunian corridor and in the Depalpur tehsil of Punjab to investigate how communities living in the former Beas River basin understand, deal with and resist the cumulative environmental degradation. Applying the framework of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence, the study traces four historically layered processes, pre-modern geophysical upheaval, colonial hydraulic restructuring, post-colonial land redistribution, and current industrial encroachment, through which damage accumulates over generations without achieving political visibility or accountability. Fieldwork reveals interlocking forms of dispossession: erosion of fisheries and agrarian livelihoods, enclosure of communal river basins by mechanized sand-mining, disproportionate groundwater pollution in households with no land and women, and the generational loss of environmentally-based knowledge. The study further argues that oral traditions, ritual practices, and communal storytelling on the dry riverbed constitute active forms of counter-narration and environmental resistance rather than nostalgic commemoration. The article proposes that a vanished river may be conceptualised as a living cultural commons, generating ongoing and institutionally unaddressed claims upon water governance frameworks.