ENVIRONMENT, MOBILITY AND SETTLEMENT

Detailed chapter description

A settlement map is not simply a map of where people preferred to live. In the Himalayan foreland and Middle Ganga plain, the ground itself was repeatedly remade by rivers, sediment, monsoon floods, groundwater, erosion and local tectonic movement. The same processes that threatened houses could renew fields, create fisheries, open transport corridors or bury older occupations. This chapter therefore treats settlement as a negotiation among several changing variables rather than as a one-time choice of a “good” site. The purpose is not to make environment a deterministic cause of culture. Human knowledge, labour, storage, social cooperation, route networks and technology all affected how communities used a given surface. At regional scale north Bihar and the adjoining Nepal Tarai appear extremely flat, but that appearance conceals differences that mattered greatly at household scale. Natural levees stand slightly above adjoining backswamps; abandoned channels become linear depressions; crevasse splays and bars create locally raised sandy ground; older alluvial surfaces may drain differently from younger floodplain deposits; and fan surfaces grade southward from the Himalayan front. Sinha’s work on the Gandak–Kosi interfan and later studies of the Gangetic plains emphasize this geomorphic diversity. A height difference of only a metre or two can change the duration of waterlogging, the accessibility of a well, the suitability of a crop, and the probability that a house floor remains dry during ordinary floods (Sinha 1995, 1996; Sinha et al. 2005). Sinha and Friend classified rivers of the northern Bihar plains by source area—mountain-fed, foothills-fed, plains-fed and mixed-fed—and showed that their hydrology and sediment behaviour differ (Sinha and Friend 1994). A large Himalayan river brings a different combination of discharge, sediment calibre and seasonal variability from a smaller plains-fed stream. This matters for settlement history because “living by a river” could mean living beside a braided trunk channel, an anabranching foothills-fed river, a smaller meandering stream, or an abandoned channel that retained water after the active course moved elsewhere. The economic possibilities and risks were therefore not uniform across the floodplain.