colonial state A floodplain governed through records Colonial rule in north Bihar and the eastern Ganga plain encountered a landscape in which rivers altered fields, roads, ferries, administrative boundaries, and taxable assets. The state answered with surveys, flood reports, embankment files, railway engineering, remission rules, relief codes, and district statistics. These records make environmental change unusually visible, but they were produced for government purposes and must be read as interventions as well as descriptions. The central question is therefore not whether the colonial state 'controlled' the rivers. It did not. The historical problem is how officials, zamindars, engineers, merchants, cultivators, boatmen, and labourers redistributed risk while trying to protect revenue, communication, settlements, crops, and property. Christopher Hill and Praveen Singh both emphasize that river management became a field of social control and political conflict rather than a purely technical response to nature. Rivers were infrastructure before railways The Ganga, Gandak, Bagmati, Kosi, Mahananda, and their distributaries carried boats, supplied fisheries, watered fields, deposited silt, and created ferries and market points long before the railway age. Seasonal navigation and crossing conditions varied sharply. A river could connect a bazaar to wider exchange in one season and isolate the same locality after channel migration or flood damage. Transport history must therefore begin with water. Railway and road systems were inserted into an already active network of channels, landing places, seasonal tracks, ferries, cattle routes, and pilgrim itineraries. The new infrastructure did not replace this older mobility in a single transition. The Kosi as a moving river system The Kosi occupied a broad alluvial fan and repeatedly shifted among channels across the north Bihar plain. Colonial officers encountered erosion, deposition, waterlogging, sand casting, abandoned channels, and newly formed diara land as recurrent administrative problems. The later image of a single river permanently confined between embankments should not be projected backward onto the nineteenth century. Settlement reports and later geomorphological work allow course change to be reconstructed, but each map belongs to its own date and survey purpose. This volume therefore avoids converting a sequence of historical maps into an exact year-by- year river position where the evidence does not support that precision. Bagmati, Kamla, Gandak and the multiplicity of flood regimes North Bihar did not experience one uniform flood regime. The Bagmati and Kamla crossed low-gradient plains with shifting channels and drainage interactions; the Gandak carried Himalayan sediment toward the Ganga; smaller channels could become locally destructive even when they were absent from provincial narratives. District boundaries also cut across river systems. Policy consequently varied by tract. An embankment that appeared effective on one reach could cause drainage congestion elsewhere. Comparisons across rivers are useful only when the local channel pattern, floodplain elevation, maintenance system, and downstream effects are specified. The Ganga, chars and diaras Along the Ganga and its tributaries, accretion and erosion produced chars and diaras whose legal and fiscal status could be disputed. A newly emerged tract might be fertile but unstable; a village recorded in one survey could lose land to the river before the next. These processes linked physical change to tenancy, estate boundaries, policing, and assessment. The colonial archive therefore contains both geomorphological evidence and legal argument. Survey maps, settlement reports, boundary proceedings, and revenue cases should be compared rather than treated as interchangeable descriptions of land. Alluvion and diluvion as legal problems River-made land forced the colonial state to translate dynamic floodplain processes into property categories. Accretion could enlarge a holding, while diluvion could erase it; re-formation raised disputes about continuity of title and boundary. Legal doctrine did not stop river movement, but it shaped which claims could be recognized after the channel changed. This juridical layer is important because the physical river and the cadastral river were not always the same object. Survey lines, court decrees, estate papers, and actual channels could diverge, especially in years of rapid erosion or avulsion. Permanent Settlement and hydraulic responsibility The Permanent Settlement fixed government revenue demands on recognized estates but did not produce a simple rule for who must maintain every embankment, drainage cut, or river work. Harrison's 1875 Bengal Embankment Manual shows that government intervention after 1793 involved continuing disputes over responsibility, benefit, cost recovery, and state control. Hydraulic works therefore sat uneasily between private property and public risk. A bund on one estate might protect taxable crops while transferring water to another. The state repeatedly had to decide when an ostensibly local structure had consequences large enough to justify public supervision. The Bengal Embankment Act of 1873 The Bengal Embankment Act, 1873, was enacted on 24 December 1873. It provided a statutory framework for government action relating to embankments and associated land. Harrison's manual, published in 1875, explained the administrative history and controversies that had accumulated since the Permanent Settlement. The Act should not be read as the moment when embankments first appeared. Bunds and flood banks were much older. Its importance lies in formalizing powers and procedures within a colonial legal order that increasingly treated river works as matters of engineering, revenue, land acquisition, and public administration. Zamindars as hydraulic intermediaries Praveen Singh shows that zamindars became central intermediaries in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century flood control in north Bihar. Estate interests could favour embankments that protected valuable cultivation, roads, or settlements. Government, however, did not always agree with local proprietors about the long-term effects of those works. This relationship was neither simple partnership nor permanent opposition. At different moments the state compelled repairs, tolerated private construction, debated removal, or shifted financial responsibility. Hydraulic authority was therefore layered in much the same way as agrarian rights. Indigo, plantations and private bunds Commercial agriculture could create its own hydraulic priorities. Later studies of the colonial floodplain note private embankments associated with plantation and estate interests, including works intended to shield crop zones. These structures entered a wider drainage system whether or not they had been planned as regional works. The historical point is not that every private bund caused flooding. It is that cumulative construction could alter the movement of water, and responsibility for those combined effects was difficult to assign within a property regime organized estate by estate. Roads and railways became hydraulic structures Raised roads and railway embankments crossed natural drainage lines and therefore acted as hydraulic structures as well as transport routes. Culverts and bridges were intended to pass water, but openings could become inadequate when channels shifted or flood volumes changed. Colonial records repeatedly linked insufficient waterways to local flooding and waterlogging. This dual role complicates celebratory narratives of infrastructure. A railway could reduce the cost of moving grain while simultaneously obstructing drainage in a neighbouring tract. The same work could increase resilience at one scale and vulnerability at another. Insufficient waterways and the archive of complaint Selections from colonial railway records cited by Praveen Singh include files from 1896-1905 concerning insufficient waterways on the Tirhut State Railway. Such records are valuable because they connect engineering specifications with petitions, flood observations, and the recurring need to enlarge or alter openings. Complaints do not prove that every reported flood was caused by a railway embankment. They do show that local people and officials understood transport works as part of the hydraulic landscape rather than as neutral lines laid across it. Flood reports as an administrative genre The Bihar State Archives' digitized collection on colonial floods demonstrates how routine reporting developed across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Files cover crop damage, inundation, relief, bund construction, river boundaries, survey of diaras, and later telegraphic reporting procedures. A flood report was not a transparent photograph of suffering. It followed administrative categories: acreage damaged, roads cut, relief required, prices, mortality, and revenue effects. What could be counted was more likely to enter the permanent record than household losses, unpaid care work, or displacement that did not meet official thresholds. The floods of 1871 The Bihar State Archives catalogue preserves multiple files from 1871 on floods in Tirhut and Purnea, including damage from the Bagmati and heavy rain. Their clustering shows that flood administration was already producing cross-district correspondence before the famine and railway crises of the mid-1870s. These records are especially useful when read with district gazetteers and later settlement reports, because each source class emphasizes a different temporal scale: immediate emergency, retrospective district description, or cadastral reclassification. The Kosi bund file of 1895 The Bihar State Archives catalogue includes an 1895 file on the erection of bunds along the Kosi River. The catalogue entry is a secure archival anchor for official attention to Kosi embankment proposals or works in that year; it does not by itself establish the exact length, effectiveness, or continuity of any structure. This distinction matters because later flood-control histories can compress separate local bunds into a single imagined system. The chapter therefore cites the archival horizon without inventing a continuous nineteenth-century Kosi embankment line. River movement and the Nepal-British boundary A 1907 Bihar archival file concerns changes in a river course forming part of the boundary between Nepal and British territory in the Patna Division. The file illustrates a larger borderland problem: when a boundary followed a mobile river, physical change could acquire diplomatic and cadastral consequences. The colonial border was thus not merely a surveyed line imposed on static terrain. Rivers required repeated observation, correspondence, and negotiation. This is one reason the history of Mithila cannot be separated cleanly into modern national containers. Floods of 1913 and the expansion of public debate Floods in Bihar and Orissa in 1913 generated official reports and legislative questions about damage and prevention. By the following years, questions concerning Champaran, Darbhanga, and Muzaffarpur addressed both relief and the history of recurring floods. The growing public record reflects provincialization after 1912 as well as the widening of representative institutions. Flood control became a subject on which engineers, administrators, landlords, legislators, and affected communities could make competing claims about responsibility. The 1915-1917 flood-control questions Bihar and Orissa council questions from 1915-1917, preserved in the state archive catalogue, asked about flood prevention, past flood history, relief measures, and engineering schemes. Their form reveals an important political transition: disasters could be used to demand explanations from government rather than being treated solely as district administrative events. This did not make policy democratic in a modern sense. Representation remained limited, and many floodplain residents lacked direct institutional voice. Nevertheless, the archive of questions and answers helps reconstruct how river management entered provincial politics. Surveying the diaras Diaras demanded repeated measurement because the terrain itself changed. Survey operations along the Gandak, Gogra, Ganga, Kosi, and other rivers attempted to stabilize rights and boundaries on paper even when channels continued to migrate. Maps became instruments of both knowledge and adjudication. The resulting cadastral precision should not be confused with physical permanence. A survey can be highly accurate for the date of observation and still become obsolete after erosion, accretion, or avulsion. The Kosi Diara surveys of the 1920s Nalinindra Lal Bose's report on the Kosi Diara area of Purnea and Ray Hardatta Prasad's later report on Bhagalpur and Purnea provide unusually detailed colonial attempts to classify land in an actively changing river environment. The later operations extended through 1926-1931. These reports connect geomorphology to tenures, rents, settlement boundaries, and cultivation. They are therefore foundational sources for the social history of the Kosi, but their categories must be read as products of settlement administration rather than timeless local classifications. Local knowledge and engineering knowledge Cultivators, boatmen, fishers, ferrymen, estate staff, and village officials accumulated practical knowledge of channels, drainage paths, breach points, and seasonal crossings. Engineers brought surveying instruments, hydraulic calculations, standardized drawings, and comparative experience from other regions. The two knowledge systems were not simply opposites. Officials relied on local testimony, while villagers could use engineering language in petitions. The more useful historical question is whose knowledge entered a sanctioned plan, whose observations were discounted, and who bore the cost when a design failed. From confidence to engineering scepticism Praveen Singh's reconstruction shows that by the 1930s some engineers had become strongly sceptical of attempts to confine north Bihar rivers and favoured removing embankments where possible. This technical shift arose from accumulated experience of drainage obstruction, sedimentation, and unintended effects. Yet existing 'protected' zones generated political constituencies for keeping embankments. Once cultivation, roads, settlements, and property expectations adjusted to a structure, removal could appear as a new threat. Hydraulic policy therefore acquired path dependence before the postcolonial era. Flood control as distribution, not elimination No embankment eliminated flood risk for an entire basin. It redistributed the timing, depth, location, and political visibility of water. Areas behind a bund might avoid frequent shallow floods while becoming vulnerable to waterlogging or a severe breach; areas outside might receive concentrated flows. This distributive perspective is more historically useful than asking whether colonial flood control 'worked' in the abstract. Success and failure depended on scale, beneficiary, season, maintenance, and the counterfactual against which a project was judged. Diagram 36: colonial river governance as a feedback system Diagram 36. Colonial river governance as a feedback system. Original analytical diagram for this volume. Sources: Harrison 1875; Hill 1997; Singh 2008; Bihar State Archives flood collection. The 1873-1874 Bihar famine The famine crisis of 1873-1874 exposed the vulnerability of north Bihar to crop failure, high prices, and weak transport. Contemporary government response placed unusual emphasis on importing and moving grain. The crisis became one of the contexts in which railway construction was justified as both immediate relief and long-term infrastructure. Famine history must still distinguish availability from entitlement. Grain movement could improve while poor households remained unable to purchase food. Roads and railways changed the logistics of relief; they did not erase inequalities of income, credit, caste, or access to state assistance. Relief works and the making of the famine line The official history of the East Central Railway identifies the Dalsinghsarai-Samastipur-Darbhanga route as the 'Famine Line.' Construction began in the famine context and a 43-mile line opened to the public on 1 November 1875 under the state-owned Tirhut Railway. Earlier temporary operation and relief construction preceded the permanent opening. The line is important because transport infrastructure and disaster administration were institutionally linked. Labour on works could provide wages, while the finished railway promised faster movement of grain and officials. A relief project could therefore become a durable instrument of market integration and state reach. From temporary relief line to Tirhut State Railway The famine line did not remain an isolated emergency track. The permanent railway was developed through later extensions connecting Samastipur, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, and additional north Bihar routes. A project born in scarcity became part of a regional transport network. That transformation also changed land values, market orientation, travel time, and administrative access. Yet the chronology of individual branches must be kept distinct; later extensions should not be backdated to the original 1874-1875 famine construction. Railway expansion and uneven integration Railways allowed grain, cash crops, passengers, mail, and officials to move farther and faster, but access depended on distance from stations and the condition of feeder roads and ferries. A village several kilometres from the line could remain difficult to reach during the monsoon. The network therefore produced corridors and nodes rather than uniform modernization. Some bazaars gained traffic; others lost passing trade. Transport advantage became a new component of regional inequality. Railway ferries and broken lines Before major bridges spanned every large river, railway systems relied on ferries to connect discontinuous sections. Historical railway reports describe ferry connections across river channels, including links associated with Kosi extensions. Passengers and goods therefore moved through combined rail- water systems. This hybrid infrastructure is easily forgotten in maps that show continuous later railway routes. In the colonial period a 'rail journey' could include transfer to boat, seasonal delays, and the relocation of a ghat as channels shifted. The Kosi and the railway frontier Railway extension toward the Kosi and Nepal frontier was constrained by the same river mobility that made transport desirable. Alignments required embankments, bridges, and ferries in terrain where channels could migrate and approaches could be damaged by flood. Transport policy thus reproduced the central hydraulic dilemma: building a fixed line across a mobile landscape demanded continuing maintenance and sometimes redirected water. The railway was not simply laid upon the floodplain; it became part of it. Roads, bridges and district government Metalled roads and bridges expanded the reach of district headquarters, courts, police, schools, markets, and medical relief. Their importance is visible precisely when they failed: flood reports routinely recorded cut roads, damaged bridges, interrupted ferries, and isolated police stations or market centres. A road network therefore belonged to the administrative geography of the state. Repair priorities reveal which routes officials considered essential for revenue, policing, commerce, and relief. Transport and pilgrimage Railways and roads altered pilgrimage to Janakpur, Simraongarh-area shrines, Ganga ghats, and other sacred centres by shortening some journeys and changing where travellers assembled. Older foot, bullock-cart, and river routes continued alongside stations and branch lines. Pilgrimage traffic also reinforced commercial networks. Fairs, lodging, food markets, animal trade, and religious travel shared infrastructure, making it difficult to separate sacred mobility from economic mobility. Markets after the railway Railway stations became new points of aggregation for grain, oilseeds, livestock, cloth, salt, and migrant labour. Yet market integration remained dependent on local roads, credit networks, wholesalers, and river crossings. Price convergence was therefore uneven. The chapter treats railway expansion as a change in transaction costs rather than as automatic development. Who benefited depended on control of produce, access to credit, ability to travel, and exposure to new competition. Disaster and the politics of repair Flood or famine transformed routine public works into urgent political questions. Which bridge was repaired first, which embankment was cut, which road received relief labour, and which village qualified for assistance all distributed public resources. Repair records can therefore reveal state priorities more clearly than completed-project lists. They show infrastructure as a continuing fiscal commitment rather than a one-time act of construction. Malaria, drainage and waterlogging Colonial debate about drainage increasingly linked stagnant water, embankments, and public health. By the early twentieth century, official discussions of drainage and river utilization also considered malaria and the agricultural effects of waterlogging. Medical and engineering explanations changed over time, so retrospective certainty should be avoided. What is historically secure is that drainage became simultaneously a sanitary, agrarian, and hydraulic problem within provincial administration. Weather observation and the numerical state Rain gauges, river observations, crop estimates, price series, and damage returns expanded the numerical archive of calamity. These measurements made comparison possible across districts and years, but their coverage and reliability were uneven. A number in a government report is therefore evidence of both an event and a reporting system. Missing data may reflect administrative absence rather than absence of rain, flood, hunger, or damage. Maps, gauges and the production of a manageable river Survey maps and water-level observations translated mobile rivers into lines, levels, and sections that engineers could compare. Such representations were indispensable to planning, yet they necessarily simplified a landscape of multiple channels, local depressions, seasonal wetlands, and informal cuts. The history of colonial science is strongest when maps are read alongside field notes, petitions, maintenance files, and subsequent channel change. A map could guide intervention while also concealing processes outside its scale. Calamity archives and social invisibility Administrative disaster files often privilege taxable land, public buildings, roads, and officially registered deaths. Loss of fodder, domestic utensils, unpaid household labour, fisheries access, common grazing, and informal housing could be recorded inconsistently or not at all. This archival imbalance intersects with caste, class, gender, and landholding. The households most vulnerable to displacement were often those least able to produce documentary proof of loss. The earthquake of 15 January 1934 On 15 January 1934 a major earthquake devastated large areas of north Bihar and Nepal. The Geological Survey of India's Memoir 73, published in 1939, remains a foundational scientific account, combining intensity observations, geology, ground effects, eyewitness reports, and damage to structures and infrastructure. The chapter uses the exact date as secure while avoiding the uncritical transfer of later magnitude estimates into the contemporary record. Modern seismology can reassess the event, but colonial reports should be cited for what they actually observed and calculated. Ground failure on the alluvial plain The 1934 memoir documented fissuring, subsidence, sand and water eruptions, and severe ground disturbance in parts of the Ganga plain. Such effects help explain why damage varied even among buildings of similar apparent construction. The event demonstrates that disaster cannot be reduced to the shaking source alone. Soil conditions, groundwater, building materials, maintenance, settlement density, and infrastructure design shaped local consequences. Darbhanga and the earthquake Darbhanga lay within the severely affected north Bihar zone. Estate buildings, public structures, houses, roads, and communications all entered the reconstruction archive. Damage to elite architecture is often better photographed and described than damage to ordinary dwellings, creating a strong visual bias in later memory. A balanced account therefore uses palace and institutional damage as evidence without allowing it to stand for the total social impact of the earthquake. Muzaffarpur and the central damage tract Muzaffarpur and adjoining areas were among the tracts closely documented in scientific and administrative accounts of the earthquake. Reports recorded building collapse, ground effects, communications disruption, and the difficulties of immediate relief. Local variation cautions against assigning a single intensity or damage ratio to an entire district. The memoir's detailed observations are more useful than a generalized regional label. Monghyr, Bhagalpur and the eastern field The earthquake's effects extended into the eastern Ganga region, including Monghyr district, which receives specific treatment in the Geological Survey memoir. This connects the disaster history of Mithila with Anga and the wider Bihar plain rather than confining it to Darbhanga alone. Infrastructure damage in the east also affected through- routes linking Patna, north Bihar, Bengal, and the Ganga corridor, showing how a regional earthquake could become a network-wide transport event. Bridges, rails and communications after the earthquake The Geological Survey memoir includes dedicated observations on bridges and other engineered structures. Damage to tracks, bridge approaches, roads, telegraph or administrative communications could delay relief even when the transport network had previously increased connectivity. The earthquake therefore reversed the normal logic of infrastructure: systems designed to accelerate movement became vulnerable links whose failure determined where help could arrive quickly. Relief administration in 1934 W. B. Brett's 1935 report documents measures taken by the Bihar and Orissa government through the end of 1934. Relief required damage assessment, camps, medical support, grants, loans, transport, temporary shelter, and reconstruction decisions across a very large affected area. Such reports show administrative capacity, but they also define eligibility. The categories used to distribute assistance shaped whose losses became compensable and whose recovery depended on family, landlord, credit, charity, or migration. Reconstruction and new building practices Earthquake reconstruction encouraged renewed attention to structural design, building materials, and public works standards. Scientific investigation and administrative rebuilding became connected: observed failures were turned into lessons for future construction. The result was not a uniform transition to earthquake- resistant architecture. Cost, technical capacity, local materials, and the distinction between public and private construction limited the reach of new standards. Earthquake memory and the politics of evidence Photographs, palace ruins, official reports, memoirs, and oral recollection created different memories of 1934. Monumental damage can dominate visual history because it was photographed, while household displacement and long-term debt are less visible. The chapter therefore distinguishes spectacular evidence from representative evidence. A famous photograph may be authentic without being statistically typical. Famine, flood and earthquake were not one category Colonial administration increasingly grouped calamities within systems of relief and public works, but famine, flood, and earthquake operated through different physical mechanisms and temporalities. Famine could develop over months through crop and price failure; floods could arrive seasonally or suddenly; earthquakes struck without hydrological warning. Comparing them is useful for studying state capacity and inequality, not for erasing their differences. Each disaster generated its own evidentiary problems and forms of vulnerability. Calamity as a test of the colonial state Disasters exposed the gap between claims of administrative order and the physical limits of government. Relief could demonstrate logistical capacity and humanitarian concern, while failures revealed thin staffing, poor roads, contested statistics, and unequal access. Public criticism of relief and flood policy became part of provincial politics. Calamity therefore shaped legitimacy as well as mortality and material loss. From colonial debates to postcolonial river engineering By the 1940s north Bihar's flood problem had accumulated a long archive of embankment controversy, drainage complaints, surveys, and proposals. Postcolonial governments inherited not an untouched basin but a landscape already reorganized by estates, railways, roads, cadastral boundaries, and partial river works. Chapter 26 returns to the Kosi after independence. The analytical continuity is institutional: postcolonial barrage and embankment projects emerged from earlier debates, but their scale, treaty framework, and engineering system were new and should not be backdated into the colonial period. Source control: event, report and retrospective interpretation This chapter uses three evidentiary levels. Dated laws, archival files, railway openings, survey operations, and the 1934 earthquake provide firm chronological anchors. District reports and engineering memoirs describe conditions through official categories. Later scholarship interprets the political and environmental consequences of those interventions. Keeping these levels separate prevents a common error in environmental history: turning a later diagnosis into a statement that colonial officials already possessed the same explanation at the time of action. Diagram 37: calamity, transport and state-building chronology Diagram 37. Calamity, transport and state-building: selected colonial anchors. Original analytical diagram for this volume. Sources: Bengal Embankment Act 1873; East Central Railway historical note; Bihar State Archives; Prasad 1932; Dunn et al. 1939. What changed by the end of colonial rule By 1947 the region possessed denser transport networks, more formalized flood administration, wider cadastral coverage, and a much larger archive of engineering knowledge than it had in 1765. Yet rivers remained mobile, disaster losses remained unequal, and infrastructure itself had become part of the hydraulic system. The colonial legacy was therefore double. It expanded the capacity to measure, move, repair, and intervene while also fixing property, roads, rail embankments, and administrative expectations into a landscape that continued to move. Chapter conclusion: mobility, risk and state power The history of rivers and calamity cannot be separated from the history of transport. The famine railway, flood embankments, roads, ferries, cadastral surveys, and earthquake reconstruction all show the state attempting to stabilize circulation and revenue in a physically unstable environment. The most durable lesson is not that technology failed or succeeded once and for all. Every intervention redistributed access and risk. A connected history of Mithila, Vajji, and Anga must therefore treat environmental change, infrastructure, property, and political authority as a single field of historical analysis. Chapter-specific bibliography Harrison, Henry Leland. The Bengal Embankment Manual: Containing an Account of the Action of the Government in Dealing with Embankments and Water-courses since the Permanent Settlement; a Discussion of the Principles of the Act of 1873. Bengal Secretariat Press, 1875. Hill, Christopher V. River of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in Riparian North India, 1770-1994. Association for Asian Studies, 1997. Singh, Praveen. 'The Colonial State, Zamindars and the Politics of Flood Control in North Bihar (1850-1945).' Indian Economic & Social History Review 45, no. 2 (2008): 239-259. https://doi.org/10.1177/001946460804500203. Government of Bengal. The Bengal Embankment Act, 1873 (Bengal Act VI of 1873), enacted 24 December 1873. Bihar State Archives. Flood in Colonial Bihar (1871-1939): Selected Digitized Collection. Government of Bihar. Bose, Nalinindra Lal. Final Report of Survey and Settlement Operations of the Kosi Diara Area of the District of Purnea, 1923-26. Government of Bihar and Orissa, 1927. Prasad, Ray Hardatta. Final Report on the Kosi Diara Survey and Settlement Operations in the Districts of Bhagalpur and Purnea, 1926- 1931. Superintendent, Government Printing, Bihar and Orissa, 1932. Inglis, W. A. The Canals and the Flood Banks of Bengal. Bengal Secretariat Press, 1909. Inglis, W. A. A Review of the Legislation in Bengal Relating to Irrigation, Drainage and Flood Embankments. Bengal Secretariat Press, 1911. Government of India. Report of the Indian Famine Commission. Calcutta, 1880. East Central Railway. General Information: Founding of the Division - A Brief History. Official history of the Dalsinghsarai-Samastipur- Darbhanga famine line and Tirhut Railway. Dunn, J. A., J. B. Auden, A. M. N. Ghosh, S. C. Roy, and D. N. Wadia. The Bihar-Nepal Earthquake of 1934. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India, vol. 73. Geological Survey of India, 1939. Brett, W. B. A Report on the Bihar Earthquake and on the Measures Taken in Consequence Thereof up to the 31st December 1934. Government Printing, Bihar and Orissa, 1935. O'Malley, L. S. S. Bengal District Gazetteers: Darbhanga. Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1907. O'Malley, L. S. S. Bengal District Gazetteers: Muzaffarpur. Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1907. O'Malley, L. S. S. Bengal District Gazetteers: Purnea. Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1911. Bengal Government. Bengal District Gazetteers: Bhagalpur. Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1911.