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Category=NHTB
Category=NHTK
Category=NHTP
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forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780197911457
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 16 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Water in Hyderabad and the Deccan explores how water has shaped power, society, and the environment in the Deccan over nearly a thousand years. Moving beyond technical views, it adopts a hydrosocial lens to show how water and society co-produced each other. From celebrated reservoirs and sacred springs to monsoons, canals, and everyday bodily experiences, the book reveals how elites used water to assert authority while ordinary people relied on it for survival and meaning. It traces how rivers, rituals, floods, and infrastructure shaped governance, class, and culture while also exposing human fragility. A Postscript links historic water politics to today's crises of depletion, privatization, and uneven access. Offering a long-term, deeply interconnected history, the book reframes the Deccan's past through water, challenging conventional narratives and illuminating a region where power has always flowed through its waters. A compelling read, Water in Hyderabad and the Deccan will appeal to scholars working in history, environmental history, South Asian studies, urban studies, sociology, and development research as well as researchers of governance, resource politics, and human-environment interactions.
Benjamin B. Cohen is Professor of History at the University of Utah, specializing in South Asian history with particular emphasis on the early-modern and modern periods. His scholarship focuses on colonial and postcolonial South Asia, with a regional concentration on the Deccan and Hyderabad. Cohen is the author of three monographs, an edited volume, and numerous articles and book chapters. He teaches courses on ancient, medieval, and modern South Asia, as well as environmental history. He received his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his BA from Earlham College.
