Introduction

The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The most important single element of development during the mid-twentieth century was the massive extension and renovation of Sind's irrigation system and the corresponding increase in acreage of land available for cultivation. The central symbols of this development were three barrage dams—the Lloyd Barrage at Sukkur completed in 1932, the Kotri Barrage completed in 1955, and the Gudu Barrage completed in 1962. This paper examines the way that ideas of development and modernity were inscribed in discourses surrounding the ceremonial events connected with these projects, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing progress on a province considered backward by its administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. Because of the vital agricultural and economic importance of the Barrages to Sind, these ceremonies were major events, in which the harnessing of a capricious natural resource (the River Indus) signified the rulers' mastery over their territory. As such, the ceremonies provide a unique window onto the public presentation of state authority before and after Independence.

The power of ritual in locating states in relation to the peoples whom they govern is well known to the humanities. In terms of colonial India, this scholarship has considered a range of angles, from the shift from princes to nationalist leaders participating in imperial ceremonies during the twentieth-century Raj, to the tension produced by the way that ceremonies function as a performative arena for diverse interests at the same time that the hegemony of the organizer is asserted over the actors.