Jacob Shell: Visual Work + Short Essays

This project geovisualizes the shifting of the Lohit River in far northeastern India (today's Arunachal Pradesh) in the years following the 1950 Tibet-Assam Earthquake (8.6 magnitude). As the river shifted, it inundated the district capital of Sadiya, which was completely abandoned during the late 1950s. Today the remains of old Sadiya are right in the middle of the present dry-season course of the Lohit.

I became interested in Sadiya and its destruction while doing field research in Arunachal Pradesh for my book "Giants of the Monsoon Forest" (WW Norton, 2019) about cultures of elephant-reliant transportation in the Indo-Burmese borderlands. During my field interviews in the area in 2016 and 2017, ethnic Hkamti elephant handlers in Arunachal informed me that, in its heyday, Sadiya had been a kind of "city of elephants," where locals owned hundreds of trained Asian elephants who did transport and logging work by day and grazed, browsed, and mated in the town's forested hinterlands by night. Highly adept at providing mobility during floods, the Sadiya elephants had been essential in the evacuation of the town. The ethnographic information I gathered on this subject is presented in Chapter 9 of "Giants of the Monsoon Forest."

Eventually the district capital was relocated inland, to a place called Tezu. Some Sadiya elephants were relocated here and assisted in the construction of an Indian military airfield during the 1962 India-China border war (China still officially claims the Himalayan section of Arunachal Pradesh).

The mapping project, which partly evokes Harold Fisk's classic 1940s series visualizing the archaic courses of the Lower Mississippi, superimposes the present monsoon-breadth of the Lohit (and also a major tributary, the Dibang) on a map of the area surveyed during 1926-1945. The project was done on Adobe Illustrator.

The satellite part of the map shows Google Earth imagery. I have also graphically exaggerated the Sadiya Bridge, a 5.7-mile viaduct across the monsoon high-water level of the Lohit River. This bridge was completed in 2017 and replaced a boat ferry whose cross-river route had to be constantly reconfigured due the transient quality of the Lohit River's many sandbars. I took this ferry in 2016, its final year of operation.

Another way across the river channels of the Lohit-Dibang confluence region, whose fluvial geomorphology becomes highly transient and changeable during monsoon, is by elephant. This was true along the Sissiri River (a Lohit-Dibang lesser-tributary) as recently as 2017 . The below photo shows an elephant ford across the Sissiri River, not far from the village of Dambuk, during September of 2017. (I discuss this ford in "Giants of the Monsoon Forest" and other published works.)

BONUS: while I was doing research in this region in 2016, a Hkamti gentleman in his 70s showed me some old paper records in his possession, written in the rare, and under-researched, Hkamti script. This writing system was formalized in the days of the Hkamti Long statelet which had existed at the northern tip of Burma (centered around modern-day Putao) through the 19th century. I was not able to get a translation of the script. The Hkamti-Shan language is in the Tai language group, but the script resembles the Burmese writing system.