Recent years have seen a burgeoning of scholarship in infrastructure from across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Infrastructures have been conceptualized in various ways. For some, they are built networks that facilitate various exchanges over space – flow of goods, wastes, people, and ideas, among others. For some others, infrastructures are beyond material networks; people, non-human life, and nature itself is viewed as infrastructure. As to when and how something becomes infrastructure thus becomes relational and socially situated. In the age of neoliberal capitalism that we live in, there’s been a massive proliferation of infrastructures globally – from transport networks to energy infrastructure to mega hydraulic projects – that have reshaped ecologies and life across scales, some with planetary implications. Critical research on infrastructure has thus become all the more relevant today. My new research project focuses on the social life of embankments in eastern India. Ever since the British Raj, embankments have proliferated in the country as a flood control measure. Far from controlling floods, however, these infrastructures have done the opposite – they have turned the natural process of flooding calamitous. Even so, the embankments are here to stay, and riverine communities across the country have found ways to living with these embankments, however grudgingly. Enough has been written about the failure of embankments in flood control. My new research goes beyond that by locating embankments in the wider web of life in the floodplains. This book project is an attempt to rewrite the historical geographies of eastern India by placing the embankments at the center of analysis.