Zubairi, Hiba Hasan2025-05-092025-05-092025-05-092025-02-05https://hdl.handle.net/10012/21718In less than a hundred years of colonial occupation, almost all of South Asia’s cotton species were erased. Where previously native communities had cultivated thousands of localized subspecies to foster unique properties, the British Empire imposed a single species of American cotton to meet their insatiable demand for textiles. My M.Arch research thesis examines cotton, in the context of South Asia, as a vessel for colonial extraction, environmental transformation, exploitation, and erasure. The displacement of Indigenous ‘desi’ cotton and propagation of ‘American’ cotton gave way to large scale environmental transformation, most notably the construction of the world’s largest irrigation system, to date, across the Indus River Basin. As the irrigation network transformed the province of Punjab into an agricultural asset, colonial intervention erased its forest, wetland and pastural landscapes. Simultaneously, colonial processes of extraction and manufacturing rendered native cotton methods obsolete, resulting in the degradation of textile tradition and the disappearance of native spaces of production such as kharkhanas. With my research, I aim to create spatial documentation of cotton in undivided Punjab, from plant to fabric, as a means to explore how life in South Asia transformed through colonial processes. Through archival research, architectural documentation and tapestries, this thesis traces the processes of cotton cultivation and production across the Punjabi landscape from pre-colonial eighteenth century to British exodus in 1947. Specifically investigating the spatial operations executed by colonial forces in order to displace Indigenous methods of production, and the resistance which came as a response from native Punjabis. Through the obsolescence of these processes, native spaces of cultivation and production were changed forever, diminishing native people’s agency over their land, and altering the relationship between the built and ecological environment. By taking a multiscalar approach with every stage of cotton processing, this thesis disassembles the intertwined nature of imperial forces manifesting in scales from the river delta to the human body. To expand beyond standardized drawing methods as a means of representation and challenge the epistemological truths upheld by these standards, I’m engaging with textile making in efforts to reconnect the work back to native practices and perspectives. The artifact crafted for this thesis was made by me as I uncovered knowledge of my grandmothers’ skills as textile artisans and connected their stories to the persistence of colonial forces in modern day nation-states which continue to diminish the agency and personhood of native communities in regards to land rights.enMaster Thesis