This dissertation explores how a unique environmental discourse on “dryness” emerged through a series of colonial practices, interventions, and interactions in colonial South Asia that were aimed at a new way of understanding, and separating, land and water. These interventions were driven by, and helped disseminate, utopian (and seductive) notions of improvement, progress, and futurity that emerged, despite and through resistances, as previously autonomous locales were drawn into conversation with the metropole through the circulation of not only capital, materials, and knowledge, but also images and imaginaries. Focusing on the period from the 1860s to the 1910s, this dissertation traces the historical production of a relationship that was at once material and discursive—between “contained waters” and the creation of dry lands—through both the ideas and design interventions that were central to the colonial enterprise. In scholarship on South Asia, the dominant narrative identifies the first half of the colonial period in India (1750s–1850s) as one of knowledge formation, and the second half (1850s–1947) as involving the application of the knowledges developed through various projects. In Dacca, an urban region in Eastern Bengal that remains understudied, these projects mainly started in the 1860s, when the Dacca Municipality was formally given the legal rights to initiate projects involving procedures like land acquisition, tax collection, and the raising of donations. The Buckland Bund built along the Buriganga River was one such initial—and long neglected—intervention even as it marked the start of a larger and substantial transformation of Dacca’s landscape and other related projects that straddled engineering, landscape, and architectural design. These included the Dacca Water Works, a series of conservancy and drainage projects, and the new Civil Station Buildings, after 1905, when Dacca became the provincial capital of Eastern Bengal. The challenge that tied these projects together, and one that was for engineers and architects to solve, was the drying of the urban landscape by containing its waters. “The Making of Dry and Modern Dacca” examines how the construction of a dry landscape was related to a series of interventions in its waters and the subsequent material transformations. In discussing the material relations, I explore the colonial techniques as they were applied, with new materials brought in at the cost of destroying pre-existing social, material, and ecological realities. Comparing the sites before and after the application of these techniques, I highlight the “ecologically unequal exchanges,” and examine how the new material relations facilitated the subsequent landscape and architectural interventions in such a way as to establish a specific understanding of modernity premised upon what I will call a “discourse of drying.” In this study, I will explore four colonial techniques dedicated to the abstraction and eventual erasure of water: walling, piping, filling/draining, and building. Through each of these, water was contained, articulated, eliminated, and institutionalized. Each chapter discusses a specific project or group of projects that revolved, primarily, around one particular technique. By reconstructing a history of dryness as a history of technology, infrastructure, landscape, and architecture, I will look at the meaning of the material practices used, including what kinds of labor and institutions were involved, what were the terms of discussion of the landscape transformation, what techniques and processes were involved, and what was achieved and lost thereby.