by Sunil Amrith
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Sunil Amrith
Cover design by Rebecca Lown
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First Edition: December 2018
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Names: Amrith, Sunil S., 1979– author.
Title: Unruly waters : how rains, rivers, coasts and seas have shaped Asia’s history / Sunil Amrith.
Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020666 (print) | LCCN 2018036442 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465097739 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465097722 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Water—Social aspects—Asia—History. | Bodies of water—Social aspects—Asia—History. | Water and civilization. | Asia—Civilization—Environmental aspects.
Classification: LCC DS12 (ebook) | LCC DS12 .A54 2018 (print) | DDC 950—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020666
ISBNs: 978-0-465-09772-2 (hardcover), 978-0-465-09773-9 (ebook)
E3-20181029-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Maps
A Note on Names and Terminology
ONE
The Shape of Modern Asia
TWO
Water and Empire
THREE
This Parched Land
FOUR
The Aqueous Atmosphere
FIVE
The Struggle for Water
SIX
Water and Freedom
SEVEN
Rivers Divided, Rivers Dammed
EIGHT
The Ocean and the Underground
NINE
Stormy Horizons
EPILOGUE
History and Memory at the Water’s Edge
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sunil Amrith
Archives and Special Collections
Notes
Index
For Theodore and Lydia
LIST OF MAPS
Himalayan Rivers
South Asia’s Major Rivers
Northeast Monsoon
Southwest Monsoon
British India, 1900
The Partition of India, 1947
The Brahmaputra/Yarlung Tsangpo
India’s Dams
The Coastal Mega Cities of Asia
Map of Mumbai
Map showing the winds during the northeast monsoon, which blows from December to March.
Map showing the winds during the southwest monsoon, from June to September.
A NOTE ON NAMES AND TERMINOLOGY
MANY OF THE PLACES I WRITE ABOUT IN THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN known by different names at different points in time. As a rule, I have used the names that correspond to the period I am writing about—to cite a few examples, I use Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Poona, and Rangoon when I am discussing the colonial period and the early decades after independence; I switch to Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, and Yangon, respectively, when I am talking about more recent history, as those names were formally changed in the 1990s. I adopt a similar strategy when it comes to country names: for example, I use Ceylon and Malaya when discussing the colonial period, and Sri Lanka and Malaysia when writing about the post-independence era.
For clarity I have transliterated words from South Asian languages in a way that reflects common practice in the region rather than employing the formal diacritical marks favored by scholars of South Asian languages.
A NASA satellite image from October 27, 2002, showing a Himalayan mountain range and the rivers that descend from the Tibetan Plateau into North India. CREDIT: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
ONE
THE SHAPE OF MODERN ASIA
LOOKING DOWN FROM ORBIT, THE LENS OF A NASA SATELLITE LANDS upon this patch of Earth. In the upper half of the picture lies the curve of a Himalayan mountain range, fringed by the iridescent lakes of the Tibetan plateau.
The satellite picture is a snapshot of a single moment on October 27, 2002. But there are layers of history embedded within it. It shows us the outcome of a process that unfolded in deep time. Approximately 50 million years ago, the Himalayas were created by the collision of what would become the Indian peninsula, which had detached from Madagascar, with the Eurasian landmass. The island buckled under the edge of Eurasia, pushed up the Tibetan Plateau, and eradicated a body of water later named the Tethys Sea. “Geology, looking further than religion,” E. M. Forster wrote in A Passage to India, “knows of a time when neither the river [Ganges] nor the Himalayas that nourish it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan.” Volcanic activity under the Indian Ocean kept the pressure up, forcing layers of rock to crumple under the Indian margin to create the largest mountain chain on Earth.1
So massive are the mountains, so heavy is their concentration of snow, ice, heat, and melting water that they shape Earth’s climate. Asia’s great rivers are a product of this geological history. They flow south and southeast, and they have shaped the landscape that is visible here: the force of the rivers descending from the mountains eroded rock, creating the gorges and valleys. Over centuries the rivers have carried silt and sediment from the mountains; they have deposited them along Asia’s valleys and floodplains to sustain large human populations. Writing in the 1950s, guided by maps and not yet by satellite photographs, geographer Norton Ginsburg described Asia’s “mountain core” as the “hub of a colossal wheel, the spokes of which are formed by some of the greatest rivers in the world.”2
And then your eye comes to rest on what was invisible to the satellite but is now superimposed—evidence of a more recent history lies in the borders that dissect the rivers, their shapes governed by bureaucratic, not environmental, logic. Within the frame of this image alone, the mountains run through southwestern China, Nepal, Bhutan, and northeastern India. The rivers are more unruly; they spill beyond the frame of the photograph. From mountain peaks flow ten great rivers that serve a fifth of humanity—the Tarim, the Amu Darya, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangzi, the Yellow River, and, at the heart of this photograph, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The Himalayan rivers run through sixteen countries, nourished by countless tributaries. They traverse the regions we carve up as South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia; they empty out into the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the South and East China Seas, and the Aral Sea.
Look at the left of the picture and you can see a more compressed history. The haze of pollution that hangs over North India is a composite “brown cloud” of human-produced sulfates, nitrates, black carbon, and organic carbon. Aerosol concentrations over the Indian subcontinent are the highest in the world, especially in the winter months when there is little rain to wash the skies clean. Individual particles remain in the atmosphere only for a matter of weeks, but cumulatively the cloud lasts for months—what we see here is a fleeting archive of every domestic stove, every truck and auto-rickshaw exhaust pipe, every factory smokestack and crop fire that burned across the Gangetic plain after the end of the monsoon rains that year. But the location of the cloud, and its contributing sources, testify to a longer twentieth-century history of population growth, urban expansion, and uneven economic development through that belt of northwestern India. Over time, a constant succession of transient “brown clouds” may have attenuated rainfall over South Asia over the past half century, transforming the water cycle that binds the clouds, the mountains, and the rivers.3
Finally, look at the snow on the mountain peaks visible from outer space. The time horizon this gestures toward is the future. The descent of water is vulnerable, now, to the ascent of carbon. As Earth’s surface warms, the Himalayan glaciers are melting; they will melt more rapidly in the decades ahead, with immediate consequences for the flow of Asia’s major rivers—and for the planet’s climate.
ASIA IS HOME TO MORE THAN HALF THE WORLD’S POPULATION, but it contains less freshwater than any continent except Antarctica. A fifth of humanity lives in China, a sixth in India; but China has only 7 percent, and India 4 percent, of the world’s freshwater—and within both countries that water is distributed unevenly. The quality as well as the quantity of water is under strain from a multiplicity of new demands and uses. Asia’s rivers are choked by pollutants and impounded by large dams. An estimated 80 percent of China’s wells contain water unsafe for human consumption; in India, groundwater is poisoned by fluoride and arsenic, or made undrinkable and unhealthy by salinity.4
The effects of climate change are already manifest. They compound the water-related risks that Asia’s peoples already face. Most predictions hold that the Himalayan rivers will swell as the planet warms and the ice thaws; and then, around the middle of this century, they will start to dry out for part of the year. Existing inequalities will deepen: wet regions will get wetter, and dry regions will get drier. Within that broad pattern, there will be an increase in variability and a rise in extreme weather. The effects of planetary warming have already begun to interact with regional drivers of climate change—changes in land use, aerosol emissions, and “brown clouds”—to multiply uncertainty. Coastal regions in particular face a cascade of threats: heat stress, flooding, rising sea level, and more intense cyclonic storms.5 Most at risk is the coastal crescent at the southern and eastern edge of the Eurasian landmass, home to the greatest concentration of the world’s population. All twenty cities in the world with the largest populations vulnerable to rising sea levels are in Asia.6 Most threatened, because numbers are compounded by high levels of poverty and inequality, are Mumbai and Kolkata in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Manila in the Philippines.
All the while, statesmen and engineers plot water’s final subjugation by technology. Over the next decade, more than four hundred large dams will be built on the Himalayan rivers—by India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan—to feed the region’s hunger for electricity and its need for irrigation. New ports and thermal power plants line the coastal arc that runs from India, through Southeast Asia, to China. India and China have embarked on schemes to divert rivers to bring water to their driest lands: costing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, they are the largest and most expensive construction projects the world has ever seen. At stake in how these plans unfold is the welfare of a significant portion of humanity. At stake is the future shape of Asia, the relations among its nations. Each of these risks, each of these responses, is rooted in ideas, institutions, and choices that earlier generations have made—that is to say, they are shaped by Asia’s modern history.
I
To understand why Asia is the part of the world most vulnerable to climate change, why South Asia in particular stands at the front line, we need to turn to the history of water. Across the heartland of Asia—from Pakistan in the west, through India and Southeast Asia, to China in the east—the control of water has underpinned an increase in human population and an expansion in longevity that would have been unimaginable even in the middle of the twentieth century. In a warming world, Asia is distinctive for its sheer scale, and distinctive for the scale of inequality among its peoples. Both are rooted in the quest for water, which is a vital feature of modern Asian history, and one that we have ignored.
The struggle for water in modern history is a global story. We can tell a version of it set in the western United States, or in Germany, or in the Soviet Union, which was an Asian as well as a European power.7 But nowhere has the search for water shaped or sustained as much human life as in India and China. Their demographic weight is not a fact of nature. It is an outcome of history, a history in which the control of water was pivotal. Today that control is more rigorous than ever, thanks to intensive hydraulic engineering, but the foundations of that control are fragile. Nowhere is the multiplier effect of any destabilization in the material conditions of life greater than it is in Asia. This, too, demands a historical explanation. As rains grow erratic and storms more intense, as rivers change course and wells dry up, the hard-won gains of half a century are vulnerable to reversal. The force of planetary warming combines with the material legacy of earlier quests to control water. Warming seas meet coastal zones that sag under the weight of growing cities, many of them founded as colonial ports in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. River deltas are sinking, starved of sediment by large dams upstream that were built in the 1950s and 1960s. We live with the unintended consequences of earlier generations’ dreams and fears of water.
The origins of these dreams and fears, the longevity of the policies and infrastructures to which they gave rise, are the subject of this book. Unruly Waters tells the story of how the schemes of empire builders, the visions of freedom fighters, the designs of engineers—and the cumulative, dispersed actions of hundreds of millions of people across generations—have transformed Asia’s waters over the past two hundred years.
This is not the way we usually understand Asia’s modern history. Since the 1990s, identity and freedom have been the dominant themes in historical writing: these have oriented the study of Asia as much as anywhere else.8 The late 1980s and the 1990s witnessed an upsurge in struggles for democracy in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Burma. In trying to explain the weakness or the persistence of authoritarian states, historians looked to political and intellectual history to capture alternative understandings of freedom, especially as earlier clusters of ideas were reinvigorated after the end of the Cold War. In the study of South Asia, the theme of identity has loomed largest. In India in the 1990s, political mobilization along caste lines—and growing recognition of the deep wounds that caste still inflicts on Indian society—clashed with the spectacular rise of a violent and exclusionary Hindu nationalism to focus historians’ attention on the cleavages of culture and community that continue to divide South Asia.
These histories shed light on struggles for recognition and justice that are unfinished; they pinpoint inequalities that endure. But there is much that we have missed. Novelist Amitav Ghosh points out the irony that twentieth-century literary fiction proved oblivious to the growing crisis of climate change at the very moment of its escalation—a solipsistic turn at a moment when the material world was in the process of irrevocable transformation.9 With only a few exceptions, the same charge can be leveled at those of us who write history. My premise here is that the transformation of Asia’s environment, and in particular its ecology of water, may be as co
nsequential in modern history as the political and cultural transitions that have compelled our attention—and it is consequential, not least, for its impact on both culture and politics.
Outside the specialized field of environmental history, the disappearance of nature from most broad accounts of historical change has been marked. It is also recent. In the 1970s and 1980s, agrarian history was a vibrant field. In those decades, discussions of water and agriculture in Asia fought to shake off the ghost of the German Marxist sociologist Karl Wittfogel. Wittfogel had argued in the 1950s that the need for centralized control over irrigation lay at the heart of “hydraulic societies” like China, ancient Egypt, and India, predisposing them all to absolutist government, or what Marx had called “oriental despotism.”10 Wittfogel’s generalizations crumbled under closer examination. The agrarian histories written in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized the variability of arrangements through which different Asian societies harnessed the power of water. They all insisted on the importance of irrigation, but traced no simple relationship between that hydraulic fact and political forms. Browse through any study of South Asian or East Asian agriculture written in those decades: water is omnipresent. Historians of China were inclined to take a very long view, showing how the control of water shaped Chinese society and civilization over millennia; historians of South Asia were more likely to emphasize discontinuity—and especially the rupture that came with British colonialism, which forced the Indian countryside more fully into the global capitalist economy. Whether on the scale of millennia or of decades, this work exudes a rich sense of landscape. It is alive with a sense of the seasons changing, of the shifting flow of rivers, of the threat that floods or drought posed to human survival.11 This tradition of historical writing disappeared most conspicuously from the study of South Asia, where the turn to cultural history swept all before it. But in other fields, too, historians decamped to the cities, leaving rural history behind as they turned to urban culture and politics, to intellectual history, to histories of cosmopolitanism and travel and migration. They did so just when a mounting water crisis began to pose an existential threat.