Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  There are two main ways in which my view departs from the perspective of earlier work on the Asian countryside. The first is to see water as more than just a resource. In the pages that follow, the effects of new economic pressures and new technologies on water itself—on the water cycle, on the toxicity of water, on ideas about the value of water—are as important as the effect of water resources on agricultural output, which is what economic historians were primarily concerned with. As Asia’s waters were transformed, water was understood in new ways by meteorologists, hydrologists, and oceanographers. Recent scientific research, made possible by advances in imaging technology and statistical capacity, has transformed the possibility of understanding water and climate historically, bringing us to archives we had scarcely thought to look at. The great French historian Marc Bloch believed that human history lived “behind the features of landscape” as much as it lived in “tools and machinery” and in institutions.12 It lives, too, behind the chemical content of river water samples; behind satellite images of the water that lies underground; behind the composition of the smog that hovers above South Asia every winter, altering its rainfall. It lives in the changing ocean currents and winds.

  In Fernand Braudel’s three-fold conception of historical time, the first, slowest-moving layer was the time of nature and the seasons: a “history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” His perspective influenced histories of the Indian Ocean, for example, in which the regularly reversing monsoon winds provide a basic material backdrop, enabling long-distance trade and shaping the agricultural cycle.13 But over the last two hundred years nature has been altered by human intervention to such a profound extent that that stability and “constant repetition” cannot be assumed. By the end of the twentieth century it became possible to ask—as this book will ask—not only how climate has shaped us, but how we have affected the climate.

  My second departure stems from a more elastic sense of geography. Like most history-writing until the end of the twentieth century, agrarian history took the nation-state for granted, though often the most meaningful unit of study was the region-within-the-nation: South China or Java, the Bengal or Mekong deltas. To put water at the heart of the narrative is to demand that we adopt a more flexible conception of space. Rivers pay no heed to human frontiers; but political boundaries have had a material effect on their flow. The quest to understand climate has led meteorologists and engineers and geographers to think beyond borders; but they have faced countervailing pressure to fix their plans and dreams in place. Water draws our attention not only to the two-dimensional space between points on a map—as when we trace the crooked line of a river—but also to depth and altitude, which turn out to matter more than historians have realized.

  What we end up with is not an alternative to the well-known narrative of modern Asia shaped by empire and capitalism, forged by anticolonial revolution, remade in the second half of the twentieth century by ambitious new states. Rather, water adds another dimension to that familiar story. Asia’s waters have long been a gauge for rulers’ ambition, a yardstick of technological prowess—and a dump for the waste products of civilization. Water is, in a sense, a “sampling device” for other sorts of change, even as changes in water ecology have had a direct effect on millions of people’s lives.14 We can trace many of Asia’s political transitions through the effects they had on water: from the global reach of the British empire in the nineteenth century, to the projects of national reconstruction that the Indian and Chinese states carried out in the twentieth. But the history of water is more than a mirror to human intentions. The history of water shows that nature has never truly been conquered. Water has served as a material constraint on every Promethean plan of growth and plenty. The sheer ferocity of a wet climate—a climate of monsoons and cyclones—remains a source of fear, and no fear is as great as the fear of water’s absence, in drought. The cultural history of water is one of reverence as much as hubris. And water has its own chronology—the chronology of the seasons; the episodic chronology of sudden, intense disasters; the imperceptible chronology of cumulative damage, as manifested in the effects of human activity on the oceans.

  II

  Environmental history derives its richness from a close attention to particular landscapes—the most profound works have often been local and regional in scope, ranging from the study of a single village to a city, a forest, or a river. Only at that limited scale can we truly tease out the relationships between nature and human society. But the scale of environmental change has ballooned; its pace has accelerated. Connections between environmental crises have multiplied: the causes of harm and risk in any given locality may lie far away. We need a larger view. In a 2009 article, “The Great Himalayan Watershed,” historian of China Kenneth Pomeranz took up the challenge: “For almost half the world’s population,” he wrote, “water-related dreams and fears intersect in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau.”15 The Himalayan rivers bind the futures of the significant portion of the world’s population that depend on them; conflicts over their course, and their use, threaten to ratchet up tensions between bordering states, especially India, Pakistan, and China.

  The scale and interconnection of Asia’s water crises provide a starting point for Unruly Waters. But this is not only a view from the Himalayan peaks; still less is it the omniscient view from a satellite image, for one characteristic of the satellite view is that there are no people in it, even if signals of the human imprint are everywhere apparent. This is a history of Asia’s waters with India at its heart—and there are three compelling reasons why India is an illuminating vantage point from which to tell a story that crosses regional and national boundaries.

  The first is India’s centrality to the history of the British Empire; and empire’s centrality, in turn, to the history of climate change. The conquest of most of the world by European powers in the nineteenth century forced a fundamental transformation in the human relationship with the rest of nature. Asian and African lands were drawn more closely into a global capitalist economy. Their absorption was underpinned by imperial gunboats and colonial taxes, but it was driven, too, by new opportunities for enrichment and advancement. India was at the sharp edge of change—exploited more intensively and on a larger scale than almost anywhere else, and pivotal to the further thrust of imperial power into Asia. From European trading companies’ earliest expansion into the islands of the Atlantic and the Caribbean in the early modern era, they thrived on the exploitation of “cheap nature” as well as coerced labor.16 The pace of change stepped up in the nineteenth century. The period from the 1840s to the 1880s witnessed the global triumph of industrial capitalism; in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, “an entirely new economic world was added to the old and integrated into it.”17 India’s fields and its waters were pushed harder to sustain the colonial state—which depended on agricultural taxes—and to produce the raw materials that fed Europe’s industrial machine and its working classes: cotton, jute, indigo, sugar, tea, and coffee. Each of these thirsty crops generated new demands for water.

  From India, imperial power and investment spread east and west across the Indian Ocean. British ships, filled with Indian troops, set sail in 1839 to bombard China, to force the Chinese government to allow the sale of Indian opium to Chinese consumers—a traffic that was vital to the East India Company’s financial health. A reordering of the entire region between India and China followed. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from Burma to Vietnam, Asia’s demography changed as migration opened new frontiers of settlement; its ecology altered to accommodate the spread of cash crops for export. Many of Asia’s largest coastal cities—Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Dhaka, Hong Kong, Jakarta—began life as colonial ports, built to sustain the global trading networks on which European empires thrived.

  Imperial India reached further than the present boundaries of the Indian nation-state, and further, too, than the region we now define as South Asia—present-day India, Pakistan, Banglad
esh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka. But British India was also more internally variegated than independent India. Areas under direct British control existed amid a patchwork of other forms of polity, known collectively as “princely states,” all of which retained a degree of sovereignty while submitting to overall British domination. Both within the Indian subcontinent and beyond its shores, water constituted the connective tissue of imperial power. In the British imagination, India extended across the vastness of the Indian Ocean, connected to China and Southeast Asia (the “East Indies”) through the flow of its rivers and the span of its climate. The ability to imagine India on that scale was, itself, a product of the nineteenth century and its new ways of seeing—maps, censuses, surveys, and photographs. It depended on the compression of space by the railway and the steamship. The contraction of those larger geographies in the twentieth century is a recurrent theme in this book.

  In another sense, too, India’s experience of imperialism cast a long shadow over the history of Asia’s waters. British colonialism was a source of enduring trauma for many Indians, including for the educated elite that led India’s nationalist movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond the outright violence that the British government of India deployed, this trauma resided in a sense of profound social and economic destabilization. The effects of British policies combined with drought at various moments in the nineteenth century to create famines that killed millions. At the core of anticolonial thought in and beyond India was a clear imperative: “never again.” In China, too, the experience of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of European powers, beginning with the catastrophic Opium Wars, left political leaders with a deep and urgent drive for self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The control of water was central to almost every scheme that arose from this quest for development. Memories of the nineteenth century lie beneath the fervor with which India built 3,500 large dams, and China 22,000, in the decades after independence. The memory of subordination by European empires continues to shape Indian and Chinese foreign policy: it orients their approach to agriculture; it even underpins their responses to climate change.

  If India’s role in empire is one reason to put it at the heart of this story, the second is India’s political history after independence. Alone among Asia’s newly independent or postrevolutionary states, India has been a democracy continuously since 1947, for all but three years. Clamorous and vibrant and flawed, Indian democracy has coexisted with glaring social and economic inequalities; the Indian state has often behaved in an authoritarian manner, not averse to exercising the powers it inherited wholesale from the British Raj. In their pursuit of water at any cost, there has been little to distinguish Asian states with different political systems and with varied ideological complexions. Still, the depth and diversity of India’s public sphere has been unique.18 Debates about water in India were never limited to disagreements between experts behind closed doors (as they were in China until the 1980s). They threaded through newspaper columns; they animated social movements; they filled the publications of environmental organizations. Many of these ideas echoed beyond India, and in turn Indian observers marshaled examples and gathered data from around the region. One vehicle for the movement of ideas about water and technology was the cinema. In the second half of the twentieth century India developed a popular film industry that exceeded Hollywood in size and matched it in influence in the postcolonial world: Indian films drew large audiences across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. To an extent that has no parallel, Indian cinema captured the hopes and fears that fired visions of “development” across the Third World. Water was a recurrent theme.

  The third, and perhaps the most fundamental, reason to tell this story looking out from India is a climatic one. The Indian subcontinent is the crucible of the monsoon.19 And the monsoon is the thread that runs through Unruly Waters. In its simplest definition the monsoon is “a seasonal prevailing wind.” There are other monsoons, in northern Australia and in North America; none is as pronounced, as marked in its reversal between wet and dry seasons, as the South Asian monsoon. More than 70 percent of total rainfall in South Asia occurs during just three months each year, between June and September. Even within that period, rainfall is not consistent: it is compressed into a total of just one hundred hours of torrential rain across the summer months. Despite a vast expansion in irrigation since 1947, 60 percent of Indian agriculture remains rain-fed, and agriculture employs 60 percent of India’s population. Unlike China, unlike most large countries in the world, India’s population will continue to be predominantly rural by the mid-twenty-first century. No comparably large number of human beings anywhere in the world is so dependent on such intensely seasonal rainfall. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the finance minister in the imperial government declared that “every budget is a gamble on the rains”; more than a century later, leading environmental activist Sunita Narain reversed the terms but retained the substance of the observation: “India’s finance minister is the monsoon,” she declared.20

  Storm clouds, characteristic of the weeks leading up to the burst of the monsoon. CREDIT: NurPhoto/Getty Images

  Climate is woven into the fabric of Indian social, economic, and political thought in a way that it is not (or is no longer) elsewhere. In the late twentieth century that claim would have raised hackles among scholars of South Asia; it might still do so today. A fundamental assumption of modernity was that we had mastered nature. The notion of India in thrall to the monsoon would seem to perpetuate a colonial idea of India’s irredeemable backwardness. To emphasize the power of the monsoon would be to portray Indian lives as so many marionettes moved by a climatic puppetmaster. That is how this story would have been understood a generation ago. But to our eyes now, alarmed by the planetary crisis of climate change, a reminder of nature’s power has different implications. This is not a story of geography as destiny. It is a story of how the idea of geography as destiny provoked, from the mid-nineteenth century on, a whole series of social, political, and technological responses within and beyond India. The monsoon is significant precisely because it has been a unique source of human concern, fear, and adaptive ingenuity. The desire to liberate India from its climate powered hydraulic engineering on an ever-increasing scale, with consequences far beyond India’s borders. The struggle to understand the monsoon’s dynamics motivated scientific research that remains at the core of our understanding of global climate. Living with the monsoon, India never had the luxury of the climate-blindness that has seeped into many other societies’ worldviews. The history of how Indians have understood and coped with the monsoon may have wider lessons at a moment when climate can no longer be ignored, anywhere in the world—in this sense, at least, India is not behind the world but ahead of it. The lessons are not always heartening. As we will see, awareness of the monsoon’s enduring power has coexisted with inertia, with negligence, with decisions to put more people in harm’s way, and with maneuvers by the wealthy and powerful to insulate themselves from risk.

  The South Asian monsoon has effects far beyond South Asia. We know this, at least in part, because of climate research undertaken in India in the twentieth century. Sir Gilbert Walker, a pioneer of global climate science, wrote in 1927 that “the climate of India is of special interest, not merely as that of the greatest tropical region in the British Empire, but also because it seems to have been designed by nature with the object of demonstrating physical processes on a huge scale.” That sense of scientific opportunity, combined with the pressing material need to understand the monsoon, inspired a century of study in India. Charles Normand, Walker’s successor as head of the Indian weather service, insisted that the monsoon is “an active, not a passive feature in world weather.” Subsequent research has confirmed his view—the Asian monsoon is entwined with many aspects of the global climate. It has an important influence on global atmospheric circulation. The future behavior of the South Asian monsoon has implications for the whole worl
d.21 Arguably no other part of the global climate system affects more people, more directly.

  AND SO, STARTING OUT FROM AND RETURNING TO INDIA, WE FOLLOW the monsoon, the mountain rivers, and ocean currents—straying into Chinese waters, traveling down the Mekong, skirting the coastal arc of Asia, and coming back to the heart of South Asia.

  This is a story with many possible beginnings. The recently excavated Liangzhu Ancient City, along the lower Yangzi River delta, reveals the vast scale of hydraulic engineering undertaken along China’s coast five thousand years ago.22 The elaborate step-wells of Rajasthan and Gujarat, and the anicuts (dams) along the rivers of South India, are testament to a long struggle to cope with the monsoon. But our starting point lies in the nineteenth century, when the scale and interconnectedness of Asia’s waters first became visible, in tandem with unprecedented pressure to put water to work. The concatenation of political, economic, and environmental transformations this set in train continue to shape modern Asia.

  TWO

  WATER AND EMPIRE

  ALONG THE BANKS OF THE GODAVARI RIVER, CLOSE TO THE MIDSIZED city of Rajahmundry on the eastern coast of India, stands a museum dedicated to Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton. Pointing the way to the museum, a bronze statue of the man watches over a busy bridge across the river; he is mounted on a horse, head cocked, eyes on the horizon.