by Sunil Amrith
They make two circles of ropes long enough to suit the depth of the well, fix strips of wood between them, and on these fasten pitchers. The ropes with the wood and attached pitchers are put over the well-wheel. At one end of the wheel axle a second wheel is fixed, and close to it another on an upright axle. This last wheel the bullock turns. Its teeth catch in the teeth of the second, and thus the wheel with the pitchers is turned. A trough is set where the water empties from the pitchers and from this the water is conveyed everywhere.
Further down the Yamuna valley, toward Agra, he noticed that “people water with a bucket”—leather buckets lifted by yoked oxen—which he described as “a laborious and filthy way.”11
The Mughal realm expanded ceaselessly between 1560 and 1605, and again between 1630 and 1690. Its territories stretched from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east, and far into South India.12 The Mughals mobilized long-distance trading networks that followed the caravan routes to the western edge of central Asia and beyond. They stored wealth in precious metals. Once the Mughals conquered the Gangetic plains, they filled the state’s coffers from productive, densely settled agrarian lands and large populations. The Mughals inaugurated a rigorous system of land taxation. The administration relied on an interlocking system of larger landowners (zamindars), who served as tax collectors, and, below them, subordinate holders of rights to the land. The state used land grants to reward its loyal officials and to co-opt local elites into the system.13
Mughal military and financial prowess came from the mounted martial traditions of dry lands. As many as one in five men served in local military forces, often as seasonal labor in a climate where agriculture was uncertain and horses were plentiful.14 But India’s unruly waters had a bearing on Mughal military strategy, as they would later constrain the options of the British. As they approached the Bengal delta, Mughal armies struggled beyond Rajmahal—their horses were ineffective in the humid conditions; they had to use boats. The Akbar Nama, Abul Fazl’s account of the Emperor Akbar’s reign (1556–1603), describes the challenge of climate. In 1574, as Akbar’s forces captured the city of Patna—near the site of the ancient Ganges River port of Pataliputra—they “chose the river route, in this season full of turbulence, and with constant rain and tempest.”15
Aside from military campaigns, the instability of India’s rivers were a source of woe to local inhabitants. Historian Irfan Habib’s An Atlas of the Mughal Empire—a painstaking work of recovery—pieced together, from the minutiae of Persian sources and European travel accounts, how often, how abruptly, rivers changed course. This turmoil came from the huge loads of silt the rivers carried down from the Himalayas—when the rivers were in full force they threw up sandbanks and islands as obstacles around which the waters found a new path; silt deposits raised riverbeds and pushed the rivers into new channels. At other times, sudden changes in course were driven by violent earthquakes. The only response was flight—abandoned settlements lined the banks of vanished rivers, as when the Ganges “deserted” the once-flourishing town of Kanauj in the early sixteenth century. People had no choice but to move with the migrating waters. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the Ganges began to shift eastward. A major earthquake in 1762 and another in 1769–1770 jolted the river away from its channel, forcing it into contact with new tributaries: the Tista and the Jamuna, the Jelangi and the Mathabhanga, the Kirtinasa and the Naya Bhangini. Even the names that rivers bore could be a testament to their instability: “Naya” means new, suggesting memories of an old Bhangini. The coastline shifted with the rivers: Habib reconstructs the coast of Gujarat through “decaying ports”: places that had once been on the coast, that now lay silted up.16
As their realm expanded to reach India’s coasts, the Mughals incorporated within their realm port towns that faced the eastern and western Indian Ocean. Long before the arrival of Europeans, merchants in India had trading links that spanned the Indian Ocean rim. Indian textiles filled marketplaces across Southeast Asia and China, the Mediterranean and West Africa. Many regions of India—Gujarat, Bengal, and the Coromandel coast—thrived on long-distance trade. Textiles brought forth medicinal products, spices, local crafts, and large quantities of precious metals. On one estimate the Indian economy absorbed 20 percent of the world’s supply of silver between 1600 and 1800.17 Throughout Southeast Asia’s era of commercial expansion in the sixteenth century, Indian traders from the coasts of Gujarat, Madras, and Bengal shipped cloth to Pegu and Tennasserim in Burma, to the thriving port of Melaka on the Malay peninsula, and to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java.18
The Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires observed in Melaka in 1512 that ships from Bengal brought “five white cloths, seven kinds of sinabafos, three kinds of chautares, beatilhas, beirames and other rich materials. They will bring as many as twenty kinds.” In their holds came “very rich bed-canopies, with cut-cloth work in all colors and very beautiful,” and “wall hangings like tapestry.” Pires concluded that “Bengali cloth fetches a high price in Melaka, because it is a merchandise all over the east”—from Melaka these textiles would make their way to markets across the Indonesian archipelago. In return, Indian traders exported from Melaka “camphor and pepper—an abundance of these two—cloves, mace, nutmeg, sandalwood, silk, seed-pearls a large quantity, copper, tin, lead, quicksilver, large green porcelain ware from the Liukiu [Japan’s Ryukyu islands], opium from Aden… white and green damasks, enrolados from China, caps of scarlet-in grain and carpets; krises and swords from Java are also appreciated.”19 The variety of Indian cloth gave rise to a lexicon that seeped into languages of trade everywhere: longcloth and salemporis, moris and gingham, dungarees and guinea cloth and kaingulong. Indian weavers targeted diverse markets. Their weaves, patterns, colors, and designs were all adapted to local tastes.20
The Indian Ocean’s trading world reached deep into the interior. It intersected with circuits of commercial exchange that went overland to Central Asia. In India, as elsewhere, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the deepening commercialization of the countryside. From 1500, South India saw the rise of a merchant class whose diversified business included overseas trade, collecting and keeping a share of local tax revenues, and financing local rulers’ military ambitions. Global demand for Indian cotton set up a chain of transactions that linked the cotton-growing countryside to the port towns. Cultivators became more dependent on credit from urban merchants to finance the next year’s crop; gold and silver currency came into more widespread use. Agrarian commercialization fed the Mughal state’s treasury. The state’s demand for cash taxes, historian Victor Lieberman observes, “acted like a giant pump, sucking foodstuffs from the countryside into towns and cites.”21
This was the world that European trading companies entered; initially, they were players among many others. The monsoon winds brought the first Portuguese ships to India at the end of the fifteenth century. Arriving at Malindi on the eastern coast of Africa, Vasco da Gama sought advice from Indian traders there. They counseled him on the pattern of the winds that would take him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. A local pilot guided his voyage. Chartered companies from Europe’s western edge took to the sea because the landed power of the three great Islamic empires—the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal—blocked their path across central Eurasia. So they found an alternative route to the profitable cotton textiles of India, the spices of the Indonesian archipelago, and the ceramic manufactured goods of China. Their ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean. They arrived on the coast of western India to find a region already open to the world, tied by commerce to the littoral of the Indian Ocean right up to the Mediterranean. Coastal India already, in the sixteenth century, faced both ways: connected to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, but also to mountainous Central Asia.22
Successive invaders of South Asia had come on horse from the northwest. Now, parvenu claimants to power approached by sea. Conquest was neither easy nor initially attractive
. Monopoly was what the Europeans sought. In staking a claim to exclusivity they militarized the Indian Ocean’s sea lanes in a new way. Roiled by the Dutch revolt against the Spanish crown at home, the Portuguese soon met competition from the Dutch and English East India Companies in the Indian Ocean. European power was concentrated in a scattering of “factories” along the Indian coast. Each served as a dormitory, a trading post, and a warehouse all in one. European power rested on relationships delicately negotiated with local rulers. Competition among Europeans fueled the companies’ expansion—armed conflict at home and rivalry on the high seas heightened commercial contests in India.
By the eighteenth century European chartered companies had mobilized relationships and resources that spanned the globe.23 They paid for their purchases in Asia with silver from the mines of Potosí (in present-day Bolivia). They transported Indian cottons to the coast of West Africa, and exchanged them for enslaved human beings. Europeans possessed many advantages as they inserted themselves into the fissiparous politics of regional kingdoms that had risen to fill the political void of a declining Mughal Empire. As well as precious metals, they could offer their local allies the security promised by the sophisticated weaponry at their disposal. The companies raised a lot of capital, quickly, aided by their structure as joint-stock firms. They intervened in local succession disputes. They did deals with bankers and zamindars. British, French, and Dutch companies became enmeshed at the frontier between the coast and the interior.24
The transformative moment came in the second half of the eighteenth century. British maritime power pushed inland. Not long after the Battle of Plassey in 1757—which stabilized the British “bridgehead” in Bengal—the East India Company received the diwani, or the right to the land revenues of Bengal, the most fertile province of the Mughal Empire. Bengal’s agrarian wealth funded a violent cycle of English expansion. The Company’s army rose to become one of the largest military forces in the world. The English were the first truly to harness both of the monsoon frontiers, welding maritime and landed wealth. Between 1757 and 1857, British control expanded up the Ganges valley from Bengal; the most rapid period of expansion came in the 1790s and 1800s, as British confidence and ambition were fueled by the worldwide war against France. The Company subdued the proudly independent southern Indian kingdom of Mysore in 1799, the Gangetic kingdom of Awadh and the southern domain of Arcot in 1801, the Dutch-dominated island of Sri Lanka by 1815, the Maratha lands in western India by 1818, and the coast of Burma by 1826. The late Christopher Bayly, whose early work on the merchants and markets of North India is unsurpassed, observed that at all times the Ganges valley remained “the main axis of Britain’s Asian Empire.” The valley’s commerce “pointed northward to the high regions of Central Asia,” while “huge quantities of cotton, opium, and indigo bound for China and Europe” flowed downriver to Calcutta, along with hides, oilseeds, and the saltpeter used to make gunpowder. Shipments of rice, opium, and tobacco went upstream toward India’s northwest frontier.25
As British power forced its way into the interior, into southern and western India, the distribution of water created different possibilities for agricultural, fiscal, and therefore political expansion. For scientists and travelers, mastering the map of India’s water became a matter of curiosity; for revenue administrators it was a matter of urgency.
II
One of the earliest maps of the British domains in India was the work of James Rennell (1742–1830), surveyor-general of Bengal. Given the centrality of the Ganges to British power in India, Rennell set out to map the Ganges, from its source to the Bengal delta. He described the descent of the river from the “vast mountains of Thibet” to the Indian plains, where it “serves the capacity of a military way through the country,” before reaching the ocean in “a labyrinth of rivers and creeks.” Rennell was impressed by the power of India’s rivers: “next to earthquakes,” he wrote, “perhaps the floods of the tropical rivers produce the quickest alterations in the face of our globe.” He described the “extensive islands” of silt (known locally as chars) formed “during an interval far short of that of a man’s life.” Rennell saw that “it is no new thing for the rivers in India to change their course.” He described how the confluence of the Kosi and the Ganges had migrated forty-five miles in a short span of time. The mighty Brahmaputra, India’s second-largest river, had “varied its course still more.” Rennell described the Brahmaputra as unknown, forbidding, and turbulent. Where the Brahmaputra met the Ganges, in the Bengal delta, he described “a body of running fresh water, hardly to be equalled in the old hemisphere.” Its governing influence was the monsoon. The characteristic pre-monsoonal storms, known as northwesters, were “the most formidable enemies that are met with in this inland navigation.” Of enemies there were plenty. Traveling upriver, he wrote, a regular “budgerow” (bajra)—large boats with cabins that covered their length, most common along the Ganges—“hardly exceeds 8 miles a day, at ordinary times.”26
Map of the Ganges and Brahmaputra as they meet in the Bengal delta, from James Rennell, A Bengal Atlas: Containing Maps of the Theatre of War and Commerce on That Side of Hindostan (London, 1781). CREDIT: Courtesy of the Map Collection, Harvard College Libraries
Rennell was not alone in his fascination with, even fear of, India’s climate. As they established gardens as a site of botanical and commercial experiment, Company officials in India took a greater interest in the weather—none more so than William Roxburgh (1751–1815). Roxburgh studied anatomy and surgery at Edinburgh University at a time of intellectual ferment; he left Edinburgh in 1772 to join the East India Company’s ship Houghton as surgeon’s mate on a voyage to India. The following year, he signed on for another voyage, which took him via Saint Helena and the Cape to Madras.27 Upon his arrival at Fort Saint George in 1776, Roxburgh began a meteorological diary. He equipped himself with a portable barometer “made by RAMSDEN” and an indoor thermometer supplied by Nairne and Blunt—scientific instruments, like texts and theories, moved along imperial shipping lines. His outdoor thermometer he placed “under a small, shady tree.” His observations, three each day, devised a scale for describing the winds: “gentle, brisk, stormy, and what we call a tufoon in India.” The rain gauge he had initially proved worthless; he assured his correspondents that he had installed a better model on the roof of his house on the hospital grounds.28 Based initially in Madras, Roxburgh moved south down the coast to the small port of Nagore, long connected to Southeast Asia by Tamil Muslim merchants; from there, he settled in Samulcottah (Samalkot) on the Godavari delta, midway along India’s eastern coast, until finally in 1793 he became director of Calcutta’s botanical garden. Roxburgh followed many pursuits. He made a small fortune as a private trader. He kept an “experimental botanical plantation” where he grew indigo and pepper, breadfruit and sugarcane; he collaborated with botanist Johann Gerhard König, who was stationed at the Danish settlement of Tranquebar on the Madras coast.29
Roxburgh was a keen observer of life around him. He took an interest in how the monsoon’s rhythms shaped farming on the land. “The rains generally set in, in June,” he wrote in his description of the growing season of the Godavari delta, “towards the end of that month, the coarse or early Paddy, is sown, and in July the better sorts, or great crop.” He described how “our rains continue from the time they set in, June, ’till about the middle of November; July and August, are generally our wettest months: in October and November the weather is more stormy, being the period we call the Monsoon.” In his usage, “monsoon” was the period of change, as the winds switched from southwest to northeast. “The cultivator has to depend on the rains,” he said again; “the more favorable they are, the better is the crop.” Higher, more arid lands, “as in every other part of India,” were given over to “dry grain.”30 He undertook a detailed study of hardy crops that thrived in dry conditions, locally and around the world. He ordered samples from across the empire; he planted them in his experimental garden.
31
Roxburgh became an astute observer of South India’s climate, both in its regularity and its extremes. He could not himself escape its risks. In 1787, a severe cyclone struck the Godavari delta; it destroyed Roxburgh’s home, his herbarium, his library, and most of his personal wealth. His family escaped narrowly with their lives. He observed at close quarters the prolonged drought that brought famine to the region in the late 1780s and early 1790s. In 1791 Roxburgh wrote to his friend, celebrated English naturalist Joseph Banks, that “the famine of these provinces begins to rage with double violence, owing to a failure of our usual rains.” Two years later, Roxburgh’s friend Andrew Ross declared that “the dreadful effects of the famine here have… far exceeded any description from us.” He saw that “in many places where populous villages formerly stood, there is at present neither vestige of man or beast.”32 Roxburgh looked for patterns in the data he had collected—he sought to understand the cycles of the seasons, and variations from year to year.33 During his years on the Coromandel coast, Roxburgh had collected an extent of meteorological data on the Madras coast that one historian describes as “unrivalled elsewhere until the 1820s except among indigenous Chinese observers.”34 The early initiatives of Roxburgh and his colleagues formed a foundation on which India’s modern meteorology was built.
He began to wonder, like so many others of his generation and education, whether India’s nature might benefit from “improvement.”35 He wanted to harness the water that “passes annually unemployed into the sea.”36 He was “astonished” to find not the “least trace of any work, ancient or modern, for retaining, or conveying the water to fertilize their Paddy Lands” in the region; the result was that “the cultivators here depend entirely on rains, when they fail, a famine is, and must ever be, the consequence.” Roxburgh observed, and sketched, the Godavari delta; he imagined it transformed. “In consequence of the favourable level and descent of lands,” he wrote, “we clearly see the infinite benefit that must arise from the waters of large rivers when a method of making them subject to the will of man is affected.” The solution he saw was to use natural basins to store large quantities of water as the Godavari descended from the hills.37