by Sunil Amrith
III
However we understand India’s economic transformation in the nineteenth century, water is at the heart of it. The flow of water—the flow of India’s rivers, their seasonality, their propensity to change course—constrained how India’s producers could respond to new market opportunities and new compulsions. Britain’s industrialization had benefited from an elaborate network of canals; India’s economic development, by contrast, was limited by the difficulty and expense of water transportation. China had a far more extensive network of canals than India at the time, but unlike in Britain, energy sources were far from the waterways.38 The availability of water enabled a changing landscape of cash crop production, for some; water’s absence tested others’ capacity for bare subsistence. Water was instrumental to making the Indian soil produce more of the commodities the world demanded.
In the 1830s and 1840s, India’s British rulers still faced constraints that would have been familiar to their predecessors. Transport was slow—and dangerous. “No part of the inland navigation of India is so dreaded or dangerous,” wrote the botanist Joseph Hooker in 1848, “as the Ganges at its junction with the Cosi”; in the rainy season the Cosi “pours so vast a quantity of detritus into the bed of the Ganges that long islets are heaped up and swept away”; boats “are caught in whirlpools formed without a moment’s warning.”39 The monsoon governed not only the harvest—and threatened the possibility of harvest failure—but also threatened the health of Europeans. Cholera, malaria, and other ailments led many British officials in India to an early grave. Water was still a source of both awe and foreboding for British residents in India. A medical topography of Calcutta published in 1837 stated that “without taking into view the expanse of the Bay [of Bengal], the coup d’oeil of a good map of Bengal will at once show how bountiful nature has been to that country, by means of her majestic rivers with innumerable tributaries.” But these waters were at the same time the source of “aqueous exhalations”—a product of the “commerce of land and water” in a monsoon climate—that menaced life. The author James Martin saw a clear “connexion of the rainy season with disease,” and suggested that “among Europeans, the diseases of the rainy season assume a character of diminished vital action.” Throughout the nineteenth century, fears persisted of whether Europeans could survive tropical climates.40
To make India productive, to integrate it more fully with the global capitalist economy that was in formation, to exploit more effectively its natural resources to feed Britain’s industrialization, British engineers and investors and administrators looked to master the unevenness of water, its extreme seasonality in India; and they sought to conquer space. Both of these quests unfolded between the 1830s and 1870.
HALF A CENTURY AFTER ROXBURGH’S TIME, THE GODAVARI DELTA was still “entirely without any general system of irrigation, draining, embankments or communications.”41 This was the verdict of Arthur Thomas Cotton (1803–1899), the museum to whose memory opened this chapter. Like Roxburgh’s before him, Cotton’s problem was the distribution of rainfall across the landscape. His task: “counteracting the irregularity of natural supplies of water.” “One year a portion of the whole crop… is destroyed by the overflowing of the rivers,” Cotton observed, “in another, the crop is destroyed by a failure of the rains over three-fourths of the district.” He was convinced that “not an acre… need be dependent at all” upon the rains if a comprehensive system of irrigation were introduced. He insisted that the Godavari delta needed not a piecemeal restoration of existing irrigation works, but rather “works of a general nature.” Perennial irrigation; an improvement in the “roads and bridges” of the region; a restoration of the port of Kalinga (“Coringa”) so that it could fulfill its potential as “incomparably the best port” between Hooghly and Trincomalee—such investments in infrastructure would free the district from its uneven and capricious rainfall.
Cotton made a fervent case for government intervention. India was unlike Britain, he argued; the rules governing public expenditure could not be considered akin to the principles of household economy. The problem was that “there is almost literally no capital to enable landowners to make improvement.” An outlay of three hundred or four hundred thousand rupees each year by the state “would put life and activity into the whole district”—in time, revenue would flow into the treasury far exceeding what the state might spend. Possessed by evangelical self-confidence—nothing less than a sense of destiny—Cotton went further. He condemned what he saw as his countrymen’s “proneness… to lower ourselves to the level of natives” instead of “diligently applying the means which God has placed in our hands to benefit the countries He has given us charge of.”42 Cotton found the support and the money for his grand scheme. In 1852, he completed his barrage at Dowleswaram. But his dreams were bigger. Cotton imagined a network of canals that would, one day, bring the Himalayan rivers to the southern tip of the peninsula. He also saw that the rivers had unrealized potential for navigation. In 1867, Cotton dreamed of a link between the Brahmaputra River—its upper reaches were still at that time unknown to British explorers—and the Yangzi. “The throwing open of all India to all China, the access of a country containing 200 millions of people to the produce of a country occupied by 400 millions,” he wrote, would be “a work of such magnitude as that nothing approaching it has ever been seen in the world.”43
In the British imagination as well as in administration, Peninsular India was quite distinct from the “heartland” of Gangetic India. Separated by half a century, William Roxburgh and Arthur Cotton in turn sought to mold a riverine landscape that attached the dry interior of the Deccan plain to the coast of the Bay of Bengal. They sought both to harness and to overcome the political inheritance that distinguished South India from the north. In the former, political power was contested within a system of small states that arose to fill the void of the troubled Mughal Empire; the hydraulic landscape was dispersed in thousands of tanks, wells, dams, and weirs, many of them now lay in a state of disrepair after decades of warfare—not least the warfare that accompanied English expansion. But Cotton’s counterparts along the Ganges were no less anxious to see what could be done to “improve” nature: to repair or replace the hydraulic remnants that scattered the valley. They faced different challenges, they chose different solutions, but they shared many assumptions with their counterparts in the south. Just two years after Cotton’s barrage was complete, a project still more monumental opened its floodgates: the Ganges Canal, at the time (and still today) the largest in the world.
The Ganges Canal was the creation of Proby Cautley—Arthur Cotton’s contemporary, classmate, and eventually his bitter rival. Cautley arrived in India in 1819 as an artilleryman. A few years after his arrival, the first Anglo-Burma war in 1824 drew many of the East India Company’s engineers across the Bay of Bengal; their absence created new openings in India for those without formal training. Like so many Company officers, Cautley was an autodidact. He learned his craft through practice and observation. Working in different ecological settings, Cautley and Cotton embraced different hydraulic approaches. By the 1860s, they fought their battles in a bitter and public war of pamphlets. Cotton accused Cautley of making fundamental mistakes in the design of the Ganges Canal; at stake was not only prestige, but also a debate over the ownership and financial management of India’s hydraulic works.44 Along the Ganges, as everywhere else in India, the infrastructure of water control long preceded British rule. But in the nineteenth century British engineers turned the Ganges valley into one of the most “thoroughly engineered” landscapes in the world.45
The Gangetic plain’s hydraulic transformation began with the Company’s effort to restore the old Yamuna Canal’s supply of water to Delhi. The waterworks dated back to pre-Mughal times: Delhi’s water infrastructure owes much to the rule of Sultan Iltutmish in the thirteenth century. He ordered the construction of an elaborate web of tanks and step wells. The Mughals brought them to a new level of sophis
tication. They built a complex of ornate gardens along the banks of the Yamuna River, laid out around the tombs of Mughal leaders. They watered their new capital at Shahjahanabad from a canal and an interlocking system of smaller canals and drains. Emperor Akbar ordered the renovation of the West Yamuna Canal—first built by the ruler Firoz Shah—for irrigation, and extended it to Delhi.46 Akbar’s Canal Act of 1568 declared the canal’s aims to be “to supply the wants of the poor,” to “leave permanent marks of the greatness of my Empire by digging canals,” and to ensure that “the revenues of the Empire will be increased.”47 The British found the canal gone to ruin, yet traces of its sophisticated engineering remained. In 1820, British engineers restored the water supply to Delhi through the West Yamuna Canal. They followed quite consciously in the footsteps of Mughal architects.
With this success in hand, local administrators turned to the restoration of the eastern branch of the Yamuna Canal. Second in command of this project was young Proby Cautley, who had no prior experience of hydraulic engineering. Cautley was open, perhaps unusually open, to learning from local practices: he suggested adapting local well-building techniques to provide a stronger foundation for bridges than usual European methods could sustain in the soils of the Gangetic plain.48 As he took charge of the canal project, Cautley ordered the construction of rest houses every ten or twenty miles along the path—in keeping with the old Mughal tradition of caravansarais along the Grand Trunk Road. Besides water, Cautley’s interests encompassed archaeology, paleontology, and botany. In 1831, while supervising the digging of a well as part of the canal project, he discovered evidence of an ancient settlement at Belka. With even more enthusiasm, Cautley and his colleague Hugh Falconer began collecting fossils of mammals and birds and fish, eventually shipping to the British Museum in London a collection that took up 214 crates. The history of science in nineteenth-century India often saw the blurring of lines between disciplines.
By the middle of the 1830s, though, Cautley was first and foremost a water engineer. In 1835, he became the Company’s superintendent of canals. His predecessor in that role, John Colvin, had left him with an idea: to build a canal to bring the waters of the Ganges to the arid Doab (the name means “between two rivers”) that lay between the Ganges and the Yamuna. Early investigations concluded that the canal would be too expensive—and probably an engineering challenge too far. The calculus of costs and benefits, so central to the Company’s mode of administrative thought, changed in 1837 when a major famine devastated the drought-prone Doab. By 1840 plans were in place to build what would become the Ganges Canal.49
The centerpiece of the canal complex was a headworks at Haridwar, where the Ganges meets the plains. Its most complex feat of design was the Solani aqueduct, which ran sixteen miles below Haridwar—civil engineer G. W. MacGeorge, author of an 1894 treatise on the infrastructure of British India, called it the “most interesting and remarkable modern structure in India.”50 The technical challenges were formidable. The project created a hybrid landscape as an artificial “river” crisscrossed Himalayan streams that in the summer became torrents. “To carry the great canal—itself a small river—across such a country,” one British engineer observed, “to see it pass silently on, uninterrupted and uninjured by these torrents” was “a triumph of art and engineering ability.”51 Above all, it was a feat of labor. The works were labor-intensive; machines played little role in the initial stages. The canal was the work of thousands who molded and fired bricks, their kilns fed by timber from local forests.52 Earthworkers (bildars) dug the canal. Hundreds of men were deployed in transporting materials. Much of the work was organized by local contractors, who recruited workers from across the region. We know almost none of their names. Historian Jan Lucassen, in studying a strike by the brickworkers in 1848–1849, has uncovered a few of their stories. When their employers tried to cut wages, brickworkers first deserted the site, and later set fire to a number of encampments.53
At the time of its opening in 1854, the Ganges Canal was more than seven hundred miles long. A pamphlet, “A Short Account of the Ganges Canal,” was distributed in English, Hindi, and Urdu at the opening. It declared that “the great motive by which the British government was led to sanction the Ganges Canal” was “to secure to its people, in the country between the rivers Ganges and Jumna, an immunity from the pains and losses that famine brings with it.”54 The famine of 1837 and 1838 was still fresh in the spectators’ memories. For Company administrators, those memories involved the loss during the famine of land revenues, and relief expenditures amounting to over 5 million pounds—financial loss was the spur to action, however sincere the humanitarian considerations might have been.
A year after the canal opened, the North American Review, a Boston literary journal, published an account of the Ganges Canal and its opening ceremonies. It evoked the “double sanctity” that the “mysterious river of the farthest East” now possessed—the Ganges had long been revered and worshipped as a divine river, a place of pilgrimage for people from the distant corners of India; now it was newly (or doubly) blessed by the bounty of technology. The canal was hailed as “the largest of its kind in the world, adapted for navigation as well as for irrigation”; it was “designed not less for the benefit of a remote future than of the present age.” The inauguration of the canal drew large crowds. “From the most distant parts of India pilgrims came up this year,” the American correspondent wrote, “when the revered Ganges was about to leave her ancient and hallowed channel for one formed for her by the hands of strangers.” Quoting from a “private account” that had come into the journalist’s possession, he described how the aqueduct’s embankments were “lined by our own work-people, to the number of more than thirty-five thousand men,” in “long lines of stout forms.” The military presence was strong, for here as in every development of infrastructure in India, military imperatives were paramount. “The infantry were on the tops of the aqueduct parapets” while “the artillery were stationed on a high piece of ground.” The crowd gathered to celebrate the new canal was estimated at not fewer than five hundred thousand people.
The canal was a monument to imperial power, a symbol of English conquest over India’s land and water. In his opening speech, Lieutenant Governor John Colvin—Cautley’s predecessor, and the originator of the idea for the Ganges Canal—declared that “we have an answer… to the old reproach, that the British have left no permanent mark upon the soil of India to attest the power, the wealth, and the munificence of their nation.” But the canal also marked a symbolic step up in the justification of British rule on humanitarian grounds. In the eyes of the American journalist, it was “difficult to conceive of a more impressive service” than the opening prayers consecrating the complex. Seen through the observer’s evangelical imagination, the entire Ganges Canal complex was the work of a “few hundred Christians in the heart of a foreign country, surrounded by many thousand heathens”—a “work of civilization… for the benefit of these unenlightened multitudes.” He declared a new “era of intelligent and liberal government” that “regards and cherishes the interests of the governed.” He conceded that, for all its benefits, the advance of British rule in India had been attended by “the bitter consequences of evil” and “past misgovernment.” But the tide had turned: “The night in which false religion, tyranny, and war have enveloped India,” he wrote, “is giving place to the day of Christianity, good government, and peace.”55
Not long after the completion of the Ganges Canal, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 brought an end to the East India Company’s rule. A mutiny within the army spiraled into widespread social protest that spread across North India; the old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, was the rebels’ symbolic leader. The rebellion was suppressed with spectacular violence. The British government took control of India from the East India Company. The colonial state intervened more extensively in the countryside. It used the law to reconfigure property rights and to reshape relations between landlords and ten
ants, men and women, Hindus and Muslims, dominant and subordinate castes. It used force to settle mobile people, and the force of punitive contracts to mobilize labor for the plantations of Southeast Asia. In 1869, the government’s approach to the land found clear expression in Lord Mayo’s dictum that “every measure for the improvement of the land enhances the value of the property of the State”; especially so, he added, because “the duties which in England are performed by a good landlord fall in India, in a great measure, upon the government.”56
IN THE ODES OF THE EMPIRE’S PRAISE SINGERS, THE ACHIEVEMENTS of British engineers in nineteenth-century India stood without parallel. But what truly was new about the hydraulic fever of the second half of the nineteenth century? For Cotton, it was the capacity to design the world anew through “works of a general nature.” But the ancient tank irrigation of southern India was just as ambitious, just as systemic. Landscapes of water have always been shaped by human intervention. Water historian Terje Tvedt warns us against the conceit that the “conquest of nature” is a modern phenomenon.57 But there can be no question that the scale of the works designed and built in the nineteenth century were without precedent. Steam power broke the physical limits of earlier modes of construction—even though, as we have seen, old methods were used extensively as better adapted to local ecology.