by Sunil Amrith
Behind the self-regarding, if genuine, heroism of the engineers’ accounts lies the forgotten heroism of those Indian workers who built the steel lines, the canals, the bridges. Countless among them paid with their lives. However fervently the railway engineers believed they could import their methods from England—just as they imported steam engines, coal, locomotives, tracks, sleepers, and even prefabricated bridges—what emerged in practice was a hybrid approach to building infrastructure.75 India’s ecology could not easily be “smoothed down.” Whether through railway lines or irrigation canals, reshaping the Indian landscape was a colossal feat of work.
It was India’s hydrology that challenged every scheme. Building the rail line from Howrah to Burdwan in Bengal, engineers faced an “inland sea” of water channels that required, in response, “viaducts, bridges, culverts, and flood openings” on a scale that no engineering project in the nineteenth century had ever attempted. Building bridges and aqueducts over the Himalayan rivers demanded ingenuity and a great deal of improvisation. Designs had to take into account the “immense volumes of water periodically brought down” by the great rivers through “seasons of flood,” and the “erratic and unstable character of their channels.” The rivers “scoured” the piers and abutments of bridges: torrents of water scraped away their foundations. So the engineers harnessed the knowledge of the people who knew the land most intimately. Even with the arrival of steam dredges and sand pumps, the terrible labor of divers and hand-diggers was vital; the piers of India’s railway bridges often reached one hundred feet below the water’s surface.76 Other skills came into play. Work was overseen by men who had experience as seafarers, as lascars, in the British merchant marine. Their mastery of the winds, the tides, the currents; their mastery of a language of command—these were put to new use to reshape India’s inland seas, far from the ocean air.
Few believed as fervently as Rudyard Kipling in Britain’s imperial mission. But in his short story “The Bridge Builders”—based on his experience watching the Kaisar-i-Hind bridge being built across the Sutlej River, a tributary of the Indus in the northwest—what emerges most strongly is a sense of fragility before nature, and the deep dependence of British engineers on local expertise. The driving force in the story is the character of Peroo, a lascar from Kachch, “familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London.” His mastery of the sailing ship had found a new outlet:
There was no one like Peroo, serang, to lash, and guy, and hold, to control the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure upstream on a monsoon night and report on the state of embankment-facings.
As a storm threatens the bridge he has designed, chief engineer Findlayson falls into an opium-induced hallucination, haunted by the question of whether his bridge would survive the onslaught of the water: he asks himself, “What man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic?”77
In the story the bridge survives. But the fears were well founded. India’s ecology of water threatened not only the stability of bridges but the lives of the thousands of men who built them. Railway workers faced punishing conditions; infectious diseases were a constant threat. New infrastructure diverted watercourses, altered drainage channels, modified the water cycle; new risks were not far behind, posed above all by malaria. However far the power of steam had advanced, the monsoon rivers retained the capacity to surprise. In 1868, Sibganj, a “great grain market” along the Ganges, was destroyed: “A northward movement of the river in 1868 swept away the bank on which the market stood.” Traders moved on; they set up at Karik, six miles to the northeast.78
V
If India’s empire builders needed a reminder of their fragility, it came from the ferocity of the monsoon climate.
In October 1864, a “cyclone of unparalleled fury” struck Calcutta and the coastal districts of Bengal. The “rivers raged and tossed like a sea” and left the city “in ruins.” “Far as the eye can see,” a British correspondent wrote, “there is unbroken waste and gloom.”79 The cyclone originated in the Bay of Bengal, to the west of the northern Andaman Islands, on October 2. That morning, from the deck of the Conflict, sailors observed that “the stars had a sickly appearance.” The sailors saw that the sun “rose blood red.” The cyclone had built up in the southwest, its effects felt in Ceylon and Port Blair a few days earlier; it gathered force as it approached the Andamans. From the Andamans the cyclone swept up the Bay of Bengal, traveling at ten miles an hour toward the mouth of the Hooghly River. As the cyclone approached the coast of Bengal, the steamer Martaban was at anchor in the Saugor Roads. By the morning of October 5, the wind-whipped vessel drifted with its “jibboom gone and likewise the fore-royal and top-gallant masts.” By the afternoon the gusts had eased, the captain wrote, “leaving us a total wreck.” The crew realized they had been “dragged 17 miles across the banks at low tide.”80
Another vessel, the Ally, foundered. It had departed from Calcutta on October 4, carrying 335 migrants bound for Mauritius. They were indentured workers, hundreds among the hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers from India bound to labor on the sugar plantations that met the British Empire’s taste for sweetness. The ship was overturned by a gale. Only twenty-two of the emigrants and seven of the ship’s crew survived.81
However visibly Calcutta was affected, the storm was worse in rural Bengal. It swept through coastal districts and moved inland to the northeast, finally fizzling out over Assam on October 7. Few people survived to bear witness. The storm surge generated “great sea waves… which, on reaching shallow waters, were piled up to a height greatly exceeding that of the highest spring tides, when they broke over the low lying lands at the mouths of the Hooghly and Godavery.” A lighthouse keeper wrote to Calcutta in despair: “I cannot accurately state what the loss of life has been by the Cyclone and inundation, but I am afraid the fatal malady has carried off more.” Disease killed many more than the initial flood. “Every tank, pond and well,” he wrote, “is stagnant with decaying matter.” More than fifty thousand people died. Flooding drove millions from their homes.82
This account of the storm, penned in 1867, comes from Henry Francis Blanford. He was born in London in 1834. His father, William Blanford, owned a workshop manufacturing gilt moldings—one of innumerable small manufacturers propelling Britain’s industrialization. In 1851, Henry joined London’s Royal School of Mines, and from there traveled to the Bergakademie in Freiberg to continue his study of mining. Along with his brother William Thomas Blanford, Henry joined the Geological Survey of India in 1855. Their first assignment was to explore the Talchir coalfield in Orissa, in eastern India—vital in this new era when India’s hunger for coal was spurred by the railways. The Blanfords’ inquiries in Orissa established some of the key groundwork for the later discovery of Gondwana, the supercontinent that fused the southern hemisphere’s landmasses together with the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula. Gondwana broke up into eastern and western segments—separating Africa, South America, and Australia—while the Indian subcontinent’s northward drift and collision with the Eurasian continent, around 50 million years ago, created the Himalayas.
The following year, 1856, Henry took over as curator of the new Museum of Geology in Calcutta, and supervised the official Geological Survey of India, charged with exploring India’s geology with a view to exploiting its mineral resources. He spent the rest of the 1850s in southern India, investigating the stratigraphy and paleontology of rock formations between Tiruchirapalli and Pondicherry. After a sojourn back in Europe to recover from ill health brought on “by the exposure incidental to geological surveying in India,” Blanford returned in 1862 to teach physics and chemistry at Presidency College, Calcutta.
Around that time, Blanford became involved with the Asiatic Society. Founded by famed Orientalist and linguist Sir William Jones in 1784, for
“enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia,” the Asiatic Society of Calcutta emerged as the most influential among a network of learned societies in the colonial world. Its journal was a storehouse of cultural, linguistic, and scientific research. The inclusion of meteorology among its subjects was due in large part to the work of a retired ship’s captain and president of the Marine Courts of Calcutta, Henry Piddington (1797–1858). Inspired by the work of Colonel Henry Reid—pioneer of American meteorology and author of An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms—Piddington’s interest in the characteristic storms of the Indian Ocean was deeply practical. His aim is clear from the title of his 1848 treatise, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms, which he dedicated to “mariners of all classes in all parts of the world.” In his catalog of different types of storms, Piddington proposed a new word, “cyclone,” to describe those driven by “circular or highly curved winds.” He derived his term “from the Greek kukloma (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake).” The new science of cyclones demanded attention from sailors, he wrote, “for it is… a question of life and death, of safety or ruin.” He described a “storm wave,” of the kind that struck Bengal in 1864, as a “mass of water… driven bodily along with the storm or before it”; crashing upon bays and estuaries, they caused “dreadful inundations.” Piddington published in the Asiatic Society’s journal a series of ships’ logs, from which he derived his work on the forces driving the Bay of Bengal’s cyclones.83 Blanford began lecturing at Presidency College, Calcutta, a few years after Piddington’s death; he studied Piddington’s writings and developed an interest in the science of storms. Given his prominence in Calcutta’s world of science, given his expressed interest in the weather, Blanford was an obvious candidate to lead the society’s inquiry into the great cyclone of 1864. James Gastrell, Blanford’s collaborator in compiling the report on the great cyclone, was the Asiatic Society’s treasurer, and he also worked as the deputy surveyor-general for the government of India. What began as a report for the Asiatic Society became an official inquiry.
To reconstruct the path of the storm, Gastrell and Blanford pored over the logbooks of ten ships dispersed across the Bay of Bengal through the storm. The storm’s chroniclers tallied the ships’ barometric pressure readings with sailors’ descriptions of sky and sea; they plotted these against the ships’ likely positions to track the storm’s path. The record of the Moneka gives a sense of the terse precision of the ship’s log, heavy with foreboding:
From midnight to noon, light and variable winds from north-west to west, with cloudy weather; sea more composed, but south south-west swell as lively as ever. No rain this day. Barometer 29.74. Thermometer 82˚. From noon until midnight, light and unsteady winds from west by north, with cloudy weather; sky looking very black and lowering to the north and north north-east, with a high rolling sea from the same quarter. Sea rose very quickly; observed lightning in the north north-west. Barometer inclined to fall. Midnight, gently increasing wind from west, with gloomy appearances to north north-east. Sea still very heavy from that quarter. Ship pitching, bows under.
Gastrell and Blanford traced the cyclical motion of the winds by comparing the logs of the Conflict and the Golden Horn. The two vessels began the afternoon of the storm one hundred miles apart; by midnight, they were at most twenty or thirty miles apart, having been blown toward each other by the rotating cyclone. Sailors’ most common response to the power of the storm was awe. The power of steam was no match for the cyclone. The Alexandra was a steam tug, at the mouth of the Hooghly River when the storm hit; traveling into a headwind, its engines “were set going with seven revolutions, at full power,” making no progress. The “frightful roar of the hurricane” drowned out even the din of the steam engine. The winds overcame the ship: a “moaning sound,” a “sudden blast from the northwest,” and suddenly the ship was lying on its side.84
Vital though ships’ readings were, their barometers were not always standardized, and their readings were difficult to compare with one another. The ships’ records had to be read against measurements from land observatories. Gastrell and Blanford had access to the records of sixteen land stations, from Agra and Benares on the Gangetic plain to Kandy in the mountains of Ceylon and Port Blair on the Andaman Islands; farthest south was the station in Singapore. They were few in number and widely spaced. Their records had to be supplemented by the private journals kept by individuals such as one Mr. Barnes of Kandy. He noted on October 1, 1864: “raw and very damp, low scud nimbi covering the greater part of the sky, (dense cirro-cumuli beyond), and moving generally from west south-west, the wind veering from west to south and back.”85
To follow the storm after it made landfall, the investigators relied on eyewitnesses: lighthouse keepers, railway stationmasters, European missionaries and district officials, captains of riverboats, government engineers. Gastrell and Blanford were tireless in their work of archiving the storm. Accounts of the devastation were heartbreaking. The storm’s detectives searched these reports for telling details; they were intrigued by accounts that described the changing color of the sky, the shifting quality of the light, as the cyclone advanced. It was the best record they had of the formation and movement of clouds. Observers saw clouds of “dark lead” and indigo; they saw blackened afternoon skies lit up with “balls of fire,” and nocturnal landscapes glowing with eerie light.86
Storm investigation was a form of narrative, and nature was the protagonist. Gastrell and Blanford depicted a battle of forces. A few days before the storm’s arrival on the coast of Bengal, “the northerly current retreated before its stronger opponent, now forcing its way up the east of the Bay.” That current was in turn “opposed” by the Yamadoung Mountains of Arakan on Burma’s western coast—an obstacle the winds circumvented as they “curved round” them. The story of the storm took form akin to a travel account: it had a point of origin, an itinerary, and a destination—and it left a trail of destruction in its wake. The investigators depicted the storm’s “tracks” using wood-block print, in two dimensions on a map. But their picture of the storm—bringing together pressure readings, wind speeds, latitude, and longitude—was fully three-dimensional. They were as interested in its vertical as its horizontal dimensions: the dance of rotating winds, the churning ocean currents, the contours of landscape.87
Gastrell and Blanford were limited to retrospective reconstruction. What they hoped for was instantaneous information. Their goal was to track future storms as they unfolded, through a network of monitoring stations linked by telegraph. They emphasized the “great importance” of meteorological telegraph stations “along both coasts” of India; ideally, they wanted an archipelago of observatories encompassing Ceylon and the Burma coast, “if possible as far down as Port Blair on the east side of the Bay.” From the very detail of their inquiry into the storm of 1864, they sought an expanded sense of correlation and consequence across space and time, using “indications from distant stations.”88 What were the telltale signs, in the Andamans or in Ceylon, that presaged trouble in Bengal a few days later? How could some form of warning be delivered in time? Their view of the world was one that linked land, sea, and atmosphere. The Indian Ocean, on this view, was a weather factory: the source of India’s climate.
WITH THE ADVANCEMENT OF STORM SCIENCE CAME A DIFFERENT way of thinking about space—and about India’s place in the world. A new understanding of the monsoon emerged from the fusion of maritime and terrestrial observation. In the same decades, British explorers and scientists began to study the Himalayas. From there, botanist Joseph Hooker observed the monsoon from the other side—from the mountain peaks. In Sikkim, Hooker witnessed a watery realm reaching from the ocean to the atmosphere; the sky was a mirror to the sea. “The ocean-like appearance of this southern view,” he wrote, “is even more conspicuous in the heavens than on land, the clouds arranging themselves after a singularly sea-scape fashion.” “Upon what
a gigantic scale does nature here operate,” Hooker exclaimed. He described a climatic system where “vapours raised from an ocean whose nearest route is 600 kilometres distant are safely transported without the loss of one drop of water to support the rank luxuriance of this far distant region.” And then, “the waste waters are returned by the rivers to the oceans, and again exhaled, exported, recollected and returned.”89
The enduring power of the monsoon to cause distress and upset political calculation, within and far beyond India, would become amply clear in the 1870s.
THREE
THIS PARCHED LAND
BETWEEN 1876 AND 1879 THE DECCAN PLATEAU IN THE SOUTH and parts of northwestern India suffered famine as intense as any ever recorded. Twenty years later, in 1896 and 1897, drought ravaged millions of lives again, this time across a large expanse of central India. Before they had recovered, another serious famine struck those same regions in 1899 and 1900. Crops withered. Cattle perished. Tanks ran dry. Employment vanished. Those with the least power in society—the landless, the aged and infirm, women and children—were the first to find that they could earn no money with which to purchase the food that made it to market, its price swollen by scarcity and rumor. People moved to the cities, where some of them survived on private charity; hundreds of thousands moved to British famine camps, where they received meager rations and a cash wage for strenuous labor building roads, digging ditches, breaking stones. Rarely in the voluminous reportage on the famines do we read the actual name of a person who died. They succumbed to starvation; weakened by hunger, they fell to cholera, to plague, to the catchall “fevers” that medical officers inscribed as their “cause of death.”