Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  The strongest iteration of the desiccationist view was penned by an anonymous correspondent to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1877. He called himself “Philindus”—an echo, probably deliberate, of the liberal publication Friend of India. His dispatch reached a wide audience, discussed not only in England but as far away as Japan.23 Philindus begins his piece by recalling an episode at “the most sacred sanctuary of South Indian vapidity: I mean the bar of the Madras Club,” where he heard two men, “Jones and Brown of the Civil Service,” denigrating Arthur Cotton’s achievements as driven by vanity and wasteful expenditure. After a strong defense of Cotton’s genius, echoing Cotton’s belief that water was the key to India’s security and prosperity, Philindus set out his main claim: the “disastrous action of drought in Southern India” owed much to the “enormous extent” to which “the jungles of the Carnatic, and of the Peninsula generally, have been cut down during the past century.” He invoked the authority of the American geographer George Perkins Marsh, whose influential 1865 book contained the first global account of environmental transformation by human hands. Marsh had seen that “as forests are cut down, the springs which flow from them, and consequently the water-courses which are fed by these, diminish in number, continuity and volume.” Philindus approved: he was quite certain that “the most crying of the evils” afflicting South India was “the increasing desiccation of the country from the reckless destruction of its trees and forests.”24 In the first of their “Famine Narratives,” published for India’s growing reading public, the Sabha’s reformers invoked a similar sense of drought being caused by human intervention: “Owing to denudation of forests and the absorption of waste lands under the mischievous system of a wrongly conceived revenue settlement,” they argued, “the occasional rain that falls is never retained by the soil.”25

  At the peak of the great famine, the Government of India’s Forest Act of 1878 brought India’s forests under public ownership. Was this the avant-garde of global conservation, or a land grab that dispossessed India’s most marginal people? It was both.26 The attempt to limit the pace at which India’s forests were being cut down began with a material concern about rapid depletion of a profitable resource, vital not least to India’s railways. By the 1870s, the ecological argument pushed in the same direction, spurred by concerns about the long-term climatic harm that deforestation brought. By the same token, the Forest Act compounded the creeping attack on the rights of India’s adivasis. Wrote Valentine Ball, an Irish geologist and anthropologist who had spent many years in central India: “The reservation of forest tracts which prohibits the inhabitants from taking a blade of grass from within the boundaries” had the effect of leaving people “cut off from… food sources throughout wide areas.”27 Forests were a refuge particularly in lean times: a source of tubers, fruits, and other foodstuffs that staved off starvation, even if they were no defense against hunger. The encroachment of the state upon India’s forests threatened the lifestyles as well as the livelihoods of adivasi communities.

  II

  The famine provoked a searching look at Indian society; most of all, it turned the spotlight on the state. The British government’s inaction, its seeming indifference to Indian lives, catalyzed criticism from within and from outside.

  The most immediate charge was that the government of India had neglected the most basic precautions in advance of the drought, driven by a damaging parsimony. It had neglected southern India’s web of tanks; by the 1870s, many of them lay in ruins. One British observer lamented that “the former rulers of India, if not so great or so powerful, yet had more of that simple craft and homely benevolence which show themselves in storing the rain and diverting the torrent to the first necessities of man.”28 In these humble tasks, the British colonial state failed. Their failure was evident when the rains at last came, late in the summer of 1877—so much rain that “the famine year of 1877 will appear in the Madras meteorological records as the year of the heaviest rainfall in a long period.” The maintenance of tanks had fallen victim to the state’s drive to cut spending, but many saw that “when economy is required, [tanks] are the very last thing that should be tampered with.” The neglect of India’s infrastructure of water allowed “a flow towards the sea of a precious fluid which represents in passing away unused a sacrifice of human lives.”29 Florence Nightingale observed that the Madras rains of 1877 “were lost, because the tanks were left unfinished in the autumn of 1876; the order having been issued for the stoppage of all public works” as a measure to cut government spending. The result: “Millions of tons of precious water so ran to waste,” and millions of people starved for want of water.30 From this point on, the “waste” of India’s water came to be a battle cry for humanitarians, engineers, and critics of colonial policy.

  A greater indictment of colonial rule arose from what the famine revealed about the conditions of life in India—it was as if the catastrophe lifted a veil covering the everyday workings of Indian society and economy. The reason that so many people in India were so vulnerable to the failure of the rains, many argued, was that British domination had impoverished them, eroded their defenses. “A people must be poverty-stricken beforehand to be thus absolutely cut down by want of food,” an American observer of the famine wrote.31 The idea that British misrule had undermined Indian economic independence was not novel; Adam Smith had been damning in his assessment in The Wealth of Nations. By the 1860s, the notion of a “drain of wealth” from India was most closely associated with the writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi merchant and scholar who would go on to be elected the first Indian member of the British Parliament. Naoroji penned a devastating verdict on the economic effects of British rule in India. The famines of the 1870s sharpened his scalpel. The vast bulk of India’s people were “living from hand to mouth,” he wrote, so much so that “the very touch of famine carries away hundreds of thousands.” Despite this, he argued, the Indian peasantry bore a “crushing” burden of land tax—India essentially paid for its own colonization through the “home charges” remitted each year to Britain. “Every single ounce of rice… taken from the ‘scanty subsistence’” of India’s people, Naoroji charged, “is to them so much starvation.” Heedless of India’s suffering, British rule, in contravention of its own stated principles, “moves in a wrong, unnatural, and suicidal groove.”32

  Naoroji’s analysis was all the more powerful for being couched in the language of loyalty to empire: his fury was measured, every sentence backed by the colonial government’s own statistics. Like so many political economists at the time, Naoroji was fond of fluid metaphors—he wrote of a “drain” of wealth from India, of “flows” in the wrong direction. India’s closeness to the brink of disaster and the fragility of its people’s subsistence arose from its acute dependence on water. In the view of so many critics of British policy in the 1870s, to mitigate that dependence—to secure life against the “very touch of famine”—ought to be the overriding concern of government.

  AS THE DISASTER UNFOLDED, THE MOST PRESSING CHARGE AGAINST the British government was that it had failed to provide adequate relief to starving people: it was too slow, too callous, too divided within itself, too concerned with economy, or simply too incompetent. The deliberate withholding of relief by the state, underpinned by an unrelenting faith in free markets and notwithstanding plentiful stocks of food in other regions of India—this remains at the core of historians’ later attempts to provide a moral reckoning of India’s nineteenth-century famines.33

  William Digby (1849–1904) wrote the most detailed account of the Madras famine, in two exhaustive volumes that appeared in 1878. Digby was a journalist and campaigner. From a humble start at his local paper, the Isle of Ely and Wisbech Advertiser, Digby edited the Ceylon Observer and, from 1877, the Madras Times.34 Digby’s account is a tragedy in slow motion: a story of warnings ignored, precautions abandoned, decency abrogated. A recurrent theme in his account of the famine is the conflict between local officials, many of them human
e and observant, and an imperial government hidebound by ideology. As the first reports of starvation deaths began to filter through to the government in the last months of 1876, every village magistrate in North Arcot district received a warning from the collector that they would be “held responsible for the safety of individuals whose deaths may have been occasioned by starvation.” But responsibility was precisely what the imperial government wished to avoid. Late in 1876, as it seemed more likely that large-scale famine relief would be necessary, the Madras government tried to bolster its granary by purchasing food in secret, acting through Messrs Arbuthnot & Co. The Madras government was at pains to do so anonymously so as not to interfere with the market, but its actions drew the ire of the imperial government, which ordered an immediate halt to the practice: “The supreme authorities objected to interference with trade,” Digby observed laconically.

  Famines had recurred periodically in India through the nineteenth century. British responses were ad hoc: they depended on the proclivities of the officials in charge at the time; they drew on local precedents and memories of earlier dearth; they were shaped by the security or fragility of colonial control over the affected areas. The most recent crisis before the disasters of 1876–1878, the Bihar famine of 1873–1874, was anomalous: on that occasion British intervention in the face of food shortages was unusually energetic and effective. Rather than imposing controls on the grain trade, the government imported directly 480,000 tons of rice from Burma, which by that time was emerging as India’s new rice frontier. With regular and plentiful rainfall in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma seemed immune from the fluctuations of climatic fortune that bedeviled Indian agriculture. More locally, the state purchased grain incognito, acting through agency houses to stockpile food without creating panic in the market. Local people were employed on relief works for a cash wage. By contrast with common British practice, eligibility tests for relief were neither exacting nor punitive: the administration trusted the knowledge of village leaders and local-level officials. Even by the standards of, say, the late twentieth century, British intervention in the Bihar famine was a success. The official in charge of relief was Richard Temple.35

  Far from celebrating the policy’s success in Bihar, public reaction in England was harsh. The Economist condemned the large expenditure on famine relief, concerned that it had led Indians to believe that it was “the duty of the Government to keep them alive.”36 Worse was to follow. A tract titled The Black Pamphlet of Calcutta, circulated in 1876, turned its fire on Temple in particular, describing his policies as “an economic catastrophe, a culmination of unthrift and unreason.”37 It was published anonymously but its author was soon revealed as Charles O’Donnell, an Irishman who served in the colonial government of India. In these critics’ eyes, the famine was a fiction, because for all the money spent, hardly a single death from starvation was recorded; they refused to see that this may rather have confirmed the policy’s wisdom.

  Temple was stung by humiliation. An ambitious man, he was determined to learn from the experience, and more determined to see that it did not hold back his advancement. When Temple was appointed the viceroy’s envoy to the famine districts in 1877, there were murmurings that he might be too generous. He set out to prove them wrong. As Digby pointed out, “Sir Richard was commissioned to the distressed districts to economise, and it was known… that he would exercise economy.” Temple fought to trim the scale of relief that the Madras government was providing to its starving subjects—in what became notorious as the “Temple Wage,” he cut wages on relief works to (or even below) the level of basic subsistence. A newspaper in Ceylon pointed out with dark humor that the scale of rations provided in the famine relief camps of Madras was significantly lower than those enjoyed by a prisoner, Juan Appu, “recently convicted of knocking out the brains of a near relative.”38 In a missive “from the affected districts,” a missionary correspondent took aim at Temple’s “extra-economical theory of managing a famine”—perhaps there is a double meaning here, suggesting both that Temple’s policy was excessively stingy, and that it was “extra-economical” in the sense of being motivated by ideology more than by economy. The letter concluded: “The duty of a great Government is not only to prevent its subjects from dying of starvation but to save life.”39

  Others around the world drew different lessons from India’s famine. In Shanghai, as news of the horror of North China’s famine reached the port city’s elite, a feature in Shenbao—one of China’s first modern newspapers—praised the British response to India’s famine to underline the paper’s charge that the Chinese state had failed to relieve its suffering subjects. The reference to India was mostly rhetorical, a way to call attention to the Chinese state’s weakness. It was not based on a deep understanding of the Indian famine; rather, Shenbao’s account of the Indian famine drew largely on the accounts of Shanghai’s British press, which reflected the ideological orthodoxy in support of Temple’s parsimony.40

  BY THE TIME THE SUMMER MONSOON ARRIVED IN 1878, SWATHS OF India lay in ruins. At a most cautious estimate, 5 million people had died from starvation or from disease. When the British government appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate the catastrophe, it was all set to be a whitewash. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, sought vindication in the face of widespread criticism at home and abroad; the finance minister, John Strachey, pushed for the appointment of his brother, Richard, as chair of the committee.41 Despite its origins, despite a heavy dose of self-justification, the Famine Enquiry Commission’s 1880 report was an “intellectual and administrative masterpiece,” in the words of one of the most astute observers of hunger and famine in late-twentieth-century India.42 Under Strachey’s leadership, the commission included (as “English” member) the Irishman James Caird, Madras official H. E. Sullivan, and C. Rangacharlu and Mahadeo Wasadeo Barve, officials of the princely states of Mysore and Kohlapur. They toured the country. They accumulated hundreds of hours of testimony. One theme dominated their report—water.

  The famine commissioners’ diagnosis of the root cause of India’s famines was unequivocal: “All Indian famines,” they wrote, were “caused by drought.” The commissioners saw that India’s task was to find means for the “protection of the people of India from the effects of the uncertainty of the seasons.” The seasonality and unpredictability of the monsoon was at the heart of the matter. The report’s opening sketch of India’s geography takes the form of a narrative map of water, an account, by now familiar, of the frontiers of wet and dry lands. Strachey’s long-standing interest in meteorology was one reason why the committee’s report went beyond justifying imperial policy: Strachey saw, here, an occasion for the elevation of meteorology to a position of greater prominence in India’s future. To Strachey’s dismay, there was vigorous debate within the committee. The final report was accompanied by a dissenting note by Caird and Sullivan. They disagreed with the majority view that the government of India was right not to intervene in the grain trade. Caird and Sullivan condemned the reliance on harsh “tests” to determine eligibility for relief; above all, they advocated for the establishment of public granaries in remote districts, where private trade was unlikely to reach. India’s suffering, they saw, came from a “want of timely preparation to meet a calamity, which though irregular in its interval, is periodical and inevitable.”43

  If there was disagreement on how far the state should intervene in markets, on the “inevitability” of drought all agreed. Turning to the question of whether droughts may better be predicted, the famine commission dismissed an idea that was fashionable at the time—the theory that sunspots, dark and cool patches on the sun’s surface caused by magnetic flux, followed eleven-year cycles correlated with droughts across large parts of Earth. The theory was championed by figures including the economist W. Stanley Jevons, famed logician and proponent of the “marginalist revolution” in economics, and William Wilson Hunter, editor of the Gazetteer of India.44 The commissioners, however, concluded that sunspots
“cannot be said to be in any sufficient degree established, still less to be generally accepted”—they had been “contested on various grounds, such as that the evidence is directedly opposed to them.”45 Instead, the commissioners lauded the patient work of meteorological observation. “As at present no power exists of foreseeing the atmospheric changes effective in producing the rain-fall, or of determining beforehand its probable amount in any season,” the commissioners concluded, “the necessity becomes greater for watching with close attention the daily progress of each season as it passes, for ascertaining with accuracy and promptitude the actual quantity of rain in all parts of the country.” They observed that “within the last few years a very satisfactory system of meteorological observations has been established all over British India”—there were more than one hundred rainfall observation stations across the country by 1880, and these tracked the progress and development of the monsoon across the country. The famine commissioners insisted that “it is of primary importance” that this infrastructure “shall be maintained in complete efficiency.”46

  The most important institutional innovation of the commission lay in the Famine Codes, which sought to break the link between drought and famine. They consisted of prescriptions for local government officials faced with scarcity. Their ultimate tool was the provision of large-scale public works in famine-affected areas to generate employment income, and to attract food supplies to the area by boosting purchasing power. The codes were, by definition, an emergency measure, but they also stimulated thinking about how to reduce India’s dependence on the vagaries of the monsoon. “Among the means that may be adopted for giving India direct protection from famine arising from drought,” the famine commission concluded, “the first place must unquestionably be assigned to works of irrigation.”47 The famine commission’s overriding conclusion was that India’s water resources needed to be managed better.