Unruly Waters
Page 10
III
Twenty years after the suffering of the 1870s, India experienced two more major famines that marked what historian Ira Klein has aptly called a “grim crescendo of death.”48
The drought of 1896 was felt first in the “black soil” region of Bundelkhand in central India, in the nineteenth century a region at the frontier of cotton production for export. By the end of the year, the summer rains had fallen short; the suffering spread across central India, reaching up toward Punjab, down to Madras, and east to upper Burma. The return of the rains in 1897 then unleashed a lethal epidemic of malaria. The famine coincided with an epidemic of bubonic plague that arrived in Bombay in 1896. The epidemic would persist for a decade, thriving on the large-scale migration sparked by famine, feeding on a population weakened by hunger, spreading along the railway lines to rural areas. In the eastern region of Chota Nagpur, creeping deforestation and colonial forestry laws had imperiled local adivasi communities, which had no local source of subsistence left, even as they fell through the cracks of the minimal safety net provided by colonial relief works. Mass starvation ensued. Only three years later, the same regions of central India faced another failure of the summer monsoon. Rainfall in 1899 was the lowest ever recorded in India. The drought covered an expanse of a million square kilometers of territory—central India was again worst hit—affecting tens of millions of people. In Bombay, the famine of 1899 and 1900 was the worst of the nineteenth century.49
By the 1890s, photographic technology had become cheaper and more portable than it had been two decades earlier. Haunting images of starving people in India circulated through missionary and humanitarian networks around the world. Fund-raising drives garnered millions of pounds in donations. Missionaries, writers, and photographers traveled to India. Among them was the American George Lambert, representing the Home and Foreign Relief Commission that drew its members from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, and Kansas. The famines of the 1890s helped to bring about a new global humanitarian sensibility on the part of middle-class publics in Britain, the United States, and Europe—a sense of identification with the suffering of distant strangers. But the same imagery that brought forth donations often reinforced the idea of a helpless India at the mercy of the elements, diverting attention from the political and economic subordination to British interests that left such a large number of Indians vulnerable to the monsoon. The question that had raised itself in the 1870s remained: was famine a “natural” disaster, or a political one?50
The backdrop to so many of the photographs, and to so many famine travelogues by European and American missionaries and journalists, was the sheer dryness of the land. In 1899, the Times of India’s correspondent in the princely state of Kathiawar, in Gujarat, suggested that even a photograph might not be enough to convey the absence of water:
Were I an artist of the impressionist school and did I wish to represent the scene, I should dash in yellowish grey, a long diminishing streak, which would be the road throwing up the heat that made the distance shimmering and indistinct; a great splash of reddy-brown on either side would indicate the land where the crops should be; and above all a liberal dash of blue from the horizon to the top of my canvas would be the sky. I do not think I ever hated blue before; but I do now.51
Vaughan Nash (1861–1932), a British journalist and correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, described “tracts of dismal sun-cracked desert,” and “brown wilderness spreading to right and left”—there was “no water in the wells, no water in the rivers,” and the people he met at famine camps had their “lips and throats too parched for speech,” so much that “the silence is unbroken.” The famine camps offered a bare minimum. At a famine camp outside Poona, he wondered “whether the people can subsist on this penal allowance without ripening for cholera and other famine diseases.” “There must be something wrong with India,” he concluded, “when one finds a collapse like this.”52
The “collapse” was not as severe as it had been in the 1870s. The Famine Codes had taken effect in 1883—each province had its own, modeled on the template proposed by the 1880 famine commission. Once a district officially declared that it had crossed from “scarcity” into “famine,” the codes’ machinery started up: public works were initiated to provide employment to boost local incomes, combined with relief for those not able to work. However, local governments worked under enduring, sometimes intolerable, pressure to economize; there was a clear incentive for district officials not to declare famines, and many waited until it was too late in 1897 and again in 1899. Nash pointed out that India’s Famine Codes were “excellent on paper,” but in reality local governments were “short of administrators, short of doctors, short of medical assistants, short of material.” The infrastructure of relief was creaky, but it was extensive. At the peak of the famine of 1896–1897, 6.5 million people were receiving public relief. The monsoon failures of the 1890s were more severe than those of the 1870s—1899 saw the greatest shortfall—but mortality was lower. Nevertheless, at the very least a million people died.
The more concerted response to famine in the 1890s cannot be ascribed to imperial benevolence, though there is no doubting the good intentions of many local officials. Rather the colonial state was newly aware of pressure from Indian civil society—from journalists, lawyers, industrialists, and activists who came together in a growing number of associations: professional associations, caste associations, religious associations, reformist associations. They met in study clubs and book rooms, in university halls and public parks; they expressed their views in an expanding universe of print, in multiple Indian languages as well as in English. If the British were quick to see the malign influence of “agitators” behind every criticism of their rule, they could not avoid growing public scrutiny of their actions—or their failure to act. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, which had played such an active role in documenting the 1876 famine, adopted a more confrontational approach under the leadership of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who took over in 1890. When before they petitioned government, now the Sabha convened large public meetings, speaking directly to kisans (farmers) about their rights to relief. The Sabha’s local informants produced reports that contradicted official statistics and fueled criticism. Unable to trust government to intervene, Indian civic leaders took famine relief into their own hands, often working with charities overseas. The private charity of wealthy families had always played a vital role in providing food to the hungry. Arguably it mattered more, for most of Indian history, than government policy; very often it was religiously motivated. But indigenous charity organized itself on a larger scale in the 1890s, mirroring as well as challenging state infrastructures. The two most prominent Hindu reformist movements of the age—the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission—undertook large-scale charity work for the first time during the famines of the 1890s.53 The famines of the late nineteenth century spurred the development of pan-Indian political anger and activism.
IV
More than a century after the great famines, the question of responsibility still haunts us. For Mike Davis, author of a path-breaking global history of the famines, the answer is present even in his title, Late Victorian Holocausts. “Imperial policies towards starving ‘subjects’ were often the exact moral equivalent of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet,” Davis writes; the millions who died during the late Victorian famines were “murdered… by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.” Yes, the rains failed on a colossal scale; but what turned drought into disaster was imperial policy: in the long term, by undermining the resilience of rural communities in the process of dragging India into modern capitalism; in the short term, by denying relief to starving people because of an unflinching refusal to interfere with “free” markets. Far from alleviating famine, the railways encouraged speculation, sucked food out of regions where it was needed most, and hastened the spread of epidemics.54
Without absolving colonial high offici
als of callousness, other writers paint a more ambivalent picture. They point to how life and livelihood in rural India had long been acutely dependent on rainfall; as long as India’s infrastructure remained patchy, this would continue to be the case. “Famines were frequent and devastating” in colonial India, writes geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty, “but were they more frequent or more devastating than famines in pre-colonial regimes? Very doubtful.”55 Economists continue to believe that “railroads dramatically mitigated the scope for famine in India” and made Indian lives “less risky,” but they point out that it took until the early twentieth century for these effects to be widely felt.56
In his global history of the nineteenth century, Jürgen Osterhammel draws a contrast between the Indian and Chinese famines of the 1870s. Osterhammel calls the Indian famine a “crisis of modernization,” which is to say, it was a crisis brought on by the uneven impact of global markets on the Indian countryside. The Chinese famine, by contrast, he called more a “crisis of production than a crisis of distribution.” The affected parts of North China were already under strain; they inhabited an “ecologically precarious niche, where for centuries state intervention had been able to ward off the worst consequences of disastrous weather conditions.” Still reeling from the massive rebellions that rocked China in the 1850s and 1860s—the Taiping Rebellion the largest of them—and under pressure from European encroachment, the Qing state was much less capable than it was in the past of responding to the crisis. Osterhammel is cautious in his assessment of the historical consequences of the great famines of the 1870s. They brought no real change, he argues. In China there was “no really significant increase in political or social protest”; in India, British rule “held firm.”57
But beyond the immense suffering they caused, there is a sense in which the famines were profoundly consequential for the future. The catastrophes of the late nineteenth century left many people—Indian economists and British administrators, water engineers and humanitarian reformers—with an acute anxiety about climate and water. To borrow a phrase from an earlier work of Davis’s—a book about California and not India—climate was at the heart of a new “ecology of fear.”58
FOUR
THE AQUEOUS ATMOSPHERE
IN OCTOBER 1876, JUST AS ALARM SPREAD ACROSS MADRAS OVER THE failure of the rains, India’s eastern seaboard was struck by the worst cyclones ever recorded. Two storms followed in rapid succession: the first hit Vishakapatnam on the Orissa coast; the second inundated the Meghna delta in eastern Bengal. The loss of life was incalculable—the greatest toll was taken by the storm surge that accompanied the cyclone as it hit eastern Bengal. The commissioner of Dacca division, surveying the devastation, wrote of one locality that “not a single hut and hardly a post was left standing”; it was, he said, “too soon to attempt to compute with anything like accuracy the loss of life which has occurred.” In district after district, local people estimated that 40 or 50 percent of the local inhabitants had died. In another village on his journey the commissioner listed the victims not by their names but by their positions: “Moonsif, rural sub-registrar, native doctor, post-master, court sub-inspector, abkaree darogah, two abkaree burkundauzes, seven constables, a mohurir of the moonsif’s court, and a post-office peon.”1
John Eliot, meteorologist of Bengal, set out to archive the storm. He relied on the usual combination of ships’ logs and eyewitness accounts, supplemented now by records from the many land-based observatories that had been established over the preceding decade. Eliot conveyed the ferocity of the storm as it built over the Bay of Bengal: “This piled-up mass of water advanced under the pressure of the acting forces towards the head of the Bay” at twenty miles an hour. He estimated that the storm contained latent energy from the evaporation of water over the Bay of Bengal “equal to the continuous working power of 800,000 steam-engines of 1,000 horse-power.”2 Eliot proceeded to narrate an epic battle of forces between the storm wave rushing in from the ocean, and the Himalayan rivers—the combined power of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra—seeking an outlet to the sea. “These two vast and accumulating masses of water opposed each other over the shallows of the estuary,” he wrote; their “struggle and contention for mastery” brought death and destruction to millions of people. Eventually, the “larger and more powerful mass of water forming the storm-wave” overcame the river waters. It deluged the islands at the mouth of the Meghna, one of three rivers that constitutes the Ganges delta; the islands were themselves “formed chiefly from the detritus of the Himalayas deposited over the area in which the tidal and river waters wage incessant warfare.”3
This was a vision of India’s climate shaped by water in every dimension: the descent of water from the Himalayan rivers and the ascent of water vapor from the Bay of Bengal and the winds stirring the ocean surface and transporting clouds to shore. On what scale should the climate of India be understood? The problem, Eliot noted, was that “so little is known of the action and independent motion of the aqueous vapour in the atmosphere, and of its relations to the atmosphere of dry air.”4 Tracking alongside the story of the disastrous famines, this chapter charts the quest to understand the monsoon that unfolded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Famine spurred the development of Indian meteorology. As knowledge of the monsoons grew, so, too, did awareness that India’s climate was shaped by distant influences. As India’s boundaries hardened, it mattered more to understand the rivers that crossed them. New knowledge of water raised new questions about India’s place in Asia—and uncomfortable questions about how far science could conquer nature.
I
Meteorology was an international science by the 1870s: the telegraph had allowed the world’s weather to be tracked with unprecedented immediacy. In 1873, the United States and a number of European countries agreed to form the International Meteorological Organisation (IMO). Like many international associations at the time, the IMO was a voluntary initiative, founded on an aspiration for greater cooperation between national weather services in the sharing of information. Like many international associations at the time, its concerns were dominated by those of industrialized, imperial powers. Britain claimed predominance in international meteorology because it represented a vast empire of climatic variation.5
Among the priorities of the new international meteorology was to devise a common and standardized language in which to describe the weather anywhere in the world. Especially daunting was the challenge of finding words to describe clouds in all of their variety, in their mutability and evanescence, in all of their profoundly local manifestations. The tools of Linnaean classification struggled to capture the texture of the skies. The basic cloud types that we still use—the puffy white cumulus; the gray blanket of stratus; the wispy cirrus; the dark rain cloud, nimbus—date from the early nineteenth century, in the parallel but independent work of Luke Howard in England and of the French statistician Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The midcentury advent of photography was a fillip to cloud watchers, giving them the tool to capture clouds in a fleeting instant. Under the leadership of Swedish meteorologist Hugo Hildebrandsson, director of the Uppsala observatory, the IMO published its first international cloud atlas in 1892. The atlas aimed to standardize the cloud observations that professional and amateur meteorologists and cloud-watchers were compiling the world over. Hildebrandsson and colleagues illustrated their atlas primarily with photographs, each illustrating a typical instance of a particular cloud form, even if each individual cloud that had been photographed would have changed shape moments later. As historian of science Lorraine Daston observes, long after the effort to standardize observations, knowledge of clouds and weather remained a profoundly local affair.6
Meteorologists in the nineteenth century studied the genesis of storm systems in the Indian Ocean. CREDIT: Illustration by Matilde Grimaldi
Formal classification could not always capture the nuance of clouds in different climates. In agrarian societies (and so across much of Asia) the mutability of clou
ds had an immediate bearing on people’s fortunes and the sky was a series of signs to be read, or warnings to be heeded. Every Indian language contains a rich lexicon to describe clouds, capturing their relation to the seasons and to the landscape. In Tamil, mazhaichaaral invokes the drizzle from clouds that gather atop hills; aadi karu are the dark clouds that gather in the month of aadi, promising a good harvest to come. Notwithstanding the promise of meteorological advances, British officials in India often turned to local, or what they called “folk” knowledge, when they wanted to understand how the weather shaped the harvest. Historian Shahid Amin found in the local archive of Gorakhpur district, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a handwritten account from 1870, penned by a British district officer, compiling local aphorisms about the seasons. The sayings take the form of instructions to farmers issued by each season, personified by its name in the Sanskrit calendar. The hot summer season of “Jeth” (in May and June) says: “Be undaunted by the heat of the season. Make ready your threshing flood; work hard and gather the produce before the rains set in.” The winter season of “Magh” warns farmers to “leave your cane mill and drive the water full into your fields. If God be pleased to give you rain you will be truly blessed.” Other regional traditions across India had their own stores of wisdom about the clouds and the rains. In the words of a Tamil proverb, “If clouds withhold their gifts and grant no rain, the treasures fail across the ocean’s wide domain”—local wisdom conveyed an awareness of the connectedness of the weather across large areas. Cultivators searched the skies for signs of foreboding. “Oh farmer!” another proverb pleads, “get out of the field with the young seedlings in your hand, should you see the first crescent moon in [the month of] Arpisi.” Right up to the 1930s, alongside the development of meteorology, local governments in British India collected and published proverbs about climate and weather and cultivation.7