by Sunil Amrith
But the monsoon failures of the 1870s were so total, so devastating, that new answers were sought from the new science of climate.
II
Faced with the total failure of the rains in 1876 and 1877, India’s meteorologists sought an explanation. Leading the quest was Henry Blanford, the geologist-turned-meteorologist who had risen to prominence with his study of the Calcutta cyclone of 1864, and who was now director of the Indian Meteorological Office. In his regular report on India’s climate and rainfall for the year 1876—written with factual detachment in the midst of disaster—Blanford ascribed the drought to the “remarkable and unseasonable persistence of dry northwest winds”—winds he had studied a few years earlier.8 Blanford observed two abnormal forces at work: the first was exceptionally high pressure across northern and western India; the second was a sharper than normal temperature contrast between northwestern and eastern India. He concluded that “some cooling influence more potent than usual was at work, probably in the Punjab and on the northern mountain zone.”9 The following year, again, Blanford reported that “the land winds have been so persistent in the upper provinces and on the plateau south of the Ganges, as to cause an almost complete failure of the summer rains in that region.”10 As he sought to understand what had happened, what Blanford needed above all was data.
By the time of the famine commission report in 1880, India had more than one hundred meteorological observation centers. In the decade that followed, Madras, for instance, maintained eighteen observatories under the directorship of Elizabeth Isis Pogson. She was the daughter of Norman Pogson, an astronomer who was director of the Madras Observatory for decades. Isis was taken on in 1873 in the role of “computer,” earning the salary of a “cook or a coachman.” The family grew up in poverty, and Isis was forced to work, as well as looking after her siblings upon her mother’s death. By the 1880s, as meteorology developed as a branch of science separate from astronomy, she was placed in charge of Madras’s network of monitoring stations.
Pogson was zealous, inspecting regularly as many of the rain monitoring stations as she could. Her reports exposed the shaky edifice upon which India’s weather data were based. Weather observatories tended to be built on hospital grounds, under the responsibility of the local medical officer; some were more enthusiastic than others about this addition to their duties. At Cochin, Pogson found that the local station needed better fencing, “to prevent stray cattle straying into the shed”; she personally arranged for supplies from Oakes and Company of Madras. She battled vandals as much as cattle. In Cuddapah, “the grass minimum thermometer had only been in use for six days when it was… found broken outside the hospital compound, evidently done out of sheer mischief.” From Kurnool, she had to report that the data were “perfectly useless” because of the positioning of the apparatus. There, the local postmaster had to double as the meteorological assistant, and he struggled with the job. “He was very willing and anxious to learn,” Pogson wrote, “but… could not possibly undertake to record” the data “as his combined duties as Postal and Telegraph Master were too much.”11
The traces she has left in the archive are filtered through the technical language of meteorology and contained within columns and tables of official forms. As far as I know she left no personal papers—we can only speculate about how Isis Pogson experienced being a rare woman within the scientific apparatus of British India. As a young science struggling for legitimacy meteorology was likely more open, a little freer from prevailing hierarchies, than more established fields. Meteorology was among the “field sciences” that, as historian Kapil Raj shows, were more open to local knowledge than the laboratory sciences. But the obstacles Pogson faced getting her due recognition as a pioneer of global meteorology are telling. In 1886, she was nominated for membership of the Royal Astronomical Society; she was turned down after the council decided that the use of the masculine pronoun throughout the Society’s charter meant that women could not be admitted as fellows. She finally became a member only in 1920, after she had returned to England, leaving India and meteorology behind.12
The Indian staff of the meteorological department, too, found a degree of openness they would not have encountered elsewhere in the bureaucracy of the Raj, though this was always weighed down by the knowledge that they could never rise beyond a subordinate position. Much was left in their hands by an institution that was young, understaffed, and underfunded. The most senior Indian meteorologist under Blanford, Lala Ruchi Ram Sahni, wrote a memoir in the 1930s, by which time he had risen to prominence as a patriot and a social reformer in Punjab; his recollections give us a rare insight into everyday life in the cockpit of monsoon science. Ruchi Ram recalled the global reach of Indian meteorology even at that early stage; Blanford would invite him home regularly to sit down and discuss the latest research findings “made in Russia, America, or somewhere else.” Blanford’s emphasis was always “on the interdependence of the weather in different parts of the world.” Ruchi Ram recalled that this “made a deep impression on me in its widest implications.”
But Ruchi Ram concluded his account of the meteorological department on a more personal note. He suggested that “if all Englishmen were like Mr Blanford, the social and political relations between the two races [British and Indian]… would have been quite different from what, unfortunately, we find today.” He absolved Blanford of any sense of racial arrogance. Ruchi Ram’s most powerful memory was “trifling,” but revealing. Most British officials in those days, he recalled, would bark orders at their subordinates, keeping them waiting, and standing—but not Blanford. Blanford, Ruchi Ram wrote, “never once shouted to me from his chair, or even sent for me through the chaprasi.” Instead, “the old man would get up from his seat, and opening the door that separated our rooms, would say gently, ‘Lala Ruchi Ram.’”13
Looking forward, it is surprising to note how many Indian intellectuals spent time working in the meteorological department in the early twentieth century. They included Chintamani Ghosh, founder of the influential nationalist periodical The Modern Review, and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a master statistician who would play a leading role in making economic policy in independent India. In part, this may have been down to the way meteorology posed a daunting challenge of statistical analysis, which attracted many of India’s brightest minds; in part, it may have come from a sense that understanding the monsoon was of vital importance to India’s future. And perhaps the Meteorological Department also left them freer from restrictions and pressures. On that count, Ruchi Ram learned one important lesson from Blanford: “He would ask me not to do this or that work myself, but got it done by one of the clerks so as to find [me] more time for self-study.”14 But that is to get ahead of the story.
AS RECORDS OF THE MONSOON ACCUMULATED, METEOROLOGISTS looked to capture its “normal” characteristics. In the late 1870s, Henry Blanford described the monsoon as a self-contained system; a climatological force that shaped and demarcated the Indian subcontinent: “India, together with the circumadjacent seas, is, in the main, a secluded and independent area of atmospheric action.”15 In Blanford’s vision, the monsoons were an active force—he saw that “the goal of the monsoon, the place of low barometer to which its course is directed, is constantly changing.”16 Blanford viewed the monsoon as driven by the “primary contrast of land and water.” He confirmed what was by then well known, that the driving force of the monsoon was the difference in solar heat received by the land surface of India at different points in the year, and its contrast with the relative heating or cooling of the Indian Ocean. But Blanford was able, now, to introduce new complexities to the science of the monsoon. He showed that the monsoon was not, as many had believed, “one current flowing alternately to and from Central Asia,” but rather that it was formed from the intersection of “several currents, each having its own land centre.” He described an alternate opening and closing of the Indian subcontinent to wider atmospheric forces. In the periods of transition, as
the winds reversed—between March and May, and again in October and November—Blanford observed that “the interchange of air currents between land and sea is, in a great measure, restricted to India and its two seas.” But once the southwest and northeast monsoons had set in, they connected the Indian “wind system,” as Blanford called it, with “those of the Sunda Islands and Australia, and, at one season, the trade winds of the South Indian Ocean.”17
Driven by clear laws, Blanford believed that the monsoons were strongly predictable. “Order and regularity are as prominent characteristics of our atmospheric phenomena,” he wrote, “as are apparent caprice and uncertainty those of their European counterparts.”18 Beneath this broad predictability, however, the monsoon was characterized by its unevenness. Within any given monsoon season, Blanford observed, rains were not “persistent and unvarying”; rainfall was subject to “prolonged periods of suspension” as well as “regular interruptions known as ‘breaks.’” Even more striking was the monsoon’s spatial unevenness: meteorologists found “a great diversity of rainfall” in different parts of India. “No country in the world,” Blanford insisted, “furnishes such contrasts.” Even as the broad contours of the monsoon seemed amenable to prediction, uncertainty was a defining climatic feature in many parts of the country, and “those provinces which have the lowest rainfall are also those in which it is most precarious.”19
Meteorological anxiety about the unevenness of India’s rainfall shaped perceptions of the land itself. In the most lyrical passage in his guide to India’s weather, Blanford contrasted tropical with temperate landscapes:
Instead of feeding perennial springs, and nourishing an absorbent cushion of green herbage, the greater part flows off the surface and fills the dry beds of drains and watercourses with temporary torrents. In uncultivated tracts, where jungle fires have destroyed the withered grass and bushy undergrowth, and have laid bare the soil and hardened its surface, this action is greatly enhanced;… not only is water lost for any useful purpose, but by producing floods, becomes an agent of destruction. Under any circumstances, the character of the rainfall is hardly compatible with economical storage and expenditure in any high degree; and much more, therefore, than in temperate regions is it incumbent on us to safeguard such provident arrangements as nature has furnished for the purpose.20
The rhythms governing the distribution of rainfall proved an enduring mystery. Indian meteorologists pored over the correlations of monsoon failure across different parts of the country. Blanford observed the “curious relations in the way in which certain provinces are prone to vary alike,” suffering drought or excessive rainfall simultaneously, “while others vary in the opposite direction.”21 The 1880 famine commission observed that on five occasions over a century, severe droughts on the Indian Peninsula were followed, a year later, by drought on the plains of North India. The causal mechanisms at work eluded meteorology until well into the twentieth century. Much uncertainty still remains.
As clues mounted, Blanford looked back at his annual reports for 1876 and 1877, and he grasped the significance of two tentative observations he had made at the time. The first was that the years of the great drought had also seen unusually heavy snowfall over the Himalayas, later than usual in the winter. Blanford investigated this puzzle over the years that followed. By 1884, he was convinced that the “extent and thickness of the Himalayan snows exercise a great and prolonged influence on the climatic conditions and weather of the plains of North-Western India.” He suggested that keeping a close watch on Himalayan snowfall might hold the key to predicting the strength of the summer’s monsoon to follow. But he was also quick to acknowledge that the forces at work might be far larger. Between 1876 and 1878, he wrote, “excessive pressure was shown to affect so extensive a region, that it would be unreasonable to attribute it to the condition of any tract so limited as a portion of the Himalayan chain,” vast though the mountains were. Blanford’s calculations showed that high pressure had prevailed across “extra-tropical Asia… and in Australia.”22
Weather scientists across the British empire sought to pool their expertise and their information. Isis Pogson’s detailed account of her library’s holdings in Madras gives us a glimpse of these global connections. It included the proceedings of the First International Meteorological Congress in Vienna and reports from observatories in Batavia and Singapore and Manila.23 The development of monsoon science probably owed more to imperial and interimperial networks within Asia and Oceania than to wider international ones. As Blanford pursued his intuition about the great drought, he relied heavily on “private correspondence” with district officials in the Himalayas, and with meteorologists across the British Empire.24 He wrote to his counterparts at other stations across the Indian and Pacific oceans asking them to furnish him with data on atmospheric pressure from 1876 to 1878. Charles Todd, chief meteorologist of South Australia, was quick to respond with records from South Australia and the Northern Territories. Todd and Blanford both saw that their data correlated. By 1888, Todd concluded that “there can be little or no doubt that severe droughts occur as a rule simultaneously” over India and Australia. Information filtered in to Blanford from island observatories, too, which had long been central to British and French ecological investigations: Mauritius, Reunion, the Seychelles, and Ceylon.25 It was clear, by the 1880s, that the scale of influences on India’s climate reached far beyond India’s shores.
The famine commission of 1880 had expressed hope that the development of meteorology may provide some advance warning of monsoon failure. In 1881, Blanford was asked to come up with concrete proposals to implement the famine commission’s recommendations for the development of India’s meteorological infrastructure. His priority was the establishment of more monitoring stations. But he also looked to the more systematic collection of data from ships: a strengthening of the earliest maritime roots of meteorology. Information from ships was “urgently required” not only to track storms, but also “to throw light on the causes of the variations of the south-west monsoon rainfall.” From 1881, data was collected systematically from every ship entering the port of Calcutta.26
In 1882, Blanford began to produce his first, tentative monsoon forecasts. A long-range monsoon forecast was a fundamentally different enterprise from the storm warnings that had dominated the concerns of Indian meteorologists. Especially with the aid of the telegraph, the approach of storms was now immediately visible. Cyclones were dramatic; their impact was urgent. Forecasting a year’s monsoon, by contrast, required a more fundamental understanding of climate and climatic variation, founded on the slow analysis of a wide range of parameters on longer timescales. Despite his own awareness that India’s climate was subject to oceanic or even planetary influences—a phenomenon that we now know as “teleconnection”—Blanford chose to base his forecasts on one primary indicator: snowfall in the Himalayas. From 1885, the Indian Meteorological Office’s annual monsoon forecasts were published in the Gazette of India—and for the first few years, they proved accurate, at least as a broad-brush indication of whether monsoon rainfall was likely to be normal, excessive, or deficient.
III
The investigation of the oceanic and planetary influences on India’s climate became an enduring concern for John Eliot (1839–1908), Henry Blanford’s successor as director of the Indian Meteorological Office. The son of a schoolmaster and a graduate of Cambridge, Eliot began his career in India lecturing at the engineering college in Roorkee, which Proby Cautley had established at the head of the Ganges Canal; he moved on to Muir College in Allahabad, where he also served as director of the local meteorological observatory. In 1874, he took up a position as professor of physical science at Presidency College, Calcutta, where Blanford had also taught—and Eliot took over Blanford’s role as meteorological reporter to the government of Bengal. In 1886, Eliot again succeeded Blanford, now as the meteorological reporter to the government of India—effectively the head of India’s meteorological service—a
nd held that position until 1903. Tall and heavy-set and prone to bouts of illness, Eliot was also an “accomplished musician” on the piano and organ.27 In contrast with Blanford, Eliot was known, by his Bengali staff, as “the native hater.” Blanford’s most senior Indian officer, Lala Ruchi Ram Sahni, decided he would rather quit his job and move to the Punjab Education Department than work for the irascible and prejudiced Eliot.28
Like Blanford, Eliot first served in Bengal. Like Blanford, his early work was on the cyclones that threatened the Indian coast. Even as prolonged drought stalked the land, sudden tropical storms continued to pose a recurrent threat, as Eliot had seen during the cyclones of 1876. Eliot pursued simultaneously the two strands of Indian meteorology that Blanford handed on to him: the study of extreme weather events, and the quest to forecast each year’s monsoon. The first proved easier than the second to achieve.
Eliot’s greatest influence on the field came from his understanding of cyclones. A few years after taking over as chief meteorologist of British India, Eliot published his Handbook of Cyclonic Storms in the Bay of Bengal.29 The nautical roots of monsoon science remained evident: Eliot’s book was, above all, a practical guide for seafarers. It gained readers across Asia. Among those who learned from Eliot’s book—calling it both “masterful” and instructive”—was Father José Algué (1856–1930), a Spanish Jesuit meteorologist who led the Manila Observatory and stayed on after the 1898 American conquest of the Philippines to head the weather bureau.30 From a network of observatories across the western Pacific, local weather watchers grappled with the power and the unpredictability of tropical storms known as “typhoons” in the Chinese-speaking world: storms identical in nature to the cyclones of the Indian Ocean and the hurricanes of the Atlantic. The Japanese government invested in a centralized system of weather observation in keeping with its modernizing thrust after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Elsewhere private bodies took the initiative—particularly the Jesuits, who founded a series of meteorological observatories across and beyond the Spanish empire: at the Real Colegio de Belém in Havana (in 1857), at Ateneo Municipal de Manila (in 1865), and at Zikawei (Xujiahui) on the outskirts of Shanghai (in 1872). From 1869, the British-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service developed a network of meteorological observation. As in India, the practical value of storm forecasts for mariners provided the spark. Robert Hart, director of the Chinese customs, wrote of his hope of “throwing light on natural laws and… bringing within the reach of scientific men facts and figures from a quarter of the globe which, rich in phenomena, has heretofore yielded so few data for systematic generalisation.”31 These observatories exchanged information and developed a network of observation across the Pacific coast of Asia; but this remained walled off from the Indian Ocean, even as data began to reveal the connectedness of Asia’s climate across its whole expanse. Algué was a towering figure, and he found much in Eliot’s work on the Bay of Bengal to echo his own studies on the Philippine archipelago.32