Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  In his 1904 treatise on The Cyclones of the Far East, a revised English version of a Spanish text written in 1897 (penned under the “roar of the cannon and the rumors of war” that “rob the mind of the calmness which is so necessary in a work of this kind”), Algué insisted that “there is no tropical storm which is developed or felt in the sea or on the coasts of China which has not exercised some influence upon this Archipelago.” The Manila Observatory built weather monitoring stations across the Philippines, staffed by Filipino volunteers and a growing cadre of trained local technicians. Algué aimed to educate the public about the tropical storms that posed a recurrent threat to their lives and livelihoods. But just like Blanford and Eliot in India, Algué imagined a broader climatic region. The telegraph allowed for the transmission of instantaneous weather information. The Manila Observatory could now warn the China coast of approaching storms; meteorologists could “watch” storms developing in the Pacific. A French journalist wrote admiringly of the “completeness with which the Asiatic continent, from Cape St. James to the mouth of the Amur river, is safeguarded against surprises thanks to the meteorological services of Japan and the Philippines.”33 “Owing to the opening up of the Far East in recent years,” Algué wrote, he had revised his work on the Philippines to give it “a greater compass.”34 That “compass” reached beyond the South China Sea and toward the Bay of Bengal.

  Part of Algué’s book was devoted to an account of “two very remarkable storms” described by Eliot. In a feat of meteorological detection, Algué matched up Eliot’s accounts of the Port Blair cyclone that hit the Andaman Islands in November 1891, and the Chittagong cyclone of October 1897, with his own records in Manila. Of the storm of 1891, Eliot had simply written that there was an “absence of information” on the cyclone’s origins in the South China Sea. Algué found a small item in the Bulletin of the Manila Observatory for October 1891 that might provide the missing context: “Very probably the typhoon which was felt on the 30th and 31st in Singora and other cities,” Manila’s meteorologists wrote, “then traversed the Peninsula of Malaca after running through the Gulf of Siam, to obtain new strength in the Bay of Bengal.” Ships’ logs allowed observers in the Philippines to track the path of the storm down the South China Sea, until they lost sight of it in the Gulf of Siam—which is precisely where Eliot began his account. Eliot picked up the storm in Siam, where on November 1, 1891, a storm wave flooded Chaiya, and “387 religious buildings and 4,238 other buildings were more or less completely destroyed.” It moved out over the Andaman Sea causing devastation in Port Blair, and fizzled out over the east coast of India.

  Algué reconstructed the Chittagong cyclone of 1897 with equal precision. There, too, Eliot began his account of the storm on the Malay Peninsula, but Algué traced it back to the seas around the Philippine archipelago. He combed through accounts from Jesuit observers in the Philippines; he tracked the storm’s path through the logs of the German steamer Sachsen, heading from Singapore to Hong Kong, and the British ship Faichiow, traveling from Bangkok to Hong Kong.35

  Algué’s account reveals how little communication there was at the time between weather observatories in the South China Sea and those in the Indian Ocean. Each body of water seemed a closed system, each with its own characteristic storms—the typhoon seas and the cyclone seas. The expansion of telegraphic communication allowed for a new sense of scale to emerge, a new way of envisaging weather in time and space. Algué’s map of the two “remarkable storms” presents a different Asia: an Asia of storm tracks that traversed sea and land, crossing imperial borders; a coastal rim from the Philippines in the east to India in the west that shared risks to an extent previously unimagined.

  “Two Remarkable Cyclones”: a map from Algué’s study of typhoons and cyclones. CREDIT: Rev. José Algué, The Cyclones of the Far East (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1904)

  But where Eliot succeeded in illuminating the nature and the threat of cyclones, his long-range forecasts of the South Asian monsoon fared less well. The number of weather monitoring stations in India grew from 135 in 1887 to 230 in 1901. By the turn of the twentieth century, the meteorological office issued five daily weather reports—one for India as a whole, and one for each major region (including one for the Bay of Bengal). Eliot’s most significant innovation was to introduce what he called an “extra-Indian” dimension to his forecasts. He incorporated into his forecasts data from the southern Indian Ocean; he was particularly convinced of a correlation between pressure in Mauritius and monsoon rainfall in India. Eliot’s forecasts grew increasingly elaborate through the 1890s as they “extended to thirty printed foolscap pages.”36

  However, Eliot’s forecasts failed to warn of the climatic disasters that arrived in India in 1896–1897, and again in 1899–1900. Both, later research would show, were strong El Niño years; both droughts reached beyond India to affect China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. In 1899, Eliot’s forecast predicted that monsoon rainfall would be “on the average of the whole area… slightly above the normal.” As it proved that year the shortfall from “the normal” was worse than ever before. But even had Eliot predicted the drought accurately, it is unlikely that the British colonial government would have had the willingness or the drive to intervene on the scale that would have been necessary to avert starvation.

  IV

  What did it imply to think of Asia as an integrated climatic system? According to the evolving understanding of storms and monsoons, Asia appeared as an expanse of depth and altitude put in motion by the circulation of air. It was a land- and seascape defined by nature rather than by empires, its boundaries dictated by the winds and the mountains. But as soon as this picture of climate was translated into two-dimensional maps, the weight of political boundaries became evident. The first Climatological Atlas of India, compiled by John Eliot after his retirement from India, began with a map of winds and pressure across an interlinked oceanic and continental system. It showed how the climate of India was shaped by the transfer of heat and energy between the Eurasian continent and the vastness of the Indian Ocean. This was in keeping with Eliot’s own, evolving understanding of India’s monsoon. But the flurry of maps in the atlas—monthly maps of temperature and humidity and rainfall, cloud cover and wind direction and wind speed—confined themselves to the territorial expanse of British India. In map after map, the territory of British India was shaded a different color from the surrounding mass in order to stand out; even the arrows showing wind speed are limited to the subcontinent, as though the winds were self-contained. Only the map of storm tracks stretches out toward the Bay of Bengal, as if the ocean were but an external source of weather as it affects the land.37

  Climate science was forced into contact with geopolitics. Ideas about India’s climate echoed, and informed, broader debates about India’s place in the world. The networks of storm warnings along the coastal crescent from India to China mirrored Asia’s maritime geography. The names of the stations that broadcast telegraph reports were the names of the great ports; the tracks of the tropical cyclones they monitored were the tracks of busy shipping lanes. Research on the longer-term regularities of India’s climate, as opposed to episodic weather, pointed in a different direction. India’s climatology emphasized its distinctiveness, even its isolation. As Blanford put it, the monsoon system rendered India “a secluded and independent area of atmospheric action.” Ideas about climate coincided with new understandings of both geology and geopolitics. Blanford had begun life as a geologist, and in the late nineteenth century others in that field delved deeper into India’s natural history. They argued that India was a breakaway fragment of the lost supercontinent of Gondwana that had collided with Eurasia in what was, on a geological timescale, the recent past. In the realm of geopolitics, at the same time, British strategists were increasingly worried by threats to their dominance that came not from sea, but from land, through the mountains of Central Asia—the threat from Russia above all. These arguments about India—
each of them depicted visually in the form of maps—came together to produce a “subcontinental” as opposed to what had been essentially a maritime view of India. The use of the term “the Indian subcontinent” dates from the early twentieth century. The Himalayas were crucial to this vision of India. They came more clearly into view in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: their role in India’s climate, their place as the source of India’s rivers, their strategic importance to India’s security.

  The official compendium of India’s history and geography, the Imperial Gazetteer—edited by William Wilson Hunter, a keen meteorologist as well as an ethnographer, and published in eight volumes in 1881—insisted that “by India we now imply not merely the wide continent which stretches southward from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, but also the vast entourage of mountainous plateaux and lofty ranges.” India, Hunter insisted, “can no longer be considered apart from that wide hinterland of uplands.” This was a political as much as a geographical imperative. “India,” he wrote, “must be held to include those outlying territories over which the Indian administration extends its control, even to the eastern and southern limits of Persia, Russia, Tibet, and China.” It was overland, across the mountain passes from the northwest, that every invading force—save the British—had arrived in India. India’s imperial rulers continued to fear a resurgent threat from their rivals among landed Eurasian empires. But Hunter’s concern was with the future as much as with a repetition of the past. In “a future of railways developments,” with a “rush of motor traffic,” it was possible that “the land approaches to India” would “rival those of the sea”—“then will some of these again become the highways of the eastern world.” By that time, “we shall take out tickets in London for Herat, and change at Kandahar for Kabul or Karachi.” Among these frontiers, the least explored but one “potentially destined to play an important part in Indian history” was “the great highway of the Brahmaputra valley from the plateau of Tibet to the plains of Assam.”38

  Hunter drew two conclusions. The first was that “the material wealth of India largely depends” on its “capacity for the storage of that water supply which carried fertility to its broad plains.” The other was that British India’s security depended on “guarding the gateways and portals of the hills,” preventing “those landward irruptions” that had reshaped Indian history on many occasions in the past. These propositions would endure; they would outlast the British Empire that Hunter and his contemporaries wanted above all to preserve. And here is the contradiction at their heart: envisioning India through its rivers encouraged a far-reaching consideration of its connections with distant places, of “world highways” (or potential “highways”) that situated India in relation to the flow of goods, people, money, and water to and from China, Tibet, and the expanse of Central Asia. By contrast, to see the Himalayas as a natural barrier, one always under threat of breach, was to advocate for a vision of India as a bounded place, an “amphitheater” sealed off from the rest of Asia. Natural frontiers became synonymous with the security of the realm. Hunter’s concern with the economic value of water to Indian agriculture reinforced this bounded view. Water was a resource to be stored, possessed, harnessed, and put to work: the essence of India’s “material wealth.”

  Hunter’s was a view moving up to the mountains, and away from the ocean. The last part of the nineteenth century saw a final push of Himalayan exploration, which had begun a century earlier. When Trelawney Saunders drew his map of India’s mountains and river basins in 1870, he noted that Tibet was still terra incognita; Arthur Cotton argued the same when he dreamed of a canal link between India and China. Locating the source of Asia’s great rivers was the final frontier in the spate of expeditions undertaken by European explorers in the nineteenth century. It was not until his expedition of 1905–1908 that the Swede Sven Hedin finally discovered the source of both the Indus and the Brahmaputra on the Tibetan Plateau. Describing his first sight of the Brahmaputra, Hedin fell into rapture. “Above the dark-grey ridge rises a world of mountains which seems to belong to the heavens rather than the earth,” he wrote of the northern Himalayas, “between them and the dark grey crest, comparatively near to us, yawns an abyss, a huge fissure on the earth’s crust, the valley of the Brahmaputra or the Tsangpo.” He described the water: “Bluish-green and almost perfectly transparent, it flows slowly and noiselessly in a single bed to the east, while here and there fishes are seen rising.”39

  A decade after Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address to the American Historical Association, on the “closing” of the American frontier, the British imperial geographer and strategist Halford Mackinder made the point on a much larger scale. In 1904, just the year before Hedin’s expedition, Mackinder argued that “geographical exploration is nearly over.” There were no “blank spaces” left on the map of the world. In Asia, he witnessed “the last moves of the game first played by the horsemen of Yermak the Cossack and the Shipmen of Vasco da Gama.” Mackinder foresaw that the heartland of Eurasia would, again, become the pivot of global power. “A generation ago steam and the Suez Canal appeared to have increased the mobility of sea-power relatively to land-power,” he declared, but now transcontinental railways were “transmuting the conditions of land-power.”40 In this light the mountainous frontier of the Himalayas still appeared remote and forbidding. But it was now clear that they might contain vast water resources—resources to be captured for the development and security of the plains.

  And here we have the paradox that deepened in these years: water and climate were boundless. Their boundlessness became clearer with every advance in the technologies of measurement. Yet, as the next chapter will show, they came under ever tighter but more fragmented territorial control. We turn now to the fevered quest for water that gripped India, and most of Asia, in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  FIVE

  THE STRUGGLE FOR WATER

  IN INVISIBLE CITIES, HIS TALE OF AN IMAGINED ENCOUNTER BETWEEN the Italian explorer Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, Italian novelist Italo Calvino describes the fictional city of Isaura like this:

  Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock’s calcerous sky.1

  Calvino’s exquisite depiction of “Isaura” distills the themes of this chapter, which is concerned with the search for new sources of water in India. At the turn of the twentieth century, India still reeled from the famines of the 1870s and the 1890s. Advances in meteorological science had pointed to the awesome power of the monsoon climate, and sketched its continental span. Indian economists and British administrators, water engineers and industrialists joined in a search for water to secure India from climatic vulnerability. They looked for water underground. They built dams to harness the power of rivers. They explored new ways to store rainwater. Across India, water formed “invisible landscapes” that shaped “the visible one.” In trying to exploit water more intensively, administrators and engineers came to see it as a bounded resource. Control was their aim, but it proved an elusive goal. For in those same decades, climate science pointed in the opposite direction: it threw up the enormity of the scale on which nature worked. The study of the monsoon became ever more spectacularly global. Understanding that the climate of any given part of Asia was subject to remote oceanic and atmospheric influences still too complex fully to comprehend, meteorology called into question the confidence with which many believed nature could be conquered.