Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  I

  In almost any account of modern Indian history, the last two decades of the nineteenth century appear as a moment of political awakening. The formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 represents, in most textbooks, the beginning of organized nationalism, albeit a tentative nationalism still dominated by an urban and professional elite, still outwardly loyal to the empire. The famines of the last quarter of the nineteenth century catalyzed criticism of colonial rule. They made brutally evident the insecurity of life endured by most of India’s people; they called into question the effectiveness of the colonial government; above all, they laid bare whose interests the British had in mind when they governed India. “Britain has appropriated thousands of millions of India’s wealth for building up and maintaining her vast British Indian Empire… [and] has thereby reduced the bulk of the Indian population to extreme poverty, destitution, and degradation,” said Dadabhai Naoroji, an early proponent of economic nationalism in India, and the first Indian to be elected to the British Parliament, in a speech at the Plumstead Radical Club in London in 1900. Naoroji argued that it was Britain’s “bounden duty in common justice and humanity to pay from her own exchequer the costs of all famines and diseases caused by such impoverishment.”2 The experience of drought and famine gave rise to new ways of thinking about state and economy, nature and climate. The material consequences of those ways of seeing continue to shape our world.

  By the 1890s, many Indian economists saw the monsoon as a limiting condition on India’s future development. Mahadev Govind Ranade—social reformer and High Court judge and early leader of the reformist Poona Sarvajanik Sabha—declared in 1890 that in many parts of the country “the last margin has been reached, and millions die or starve when a single monsoon fails.” Ranade believed that only a complete transformation of land and water could protect India from future disasters. He lamented the “ruralizing” of India—the destruction of local industries as a result of Lancashire textiles flooding the market. Ranade felt that only an industrial future, with some measure of protection for local industries from foreign competition, would free India from its vulnerability, which arose, he believed, from the country’s acute dependence on agriculture. He wrote admiringly of the Cultivation System in the Dutch East Indies, a coercive Dutch colonial policy that forced cultivators to set aside a portion of their lands for the production of export crops. Whether or not Ranade was aware of the system’s harshness, which provoked protest and resistance in Java, he saw it as a welcome alternative to the British worship of free trade and even as a boost to Indonesian industry.3

  Romesh Chander Dutt—Bengali economist and poet, civil servant, and translator of Hindu epics—went further than Ranade in pinpointing responsibility for India’s famines. In 1901 Dutt began his open letter to the viceroy, Lord Curzon, with the “melancholy” observation that 15 million people had died in famines in India within Dutt’s own lifetime. He dismissed British observers’ fixation on the predatory moneylender as the chief cause of distress to Indian cultivators in times of drought. “The money-lender is the result, not the cause, of the poverty of the cultivators,” Dutt wrote, suggesting that Indian farmers fell back on credit only because their earnings were insufficient to cover the heavy burden of taxation. Turning to Malthusian fears about India’s population growth, Dutt pointed out that India’s population grew more slowly in the nineteenth century than England’s. The “immediate cause of famines in almost every instance is the failure of the rains,” he said, and the threat of famine would persist “until we have a more extensive system of irrigation.” But he distinguished the “immediate” cause of famine from the root cause—the reason why a failure of the rains should bring so many to the brink of starvation. That root cause was the “chronic poverty of the cultivators, caused by the over-assessment of the soil.” Developing the argument that Naoroji had made earlier, Dutt argued that the weight of the land tax—used to finance the “most expensive foreign government on earth,” bloated by its imperial adventures beyond India’s shores—was the main cause of India’s poverty. In 1903 Dutt published his masterpiece, an economic history of India in two volumes. Written with flair and backed by reams of statistics, Dutt’s book argued that Britain had “drained” India of its wealth and contributed to the devastation of its industries. In his catalog of misguided colonial policies, however, Dutt expressed his great admiration for Arthur Cotton, whom he thought to possess “a reputation higher than that of any other engineer who has ever worked in India.” Dutt agreed with Cotton that India’s salvation lay in irrigation. The problem, Dutt discerned, was that colonial administrators had ignored Cotton; they “returned again and again to the narrower view, based on the immediate financial return of works constructed.” The British government of India was so concerned with avoiding unnecessary expense that it was trapped in a short-term view of India’s economic development, unwilling to invest in expensive infrastructure that might, in time, have paid off.4

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE INDIAN Irrigation Commission undertook a grand tour of India’s water. Famine was a raw and recent memory. Colonial officials and Indian critics alike believed that irrigation was essential to protect India from a recurrence of the horror. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, appointed Scotsman Colin Scott-Moncrieff to lead the investigation. Scott-Moncrieff was famous for directing the hydraulic transformation of the Nile in the 1880s through a restoration of the Nile Barrage, but he had started his career with the Bengal Engineers and had served as Burma’s chief engineer in the 1870s. Twenty years later, he returned to India. His brief was as simple as it was daunting—to determine how far irrigation could protect India from the vagaries of its climate.5

  The British colonial government of India has been described as “ethnographic”: it collected obsessively information about every aspect of life within its domain; it classified India’s people by caste and faith; it published reports of “moral and material progress.”6 In the first three decades of the twentieth century, four commissions of inquiry—on irrigation, agriculture, banking, and labor—cemented the state’s knowledge of its territory and its population. This vast enterprise of information-gathering generated authoritative tomes, divided by province, backed with appendices. To read them now is to leap into the minutiae of economic life in India, village by village. The commissions published extensive volumes of testimony, both oral and written, which are in turn prosaic and lyrical, combative and dull. It is easy to forget how small these commissions were, how dependent they were on knowledge provided by others. Scott-Moncrieff was joined by Thomas Higham, India’s chief inspector of irrigation; by Denzil Ibbetson, chief commissioner of the Central Provinces; by John Muir-Mackenzie, chief secretary to the government of Bombay; and by a sole Indian, Rajaratna Mudaliar, a member of the Madras Legislative Council. The five men met in Lahore, and over two periods of six months each, in 1901 and 1902, they traveled together across India. They covered more than five thousand miles; they interviewed 425 witnesses in 91 sittings. “This is pretty hard work,” Scott-Moncrieff wrote to a relative in England, “listening to witnesses and asking questions for six hours is, I can assure you, rather fatiguing”; but he conceded that “we travel very luxuriously, generally in special trains” and, at every stop, “we are most hospitably entertained in the generous old Indian fashion.”7

  Finally they settled in Lucknow, by the banks of the Ganges, and wrote their report surrounded by meteorological charts, statements, petitions, and two years’ worth of impressions.

  Once again, they began with the rains: “Not only a main factor in determining the value of irrigation” but also “the primary source of all means of supplying it.” The irrigation commissioners went back to Henry Blanford’s writings, their main source on India’s struggle with the monsoon. They drew attention to water’s “unequal distribution throughout the seasons, its still more irregular distribution over the surface of the country, and its liability to failure or serious deficiency.�
��8 They turned, then, to India’s geology, which had been Blanford’s original concern. Each of India’s main geological regions, the expanse of alluvial and crystalline soils, offered possibilities, and challenges, for irrigation. The commission’s data showed that 20 percent of the cultivable land of British India was under irrigation by the turn of the twentieth century, from the large canals of the Gangetic plain to the 626,000 wells watering Madras Presidency.

  They concluded that India offered “a wide but not unlimited field” for ambitious engineers. They listed the many obstacles, from the topography of the landscape to the cost of irrigation works. The British government retained the fixation on parsimony that had driven famine policy in the 1870s. In hundreds of pages of testimony to the irrigation commission, witnesses were asked, again and again, about whether investment in irrigation would ever pay for itself. The commissioners dreamed of a time when farmers would pay for water “what it is really worth”; they searched for ways to justify irrigation expenditure to the state, ever anxious about the charge of extravagance. They also saw as a problem water’s very expanse, in relation to the lines of jurisdiction that ran through India. “The manner in which the various states and territories are intermingled,” they wrote, were an “obstacle” to their visions. The commissioners expressed fulsome thanks to the princely rulers that had hosted them on their tour, but the patchwork of sovereignty that interspersed regions of direct British control with princely territories caused anxiety. The problem was enduring: the “only suitable site for a storage work,” they observed, “may lie in a territory whose people would not only derive no benefit, but might even be put to considerable loss.” They had diagnosed a source of hydraulic inequality that would sharpen over the century ahead.9

  Among the resources the irrigation commissioners looked to was India’s ocean of water under the ground. By the late nineteenth century the quest for subterranean water had attained new fervor. A breakthrough in technology brought with it a sense of untapped possibility: engine-driven pumps promised to reach much deeper underground than the manual ways that were little changed from Babur’s time. After the famines of the 1870s, agricultural officials in the most arid districts encouraged the construction of wells by landowners. “The main difficulty… in well construction is not the discovery of water,” wrote W. C. Bennett, director of agriculture in the Northwest Provinces, “the water level is known locally all over the Provinces.” The problem was to determine where the soil could support deep wells, given the “extreme capriciousness and uncertainty” of the clay stratum beneath the surface.10

  From the start, and in contrast with government-built canals, wells were in private hands; “policy,” such as it was, involved encouraging landowners to dig wells. The government’s role, if it had any, was limited to providing credit and information. Already by the 1880s, Bennett estimated that almost 58 percent of the irrigated area in the province he administered was under well irrigation; canals, which received infinitely more money and attention, accounted for only 24 percent. To his mind the importance of wells could not be overstated. They usually held enough water “to carry the people through one season of failure of the rains”—though he cautioned that if the rains should fail two years running, as they had in 1876 and 1877, the wells would run dry.11 Water prospectors began to imagine the map of India with an added dimension—the underground. As well as roads and railways, wrote an engineer from the Bombay Deccan, it would help if maps could show the “water levels as well as showing depth of spring levels below the surface.”12

  By the early twentieth century, Madras was at the forefront of a water-mining boom. A keen observer of this economic revolution was Alfred Chatterton, a British engineer who had made his career in the Madras government. He served as superintendent of industrial education and insisted on the development of a department of industry in the province to encourage local manufacturing. He was quietly sympathetic to swadeshi initiatives to support local producers and boycott imports. To that end he opened a government pencil factory in Kurukkupet, which promised to boost local industry.13

  Irrigation was among Chatterton’s main interests as an engineer. He was the author of a book on lift irrigation (the extraction of water from wells), and the possibilities he saw before him, as he surveyed the Madras countryside, seemed limitless. On a tour of Trichinopoly he reported that there had been a “very large number of applications” for government loans for the purchase of engines and pumps. He appended a list of all of the firms supplying oil engines in Madras, a total of 125 in the province; the largest dealer was Massey & Co., which in 1904 supplied ninety-one engines of a total of 869 horsepower. Chatterton was impressed: “It is obvious from this that the oil-engine has come to stay in the Madras Presidency and that it is suited to the conditions of the country,” he wrote. “I am sanguine enough to think that this is merely the beginning of things and that in the next year or two the use of oil-engines will increase very rapidly for irrigation work.”

  That year, the northeast monsoon had brought scanty rainfall; the new technology was put immediately to the test. “The engine was started 568 times,” reported an agricultural station at Melrosepatnam, “and ran for 2074 hours.” Most of the engines ran on liquid fuel—that is to say, petroleum—which was half or even a quarter the price of kerosene oil. The main source of supply was from the Borneo oil fields, imported by Best and Company and held in a four-thousand-ton storage tank in Madras. In Borneo, as in the fields of the Burmah Oil Company, a new era had begun.14

  India tumbled into the embrace of fossil fuels. Very early in the twentieth century, oil unleashed a vision of plenitude based on the extraction of water—a vision that continues to shape contemporary India. “The oil engine and pump do work,” Chatterton observed, “[utilizing] to an extent absolutely unknown previously the quantity of water available for irrigation.” The abundance of water beneath the soil lay in “a succession of spring channels, one below the other.” Their exploitation had once relied on a vast corps of voluntary or corvée labor, but now “much larger quantities of water could be abstracted from the river-beds by means of engines and pumps.” Already there were three-quarters of a million wells scattered across Madras. Most of them were in the hands of small landowners. The potential for further development seemed vast. Chatterton evoked a terrain with “many deep old furrows filled with sand which mark the ancient course of river-beds” that were “full of water.” Water engineers imagined a whole country underground—a network of vanished rivers still running with water, waiting to be forced to the surface. On this view, the “problem of subterranean water” was part of a broader problem of energy: its extraction depended on “distributing power cheaply… by wire ropes, compressed air or electricity.”15

  II

  Nowhere in India was the quest for water more transformative than in Punjab. In a remarkably short time, Punjab rivaled the Gangetic plains and the river valleys of the southern peninsula as India’s agrarian heartland. The impetus for the change came from British attempts to bring water to what they claimed as “wastelands” in western Punjab—a land at the limits of the monsoon, described by James Douie, an experienced district official in the province, as “in reality part of the great desert extending from the western Sahara to Manchuria.” Here, “irrigation was not designed to assist agriculture and diminish the losses from seasonal vagaries, but to create [agriculture] where it did not exist.”16

  Between 1885 and 1940, the colonial government built nine Canal Colonies—townships of settlement each built around an irrigation canal—through a stretch of western Punjab between the Beas and Sutlej rivers and the Jhelum, covering an area of 13 million acres. The largest of them was the Chenab settlement, started in 1892; the most challenging for the engineers was the massive Triple Canal project, completed in 1915 through difficult terrain. More than a million people moved voluntarily to these new colonies from the more densely populated lands of eastern Punjab; they inaugurated a revolution in the product
ion of wheat, cotton, and sugar. The Canal Colonies attempted to create a new landscape—and a new society. They were among the first of their kind, establishing a pattern that would become common throughout the world in the twentieth century: a state-financed and state-directed resettlement of people in the service of agricultural “development.” The British officials who envisaged the project in the 1880s were ambitious. They sought to create a new sort of Indian village, populated by cultivators carefully selected for their vigor and ability, providing a new dynamo for agrarian capitalism.

  Speaking to an audience at London’s Royal Society of the Arts in 1914, James Douie—a career civil servant who had spent thirty-five years in Punjab, his roles including chief secretary to the government, and settlement commissioner—lauded the achievements of Punjab’s engineers. In his mind, the “colonization” of “waste” land in the Punjab was part of a global process. “When one speaks of colonization the mind turns at once to new countries,” he conceded: “the prairies of the United States, or the pampas of Argentina.” Many of those large movements of people, too, had involved the search for new sources of water to make arid lands productive. And in Punjab a similar movement was underway. Douie’s account made clear how fully the Canal Colonies were the product of an engineer’s vision backed by the power of the state—right down to “allotting land in complete squares.” People “who love the irregular fields of the homeland, with their hedges of black and white thorn or wilding rose, may think these unenclosed rectangular fields dull,” he admitted—but they were designed for utility. In a society where the rules of inheritance allotted an equal share of land to every son, “twenty-five equal rectangular fields can be divided, accurately, easily, and cheaply.”17