Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  The state reserved the power to decree not only the shape of each parcel of land but also the composition of its population. The language of science lent authority to ideas about physical capacity and heredity—many British officials were obsessed with categorizing India’s people according to the size of their skulls. The impetus to conflate physical appearance with innate character was especially strong in Punjab, which had become the prime recruiting ground for the British army in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion. To make this strategic shift appear natural, army recruiters, high officials, and a number of their local allies proffered an enduring myth that Sikhs—alongside the Gurkhas of Nepal and in contrast with “effeminate” Bengalis—were a “martial race.”18 Relating how he had made his choice of future colonists from among the large number of applicants in any given village, Douie was straightforward: “I looked at their chests,” he said, as he proceeded to show his audience in London a series of slides of unclothed Punjabi bodies. One of his fellow officers had focused on the applicants’ hands.19

  The British gamble paid off. By 1915, the financial commissioner of Punjab wrote of Chenab district that “the land revenue of this tract… exceeds any other district in India.”20 Punjab became the engine of agrarian growth in India. By 1931, 46 percent of all canal-irrigated land in British India was in Punjab; Madras came a distant second. Prosperity from cultivation spurred local industrialization with the rise of cotton ginning factories. With land grants to families who had served in the army, the British shored up loyal support in the region. Many local men saw themselves as protagonists in what one of them called “man’s conquest over nature.”21 But social transformation was never free from tension. In 1907 protest erupted in the Canal Colonies against legislation giving the government sweeping new powers to regulate settlement and land use. Colonists complained about the inadequate supply of irrigation water to their fields; they chafed against a lower-level bureaucracy that accumulated arbitrary power; they objected to the infringement of customary rights in the name of scientific management.22

  BRITISH OFFICIALS LIKE DOUIE SAW PUNJAB’S CANAL COLONIES IN light of a worldwide process of frontier colonization. He referred repeatedly to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to Australia and the American prairie. He could just as well have looked across to China. In China’s far northeast, a comparable process of peasant colonization was underway. It dwarfed the movement in Punjab. Between 28 and 33 million Chinese migrants moved to Manchuria after 1850; the movement accelerated in 1890, simultaneous with the development of Punjab’s Canal Colonies. Many went to work in mines and on the railways, but most Chinese migrants to Manchuria went as cultivators. By the 1920s, the soybean made up 80 percent of the region’s exports. A relatively small proportion of the migrants owned land on a freehold basis; many more leased their land or worked as sharecroppers. Expanses of Manchuria were owned by Chinese official organizations, or by private and semiprivate companies. Large landowners accumulated holdings. And if the Chinese state did not play as active a role in encouraging migration as did the British colonial government in northwestern India, it was far from absent.

  As in Punjab, family was the “engine of migration” to Manchuria. Families in Shandong and Hebei sent young men to Manchuria as part of a diversified strategy for family survival. But there the expectation of return was almost universal, unlike in Punjab, where families moved permanently to new settlements and over shorter distances than their Chinese counterparts destined for Manchuria. As in Punjab, most Chinese migrants to Manchuria moved in small groups of kinsmen or fellow villagers. They went where uncles, cousins, or others from their villages had blazed a trail. The railway and the steamship made their journeys more affordable, and took them to places previously inaccessible. When this happened on a large enough scale, whole “villages across the sea” emerged, each resembling a northern Chinese village transplanted to Manchuria.23 In historical perspective, these movements represent the final closing of a global frontier—the crescendo of a process of migration, settlement, and colonization that had begun a few centuries earlier.24 From Punjab to the American West, colonization depended on water; in Manchuria, too, irrigation was vital to the expansion of settlement and production.25 Everywhere, colonization displaced communities of people—often pastoralists—who were already there. Their livelihoods and their cultural habits were disregarded as these “empty” lands were settled in the name of agriculture and civilization.

  The very designation of western Punjab as “waste” stripped local pastoralists of their claim to the land: this was no neutral description of a landscape, but rather a justification for what administrators and engineers wished to create. Pastoralists in western Punjab soon found their livelihoods under threat. Where once they knew the landscape intimately, now British engineers and new settlers had captured the water. In the words of a local official, many local people were “driven to migrate by the gradual impoverishment of their villages.” Many other “calamities for future generations,” as Alexander von Humboldt had called them, lay in store. One was malaria—changes in the hydrology of the land created conditions ripe for its spread. A local petitioner complained that the Canal Colonies had “injuriously modified the climate” so that “malaria always prevails there.” Another enduring problem that emerged from Punjab’s great experiment was waterlogging so severe that it made some lands impossible to cultivate.26

  III

  The transformation of India’s waters went far beyond Punjab. Bombay, Madras, and the United Provinces were all sites of intervention and experiment spurred by the recent memory of famine. Hydraulic engineers built on the nineteenth-century schemes like the dams designed by Arthur Cotton along the Krishna, Godavari, and Kaveri rivers of southern India. In Punjab, the land allocated to the Canal Colonies was already in government hands. Elsewhere, a prolonged process of land acquisition was underway, facilitated by 1894 legislation making it easier for the government to take over private land for “public” purposes. While the 1894 Land Acquisition Act aimed to ease railway construction, it came into force just as water engineering projects proliferated across India. By the early twentieth century a long and painful process was underway, displacing families and whole communities to make way for water infrastructure projects—it continues to unfold to this day.

  Sitting in the Maharashtra Archives in Mumbai, housed in the decaying Gothic splendor of Elphinstone College, I saw thick files full of petitions and disputes over land, water, and compensation. “Attempts were made to acquire the land amicably but the owners refuse reasonable terms,” an official notice of 1889 read, and so it would be seized: “Permission may be granted to take possession of the land on the expiration of 15 days from the publication of this notice.” That was just the beginning; just how much land was taken over this way, piece by piece? Some years later, in 1903, Sakharam Balaji, a farmer who stood to lose his lands, wrote in anguish to the local government office. He had lent support to the construction of a local dam by supplying it with materials, “straining my every nerve” in the process. He was then stunned to find out that the dam would drown his two hundred acres of land. “Money given to me by the Government in light of compensation will not suffice,” he declared, for where else could he go? “Land if properly cultivated and repaired will last long,” he said, and he had invested handsomely in his own. The archival file is complete with crossings-out and handwritten insertions as Sakharam (or perhaps his scribe) sought the right words. “My occupation is nothing but husbandry,” he argued, “and my maintenance is solely dependent on this husbandry.” His concern was well founded. Displacement meant more than the loss of land—it was a loss of livelihood, an uprooting of life. Sakharam was fortunate. The local government ruled in his favor and resituated the dam. But many others would suffer irreparable loss.27

  Groups of landowners came together to protest their dispossession. The residents of Belgaum district in Bombay Presidency—“the most loyal and dutiful, but at the same time the poorest, s
ubjects of His Majesty”—feared that a dam, linked to a series of canals, would “inundate almost all the lands of our valleys causing the residents to shift themselves for their lives to some other distant tract not yet known.” They made a powerful claim, couched in the language of justice; they challenged the government on its own terms: “The inhabitants of the above-named villages have equal rights to secure the advantages of benign rule of British Government, as the villages which are to be profited by this canal.” The petition ends with more than a hundred signatures in Marathi.28

  THE PEOPLE OF BELGAUM WERE DISPLACED, IN PART, BECAUSE OF A cascade of new demands for water from India’s growing cities. Whereas the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s had seen India reduced to a “colonial” economy—focused on the export of raw materials, and the import of manufactured goods—the tide had started to shift by the 1890s. While factories in India were concentrated in a handful of cities—Bombay, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Coimbatore—Indian industrial capitalism hit its stride in the early decades of the twentieth century, boosted by the suspension of imports and the voracious military consumption of manufactured goods during the First World War. The French geographer Jules Sion observed after the war: “In Bombay, almost all the factories have Indian owners, directors, engineers. The country’s capitalists compete with foreigners for mining concessions. Many vast plantations of tea and coffee are managed entirely by locals. This economic nationalism faces an obstacle in the entrenched habits and ignorance of the masses,” he observed, “But it has already proved its vitality.”29

  With urbanization came new demands on water. Bombay was the first city in British India to have a municipal water supply, which started operation in 1860. But the city’s growth quickly outstripped the scheme’s capacity. In 1885, the Tansa project aimed to augment urban water supply; when it opened in 1892, it supplied the city with 77 million liters of water a day, though this still reached only a small proportion of its residents. The project came with unwanted consequences. Water supply in the absence of adequate drainage led to waterlogging in many neighborhoods of the city, contributing to the conditions that allowed the bubonic plague epidemic of 1896 to spread. As the city of Bombay grew—its population reached 1.2 million by 1920—its tentacles reached ever further into the countryside of Maharashtra in search of water for its residents.30

  As industrialists grew more prominent, both within the colonial government and within the nationalist movement, their voices grew louder. Among their most pressing needs: water and power. The use of water for irrigation was “well understood,” the Indian Industrial Commission reported in 1918, but now water had a “double object”—irrigation and electricity generation.31 The era of “white gold,” as hydroelectric power had come to be known in Europe and America, came to India.

  India’s first hydroelectric plant was built outside the Raj, in the princely state of Mysore, in 1903. The Sivasamudram Dam along the Kaveri River was built to supply electricity to the Kolar gold mines nearby, which were India’s largest. India’s biggest industrial firm, Tata and Sons, followed closely behind. Having made a fortune exporting opium to China in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Tatas were among the earliest to move into the cotton industry. Perennially in need of electricity to power their factories in Bombay, the Tatas looked to harness the heavy monsoon rains that fell on the Western Ghats mountain range. Theirs was already a self-consciously global enterprise. The Tatas’ close ties with the United States meant that American models and expertise were foremost on their minds when they decided to build a hydroelectric plant of their own at Khopoli, in the Western Ghats, completed in 1915. Within three years, the plant was supplying Bombay’s cotton mills with forty-two thousand horsepower of electricity, for twelve hours a day.32

  One of the enduring heroes of India’s attempt to transform its waters was an engineer named Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. Visvesvaraya was born to a poor Brahmin family in the princely state of Mysore in 1860. He studied engineering in Pune’s College of Science, and served the government of Bombay for twenty-five years as an engineer in the Department of Public Works. Visvesvaraya was ascetic in his habits, a firm believer in hard work and self-help. His first big achievement was the construction of a new water pipeline in the town of Nasik. In the course of redesigning the water supply of the much larger city of Pune, Visvesvaraya patented a new system of automatic sluice gates, which remained in use for decades afterward; in keeping with his dedication to public service, he gave up any claim to royalties. From the outset, Visvesvaraya was obsessed with the “waste” of water. He grappled with “how to bring under control the irregular distribution of water to crops… and its wasteful use by cultivators.” He found that “the cultivators were unaccustomed to control” by engineers and wise administrators. To assert that “control” over water would be a lifelong battle for Visvesvaraya.33

  Visvesvaraya’s horizons expanded in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he began to travel the world. His first trip abroad was to the country that impressed him more than any other: Japan. Visvesvaraya spent three months in Japan in 1898. He wrote a book based on his impressions, but “did not… think the time was opportune to publish it”; he was a civil servant, and not one for overt political confrontation. Yet seeing Japan had led him to conclude just how little the British were doing, in comparison, for the development of India. “Since all industrial progress in Japan has been achieved in comparatively recent years,” he wrote, “she offers to India the most direct and valuable lessons obtainable in material advancement and reconstruction.” The greatest lesson, he thought, was that the Japanese state had taken a direct and interventionist role in fostering economic development.34

  Visvesvaraya’s career took him to West as well as to East Asia. In 1906, the government of Bombay deputed him to the British protectorate of Aden, to investigate the city’s water supply. Poring over the city’s sanitary records, he found an alarmingly high death rate; he was quick to conclude that “a system of pipe sewers is the only satisfactory method.” The authorities accepted his recommendation that a series of wells be dug to supply the city from the River Lahex. Upon retirement from government service—and perhaps frustrated by the racial glass ceiling of the Raj, which meant that he could never become chief engineer of Bombay—Visvesvaraya toured the world. He visited western Italy, Russia, and North America to study dams and irrigation techniques. Arriving in New York, he found “an association of Indian traders and businessmen there, men of energy, vitality and ambition.”35

  After a year of roving consultancy, Visvesvaraya was persuaded in 1909 to take up the position of chief engineer of Mysore. Among the princely states, Mysore was self-consciously progressive; a succession of dewans (prime ministers) had, with the Maharaja’s encouragement, instituted educational and infrastructural reforms. A few years after his appointment as chief engineer, Visvesvaraya assumed the role of Dewan: he made primary education compulsory; he invested in infrastructure and sanitation. Given free rein and a generous budget, Visvesvaraya scaled up his ambitions. He dreamt his masterpiece: the Krishnarajasagar Dam along the Kaveri River. It was Visvesvaraya’s plan for a “multi-purpose” project—the dam would irrigate one hundred acres of land, it would provide power to the Kolar gold fields, and it would electrify the city of Bangalore. The problem, as we will see, is that the British had their own plans for the same river.

  CHANNELING RIVERS AND RAINS, PUMPING WATER FROM UNDERGROUND—there was a third frontier in view at the turn of the twentieth century: the ocean. Frederick Nicholson joined the Madras civil service in 1869, aged twenty-three and fresh from Oxford. Over the next three decades he would serve as collector of Tinevelly (Tirunelveli), Madras, and Coimbatore; he witnessed the great famines of the 1870s, which shaped his view of the world; he fell in love with the Nilgiri hills, where eventually he retired and lived until his death in 1936.36 At the turn of the twentieth century, Nicholson turned his attention to the fisheries of Madras. He wrote in 1899 tha
t “when we despair of food independent of climate for a rapidly-increasing population, of industries for non-agriculturists, of manure for deteriorating soils, we may thank God that we have yet got the fisheries to develop.” “Food independent of climate” was precisely what India’s quest for water sought to bring about—Nicholson saw this more starkly than most. “The sea yields its harvests in enormous quantities wholly irrespective of droughts and seasonal catastrophes,” Nicholson wrote, “and the food, being highly nitrogenous and concentrated, is of extreme value.” As insurance against a fickle monsoon, the fisheries were hard to beat. He told the Lahore Industrial Conference in 1909 that, when he had first arrived in India, “the time was not ripe for devising for the distant and vague harvest of the sea what was barely coming into contemplation for the harvest of the soil under foot”; but now, the time was ripe for “adding the harvest of the sea to the harvest of the soil.” Nicholson made a crucial distinction: the government’s interest in fisheries was purely as a source of food, and not as a source of revenue—which is how the British had treated India’s land from the earliest days of the East India Company’s rule.37

  Nicholson traveled to Japan and to Denmark, seeking inspiration for the development of the fisheries of Madras. Like Visvesvaraya, Nicholson thought that Japan’s example was most apposite for Madras. There, an “ancient” fishing industry had been transformed by “scientific foresight,” backed by an energetic government and generous investment; Nicholson suggested that India’s fishing industry in 1907 was where Japan’s had been before the Meiji Restoration of 1867.38 Nicholson created the Madras Department of Fisheries in 1907 and served as its honorary director. His genuine sympathy for poor fishing communities melded with a widely shared view that held “poor,” “ignorant,” and caste-bound hereditary fishers culturally inferior to landed cultivators. The result was a policy of gradualism. Nicholson doubted whether the rapid advance of fishing technology was possible in India; he preferred to build incrementally on existing practices using existing social structures; he was an enthusiast for cooperative societies as a way to foster a stronger sense of collective action among fishers.