by Sunil Amrith
The role of official meteorologist had left Walker little time for basic research; he took what opportunities he could. The First World War brought new challenges. The meteorological office had always scrabbled for resources; during the war, Walker’s deputies were transferred out. G. C. Simpson and Charles Normand were sent to Mesopotamia in 1916, where Normand took charge of military meteorology. Their expertise formed part of a wider infusion of British Indian personnel into Iraq to accompany an even larger number of troops: hydraulic engineers and entomologists, together with a great many vessels built in Indian shipyards.60 In their absence, it fell to Hem Raj to keep Indian meteorology running. A veteran Indian officer in the department with a “photographic memory” for weather charts, Hem Raj oversaw the department’s day-to-day operations. Walker later paid warm tribute to “R.B. Hem Raj, who sacrificed his life in the cause of the allies by concealing a serious illness in order that he might continue his important assistance in an under-staffed office.”61 Even as research ground to a halt in Walker’s office, the war brought significant advances in global meteorological understanding, thanks primarily to the work of Vilhelm Bjerknes in Bergen—together with his son Jacob and Halvor Solberg—on the development of midlatitude cyclones. Bjerknes and his team brought a metaphor from the battlefields to their understanding of weather “fronts,” as they illuminated the dynamic interaction of warm and humid air currents with polar currents. It would be Jacob, five decades later, who finally identified the El Niño phenomenon, expanding on Gilbert Walker’s insights.
However wide he cast his statistical net, Walker remained a keen observer of his surroundings. He developed an interest in the flight of vultures and kites, which he watched through a telescope in Simla. He noticed that the birds knew where to look for updrafts, allowing them to ascend to up to two thousand feet without flapping their wings. This insight inspired Walker to take an interest in the physics of cloud formation; he even wanted to take up gliding upon his return to England, and was sad to find that “at 65 his reactions were too slow to allow him to be a successful glider pilot.”62 Walker left India in 1924, twenty years after taking over the Meteorological Department. He became professor of meteorology at Imperial College, London. Freed from the practical responsibilities of the Indian weather service, Walker turned his attention in the 1920s to developing his understanding of what he called “world-weather”—to which he saw the Southern Oscillation as crucial. Walker remained eclectic in his interests and his methods. In 1927 he warned of the danger of over-specialization: “There is, to-day, always a risk that specialists in two subjects, using languages full of words that are unintelligible without study,” he wrote, “will grow up not only, without knowledge of each other’s work, but also will ignore the problems which require mutual assistance.”63 There is a hint, here, of the quest to defend meteorology as a science, against those who would see it as mere observation. However global his perspective became, Walker never left the monsoon behind.64 One of his successors as director of Indian meteorology, Charles Normand, explained many years later why this was. “The Indian Monsoon,” Normand wrote, describing Walker’s work, “stands out as an active and not a passive feature in world weather.” India, on this view, was a driving force in the world’s climate. The irony was that “Walker’s worldwide survey ended by offering a promise for the prediction of events in regions other than India,” since India’s experience seemed “more efficient as a broadcasting tool than an event to be forecast.”65
Soon after the war, the advent of long-distance flights between Europe and Asia in the 1920s shed new light on atmospheric dynamics while demanding more comprehensive forecasts for aviators. From an observatory in Agra, the Indian weather service could now send balloons up to twenty thousand feet, which returned measurements of upper air conditions. Flight through clouds was giving scientists “insight into cloud formation”; aerial photography provided a new perspective on the vertical dimension of the weather—“we see how different a cloudscape seen from above is from one viewed from the ground.”66
EVEN BEFORE THE WAR’S END, THE PROSPECT OF POLITICAL CHANGE was in the air in India. Under pressure from the eruption of mass political protest in India, to which we will return in the next chapter, the reforms enacted under the Government of India Act of 1919 devolved many responsibilities to the provincial level—a system known as “dyarchy.” It expanded representative government, though electorates remained small. In parallel to this, a change in personnel began to be felt across the colonial administration—a process of “Indianization,” as it was called, in the bureaucracy. Lower-level judges and immigration officials, health inspectors and government scientists were more likely, after 1920, to be Indian rather than British men—but men they mostly remained. And there were limits to how high Indians could rise, which in turn fueled middle-class support for the nationalist movement.
Meteorology moved in the same direction. In the early 1920s, new Indian officers were hired to senior positions in the Meteorological Department: G. Chatterjee, of Presidency College, Calcutta, took over the Upper Air Observatory in Agra; S. K. Banerjee, a noted mathematician, joined the department in Simla—he would go on to become the first director of the Indian Meteorological Department after independence. In Bengal, a young statistician called Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, fresh from Cambridge, was hired to work at the observatory in Calcutta; his impact on the path of India’s economic development would be immense. In 1921, Gilbert Walker wrote to Delhi, insisting that “it is natural for the government to insist that a serious attempt be made to find and train Indians who shall be capable of carrying out the work of the Department,” noting that there was little to distinguish the abilities of British from Indian staff. “On political grounds,” he noted, “it is obvious that this policy of Indianization must be loyally accepted.” J. H. Field, Walker’s successor, went further. In 1925, Field pleaded for more resources—he wanted six new posts, and a more energetic program of research. He justified his demands by insisting on the talent of Indian meteorologists, and by pointing to the new demands that would arise from air links between Europe and Asia. “India has now for the first time an opportunity to show what an Indianised department can do,” he declared. “The opportunity is magnificent and unique: if the controlling department of the government will only rise to the height of this occasion and give me what I ask, it is to be expected that my Indian staff will justify demands as an outstanding example of efficiency in running their own concern.” In an age of austerity Field did not secure the resources he had asked for, but the “Indianization” of the meteorology department was underway. The Indian officials who joined the department in the 1920s were “nationalists to the core,” writes D. R. Sikka, director of the Indian Meteorological Department in the late twentieth century. This did not prevent them from being “loyal to the department,” believing it to stand above politics. But in the 1920s and 1930s India’s rainfall became ever more deeply political.67
IN HIS ACCOUNT OF ISAURA, ITALO CALVINO WROTE THAT THE city’s water gods inhabited the whole vertical expanse of water. They lived, he wrote,
in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.68
The fictional Isaura is timeless, its waters unchanging. In early twentieth-century India, technology transformed water in every dimension. Electric pumps extracted water from the depths and balloons measured the moisture of the upper atmosphere; big dams harnessed the descent of rivers, for irrigation and flood control and to generate electricity. A vision of India tha
t “moves entirely upward” sat alongside the older (and flatter) maritime conception of India at the heart of an imperial web of sea-lanes. The next chapter will turn to the story of how struggles for water were intensified by Asian nationalisms in the 1930s.
SIX
WATER AND FREEDOM
AN ANCIENT DICTUM—THAT THE CONTROL OF WATER CONFERRED political power—acquired new meaning, and new urgency, in an age of nationalism. From India to China, water was at the heart of programs for political renewal and national development in the 1920s and 1930s. The rising generation of leaders in Asia included engineers, architects, and physicists, alongside lawyers and schoolteachers. Many of them felt that the conquest of nature in the early twentieth century had not gone far or fast enough. For inspiration they looked to the world’s rising powers. They studied the New Deal in the United States. American technological modernity was epitomized by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which gathered together previously disparate approaches to flood control, river navigation, electricity generation, soil conservation, irrigation, and public health. Asian nationalists drew lessons from the breakneck industrialization and the colossal engineering schemes of the Soviet Union, not least because the Soviet Union was also a major Asian country that had attempted to reengineer landscapes that resembled those of China’s and India’s northwestern reaches, and has done so at a pace unprecedented in global history.
In India, in China, across Southeast Asia, nationalist movements were unstable social coalitions. Their leaders struggled to create a sense of unity and purpose, while acknowledging the fractures of social and economic inequality and addressing regional disparities. Many divisions emerged over the control and sharing of resources—among which water was often the most vital. The 1920s and 1930s were characterized by deepening contacts and solidarities among anticolonial and revolutionary movements across and beyond Asia. But when it came to tangible material questions, like sharing water, they began to draw firm lines around their respective domains. In these decades between the world wars, the seeds were sown for water conflicts that would intensify in the second half of the twentieth century after Asian nations won their freedom from colonial rule.
I
As we saw in the last chapter, India’s landscape was reshaped by the quest for water in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the accounts of engineers the construction of canals and dams, and the pumping of underground water were purely a technical process, outside politics. Few of them, British or Indian, departed from the assumption that the British colonial government would lead the charge. But the rise of nationalism raised new questions about who would benefit from these changes in India’s land and water.
Indian nationalism emerged as a powerful mobilizing force in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Swadeshi movement arose in protest against a 1905 British plan to partition the province of Bengal, ostensibly for economic reasons, but also to divide what the colonial government perceived to be a threatening locus of political organization. “Swadeshi,” meaning “home-made,” began with the boycott of British goods in favor of locally produced products, but it burgeoned into a diverse movement that included those—branded “terrorists” by the British—who advocated the violent overthrow of the colonial government. The protesters achieved their immediate goal: the British revoked their decision to break up the province. But the Swadeshi mobilization was transient and fragile; it splintered into mutually hostile factions. It was largely confined to the province of Bengal, and even there, it was dominated by elite Hindus to the exclusion of Muslims. The Swadeshi movement mirrored similar uprisings elsewhere. Across Asia, the early twentieth century saw a wave of boycotts and demonstrations and strikes. The same year the Swadeshi movement began, Shanghai witnessed a widespread boycott of American goods in response to the wave of violence and discriminatory legislation directed against Chinese immigrants in the United States in the early twentieth century. By the 1910s, these stirrings of unrest had turned into mass movements.
In India, the most effective and visible political leader was a lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Born to a merchant family in Porbandar, a port town in Gujarat on India’s western coast, Gandhi spent decades outside India. He studied law in London between 1888 and 1891. There he came under the influence of the spiritualist Theosophy movement; he discovered vegetarianism; he experienced a political and spiritual awakening that led him to the study of Indian philosophy and religion. In 1893, Gandhi took up an offer of a job as a lawyer in South Africa. He quickly came to lead protests against the race-based exclusions and restrictions faced by the Indian community in South Africa—a diverse group that included Gujarati merchants and traders, concentrated in Durban and Johannesburg, as well as indentured workers from Tamil Nadu and Bihar, who worked on the sugar plantations of Natal. Gandhi, like most of South Africa’s Indian community, supported the British in the South African War, a brutal contest between English and Afrikaner settlers. Hopes that the British would reward Indian support after the war proved short-lived. The rapprochement between the English and the Afrikaners in the postwar settlement led to a tightening of restrictions on the Indian community, including a requirement for them to carry identity cards (“passes”)—though, always, the colony’s African majority faced discrimination that was far worse. Immersed in reading Tolstoy and Thoreau, Gandhi experimented with communal living at a settlement named Phoenix. He started a printing press. He honed his political tactics—a form of nonviolent civil disobedience that he dubbed satyagraha (“struggle for truth.”)
During his South African years, Gandhi developed a critical account of British rule in India. He published Hind Swaraj in 1909, a treatise that took the form of a dialogue with an imagined reader. Gandhi took aim not only at the violence and tyranny that underpinned British rule in India but also, more radically, at its material effects. “India’s salvation consists of unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years or so,” he wrote. “The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper class have to learn to live consciously and religiously and deliberately the simple life of a peasant.”1 Gandhi concluded that “machinery is the main symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.” In rejecting “telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers [and] doctors,” Gandhi was being provocative; he aimed to shock his readers into asking questions about the ultimate ends of India’s embrace of industrial modernity.
Gandhi’s analysis stood at odds with the rush to secure India against vulnerability to nature—a process which, we have seen, involved many Indians alongside British water engineers and administrators. Over the years, Gandhi developed further the idea that India’s freedom lay in living with the rhythms of nature. He was repulsed by India’s cities, though his vision of the country as an agglomeration of “village republics” was largely a myth drawn from the writings of British orientalists like Henry Maine. As a symbolic figure, as a tactician, Gandhi was unrivaled within the Indian nationalist movement. His economic ideas remained marginal. They stood as a quiet counterpoint to the powerful tune of more technology, more control, more progress. Most of Gandhi’s associates and many of his followers had a different view of what India needed—the “simple life of the peasant” was precisely what they aimed to relegate to the past.
When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he hurled himself into political activity. He had already acquired the honorific “Mahatma” (“great soul”); his reputation as an effective organizer and powerful speaker had traveled with him from South Africa. He began on a small scale, interceding on behalf of indigo workers in Champaran, Bihar, who were protesting their exploitative working conditions. By 1917, Gandhi was India’s preeminent politician. He jolted the Indian National Congress to life, expanded its membership, forged a coalition of rural and urban supporters. Gandhi rejected the class-based mobilization of the left in favor of an emphasis on conciliation; among his supporters were India’s largest industrialists,
including the Birla family. Gandhi launched his mass Non-Cooperation Movement in 1919, in protest against the slow pace of political reform in British India and directed in particular against the prolongation of the state’s wartime emergency powers. A campaign of protests and boycotts, fasts and vigils, lasted until 1922, when Gandhi called it off following an act of violence in the small town of Chauri Chaura, where Congress supporters had attacked a police station. A cycle of repression and concession would unfold over the subsequent two decades. The British government of India locked Gandhi and his lieutenants up in prison on many occasions, interspersed with periods of negotiation.
The nationalist upsurge spanned Asia. The Non-Cooperation Movement in India raged at the same time that China saw an outpouring of social and political protest against the territorial concessions that Japan, victorious on the Allied side, had gained in China after the First World War. A wide coalition of youth and students and activists came together in a loose grouping known as the May Fourth Movement. In Vietnam and in Indonesia, too, the 1920s saw the rise of new political and social movements directed, respectively, against French and Dutch colonial rule. In all three countries, unlike in India, communism emerged among the most powerful and most compelling of political movements.
Asia’s nationalist movements spoke the language of freedom and sovereignty, and it is on the richness and multiplicity of these concepts that historians have focused their attentions. But there was always a strong material underpinning to the ambitions of Asia’s nationalists. It is here that the history of nationalism intersects with the battle to bring unruly waters under control. Nationalist leaders needed water, mineral resources, and fossil fuels to realize their plans for industrialization, to make good on their promises of an end to hunger and poverty. A new sense of confidence crept into visions of Asia’s future. Consider this contrast: In 1909, the imperial finance minister of India had characterized each of his budgets as a “gamble on the rains,” conveying a sense of fatalism about the power of nature over economy and society. Twenty years later, Jawaharlal Nehru—Cambridge-educated lawyer and scion of an elite Allahabad family, son of pioneering nationalist Motilal Nehru, and by the 1920s Gandhi’s most trusted younger colleague, and one of India’s most influential and charismatic politicians—declared that “modern science claims to have curbed to a large extent the tyranny and the vagaries of nature.”2 Nehru was clear about the material urgency behind every vision of freedom. “Our desire for freedom is a thing more of the mind than the body,” Nehru said, but most Indians suffered “hunger and deepest poverty, and empty stomach and a bare back.” For the masses, “freedom is a vital bodily necessity.”3