by Sunil Amrith
In China, as in India, water was a vital ingredient of freedom. The control of water was essential to China’s emergence from a century of humiliation at the hands of imperial powers, which had culminated in 1911 with the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Sun Yat-sen, architect of China’s republican revolution, applied himself to the problem of China’s development, even as rival regional polities tore China apart. In The International Development of China, Sun set forth an expansive vision of China as what he called an “economic ocean” for the world. His book was replete with maps of rivers diverted, maps of rail lines laid, maps of ports dredged and electricity generated.4 Water was at the heart of his vision. Sun told a meeting in Guangdong in 1924: “If we could utilize the water power in the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to generate one hundred million horsepower of electrical energy, we would be putting twenty-four hundred million men to work!” Sun predicted that “when that time comes, we shall have enough power to supply railways, motor cars, fertilizer factories and all kinds of manufacturing establishments.”5
In contrast with India, where the focus had long been on irrigation, Chinese river engineering in the early twentieth century focused on flood control. Though China, too, had suffered from the great droughts of the 1870s and 1890s, it had also experienced disastrous river flooding on a scale unknown in India. By the 1920s, the Yellow River, famously silt-laden, posed a particular challenge—a challenge embraced by an international corps of engineers. Two Americans, John Freeman and O. J. Todd, played a central role; their Chinese protégés included Li Yizhi (1882–1938), whose stature in China was akin to Visvesvaraya’s in India. Li studied in Berlin and then visited hydraulic projects across Europe; he was aided in his work by a new cadre of Chinese graduates from MIT and other leading American institutions. “To manufacture cotton into yarn, to grind grain into flour, to light cities and otherwise modernize this part of Shansi,” Todd wrote, “will be part of the benefit that these Yellow River Falls may confer on the nearby country.”6 His ambition found many echoes across China, in India, and in other parts of the colonized world. But beneath that ambition was an enduring sense of fragility.
TO HARVEST WATER WAS TO REDRESS THE INEQUALITIES OF nature—to even out the uneven reach of the monsoon, to ensure against the particular unpredictability of the rains in the places that needed it most. But water was also an engine of inequality between people, between classes and castes, between city and country, between regions. The command of water underpinned the accumulation of land. The control of water was a source of power; its absence, a source of enduring exclusion. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, water was at the material heart of many struggles for freedom—but freedom for whom?
The question arose forcefully in the western Indian town of Mahad, near Poona, in March 1927. The local Dalit community—those excluded from the Hindu caste system, once known as Untouchables, whose daily lives were marred by residential and occupational segregation as well as by violence and material deprivation—were denied access by upper-caste Hindus to a local tank containing drinking water. Although a court had ruled that this exclusion was illegal, it continued—as it did in countless towns and villages across India, as it still does today. Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar—a brilliant lawyer from a poor family in western India, who had received scholarships to study at the London School of Economics and Columbia University—led a march to the tank. He drank a symbolic cup of water from the reservoir. The retaliation from local caste Hindus, who felt their social dominance under threat, was brutal and immediate. Dalits were attacked; many lost their jobs. “We now want to go to the Tank only to prove that, like others, we are also human beings,” Ambedkar declared, as he launched a satyagraha with four thousand volunteers. At the last minute, he called off the movement, trusting in the courts to deliver justice for his community. It took a decade for Ambedkar’s trust to be vindicated, when a further ruling insisted the tank be opened to all—contradicting the caste Hindus’ claim that it was private property, and therefore that they were free to exclude whomever they chose from the tank’s waters.7
In the broadest terms there remained a tension at the heart of the Indian nationalist movement. As one political theorist has described it, it was a tension between, on the one hand, “social freedom from caste domination,” and, on the other hand, an overriding emphasis on the immediacy of “political freedom from colonial rule,” deferring or subsuming those other struggles.8 Ambedkar and Gandhi would find themselves on opposite sides of that debate, coming into conflict in the 1930s over whether Dalits should have separate representation in the legislative councils of British India, which India’s Muslims already had. It is no coincidence that both leaders invoked the symbolic as well as material power of water. For his part, one of Gandhi’s most effective and iconic campaigns was the “salt march” to the sea at Dandi, in 1930. Choosing the British salt tax as the symbolic focus of his satyagraha, Gandhi observed that “next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.”9 The vital properties of salt linked the coastal ecosystem with the lives of millions inland. Gandhi’s was an argument about climate and society—the poorest, who labored outdoors in the heat, were most in need of salt. Where Ambedkar’s march on the tank had drawn attention to water as an indicator of profound social inequality, Gandhi used it as a symbol of unity. Within and beyond India, competing claims on water and resources escalated in the 1930s.
II
How far could Asia’s environmental inheritance be molded? What was the potential of technology to transform Asia, to make use of water and to make water available to all? Contending answers to these questions played out in the decades between the two world wars. Iron confidence in the conquest of nature, expressed by engineers and scientists and nationalists, alternated with a sense of vulnerability before nature’s power and its unpredictability. As new knowledge of the monsoon became more widely known, climate itself provided a new way to think about Asia, its boundaries—and its future.
“I wish to treat the monsoon as a way of life,” wrote Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960) in the late 1920s; this was “something that a hygrometer cannot do.” And so the fullest expression of the idea that the monsoon constituted the essence of India came not from a European but a Japanese observer. Watsuji was a scholar of Japanese ethics and aesthetics. He translated the works of Søren Kierkegaard into Japanese. He traveled to Germany in 1927 to study with Martin Heidegger.10 His journey took him by way of Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East. During and after his journey he wrote Fūdo, loosely translated as “climate”; it was Watsuji’s response to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Fūdo was not translated into English until 1961. It is unlikely that the book was widely known in India. But India was central to the book’s argument that climate shaped culture, society, and history. Fūdo is unusual in contrasting India’s climate not primarily with Western Europe’s, but with Japan’s and China’s. Watsuji’s work was part of a larger intellectual and political movement in Japan to think about Asian societies—their similarities and contrasts—in light of European domination of the world, and in light of Japanese ambitions for regional supremacy.
The humidity of a monsoon climate, Watsuji believed, “does not arouse within man any sense of a struggle against nature,” unlike in desert lands. The “distinctive character… of human nature in the monsoon zone,” he insisted, “can be understood as submissive and resignatory.” This was in part because of the monsoon climate’s doubleness: it “typifies the violence of nature” with its huge storms, “the power is so vast that man is obliged to abandon all hope of resistance”; but this is “a threat filled with power—a power capable of giving life.”11 In Watsuji’s eyes India represented the most extreme manifestation of a monsoon climate. “It is the rainy season, brought by the monsoon, that has done most to create the resignation of the Indian,” he noted. He observed that “over two-thirds of India’s 320 millions (a fifth of the world’s popul
ation) are farmers and grow their crops thanks to the monsoon” and so “whether it is late, whether it lasts its due time” are “matters of great moment.” India’s masses, Watsuji argued, had “no means of resistance against nature.” There was “no escape for India’s people from such insecurity of life.” This insecurity brought about “a lack of historical awareness, a fullness of feeling and a relaxation of will power.”12
This was a familiar pattern of argument: a familiar set of stereotypes about Indians as lazy and emotional. Nineteenth-century British liberals claimed that Indians lacked the rationality for self-government. They were too close to nature. Watsuji drew on this intellectual tradition; but in his writing we also see a distinct sense of Japan’s historic mission to “save” Asia from European domination and from its own backwardness. “The people of the South Seas have never made any appreciable cultural progress,” he declared, but “there would be startling advances if some way were found to break this mold and set this teeming power in motion.” The resignation of Indians, he wrote, “prompts in us and draws out from us all our own aggressive and masterful characteristics.” It was “on such grounds that the visitor to India is made to wish impulsively that the Indian would take up his struggle for independence.” A struggle, by implication of this circular reasoning, that could only be guided by peoples whose climates had endowed them with different traits.13 Watsuji implied that the Japanese were better placed to lead this charge than Europeans. Westerners could never truly understand the monsoon, whereas Japan had its own experience of tropical climates on the southern fringes of the archipelago, and on its model colony of Taiwan. Watsuji was not alone. Between the wars, many Asian students, scientists, and political leaders contemplated the relationship between nature and power, between nature and empire, between nature and nation. Watsuji Tetsuro concluded that for India’s future, “change depends upon the conquest of climate.”14 Stripped of its moral, even spiritual, connotations, that conquest was, ultimately, a question of technology.
A less abstract perspective, but one that shared Watsuji’s concern with how climate and ecology shaped culture, came from the Bengali sociologist and economist Radhakamal Mukerjee, a professor at Lucknow University who devoted much time and many pages in the 1920s and 1930s to the problems of rural India. Mukerjee was deeply concerned with water. In recent years the eccentric and eclectic Mukerjee has been recovered by historians as a prophet of an ecologically sensitive and localist approach to development—but he cuts an ambiguous figure. He was a committed eugenicist; he absorbed the racial and environmental determinism of his time and then inverted it, calling, for instance, for lebensraum for the “teeming millions” of India and China.15 Nevertheless, his was a rare voice of concern about India’s environmental balance at a time of rapid development—and his concerns were more tangible and specific than, say, Gandhi’s. “Man, tree, and water cannot be regarded as separate and independent,” Mukerjee wrote; he decried “crimes” against nature that would in turn “[let] loose destructive forces.” Wise development, Mukerjee argued, would pay heed to the “natural balance of man with the organic and inorganic world around him.” Only in that balance could human society find “security, well-being, and progress.”16
Mukerjee’s prescription for India’s future came from his close study of the riverine landscape of his native Bengal. Drawing on the work of the Russian anarchist geographer Léon Metchnikoff, who in 1889 published a wide-ranging history of riverine civilizations (including the Ganges valley), Mukerjee thought of river basins as living entities. Each river was “a synthesis or epitome of all the possible environmental variations and influences”; each river’s “properties, colorations and varied taste,” as well as its “plastic or destructive power,” was a product of climate and geology. Mukerjee’s diagnosis was that the vital force of Bengal’s rivers had been eviscerated by more than a century of British rule. He observed the deterioration of soil quality from overintensive cultivation. Others had observed this worrying trend, and ascribed it to the pressure of population. But the root problem, as Mukerjee saw it, was that “agriculture comes to be influenced rather [more] by the state of the market than by an arranged succession of crops which may replenish the soil.” Pressing on the ecology of land and water, the demands of the colonial state and capitalists for the products of the soil had left the Bengal delta “moribund.” But where did the roots of its revival lie? For Mukerjee, as also for the British hydraulic engineer William Willcocks—famous as the architect of the first Aswan Dam on the Nile River—part of the answer lay in recovering and reviving local traditions of irrigation and water management. For others, as we will see, only the wholesale transformation of nature by technology would match the scale of the challenge.17
Another part of Mukerjee’s concern echoed the debate of the early twentieth century about India’s place in the world—a debate that ranged across many fields of science and politics—over whether India was better seen as a bounded territory or as part of an oceanic realm. Of all of the ways that human beings had “gained a gradual mastery of the waters,” he argued, “by far the most significant development is trade by sea.” India’s maritime connections, Mukerjee observed, “usher[ed] in an oceanic civilization superseding the fluvial.” The resources of the river valleys were “narrow and limited” in comparison with oceanic commerce, which “extends as wide as the world.” The more that traffic on the sea-lanes sucked up the produce of the river valleys, the sharper their decline became. Demand from distant markets upset what Mukerjee called “ecological balance.” But he was optimistic. He felt that the excesses of “oceanic civilization” were now apparent; he looked forward to the moment when “man becomes more agriculturally inclined than ever before and atones for his past neglect.”18 He was to prove prescient—though the motive force of a return to agriculture, and a revival of the river valleys, was not atonement so much as necessity.
IF THE INTEGRATION OF INDIA WITH REGIONAL AND GLOBAL MARKETS had placed new demands upon soil and water, the collapse of those markets in the 1930s created new dilemmas. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, many rural communities in India had relied on resources from overseas to survive—exports from the rice fields of Burma, and the remittances that came back to India from the wages of migrant workers in Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon. This was the key to a puzzle that historian Christopher Baker confronted in a brilliant and neglected 1981 essay on the economic integration and subsequent disintegration of Asia. In India, as in China and Java, the 1920s marked the “critical point” when “land ran out,” Baker wrote. What demographers have struggled to explain is that, despite dire warnings in the 1920s, no Malthusian crisis ensued. To the contrary, population growth gathered pace even as agricultural yields declined year after year. The answer, Baker saw, lay in the interconnected regional economy that provided a lifeline for the densely settled agrarian heartlands of southeastern India or southern China, providing new opportunities for long-distance migration for their young men and a smaller but still significant number of young women. The expansion of rice cultivation along the Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Chao Phraya river basins after 1870 added around 14 million acres of new rice-growing lands in fifty years.19 The opening of this final frontier of cultivation was accompanied by vast migration from India and China to Southeast Asia. More than 20 million passenger journeys traversed the Bay of Bengal, and a similar number the South China Sea, in the half century after 1870. Migrants went to work on the rubber plantations and tin mines of Malaya, on the tobacco fields of Sumatra, on the docks and in the mills and factories and on the streets of the growing port towns of Singapore and Rangoon, Penang and Surabaya. Many of these journeys were temporary, their pattern circular. Violence was never far from the experience of migrant workers; they traveled under a variety of arrangements and agreements, founded on debt. But Southeast Asia provided a horizon of opportunity, however fragile; year after year, the number of new arrivals in Southeast Asia outstripped the number of p
eople heading back home.20
The global economic depression of the 1930s changed everything as it disconnected the regional economies of South and Southeast Asia. The depression made the inequalities of colonial capitalism starkly visible. Frustration about rising unemployment and intolerable debt found an outlet in anti-immigrant sentiment; mass political movements began to speak of redistribution. The collapse of global commodity markets led to a reversal of the flows of migration that had become entrenched over sixty years. The number of Indians departing Burma and Malaya exceeded the number of arrivals between 1930 and 1933; the same was true of the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, despite the fact that China in those years suffered both from civil strife and from escalating Japanese military intervention. More than six hundred thousand people left Malaya between 1930 and 1933. They had to fend for themselves when they returned home. The Indian government’s agent in Malaya noted that repatriation to India in times of distress “is proving less and less effective as a remedy against unemployment.” Tamil workers in Malaya received no relief, and “their suffering is merely transferred from Malaya to South India.”21 John Furnivall, Burma-based British scholar, administrator, and Fabian socialist, wrote with prescience in 1939 that “we can already see that 1930 marks the… close of a period of sixty years, beginning with the opening of the Suez Canal, and, although less definitely, the close of a period of four hundred years from the first landing of Vasco da Gama in Calicut.”22