Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  III

  When the colonial government of Madras opened the Mettur Dam along the Kaveri River in 1934, it was for a brief moment the largest dam in the world. It had been in the works for almost two decades. The dam could “boast of controlling works that leave those at Assouan [Aswan] well behind,” one newspaper report declared, revealing how far water engineering had become a global endeavor. Mettur was three times the Aswan dam’s length, standing 5,300 feet long, 176 feet high, 171 wide, and boasting a sixteen-foot roadway on top. The idea invoked, again and again, was control. “Rivers in India are not all tidy instruments,” the columnist observed. India’s rivers had a will of their own: “not many of them are content just with carrying water from mountain to sea,” he wrote, “they love to spill it on the way… to damage while they enrich the lands they flow through.” He drew a clear lesson: “They do not restrain themselves, and must be restrained.”23 Not all observers were so sanguine. In a handwritten note on a file in the Tamil Nadu archives in Chennai, a civil servant who signed off as “SA” took a dim view of what seemed to be the hubris behind the Mettur Dam:

  The Superintending Engineer’s report is too self satisfied, or takes too much for granted, the infallibility of the officers of the department and the rank ignorance and prejudice of the ryots [farmers]. I do not think the position in Tanjore district is quite so very simple as the… report makes it out to be. While I am behind no one else in my admiration of the skill of our engineers who have built the great dam at Mettur and have succeeded in opening out the possibility of providing efficient irrigation facilities for large tracts of Country, the problem in Tanjore district has yet to be studied with sympathy and local knowledge.24

  But SA’s was the voice of a minority. The “restraint” of water, more than any other single solution, promised to address so many of the problems that came together to create a sense of agrarian crisis. Declining soil fertility, falling crop yields, the closing of overseas frontiers for migration and the depression’s shock to trade—all of these combined with a broader sense of the enduring unpredictability of a monsoon climate. But every scheme to control water had the potential to create conflict between users upstream and downstream, between beneficiaries and losers. Since those unequal benefits often fell on either side of a political boundary, attempts to control water sharpened awareness of borders. Everywhere, as claims multiplied on river water for irrigation and power, so too did efforts to claim water as territory. The Mettur Dam had run into just this problem—that is why it was so long in the making. The Kaveri River flowed through both Madras Presidency and the princely state of Mysore. Mysore was quicker than Madras to attempt to harness the river, thanks in large part to the work of the engineer M. Visvesvaraya. But if Visvesvaraya’s plans for his Krishnarajasagar Dam were realized, the British claimed, Mettur would not have enough water. The tangle that ensued became the first, and certainly not the last, territorial dispute over water in modern India. The first treaty between the governments of India and Mysore over water dated back to 1892; at that time of agricultural intensification, it was already clear that conflict might lie ahead. Unable to reconcile their dispute over Krishnarajasagar, both sides went to arbitration by the imperial government of India and agreed upon a technical solution: the tribunal decided on the exact quantities of water that Mysore and Madras were entitled to. Neither side was entirely satisfied, but they signed an agreement in 1924.25 The distribution of Kaveri water has continued to haunt the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka since 1947—a point of recurrent conflict, both within and outside of the courts.

  Many of Asia’s leaders believed that centralized planning would balance the needs of different constituencies. Planning would address the conflicts that arose between regions and communities; it would distribute resources in the most equitable and efficient way. Water resource planning took its place alongside economic planning in China as well as in India. In 1933, and in the aftermath of disastrous floods two years earlier, Chiang Kai-shek, who was by that time in command of a large part of China, assembled the Yellow River Conservancy Commission. Just as Indian engineers started to imagine the uses of water beyond irrigation, so China’s planners too moved toward multipurpose water projects. Foreign engineers were drawn to the challenge that the Yellow River’s control posed. Eminent German hydrologist Hubert Engels set up a Yellow River research center in Dresden; the League of Nations, too, lent its support and expertise to the Yellow River commission.26 China was an independent republic in the 1930s but faced a growing threat from the territorial expansion of the Japanese empire. In India, the Congress party—which won large majorities in the elections of 1937, held under an expanded franchise—began to think about India after British rule, even if the arrival of freedom seemed to lie in the distant future. The Congress party’s National Planning Committee, convened in 1938 by Jawaharlal Nehru, brought together a coalition of left-leaning nationalists, Gandhian thinkers, industrialists, and scientists including Radhakamal Mukerjee. It saw itself as a state-in-waiting. The group formed several subcommittees, of which one dealt with “River Training and Irrigation,” chaired by Nawab Ali Nawaz Jung, chief engineer of the princely state of Hyderabad. The committee reported that “it is important that our rivers should be developed to the greatest possible extent and effectively utilised.” It was a task that could not wait: “Conservation of water by storage,” they concluded, “has become a matter vital to the future” of India.27

  THROUGHOUT THE 1930S, INDIAN AND CHINESE PLANS TO CONTROL water proceeded with each oblivious to the other—and Chinese plans were soon consumed by the crisis of war with Japan. It would be a long time before their river engineering projects put them on a collision course. But there were portents of trouble to come. In the early 1930s, there was a flare-up of tension on the fringes of British and Chinese control—on the border between Burma, still ruled as part of British India, and Yunnan. A secret British intelligence file went into great detail on “Chinese Claims to the Irrawaddy Triangle”; it was filled with correspondence and translated pamphlets and newspaper articles, all deployed as evidence that the Chinese state was making a “fantastic claim… to the whole of Burma north of latitude 25˚35N, right up to the Assam border.” On the Chinese side, William Credner, a geographer sympathetic to Chinese nationalism and based at Sun Yat-sen University, undertook an expedition to the Irrawaddy triangle along with three Chinese officials in 1930. They sought to address the “long-outstanding question of the undemarcated northern and southern sections of the Yunnan-Burma boundary,” left undefined in a treaty of 1894. They protested successive British military expeditions in the area, which the British justified on the grounds of suppressing a local slave trade. The Chinese party “advanced far into the uncivilized and remote districts,” he wrote, and undertook the “plentiful collection of information”—not only on the “boundary question,” but also on the “topography of the region.” For now, the border was important as a symbolic marker of Chinese sovereignty: “It is hoped that Yunnanese of all classes will unite in striving to prevent the territory from being treated as a British colony again,” an intercepted Chinese memorandum declared. But there was also a hint, in the close attention to landscape and the flow of rivers, that frontier regions would become vital for other reasons, too: for their water and their mineral riches.28

  The question of borders arose, in a different sense, in India’s fisheries. By the 1930s, V. Sundara Raj had succeeded James Hornell as the first Indian director of the Madras Fisheries Department. Unlike his predecessors, he looked forward to the wholesale transformation of India’s fisheries by technology. Writing at the height of the Depression, as the regional economy had contracted and patterns of inter-regional migration had reversed, Sundara Raj worried that the Ceylon government had begun “deep-sea fishing experiments” with a trawler, in what he saw as water belonging to Madras. He pointed to Malaya, too, and the “great awakening in these sister states”; his concern was that “other Governmen
ts will exploit the Madras fishing grounds.” He repeated his request, denied the first time around, for a trawler and a cutter, to commence his own deep-sea exploration. Sundara Raj saw “intensive ocean research and exploration of ocean grounds” as a global trend—he cited examples from Japan, Canada, and the United States.29

  IV

  From the late 1930s Asia was embroiled in war. China’s experience of war was most prolonged, and most traumatic. Beginning with the annexation of the northeastern Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese empire advanced, propelled by the actions of local military commanders. Japan’s rulers eyed China’s mineral resources, its strategic position, and its territorial expanse. General Chiang Kai-shek’s very success in gaining control over China presented a threat to Japanese ambitions, which had been well served by China’s internecine strife in the 1920s. In 1937, simmering conflict erupted into full-scale war. Under pressure of conflict, the best laid plans for the development of water resources went awry, with catastrophic effects. In June 1938, retreating Chinese troops breached the Yellow River dikes in Huangyuankou, in Henan Province, to stop the Japanese advance on the Nationalist stronghold of Wuhan. It was, in the words of one historian, “the single most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history.” Its dikes breached, the Yellow River rushed southeast, spilling into the Huai River system and drowning tracts of flat land on its way. More than eight hundred thousand people were killed, and 4 million displaced, by this desperate act of hydraulic sabotage.30

  The war in Asia spread in December 1941, when Japanese forces simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor and swept through Southeast Asia. Within a year, the Japanese empire had absorbed a region that had, since the nineteenth century, been divided among imperial powers. They conquered British-ruled Malaya and Burma, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and the American-ruled Philippines. The fall of Burma brought the threat of a Japanese invasion to India’s borders.

  Though Indian territory saw little fighting, it became a vast supply base and center of operations for the Allied war effort in Asia—and Indian troops constituted a sizeable contingent of Allied forces in every theater of war. The war also transformed Indian politics. Incensed that the British government had declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Indian politicians, the Congress party resigned from the provincial governments it had controlled since the elections of 1937. After the failure of negotiations with a British delegation led by Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps in August 1942, Gandhi launched another mass campaign of civil disobedience—the Quit India Movement. Parts of North India became ungovernable. The British responded by dropping bombs on civilians to quell the revolt.31 In their search for support as Congress party leaders languished in prison, the British turned elsewhere. The war boosted the power and the standing of the Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had in 1940 passed the “Pakistan resolution,” calling for the establishment of a homeland for India’s Muslims—though how, where, and when were questions left deliberately unclear. The British were forced to concede that India would gain freedom, in some shape or form, after the war.

  AS HISTORIAN SRINATH RAGHAVAN HAS SHOWN, THE WAR LED TO A vastly expanded role for the state in the economy, laying the groundwork for the apparatus of planning in independent India.32

  Among other fields, the war gave a boost to meteorology, as India became a hub of military aviation. The Indian Meteorological Department grew fast: its budget trebled between 1939 and 1944, and it established a new base of operations on a thirty-acre campus along Delhi’s Lodhi Road. It proved difficult to find and train enough staff to keep pace with the expansion of facilities. Some of India’s leading meteorologists suffered loss and hardship during the war. Most of the staff of the Burma Meteorological Department were Indian; and when Japanese bombing raids began on Rangoon, they joined the exodus of up to a half-million Indian refugees—most of whom walked back to India, through jungle and mountains, into Assam. The director of Burma’s weather service, S. C. Roy, walked from Rangoon to Imphal. One of his deputies, S. N. Ghosh, survived the long trek only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid on the Indian border. The war saw the recruitment of a new cadre of meteorologists in India—the generation that would staff India’s weather service after independence. The meteorology department had three times as many staff by the end of the war as it did at the start. In 1944, Charles Normand retired as its director after thirty-one years working for the department; his successor, S. K. Banerji, was the first Indian to head the meteorological service. The war saw the beginning of aircraft weather reconnaissance over the Bay of Bengal, through a series of flights between Madras and the Andaman Islands. It also witnessed a breakthrough in communications technology. The India Meteorological Broadcast Center was established at the Royal Air Force base in Nagpur, in central India. The Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force installed the first teleprinters in India for the transmission of weather data.33

  The development of meteorology was oriented by military needs. In weather forecasting as in medicine, civilian applications for the new technologies were a low priority. However much the new technologies promised, India’s experience of the war shattered the complacent assumption, pervasive by the 1930s, that nature had been conquered.

  WHEN THE JAPANESE INVADED BURMA IN 1942, BRITISH INDIA lost 15 percent of its total rice supply. In some areas that took large imports of Burmese rice, like Madras, the shortfall was overcome by local production. But in Bengal a long-term decline in the rural economy came together with natural disaster, compounded by wartime political bungling, to cause a catastrophic famine—the first in India since the early twentieth century. The return of starvation to Bengal came as a traumatic shock. From the time of the Indian Industrial Commission in 1918, most observers took for granted that famine had been confined to India’s past. In the 1920s and 1930s, nutritional scientists and health officials began to think about food as a way to enhance life rather than simply to sustain it—their concern moved from absolute starvation to malnutrition. “The days when we could cast the blame on the gods for all our ills are past,” Nehru had written in 1929.34

  During the winter monsoon of 1942, a fearsome cyclone struck eastern Bengal, flooding fields and destroying crops. “In violence and devastation it surpassed any other natural calamity that befell this country,” one contemporary account observed, “it forced from the Bay a high tidal wave” that reached 140 miles per hour. The cyclone “swept the standing crops, blew off the roofs, uprooted most of the trees, demolished the huts”; the floods that followed “washed away nearly [three quarters] of the livestock, and some 40,000 human beings.”35 Unnerved by the prospect of a Japanese invasion from Arakan, local officials imposed a scorched-earth policy, denying local cultivators the boats they used to transport rice. Internal divisions paralyzed the Bengal government. Driven by Winston Churchill’s animus toward India, the British cabinet ignored every warning. They continued to export Indian rice to feed troops in other theaters of war. They refused to deploy Allied ships to send relief to Bengal.36 As shortages intensified, the most vulnerable people—landless laborers, fishers, women, and children—starved. Calcutta’s relative wealth sucked in from rural Bengal rice that could have fed those in dire need.37

  The vulnerability of Bengal’s poor, like their debts, had compounded over decades. During the Depression, smallholders unable to repay loans had lost much of their land. The productivity of Bengal’s lands had declined in the twentieth century as railway embankments stemmed the flow of rivers and invasive water hyacinth choked streams. By 1942, the crisis was acute. As scarcity closed in, patrons deserted their sharecroppers, choosing to pay them in cash rather than in kind just when inflation made rice unaffordable. Families abandoned their weaker members. Hit by the successive blows of a loss of imports, “boat denial” by the state, a devastating cyclone, and a lack of relief, the economy and society of Bengal collapsed.38

  Even the conservative States
man newspaper of Calcutta published photographs of starving children and abandoned corpses—scenes reminiscent of the 1870s and the 1890s when the great El Niño droughts had combined with the churning effects of capitalism to deliver disaster. These images met with stony-faced inaction by the British government. This time, Indian observers held the British government directly responsible for starvation. “It was a man-made famine which could have been foreseen and avoided,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote from Ahmednagar jail. He was sure that “in any democratic or semi-democratic country, such a calamity would have swept away all the governments concerned with it.” But just as disturbing was the callousness of wealthy Indians. Nehru expressed disgust at the “dancing and feasting and a flaunting of luxury” in Calcutta while millions starved. S. G. Sardesai, a Communist activist, decried the “unbridled profiteering” of hoarders and speculators, and argued that “total mobilization means vigorous and just procurement of the genuine surplus from rural areas, vigorous price controls, and total rationing in cities.”39 When they finally secured London’s commitment to relief in the autumn of 1943, Indian officials had to raise the alarm that Bengal’s continued starvation could endanger the war effort.