by Sunil Amrith
When the Stanford University economists V. D. Wickizer and M. K. Bennett examined Asia’s rice economies in 1941, they surveyed the wreck of what had once been an integrated system. In their analysis, they used the term “Monsoon Asia” as “a convenient designation for a specific group of countries in which monsoonal climatic conditions profoundly influence both agriculture and economic life.” “Monsoon Asia” was bound together by climate, by the direction of the winds, and by the trade in rice, but divided by empires. Wickizer and Bennett witnessed “Monsoon Asia” splintering further as a result of depression and now war. They wrote of their hope for “a reversal of the recent trend towards economic nationalism.” Their recipe for regional sustainability was for a return to the free commerce in rice, augmented by capital investment. But their projection of “unfavorable” conditions proved much closer to the eventual outcome. “If peace should come with important territorial changes in Monsoon Asia,” they argued, “changes in the political composition of Monsoon Asia following the termination of present wars might readily result in a rather sudden shift and re-orientation, completely reversing the tendencies of the past decade or more.”40
The most enduring political consequence of the Bengal famine was the decisive rejection of any postwar return to the old ways of unregulated markets and inter-regional trade in rice. Indian planners and politicians, technocrats and populists, all emphasized the need for self-sufficiency in the future. Water was vital to their plans. Starvation’s return to India scarred Nehru’s generation of leaders. Having asserted that national sovereignty would alleviate the problem of starvation, Nehru and his contemporaries were haunted by the prospect of failure. “We live continually on the verge of disaster in India, and indeed disaster sometimes overwhelms us,” Nehru wrote. The same year, Patna University economist and demographer Gyan Chand declared that “ours is a death-ridden country. We might very well adopt the human skull as our national emblem.”41
AS THE WAR APPROACHED ITS END, THE EXPERIENCE OF FAMINE IN India—and also in China and Vietnam—came together with the force of rising expectations. In the eyes of many Asian observers, only the wholehearted embrace of state planning, wedded to powerful technology and under the control of nationalist rather than colonial forces, would address the colossal vulnerability of Asia’s people to privation and starvation, both of which the war had laid bare.
Even British planners began to contemplate large schemes to transform water. The Bhakra Dam, in Punjab, was first proposed in 1944. It was a monument to British plans for India’s postwar reconstruction at a time when few believed the Raj would collapse so quickly after the war’s end.42 The project had its skeptics. “For advertisement reasons some authorities in India have published optimistic forecasts of the time in which they propose to construct high dams,” one official scrawled in an archival note. “There is sound opinion, unbiased by connection with these projects, which considers these forecasts fantastic.”43 But speed and scale were what Indian nationalists wanted.
One of the voices in favor of a planned conquest of India’s rivers was the scientist Meghnad Saha. Saha was born in 1893 in an East Bengal village, to a lower-caste family without education or resources, and with several children to feed. His scientific aptitude was evident from childhood; he won a series of scholarships that led him to Calcutta University in the 1910s. He studied in England and then in Germany, returning to a position at Allahabad University, one of India’s most distinguished institutions. Saha’s pioneering contributions to astrophysics gained him widespread recognition, notably for his paper on “Ionisation in the Solar Chromosphere.” By the 1930s he was no longer content to confine his work to the laboratory. He founded the journal Science and Culture to reach a wider public; he became a missionary for scientific development, and a strident critic of Mahatma Gandhi’s suspicion of modern technology. “We do not for a moment believe that better and happier conditions of life,” he wrote, can be secured by “reverting back to the spinning wheel, the loin cloth, and the bullock cart.”44 One of Saha’s central concerns was with water, and his dreams of water were grand.
Saha’s essay on “Flood,” published in Science and Culture in 1943, at the height of the war, envisaged wholesale environmental transformation. He described the decline of the Damodar River: diverted by railway embankments, its course had moved toward Calcutta, and now it threatened to inundate the city. Drawing on a global range of examples and references—the 1913 floods in the Miami valley, and, above all, the Tennessee Valley Authority—Saha argued that the key lay in a “radical solution” to make the Damodar “a perennial” rather than a seasonal river: that is, to “liberate” it from the monsoon. He argued for the adaptation of the American approach: “to regard the whole river basin as a unitary area, and coordinate plans of flood control with those of irrigation, development of backward agricultural areas, development of hydroelectric power, and improvement of navigation.”45 Elaborating on his plans in another article the following year, written together with his colleague Kamalesh Ray, Saha expressed optimism: “Nature, vested interests and thoughtless managements made a once prosperous valley a wilderness, but Nature, Man and Science can again make it a smiling garden,” they wrote. Saha was scathing in response to those, like Radhakamal Mukerjee, who had argued that restoring forests and local efforts at soil conservation would strip the Damodar of its destructive power. Saha called the claim that deforestation affected rainfall “absurd”—a claim for which there was “not a single iota of positive proof.” If changes in forest cover and land use had any effect at all on local climate, Saha argued, they “must be extremely small compared to the huge monsoon currents which are responsible for the precipitation on the Damodar Valley.” Working at the cutting edge of planetary science, Saha was well aware of new work on the monsoons, and their integration with other parts of Earth’s climate. The scale of India’s climate was so vast as to render any local modifications in the water cycle trivial in importance. Saha pointed out that rainfall in the Damodar valley was determined by “atmospheric conditions in the Bay of Bengal… which are generally thousands of feet in depth”, “local conditions” could have little effect upon them.46
Rainfall was beyond human intervention. But human intervention to transform the landscape could neutralize the threat posed by uncertain rainfall, securing rivers from the alternating lack and excess of water. And here, Saha was confident about the future. “We are fortunate to live at a time when the large scale experience of thousands of dams constructed in the USA since 1915 are at our disposal,” he said; he believed that the global circulation of ideas and technology, a process of learning, would come to India’s aid. In valorizing the American and Soviet models, Saha indicated that his dreams for India extended beyond anything the sluggish British colonial state could carry out. He envisaged the construction of dams in eastern India that would last for “hundreds of years.”47
IN THE 1920S AND 1930S, WATER BOTH CONNECTED AND DIVIDED Asia. A new awareness of the dynamics of climate made clear the extent to which Asia’s coastal arc shared vulnerability to powerful cyclones that crisscrossed its seas. In the fields of geography and climatology, the idea of “monsoon Asia” arose to highlight the common rhythms of rural life governed by extreme seasonality. To think of Asia as bound together by water in every dimension—the rains, rivers, and seas—was to suggest that material conditions transcended the borders between empires. But those borders hardened in the decades between the wars. The depression of the 1930s broke many links in the chain that held monsoon Asia together: barriers to movement proliferated and migration patterns were overturned; commodity markets collapsed and the trade in rice declined. These reversals made the question of who controlled water all the more important.
The Second World War provided new tools and revived old fears. The trauma of famine and social breakdown met a newfound confidence in the power of state planning and big technology to reshape economy, society, and the environment. The next chapter turns
to the struggles waged by India and by other independent Asian nation-states to understand and conquer water.
SEVEN
RIVERS DIVIDED, RIVERS DAMMED
BETWEEN 1945 AND 1950 THE MAP OF ASIA WAS REDRAWN. THE war overturned imperial rule in Asia. The prestige of European powers in South and Southeast Asia never recovered from their rapid collapse before the Japanese advance in 1942. Economically ruined by the war, European empires could not afford to hold on to their colonial territories by force without American backing—which was forthcoming only when it furthered US interests in the deepening Cold War. Most importantly, emboldened and militarized Asian leaders refused to contemplate any return to the old order.
In the war’s aftermath, new states were forged from the ruins of empires. In 1947, British India was divided into the independent states of India and Pakistan: a bloody partition along religious lines that cost millions of lives and ruined millions more. In 1948, Burma and Ceylon gained their independence from the British in mostly peaceful transfers of power—but Burma immediately faced multiple internal revolts, by Communist guerrillas and by the Karen and Kachin ethnic minorities. The Dutch tried to hold Indonesia by force. They were driven out by Sukarno’s nationalist forces in 1949 after a protracted anticolonial war that also saw failed uprisings by Communist, Islamic, and regional secessionist forces. In Vietnam, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence in 1945, moving into the vacuum left by the sudden surrender of the Japanese at the end of the war. But the French were determined to return to Vietnam, and with growing American support they waged war against the Viet Minh until Ho’s victory at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In East Asia, too, the war’s end brought revolutionary change. The civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and Mao Zedong’s Communist army culminated in Mao’s victory and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, together with a de facto Nationalist state on the island of Taiwan.1
The partition of India in 1947, showing the division of the Indus and Ganges basins.
The borderland between India and China, showing the Brahmaputra/Yarlung Tsangpo river.
Asia’s political transformation was so rapid, so dramatic, so violent, that few at the time gave any thought to its environmental consequences. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that those consequences were profound. The impact of these midcentury partitions and borders on Asia’s waters are a vital, and neglected, part of any history of the second half of the twentieth century. We have hardly begun to reckon with their effects, both positive and negative, on the lives of a significant proportion of humanity.
Dam building, more than any other project, epitomized Asia’s new leaders’ confidence in their ability to tame nature. India had fewer than three hundred large dams at independence; by 1980, it had more than four thousand. Dams were the single largest form of public investment in modern India, swallowing considerably more government expenditure than health care or education. Dams promised to liberate India from the capricious monsoon; they promised finally to free it from the specter of famine that had struck so often, and so harshly, in the colonial era. India was not alone: the enthusiasm for dam building was global. Under Mao, China built large dams on a scale that eclipsed India’s efforts: an estimated twenty-two thousand after 1949, almost half of all the large dams in the world. Along the Mekong River, dams formed part of the American strategy to shore up the anti-Communist state of South Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
These projects proceeded in parallel; by the 1960s they came into contention. Dams tried to make rivers conform to political borders by impounding their waters and diverting them to serve the needs of national development. But as multiple projects and competing ambitions arose, upstream and downstream, dams made tangible the material interdependence that transcended borders. At the time of independence, few in India had thought much about the fact that many of India’s rivers originated in Chinese territory. Only when both sides’ ambitions for river development swelled did the cross-border flow of rivers appear as a threat.
In the postcolonial age, large dams carried enormous symbolic weight. They epitomized dreams of development. More than any other technology, they promised the mastery of nature. In the global history of dam building, India played a pivotal role. India’s experience exemplified the scale of the challenge facing the Third World, but also the scale of ambition that new states upheld. Because of the unevenness of the monsoon, India’s rulers were obsessed with water. So, too, were the legions of foreign experts who arrived to help India’s quest. Unlike China, India benefited from aid from both sides in the Cold War: India’s developmental plans were a terrain for competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. India’s water engineers received advice from around the world, and in turn they shared their expertise through the United Nations and other international bodies. The broader influence of India’s addiction to large dams was cultural as much as it was political, as Indian cinema captured the imagination of viewers across Asia and Africa. Some of the most iconic Hindi films of the age were set against a backdrop of India’s struggles for water; their stories resonated far beyond India.
The conquest of water by concrete behemoths came at enormous cost. Some of those costs were evident from the outset—the displacement of people from their homes, the flooding of villages and forests by new reservoirs. Others became clearer with time. Few in the 1950s or 1960s could see just how fundamentally dams would transform Asia’s ecology of water. It was in that era that Asia’s states and peoples started on a collision course toward the water-related crises they face today.
I
Partition was a particular kind of British decolonization, which came about as an attempt to engineer, in an extremely compressed period, nation-states with clear and decisive ethnic majorities out of previously heterogeneous colonial territories. It was implemented first in Ireland, and then twice in the 1940s: on the Indian subcontinent, and in Palestine. While political tensions between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League ran high in the 1930s, it was only after the end of the Second World War that it became likely that India’s future would be a divided one. Until then, the League’s claim to represent all of India’s Muslims—divided by language and region, by class and politics—rang hollow. In the aftermath of war, a spiral of violence supercharged political negotiations, and accelerated the timetable for independence. The British, fearing entanglement in an Indian civil war, and reeling from economic crisis, sought to leave as quickly as possible, no matter what the cost. Last-ditch negotiations failed when the Congress leadership were unwilling to concede to Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand for a weak federal government with power resting in provincial hands. On June 3, 1947, British prime minister Clement Attlee announced the plan to partition the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed the last viceroy of India, charged with overseeing the division. The job of drawing the border fell to Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer with no prior experience of India. Closeted with a small boundary commission, supplied with maps and census returns, his task was to draw a line to carve off the Muslim-majority areas of Punjab and Bengal from the rest of British India, thereby creating the western and eastern wings of Pakistan—divided by more than one thousand miles of Indian territory. The location of the border was not announced until the day after independence, on August 15, 1947.2
Nobody had predicted the colossal scale of upheaval that followed. In just over a month, between September and October 1947, more than 849,000 refugees entered India on foot. A further 2.3 million crossed the Punjab border by train. Trains were attacked by armed mobs on both sides of the border—their packed carriages became chambers of death. The Indian and Pakistani armies, by mutual consent, crossed the frontier into each other’s territory to lead convoys of refugees back to safety. Arriving refugees were settled in what had been deemed “evacuee property”—many who had sought temporary refuge from the v
iolence returned to find that their homes had been seized, their departure construed as an intention to emigrate. South Asia’s cities swelled with new arrivals, Delhi and Karachi and Calcutta above all. Around 20 million refugees crossed Radcliffe’s border, more than half of them in Punjab.3
THE SIFTING OF INDIA’S RELIGIOUS MAJORITIES AND MINORITIES IN 1947 was also, as one historian describes it, a “division of nature.”4 Radcliffe himself was aware of the problem in Punjab: his border, he recorded, was “complicated by the existence of canal systems, so vital to the life of Punjab but developed only under the conception of a single administration.”5 His solution pleased nobody. Canals were severed from their headworks. In Punjab, Partition broke the carefully planned canal network laid down over a half century. Bengal had no need of the intricate irrigation systems of arid Punjab, watered as it was by the monsoon and by the Himalayan rivers. But there, the border tried to contain a naturally volatile waterscape. As the geologists and bridge builders of the nineteenth century had found, Bengal’s rivers changed course suddenly; chars, or sandbanks, emerged with the deposit of silt and vanished with the coming of floods. The chars were so fertile as to be desirable land for cultivation—if they arose along the riverine borders, were they now part of India or Pakistan? For those who inhabited this braided landscape of land and water, the answer had vital consequences.6 The Bengal border ran through the sacred Ganges and the turbulent Brahmaputra. In 1947 there was little infrastructure to stem the flow of this water, but there were many plans in place. What would happen in the future, when engineers on both sides eyed new ways of harnessing the waters?