by Sunil Amrith
Gopalaswami went on to consider the implications of India’s rapid population growth for the country’s future. The most alarming statistic, in his mind, was that the area of cultivated land per capita in India had fallen by 25 percent in thirty years: land had run out, and yields were declining. He ended his discussion on a note of foreboding, placing India’s experience in global context. It could well be the case, he wrote, that “we are passing through the last stage of that exceptional phase in the growth of mankind in numbers which was introduced mainly by the opening up of the New World and partly by the creation of a world market.”24 Gopalaswami steered clear of Malthusian alarm. Like many of his generation he believed in the power of the state, in the marriage of wise planning with technology, to solve social and economic problems.
There were three possible responses to the challenge of feeding India. The independent Indian state tried them all. To the extent that the productivity of the land suffered from the very small plots of land held by the majority of cultivators, land redistribution seemed a promising solution. Soon after independence, Nehru’s government proposed to abolish the zamindari system, the practice by which large landowners acted as intermediaries between the state and cultivators, wielding the power to collect taxes, a key feature of both Mughal and British administration. Although it had to confront some vested interests, zamindari abolition, which had to be approved state by state, was relatively straightforward—in the political culture of free India, zamindars epitomized the old feudal order that independence was meant to sweep away. But at most 6 percent of land in India changed hands under these reforms. The chief beneficiaries were most often farmers who were already relatively well off. Any energy behind land redistribution in India fizzled by the mid-1950s: by that time rural landowners had cemented themselves as an important constituency in Indian electoral politics; they closed ranks to defend their interests.25
The second approach, implemented with considerable success, was for the state to intervene more actively in the food economy. A commitment not to intervene in markets had been a shibboleth of British administration in India after the end of the East India Company. As we have seen, that iron confidence in markets shaped the British approach to the famines of the 1870s and 1890s, in which so many millions of Indians died. But the Second World War reversed that faith abruptly. India saw the rise of an elaborate apparatus of food control that lasted well beyond independence. The American T. W. Schultz, one of the pioneers of development economics, remarked in 1946 that “no country in the world, with perhaps the exception of Russia, has gone so far [as India] in controlling basic food distribution.” By 1946, close to eight hundred cities and towns were covered by the rationing scheme. In 1947 the wartime “Grow More Food” campaign was resurrected, and in 1949 the government of India set the campaign’s goal as the attainment of national self-sufficiency in food grains by 1952.26 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Indian state purchased 4.3 million tons of food from its own farmers, and just short of 3.5 million tons abroad. An elaborate network of transportation and storage was established, providing the skeleton of India’s public distribution system that, to this day, remains vital to the food security of hundreds of millions. As we will see, when serious drought threatened northern India in the mid-1960s, and Maharashtra in the early 1970s, the state’s food distribution proved its worth and averted famine.
But the approach that received by far the most attention, and the most funding, was the quest to intensify agricultural production—to grow more food on the same amount of land. Gopalaswami observed that this could be done, in Indian conditions, by increasing the spread of double cropping—in which two crops were grown each year, one in the winter and one in the summer—through the expanded use of fertilizer; and, above all, by expanding year-round irrigation to free agriculture from dependence on the monsoon. In 1951, India launched the first of its five-year plans for economic development—influenced by Soviet central planning, but maintaining a mixed economy. Fifteen percent of total expenditure under the first plan went to irrigation, and a majority of that to what were called “major and medium irrigation projects.” At their apex stood the large multipurpose dams that would transform India’s rivers in the years to come. The mastermind behind the Indian planning commission was the brilliant Bengali statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who had spent some years in the 1920s working for the meteorological department at Alipore observatory in Calcutta, and who had published a statistical essay on floods in Orissa.
THROUGH THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CLIMAX OF IMPERIAL globalization, Asia had been reconfigured laterally, as steamships and railways connected distant places. Now, however, vertical space came to matter more. Engineers began to think about the gradient of each river’s fall so they could be harnessed for hydropower; geologists aimed to measure the depth of water resources in underground reservoirs. The reorientation of Asia along a vertical axis—as if the map were now drawn in three dimensions—had everything to do with the conquest of water. And the conquest of water, ultimately, promised the enhancement of life and the diminution of premature death.
III
Inaugurating the Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi River in eastern India, just a year after he became prime minister, Nehru described the scene as a “fascinating vision of the future which fills one with enthusiasm.” He wrote that “a sense of adventure seized me and I forgot for a while the many troubles that beset us”—the “troubles,” that is, of mass refugee movements after Partition, of multiple insurgencies, of hostilities with Pakistan, of governing a new and heterogeneous nation. The sight of Hirakud convinced Nehru that “these troubles will pass” but “the great dam and all that follow from it will endure for ages to come.”27
The Indian state wasted no time pursuing its ambitious agenda. At independence, India had only thirty dams higher than thirty meters. Most colonial works of hydraulic engineering had been on a smaller scale: fifteen- to twenty-meter-high tanks and bunds, linked to a network of canals. During the Second World War, the colonial state began to think big—and the plans of the 1940s paved the way for India’s largest hydraulic schemes in the 1950s. The largest of them were large water storage works at Bhakra, in Punjab, Hirakud in Orissa, Tungabhadra and Nagarjunasagar in the Deccan, and the Damodar valley project in Bengal. They epitomized the imperative of multipurpose development. Each scheme promised a cluster of benefits: year-round irrigation; water storage to even out the concentration of the monsoon rains; embankments to prevent flooding during torrential rain; river navigation; and hydroelectric power. Each scheme had its own priority among these uses—the Damodar project was designed with flood control primarily in mind; Bhakra’s particular symbolic importance came from its role in compensating for India’s loss of Punjab’s Canal Colonies at Partition, by creating a new hydraulic infrastructure around the dam complex. The projects were technically demanding as well as expensive. The Damodar valley project owed most to outside funding and expertise: it received a US$18.5 million loan from the World Bank in 1950, and its technical advisors included David Lilienthal. For the most part, India’s large dams were funded by the state’s tax revenues, their costs recouped later through an “improvement cess,” a levy on landowners who benefited most from the dams. But large dams very often ran over budget and behind schedule.
The large schemes were the most visible manifestation of India’s attempt to remake nature. Many smaller projects sprang to life after independence: irrigation dams in the Vindhya hills, the Pykara hydroelectric scheme in Tamil Nadu, the Sarda Canal in Uttar Pradesh, the Sengulam project in Kerala. Beyond these lay innumerable canals restored, power lines laid, tanks and irrigation channels built or resurrected. Many of these schemes built on colonial precedents. What was new was their scale, but also the language in which they were justified. As a perceptive visitor to India observed at the time, the colossal projects “stand out for their quality of newness,” even if their impact on water availability and power generation was les
s than the cumulative impact of many smaller initiatives. The mega-projects marked a true departure: “dependable in the worst monsoon, dynamic in the most backward region.” Above all, “they stand for something India could not build, and did not will, before she became a nation.”28 The moral fervor behind the quest to harness India’s waters came from this sense of historic opportunity. So, too, did the planners’ willingness to force through their schemes, whatever the cost.
The Bhakra Nangal project, in Punjab, was India’s most prominent engineering scheme. It stood 680 feet high, the second-tallest dam in the world at the time; it consumed 500 million cubic feet of concrete. Bhakra’s location in the partitioned province of Punjab added resolve and poignancy to its promise of a more secure future. The dam had first been proposed in 1944, and construction began soon after independence. Facing the future, India’s water engineers began with a familiar problem: “One of the chief characteristics of rainfall is its unequal distribution over the country,” they wrote, and “another important characteristic is the unequal distribution of precipitation over the year.”29 They set out to free India from the seasons.
A. N. Khosla (1892–1984) stood behind many of India’s plans to harness water after independence. He was the first chair of the Central Water and Power Commission of India, a graduate of the Roorkee College of Engineering and a stalwart of the Punjab irrigation department.30 He imagined the future in, by his own admission, “fantastic” terms. In an address delivered on All-India Radio in 1951, Khosla declared that “it will be no idle dream to contemplate the linking up of the Narmada with the Ganga through the Sone, or with the Mahanadi over the Amarkantak plateau, and thus connect the Arabian Sea with the Ganga and the Bay of Bengal right through the heart of India.”31 Old dreams of reshaping India’s geography—Arthur Cotton’s dreams—gained new life after independence.
Dreams of hydraulic engineering were inseparable from dreams of freedom. Kanwar Sain, Khosla’s successor as head of India’s water authority, wrote that “the river valley projects constitute the biggest single effort since independence to meet the material wants of the people, for from irrigation springs ultimately the sinews of man, from power the sinews of industry.” He voiced the hopes of many of India’s planners and architects when he declared that the dams “are indeed the symbols of the aspirations of new India, and the blessings that stream forth from them are the enduring gifts of this generation to posterity.” His words were followed, in a public information pamphlet, by page after page of statistics: kilowatts generated and projected, hectares irrigated, gallons of water stored, tons of concrete expended. Large numbers were a form of rapture.32 For Khosla and for Sain, as for so many of their peers, Bhakra was the showpiece.
Jawaharlal Nehru addressing a large crowd at the dedication of the Bhakra Dam, October 1963. CREDIT: Bettmann/Getty Images
Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai celebrating the New Year on a special train taking them back to Delhi after a visit to the Bhakra Dam, December 31, 1956. CREDIT: Bettmann/Getty Images
Opening the Nangal Canal in 1954, Nehru’s reverence was palpable. “What place can be greater than Bhakra Nangal,” he wondered, “where thousands of men have worked or shed their blood and sweat and laid down their lives as well? Where can be holier than this?” Nehru spoke at length in Hindi and more briefly in English, before a crowd of thousands. “We talk about Mother India,” he said, and now “Mother India is in labour, producing and creating things.” At the time, India was ablaze with demands for the creation of linguistic states out of the composite provinces inherited from British India. “We talk so much about changing the provinces, expanding them, shortening them, disintegrating them,” Nehru said at Nangal, his irritation unconcealed. “I do not mind our people getting terribly excited about it,” he said, “and forgetting the major things.” But Nehru made a clear contrast between the “major things”—“Making a new India… putting an end to the poverty of India”—and what he called “petty disputes.” Nehru turned to the theme of revolution. “A revolution does not mean the breaking of heads,” he insisted; of India’s own gradual, nonviolent revolution, he declared that, with independence, “we finished it in a way in the political sphere… we have to continue it in the social and the economic sphere.”33 Bhakra became a symbol of India’s ambitions. It was an obligatory stop on the itinerary of every official visitor. On the last day of 1956, Nehru took Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to Bhakra—the two had built a rapport over the previous two years, though it would turn out to be short-lived. “These are the new temples of India where I worship,” Nehru told Zhou. “I am deeply impressed,” Zhou replied.34
The excitement of the Bhakra project was captured in a 1957 documentary made by the government of India’s Films Division. It was produced by Ezra Mir, born Edwyn Meyers: an Indian Jewish filmmaker who began by making propaganda films for the British during the Second World War, and who went on to make seven hundred documentaries in the 1950s and 1960s. The Films Division was charged with bringing “new India” to life on screen. Its productions included films about India’s freedom struggle and profiles of political leaders and musicians. Above all, the films dramatized the quest for “development”—for health and water, food and education. Public information films played in cinemas across the country before the feature films that people had bought tickets for—they reached an audience of millions.35
The Bhakra film was an epic. Its visual language came from a tradition that had circulated globally during the war: Soviet and Pathé newsreels suggested the form, the genre, the structure in which India’s propagandists worked—and which they made their own. The narrator’s voice is clipped and serious. The soundtrack begins with nineteenth-century European music: brassy and bright, like a march. “For centuries,” the narrator begins, “gazing upon the parched lands of Punjab and Rajasthan, we have dreamed of reclaiming the desert.” The struggle at the heart of the film is clear from the outset, as suddenly the background music turns to an Indian folk theme and the film cuts to a scene of women lining up at a well, whose “search for water, “we are told, “was never-ending.” The solution, the film’s narrator declared, lay in the “unused, wasted” waters of the Sutlej River, flowing down from the Himalayas. And then “at last,” as if inevitable, “the decision was taken—the Sutlej must be tamed.” The film cuts to the image of a young, studious-looking engineer, slide rule in hand: he is the protagonist of this drama. The narrator spins out superlatives, the music turns to a fanfare of trumpets, the camera shows us Bhakra’s sheer size: it is “massive,” “stupendous,” “mighty,” “a miracle.” It held out for India “the promise of an exciting, dramatic future.”36
The film was finished before the dam. It shows us a worksite of ceaseless, noisy activity: the rumble of drills; the explosion of blasted rock; the clatter of a conveyor belt ferrying bucket after bucket of material up to the dam; the clink of hammers and the heft of spades as imported machines—some of them reassembled, piece by piece, on location—dovetail with the oldest kinds of human work. India’s dams were a lucrative source of contracts for foreign engineering firms like Hazra & Co. of Chicago, who provided material, equipment, and many consultants. But dam building was also a spur to local industry; the largest cement factory in Asia came up to feed the “colossus” that was Bhakra. Toward the end of the film, we see the changing of shifts at the end of a working day. Darkness descends on the site and “the lights of the great dam are switched on, glowing like stars.” At moments in the film, the dam seems to transcend technology, evoking a deeper and more ancient sense of wonder—it was a “miracle.”
Until the last few minutes of the film, the only voice we hear, apart from the narrator’s, is a brief clip of Harvey Slocum—the straight-talking, autodidact American dam builder who supervised Bhakra’s “army” of Indian engineers, and who died suddenly on site in 1961. But then, finally, our focus shifts to the makers of Bhakra. At the end of a shift, “men emerge from every corner.” We see a worker a
rriving home as his three children run to greet him. As he enters his modest quarters, his wife rises to offer him water, a smile on her face. It is the first intimate or domestic scene in the film—the first sight of a woman, or of children; in the background the orchestra is replaced by a simple folk melody played by a flute. The parting message is one of national unity: Bhakra represents the nation. “Never in the long history of India,” the narrator declares, “have there been so many men from different parts of the country working together for a common purpose.” The effort of creating Bhakra united Indians where the politics of region and linguistic identity divided them. The film closes with the voices of the workers, each speaking his own language. B. Srinivasan faces the camera; he speaks in Tamil without captions or voiceover; his speech is stiffly awkward before the camera. “My name is Srinivasan. I have worked here for a year and a half. My home is in Madurai district.” We hear from workers in Punjabi, Marathi, and Bengali, some of their words drowned out by the noise of construction.
Harvey Slocum, the American dam builder who supervised construction at Bhakra. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images
The Bhakra Dam under construction. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images