by Sunil Amrith
EIGHT
THE OCEAN AND THE UNDERGROUND
IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS, SET IN BENGAL IN THE LATE 1960S AND early 1970s, Neel Mukherjee brings a novelist’s imaginative sympathy to evoke what it feels like to depend on the rains. Supratik, the novel’s protagonist, has become involved in the Naxalite movement, a violent revolutionary movement of Maoist inspiration, committed to rural revolution in India. As part of his work of political outreach, Supratik, a privileged city boy, spends time in the countryside, growing accustomed to its rhythms. He inhabits a rural Bengal that is impoverished, indebted, under the heel of landlords—and governed by the monsoon. As they prepare the seedbeds to transplant paddy saplings, Supratik’s host, Kanu, gazes at the sky. His questions are perennial ones: “Would it arrive this year? his eyes seemed to be asking; would it be late? would it be enough? There was both anxiety and resignation in his face.” And then, this time, the rains came. Supratik continues: “It was exactly as I remembered from childhood—sheets of water coming down for hours and hitting the ground with such force that you thought the road would dissolve—except here the ground, which is earth, does dissolve.”1
On the surface there is little to connect this imaginative account of the lived experience of climate with the meteorological data being accumulated by international scientists at the time. Human lives and voices could not be fed into climate models, where readings of pressure and wind and moisture could. But they told different facets of the same story.
This chapter tells two intersecting stories—the connections between them were not fully evident at the time. The first is the story of monsoon science in the 1960s; the second is the political and economic history of India’s mid-1960s droughts. The International Indian Ocean Expedition ran between 1959 and 1965. It used new technology to uncover the forces underpinning the monsoon; it resituated South Asia in relation to the vastness of the Indian Ocean; it established new links between the countries along the ocean’s rim, including a web of weather-monitoring stations. The scientific expedition raised the alarm that human activity was starting to make itself felt in the oceans—perhaps even that it was altering Earth’s climate. At just the moment when Asian states were sloughing off the web of connections that linked them across borders and seas, satellites and aerial photographs and deep sea probes projected a view of Asia shaped by a vast, connected climate system—a system with very tangible consequences for the large development schemes that states around the Indian Ocean rim had embarked on.
In the same years the monsoon came urgently back into view in India, which was in the grip of drought for three pivotal years in the mid-1960s. India’s enthusiasm for the Indian Ocean Expedition, in common with many other countries in the region, was driven primarily by short-term concerns with a looming food crisis, which threatened political unrest. The Indian Ocean Expedition promised a survey of the sea as a set of “material resources to be exploited.”2 Most of all, it promised more accurate weather forecasts. India’s response to the crisis of the mid-1960s was to intensify its quest for water. The dam building of the 1950s had not gone far or fast enough. Old fears of the monsoon climate resurfaced, regardless of the advances in climatic understanding that the new science promised. The government adopted a package of agricultural reforms that included high-yielding crops, vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, and the more intensive exploitation of groundwater using electric pumps.
IN HIS 1981 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL Association, on “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” historian of the Atlantic world Bernard Bailyn spoke of the relationship between what he called latent and manifest processes in history. The former he described as “events that contemporaries were not fully or clearly aware of… however much they might have been forced unwittingly to grapple with their consequences.” He described the relationship between latent and manifest events like this:
The events I am referring to were known, if at all, only vaguely by contemporaries or by previous historians to have been events; they are being discovered as particular happenings now for the first time. Taken together, they form a new landscape, a landscape like that of the ocean floor, assumed to have existed in some vague way by people struggling at the surface of the waves but never seen before as actual rocks, ravines, and cliffs. And like the newly discovered ocean floor—so rich, complex, and busy a world in itself—the world of latent events can be seen to be part of, directly involved with, the manifest history of the surface world itself.3
Bailyn’s oceanographic metaphor is especially apt in this chapter, where it takes on literal as well as symbolic meaning. We can now, for the first time, integrate the discovery of the Indian Ocean’s effects on the monsoon, the early signs of climate change, with the manifest political and economic transformations of India and other parts of Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.
The lessons of the new climate science—that Asia was intensely vulnerable, increasingly interconnected, bound by growing risks from the destabilization of its climate—went unheeded before a renewed quest to conquer nature. The 1960s and 1970s were the decades that pushed India and other parts of Asia more fully toward a crisis of water.
I
By the 1960s the Indian Ocean was largely invisible to states in South Asia who looked no further than the waters immediately off their coasts. Migrants had once traversed the sea with few restrictions, in a pattern of circular migration. Now they faced an obstacle-strewn space governed by passports and visa restrictions.4 As India prepared for the International Conference on the Law of the Sea, to be held in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations in early 1958, it was clear to Indian negotiators that the meeting would have what they called “far-reaching consequences.” At stake was the renegotiation of the customary three-mile limit on the extent of each state’s “territorial waters,” a legal conception that came into widespread use around this time. Lawyers at India’s Ministry of External Affairs pinpointed the core conflict: “The countries which support the three mile limit,” they noted, “own over 80% of the world tonnage and are therefore interested in maintaining freedom of the seas.” India, on the other hand, along with many developing countries, claimed a greater expanse of water of its coasts “on the ground of security or for economic reasons such as the preservation of exclusive fishing rights for their nationals.” Among the pressing reasons for a change were technological developments that allowed for the exploitation of resources further offshore, not least fishing by large trawlers. India was equally concerned with the “conditions under which the waters of a bay can be regarded as internal waters,” given the “close linking of the waters to the land domain” and the “utility of the bay to the economic needs of the country.”5 Although negotiations over the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea would continue through the early 1980s, the final agreement recognized the claims of countries pressing for an extended definition of territorial waters, to which was added a wider exclusive economic zone. The sea came, more and more, to resemble the land—as a form of territory.
To scientists, the Indian Ocean was “the largest unknown area on earth.” Paul Tchernia, who worked in the physical oceanography laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, described it as the “forlorn ocean.” Returning from a voyage through the Indian Ocean en route to and from the Antarctic, he suggested that an international investigation of the Indian Ocean should be incorporated into the activities of the UN’s International Geophysical Year in 1957–1958: a massive exercise in coordinated data gathering that transformed knowledge of Earth’s physical processes. Tchernia’s suggestion came too late to include the Indian Ocean in that giant program, but there was a convergence of interest in investigating the least well-studied among the world’s oceans. The catalyst came from a meeting of the Special Committee on Oceanic Research, set up by the International Council of Scientific Unions. It met for the first time at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in coastal Massachusetts in August 1958. Among its champ
ions was the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Roger Revelle (1909–1991), a pioneer in the study of global warming and the effects of carbon emissions on the oceans.6
Midcentury oceanographers were drawn to the Indian Ocean for the same reason that medieval traders could cross it—the seasonal reversal of the monsoon winds. This pattern of reversing winds made the Indian Ocean unique; this made it a “model of the world ocean,” upon which scientists could test their “wind-driven models.”7 Many scientists who lived on the ocean’s rim, especially those in government service, had more immediate interests. The ocean’s fisheries held the potential to address concerns about food shortages in Asia and Africa; its mineral wealth had barely begun to be exploited. Unlocking the mechanism of the ocean’s influence on climate could provide the key to food security and economic development.8
From the start there was tension between short-term and long-term aims of the project; between the search for quick results and the patient accumulation of data on which to build scientific understanding. Oceanographer Henry Stommel approached the wild enthusiasm for the new Indian Ocean Expedition with skepticism. He published a few editions of an anonymous newsletter he called Indian Ocean Bubble—named to invoke the eighteenth-century speculative craze known as the South Sea Bubble—with the implication that his colleagues’ craze for the Indian Ocean, too, was built on speculation. Its circulation was limited to a short list of oceanographers. Its final editorial was honest to a fault. “I think there is only a very remote chance that the Expedition will help improve fisheries and alleviate the poverty of the people in many Indian Ocean countries,” Stommel wrote. He found it “disheartening” to see “oceanography join the long line of pressure groups acting—under the guise of humanitarianism—to advance their own interests.” Those “interests” were “in themselves legitimate, but essentially unrelated to the moral and ‘socio-economic’ issues which they pretend to serve.”9
In the end the International Indian Ocean Expedition involved forty ships from thirteen countries. Its capacious agenda encompassed what the mission’s official chronicle called “moral and ‘socio-economic issues” as well as the “interests” of oceanography in basic research. The list of countries involved does not map easily onto the geography of the Cold War. Many large states bordering the Indian Ocean were enthusiastic participants in the program, including hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, as well as Indonesia and Australia. The United States played a leading role, involving scientists from the Scripps and Woods Hole institutes of oceanography, as well as the US Weather Bureau and the navy. The British, too, were heavily involved, given that they still had a substantial colonial and strategic presence in the region in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union contributed the 6,500-ton Vityaz, the largest ship in the program. The Indian Ocean Expedition also marked the rebirth of German oceanography after the war, and it showed the resurgent scientific and technical prowess of Japan, which contributed two vessels, the Kagoshima Maru and the Umitaka Maru.10
The Indian ships on the expedition reflected—in their origins, their shape, their materials—different epochs of seafaring history. The Kistna, its “sleek lines betraying… naval origins,” as one observer put it, was built as a naval frigate in 1943, a product of the Second World War’s fillip to Indian industry.11 Now armed with an Edo echo sounder with a range of six thousand fathoms, the ship was fitted for oceanographic research, but it came with a warning: “Austere living conditions; not fit for women scientists. No salt water bath fitted.” The smallest vessel in the expedition was the R.V. Conch, which belonged to the University of Kerala. It represented a much older tradition of shipbuilding: it was a small ship built of hardwood, in the long tradition of coastal craft that had threaded together India’s western coast for centuries. By contrast the trawler R.V. Varuna was brand-new, purpose-built in Norway in 1961 in connection with the Indo-Norwegian fisheries project. Despite its novelty, it came with the same “men only” warning as the naval frigate: “Women scientists cannot be housed.”12 From the earliest days of the spice traders, the Indian Ocean was crossed predominantly by men—some things were very slow to change, and the loss to Indian Ocean science has been considerable.
The expedition’s research aims encompassed the study of ocean currents and littoral drift; an investigation of ocean chemistry, salinity, and temperature; the exploration of marine life, and especially fisheries; the study of wind and atmospheric conditions and rainfall. Much of the excitement came from the new technologies that allowed scientists to see the sea anew. Sonar technology allowed them to hear enough to map the Indian Ocean’s sea floor with heightened accuracy—their images evoked an underwater continent as varied in its topography as the land above. Advances in satellite technology provided synoptic pictures of cloud cover and precipitation. Computers allowed scientists to process quantities of data beyond all precedent: Klaus Wyrtki of the University of Hawaii oversaw the production of an oceanographic atlas, which processed data from twelve thousand hydrographic stations stored on two hundred thousand computer cards.13
Among all of the Indian Ocean Expedition’s endeavors, one observer wrote, “none shows more contrast between past and present than meteorology.”14 The Indian Ocean Expedition marked the most intensive investigation of the South Asian monsoon since the days of Gilbert Walker, now with a raft of new tools. Fascinating though it was to glimpse the ocean’s floor, for many scientists the most urgent priority for the Indian Ocean Expedition was to provide a better picture of Asia’s climate. Almost a century after the establishment of the Indian Meteorological Department, scientists wrote in 1962 that “inadequate knowledge of the large-scale influences on weather have always hampered weather forecasting.” The need to understand the monsoon “has become even greater and more urgent,” they argued, “in view of the large scale development plans of many of the countries in the field of agriculture, exploitation of water resources, flood control programmes, and programmes for ameliorating the consequences of weather extremes.” Economic planning, they wrote, demanded “accurate advance information on the onset of the rains, its variations from day-to-day” and “the occurrence of spells of heavy rain and breaks.”15
In his 1927 presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society, Gilbert Walker had speculated that “variations in activity of the general oceanic circulation” would likely be “far reaching and important” in understanding the world’s climate.16 It was not until the 1960s, bolstered by data collected during the International Geophysical Year and the Indian Ocean Expedition, that his insight would be developed. Walker’s pioneering work on the lateral connection between the climates of Indian Ocean and the Pacific—his Southern Oscillation—now acquired a vertical dimension. The Indian Ocean Expedition focused on understanding the exchange of energy between the ocean and the atmosphere, driven by the monsoon winds. Piece by piece, scientists sought to understand the large-scale monsoon circulation of the Indian Ocean. The reversal in the direction of the monsoon winds had been well known for centuries, but it was more difficult, one scientist wrote, to “determine the vertical limits—than the horizontal—of the monsoon influence.” Changes on Earth’s surface were linked with changes in the deep sea, and in the upper atmosphere.17
A crucial component of the Indian Ocean Expedition was the International Meteorological Centre that was set up in Bombay in 1963, at the Colaba observatory, which was first built as an astronomical observatory by the East India Company in 1826. Along with India, the project received support from Ceylon, Indonesia, Japan, the Malagasy Republic, Malaya, Mauritius, Pakistan, Thailand, the states of East Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Its prized possession was an IBM 1620 “computor” (as the word was then spelled), financed by the United Nations Special Fund. The center’s director was tropical meteorologist Colin Ramage. In 1958 Ramage moved from a position as deputy director of the Royal Observatory in Hong Kong—where he had studied the South China Sea’s typhoons—to a professorship at the U
niversity of Hawaii at Manoa, where he directed a US Air Force–funded research station on meteorology. “Just as every viewer has his personal rainbow,” wrote Colin Ramage, “so every meteorologist seems to possess a personal and singular understanding of what is meant by ‘monsoon.’” The one point of agreement, Ramage noted, was that the Indian monsoon is the largest and most dramatic.18 For all the international involvement, the core of the International Meteorological Centre’s personnel came directly from the Indian Meteorological Department, which contributed one hundred staff.
Already during the UN’s International Geophysical Year in 1957–1958, Indian meteorologists had made a signal contribution. Among them was Anna Mani. Born in 1918 in the princely state of Travancore, Anna Mani studied physics at Presidency College Madras and then worked at Nobel laureate C. V. Raman’s laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1945, she received a scholarship to Imperial College—I heard many stories of Anna Mani from the Indian meteorologists I met, including a story, perhaps apocryphal, of how she endured her voyage to Southampton as one of the few women on a ship full of demobilized troops. Mani joined the meteorological department in 1948, and during the International Geophysical Year, she took charge of a network of stations to measure solar radiation across India.19 Just the year before the International Meteorological Centre was established, India had augmented its research capacity with the establishment of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Poona, which remains one of the country’s preeminent institutions. Under the Indian Ocean Expedition, those most intimately familiar with the monsoon now contributed to research on a global scale.