by Sunil Amrith
In a pamphlet published by the World Meteorological Organization, Ramage described the Colaba center at work:
Throughout the night, staff in the small, air-conditioned communications room have been receiving broadcast coded weather reports from the Indian Ocean region in morse code and on teleprinters. Pictures of charts analysed a few minutes before in the meteorological centres at Nairobi, Moscow, Sangley Point and Canberra unroll from facsimile printers. Across the compound of Colaba Observatory in the Signal Office of the western Regional Meteorological Centre, other teleprinters disgorge figure-crammed sheets of paper containing detailed information on Indian weather, and on the weather over the whole eastern hemisphere north of the equator.20
In this scene the Indian Ocean came alive, where as a zone of trade and as a political idea it was dead. The sea was connected in a new way by weather maps and the flow of data through fascimile printers. In the late nineteenth century, the expanded collection of data transmitted through the telegraph allowed the first synoptic weather maps of large regions to be drawn. The Colaba center’s work reflected a new geography as well as advances in technology. Overlaid on the old British imperial networks of weather reporting were new centers of knowledge and power, including Moscow and even Vladivostock. This nocturnal hive of activity, in a small corner of south Bombay, gave substance to the idea of the Indian Ocean as a vast weather system stretching beyond national boundaries. Not all of the exchange was unfettered. Thousands of reports came in, but “problems in radio transmission meant that the centre got less than half the observations made.” Nevertheless, Ramage was reassured, “copies of all observations were sent by mail,” furnishing a paper archive of minute observations of the Indian Ocean’s climate, even if, by the time they arrived, “they were not much good for forecasting.” More disappointing was the fate of a floating automatic weather station provided by the US government and anchored in the Bay of Bengal by the Indian navy: “After a few months, its radio quit and it was neither seen nor heard from again.”21
The new quest to understand the monsoon relied on two breakthroughs in technology: aerial video and satellite photography. Five research aircraft were based in Bombay to support the International Meteorological Centre’s work: one belonged to Woods Hole, the other four to the US Weather Bureau, including two large DC-6 airplanes. As in the nineteenth century, cyclones held a particular fascination for meteorologists—and now improved storm forecasting would benefit the growing numbers of people who lived in South Asia’s coastal cities. The US Weather Bureau’s two DC-6 aircraft flew the first aerial reconnaissance mission into a cyclone in the Indian Ocean (though there had been many such missions over the Atlantic): Ramage was in the scientific observer’s seat on one of them. Ramage’s plane flew through the storm at 20,000 feet; the other was way down at 1,500 feet above the ocean’s surface. “I thought the aircraft was falling to pieces,” Ramage wrote, “we dropped 300 feet in a single second”—a common complaint of nervous flyers in turbulence, but in Ramage’s case it was likely accurate. Most awesome, for this lifelong student of tropical storms, was the experience of flying into the eye of a monsoon depression. He described flying “into an amphitheatre of multi-layered nimbo-stratus cloud. In the centre only thin milky cloud above us and almost none below, and five minutes later we were once again in rain clouds.”22
When Ramage and Indian meteorologist C. R. Raman (brother of Nobel laureate in physics C. V. Raman) produced their atlas of Indian Ocean meteorology, they were able to draw 144 charts based on 194,000 shipboard observations and 750,000 balloon ascents into the upper atmosphere. The ability to visualize the weather in new ways was especially compelling. Scientists installed cameras on commercial and military aircraft flying through the region to take time-lapse films of the clouds they encountered in flight over the Indian Ocean. Ramage described how time-lapse cameras had previously been used “spectacularly in science films to compress into a few seconds the blooming cycles of flowers”; now they were placed on aircraft to photograph clouds at the rate of one frame every three seconds. On a six-hour flight, they would record every cloud on thirty meters of 16 mm film. Watching the videos later, Ramage wrote, “The viewer gets the rather exciting impression of flying at about 50 times the speed of the aircraft.”23
An even more promising development was underway by the end of the expedition—daily satellite photographs of the Indian Ocean. “We now have for the first time,” Ramage enthused, “the opportunity to attempt a complete description of the whole atmospheric distribution over the Indian Ocean.” That “complete description” is what Ramage and Raman attempted, chart by chart, in their meticulous work of climatic reconstruction. The most exciting prospect lay just over the horizon of possibility. The force of the monsoon came from the exchange of energy between air and sea—it was now possible to study this complex process. The promise of satellite photography was that it might “elucidate the role of the monsoons in the total atmospheric circulation.”24
Despite his optimism, Ramage delivered a modest assessment of progress. The goal of Henry Blanford and Gilbert Walker—a long-range forecast of the monsoon—remained elusive. Even incremental improvements in forecasting, Ramage thought, would help in “aiding flood prevention and control and in enabling irrigation engineers to make the best possible use of stored water,” as well as helping the fishers of the Indian Ocean rim to take advantage of lulls in the monsoon, up to a week long, to take to sea. But the prospect of an accurate long-range forecast, Ramage lamented, was “as remote as ever.” The vast accumulation of data had not altered a truth well known—that “the atmosphere is turbulent and chaotic.” There was no substitute for patient observation. The best meteorologists could do was to keep doing what was embedded in their practice: to use “long climatological records and detailed statistics to come up with a sort of odds on what the next season’s rainfall will be.” His conclusion was sober:
The apparently rhythmic nature of rain-and-break, rain-and-break, during the summer monsoon encourages us to delve more deeply into the underlying causes of the rhythm and in particular the causes for interruptions or changes in the rhythm. Finding the rhythm of a total season, however, seems almost certainly beyond our immediate grasp.25
MORE OMINOUS SIGNS EMERGED FROM THE INDIAN OCEAN EXPEDITION. Two years before that expedition began, Revelle had written, with his colleague the geochemist Hans Seuss, that human beings were conducting, unwittingly, a “large scale geophysical experiment” with the world’s climate. “Within a few centuries,” Revelle and Seuss wrote, “we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”26 One of Revelle’s students, Charles Keeling, was the first to start systematic measurements of atmospheric carbon the following year, in 1958. Revelle and colleagues had long-range goals for their study of the Indian Ocean: they wanted to see how far the Indian Ocean was a “dump for the waste products of industrial civilization.” And they sought to determine “the role of the ocean in climatic change, especially in absorbing the carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned.”27 We have forgotten how important the Indian Ocean was to documenting anthropogenic climate change, prompting early stirrings of alarm. The data from the Indian Ocean voyages suggested that the sea and the atmosphere were being affected by human activity on land. But these “long range” problems were then distant from the level of human experience. The time horizons of oceanic research were incommensurable with those of planning for food security. Because the long-range monsoon forecast remained elusive, because understandings of climate grew more complex, it was easier to focus on what could be contained and controlled—one river valley at a time.
The Indian Ocean Expedition generated a picture of the South Asian monsoon that was an integral part of the global climate system. South Asia’s climate was part of a large-scale interchange of energy and moisture between the ocean and the atmosphere. This expansion i
n the scale and complexity of understanding sat uneasily with the confidence, so prevalent in Asia among dam builders and planners, that nature could be anticipated, or its effects engineered away. A 1968 pamphlet on the monsoon—written by P. K. Das, director of the Indian Meteorological Department, and published as part of a National Book Trust series, “India: The Land and People”—contrasted the tendency of Indian farmers and poets to see the monsoon in vast, even cosmic, terms with “more rational techniques, such as the scientific control of river valleys.” In a sense, with its emphasis on turbulence and chaos and complexity, the new monsoon science resonated more easily with what Das saw as the superstitious view than with a view of the monsoon as simply a variable to be controlled.28
II
The final year of the International Indian Ocean Expedition coincided with the worst failure of the South Asian monsoon in decades. For two successive years, in 1965 and 1966, large parts of India suffered from drought. The drought coincided with India’s first major political transition after independence, following the death of Jawaharlal Nehru at the end of May 1964, and it pushed forward a change in economic strategy that was already underway. The two years after Nehru’s death made clear the limits of India’s progress toward self-sufficiency in food.
Nehru was succeeded by the diminutive and mild-mannered Lal Bahadur Shastri, a party stalwart from the Hindi heartland of North India. When Shastri took office, alarm about India’s food situation was widespread. There had been many flare-ups of protest in the cities, dubbed “bread riots” in the media. The Congress party’s distinctive style of accommodative politics came under strain after the disaster of the China war. Groups that had long formed part of the Congress coalition—middle- and upper-caste landowners, urban workers, industrialists—were no longer content to defer to the urban elite, no longer willing to keep a lid on their conflicts with each other. Some of them found a voice outside the Congress umbrella. Under attack from left and right, Shastri, who was easy to underestimate, undertook a series of quiet but decisive reforms. Political scientist Francine Frankel, who was doing research in India at the time, describes the result: “A series of undramatic initiatives in economic policy that went virtually unnoticed at the time cumulatively altered the entire approach to India’s development strategy.”29
The core of Nehru’s approach had been a push for import-substituting industrialization. India in the 1950s had developed as a mixed economy, but one in which the public sector played a leading role, especially at the “commanding heights” of the economy. This was the strategy championed in the 1950s by the planning commission, to which Nehru gave considerable autonomy under the leadership of master statistician (and sometime meteorologist) P. C. Mahalanobis, dubbed “the Professor.” The Indian countryside was given two roles to play in this “drama,” as Mahalanobis insisted that the second five-year plan must be: The first was to ensure food security to a country still scarred by the memory of colonial famines, with the ultimate aim being self-sufficiency in food grains. The second was to generate foreign exchange through the export of nonfood crops to pay for the imported machinery that India would need until its own factories could make them. Jute and cotton were two of India’s most valuable exports.
But at odds with the emphasis on self-reliance came an increasing reliance, through the 1950s, on food aid from the United States. From the time of its institution in 1954, Public Law 480, or PL-480—known widely as the “food for peace” scheme—disposed of the large agricultural surpluses of the American Midwest in the postcolonial world, on preferential terms. India was by far the largest recipient of this aid. Indian imports of American wheat grew from two hundred thousand tons in 1954 to more than 4 million tons by 1960. Given the ups and downs of the Indo-American relationship in the 1950s, this struck many Indian politicians as an uncomfortable level of dependence on an unreliable patron. The importance of American food aid was only one indication that the Indian government’s agricultural strategy had faltered. Looking back, in the late 1960s, an official report acknowledged the problem. “All the efforts at achieving self-sufficiency in foodgrain production during the three Plan periods did not fully succeed,” the Indian ministry of agriculture acknowledged; instead, a sharp drop in agricultural production in the early 1960s came as a “great shock to everyone concerned with agriculture.” After 1961, per capita income in India did not increase, and by the mid-1960s the availability of food per capita was lower than it was in 1956.30
The man charged with addressing this “shock” was C. Subramaniam. He was born in 1910 to a farming family in Coimbatore district in Madras, a prosperous region of irrigated export agriculture at the edge of the Western Ghat mountains and a center of India’s textile industry. Subramaniam was a protégé of the veteran Madras leader of the Congress party, C. Rajagopalachari. He joined the Indian freedom movement as a young man; he was one of an army of Congress party workers imprisoned by the British during the Quit India movement in 1942. He spent the 1950s in the state government of Madras, until Nehru appointed him to the coveted industries portfolio in his cabinet. For Shastri to move him to agriculture, something of a Cinderella ministry, seemed a step down. But Subramaniam embraced the challenge. He came to represent a strand of economic thinking in India that had always run alongside, sometimes in tension with, the planning commission’s “industry first” approach. Subramaniam believed, contrary to the planning commission, that the Indian countryside was the key to security and progress. Subramaniam drew on ideas that had been in circulation from the late nineteenth century. They were prominent in the writings of India’s early “economic nationalists,” and found new expression in the 1920s and 1930s in detailed studies of agricultural economics.31
In the circumstances of the early 1960s, a rediscovery of rural India’s importance converged with a line of thought that American development experts pressed upon India. From the late 1950s the World Bank and many American government observers began to urge that India should pay more attention to agriculture, even at the expense of scaling back its grand industrial vision. Specifically, they advocated for markets to play a greater role in Indian agricultural policy, which would in turn spur investment in new technologies. They were skeptical of the Nehru government’s emphasis on agricultural cooperatives; they argued, instead, that India could boost its food production most rapidly by providing incentives to farmers with capital, those who already benefited from larger landholdings and irrigation facilities, even if this came at the price of higher levels of inequality in the countryside. Wielding the powers of persuasion and veiled threat that they gained from India’s dependence on American food aid, these outside experts gained a sympathetic hearing from within the Indian government, which had its own “America lobby” as well as pro-Soviet faction.32
From the outset Subramaniam believed that new technologies were the key to the transformation of India. One of his first initiatives was to strengthen the moribund Indian Council for Agricultural Research, and to bolster agricultural education in India. Early in his tenure as agriculture minister, Subramaniam was impressed by reports of the stunning results shown by Rockefeller-sponsored experiments in Mexico with high-yielding varieties of maize and wheat, and by experiments with new hybrid strains of rice in Taiwan and the Philippines. Could they work in India? A team of scientists led by the Canadian plant pathologist R. Glenn Anderson had already initiated a series of experimental stations in India with pilot projects in Delhi, Ludhiana, Pusa, and Kanpur; when one hundred kilograms of seed, flown in from Mexico, arrived in India in 1964, they were ready to test them in Indian conditions. Here lay the roots of what would come to be known as the “Green Revolution,” which would transform Indian and global agriculture in the final third of the twentieth century.33
But first Subramaniam had to prevail over his cabinet colleagues who remained committed to the Congress’s stated goal of moving toward a “socialist pattern of society”—or, at least, to rapid industrialization first and foremost. T. T.
Krishnamachari was the planning commission’s most vocal proponent of focusing on heavy industry. His concern was primarily with keeping food prices down for urban workers. To achieve this, he argued for a national food distribution system based on a system of price controls and monopoly food procurement by the state. Subramaniam pointed out that this infrastructure of food control, which had its roots in the wartime economy, was “uneconomical”—government prices for compulsory procurement were so low that they gave farmers no incentive to invest in new technology. The two sides crossed swords over inequality. Subramaniam recalled in his memoirs that his opponent argued against high-yielding varieties because “this strategy would lead to greater social tension within the rural areas, because benefits would be unequally distributed.” Subramaniam’s response was to ask his critics “what other option we had.” To those who argued that he was caving to American pressure, Subramaniam countered that only a new approach to agriculture would save India from subjection, for he feared that “once we became dependent on these imported foodgrains other political strings would be attached to them.”34 The turn to high-yielding varieties made Indian agriculture dependent, instead, on large imports of chemical fertilizer—and more dependent than ever on new sources of water.
The crux of Subramaniam’s strategy was to “concentrate modern inputs in irrigated areas.”35 This is a prosaic way to describe a fundamental change. From the nineteenth century India’s geography of water had shaped plans for the country’s future. Now the difference between irrigated and rain-fed lands would be accepted as a necessary inequality—even a matter of strategy.