by Sunil Amrith
Climate change is not the most obvious or proximate cause of his distress. Here, as elsewhere in Asia, the effects of climate change compound a crisis already far advanced—a product of reckless development and galloping inequality. Mr. Rathnam’s livelihood has been threatened by the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of highly capitalized owners of large trawlers. There are fewer fish to catch because of what a recent report calls “an uncontrolled addition of fishing boats between 1965 and 1998.” The size of the catch has collapsed, and its composition has changed: fewer large predators, fewer fish that command high prices on the market. The dramatic fall in their incomes has pushed many small fishers ever deeper into debt. Development along the large highway down the coast from Chennai has led to a spike in property speculation, fueling a construction boom that flouts coastal zone regulations. A tidal wave of plastic, and effluent from factories and power plants, floats out to sea. Compounding each of those challenges, climate change is also now making itself felt. Rising sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have exceeded the boundaries that can sustain many forms of aquatic life.4
One of the questions I asked Mr. Rathnam that day on the beach, was, “What happened to the family that lived in this house, and others like them?” One part of the answer, I expected—there had been a large movement of younger people to the growing cities, and to Chennai in particular.
But there was another part of the answer that I did not expect. In light of the work I had spent the previous decade doing on migration across the Indian Ocean, I had the feeling of a very familiar map of migration being drawn before my eyes. All but the very poorest households in the village, Mr. Rathnam told me, has at least one family member overseas. A similar story emerged in the neighboring hamlet. Older routes of migration have been reinvigorated—plenty of sons and nephews in the village were in Singapore and Malaysia, working in construction. Others had taken more recent paths. Many work on fishing fleets in the Persian Gulf. Colonial connections, too, continue to shape people’s trajectories in Pondicherry, which was a French-ruled enclave within British India—one older fisher turned to his memories of the “French time,” and then enumerated his family members now living in Paris. Old geographies still matter. In this part of South India, people experience and imagine climate change at home in relation to a constellation of distant places; family histories of mobility are reactivated as a means of support or insurance. But borders are harder than ever to cross. Every day, South Indian fishermen, struggling to make a living, stray into Sri Lankan territorial waters in search of fish; many have been arrested and detained by the Sri Lankan coast guard.
People experience climate change in space as well as in time. They mark change in terms of their memories of the seasons as they used to be, or of epochal storms that now seem portents of the future. But they also mark it through traces on the landscape, through memories of old houses and old neighbors. Traces of those earlier times lie embedded as debris at the water’s edge.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE RESEARCH I DID FOR THIS BOOK BETWEEN 2012 AND 2015 received funding under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013/ERC Grant Agreement 284053) from the European Research Council, held at Birkbeck College, London. Since 2015, my work has been supported by Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; I am grateful to deans Michael Smith, Nina Zipser, and Laura Fisher for providing me with the resources that make my work possible. More recently I have benefited from the support of the Infosys Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and their extraordinary generosity has helped me bring this project to a conclusion. I would also like to thank Carol Richards and the late David Richards for their generous support of the Center for History and Economics.
The research for this book would not have been possible without the help of many fine archivists and librarians. Within the wonderful Harvard library system, I would especially like to thank Fred Burchstead, Ramona Islam and Richard Lesage, Laura Linard at the Baker Library, and everyone at the Map Collection. The staff at the Asian and African Studies reading room at the British Library have helped me over many years and many projects. In India I would like to thank the staff of the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum in Delhi; Kiran Pandey at the Centre for Science and Environment’s library; the staff of the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai; and the Maharashtra State Archives Department in Mumbai. Elsewhere, I would like to thank the staff of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the World Bank Archives in Washington, DC, the National Archives of Myanmar in Yangon, and the National Archives of Sri Lanka, Colombo.
Over the years I have been working on this book, there has been a revolution in digitization. Sources that I spent weeks or months locating are now, as I write this, freely available online. A particular treasure for historians of South Asia has been the digitization of the library of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. That remarkable institution’s collection of reports, occasional papers, and theses span a century and are now available to historians everywhere; this is truly a public service. The National Archives of India, too, has embarked on an ambitious program of digitization; access came too late for me to make use of these digitized materials in this book, but it will make new kinds of work possible in the future.
I have benefited from excellent research assistance over the course of writing this book. I would like to thank Sneha, who was indefatigable in finding sources at the National Archives in Delhi, and to two Harvard undergraduates, Aaisha Shah and Ellie Lasater-Guttman, who tracked down many textual and visual materials for me.
I am grateful to the many people who have shared their stories and memories with me over the course of writing this book. From among the extraordinary community of Indian meteorologists who have dedicated their careers to understanding the monsoon, I am especially grateful to Ranjan Kelkar, S. Raghavan, and S. R. Ramanan, who were generous with their time and spent many hours talking to me. They also shared unpublished material with me, and facilitated access to the wealth of material in the libraries of the Regional Meteorology Centre, Chennai, and the India Meteorological Department in Pune. There are many more people to thank who preferred to speak informally or to remain anonymous: my understanding of water and climate would have been poorer without the opportunity to learn from many fishers and cultivators and government officials in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. I would particularly like to thank R. Rajamanickam for an illuminating introduction to coastal communities around Pondicherry, and for setting up some initial interviews.
Writing about the history of meteorology has taken me far from my areas of expertise, and I am deeply grateful for the advice of colleagues in the fields of tropical meteorology and climate science. Professor Peter Webster of Emory University and Marena Lin of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences were generous in answering questions and sharing unpublished work with me; I am particularly grateful to Professor Adam Sobel of Columbia University who read drafts of two chapters, providing invaluable feedback, clarifying my understanding, and saving me from errors.
My wonderful literary agent, Don Fehr, has been supportive and encouraging throughout the process. Don made it possible for me to work with an editorial “dream team” of Brian Distelberg at Basic Books and Simon Winder at Penguin. Brian’s thorough and deeply insightful comments on a ramshackle draft pushed me to sharpen the argument and tighten the structure. Simon’s edits were brilliant, honing in on where I had been evasive and suggesting many fruitful comparisons and connections. The final version has benefited enormously from the meticulous and thoughtful line editing of Roger Labrie, and from Bill Warhop’s sensitive copyediting. Melissa Veronesi oversaw the production process with grace and efficiency.
LOOKING BACK AT MY CAREER OVER THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS, nothing makes me happier than that Emma Rothschild, the scholar from whom I have learned more than from anyone else, is now my closest colleague. Nobody has done more to support a
nd inspire my work. I depend on her advice even more now than when I first arrived on her doorstep as a graduate student.
I began this book while I was at Birkbeck College, University of London, where I taught for nine years. I would like to thank my former colleagues at Birkbeck, especially Chandak Sengoopta and Hilary Sapire. Since arriving at Harvard in 2015, I have accumulated many debts. I have been lucky to have the support of three exceptional deans: Diana Sorensen followed by Robin Kelsey in the Division of Arts and Humanities, and Claudine Gay in the Division of Social Science. Thomas Skerry eased my move to Harvard in many ways. At the Department of South Asian Studies, Cheryl Henderson’s kindness and efficiency make everything possible; I would also like to thank Parimal Patil for his support during his time as the department’s chair. At the Department of History, I have been fortunate to work with Rob Chung, Kimberly Richards O’Hagan, and their team. I am grateful to David Armitage and Dan Smail for their kindness during their respective terms as chair. At the Center for History and Economics, it is truly a pleasure to work with Emily Gauthier and Jennifer Nickerson—their dedication sustains the amazing intellectual community of the center. I would also like to express my thanks to the staff of the Harvard Asia Center, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
For their warmth and camaraderie and for many kinds of help, I would like to thank friends and colleagues at Harvard: Sugata Bose, Allan Brandt, Richard Delacy, Arunabh Ghosh, David Jones, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Kenneth Mack, Durba Mitra, Jonathan Ripley, Charles Rosenberg, Amartya Sen, Ajantha Subramanian, Michael Szonyi, and Karen Thornber.
The greatest joy of moving to Harvard has been the opportunity to work with a remarkable group of students. My undergraduate students’ commitment to positive change, their courage, and their talent give me optimism for the future in these dark times. I have also been privileged to work with many outstanding graduate students: Mou Banerjee, Aniket De, Yuting Dong, Shireen Hamza, Neelam Khoja, Kiran Kumbhar, Lei Lin, Amulya Mandava, Tsitsi Mangosho, Mircea Raianu, Priyasha Saksena, Hannah Shepherd, and, beyond Harvard, Jack Loveridge and Lucas Mueller. I am especially grateful to the four students I’ve worked with most closely over the last three years: Divya Chandramouli, Hardeep Dhillon, Sarah Kennedy Bates, and Iris Yellum—I have learned far more from them than they have from me.
Dispersed though they are across the world, I am always grateful for the friendship of Isabel Hofmeyr, Maya Jasanoff, Diana Kim, Sumit Mandal, Mahesh Rangarajan, Taylor Sherman, Naoko Shimazu, Benjamin Siegel, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Glenda Sluga, Eric Tagliacozzo, and A. R. Venkatachalapathy—each of them is a model of scholarly integrity, generosity, and kindness. This time again, I owe a particular debt to Tim Harper.
For helpful conversations, ideas, or invitations to present my work, I would like to thank: Seema Alavi, Michiel Baas, Abhijit Banerjee, Ritu Birla, Anne Blackburn, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Joya Chatterji, Rohit De, Prasenjit Duara, David Engerman, Amitav Ghosh, Ramachandra Guha, Anne Hansen, Namrata Kala, Akash Kapur, Adil Hasan Khan, Sunil Khilnani, T. M. Krishna, Michael Laffan, Melissa Lane, David Ludden, Amala Mahadevan, Rochona Majumdar, Farina Mir, Kazuya Nakamizo, Michael Ondaatje, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jahnavi Phalkey, Gyan Prakash, Srinath Raghavan, Bhavani Raman, Jonathan Rigg, Harriet Ritvo, Tansen Sen, Tomoko Shiroyama, Mrinalini Sinha, Vineeta Sinha, Helen Siu, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Smriti Srinivas, Julia Stephens, Kohei Wakimura, Roland Wenzlhumer, and Nira Wickramasinghe. I join many people around the world in mourning the loss of Christopher Bayly, who remains a guiding light.
THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN SINCE BECOMING A PARENT, and I could not do my work without the work of many others. I am full of admiration for the creative and nurturing teachers at Radcliffe Child Care Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I appreciate deeply the care of Marlene Boyette, Pearl Kerber, and Uyen-Nguyen Tran. I am grateful to the many people who have made Cambridge, Massachusetts, feel like home: Ian Miller and Crate Herbert, who have welcomed us from the start; Priyanka Shankar; the kind neighbors on our street; the community of Radcliffe parents, and especially Laura Muir and Danny Pallin; all at Cambridge Friends Meeting.
My family has sustained me through this time of many transitions. Barbara Phillips has been a caring presence and she has often put her own plans on hold and traveled a long way to help look after the children. Megha Amrith has been many things—an intellectual inspiration, a listening ear, a trusted source of advice, a wonderful travel companion, and a loving and enthusiastic aunt to my children. Over these years we are lucky to have added Andreas Werner and his parents to our extended family. Jairam and Shantha Amrith have given me everything—and they continue to support me in everything that I do.
Nothing I have ever achieved would have been possible without the love and generosity of Ruth Coffey. The origins of this book lie in conversations I had with Ruth a decade ago, when she was studying for a master’s degree in environmental management in London; those conversations have developed over many travels together in South and Southeast Asia. Over the past few years my absence on research trips has placed an additional burden of childcare on her, and she has taken it on with grace while embarking on a judicial career in England, teaching law at Harvard, and pursuing many other projects. She is my anchor and my guiding light.
Theodore was born when this book was in its early stages, and he has traveled many miles with me in search of water stories. I am blessed by the exuberant joy he brings to every day. He started to read just as I was writing the last sentences of this book—he asked me the other day if it was finished, and suggested that my next book should be written for children. Lydia arrived as this project neared its conclusion, and she has made my life richer and more full of wonder. I dedicate this book to them both, with love and gratitude.
SUNIL AMRITH is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University and a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. The prize-winning author of Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013), as well as several other books and articles, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ALSO BY SUNIL AMRITH
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants
Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia
Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65
ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON
India Office Records
East India Company Board of Control Records
East India Company Factory Records
Economic Department Records
Marine Records
Public & Judicial Department Records
Political & Secret Records
Official Publications Series
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH
British India Steam Navigation Company papers
Irrawaddy Flotilla Company papers [uncataloged]
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF INDIA, NEW DELHI
Department of Revenue and Agriculture
Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce
Department of Education, Health and Lands
Department of Industries and Labour: Meteorology
Home Department, Judicial Branch & Public Branch
Meteorological Department
Ministry of External Affairs
Ministry of Irrigation
Ministry of States
Political Department
TAMIL NADU STATE ARCHIVES, CHENNAI
Fisheries Department
Public Works Department
MAHARASHTRA STATE ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT, MUMBAI
Public Works Department: Irrigation, 1868–1909
INDIA METEOROLOGICAL DEPARTMENT, PUNE
Miscellaneous reports, charts, and memoirs
WORLD BANK GROUP ARCHIVES, WASHINGTON, DC
Damodar Multi-Purpose Project, India: Administration, Correspon
dence, and Negotiations, 1953–1957
Drought Prone Areas Project, India: Correspondence, 1973–1985
Indus Basin Dispute, General Negotiations and Correspondence, 1949–1960
Uttar Pradesh Tube Wells Projects, India: Correspondence, 1961–1992
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: THE SHAPE OF MODERN ASIA
1. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 116; Pranay Lal, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2017), 258.
2. Norton Ginsburg, ed., The Pattern of Asia (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 5–6.
3. V. Ramanathan et al., “Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Impact on South Asian Climate and Hydrological Cycle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 5326–5333.
4. Asia Society, Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future, a Report by the Leadership Group on Water Security in Asia (New York: Asia Society, 2009), 9; C. J. Vörösmarty et al., “Global Threats to Human Water Security and River Biodiversity,” Nature 467 (September 30, 2010): 555–561; Chris Buckley and Vanessa Piao, “Rural Water, Not City Smog, May be China’s Pollution Nightmare,” New York Times, April 11, 2016; Malavika Vyawahare, “Not Just Scarcity, Groundwater Contamination Is India’s Hidden Crisis,” Hindustan Times, March 22, 2017.
5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Geneva: IPCC, 2014); World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013); Deepti Singh et al., “Observed Changes in Extreme Wet and Dry Spells During the South Asian Summer Monsoon,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 456–461.