Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

85. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 4.

  86. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 70.

  87. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 14–15.

  88. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 108.

  89. Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 1:97.

  CHAPTER THREE: THIS PARCHED LAND

  1. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001); on the China famine, see Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

  2. The Constitution of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and its Rules (Poona, 1870); quote from S. R. Mehrotra, “The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha: The Early Phase (1870–1880),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9 (1969): 293–321; C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  3. Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, “Famine Narrative, No. 1,” October 21, 1876.

  4. Medical and Sanitary Report of the Native Army of Madras, for the Year 1875 (Madras: Government Press, 1876), 49; Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 2 vols. (London: HM Stationery Office, 1880); William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878), 1:6; W. W. Hunter, The Indian Empire: Its People, History and Products (London: Trubner & Co., 1886), 542. For a perspective from current climate science: Edward R. Cook et al., “Asian Monsoon Failure and Megadrought over the Last Millennium,” Science 328 (2010): 486–489.

  5. Arup Maharatna, “Regional Variation in Demographic Consequences of Famines in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly 29 (June 4, 1994): 1399–1410; Arup Maharatna, The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Tim Dyson, “On the Demography of South Asian Famines, I,” Population Studies 45 (1991): 5–25.

  6. Richard Strachey, “Physical Causes of Indian Famines,” May 18, 1877, Notices of the Proceedings of the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 8 (1879): 407–426.

  7. “The Famine, Letter from the Affected Districts,” The Examiner, March 24, 1877, 363.

  8. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:67–68, 1:155–156.

  9. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:174–175.

  10. J. Norman Lockyer and W. Hunter, “Sun-Spots and Famines,” The Nineteenth Century, (November 1877), 601.

  11. Strachey, “Physical Causes,” 411.

  12. Mark Elvin, “Who Was Responsible for the Weather? Moral Meteorology in Late Imperial China,” Osiris 13 (1998): 213–237; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 425–427.

  13. “The Causes of Famine in India,” New York Times (NYT), August 25, 1878, 6.

  14. “The Famine: Letter from the Affected Districts,” The Examiner, March 24, 1877, 363.

  15. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.

  16. Villiyappa Pillai, Panchalakshana Thirumukavilasam [1899] (Madurai: Sri Ramachandra Press, 1932).

  17. W. G. Pedder, “Famine and Debt in India,” The Nineteenth Century (September 1877).

  18. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:172–174.

  19. Letter from Sarvajanik Sabha Rooms to S. C. Bayley, Additional Secretary to the Government of India, April 1, 1878, in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Journal 1 (1878).

  20. “Letter from the Affected Districts” (1877), 363.

  21. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [2016]).

  22. Cited in Davis, Arid Lands, 83.

  23. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.

  24. Philindus, “Famines and Floods in India,” Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1, 1877, 236–256; George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography As Modified by Human Action (New York: Scribner, 1865).

  25. “Famine Narrative no. 1,” October 21, 1876, in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Journal 1.

  26. Ramachandra Guha, “An Early Environmental Debate: The Making of the 1878 Forest Act,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27 (1990): 65–84.

  27. Valentine Ball, “On Jungle Products Used as Articles of Food in Chota Nagpur,” in Jungle Life in India: Or, the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (London: Thos. De La Rue & Co., 1880), 695–699.

  28. George Chesney, “Indian Famines,” Nineteenth Century 2 (November 1877): 603–620.

  29. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:148–150.

  30. Florence Nightingale, “A Missionary Health Officer in India,” Good Words, January 20, 1879, 492–496.

  31. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.

  32. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty of India (London: Vincent Brooks, Day and Son, 1878), 42–43, 66.

  33. See especially Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.

  34. Chandrika Kaul, “Digby, William (1849–1904),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  35. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 1, Famine Relief (London: Stationery Office, 1880): 9–10; Jean Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India” (working paper 45, WIDER: United Nations University, Helsinki, 1988), 45.

  36. “Wasting Public Money,” The Economist, July 4, 1874.

  37. The Black Pamphlet of Calcutta. The Famine of 1874. By a Bengal Civilian (Calcutta: William Ridgeway, 1876).

  38. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:48.

  39. “Letter from the Affected Districts,” (1877), 363.

  40. Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron, 152–153.

  41. Lance Brennan, “The Development of the Indian Famine Code,” in Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, ed. Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), 91–112.

  42. Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India.”

  43. On Caird, see Peter J. Gray, “Famine and Land in Ireland and India, 1845–1880: James Caird and the Political Economy of Hunger,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 193–215.

  44. W. Stanley Jevons, “Sun-Spots and Commercial Crises,” Nature 19 (1879): 588–590; Lockyer and Hunter, “Sun-Spots and Famines.”

  45. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 1, 7.

  46. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 2, Measures of Protection and Prevention (London: Stationery Office, 1880), 9.

  47. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 2, 150–151.

  48. Ira Klein, “When the Rains Failed: Famine, Relief, and Mortality in British India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 21 (1984): 185–214, quotation on p. 185.

  49. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1898 (London: Stationery Office, 1898); Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1901 (London: Stationery Office, 1901).

  50. George Lambert, India, the Horror-Stricken Empire: Containing a Full Account of the Famine, Plague, and Earthquake of 1896–7; including a Complete Narrative of the Relief Work through the Home and Foreign Commission (Elkhard, IN: Mennonite Publishing Co., 1898).

  51. Cited in C. S. Ramage, The Great Indian Drought of 1899 (Boulder, CO: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1977), 4.

  52. Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1900), 11–14, 18–19, 27, 47.

  53. Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 341–347; Georgina Brewis, “‘Fill Full the Mouth of Famine’: Voluntary Action in Famine Relief in India, 1896–1901,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010): 887–918.

  54. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 22, 9.

  55. Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88.

  56. Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson, “Railroads and the Demise of Famine in Colonial India” (w
orking paper, 2012), available at http://dave-donaldson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Burgess_Donaldson_Volatility_Paper.pdf.

  57. Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 208–209.

  58. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE AQUEOUS ATMOSPHERE

  1. J. Elliott, Vizagapatam and Backergunge Cyclones (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877), 165–167. The most common spelling of his name is Eliot, which is the variant I use in the text, but in this publication it appears as Elliott.

  2. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 158, 182.

  3. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 159.

  4. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 183.

  5. Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21 (2006): 229–250; on Britain’s role, see Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Weather Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  6. Luke Howard, Essay On the Modification of Clouds [1803], 3rd ed. (London: John Churchill & Sons, 1865); Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, “Nouvelle définition des termes que j’emploie pour exprimer certaines formes des nuages qu’il importe de distinguer dans l’annotation de l’état du ciel,” Annuaire Météorologique pour l’an XIII de la République Française 3 (1805): 112–133; H. Hildebrandsson, A. Riggenbach, and L. Teisserenc de Bort, eds., Atlas International des Nuages (Paris: IMO, 1896); for further discussion, see Lorraine Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy: Describing the Indescribable,” Representations 135 (2016): 45–71, and Richard Hamblyn, Clouds: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2017).

  7. University of Madras, Tamil Lexicon (Madras: University of Madras, 1924–1936), 219, 1680; William Crooke, A Glossary of North Indian Peasant Life, ed. Shahid Amin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), Appendix D, “A Calendar of Agricultural Sayings”; C. A. Benson, “Tamil Sayings and Proverbs on Agriculture,” Bulletin, Department of Agriculture, Madras No. 29, New Series (1933), paragraphs 144, 163, 168, 213, 311. I have modified some of the translations from the Tamil.

  8. Henry F. Blanford, “Winds of Northern India, in Relation to the Temperature and Vapour-Constituent of the Atmosphere,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 164 (1874): 563.

  9. India, Meteorological Department, Report on the Meteorology of India in 1876 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government, 1877).

  10. India, Meteorological Department, Report on the Meteorology of India in 1877 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of the Government, 1878).

  11. “Administrative Report of the Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India, 1884–85,” BL, IOR, V/24/3022, quotations on pp. 5–14.

  12. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Mandy Bailey, “Women and the RAS: 100 Years of Fellowship,” Astronomy & Geophysics 57 (February 2016): 19–21.

  13. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni: Pioneer of Science Popularisation in Punjab, ed. Narender K. Sehgal and Subodh Mahanti (New Delhi: Vigyan Prasar, 1997), 15–17.

  14. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni, 16.

  15. Henry F. Blanford, Meteorology of India: Being the Second Part of the Indian Meteorologist’s Vade-Mecum (Calcutta: Government Printer, 1877), 48.

  16. Henry F. Blanford, A Practical Guide to the Climates and Weather of India, Ceylon and Burmah and the Storms of the Indian Seas (London: MacMillan and Co., 1889), 42.

  17. Blanford, Meteorology of India, 144–145.

  18. Blanford, Meteorology of India, 48.

  19. Blanford, Practical Guide, 64.

  20. Henry F. Blanford, The Rainfall of India, India Meteorological Memoirs vol. 3 (Calcutta: Government Printer, 1886–1888), 76.

  21. Blanford, Rainfall of India, 79–81.

  22. Henry F. Blanford, “On the Connexion of the Himalaya Snowfall with Dry Winds and Seasons of Drought in India,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 37 (1884): 3–22.

  23. List of library holdings in “Administration Report of the Meteorological Department in Western India for the year 1880–81,” BL, IOR, V/24/3023.

  24. Blanford, “On the Connexion of the Himalaya Snowfall.”

  25. Richard Grove, “The East India Company, the Raj and El Niño: The Critical Role Played by Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections, 1770–1930,” in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard Grove, Vineeta Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 301–323.

  26. John Eliot, Climatological Atlas of India (Edinburgh: J. Bartholomew & Co., 1906), xi–xii.

  27. Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1912).

  28. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni, 23.

  29. John Eliot, Handbook of Cyclonic Storms in the Bay of Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1890).

  30. Rev. Jose Algué, The Cyclones of the Far East, 2nd ed. (Manila: Philippines Weather Bureau, 1904), 219.

  31. Robert Hart, “Documents Relating to 1. The Establishment of Meteorological Stations in China; and 2. Proposals for Co-operation in the Publication of Meteorological Observations and Exchange of Weather News by Telegraph along the Pacific Coast of Asia” [1874], published in Chinese Maritime Customs Project Occasional Papers, no. 3, ed. Robert Bickers and Catherine Ladds (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2008); for further discussion, see Robert Bickers, “‘Throwing Light on Natural Laws’: Meteorology on the China Coast, 1869–1912,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land, and Power, ed. Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (London: Routledge, 2016), 179–200.

  32. Agustín Udiás, “Meteorology of the Observatories of the Society of Jesus,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 65 (1996): 157–170; James Francis Warren, “Scientific Superman: Father José Algué, Jesuit Meteorology, and the Philippines under American Rule, 1897–1924,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 508–522.

  33. Cosmos, no. 1091 (1906), 717–719: cited in Warren, “Scientific Superman,” 515.

  34. Algué, Cyclones, 3.

  35. Algué, Cyclones, 219–229; Eliot, Handbook of Cyclonic Storms.

  36. Charles Normand, “Seasonal Monsoon Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–473; Eliot, Climatological Atlas, xiii.

  37. Eliot, Climatological Atlas.

  38. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 5–6, 19–22.

  39. Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 1:279, 1:284.

  40. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 4 (1904): 421–444.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE STRUGGLE FOR WATER

  1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver [1974] (London: Vintage, 1997), 17.

  2. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), 648–653.

  3. M. G. Ranade, Essays in Indian Economics: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1899), quotation on p. 66.

  4. R. C. Dutt, Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1900), quotations on pp. 1, 17; R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1904), 172.

  5. Mary Albright Hollings, The Life of Colin Scott-Moncrieff (London: J. Murray, 1917), 298.

  6. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universi
ty Press, 2001).

  7. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1901–1903 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1903), 1:2–4; Hollings, Colin Scott-Moncrieff, 299.

  8. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1:5–14.

  9. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1:16, 1:124–125.

  10. Letter from W. C. Bennett, Director of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, North-West Provinces and Oudh, to the Secretary, Board of Revenue, NW Provinces, May 27, 1883, Maharashtra State Archives Department, Mumbai [hereafter MSA], Public Works Department: Irrigation Branch [hereafter PWD: Irrigation], v. 406 (1868–1890), M167–169.

  11. Bennett to Board of Revenue, NW Provinces, May 27, 1883, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 406, M167–169.

  12. Letter from W. W. Goodfellow, Superintending Engineer, Belgaum to the Secretary to the Government, Public Works Department, Bombay, October 17, 1883, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 406, M199.

  13. V. Sriram, “Made in Madras,” The Hindu, November 16, 2014.

  14. Letter from A. Chatterton to the Secretary to the Commissioner of Revenue Settlement, Department of Land Records and Agriculture, May 23, 1905, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 272 (1904–1909), M164–165.

  15. Letter from A. Chatterton to the Director of Agriculture, Poona, July 15, 1906, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, M199–215.

  16. “in reality part of the great desert”: in James Douie, “The Punjab Canal Colonies,” lecture delivered at the Royal Society of Arts on May 7, 1914, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 62 (1914): 611–623, quotation on p. 612; “irrigation was not designed”: in E. H. Calvert, The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab (Lahore, 1922), 123.

  17. Douie, “Punjab Canal Colonies,” 614.

  18. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

  19. Douie, “Punjab Canal Colonies,” 615–616.

  20. M.W. Fenton, Financial Commissioner, in 1915: quoted in Indu Agnihotri, “Ecology, Land Use, and Colonisation: The Canal Colonies of Punjab,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (1996): 37–58.

  21. Quoted in David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 168.