Rennell was not alone in his fascination with, even fear of, India’s climate. As they established gardens as a site of botanical and commercial experiment, Company officials in India took a greater interest in the weather—none more so than William Roxburgh (1751–1815). Roxburgh studied anatomy and surgery at Edinburgh University at a time of intellectual ferment; he left Edinburgh in 1772 to join the East India Company’s ship Houghton as surgeon’s mate on a voyage to India. The following year, he signed on for another voyage, which took him via Saint Helena and the Cape to Madras.27 Upon his arrival at Fort Saint George in 1776, Roxburgh began a meteorological diary. He equipped himself with a portable barometer “made by RAMSDEN” and an indoor thermometer supplied by Nairne and Blunt—scientific instruments, like texts and theories, moved along imperial shipping lines. His outdoor thermometer he placed “under a small, shady tree.” His observations, three each day, devised a scale for describing the winds: “gentle, brisk, stormy, and what we call a tufoon in India.” The rain gauge he had initially proved worthless; he assured his correspondents that he had installed a better model on the roof of his house on the hospital grounds.28 Based initially in Madras, Roxburgh moved south down the coast to the small port of Nagore, long connected to Southeast Asia by Tamil Muslim merchants; from there, he settled in Samulcottah (Samalkot) on the Godavari delta, midway along India’s eastern coast, until finally in 1793 he became director of Calcutta’s botanical garden. Roxburgh followed many pursuits. He made a small fortune as a private trader. He kept an “experimental botanical plantation” where he grew indigo and pepper, breadfruit and sugarcane; he collaborated with botanist Johann Gerhard König, who was stationed at the Danish settlement of Tranquebar on the Madras coast.29
Roxburgh was a keen observer of life around him. He took an interest in how the monsoon’s rhythms shaped farming on the land. “The rains generally set in, in June,” he wrote in his description of the growing season of the Godavari delta, “towards the end of that month, the coarse or early Paddy, is sown, and in July the better sorts, or great crop.” He described how “our rains continue from the time they set in, June, ’till about the middle of November; July and August, are generally our wettest months: in October and November the weather is more stormy, being the period we call the Monsoon.” In his usage, “monsoon” was the period of change, as the winds switched from southwest to northeast. “The cultivator has to depend on the rains,” he said again; “the more favorable they are, the better is the crop.” Higher, more arid lands, “as in every other part of India,” were given over to “dry grain.”30 He undertook a detailed study of hardy crops that thrived in dry conditions, locally and around the world. He ordered samples from across the empire; he planted them in his experimental garden.31
Roxburgh became an astute observer of South India’s climate, both in its regularity and its extremes. He could not himself escape its risks. In 1787, a severe cyclone struck the Godavari delta; it destroyed Roxburgh’s home, his herbarium, his library, and most of his personal wealth. His family escaped narrowly with their lives. He observed at close quarters the prolonged drought that brought famine to the region in the late 1780s and early 1790s. In 1791 Roxburgh wrote to his friend, celebrated English naturalist Joseph Banks, that “the famine of these provinces begins to rage with double violence, owing to a failure of our usual rains.” Two years later, Roxburgh’s friend Andrew Ross declared that “the dreadful effects of the famine here have… far exceeded any description from us.” He saw that “in many places where populous villages formerly stood, there is at present neither vestige of man or beast.”32 Roxburgh looked for patterns in the data he had collected—he sought to understand the cycles of the seasons, and variations from year to year.33 During his years on the Coromandel coast, Roxburgh had collected an extent of meteorological data on the Madras coast that one historian describes as “unrivalled elsewhere until the 1820s except among indigenous Chinese observers.”34 The early initiatives of Roxburgh and his colleagues formed a foundation on which India’s modern meteorology was built.
He began to wonder, like so many others of his generation and education, whether India’s nature might benefit from “improvement.”35 He wanted to harness the water that “passes annually unemployed into the sea.”36 He was “astonished” to find not the “least trace of any work, ancient or modern, for retaining, or conveying the water to fertilize their Paddy Lands” in the region; the result was that “the cultivators here depend entirely on rains, when they fail, a famine is, and must ever be, the consequence.” Roxburgh observed, and sketched, the Godavari delta; he imagined it transformed. “In consequence of the favourable level and descent of lands,” he wrote, “we clearly see the infinite benefit that must arise from the waters of large rivers when a method of making them subject to the will of man is affected.” The solution he saw was to use natural basins to store large quantities of water as the Godavari descended from the hills.37
III
However we understand India’s economic transformation in the nineteenth century, water is at the heart of it. The flow of water—the flow of India’s rivers, their seasonality, their propensity to change course—constrained how India’s producers could respond to new market opportunities and new compulsions. Britain’s industrialization had benefited from an elaborate network of canals; India’s economic development, by contrast, was limited by the difficulty and expense of water transportation. China had a far more extensive network of canals than India at the time, but unlike in Britain, energy sources were far from the waterways.38 The availability of water enabled a changing landscape of cash crop production, for some; water’s absence tested others’ capacity for bare subsistence. Water was instrumental to making the Indian soil produce more of the commodities the world demanded.
In the 1830s and 1840s, India’s British rulers still faced constraints that would have been familiar to their predecessors. Transport was slow—and dangerous. “No part of the inland navigation of India is so dreaded or dangerous,” wrote the botanist Joseph Hooker in 1848, “as the Ganges at its junction with the Cosi”; in the rainy season the Cosi “pours so vast a quantity of detritus into the bed of the Ganges that long islets are heaped up and swept away”; boats “are caught in whirlpools formed without a moment’s warning.”39 The monsoon governed not only the harvest—and threatened the possibility of harvest failure—but also threatened the health of Europeans. Cholera, malaria, and other ailments led many British officials in India to an early grave. Water was still a source of both awe and foreboding for British residents in India. A medical topography of Calcutta published in 1837 stated that “without taking into view the expanse of the Bay [of Bengal], the coup d’oeil of a good map of Bengal will at once show how bountiful nature has been to that country, by means of her majestic rivers with innumerable tributaries.” But these waters were at the same time the source of “aqueous exhalations”—a product of the “commerce of land and water” in a monsoon climate—that menaced life. The author James Martin saw a clear “connexion of the rainy season with disease,” and suggested that “among Europeans, the diseases of the rainy season assume a character of diminished vital action.” Throughout the nineteenth century, fears persisted of whether Europeans could survive tropical climates.40
To make India productive, to integrate it more fully with the global capitalist economy that was in formation, to exploit more effectively its natural resources to feed Britain’s industrialization, British engineers and investors and administrators looked to master the unevenness of water, its extreme seasonality in India; and they sought to conquer space. Both of these quests unfolded between the 1830s and 1870.
HALF A CENTURY AFTER ROXBURGH’S TIME, THE GODAVARI DELTA was still “entirely without any general system of irrigation, draining, embankments or communications.”41 This was the verdict of Arthur Thomas Cotton (1803–1899), the museum to whose memory opened this chapter. Like Roxburgh’s before him, Cotton’s problem was the distribution of rainfall across the landscape. His task: “counteracting the irregularity of natural supplies of water.” “One year a portion of the whole crop… is destroyed by the overflowing of the rivers,” Cotton observed, “in another, the crop is destroyed by a failure of the rains over three-fourths of the district.” He was convinced that “not an acre… need be dependent at all” upon the rains if a comprehensive system of irrigation were introduced. He insisted that the Godavari delta needed not a piecemeal restoration of existing irrigation works, but rather “works of a general nature.” Perennial irrigation; an improvement in the “roads and bridges” of the region; a restoration of the port of Kalinga (“Coringa”) so that it could fulfill its potential as “incomparably the best port” between Hooghly and Trincomalee—such investments in infrastructure would free the district from its uneven and capricious rainfall.
Cotton made a fervent case for government intervention. India was unlike Britain, he argued; the rules governing public expenditure could not be considered akin to the principles of household economy. The problem was that “there is almost literally no capital to enable landowners to make improvement.” An outlay of three hundred or four hundred thousand rupees each year by the state “would put life and activity into the whole district”—in time, revenue would flow into the treasury far exceeding what the state might spend. Possessed by evangelical self-confidence—nothing less than a sense of destiny—Cotton went further. He condemned what he saw as his countrymen’s “proneness… to lower ourselves to the level of natives” instead of “diligently applying the means which God has placed in our hands to benefit the countries He has given us charge of.”42 Cotton found the support and the money for his grand scheme. In 1852, he completed his barrage at Dowleswaram. But his dreams were bigger. Cotton imagined a network of canals that would, one day, bring the Himalayan rivers to the southern tip of the peninsula. He also saw that the rivers had unrealized potential for navigation. In 1867, Cotton dreamed of a link between the Brahmaputra River—its upper reaches were still at that time unknown to British explorers—and the Yangzi. “The throwing open of all India to all China, the access of a country containing 200 millions of people to the produce of a country occupied by 400 millions,” he wrote, would be “a work of such magnitude as that nothing approaching it has ever been seen in the world.”43
In the British imagination as well as in administration, Peninsular India was quite distinct from the “heartland” of Gangetic India. Separated by half a century, William Roxburgh and Arthur Cotton in turn sought to mold a riverine landscape that attached the dry interior of the Deccan plain to the coast of the Bay of Bengal. They sought both to harness and to overcome the political inheritance that distinguished South India from the north. In the former, political power was contested within a system of small states that arose to fill the void of the troubled Mughal Empire; the hydraulic landscape was dispersed in thousands of tanks, wells, dams, and weirs, many of them now lay in a state of disrepair after decades of warfare—not least the warfare that accompanied English expansion. But Cotton’s counterparts along the Ganges were no less anxious to see what could be done to “improve” nature: to repair or replace the hydraulic remnants that scattered the valley. They faced different challenges, they chose different solutions, but they shared many assumptions with their counterparts in the south. Just two years after Cotton’s barrage was complete, a project still more monumental opened its floodgates: the Ganges Canal, at the time (and still today) the largest in the world.
The Ganges Canal was the creation of Proby Cautley—Arthur Cotton’s contemporary, classmate, and eventually his bitter rival. Cautley arrived in India in 1819 as an artilleryman. A few years after his arrival, the first Anglo-Burma war in 1824 drew many of the East India Company’s engineers across the Bay of Bengal; their absence created new openings in India for those without formal training. Like so many Company officers, Cautley was an autodidact. He learned his craft through practice and observation. Working in different ecological settings, Cautley and Cotton embraced different hydraulic approaches. By the 1860s, they fought their battles in a bitter and public war of pamphlets. Cotton accused Cautley of making fundamental mistakes in the design of the Ganges Canal; at stake was not only prestige, but also a debate over the ownership and financial management of India’s hydraulic works.44 Along the Ganges, as everywhere else in India, the infrastructure of water control long preceded British rule. But in the nineteenth century British engineers turned the Ganges valley into one of the most “thoroughly engineered” landscapes in the world.45
The Gangetic plain’s hydraulic transformation began with the Company’s effort to restore the old Yamuna Canal’s supply of water to Delhi. The waterworks dated back to pre-Mughal times: Delhi’s water infrastructure owes much to the rule of Sultan Iltutmish in the thirteenth century. He ordered the construction of an elaborate web of tanks and step wells. The Mughals brought them to a new level of sophistication. They built a complex of ornate gardens along the banks of the Yamuna River, laid out around the tombs of Mughal leaders. They watered their new capital at Shahjahanabad from a canal and an interlocking system of smaller canals and drains. Emperor Akbar ordered the renovation of the West Yamuna Canal—first built by the ruler Firoz Shah—for irrigation, and extended it to Delhi.46 Akbar’s Canal Act of 1568 declared the canal’s aims to be “to supply the wants of the poor,” to “leave permanent marks of the greatness of my Empire by digging canals,” and to ensure that “the revenues of the Empire will be increased.”47 The British found the canal gone to ruin, yet traces of its sophisticated engineering remained. In 1820, British engineers restored the water supply to Delhi through the West Yamuna Canal. They followed quite consciously in the footsteps of Mughal architects.
With this success in hand, local administrators turned to the restoration of the eastern branch of the Yamuna Canal. Second in command of this project was young Proby Cautley, who had no prior experience of hydraulic engineering. Cautley was open, perhaps unusually open, to learning from local practices: he suggested adapting local well-building techniques to provide a stronger foundation for bridges than usual European methods could sustain in the soils of the Gangetic plain.48 As he took charge of the canal project, Cautley ordered the construction of rest houses every ten or twenty miles along the path—in keeping with the old Mughal tradition of caravansarais along the Grand Trunk Road. Besides water, Cautley’s interests encompassed archaeology, paleontology, and botany. In 1831, while supervising the digging of a well as part of the canal project, he discovered evidence of an ancient settlement at Belka. With even more enthusiasm, Cautley and his colleague Hugh Falconer began collecting fossils of mammals and birds and fish, eventually shipping to the British Museum in London a collection that took up 214 crates. The history of science in nineteenth-century India often saw the blurring of lines between disciplines.
By the middle of the 1830s, though, Cautley was first and foremost a water engineer. In 1835, he became the Company’s superintendent of canals. His predecessor in that role, John Colvin, had left him with an idea: to build a canal to bring the waters of the Ganges to the arid Doab (the name means “between two rivers”) that lay between the Ganges and the Yamuna. Early investigations concluded that the canal would be too expensive—and probably an engineering challenge too far. The calculus of costs and benefits, so central to the Company’s mode of administrative thought, changed in 1837 when a major famine devastated the drought-prone Doab. By 1840 plans were in place to build what would become the Ganges Canal.49
The centerpiece of the canal complex was a headworks at Haridwar, where the Ganges meets the plains. Its most complex feat of design was the Solani aqueduct, which ran sixteen miles below Haridwar—civil engineer G. W. MacGeorge, author of an 1894 treatise on the infrastructure of British India, called it the “most interesting and remarkable modern structure in India.”50 The technical challenges were formidable. The project created a hybrid landscape as an artificial “river” crisscrossed Himalayan streams that in the summer became torrents. “To carry the great canal—itself a small river—across such a country,” one British engineer observed, “to see it pass silently on, uninterrupted and uninjured by these torrents” was “a triumph of art and engineering ability.”51 Above all, it was a feat of labor. The works were labor-intensive; machines played little role in the initial stages. The canal was the work of thousands who molded and fired bricks, their kilns fed by timber from local forests.52 Earthworkers (bildars) dug the canal. Hundreds of men were deployed in transporting materials. Much of the work was organized by local contractors, who recruited workers from across the region. We know almost none of their names. Historian Jan Lucassen, in studying a strike by the brickworkers in 1848–1849, has uncovered a few of their stories. When their employers tried to cut wages, brickworkers first deserted the site, and later set fire to a number of encampments.53
At the time of its opening in 1854, the Ganges Canal was more than seven hundred miles long. A pamphlet, “A Short Account of the Ganges Canal,” was distributed in English, Hindi, and Urdu at the opening. It declared that “the great motive by which the British government was led to sanction the Ganges Canal” was “to secure to its people, in the country between the rivers Ganges and Jumna, an immunity from the pains and losses that famine brings with it.”54 The famine of 1837 and 1838 was still fresh in the spectators’ memories. For Company administrators, those memories involved the loss during the famine of land revenues, and relief expenditures amounting to over 5 million pounds—financial loss was the spur to action, however sincere the humanitarian considerations might have been.
A year after the canal opened, the North American Review, a Boston literary journal, published an account of the Ganges Canal and its opening ceremonies. It evoked the “double sanctity” that the “mysterious river of the farthest East” now possessed—the Ganges had long been revered and worshipped as a divine river, a place of pilgrimage for people from the distant corners of India; now it was newly (or doubly) blessed by the bounty of technology. The canal was hailed as “the largest of its kind in the world, adapted for navigation as well as for irrigation”; it was “designed not less for the benefit of a remote future than of the present age.” The inauguration of the canal drew large crowds. “From the most distant parts of India pilgrims came up this year,” the American correspondent wrote, “when the revered Ganges was about to leave her ancient and hallowed channel for one formed for her by the hands of strangers.” Quoting from a “private account” that had come into the journalist’s possession, he described how the aqueduct’s embankments were “lined by our own work-people, to the number of more than thirty-five thousand men,” in “long lines of stout forms.” The military presence was strong, for here as in every development of infrastructure in India, military imperatives were paramount. “The infantry were on the tops of the aqueduct parapets” while “the artillery were stationed on a high piece of ground.” The crowd gathered to celebrate the new canal was estimated at not fewer than five hundred thousand people.
The canal was a monument to imperial power, a symbol of English conquest over India’s land and water. In his opening speech, Lieutenant Governor John Colvin—Cautley’s predecessor, and the originator of the idea for the Ganges Canal—declared that “we have an answer… to the old reproach, that the British have left no permanent mark upon the soil of India to attest the power, the wealth, and the munificence of their nation.” But the canal also marked a symbolic step up in the justification of British rule on humanitarian grounds. In the eyes of the American journalist, it was “difficult to conceive of a more impressive service” than the opening prayers consecrating the complex. Seen through the observer’s evangelical imagination, the entire Ganges Canal complex was the work of a “few hundred Christians in the heart of a foreign country, surrounded by many thousand heathens”—a “work of civilization… for the benefit of these unenlightened multitudes.” He declared a new “era of intelligent and liberal government” that “regards and cherishes the interests of the governed.” He conceded that, for all its benefits, the advance of British rule in India had been attended by “the bitter consequences of evil” and “past misgovernment.” But the tide had turned: “The night in which false religion, tyranny, and war have enveloped India,” he wrote, “is giving place to the day of Christianity, good government, and peace.”55
Not long after the completion of the Ganges Canal, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 brought an end to the East India Company’s rule. A mutiny within the army spiraled into widespread social protest that spread across North India; the old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, was the rebels’ symbolic leader. The rebellion was suppressed with spectacular violence. The British government took control of India from the East India Company. The colonial state intervened more extensively in the countryside. It used the law to reconfigure property rights and to reshape relations between landlords and tenants, men and women, Hindus and Muslims, dominant and subordinate castes. It used force to settle mobile people, and the force of punitive contracts to mobilize labor for the plantations of Southeast Asia. In 1869, the government’s approach to the land found clear expression in Lord Mayo’s dictum that “every measure for the improvement of the land enhances the value of the property of the State”; especially so, he added, because “the duties which in England are performed by a good landlord fall in India, in a great measure, upon the government.”56
IN THE ODES OF THE EMPIRE’S PRAISE SINGERS, THE ACHIEVEMENTS of British engineers in nineteenth-century India stood without parallel. But what truly was new about the hydraulic fever of the second half of the nineteenth century? For Cotton, it was the capacity to design the world anew through “works of a general nature.” But the ancient tank irrigation of southern India was just as ambitious, just as systemic. Landscapes of water have always been shaped by human intervention. Water historian Terje Tvedt warns us against the conceit that the “conquest of nature” is a modern phenomenon.57 But there can be no question that the scale of the works designed and built in the nineteenth century were without precedent. Steam power broke the physical limits of earlier modes of construction—even though, as we have seen, old methods were used extensively as better adapted to local ecology.
The British justification of large-scale public works, too, had new dimensions. In precolonial India, though not as markedly as in China, the control of water lent legitimacy to local rulers. Irrigation works bolstered local resilience to drought, and ensured states’ coffers remained full. Maximizing revenue remained the be-all and end-all of British rule in India, from start to finish; behind every investment in infrastructure lay the aim of extraction. Like many local rulers before them the British government of India used irrigation works to signal their benevolence, to demonstrate their power, to satisfy their own vanity. But some British architects of water went further than this. Driven by an aggressive evangelical Christianity, engineers like Arthur Cotton saw their mission as going far beyond the sustenance of revenue for the state. Irrigation, alongside other technologies, would usher in the social and moral transformation of rural India: midwife to an ever-expanding universe of commerce and trade. The moral argument for infrastructure in India laid deep roots in the nineteenth century—it would not be long before it was turned against British rule.
In earlier times the benefits of hydraulic infrastructure resided entirely at the local, or at most the regional, level. In this sense, perhaps the most far-reaching change that British imperial engineering brought was its spatial expanse—in the imagination of British engineers and administrators and investors, the irrigation of a particular district of the Godavari delta or the Gangetic plain would have repercussions across the globe, as more and more of the products of India’s soil found their buyers in the markets of London and Liverpool, Hamburg and New York.
IV
The irregular availability of water was one challenge; the conquest of space was another. To take the augmented products of India’s irrigated lands to market, India’s great rivers had to be made navigable. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, little had changed since cartographer James Rennell’s description in the 1790s. The inland waterways of Bengal sustained “a system of regional trade that served a population of some 60 millions.” An array of specialist vessels plied the waterways of the Bengal delta: salt boats, the boats used by woodchoppers in the Sundarbans, the small craft for the traffic in betel leaf, and the distinctive port lighters that serviced European merchantmen, loading and unloading their cargoes. Higher up the hierarchy in this catalog of rivercraft were the bajra preferred by European employees of the Company, with a large sail on a single mast. Most luxurious was the pinnace, reserved for higher officials and the wealthiest Indian merchants. The river teemed with life, animated by the labor of boatmen with a panoply of specialized skills. A distinctive Anglo-Indian lexicon emerged to describe work on the river—the product of British translations and mistranslations, transcriptions and mispronunciations of local words.58 Serangs and tindals were boatswains; manjhees and seaconnies were steersmen; dandees, expert oarsmen, lascars, sailors. Each group knew the river intimately.59
But fluctuations in the Ganges River’s flow between the wet and the dry season, the heavy loads of silt that it carries, forging and undoing sandbanks and shoals along its course—these all made it treacherous for larger vessels. Sandbanks deceived the most seasoned boatmen. Insurance firms charged the same premium on freight going from Calcutta up the Ganges to Allahabad as they did to London. If anything, Company rule had slowed traffic along the river, because of its punitive taxation. This was the view of Charles Trevelyan, who traveled down the Ganges and the Yamuna in 1830 to report on the oppressions inflicted by countless customs posts, acting in the Company’s name, along the riverbanks. “These streams, intersecting, as they do, the whole of the Bengal Provinces from one end to the other and terminating in the Sea port of Calcutta,” Trevelyan wrote, “must be the great channels and high roads of trade of the country.” But they fell short of that potential. Trevelyan found that the number of customs inspections was enough “not only to embarrass the navigation of the Jumna, but to close it entirely for nearly half its course from the hills.” He noted how few of the “great staples” of salt, cotton, ghee, and asafoetida traveled by river—instead, merchants resorted to “tedious and expensive land carriage.” Only one cargo of salt arrived in Agra from Delhi in the year 1830 even though vast quantities were traded yearly from Delhi “for the consumption of our Eastern Provinces.” In his sloping copperplate hand, Trevelyan was damning: “It may appear extraordinary,” he wrote, “that the Officers who are charged with the collection of the customs should possess so imperfect an idea” of the inspections and exactions conducted in their name. Those who suffered most were the “poorer class of merchants and traders who can ill afford to pay.” Trevelyan noted that “speed is the Life of Trade.” Like so many other Company officers, he was a trader himself: he spoke from experience.60 Trevelyan’s report played a key role in the East India Company’s abolition of internal customs duties.
By the time Trevelyan made his voyage downriver, the Ganges was the site of some of the earliest experiments with steam technology in India. British administrators and businessmen looked eagerly to the expansion of trade and navigation upriver. The first steam engine to arrive in Calcutta, in 1817 or 1818, was there to clean the river Hooghly. The eight-horsepower engine from Birmingham powered revolving buckets to clear the river of the silt it carried from the hills. A few years later, the steamboat Diana, launched in July 1823 by the Calcutta shipbuilding firm Messrs Kyd & Co, drew large crowds to witness its maiden voyage. As a commercial proposition it failed. War spurred technical improvement. In 1825 the company launched a military expedition against the Burmese kingdom after tension along India’s expanding northeastern frontier. The old dredger was converted into a warship; unprofitable Diana was pressed into service to carry medical supplies and the wounded between India and Arakan, on the eastern littoral of the Bay of Bengal. It was deployed up the Irrawaddy River, where local people labeled the ship the “fire devil.”61
By the 1830s, steamboat agents had set up shop at every point along the river—most of them as a sideline to their primary occupations. Many profited from the arrival of steam. J. P. Leslie was by day a pleader at the Allahabad High Court; he made himself the government’s agent at the port and charged commission for overseeing the loading and unloading of cargo. Carr, Tagore, & Co., managing agents, secured the contract to supply coal to the government’s Steam Department from their mines in Burdwan, in eastern Bengal. The Ganges was a microcosm of India’s economic transformation. Steamboats began to carry to Calcutta the revenues on which the East India Company’s administration depended—the proceeds of the annual harvest. Steamboats were filled with “boxes loaded with five thousand rupee coins,” each one “roped, ticketed, and sealed with lead and wax” and guarded by one or more soldiers. Upriver, private money traveled from Calcutta merchants to Patna, Benaras, and Allahabad—advances on the crops eagerly awaited by traders in London and Liverpool and New York. The Ganges was a conduit for India’s economic integration with the world. The bulk of the cargo traveling up from Calcutta consisted of the material paraphernalia of British imperialism in India—arms, medical supplies, printing presses, seals for opium agents, compasses and theodolites for the staff of the Indian Survey, the mammoth project to map and survey every inch of British territory in India. Consignments of three commodities dominated steam traffic along the Ganges: cotton, indigo, and opium. Each was of global importance. Long transported to Calcutta on country boats, indigo was small enough to be stashed away—it was a favored way for company officers to smuggle their ill-gotten gains out of the country. From 1836, consignments began to travel downriver by steamboats.62
By the end of the 1830s, ironclad steamers traversed the 780 miles between Calcutta and Allahabad in three weeks, but beyond Allahabad they found their passage blocked.63 The Ganges continued to challenge the power of steam. Even under experienced pilots, steamboats ran aground. They foundered on the river’s treacherous shoals and sandbanks. Silt blocked the path of large vessels, confining them to the most easily navigable stretches of the river. More nimble vessels lacked the power to push upriver. And steamboats were expensive. The most valuable commodities formed the bulk of the cargo on steamboats along the Ganges. But steam freight was too costly for most merchants. Bulk goods—rice, sugar, saltpeter, linseed, hemp, and hides—continued to travel on country boats, or overland.64 Far from supplanting earlier uses of the river, the steamboat took its place in a varied economy of energy and transportation: the oldest and the newest technologies coexisted and competed with one other. Often the river itself—its currents, its seasonality, its contours—set the boundaries of what was possible or financially viable.
In the end it was not road but rail that emerged as the biggest competitor to steam vessels on the river. Because of British investors’ embrace of the railroad, steam transportation along the Ganges never really flourished.
THE WORLD OVER, THE COLLAPSE OF SPACE AND TIME BY THE RAILROAD, the steamship, and the telegraph underpinned the transition to industrial capitalism. Writing of the same period in the nineteenth century, environmental historian William Cronon describes how Chicago’s tentacles reshaped the entire landscape of the American Midwest. Cronon writes of the “railroads’ liberation from geography”—their ability to operate “quite independently of the climatic factors that had bedeviled earlier forms of transportation.”65 But how much did this apply in India? Could rail operate “independently” of the monsoon, where river transport could not?
India’s railway dreams were born in the 1830s; by the 1840s, these visions had become a sort of “mania.” The construction of India’s railway network began in the 1850s and reached its zenith in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, financed by private investors at public risk, their returns guaranteed by the state. By this time railway lines snaked across Europe and North and South America. Now speculators eyed India with anticipation. After false starts and burst bubbles, construction began in the 1850s.66 In 1853 the Marquess of Dalhousie, governor-general of India, inaugurated the construction of India’s railways: investors were guaranteed a rate of return of 5 percent. As ever, military needs loomed largest in the government’s calculations. As Dalhousie told Parliament in a statement that inaugurated India’s railway age, a countrywide rail network “would enable the Government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months.” He envisaged the “commercial and social advantages” of the railway as “beyond all present calculation.” Beyond calculation, too, were the “extent and value of the interchange which may be established with people beyond our present frontier.”67
Within three decades, civil engineer George W. MacGeorge estimated that the railway had reduced India to “one-twentieth of its former dimensions.” Trains could cover up to six hundred kilometers a day. Bullock carts could manage, at best, twenty to thirty kilometers a day; river boats could cover sixty-five kilometers a day going downstream, but even fewer than a bullock cart when battling upriver. The railway grid consolidated the state’s control over Indian territory. India’s cotton and indigo, jute and opium moved faster to the ports of Bombay and Calcutta for export. The railway implanted the colonial state upon the recently conquered lands of the northwest.68
Among those who watched with interest was Karl Marx, who saw the railway as a necessary tool to break down feudalism and social division. Rail collapsed distance. Rail integrated markets. Marx quoted from a British observation just a few years earlier, in 1848, that “when grain was selling from 6/- to 8/- a quarter at Khandesh, it was sold at 64/- to 70/- at Poona, where people were dying in the streets”; the sole reason was that “the clay-roads were impracticable.” In Marx’s view, one of the railway’s potential benefits lay in what it could do to the hydraulics of the land: it could “easily be made to subserve agricultural purposes,” he thought, “by the formation of tanks” along the railway embankments, “and by the conveyance of water along different lines.” A few years later, in 1860, railway engineer Edwin Merrall published a riposte to Sir Arthur Cotton’s condemnation of expensive railway construction in India; it was a defense of the value of railways, faced with Cotton’s alternative—investing in India’s waterways. For Merrall, too, water was central. Merrall insisted that the railway could overcome climatic variation, operating “at all seasons of the year,” whereas rivers swelled during the monsoon and dwindled in the dry season, leaving few months of the year when they could be traversed safely. India regularly suffered from famine, “from the failure of the periodical rains”; but “such scarcity,” he argued, “is not general, but partial and local,” and could “very easily be met by an increased supply of food from other and more fortunate districts.” The railway’s greatest promise was to connect the driest parts of India with those “which never want water.”69
It is difficult to write about India’s railways without a flurry of astonishingly large numbers. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the Indian railways expanded to encompass twenty-four thousand miles of track, and India possessed the fourth-largest railway network in the world: by far the largest in Asia. India’s railways demanded a “prodigious consumption of mineral or vegetable food, in the shape of coal, coke, or wood,” vast quantities of iron and steel, and the complex manipulation of water to supply the engines. Because so many of the materials were imported, Indian railway expansion was a fillip to British industry.70
But what did this mean for villagers in a district facing drought or flood? Some observers worried from the outset that, contrary to the dominant view, transportation was no panacea for social and economic inequality. Writing in 1851, C. H. Lushington, railway commissioner, saw that the lands of the Ganges valley were “sublet in very small portions”; they were worked by the “poor and needy” who were “without capital who live from hand to mouth.” They lacked the stocks of grain that would “make it worth their while” to seek distant markets. He worried that railway lines would cut through small holdings, dividing them further; he feared the “serious and tangible injuries” that would come from the way the railway lines interfered with drainage by building over natural floodplains. A quarter of a century later, many of his fears would prove prescient.71
The railways reached deep into the interior. They carried the force of the state and the pull of global markets to even the smallest villages. An Indian economist writing in the mid-twentieth century described the railways as sparking a “revolution in the economic pattern of the country”: the “age-old walls of localized economy,” he wrote, “were collapsing.” Recent analysts reach a similar conclusion based on the modeling of district-level data. Dave Donaldson estimates that the arrival of the railroad in any given district raised real income by 16 percent, thanks to “previously unexploited gains from trade due to comparative advantage.” He echoes a sense widely shared in the late nineteenth century: “Districts that had been largely closed economies opened up as they were penetrated by railroads.” His data show that the dependence of local grain prices and even local mortality rates on local rainfall vanished at last with the arrival of the railways.72 But these numbers tell us little about how resources were shared within each village, district, or household. Markets grew more integrated, but many without land or capital were not well positioned to benefit from this expansion. And what effect did these transformations have on those—the lower castes, women and children, those ill or disabled—who had to look outside the market, to benefits in kind or to always-tenuous customary entitlements, for their security and survival?
However dazzling its scale, the rail network met the needs of a colonial export economy, driving produce to the river mouth ports. It was designed to take India’s jute and cotton and tea and coal to where merchants needed them; it was designed to transport labor to the plantations and mines and factories. The massive expansion in mobility both within and beyond India in this period coexisted with deepening pockets of social and geographical immobility. Swaths of India remained off the railway map. The inequality between regions that benefited from the change and those left behind grew starker. Where there were no rail connections, roads also tended to be poor, and waterways poorly maintained. The National Sample Survey of India showed that, even a century after 1870, no fewer than 72 percent of journeys in many parts of rural India were undertaken on foot. Always, the newest and the oldest technologies depended on one another: as historian David Arnold observed, “The railways relied on country carts to bring raw cotton and other cash crops to the railheads or distribute grain to needy villages in times of famine.”73
But in this age of evangelical faith in the “civilizing” effects of capitalism, of which British rule was the “Providential” vehicle in India, the railway seemed to augur an “extraordinary awakening”: a “wonderfully rapid subversion of previous habits of life and thought” in India. The engineer George MacGeorge’s encomium concluded that “one of the most rigid and exclusive caste systems in the world” had been “penetrated on every side by the power of steam.” Many Indian observers shared his enthusiasm. Madhav Rao, chief minister of the princely states of Travancore, Indore, and then Baroda, wrote of the “glorious change the railway has made,” as “populations which had been isolated for unmeasured ages, now easily mingle in civilized confusion”—it offered no less than the prospect of India becoming “a homogeneous nation.” Not only did the railway change people’s behavior, it transformed the landscape: trains ran through the rainy season and the dry, they crossed bridges across rivers and mountains, connected humid and arid regions. As they cut a track through the Western Ghats, railway engineers had turned “the stupendous natural inequalities of the precipitous hills into a series of uniform inclined surfaces,” and “the whole rugged and inhospitable region has been smoothed down.”74
Behind the self-regarding, if genuine, heroism of the engineers’ accounts lies the forgotten heroism of those Indian workers who built the steel lines, the canals, the bridges. Countless among them paid with their lives. However fervently the railway engineers believed they could import their methods from England—just as they imported steam engines, coal, locomotives, tracks, sleepers, and even prefabricated bridges—what emerged in practice was a hybrid approach to building infrastructure.75 India’s ecology could not easily be “smoothed down.” Whether through railway lines or irrigation canals, reshaping the Indian landscape was a colossal feat of work.
It was India’s hydrology that challenged every scheme. Building the rail line from Howrah to Burdwan in Bengal, engineers faced an “inland sea” of water channels that required, in response, “viaducts, bridges, culverts, and flood openings” on a scale that no engineering project in the nineteenth century had ever attempted. Building bridges and aqueducts over the Himalayan rivers demanded ingenuity and a great deal of improvisation. Designs had to take into account the “immense volumes of water periodically brought down” by the great rivers through “seasons of flood,” and the “erratic and unstable character of their channels.” The rivers “scoured” the piers and abutments of bridges: torrents of water scraped away their foundations. So the engineers harnessed the knowledge of the people who knew the land most intimately. Even with the arrival of steam dredges and sand pumps, the terrible labor of divers and hand-diggers was vital; the piers of India’s railway bridges often reached one hundred feet below the water’s surface.76 Other skills came into play. Work was overseen by men who had experience as seafarers, as lascars, in the British merchant marine. Their mastery of the winds, the tides, the currents; their mastery of a language of command—these were put to new use to reshape India’s inland seas, far from the ocean air.
Few believed as fervently as Rudyard Kipling in Britain’s imperial mission. But in his short story “The Bridge Builders”—based on his experience watching the Kaisar-i-Hind bridge being built across the Sutlej River, a tributary of the Indus in the northwest—what emerges most strongly is a sense of fragility before nature, and the deep dependence of British engineers on local expertise. The driving force in the story is the character of Peroo, a lascar from Kachch, “familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London.” His mastery of the sailing ship had found a new outlet:
There was no one like Peroo, serang, to lash, and guy, and hold, to control the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure upstream on a monsoon night and report on the state of embankment-facings.
As a storm threatens the bridge he has designed, chief engineer Findlayson falls into an opium-induced hallucination, haunted by the question of whether his bridge would survive the onslaught of the water: he asks himself, “What man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic?”77
In the story the bridge survives. But the fears were well founded. India’s ecology of water threatened not only the stability of bridges but the lives of the thousands of men who built them. Railway workers faced punishing conditions; infectious diseases were a constant threat. New infrastructure diverted watercourses, altered drainage channels, modified the water cycle; new risks were not far behind, posed above all by malaria. However far the power of steam had advanced, the monsoon rivers retained the capacity to surprise. In 1868, Sibganj, a “great grain market” along the Ganges, was destroyed: “A northward movement of the river in 1868 swept away the bank on which the market stood.” Traders moved on; they set up at Karik, six miles to the northeast.78
V
If India’s empire builders needed a reminder of their fragility, it came from the ferocity of the monsoon climate.
In October 1864, a “cyclone of unparalleled fury” struck Calcutta and the coastal districts of Bengal. The “rivers raged and tossed like a sea” and left the city “in ruins.” “Far as the eye can see,” a British correspondent wrote, “there is unbroken waste and gloom.”79 The cyclone originated in the Bay of Bengal, to the west of the northern Andaman Islands, on October 2. That morning, from the deck of the Conflict, sailors observed that “the stars had a sickly appearance.” The sailors saw that the sun “rose blood red.” The cyclone had built up in the southwest, its effects felt in Ceylon and Port Blair a few days earlier; it gathered force as it approached the Andamans. From the Andamans the cyclone swept up the Bay of Bengal, traveling at ten miles an hour toward the mouth of the Hooghly River. As the cyclone approached the coast of Bengal, the steamer Martaban was at anchor in the Saugor Roads. By the morning of October 5, the wind-whipped vessel drifted with its “jibboom gone and likewise the fore-royal and top-gallant masts.” By the afternoon the gusts had eased, the captain wrote, “leaving us a total wreck.” The crew realized they had been “dragged 17 miles across the banks at low tide.”80
Another vessel, the Ally, foundered. It had departed from Calcutta on October 4, carrying 335 migrants bound for Mauritius. They were indentured workers, hundreds among the hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers from India bound to labor on the sugar plantations that met the British Empire’s taste for sweetness. The ship was overturned by a gale. Only twenty-two of the emigrants and seven of the ship’s crew survived.81
However visibly Calcutta was affected, the storm was worse in rural Bengal. It swept through coastal districts and moved inland to the northeast, finally fizzling out over Assam on October 7. Few people survived to bear witness. The storm surge generated “great sea waves… which, on reaching shallow waters, were piled up to a height greatly exceeding that of the highest spring tides, when they broke over the low lying lands at the mouths of the Hooghly and Godavery.” A lighthouse keeper wrote to Calcutta in despair: “I cannot accurately state what the loss of life has been by the Cyclone and inundation, but I am afraid the fatal malady has carried off more.” Disease killed many more than the initial flood. “Every tank, pond and well,” he wrote, “is stagnant with decaying matter.” More than fifty thousand people died. Flooding drove millions from their homes.82
This account of the storm, penned in 1867, comes from Henry Francis Blanford. He was born in London in 1834. His father, William Blanford, owned a workshop manufacturing gilt moldings—one of innumerable small manufacturers propelling Britain’s industrialization. In 1851, Henry joined London’s Royal School of Mines, and from there traveled to the Bergakademie in Freiberg to continue his study of mining. Along with his brother William Thomas Blanford, Henry joined the Geological Survey of India in 1855. Their first assignment was to explore the Talchir coalfield in Orissa, in eastern India—vital in this new era when India’s hunger for coal was spurred by the railways. The Blanfords’ inquiries in Orissa established some of the key groundwork for the later discovery of Gondwana, the supercontinent that fused the southern hemisphere’s landmasses together with the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula. Gondwana broke up into eastern and western segments—separating Africa, South America, and Australia—while the Indian subcontinent’s northward drift and collision with the Eurasian continent, around 50 million years ago, created the Himalayas.
The following year, 1856, Henry took over as curator of the new Museum of Geology in Calcutta, and supervised the official Geological Survey of India, charged with exploring India’s geology with a view to exploiting its mineral resources. He spent the rest of the 1850s in southern India, investigating the stratigraphy and paleontology of rock formations between Tiruchirapalli and Pondicherry. After a sojourn back in Europe to recover from ill health brought on “by the exposure incidental to geological surveying in India,” Blanford returned in 1862 to teach physics and chemistry at Presidency College, Calcutta.
Around that time, Blanford became involved with the Asiatic Society. Founded by famed Orientalist and linguist Sir William Jones in 1784, for “enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia,” the Asiatic Society of Calcutta emerged as the most influential among a network of learned societies in the colonial world. Its journal was a storehouse of cultural, linguistic, and scientific research. The inclusion of meteorology among its subjects was due in large part to the work of a retired ship’s captain and president of the Marine Courts of Calcutta, Henry Piddington (1797–1858). Inspired by the work of Colonel Henry Reid—pioneer of American meteorology and author of An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms—Piddington’s interest in the characteristic storms of the Indian Ocean was deeply practical. His aim is clear from the title of his 1848 treatise, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms, which he dedicated to “mariners of all classes in all parts of the world.” In his catalog of different types of storms, Piddington proposed a new word, “cyclone,” to describe those driven by “circular or highly curved winds.” He derived his term “from the Greek kukloma (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake).” The new science of cyclones demanded attention from sailors, he wrote, “for it is… a question of life and death, of safety or ruin.” He described a “storm wave,” of the kind that struck Bengal in 1864, as a “mass of water… driven bodily along with the storm or before it”; crashing upon bays and estuaries, they caused “dreadful inundations.” Piddington published in the Asiatic Society’s journal a series of ships’ logs, from which he derived his work on the forces driving the Bay of Bengal’s cyclones.83 Blanford began lecturing at Presidency College, Calcutta, a few years after Piddington’s death; he studied Piddington’s writings and developed an interest in the science of storms. Given his prominence in Calcutta’s world of science, given his expressed interest in the weather, Blanford was an obvious candidate to lead the society’s inquiry into the great cyclone of 1864. James Gastrell, Blanford’s collaborator in compiling the report on the great cyclone, was the Asiatic Society’s treasurer, and he also worked as the deputy surveyor-general for the government of India. What began as a report for the Asiatic Society became an official inquiry.
To reconstruct the path of the storm, Gastrell and Blanford pored over the logbooks of ten ships dispersed across the Bay of Bengal through the storm. The storm’s chroniclers tallied the ships’ barometric pressure readings with sailors’ descriptions of sky and sea; they plotted these against the ships’ likely positions to track the storm’s path. The record of the Moneka gives a sense of the terse precision of the ship’s log, heavy with foreboding:
From midnight to noon, light and variable winds from north-west to west, with cloudy weather; sea more composed, but south south-west swell as lively as ever. No rain this day. Barometer 29.74. Thermometer 82˚. From noon until midnight, light and unsteady winds from west by north, with cloudy weather; sky looking very black and lowering to the north and north north-east, with a high rolling sea from the same quarter. Sea rose very quickly; observed lightning in the north north-west. Barometer inclined to fall. Midnight, gently increasing wind from west, with gloomy appearances to north north-east. Sea still very heavy from that quarter. Ship pitching, bows under.
Gastrell and Blanford traced the cyclical motion of the winds by comparing the logs of the Conflict and the Golden Horn. The two vessels began the afternoon of the storm one hundred miles apart; by midnight, they were at most twenty or thirty miles apart, having been blown toward each other by the rotating cyclone. Sailors’ most common response to the power of the storm was awe. The power of steam was no match for the cyclone. The Alexandra was a steam tug, at the mouth of the Hooghly River when the storm hit; traveling into a headwind, its engines “were set going with seven revolutions, at full power,” making no progress. The “frightful roar of the hurricane” drowned out even the din of the steam engine. The winds overcame the ship: a “moaning sound,” a “sudden blast from the northwest,” and suddenly the ship was lying on its side.84
Vital though ships’ readings were, their barometers were not always standardized, and their readings were difficult to compare with one another. The ships’ records had to be read against measurements from land observatories. Gastrell and Blanford had access to the records of sixteen land stations, from Agra and Benares on the Gangetic plain to Kandy in the mountains of Ceylon and Port Blair on the Andaman Islands; farthest south was the station in Singapore. They were few in number and widely spaced. Their records had to be supplemented by the private journals kept by individuals such as one Mr. Barnes of Kandy. He noted on October 1, 1864: “raw and very damp, low scud nimbi covering the greater part of the sky, (dense cirro-cumuli beyond), and moving generally from west south-west, the wind veering from west to south and back.”85
To follow the storm after it made landfall, the investigators relied on eyewitnesses: lighthouse keepers, railway stationmasters, European missionaries and district officials, captains of riverboats, government engineers. Gastrell and Blanford were tireless in their work of archiving the storm. Accounts of the devastation were heartbreaking. The storm’s detectives searched these reports for telling details; they were intrigued by accounts that described the changing color of the sky, the shifting quality of the light, as the cyclone advanced. It was the best record they had of the formation and movement of clouds. Observers saw clouds of “dark lead” and indigo; they saw blackened afternoon skies lit up with “balls of fire,” and nocturnal landscapes glowing with eerie light.86
Storm investigation was a form of narrative, and nature was the protagonist. Gastrell and Blanford depicted a battle of forces. A few days before the storm’s arrival on the coast of Bengal, “the northerly current retreated before its stronger opponent, now forcing its way up the east of the Bay.” That current was in turn “opposed” by the Yamadoung Mountains of Arakan on Burma’s western coast—an obstacle the winds circumvented as they “curved round” them. The story of the storm took form akin to a travel account: it had a point of origin, an itinerary, and a destination—and it left a trail of destruction in its wake. The investigators depicted the storm’s “tracks” using wood-block print, in two dimensions on a map. But their picture of the storm—bringing together pressure readings, wind speeds, latitude, and longitude—was fully three-dimensional. They were as interested in its vertical as its horizontal dimensions: the dance of rotating winds, the churning ocean currents, the contours of landscape.87
Gastrell and Blanford were limited to retrospective reconstruction. What they hoped for was instantaneous information. Their goal was to track future storms as they unfolded, through a network of monitoring stations linked by telegraph. They emphasized the “great importance” of meteorological telegraph stations “along both coasts” of India; ideally, they wanted an archipelago of observatories encompassing Ceylon and the Burma coast, “if possible as far down as Port Blair on the east side of the Bay.” From the very detail of their inquiry into the storm of 1864, they sought an expanded sense of correlation and consequence across space and time, using “indications from distant stations.”88 What were the telltale signs, in the Andamans or in Ceylon, that presaged trouble in Bengal a few days later? How could some form of warning be delivered in time? Their view of the world was one that linked land, sea, and atmosphere. The Indian Ocean, on this view, was a weather factory: the source of India’s climate.
WITH THE ADVANCEMENT OF STORM SCIENCE CAME A DIFFERENT way of thinking about space—and about India’s place in the world. A new understanding of the monsoon emerged from the fusion of maritime and terrestrial observation. In the same decades, British explorers and scientists began to study the Himalayas. From there, botanist Joseph Hooker observed the monsoon from the other side—from the mountain peaks. In Sikkim, Hooker witnessed a watery realm reaching from the ocean to the atmosphere; the sky was a mirror to the sea. “The ocean-like appearance of this southern view,” he wrote, “is even more conspicuous in the heavens than on land, the clouds arranging themselves after a singularly sea-scape fashion.” “Upon what a gigantic scale does nature here operate,” Hooker exclaimed. He described a climatic system where “vapours raised from an ocean whose nearest route is 600 kilometres distant are safely transported without the loss of one drop of water to support the rank luxuriance of this far distant region.” And then, “the waste waters are returned by the rivers to the oceans, and again exhaled, exported, recollected and returned.”89
The enduring power of the monsoon to cause distress and upset political calculation, within and far beyond India, would become amply clear in the 1870s.