SIX

WATER AND FREEDOM

AN ANCIENT DICTUM—THAT THE CONTROL OF WATER CONFERRED political power—acquired new meaning, and new urgency, in an age of nationalism. From India to China, water was at the heart of programs for political renewal and national development in the 1920s and 1930s. The rising generation of leaders in Asia included engineers, architects, and physicists, alongside lawyers and schoolteachers. Many of them felt that the conquest of nature in the early twentieth century had not gone far or fast enough. For inspiration they looked to the world’s rising powers. They studied the New Deal in the United States. American technological modernity was epitomized by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which gathered together previously disparate approaches to flood control, river navigation, electricity generation, soil conservation, irrigation, and public health. Asian nationalists drew lessons from the breakneck industrialization and the colossal engineering schemes of the Soviet Union, not least because the Soviet Union was also a major Asian country that had attempted to reengineer landscapes that resembled those of China’s and India’s northwestern reaches, and has done so at a pace unprecedented in global history.

In India, in China, across Southeast Asia, nationalist movements were unstable social coalitions. Their leaders struggled to create a sense of unity and purpose, while acknowledging the fractures of social and economic inequality and addressing regional disparities. Many divisions emerged over the control and sharing of resources—among which water was often the most vital. The 1920s and 1930s were characterized by deepening contacts and solidarities among anticolonial and revolutionary movements across and beyond Asia. But when it came to tangible material questions, like sharing water, they began to draw firm lines around their respective domains. In these decades between the world wars, the seeds were sown for water conflicts that would intensify in the second half of the twentieth century after Asian nations won their freedom from colonial rule.

I

As we saw in the last chapter, India’s landscape was reshaped by the quest for water in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the accounts of engineers the construction of canals and dams, and the pumping of underground water were purely a technical process, outside politics. Few of them, British or Indian, departed from the assumption that the British colonial government would lead the charge. But the rise of nationalism raised new questions about who would benefit from these changes in India’s land and water.

Indian nationalism emerged as a powerful mobilizing force in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Swadeshi movement arose in protest against a 1905 British plan to partition the province of Bengal, ostensibly for economic reasons, but also to divide what the colonial government perceived to be a threatening locus of political organization. “Swadeshi,” meaning “home-made,” began with the boycott of British goods in favor of locally produced products, but it burgeoned into a diverse movement that included those—branded “terrorists” by the British—who advocated the violent overthrow of the colonial government. The protesters achieved their immediate goal: the British revoked their decision to break up the province. But the Swadeshi mobilization was transient and fragile; it splintered into mutually hostile factions. It was largely confined to the province of Bengal, and even there, it was dominated by elite Hindus to the exclusion of Muslims. The Swadeshi movement mirrored similar uprisings elsewhere. Across Asia, the early twentieth century saw a wave of boycotts and demonstrations and strikes. The same year the Swadeshi movement began, Shanghai witnessed a widespread boycott of American goods in response to the wave of violence and discriminatory legislation directed against Chinese immigrants in the United States in the early twentieth century. By the 1910s, these stirrings of unrest had turned into mass movements.

In India, the most effective and visible political leader was a lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Born to a merchant family in Porbandar, a port town in Gujarat on India’s western coast, Gandhi spent decades outside India. He studied law in London between 1888 and 1891. There he came under the influence of the spiritualist Theosophy movement; he discovered vegetarianism; he experienced a political and spiritual awakening that led him to the study of Indian philosophy and religion. In 1893, Gandhi took up an offer of a job as a lawyer in South Africa. He quickly came to lead protests against the race-based exclusions and restrictions faced by the Indian community in South Africa—a diverse group that included Gujarati merchants and traders, concentrated in Durban and Johannesburg, as well as indentured workers from Tamil Nadu and Bihar, who worked on the sugar plantations of Natal. Gandhi, like most of South Africa’s Indian community, supported the British in the South African War, a brutal contest between English and Afrikaner settlers. Hopes that the British would reward Indian support after the war proved short-lived. The rapprochement between the English and the Afrikaners in the postwar settlement led to a tightening of restrictions on the Indian community, including a requirement for them to carry identity cards (“passes”)—though, always, the colony’s African majority faced discrimination that was far worse. Immersed in reading Tolstoy and Thoreau, Gandhi experimented with communal living at a settlement named Phoenix. He started a printing press. He honed his political tactics—a form of nonviolent civil disobedience that he dubbed satyagraha (“struggle for truth.”)

During his South African years, Gandhi developed a critical account of British rule in India. He published Hind Swaraj in 1909, a treatise that took the form of a dialogue with an imagined reader. Gandhi took aim not only at the violence and tyranny that underpinned British rule in India but also, more radically, at its material effects. “India’s salvation consists of unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years or so,” he wrote. “The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper class have to learn to live consciously and religiously and deliberately the simple life of a peasant.”¹ Gandhi concluded that “machinery is the main symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.” In rejecting “telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers [and] doctors,” Gandhi was being provocative; he aimed to shock his readers into asking questions about the ultimate ends of India’s embrace of industrial modernity.

Gandhi’s analysis stood at odds with the rush to secure India against vulnerability to nature—a process which, we have seen, involved many Indians alongside British water engineers and administrators. Over the years, Gandhi developed further the idea that India’s freedom lay in living with the rhythms of nature. He was repulsed by India’s cities, though his vision of the country as an agglomeration of “village republics” was largely a myth drawn from the writings of British orientalists like Henry Maine. As a symbolic figure, as a tactician, Gandhi was unrivaled within the Indian nationalist movement. His economic ideas remained marginal. They stood as a quiet counterpoint to the powerful tune of more technology, more control, more progress. Most of Gandhi’s associates and many of his followers had a different view of what India needed—the “simple life of the peasant” was precisely what they aimed to relegate to the past.

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he hurled himself into political activity. He had already acquired the honorific “Mahatma” (“great soul”); his reputation as an effective organizer and powerful speaker had traveled with him from South Africa. He began on a small scale, interceding on behalf of indigo workers in Champaran, Bihar, who were protesting their exploitative working conditions. By 1917, Gandhi was India’s preeminent politician. He jolted the Indian National Congress to life, expanded its membership, forged a coalition of rural and urban supporters. Gandhi rejected the class-based mobilization of the left in favor of an emphasis on conciliation; among his supporters were India’s largest industrialists, including the Birla family. Gandhi launched his mass Non-Cooperation Movement in 1919, in protest against the slow pace of political reform in British India and directed in particular against the prolongation of the state’s wartime emergency powers. A campaign of protests and boycotts, fasts and vigils, lasted until 1922, when Gandhi called it off following an act of violence in the small town of Chauri Chaura, where Congress supporters had attacked a police station. A cycle of repression and concession would unfold over the subsequent two decades. The British government of India locked Gandhi and his lieutenants up in prison on many occasions, interspersed with periods of negotiation.

The nationalist upsurge spanned Asia. The Non-Cooperation Movement in India raged at the same time that China saw an outpouring of social and political protest against the territorial concessions that Japan, victorious on the Allied side, had gained in China after the First World War. A wide coalition of youth and students and activists came together in a loose grouping known as the May Fourth Movement. In Vietnam and in Indonesia, too, the 1920s saw the rise of new political and social movements directed, respectively, against French and Dutch colonial rule. In all three countries, unlike in India, communism emerged among the most powerful and most compelling of political movements.

Asia’s nationalist movements spoke the language of freedom and sovereignty, and it is on the richness and multiplicity of these concepts that historians have focused their attentions. But there was always a strong material underpinning to the ambitions of Asia’s nationalists. It is here that the history of nationalism intersects with the battle to bring unruly waters under control. Nationalist leaders needed water, mineral resources, and fossil fuels to realize their plans for industrialization, to make good on their promises of an end to hunger and poverty. A new sense of confidence crept into visions of Asia’s future. Consider this contrast: In 1909, the imperial finance minister of India had characterized each of his budgets as a “gamble on the rains,” conveying a sense of fatalism about the power of nature over economy and society. Twenty years later, Jawaharlal Nehru—Cambridge-educated lawyer and scion of an elite Allahabad family, son of pioneering nationalist Motilal Nehru, and by the 1920s Gandhi’s most trusted younger colleague, and one of India’s most influential and charismatic politicians—declared that “modern science claims to have curbed to a large extent the tyranny and the vagaries of nature.”² Nehru was clear about the material urgency behind every vision of freedom. “Our desire for freedom is a thing more of the mind than the body,” Nehru said, but most Indians suffered “hunger and deepest poverty, and empty stomach and a bare back.” For the masses, “freedom is a vital bodily necessity.”³

In China, as in India, water was a vital ingredient of freedom. The control of water was essential to China’s emergence from a century of humiliation at the hands of imperial powers, which had culminated in 1911 with the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Sun Yat-sen, architect of China’s republican revolution, applied himself to the problem of China’s development, even as rival regional polities tore China apart. In The International Development of China, Sun set forth an expansive vision of China as what he called an “economic ocean” for the world. His book was replete with maps of rivers diverted, maps of rail lines laid, maps of ports dredged and electricity generated.⁴ Water was at the heart of his vision. Sun told a meeting in Guangdong in 1924: “If we could utilize the water power in the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to generate one hundred million horsepower of electrical energy, we would be putting twenty-four hundred million men to work!” Sun predicted that “when that time comes, we shall have enough power to supply railways, motor cars, fertilizer factories and all kinds of manufacturing establishments.”⁵

In contrast with India, where the focus had long been on irrigation, Chinese river engineering in the early twentieth century focused on flood control. Though China, too, had suffered from the great droughts of the 1870s and 1890s, it had also experienced disastrous river flooding on a scale unknown in India. By the 1920s, the Yellow River, famously silt-laden, posed a particular challenge—a challenge embraced by an international corps of engineers. Two Americans, John Freeman and O. J. Todd, played a central role; their Chinese protégés included Li Yizhi (1882–1938), whose stature in China was akin to Visvesvaraya’s in India. Li studied in Berlin and then visited hydraulic projects across Europe; he was aided in his work by a new cadre of Chinese graduates from MIT and other leading American institutions. “To manufacture cotton into yarn, to grind grain into flour, to light cities and otherwise modernize this part of Shansi,” Todd wrote, “will be part of the benefit that these Yellow River Falls may confer on the nearby country.”⁶ His ambition found many echoes across China, in India, and in other parts of the colonized world. But beneath that ambition was an enduring sense of fragility.

TO HARVEST WATER WAS TO REDRESS THE INEQUALITIES OF nature—to even out the uneven reach of the monsoon, to ensure against the particular unpredictability of the rains in the places that needed it most. But water was also an engine of inequality between people, between classes and castes, between city and country, between regions. The command of water underpinned the accumulation of land. The control of water was a source of power; its absence, a source of enduring exclusion. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, water was at the material heart of many struggles for freedom—but freedom for whom?

The question arose forcefully in the western Indian town of Mahad, near Poona, in March 1927. The local Dalit community—those excluded from the Hindu caste system, once known as Untouchables, whose daily lives were marred by residential and occupational segregation as well as by violence and material deprivation—were denied access by upper-caste Hindus to a local tank containing drinking water. Although a court had ruled that this exclusion was illegal, it continued—as it did in countless towns and villages across India, as it still does today. Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar—a brilliant lawyer from a poor family in western India, who had received scholarships to study at the London School of Economics and Columbia University—led a march to the tank. He drank a symbolic cup of water from the reservoir. The retaliation from local caste Hindus, who felt their social dominance under threat, was brutal and immediate. Dalits were attacked; many lost their jobs. “We now want to go to the Tank only to prove that, like others, we are also human beings,” Ambedkar declared, as he launched a satyagraha with four thousand volunteers. At the last minute, he called off the movement, trusting in the courts to deliver justice for his community. It took a decade for Ambedkar’s trust to be vindicated, when a further ruling insisted the tank be opened to all—contradicting the caste Hindus’ claim that it was private property, and therefore that they were free to exclude whomever they chose from the tank’s waters.⁷

In the broadest terms there remained a tension at the heart of the Indian nationalist movement. As one political theorist has described it, it was a tension between, on the one hand, “social freedom from caste domination,” and, on the other hand, an overriding emphasis on the immediacy of “political freedom from colonial rule,” deferring or subsuming those other struggles.⁸ Ambedkar and Gandhi would find themselves on opposite sides of that debate, coming into conflict in the 1930s over whether Dalits should have separate representation in the legislative councils of British India, which India’s Muslims already had. It is no coincidence that both leaders invoked the symbolic as well as material power of water. For his part, one of Gandhi’s most effective and iconic campaigns was the “salt march” to the sea at Dandi, in 1930. Choosing the British salt tax as the symbolic focus of his satyagraha, Gandhi observed that “next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.”⁹ The vital properties of salt linked the coastal ecosystem with the lives of millions inland. Gandhi’s was an argument about climate and society—the poorest, who labored outdoors in the heat, were most in need of salt. Where Ambedkar’s march on the tank had drawn attention to water as an indicator of profound social inequality, Gandhi used it as a symbol of unity. Within and beyond India, competing claims on water and resources escalated in the 1930s.

II

How far could Asia’s environmental inheritance be molded? What was the potential of technology to transform Asia, to make use of water and to make water available to all? Contending answers to these questions played out in the decades between the two world wars. Iron confidence in the conquest of nature, expressed by engineers and scientists and nationalists, alternated with a sense of vulnerability before nature’s power and its unpredictability. As new knowledge of the monsoon became more widely known, climate itself provided a new way to think about Asia, its boundaries—and its future.

“I wish to treat the monsoon as a way of life,” wrote Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960) in the late 1920s; this was “something that a hygrometer cannot do.” And so the fullest expression of the idea that the monsoon constituted the essence of India came not from a European but a Japanese observer. Watsuji was a scholar of Japanese ethics and aesthetics. He translated the works of Søren Kierkegaard into Japanese. He traveled to Germany in 1927 to study with Martin Heidegger.¹⁰ His journey took him by way of Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East. During and after his journey he wrote Fūdo, loosely translated as “climate”; it was Watsuji’s response to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Fūdo was not translated into English until 1961. It is unlikely that the book was widely known in India. But India was central to the book’s argument that climate shaped culture, society, and history. Fūdo is unusual in contrasting India’s climate not primarily with Western Europe’s, but with Japan’s and China’s. Watsuji’s work was part of a larger intellectual and political movement in Japan to think about Asian societies—their similarities and contrasts—in light of European domination of the world, and in light of Japanese ambitions for regional supremacy.

The humidity of a monsoon climate, Watsuji believed, “does not arouse within man any sense of a struggle against nature,” unlike in desert lands. The “distinctive character… of human nature in the monsoon zone,” he insisted, “can be understood as submissive and resignatory.” This was in part because of the monsoon climate’s doubleness: it “typifies the violence of nature” with its huge storms, “the power is so vast that man is obliged to abandon all hope of resistance”; but this is “a threat filled with power—a power capable of giving life.”¹¹ In Watsuji’s eyes India represented the most extreme manifestation of a monsoon climate. “It is the rainy season, brought by the monsoon, that has done most to create the resignation of the Indian,” he noted. He observed that “over two-thirds of India’s 320 millions (a fifth of the world’s population) are farmers and grow their crops thanks to the monsoon” and so “whether it is late, whether it lasts its due time” are “matters of great moment.” India’s masses, Watsuji argued, had “no means of resistance against nature.” There was “no escape for India’s people from such insecurity of life.” This insecurity brought about “a lack of historical awareness, a fullness of feeling and a relaxation of will power.”¹²

This was a familiar pattern of argument: a familiar set of stereotypes about Indians as lazy and emotional. Nineteenth-century British liberals claimed that Indians lacked the rationality for self-government. They were too close to nature. Watsuji drew on this intellectual tradition; but in his writing we also see a distinct sense of Japan’s historic mission to “save” Asia from European domination and from its own backwardness. “The people of the South Seas have never made any appreciable cultural progress,” he declared, but “there would be startling advances if some way were found to break this mold and set this teeming power in motion.” The resignation of Indians, he wrote, “prompts in us and draws out from us all our own aggressive and masterful characteristics.” It was “on such grounds that the visitor to India is made to wish impulsively that the Indian would take up his struggle for independence.” A struggle, by implication of this circular reasoning, that could only be guided by peoples whose climates had endowed them with different traits.¹³ Watsuji implied that the Japanese were better placed to lead this charge than Europeans. Westerners could never truly understand the monsoon, whereas Japan had its own experience of tropical climates on the southern fringes of the archipelago, and on its model colony of Taiwan. Watsuji was not alone. Between the wars, many Asian students, scientists, and political leaders contemplated the relationship between nature and power, between nature and empire, between nature and nation. Watsuji Tetsuro concluded that for India’s future, “change depends upon the conquest of climate.”¹⁴ Stripped of its moral, even spiritual, connotations, that conquest was, ultimately, a question of technology.

A less abstract perspective, but one that shared Watsuji’s concern with how climate and ecology shaped culture, came from the Bengali sociologist and economist Radhakamal Mukerjee, a professor at Lucknow University who devoted much time and many pages in the 1920s and 1930s to the problems of rural India. Mukerjee was deeply concerned with water. In recent years the eccentric and eclectic Mukerjee has been recovered by historians as a prophet of an ecologically sensitive and localist approach to development—but he cuts an ambiguous figure. He was a committed eugenicist; he absorbed the racial and environmental determinism of his time and then inverted it, calling, for instance, for lebensraum for the “teeming millions” of India and China.¹⁵ Nevertheless, his was a rare voice of concern about India’s environmental balance at a time of rapid development—and his concerns were more tangible and specific than, say, Gandhi’s. “Man, tree, and water cannot be regarded as separate and independent,” Mukerjee wrote; he decried “crimes” against nature that would in turn “[let] loose destructive forces.” Wise development, Mukerjee argued, would pay heed to the “natural balance of man with the organic and inorganic world around him.” Only in that balance could human society find “security, well-being, and progress.”¹⁶

Mukerjee’s prescription for India’s future came from his close study of the riverine landscape of his native Bengal. Drawing on the work of the Russian anarchist geographer Léon Metchnikoff, who in 1889 published a wide-ranging history of riverine civilizations (including the Ganges valley), Mukerjee thought of river basins as living entities. Each river was “a synthesis or epitome of all the possible environmental variations and influences”; each river’s “properties, colorations and varied taste,” as well as its “plastic or destructive power,” was a product of climate and geology. Mukerjee’s diagnosis was that the vital force of Bengal’s rivers had been eviscerated by more than a century of British rule. He observed the deterioration of soil quality from overintensive cultivation. Others had observed this worrying trend, and ascribed it to the pressure of population. But the root problem, as Mukerjee saw it, was that “agriculture comes to be influenced rather [more] by the state of the market than by an arranged succession of crops which may replenish the soil.” Pressing on the ecology of land and water, the demands of the colonial state and capitalists for the products of the soil had left the Bengal delta “moribund.” But where did the roots of its revival lie? For Mukerjee, as also for the British hydraulic engineer William Willcocks—famous as the architect of the first Aswan Dam on the Nile River—part of the answer lay in recovering and reviving local traditions of irrigation and water management. For others, as we will see, only the wholesale transformation of nature by technology would match the scale of the challenge.¹⁷

Another part of Mukerjee’s concern echoed the debate of the early twentieth century about India’s place in the world—a debate that ranged across many fields of science and politics—over whether India was better seen as a bounded territory or as part of an oceanic realm. Of all of the ways that human beings had “gained a gradual mastery of the waters,” he argued, “by far the most significant development is trade by sea.” India’s maritime connections, Mukerjee observed, “usher[ed] in an oceanic civilization superseding the fluvial.” The resources of the river valleys were “narrow and limited” in comparison with oceanic commerce, which “extends as wide as the world.” The more that traffic on the sea-lanes sucked up the produce of the river valleys, the sharper their decline became. Demand from distant markets upset what Mukerjee called “ecological balance.” But he was optimistic. He felt that the excesses of “oceanic civilization” were now apparent; he looked forward to the moment when “man becomes more agriculturally inclined than ever before and atones for his past neglect.”¹⁸ He was to prove prescient—though the motive force of a return to agriculture, and a revival of the river valleys, was not atonement so much as necessity.

IF THE INTEGRATION OF INDIA WITH REGIONAL AND GLOBAL MARKETS had placed new demands upon soil and water, the collapse of those markets in the 1930s created new dilemmas. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, many rural communities in India had relied on resources from overseas to survive—exports from the rice fields of Burma, and the remittances that came back to India from the wages of migrant workers in Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon. This was the key to a puzzle that historian Christopher Baker confronted in a brilliant and neglected 1981 essay on the economic integration and subsequent disintegration of Asia. In India, as in China and Java, the 1920s marked the “critical point” when “land ran out,” Baker wrote. What demographers have struggled to explain is that, despite dire warnings in the 1920s, no Malthusian crisis ensued. To the contrary, population growth gathered pace even as agricultural yields declined year after year. The answer, Baker saw, lay in the interconnected regional economy that provided a lifeline for the densely settled agrarian heartlands of southeastern India or southern China, providing new opportunities for long-distance migration for their young men and a smaller but still significant number of young women. The expansion of rice cultivation along the Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Chao Phraya river basins after 1870 added around 14 million acres of new rice-growing lands in fifty years.¹⁹ The opening of this final frontier of cultivation was accompanied by vast migration from India and China to Southeast Asia. More than 20 million passenger journeys traversed the Bay of Bengal, and a similar number the South China Sea, in the half century after 1870. Migrants went to work on the rubber plantations and tin mines of Malaya, on the tobacco fields of Sumatra, on the docks and in the mills and factories and on the streets of the growing port towns of Singapore and Rangoon, Penang and Surabaya. Many of these journeys were temporary, their pattern circular. Violence was never far from the experience of migrant workers; they traveled under a variety of arrangements and agreements, founded on debt. But Southeast Asia provided a horizon of opportunity, however fragile; year after year, the number of new arrivals in Southeast Asia outstripped the number of people heading back home.²⁰

The global economic depression of the 1930s changed everything as it disconnected the regional economies of South and Southeast Asia. The depression made the inequalities of colonial capitalism starkly visible. Frustration about rising unemployment and intolerable debt found an outlet in anti-immigrant sentiment; mass political movements began to speak of redistribution. The collapse of global commodity markets led to a reversal of the flows of migration that had become entrenched over sixty years. The number of Indians departing Burma and Malaya exceeded the number of arrivals between 1930 and 1933; the same was true of the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, despite the fact that China in those years suffered both from civil strife and from escalating Japanese military intervention. More than six hundred thousand people left Malaya between 1930 and 1933. They had to fend for themselves when they returned home. The Indian government’s agent in Malaya noted that repatriation to India in times of distress “is proving less and less effective as a remedy against unemployment.” Tamil workers in Malaya received no relief, and “their suffering is merely transferred from Malaya to South India.”²¹ John Furnivall, Burma-based British scholar, administrator, and Fabian socialist, wrote with prescience in 1939 that “we can already see that 1930 marks the… close of a period of sixty years, beginning with the opening of the Suez Canal, and, although less definitely, the close of a period of four hundred years from the first landing of Vasco da Gama in Calicut.”²²

III

When the colonial government of Madras opened the Mettur Dam along the Kaveri River in 1934, it was for a brief moment the largest dam in the world. It had been in the works for almost two decades. The dam could “boast of controlling works that leave those at Assouan [Aswan] well behind,” one newspaper report declared, revealing how far water engineering had become a global endeavor. Mettur was three times the Aswan dam’s length, standing 5,300 feet long, 176 feet high, 171 wide, and boasting a sixteen-foot roadway on top. The idea invoked, again and again, was control. “Rivers in India are not all tidy instruments,” the columnist observed. India’s rivers had a will of their own: “not many of them are content just with carrying water from mountain to sea,” he wrote, “they love to spill it on the way… to damage while they enrich the lands they flow through.” He drew a clear lesson: “They do not restrain themselves, and must be restrained.”²³ Not all observers were so sanguine. In a handwritten note on a file in the Tamil Nadu archives in Chennai, a civil servant who signed off as “SA” took a dim view of what seemed to be the hubris behind the Mettur Dam:

The Superintending Engineer’s report is too self satisfied, or takes too much for granted, the infallibility of the officers of the department and the rank ignorance and prejudice of the ryots [farmers]. I do not think the position in Tanjore district is quite so very simple as the… report makes it out to be. While I am behind no one else in my admiration of the skill of our engineers who have built the great dam at Mettur and have succeeded in opening out the possibility of providing efficient irrigation facilities for large tracts of Country, the problem in Tanjore district has yet to be studied with sympathy and local knowledge.²⁴

But SA’s was the voice of a minority. The “restraint” of water, more than any other single solution, promised to address so many of the problems that came together to create a sense of agrarian crisis. Declining soil fertility, falling crop yields, the closing of overseas frontiers for migration and the depression’s shock to trade—all of these combined with a broader sense of the enduring unpredictability of a monsoon climate. But every scheme to control water had the potential to create conflict between users upstream and downstream, between beneficiaries and losers. Since those unequal benefits often fell on either side of a political boundary, attempts to control water sharpened awareness of borders. Everywhere, as claims multiplied on river water for irrigation and power, so too did efforts to claim water as territory. The Mettur Dam had run into just this problem—that is why it was so long in the making. The Kaveri River flowed through both Madras Presidency and the princely state of Mysore. Mysore was quicker than Madras to attempt to harness the river, thanks in large part to the work of the engineer M. Visvesvaraya. But if Visvesvaraya’s plans for his Krishnarajasagar Dam were realized, the British claimed, Mettur would not have enough water. The tangle that ensued became the first, and certainly not the last, territorial dispute over water in modern India. The first treaty between the governments of India and Mysore over water dated back to 1892; at that time of agricultural intensification, it was already clear that conflict might lie ahead. Unable to reconcile their dispute over Krishnarajasagar, both sides went to arbitration by the imperial government of India and agreed upon a technical solution: the tribunal decided on the exact quantities of water that Mysore and Madras were entitled to. Neither side was entirely satisfied, but they signed an agreement in 1924.²⁵ The distribution of Kaveri water has continued to haunt the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka since 1947—a point of recurrent conflict, both within and outside of the courts.

Many of Asia’s leaders believed that centralized planning would balance the needs of different constituencies. Planning would address the conflicts that arose between regions and communities; it would distribute resources in the most equitable and efficient way. Water resource planning took its place alongside economic planning in China as well as in India. In 1933, and in the aftermath of disastrous floods two years earlier, Chiang Kai-shek, who was by that time in command of a large part of China, assembled the Yellow River Conservancy Commission. Just as Indian engineers started to imagine the uses of water beyond irrigation, so China’s planners too moved toward multipurpose water projects. Foreign engineers were drawn to the challenge that the Yellow River’s control posed. Eminent German hydrologist Hubert Engels set up a Yellow River research center in Dresden; the League of Nations, too, lent its support and expertise to the Yellow River commission.²⁶ China was an independent republic in the 1930s but faced a growing threat from the territorial expansion of the Japanese empire. In India, the Congress party—which won large majorities in the elections of 1937, held under an expanded franchise—began to think about India after British rule, even if the arrival of freedom seemed to lie in the distant future. The Congress party’s National Planning Committee, convened in 1938 by Jawaharlal Nehru, brought together a coalition of left-leaning nationalists, Gandhian thinkers, industrialists, and scientists including Radhakamal Mukerjee. It saw itself as a state-in-waiting. The group formed several subcommittees, of which one dealt with “River Training and Irrigation,” chaired by Nawab Ali Nawaz Jung, chief engineer of the princely state of Hyderabad. The committee reported that “it is important that our rivers should be developed to the greatest possible extent and effectively utilised.” It was a task that could not wait: “Conservation of water by storage,” they concluded, “has become a matter vital to the future” of India.²⁷

THROUGHOUT THE 1930S, INDIAN AND CHINESE PLANS TO CONTROL water proceeded with each oblivious to the other—and Chinese plans were soon consumed by the crisis of war with Japan. It would be a long time before their river engineering projects put them on a collision course. But there were portents of trouble to come. In the early 1930s, there was a flare-up of tension on the fringes of British and Chinese control—on the border between Burma, still ruled as part of British India, and Yunnan. A secret British intelligence file went into great detail on “Chinese Claims to the Irrawaddy Triangle”; it was filled with correspondence and translated pamphlets and newspaper articles, all deployed as evidence that the Chinese state was making a “fantastic claim… to the whole of Burma north of latitude 25˚35N, right up to the Assam border.” On the Chinese side, William Credner, a geographer sympathetic to Chinese nationalism and based at Sun Yat-sen University, undertook an expedition to the Irrawaddy triangle along with three Chinese officials in 1930. They sought to address the “long-outstanding question of the undemarcated northern and southern sections of the Yunnan-Burma boundary,” left undefined in a treaty of 1894. They protested successive British military expeditions in the area, which the British justified on the grounds of suppressing a local slave trade. The Chinese party “advanced far into the uncivilized and remote districts,” he wrote, and undertook the “plentiful collection of information”—not only on the “boundary question,” but also on the “topography of the region.” For now, the border was important as a symbolic marker of Chinese sovereignty: “It is hoped that Yunnanese of all classes will unite in striving to prevent the territory from being treated as a British colony again,” an intercepted Chinese memorandum declared. But there was also a hint, in the close attention to landscape and the flow of rivers, that frontier regions would become vital for other reasons, too: for their water and their mineral riches.²⁸

The question of borders arose, in a different sense, in India’s fisheries. By the 1930s, V. Sundara Raj had succeeded James Hornell as the first Indian director of the Madras Fisheries Department. Unlike his predecessors, he looked forward to the wholesale transformation of India’s fisheries by technology. Writing at the height of the Depression, as the regional economy had contracted and patterns of inter-regional migration had reversed, Sundara Raj worried that the Ceylon government had begun “deep-sea fishing experiments” with a trawler, in what he saw as water belonging to Madras. He pointed to Malaya, too, and the “great awakening in these sister states”; his concern was that “other Governments will exploit the Madras fishing grounds.” He repeated his request, denied the first time around, for a trawler and a cutter, to commence his own deep-sea exploration. Sundara Raj saw “intensive ocean research and exploration of ocean grounds” as a global trend—he cited examples from Japan, Canada, and the United States.²⁹

IV

From the late 1930s Asia was embroiled in war. China’s experience of war was most prolonged, and most traumatic. Beginning with the annexation of the northeastern Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese empire advanced, propelled by the actions of local military commanders. Japan’s rulers eyed China’s mineral resources, its strategic position, and its territorial expanse. General Chiang Kai-shek’s very success in gaining control over China presented a threat to Japanese ambitions, which had been well served by China’s internecine strife in the 1920s. In 1937, simmering conflict erupted into full-scale war. Under pressure of conflict, the best laid plans for the development of water resources went awry, with catastrophic effects. In June 1938, retreating Chinese troops breached the Yellow River dikes in Huangyuankou, in Henan Province, to stop the Japanese advance on the Nationalist stronghold of Wuhan. It was, in the words of one historian, “the single most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history.” Its dikes breached, the Yellow River rushed southeast, spilling into the Huai River system and drowning tracts of flat land on its way. More than eight hundred thousand people were killed, and 4 million displaced, by this desperate act of hydraulic sabotage.³⁰

The war in Asia spread in December 1941, when Japanese forces simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor and swept through Southeast Asia. Within a year, the Japanese empire had absorbed a region that had, since the nineteenth century, been divided among imperial powers. They conquered British-ruled Malaya and Burma, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and the American-ruled Philippines. The fall of Burma brought the threat of a Japanese invasion to India’s borders.

Though Indian territory saw little fighting, it became a vast supply base and center of operations for the Allied war effort in Asia—and Indian troops constituted a sizeable contingent of Allied forces in every theater of war. The war also transformed Indian politics. Incensed that the British government had declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Indian politicians, the Congress party resigned from the provincial governments it had controlled since the elections of 1937. After the failure of negotiations with a British delegation led by Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps in August 1942, Gandhi launched another mass campaign of civil disobedience—the Quit India Movement. Parts of North India became ungovernable. The British responded by dropping bombs on civilians to quell the revolt.³¹ In their search for support as Congress party leaders languished in prison, the British turned elsewhere. The war boosted the power and the standing of the Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had in 1940 passed the “Pakistan resolution,” calling for the establishment of a homeland for India’s Muslims—though how, where, and when were questions left deliberately unclear. The British were forced to concede that India would gain freedom, in some shape or form, after the war.

AS HISTORIAN SRINATH RAGHAVAN HAS SHOWN, THE WAR LED TO A vastly expanded role for the state in the economy, laying the groundwork for the apparatus of planning in independent India.³²

Among other fields, the war gave a boost to meteorology, as India became a hub of military aviation. The Indian Meteorological Department grew fast: its budget trebled between 1939 and 1944, and it established a new base of operations on a thirty-acre campus along Delhi’s Lodhi Road. It proved difficult to find and train enough staff to keep pace with the expansion of facilities. Some of India’s leading meteorologists suffered loss and hardship during the war. Most of the staff of the Burma Meteorological Department were Indian; and when Japanese bombing raids began on Rangoon, they joined the exodus of up to a half-million Indian refugees—most of whom walked back to India, through jungle and mountains, into Assam. The director of Burma’s weather service, S. C. Roy, walked from Rangoon to Imphal. One of his deputies, S. N. Ghosh, survived the long trek only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid on the Indian border. The war saw the recruitment of a new cadre of meteorologists in India—the generation that would staff India’s weather service after independence. The meteorology department had three times as many staff by the end of the war as it did at the start. In 1944, Charles Normand retired as its director after thirty-one years working for the department; his successor, S. K. Banerji, was the first Indian to head the meteorological service. The war saw the beginning of aircraft weather reconnaissance over the Bay of Bengal, through a series of flights between Madras and the Andaman Islands. It also witnessed a breakthrough in communications technology. The India Meteorological Broadcast Center was established at the Royal Air Force base in Nagpur, in central India. The Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force installed the first teleprinters in India for the transmission of weather data.³³

The development of meteorology was oriented by military needs. In weather forecasting as in medicine, civilian applications for the new technologies were a low priority. However much the new technologies promised, India’s experience of the war shattered the complacent assumption, pervasive by the 1930s, that nature had been conquered.

WHEN THE JAPANESE INVADED BURMA IN 1942, BRITISH INDIA lost 15 percent of its total rice supply. In some areas that took large imports of Burmese rice, like Madras, the shortfall was overcome by local production. But in Bengal a long-term decline in the rural economy came together with natural disaster, compounded by wartime political bungling, to cause a catastrophic famine—the first in India since the early twentieth century. The return of starvation to Bengal came as a traumatic shock. From the time of the Indian Industrial Commission in 1918, most observers took for granted that famine had been confined to India’s past. In the 1920s and 1930s, nutritional scientists and health officials began to think about food as a way to enhance life rather than simply to sustain it—their concern moved from absolute starvation to malnutrition. “The days when we could cast the blame on the gods for all our ills are past,” Nehru had written in 1929.³⁴

During the winter monsoon of 1942, a fearsome cyclone struck eastern Bengal, flooding fields and destroying crops. “In violence and devastation it surpassed any other natural calamity that befell this country,” one contemporary account observed, “it forced from the Bay a high tidal wave” that reached 140 miles per hour. The cyclone “swept the standing crops, blew off the roofs, uprooted most of the trees, demolished the huts”; the floods that followed “washed away nearly [three quarters] of the livestock, and some 40,000 human beings.”³⁵ Unnerved by the prospect of a Japanese invasion from Arakan, local officials imposed a scorched-earth policy, denying local cultivators the boats they used to transport rice. Internal divisions paralyzed the Bengal government. Driven by Winston Churchill’s animus toward India, the British cabinet ignored every warning. They continued to export Indian rice to feed troops in other theaters of war. They refused to deploy Allied ships to send relief to Bengal.³⁶ As shortages intensified, the most vulnerable people—landless laborers, fishers, women, and children—starved. Calcutta’s relative wealth sucked in from rural Bengal rice that could have fed those in dire need.³⁷

The vulnerability of Bengal’s poor, like their debts, had compounded over decades. During the Depression, smallholders unable to repay loans had lost much of their land. The productivity of Bengal’s lands had declined in the twentieth century as railway embankments stemmed the flow of rivers and invasive water hyacinth choked streams. By 1942, the crisis was acute. As scarcity closed in, patrons deserted their sharecroppers, choosing to pay them in cash rather than in kind just when inflation made rice unaffordable. Families abandoned their weaker members. Hit by the successive blows of a loss of imports, “boat denial” by the state, a devastating cyclone, and a lack of relief, the economy and society of Bengal collapsed.³⁸

Even the conservative Statesman newspaper of Calcutta published photographs of starving children and abandoned corpses—scenes reminiscent of the 1870s and the 1890s when the great El Niño droughts had combined with the churning effects of capitalism to deliver disaster. These images met with stony-faced inaction by the British government. This time, Indian observers held the British government directly responsible for starvation. “It was a man-made famine which could have been foreseen and avoided,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote from Ahmednagar jail. He was sure that “in any democratic or semi-democratic country, such a calamity would have swept away all the governments concerned with it.” But just as disturbing was the callousness of wealthy Indians. Nehru expressed disgust at the “dancing and feasting and a flaunting of luxury” in Calcutta while millions starved. S. G. Sardesai, a Communist activist, decried the “unbridled profiteering” of hoarders and speculators, and argued that “total mobilization means vigorous and just procurement of the genuine surplus from rural areas, vigorous price controls, and total rationing in cities.”³⁹ When they finally secured London’s commitment to relief in the autumn of 1943, Indian officials had to raise the alarm that Bengal’s continued starvation could endanger the war effort.

When the Stanford University economists V. D. Wickizer and M. K. Bennett examined Asia’s rice economies in 1941, they surveyed the wreck of what had once been an integrated system. In their analysis, they used the term “Monsoon Asia” as “a convenient designation for a specific group of countries in which monsoonal climatic conditions profoundly influence both agriculture and economic life.” “Monsoon Asia” was bound together by climate, by the direction of the winds, and by the trade in rice, but divided by empires. Wickizer and Bennett witnessed “Monsoon Asia” splintering further as a result of depression and now war. They wrote of their hope for “a reversal of the recent trend towards economic nationalism.” Their recipe for regional sustainability was for a return to the free commerce in rice, augmented by capital investment. But their projection of “unfavorable” conditions proved much closer to the eventual outcome. “If peace should come with important territorial changes in Monsoon Asia,” they argued, “changes in the political composition of Monsoon Asia following the termination of present wars might readily result in a rather sudden shift and re-orientation, completely reversing the tendencies of the past decade or more.”⁴⁰

The most enduring political consequence of the Bengal famine was the decisive rejection of any postwar return to the old ways of unregulated markets and inter-regional trade in rice. Indian planners and politicians, technocrats and populists, all emphasized the need for self-sufficiency in the future. Water was vital to their plans. Starvation’s return to India scarred Nehru’s generation of leaders. Having asserted that national sovereignty would alleviate the problem of starvation, Nehru and his contemporaries were haunted by the prospect of failure. “We live continually on the verge of disaster in India, and indeed disaster sometimes overwhelms us,” Nehru wrote. The same year, Patna University economist and demographer Gyan Chand declared that “ours is a death-ridden country. We might very well adopt the human skull as our national emblem.”⁴¹

AS THE WAR APPROACHED ITS END, THE EXPERIENCE OF FAMINE IN India—and also in China and Vietnam—came together with the force of rising expectations. In the eyes of many Asian observers, only the wholehearted embrace of state planning, wedded to powerful technology and under the control of nationalist rather than colonial forces, would address the colossal vulnerability of Asia’s people to privation and starvation, both of which the war had laid bare.

Even British planners began to contemplate large schemes to transform water. The Bhakra Dam, in Punjab, was first proposed in 1944. It was a monument to British plans for India’s postwar reconstruction at a time when few believed the Raj would collapse so quickly after the war’s end.⁴² The project had its skeptics. “For advertisement reasons some authorities in India have published optimistic forecasts of the time in which they propose to construct high dams,” one official scrawled in an archival note. “There is sound opinion, unbiased by connection with these projects, which considers these forecasts fantastic.”⁴³ But speed and scale were what Indian nationalists wanted.

One of the voices in favor of a planned conquest of India’s rivers was the scientist Meghnad Saha. Saha was born in 1893 in an East Bengal village, to a lower-caste family without education or resources, and with several children to feed. His scientific aptitude was evident from childhood; he won a series of scholarships that led him to Calcutta University in the 1910s. He studied in England and then in Germany, returning to a position at Allahabad University, one of India’s most distinguished institutions. Saha’s pioneering contributions to astrophysics gained him widespread recognition, notably for his paper on “Ionisation in the Solar Chromosphere.” By the 1930s he was no longer content to confine his work to the laboratory. He founded the journal Science and Culture to reach a wider public; he became a missionary for scientific development, and a strident critic of Mahatma Gandhi’s suspicion of modern technology. “We do not for a moment believe that better and happier conditions of life,” he wrote, can be secured by “reverting back to the spinning wheel, the loin cloth, and the bullock cart.”⁴⁴ One of Saha’s central concerns was with water, and his dreams of water were grand.

Saha’s essay on “Flood,” published in Science and Culture in 1943, at the height of the war, envisaged wholesale environmental transformation. He described the decline of the Damodar River: diverted by railway embankments, its course had moved toward Calcutta, and now it threatened to inundate the city. Drawing on a global range of examples and references—the 1913 floods in the Miami valley, and, above all, the Tennessee Valley Authority—Saha argued that the key lay in a “radical solution” to make the Damodar “a perennial” rather than a seasonal river: that is, to “liberate” it from the monsoon. He argued for the adaptation of the American approach: “to regard the whole river basin as a unitary area, and coordinate plans of flood control with those of irrigation, development of backward agricultural areas, development of hydroelectric power, and improvement of navigation.”⁴⁵ Elaborating on his plans in another article the following year, written together with his colleague Kamalesh Ray, Saha expressed optimism: “Nature, vested interests and thoughtless managements made a once prosperous valley a wilderness, but Nature, Man and Science can again make it a smiling garden,” they wrote. Saha was scathing in response to those, like Radhakamal Mukerjee, who had argued that restoring forests and local efforts at soil conservation would strip the Damodar of its destructive power. Saha called the claim that deforestation affected rainfall “absurd”—a claim for which there was “not a single iota of positive proof.” If changes in forest cover and land use had any effect at all on local climate, Saha argued, they “must be extremely small compared to the huge monsoon currents which are responsible for the precipitation on the Damodar Valley.” Working at the cutting edge of planetary science, Saha was well aware of new work on the monsoons, and their integration with other parts of Earth’s climate. The scale of India’s climate was so vast as to render any local modifications in the water cycle trivial in importance. Saha pointed out that rainfall in the Damodar valley was determined by “atmospheric conditions in the Bay of Bengal… which are generally thousands of feet in depth”, “local conditions” could have little effect upon them.⁴⁶

Rainfall was beyond human intervention. But human intervention to transform the landscape could neutralize the threat posed by uncertain rainfall, securing rivers from the alternating lack and excess of water. And here, Saha was confident about the future. “We are fortunate to live at a time when the large scale experience of thousands of dams constructed in the USA since 1915 are at our disposal,” he said; he believed that the global circulation of ideas and technology, a process of learning, would come to India’s aid. In valorizing the American and Soviet models, Saha indicated that his dreams for India extended beyond anything the sluggish British colonial state could carry out. He envisaged the construction of dams in eastern India that would last for “hundreds of years.”⁴⁷

IN THE 1920S AND 1930S, WATER BOTH CONNECTED AND DIVIDED Asia. A new awareness of the dynamics of climate made clear the extent to which Asia’s coastal arc shared vulnerability to powerful cyclones that crisscrossed its seas. In the fields of geography and climatology, the idea of “monsoon Asia” arose to highlight the common rhythms of rural life governed by extreme seasonality. To think of Asia as bound together by water in every dimension—the rains, rivers, and seas—was to suggest that material conditions transcended the borders between empires. But those borders hardened in the decades between the wars. The depression of the 1930s broke many links in the chain that held monsoon Asia together: barriers to movement proliferated and migration patterns were overturned; commodity markets collapsed and the trade in rice declined. These reversals made the question of who controlled water all the more important.

The Second World War provided new tools and revived old fears. The trauma of famine and social breakdown met a newfound confidence in the power of state planning and big technology to reshape economy, society, and the environment. The next chapter turns to the struggles waged by India and by other independent Asian nation-states to understand and conquer water.