SEVEN
RIVERS DIVIDED, RIVERS DAMMED
BETWEEN 1945 AND 1950 THE MAP OF ASIA WAS REDRAWN. THE war overturned imperial rule in Asia. The prestige of European powers in South and Southeast Asia never recovered from their rapid collapse before the Japanese advance in 1942. Economically ruined by the war, European empires could not afford to hold on to their colonial territories by force without American backing—which was forthcoming only when it furthered US interests in the deepening Cold War. Most importantly, emboldened and militarized Asian leaders refused to contemplate any return to the old order.
In the war’s aftermath, new states were forged from the ruins of empires. In 1947, British India was divided into the independent states of India and Pakistan: a bloody partition along religious lines that cost millions of lives and ruined millions more. In 1948, Burma and Ceylon gained their independence from the British in mostly peaceful transfers of power—but Burma immediately faced multiple internal revolts, by Communist guerrillas and by the Karen and Kachin ethnic minorities. The Dutch tried to hold Indonesia by force. They were driven out by Sukarno’s nationalist forces in 1949 after a protracted anticolonial war that also saw failed uprisings by Communist, Islamic, and regional secessionist forces. In Vietnam, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence in 1945, moving into the vacuum left by the sudden surrender of the Japanese at the end of the war. But the French were determined to return to Vietnam, and with growing American support they waged war against the Viet Minh until Ho’s victory at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In East Asia, too, the war’s end brought revolutionary change. The civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and Mao Zedong’s Communist army culminated in Mao’s victory and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, together with a de facto Nationalist state on the island of Taiwan.1
Asia’s political transformation was so rapid, so dramatic, so violent, that few at the time gave any thought to its environmental consequences. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that those consequences were profound. The impact of these midcentury partitions and borders on Asia’s waters are a vital, and neglected, part of any history of the second half of the twentieth century. We have hardly begun to reckon with their effects, both positive and negative, on the lives of a significant proportion of humanity.
Dam building, more than any other project, epitomized Asia’s new leaders’ confidence in their ability to tame nature. India had fewer than three hundred large dams at independence; by 1980, it had more than four thousand. Dams were the single largest form of public investment in modern India, swallowing considerably more government expenditure than health care or education. Dams promised to liberate India from the capricious monsoon; they promised finally to free it from the specter of famine that had struck so often, and so harshly, in the colonial era. India was not alone: the enthusiasm for dam building was global. Under Mao, China built large dams on a scale that eclipsed India’s efforts: an estimated twenty-two thousand after 1949, almost half of all the large dams in the world. Along the Mekong River, dams formed part of the American strategy to shore up the anti-Communist state of South Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
These projects proceeded in parallel; by the 1960s they came into contention. Dams tried to make rivers conform to political borders by impounding their waters and diverting them to serve the needs of national development. But as multiple projects and competing ambitions arose, upstream and downstream, dams made tangible the material interdependence that transcended borders. At the time of independence, few in India had thought much about the fact that many of India’s rivers originated in Chinese territory. Only when both sides’ ambitions for river development swelled did the cross-border flow of rivers appear as a threat.
In the postcolonial age, large dams carried enormous symbolic weight. They epitomized dreams of development. More than any other technology, they promised the mastery of nature. In the global history of dam building, India played a pivotal role. India’s experience exemplified the scale of the challenge facing the Third World, but also the scale of ambition that new states upheld. Because of the unevenness of the monsoon, India’s rulers were obsessed with water. So, too, were the legions of foreign experts who arrived to help India’s quest. Unlike China, India benefited from aid from both sides in the Cold War: India’s developmental plans were a terrain for competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. India’s water engineers received advice from around the world, and in turn they shared their expertise through the United Nations and other international bodies. The broader influence of India’s addiction to large dams was cultural as much as it was political, as Indian cinema captured the imagination of viewers across Asia and Africa. Some of the most iconic Hindi films of the age were set against a backdrop of India’s struggles for water; their stories resonated far beyond India.
The conquest of water by concrete behemoths came at enormous cost. Some of those costs were evident from the outset—the displacement of people from their homes, the flooding of villages and forests by new reservoirs. Others became clearer with time. Few in the 1950s or 1960s could see just how fundamentally dams would transform Asia’s ecology of water. It was in that era that Asia’s states and peoples started on a collision course toward the water-related crises they face today.
I
Partition was a particular kind of British decolonization, which came about as an attempt to engineer, in an extremely compressed period, nation-states with clear and decisive ethnic majorities out of previously heterogeneous colonial territories. It was implemented first in Ireland, and then twice in the 1940s: on the Indian subcontinent, and in Palestine. While political tensions between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League ran high in the 1930s, it was only after the end of the Second World War that it became likely that India’s future would be a divided one. Until then, the League’s claim to represent all of India’s Muslims—divided by language and region, by class and politics—rang hollow. In the aftermath of war, a spiral of violence supercharged political negotiations, and accelerated the timetable for independence. The British, fearing entanglement in an Indian civil war, and reeling from economic crisis, sought to leave as quickly as possible, no matter what the cost. Last-ditch negotiations failed when the Congress leadership were unwilling to concede to Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand for a weak federal government with power resting in provincial hands. On June 3, 1947, British prime minister Clement Attlee announced the plan to partition the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed the last viceroy of India, charged with overseeing the division. The job of drawing the border fell to Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer with no prior experience of India. Closeted with a small boundary commission, supplied with maps and census returns, his task was to draw a line to carve off the Muslim-majority areas of Punjab and Bengal from the rest of British India, thereby creating the western and eastern wings of Pakistan—divided by more than one thousand miles of Indian territory. The location of the border was not announced until the day after independence, on August 15, 1947.2
Nobody had predicted the colossal scale of upheaval that followed. In just over a month, between September and October 1947, more than 849,000 refugees entered India on foot. A further 2.3 million crossed the Punjab border by train. Trains were attacked by armed mobs on both sides of the border—their packed carriages became chambers of death. The Indian and Pakistani armies, by mutual consent, crossed the frontier into each other’s territory to lead convoys of refugees back to safety. Arriving refugees were settled in what had been deemed “evacuee property”—many who had sought temporary refuge from the violence returned to find that their homes had been seized, their departure construed as an intention to emigrate. South Asia’s cities swelled with new arrivals, Delhi and Karachi and Calcutta above all. Around 20 million refugees crossed Radcliffe’s border, more than half of them in Punjab.3
THE SIFTING OF INDIA’S RELIGIOUS MAJORITIES AND MINORITIES IN 1947 was also, as one historian describes it, a “division of nature.”4 Radcliffe himself was aware of the problem in Punjab: his border, he recorded, was “complicated by the existence of canal systems, so vital to the life of Punjab but developed only under the conception of a single administration.”5 His solution pleased nobody. Canals were severed from their headworks. In Punjab, Partition broke the carefully planned canal network laid down over a half century. Bengal had no need of the intricate irrigation systems of arid Punjab, watered as it was by the monsoon and by the Himalayan rivers. But there, the border tried to contain a naturally volatile waterscape. As the geologists and bridge builders of the nineteenth century had found, Bengal’s rivers changed course suddenly; chars, or sandbanks, emerged with the deposit of silt and vanished with the coming of floods. The chars were so fertile as to be desirable land for cultivation—if they arose along the riverine borders, were they now part of India or Pakistan? For those who inhabited this braided landscape of land and water, the answer had vital consequences.6 The Bengal border ran through the sacred Ganges and the turbulent Brahmaputra. In 1947 there was little infrastructure to stem the flow of this water, but there were many plans in place. What would happen in the future, when engineers on both sides eyed new ways of harnessing the waters?
For some, the unity of nature was set against the human divisiveness of Partition. The socialist Rammanohar Lohia wrote of his astonishment that Nehru was willing to divide India’s great river basins out of political expediency.7 Saadat Hasan Manto, the most incisive and enduring chronicler of Partition in fiction, turned to the problem of water in his 1951 short story “Yazid.”8 The story’s opening image is almost shocking: “The riots of 1947 came and went. In much the same way as spells of bad weather come and go every season.” In his first two sentences, Manto evokes the indifference of nature to human suffering; he signals the insignificance of human folly faced with the cycle of the seasons; he also draws the suggestion that Partition’s violence may have been as “natural” as the rains—a message colored with irony, since it runs counter to so much of Manto’s fiction, which depicts Partition as the monumental consequence of petty and all-too-human decisions. The most memorable exchange in the story takes place between the sage village midwife, Bakhto, and Jeena, wife of the protagonist, Karimdad. One day Bakhto arrives with news that “the Indians were going to ‘close’ the river.” Jeena is nonplussed: “What do you mean by closing the river?” When Bakhto replies, plainly, “they will close the river that waters our crops,” Jeena laughs in disbelief: “You talk like a mad woman… who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.”9
PARTITION AFFECTED EVERY PART OF GOVERNMENT, EVERY INSTITUTION. The Indian Meteorological Department, too, was divided in 1947. One of the pressing tasks for the partition of Indian meteorology was the exchange of observational data—all original records relating to the weather of Pakistan, wherever in (undivided) India they were held, were transferred to the new Pakistani meteorological service. Both sides held that climatological data were “records of common interest,” as if to acknowledge that the monsoons respected no human frontiers. They supplied each other with duplicate copies. And then there was the question of the instruments upon which weather science rested. These, too, were divided: the Indian Meteorological Department reported that “out of the stock of instruments and stores held at [headquarters in] Poona and Delhi, stocks between 20 to 25% of each item were to be given to Pakistan.” A simple list conveys a deep rupture:
As a result of the partition, 2 type A Forecast Centres, 1 type C Forecast Centre, 5 Auxiliary Centres, 8 Aerodrome reporting stations, 3 Radio-sonde stations, 14 Pilot Balloon Observatories, 82 surface observatories, and 1 seismological station were transferred to the Pakistan Meteorological Service.
Incidentally, the list also conveys how dense the infrastructure of meteorology in British India had become by the end of the war. There is a poignant sense of how hard meteorologists fought to keep doing their work, regardless of the chaos and violence around them. “Interim arrangements were made,” they noted, “for the issue of storm warnings, etc. for certain regions falling in Pakistan.”10
Like meteorologists, engineers and economists looked at the material knots tying the two new states together and many of them believed that a future of cross-border cooperation was inevitable. Just a year after the event, C. N. Vakil, a professor of economics at Bombay University, wrote a pamphlet on The Economic Consequences of Partition. It was prosaic in the face of colossal upheaval. The facts, he thought, made it “easy to appreciate the need for an agreed economic policy between the two Dominions now and in the future”—that both states formally remained Dominions within the British Empire until 1950 provided a measure of political cover for negotiations to take place. Against “the atmosphere of communal bitterness as well as increasing mistrust,” Vakil believed that “fundamental economic forces in the two Dominions are likely to work in the direction of mutual inter-dependence.” But he acknowledged the real possibility that “political forces” would win out; he saw that India and Pakistan could end up in a state of “economic warfare.” The darker edge to his pamphlet came in his wish to inform “the layman” of the economic “weapons” at India’s disposal if “warfare” it was to be.11
IMMEDIATELY AFTER PARTITION ENGINEERS ON BOTH SIDES MUDDLED through. In the midst of crisis they kept the water running. In December 1947, the chief engineers of East and West Punjab signed a Standstill Agreement to maintain supplies to the Bari Doab, one of the Indus River canals ruptured by the border: the headworks fell on the Indian side of the border and most of the canal in Pakistan. When Punjab’s Canal Colonies were built they had been conceived as a unitary system, its hydraulic parts each useless in isolation; now the engineers had to improvise. And then the water stopped. On April 1, 1948, the day the makeshift agreement expired, India shut off the water supply to the canal. The fears that Manto depicted in his fiction mirrored historical events—“it’s a river, not a drain.” But the rivers, too, were national now.
The sudden stoppage raised alarm on the Pakistani side. In the midst of the spring sowing season, the waters to the Upper Bari Doab and Dibalpur canals stopped, disrupting cultivation and threatening the harvest. Residents of Lahore saw the canal that bisected their city empty of water: before their eyes was a visceral sign of Pakistan’s vulnerability. East Punjab’s engineers, on the Indian side, shut off the canal water to Pakistan without the approval of the central government in Delhi; Nehru himself worried that “this act will injure us greatly in the world’s eyes.”12
The conflict over Indus waters joined the territorial conflict between India and Pakistan over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Hindu ruler had chosen to join India rather than Pakistan under considerable pressure from the Indian side, and against the wishes of the territory’s predominantly Muslim population. The tussle over Kashmir erupted into military conflict within months of Partition, following the invasion of the territory by Pathan militia from the northwest with covert support from the Pakistani state. Upon Kashmir both India and Pakistan projected their anxious sense of truncation, in the sense that both sides ended up with less territory than they thought they ought to have, as a result of a hasty partition that satisfied nobody. Both sides came to see control over Kashmir as a vindication of their founding ideologies: for India, the extension of a secular and democratic polity; for Pakistan, the achievement of a Muslim homeland in South Asia. The views of Kashmiris, then as now, were ignored. But the Kashmir dispute also had a hydraulic dimension: of the five tributaries of the Indus River, one, the Jhelum, originates in the Kashmir valley; another, the Chenab, flows through Jammu. Gnawing at India and Pakistan, through their inability to find a solution in Kashmir, was a quest to control the state’s water.13
Pakistan and India each made their case before a global audience. The dispute over the Indus attracted international attention because it seemed like just the sort of water conflict that many others could face as the map of the world was redrawn. Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations declared in 1950 that “the withholding of water essential to an arid region to the survival of millions of its inhabitants” was “an international wrong and a peculiarly compelling use of force contrary to the obligations of membership in the United Nations.”14 The Indian argument, by contrast, was that India “has the right under the Partition, as also in equity, over the waters of rivers flowing through her territory.” India’s lawyers also advised that the provisions of international law were ill-suited to “the case of two countries, which have come into existence from the partition of a previously existing national unit”—which rested on the idea that British India was a “national unit,” a strange claim for Indian nationalists to make just a year after independence.15
Both sides used Partition to bolster their arguments. India insisted that Radcliffe’s line had given Punjab’s richest agricultural lands to Pakistan, including the Canal Colonies—lands farmed mostly by Sikh and Hindu cultivators who now found themselves uprooted as refugees in India. Partition had “disrupted [a] unitary system of canal irrigation and therefore the entire economy of the area,” executed with “complete disregard of physical or economic factors.” In this light, the Indians argued, it was their prerogative to make best use of the water resources that remained. India’s advocates portrayed eastern Punjab as the victim of a partition that had been imposed upon it “to satisfy the ideology of Mr. Jinnah and his Muslim League.” With little warning, East Punjab “found itself an economic unit, and a very much underdeveloped area.” Its survival depended on wresting control over “the life-giving waters from the Himalayas” that had, through British canals, “been unfairly diverted to increase the prosperity of distant tracts” that now lay across the border. The Pakistanis retorted that India “wishes to make a desperate attempt to escape the economic consequences of partition”—which Pakistan, as a new state, had no choice but to face. The Pakistani submission to the tribunal of arbitration gave Partition a material as well as an ideological dimension: “Apart from religious and cultural considerations, one of the main objects of partition is to enable the residents of the two Dominions to use and develop their economic resources for their own benefit.” They closed with a goad: “East Punjab should have the courage to face the economic consequences of a political standing by itself.”16
Each Punjab “found itself an economic unit”—the phrase suggests that this happened as one might “find oneself” in an unfamiliar destination after getting on the wrong train. Divided provinces, like the divided nations of which they were part, had to stand alone where once they were part of a larger whole. The vogue for planning demanded a simplified model of the economy upon which plans could be made. This cemented the vision of an Indian economy set apart from the whole web of connections that tied India to Southeast Asia and beyond.17 Partition stymied many plans: it struck at the mutual dependence of the jute growers of eastern Bengal and the export houses of Calcutta, at the ties between coal producers of eastern India and Pakistan’s factories, at the carefully calibrated use of water by farmers along the length of the canals of Punjab. These new “economic units” unleashed a desperate competition for water: the precondition for every vision of prosperity.
In both India and Pakistan, Partition generated a sense of loss and a feeling of vulnerability. Following India’s water stoppage, water engineering became an urgent priority in Pakistan. Pakistan’s engineers designed a new canal project known as the BRBD (Bambanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dibalpur); it would run parallel to the partition border, a “canal designed to sever Pakistan’s [water] supply from India.” A volunteer corps of laborers rallied to the cause of the new canal as an act of national defense—it came to be known as the Martyrs’ Canal.18 For India, the loss of the productive agrarian lands of western Punjab hastened the push to develop its eastern reaches. Plans for a large dam at Bhakra, on the drawing board since the early twentieth century, now became a priority. Old fears of famine had never gone away; they were reactivated by Partition. Eastern Punjab needed new sources of water to keep its most vulnerable districts secure from a failure in the rains.
The Indian water stoppage lasted a matter of weeks. Negotiations between the two sides resumed at the end of April 1948. In exchange for payment, India agreed to continue supplying canal water to Pakistan for an unspecified period, during which “alternative sources” would be developed. Both sides clashed repeatedly, their claims often directed at international observers. Pakistan proposed international arbitration; India insisted it was a domestic matter. In 1951 the American David Lilienthal—a senior official in the Tennessee Valley Authority, and now a globetrotting development consultant—toured India and Pakistan; he took a particular interest in the Indus water dispute. Lilienthal contrasted “politics and emotion” with “engineering or professional principles.” He described how Partition, driven by emotion and not by reason, “fell like an ax” upon the Indus basin. But, he added, “the river pays no attention to Partition—the Indus, she ‘just keeps running along’ through Kashmir and India and Pakistan.”19 He wrote a long piece for Collier’s magazine warning the American foreign policy establishment that Kashmir was “another Korea in the making.” Lilienthal had proposed that water management be removed from the political realm. He had faith in the shared training and professional camaraderie of India’s and Pakistan’s water engineers; he believed in their ability to work together for a “cooperative,” technical, solution. In Partition’s aftermath, such apolitical solutions were as attractive as they were unrealistic.
THE PARTITION OF INDIA MARKED THE BEGINNING, NOT THE END, of the division of Asia’s waters. A year after Mao Zedong’s army overpowered Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, inaugurating the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Chinese forces invaded Tibet. The annexation of Tibet was a thorn in India’s relations with China. Many Indian politicians, including members of Nehru’s cabinet, urged him to take a hard line, but Nehru opted for a path of conciliation, recognizing that India was not in a position to take any action. What went almost unremarked at the time was that the annexation of Tibet in 1950 also gave China control over much of Asia’s freshwater. The Indus was divided between India and Pakistan—but its source is on the Tibetan Plateau, which was now ruled as part of China. From the Tibetan Plateau flow the Brahmaputra (known in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo), the Salween, the Mekong, and also the Yangzi. The source of the great rivers still seemed, in 1950, remote, wild, untouched by the modern world. It is no surprise that water was mostly invisible through the process of dividing Asia into modern nation-states. In the second half of the twentieth century, water resources would become increasingly important to the process of marking and laying claim to the earth, increasingly pivotal to conflicts between Asian states. In 1950 water was not, or not yet, a cause of conflict except between India and Pakistan. But their effects on shared water resources would be among the most far-reaching consequences of Asia’s midcentury territorial disputes.
Still, the power of nature, paying no heed to new borders, was on full display in August 1950, when—on Indian Independence Day, the fifteenth—a powerful earthquake tore through the borderlands straddling India, East Pakistan, Tibet, and Burma. The earthquake was one of the ten most powerful ever recorded, caused by the collision of two continental plates. Its epicenter was in Rima, Tibet—and came just three months before the Chinese invasion—but the bulk of the damage fell on the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Even as politicians were busy redrawing the map of Asia, the earthquake altered the landscape and devastated human lives. As if to underscore the remoteness of the earthquake’s epicenter from centers of political power, relief was slow to arrive. The earthquake blocked the course of many tributaries of the Brahmaputra, changing the river’s course. The British botanist and explorer Francis Kingdon Ward was traveling in Tibet at the time, and penned one of the few eyewitness accounts from the earthquake’s epicenter. He wrote that “the immediate result of the earthquake was to pour millions of tons of rock and sand into all the main rivers… displacing millions of cubic feet of water.”
Every scheme to engineer water had to contend with the instability of Asia’s mountain rivers; with the growing confidence of postcolonial engineers, caution began to be set aside.20
II
In 1951, India carried out its first census after independence. It was at that time the largest census ever undertaken in the world. The average life expectancy in India stood at just 31.6 years for men, and 30.25 years for women.21 In the United States at the same time, that figure was 65.6 years for men, and 71.4 for women. For every 1,000 live births in India at the time, more than 140 infants died. This was an indictment of two centuries of British rule, since the “abstract number which is the average human life span,” as philosopher Georges Canguilhem noted, revealed much about “the value attached to life in a given society.”22 In China, after more than a decade of war, life expectancy was no higher. Nothing illustrates so plainly the magnitude of the challenge before the governments of Asia’s new states. For India and China, as for Pakistan and Burma and countries all along the great crescent, harnessing water was a priority in their quest to transform the conditions and expectations of life.
In his introduction to the census, commissioner R. A. Gopalaswami pinpointed what he saw as a turning point in India’s population history, around 1921. Until then India’s population had grown slowly. The terrible famines of the late nineteenth century, the prevalence of infectious diseases like plague and malaria, the devastating and rapid toll of the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed between 12 and 13 million people in India—taken together, they produced a grim toll of premature death and debilitating illness. After his account of the influenza, Gopalaswami’s narrative reaches its pivot: “We now reach the turning point,” he wrote, where after 1921, “we hear no longer about abnormal deaths.” From that point on, he argued, famine and mass epidemics ceased to be the killers that they were in India. Some of the credit he gave to the mobilizing power of Indian nationalism, some to administrative improvements that came from lessons the British had learned from earlier disasters. Gopalaswami presented a picture of India’s climate that was no longer the threat that it was: “Though the usual cycles of vicissitudes of the seasons continued and the brown and yellow belts of the country continued to suffer from droughts… there was no extraordinary calamity” in the years between the wars. Good policy was matched with good fortune, since “nature also seems to have been kindlier” in the two decades after 1921, with fewer major droughts. The Bengal famine of 1943 was a devastating reminder that famine could return to India. But it did not invalidate the longer-term pattern, and prevailing wartime conditions made it exceptional; rather, Bengal “gave a sharp jolt” to India’s leaders, and reminded them of the need for vigilance.23
Gopalaswami went on to consider the implications of India’s rapid population growth for the country’s future. The most alarming statistic, in his mind, was that the area of cultivated land per capita in India had fallen by 25 percent in thirty years: land had run out, and yields were declining. He ended his discussion on a note of foreboding, placing India’s experience in global context. It could well be the case, he wrote, that “we are passing through the last stage of that exceptional phase in the growth of mankind in numbers which was introduced mainly by the opening up of the New World and partly by the creation of a world market.”24 Gopalaswami steered clear of Malthusian alarm. Like many of his generation he believed in the power of the state, in the marriage of wise planning with technology, to solve social and economic problems.
There were three possible responses to the challenge of feeding India. The independent Indian state tried them all. To the extent that the productivity of the land suffered from the very small plots of land held by the majority of cultivators, land redistribution seemed a promising solution. Soon after independence, Nehru’s government proposed to abolish the zamindari system, the practice by which large landowners acted as intermediaries between the state and cultivators, wielding the power to collect taxes, a key feature of both Mughal and British administration. Although it had to confront some vested interests, zamindari abolition, which had to be approved state by state, was relatively straightforward—in the political culture of free India, zamindars epitomized the old feudal order that independence was meant to sweep away. But at most 6 percent of land in India changed hands under these reforms. The chief beneficiaries were most often farmers who were already relatively well off. Any energy behind land redistribution in India fizzled by the mid-1950s: by that time rural landowners had cemented themselves as an important constituency in Indian electoral politics; they closed ranks to defend their interests.25
The second approach, implemented with considerable success, was for the state to intervene more actively in the food economy. A commitment not to intervene in markets had been a shibboleth of British administration in India after the end of the East India Company. As we have seen, that iron confidence in markets shaped the British approach to the famines of the 1870s and 1890s, in which so many millions of Indians died. But the Second World War reversed that faith abruptly. India saw the rise of an elaborate apparatus of food control that lasted well beyond independence. The American T. W. Schultz, one of the pioneers of development economics, remarked in 1946 that “no country in the world, with perhaps the exception of Russia, has gone so far [as India] in controlling basic food distribution.” By 1946, close to eight hundred cities and towns were covered by the rationing scheme. In 1947 the wartime “Grow More Food” campaign was resurrected, and in 1949 the government of India set the campaign’s goal as the attainment of national self-sufficiency in food grains by 1952.26 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Indian state purchased 4.3 million tons of food from its own farmers, and just short of 3.5 million tons abroad. An elaborate network of transportation and storage was established, providing the skeleton of India’s public distribution system that, to this day, remains vital to the food security of hundreds of millions. As we will see, when serious drought threatened northern India in the mid-1960s, and Maharashtra in the early 1970s, the state’s food distribution proved its worth and averted famine.
But the approach that received by far the most attention, and the most funding, was the quest to intensify agricultural production—to grow more food on the same amount of land. Gopalaswami observed that this could be done, in Indian conditions, by increasing the spread of double cropping—in which two crops were grown each year, one in the winter and one in the summer—through the expanded use of fertilizer; and, above all, by expanding year-round irrigation to free agriculture from dependence on the monsoon. In 1951, India launched the first of its five-year plans for economic development—influenced by Soviet central planning, but maintaining a mixed economy. Fifteen percent of total expenditure under the first plan went to irrigation, and a majority of that to what were called “major and medium irrigation projects.” At their apex stood the large multipurpose dams that would transform India’s rivers in the years to come. The mastermind behind the Indian planning commission was the brilliant Bengali statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who had spent some years in the 1920s working for the meteorological department at Alipore observatory in Calcutta, and who had published a statistical essay on floods in Orissa.
THROUGH THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CLIMAX OF IMPERIAL globalization, Asia had been reconfigured laterally, as steamships and railways connected distant places. Now, however, vertical space came to matter more. Engineers began to think about the gradient of each river’s fall so they could be harnessed for hydropower; geologists aimed to measure the depth of water resources in underground reservoirs. The reorientation of Asia along a vertical axis—as if the map were now drawn in three dimensions—had everything to do with the conquest of water. And the conquest of water, ultimately, promised the enhancement of life and the diminution of premature death.
III
Inaugurating the Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi River in eastern India, just a year after he became prime minister, Nehru described the scene as a “fascinating vision of the future which fills one with enthusiasm.” He wrote that “a sense of adventure seized me and I forgot for a while the many troubles that beset us”—the “troubles,” that is, of mass refugee movements after Partition, of multiple insurgencies, of hostilities with Pakistan, of governing a new and heterogeneous nation. The sight of Hirakud convinced Nehru that “these troubles will pass” but “the great dam and all that follow from it will endure for ages to come.”27
The Indian state wasted no time pursuing its ambitious agenda. At independence, India had only thirty dams higher than thirty meters. Most colonial works of hydraulic engineering had been on a smaller scale: fifteen- to twenty-meter-high tanks and bunds, linked to a network of canals. During the Second World War, the colonial state began to think big—and the plans of the 1940s paved the way for India’s largest hydraulic schemes in the 1950s. The largest of them were large water storage works at Bhakra, in Punjab, Hirakud in Orissa, Tungabhadra and Nagarjunasagar in the Deccan, and the Damodar valley project in Bengal. They epitomized the imperative of multipurpose development. Each scheme promised a cluster of benefits: year-round irrigation; water storage to even out the concentration of the monsoon rains; embankments to prevent flooding during torrential rain; river navigation; and hydroelectric power. Each scheme had its own priority among these uses—the Damodar project was designed with flood control primarily in mind; Bhakra’s particular symbolic importance came from its role in compensating for India’s loss of Punjab’s Canal Colonies at Partition, by creating a new hydraulic infrastructure around the dam complex. The projects were technically demanding as well as expensive. The Damodar valley project owed most to outside funding and expertise: it received a US$18.5 million loan from the World Bank in 1950, and its technical advisors included David Lilienthal. For the most part, India’s large dams were funded by the state’s tax revenues, their costs recouped later through an “improvement cess,” a levy on landowners who benefited most from the dams. But large dams very often ran over budget and behind schedule.
The large schemes were the most visible manifestation of India’s attempt to remake nature. Many smaller projects sprang to life after independence: irrigation dams in the Vindhya hills, the Pykara hydroelectric scheme in Tamil Nadu, the Sarda Canal in Uttar Pradesh, the Sengulam project in Kerala. Beyond these lay innumerable canals restored, power lines laid, tanks and irrigation channels built or resurrected. Many of these schemes built on colonial precedents. What was new was their scale, but also the language in which they were justified. As a perceptive visitor to India observed at the time, the colossal projects “stand out for their quality of newness,” even if their impact on water availability and power generation was less than the cumulative impact of many smaller initiatives. The mega-projects marked a true departure: “dependable in the worst monsoon, dynamic in the most backward region.” Above all, “they stand for something India could not build, and did not will, before she became a nation.”28 The moral fervor behind the quest to harness India’s waters came from this sense of historic opportunity. So, too, did the planners’ willingness to force through their schemes, whatever the cost.
The Bhakra Nangal project, in Punjab, was India’s most prominent engineering scheme. It stood 680 feet high, the second-tallest dam in the world at the time; it consumed 500 million cubic feet of concrete. Bhakra’s location in the partitioned province of Punjab added resolve and poignancy to its promise of a more secure future. The dam had first been proposed in 1944, and construction began soon after independence. Facing the future, India’s water engineers began with a familiar problem: “One of the chief characteristics of rainfall is its unequal distribution over the country,” they wrote, and “another important characteristic is the unequal distribution of precipitation over the year.”29 They set out to free India from the seasons.
A. N. Khosla (1892–1984) stood behind many of India’s plans to harness water after independence. He was the first chair of the Central Water and Power Commission of India, a graduate of the Roorkee College of Engineering and a stalwart of the Punjab irrigation department.30 He imagined the future in, by his own admission, “fantastic” terms. In an address delivered on All-India Radio in 1951, Khosla declared that “it will be no idle dream to contemplate the linking up of the Narmada with the Ganga through the Sone, or with the Mahanadi over the Amarkantak plateau, and thus connect the Arabian Sea with the Ganga and the Bay of Bengal right through the heart of India.”31 Old dreams of reshaping India’s geography—Arthur Cotton’s dreams—gained new life after independence.
Dreams of hydraulic engineering were inseparable from dreams of freedom. Kanwar Sain, Khosla’s successor as head of India’s water authority, wrote that “the river valley projects constitute the biggest single effort since independence to meet the material wants of the people, for from irrigation springs ultimately the sinews of man, from power the sinews of industry.” He voiced the hopes of many of India’s planners and architects when he declared that the dams “are indeed the symbols of the aspirations of new India, and the blessings that stream forth from them are the enduring gifts of this generation to posterity.” His words were followed, in a public information pamphlet, by page after page of statistics: kilowatts generated and projected, hectares irrigated, gallons of water stored, tons of concrete expended. Large numbers were a form of rapture.32 For Khosla and for Sain, as for so many of their peers, Bhakra was the showpiece.
Jawaharlal Nehru addressing a large crowd at the dedication of the Bhakra Dam, October 1963. CREDIT: Bettmann/Getty Images
Opening the Nangal Canal in 1954, Nehru’s reverence was palpable. “What place can be greater than Bhakra Nangal,” he wondered, “where thousands of men have worked or shed their blood and sweat and laid down their lives as well? Where can be holier than this?” Nehru spoke at length in Hindi and more briefly in English, before a crowd of thousands. “We talk about Mother India,” he said, and now “Mother India is in labour, producing and creating things.” At the time, India was ablaze with demands for the creation of linguistic states out of the composite provinces inherited from British India. “We talk so much about changing the provinces, expanding them, shortening them, disintegrating them,” Nehru said at Nangal, his irritation unconcealed. “I do not mind our people getting terribly excited about it,” he said, “and forgetting the major things.” But Nehru made a clear contrast between the “major things”—“Making a new India… putting an end to the poverty of India”—and what he called “petty disputes.” Nehru turned to the theme of revolution. “A revolution does not mean the breaking of heads,” he insisted; of India’s own gradual, nonviolent revolution, he declared that, with independence, “we finished it in a way in the political sphere… we have to continue it in the social and the economic sphere.”33 Bhakra became a symbol of India’s ambitions. It was an obligatory stop on the itinerary of every official visitor. On the last day of 1956, Nehru took Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to Bhakra—the two had built a rapport over the previous two years, though it would turn out to be short-lived. “These are the new temples of India where I worship,” Nehru told Zhou. “I am deeply impressed,” Zhou replied.34
The excitement of the Bhakra project was captured in a 1957 documentary made by the government of India’s Films Division. It was produced by Ezra Mir, born Edwyn Meyers: an Indian Jewish filmmaker who began by making propaganda films for the British during the Second World War, and who went on to make seven hundred documentaries in the 1950s and 1960s. The Films Division was charged with bringing “new India” to life on screen. Its productions included films about India’s freedom struggle and profiles of political leaders and musicians. Above all, the films dramatized the quest for “development”—for health and water, food and education. Public information films played in cinemas across the country before the feature films that people had bought tickets for—they reached an audience of millions.35
The Bhakra film was an epic. Its visual language came from a tradition that had circulated globally during the war: Soviet and Pathé newsreels suggested the form, the genre, the structure in which India’s propagandists worked—and which they made their own. The narrator’s voice is clipped and serious. The soundtrack begins with nineteenth-century European music: brassy and bright, like a march. “For centuries,” the narrator begins, “gazing upon the parched lands of Punjab and Rajasthan, we have dreamed of reclaiming the desert.” The struggle at the heart of the film is clear from the outset, as suddenly the background music turns to an Indian folk theme and the film cuts to a scene of women lining up at a well, whose “search for water, “we are told, “was never-ending.” The solution, the film’s narrator declared, lay in the “unused, wasted” waters of the Sutlej River, flowing down from the Himalayas. And then “at last,” as if inevitable, “the decision was taken—the Sutlej must be tamed.” The film cuts to the image of a young, studious-looking engineer, slide rule in hand: he is the protagonist of this drama. The narrator spins out superlatives, the music turns to a fanfare of trumpets, the camera shows us Bhakra’s sheer size: it is “massive,” “stupendous,” “mighty,” “a miracle.” It held out for India “the promise of an exciting, dramatic future.”36
The film was finished before the dam. It shows us a worksite of ceaseless, noisy activity: the rumble of drills; the explosion of blasted rock; the clatter of a conveyor belt ferrying bucket after bucket of material up to the dam; the clink of hammers and the heft of spades as imported machines—some of them reassembled, piece by piece, on location—dovetail with the oldest kinds of human work. India’s dams were a lucrative source of contracts for foreign engineering firms like Hazra & Co. of Chicago, who provided material, equipment, and many consultants. But dam building was also a spur to local industry; the largest cement factory in Asia came up to feed the “colossus” that was Bhakra. Toward the end of the film, we see the changing of shifts at the end of a working day. Darkness descends on the site and “the lights of the great dam are switched on, glowing like stars.” At moments in the film, the dam seems to transcend technology, evoking a deeper and more ancient sense of wonder—it was a “miracle.”
Until the last few minutes of the film, the only voice we hear, apart from the narrator’s, is a brief clip of Harvey Slocum—the straight-talking, autodidact American dam builder who supervised Bhakra’s “army” of Indian engineers, and who died suddenly on site in 1961. But then, finally, our focus shifts to the makers of Bhakra. At the end of a shift, “men emerge from every corner.” We see a worker arriving home as his three children run to greet him. As he enters his modest quarters, his wife rises to offer him water, a smile on her face. It is the first intimate or domestic scene in the film—the first sight of a woman, or of children; in the background the orchestra is replaced by a simple folk melody played by a flute. The parting message is one of national unity: Bhakra represents the nation. “Never in the long history of India,” the narrator declares, “have there been so many men from different parts of the country working together for a common purpose.” The effort of creating Bhakra united Indians where the politics of region and linguistic identity divided them. The film closes with the voices of the workers, each speaking his own language. B. Srinivasan faces the camera; he speaks in Tamil without captions or voiceover; his speech is stiffly awkward before the camera. “My name is Srinivasan. I have worked here for a year and a half. My home is in Madurai district.” We hear from workers in Punjabi, Marathi, and Bengali, some of their words drowned out by the noise of construction.
Harvey Slocum, the American dam builder who supervised construction at Bhakra. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images
India’s new dams attracted thousands of visitors from near and far. They became landmarks on the landscapes they had altered beyond recognition. Their clean lines and monumental size reminded some observers of Buddhist stupas. Aesthetically, as well as symbolically, they were the “temples of new India.” But most Indians in the 1950s had never visited a big dam. Most Indians did not read the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, the pages of which told a heroic story of India’s hydraulic adventures. The place where most Indians encountered the grandeur of India’s water projects was on screen. Public information films made an impression on many minds, but the feature films of Hindi cinema really captured people’s hearts—they, more than any pamphlet filled with statistics, gave India’s hydraulic revolution emotional content. And in the process, they reached beyond India’s shores to make India’s dams a symbol for hope and progress across postcolonial Asia and Africa.
Where many a foreign consultant ended up “a White Man’s Burden character,” as David Lilienthal described himself in his diary, one American observer of India’s water projects was admiring, even at times uncritical: Henry Hart, a University of Wisconsin political scientist.37 Having worked as a “minor administrative officer” in the Tennessee Valley Authority as a young man in the 1930s, having seen a “newly-harnessed river brought to life” and the rural southern landscape of his childhood transformed, Hart lived in independent India between 1952 and 1954. He sought the answer to a question that weighed on many American minds as the Cold War intensified: “Can a revolution… be built?” Hart traveled the length of the country, funded by a Fulbright fellowship and a grant from the Ford Foundation. His book, New India’s Rivers, remains the most detailed and sympathetic account we have of India’s great hydraulic experiment.
Hart’s eye was drawn to the workers who were reduced to “an army” in so many depictions of India’s dam fever; he dedicated his book to “all who died without seeing the new India they built.” And where many observers saw only the romance of technology, Hart’s romanticism sought artisanal skill. At the Tungabhadra Dam site, for which Hart saves his richest description, he encountered Vellu Pillai, a fifty-three-year-old stonecutter who chiseled granite from the quarry to exacting specifications. Hart discovered that Vellu Pillai came from a family of stonecutters in Thanjavur. His had been “a life of dressing stones for well-linings and walls”—for “ten prosperous years,” he had carved temple deities. Evoking the ruined capital of the Vijayanagar empire, just a few miles away, Hart saw the dam resurrecting ancient skills. “The design itself was novel,” he wrote,” but the teamwork of brain and hand was a renaissance.”38 Hart speaks to no women workers, but their presence and their labor are visible in his account and especially in the photographs that illustrate his book; their stories remain untold.
The centripetal force of India’s water projects drew workers, skills, and materials from across India—and beyond. Hart observed that some of the earliest workers on the Tungabhadra worksite were Telugu porters who had arrived from Burma during the war; they were among the half-million Indian refugees who had walked through the hilly jungles back to India when the Japanese bombs fell. Many died on the arduous journey on foot across the mountains into Assam. In the 1920s and 1930s, Burma was a frontier for Telugu-speaking migrant workers from coastal Andhra: they provided much of the labor on Rangoon’s docks, they pulled rickshaws, laid roads, worked in the rice mills.39 As long-established patterns of migration shut down during and after the war, new ones opened up along India’s river valleys. From the moment the war ended, the large projects’ capacity to generate employment was a strong argument in their favor. Water projects were themselves a way to prevent the resumption of Indian labor migration overseas, which so many Indian nationalists had come to oppose as exploitative. “At present a great deal of Indian labour is being sent to Burma and other places,” noted a water engineer surveying the Ramaprasadasagara scheme along the Godavari. “An irrigation scheme of this magnitude would prevent the exodus of labor.”40
Some workers traveled to the dam sites in groups. Teams of porters, masons, and stonecutters arrived, some of them following an old practice of migration from place to place in search of work. Others ended up building the dams of India after a chance encounter. In a wartime hangar along the Tungabhadra River, India’s first factory for the manufacture of sluice gates was overseen by Mr. Eswariah; his “sheer mechanical intelligence” had been discovered by the dam’s chief engineer, Srirangachari, in a “Madras highway repair shop.”41
On many accounts of India’s dam projects, as in the public information film on Bhakra, a sense of mission drove the workers. There can be no doubting that idealism animated the efforts of many who toiled on the dam sites. But so, too, did the need to earn a living. For only so long could appeals to sacrifice on behalf of the nation mask poor pay and harsh conditions. The workers on the Hirakud Dam learned how quickly the postcolonial state was willing to deploy force to keep construction going. In 1954, Hirakud’s workers established a union of their own to challenge the officially recognized association of workers. They grappled over pay rates and the rhythms of work. After a breakdown in negotiations, the district magistrate ordered armed police to disperse a group of workers who were headed toward the chief engineer’s residence, reportedly with the intention of harming him. Following a lathi (baton) charge, fifty workers were hospitalized; two died the following day.42 In Hart’s account, which reflects the official view, the strike was the work of “agitators” affiliated with the Communist Party. As he tells the story, India’s climate itself played a role. “On any great outdoor work built in a monsoon climate,” he declared, “the hot, pre-monsoon months are the tense season.” And so, in the end, the strike appears in Hart’s account as a mere interruption: “On the Monday after the bloody Friday, men began going back to work. By Wednesday, the dam began to rise again, full speed.”43 It is as though India’s dams were a juggernaut, with a life and force of their own. That is certainly how they must have seemed to those who stood in the way of the engineers’ plans.
Not every commentator was unequivocally in favor of the large dams. The Bengali journalist Kapil Prasad Bhattacharjee was among the earliest to call into question the approach of the Damodar Valley Corporation. As a student in Paris in the 1930s, he was influenced by the work of French hydrologists. Schooled in the economic nationalism of Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Dutt, Bhattacharjee argued that the Damodar valley project would perpetuate a colonial effort to keep India poor by keeping it an agrarian economy. He worried for the future of Calcutta as a port; for Bhattacharjee, the worst effect of the Damodar projects would be to silt up the Hooghly River. He felt that more could be achieved by repair and restoration—the “proper maintenance of old canals, tanks, lakes”—than through expensive projects dependent on foreign engineering expertise. Voices like Bhattacharjee’s were in a very small minority in the 1950s, not only in India, but all over the world. He worried about the economic and the ecological effects of dam building; even Bhattacharjee had little to say about their human consequences.44
AS INDIA SOUGHT TO TAME ITS RIVERS, THE DISPUTE WITH PAKISTAN over who controlled the Indus intensified. It did not take long for David Lilienthal’s idealistic vision of water beyond politics—his proposal for the shared development of the Indus basin—to fail. In early 1954, the World Bank proposed an alternative solution, which gave shape to the treaty that eventually came about. In place of Lilienthal’s idea, the bank proposed to finish the job of Partition by dividing the water of the Indus and its tributaries completely, if not neatly, between India and Pakistan. The eastern rivers—the Beas, the Ravi, and the Sutlej—went to India; the western rivers, the Chenab and the Jhelum, went to Pakistan. Since the latter, too, originated in Indian territory, India would have the right to use their water for irrigation, transportation, and power generation, up to a limited volume. The negotiations dragged on for six years: India’s position of strength as the upper riparian continued to trouble Pakistan. But much remains obscure about the process. Despite a commitment to greater transparency, the bank declassifies documents on a case-by-case basis; many of my requests were denied, as they contained “classified material provided by member states.” Dam building remains a sensitive subject—its history raises uncomfortable questions about the present and the future.45
As ambitions for river development intensified, older water disputes reasserted themselves within India. British India had always existed amid a patchwork of other forms of sovereignty—the absorption of the former princely states into independent India raised its own problems where water was concerned. The Kaveri River dispute between the princely state of Mysore and the British-ruled Madras Presidency dates back to 1891, when the Maharaja of Mysore first proposed to make use of the river’s water in his domains. The failure of the two sides to agree on how to share the Kaveri’s water stalled M. Visvesvaraya’s great Krishnarajasagar Dam, which began to rise only after a 1924 agreement that apportioned fixed amounts of the river’s capacity to each state. In 1956, the internal map of India was redrawn: some of the old provinces of British India were broken up into new states, their boundaries corresponding roughly to the boundaries of linguistic regions. The old Madras Presidency was divided into Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andra Pradesh, each with its own state legislature—and each with a new set of claims upon the central government for resources. In this context, the Kaveri dispute resurfaced. The government of Karnataka reopened the argument, arguing that changing political and economic realities demanded a revision of the earlier agreement. In particular, the ambitious plans each state had to expand irrigation—under the auspices of India’s overarching five-year plans—spawned a new set of claims upon the Kaveri’s waters. The Kaveri dispute remains India’s longest-running water conflict; it is far from resolved. Competing claims to ownership over water, in the postcolonial era, were not only national: they were just as likely to be regional.46
IV
Mehboob Khan’s 1957 melodrama, Mother India, remains one of the world’s best-known films. It is, among other things, Indian cinema’s great water epic. The film opens with the shot of an aged Radha, the film’s protagonist and the eponymous “Mother India,” touching a clump of earth to her mouth; she raises it above her head, hands trembling. Behind her: tractors, power lines, roads—the churn of progress. A procession of construction equipment roars in the foreground, drowning out the music. The camera pans to a shot of a large dam rising. A jeep arrives in the village, full of khaki-clad, white-capped men—functionaries of the ruling Congress party. They tell Radha that the new dam will bring water to her village; they want her, as the community’s most respected elder, to inaugurate it. She refuses in all humility, until, head lowered, she allows the politicians to lead her to the dam. They place a ceremonial garland around her neck. At the very moment she is about to pull the lever to open the dam’s gates, the film slips into flashback. Radha’s life comes to symbolize the struggle of the Indian nation for freedom.
Early in the film Radha’s husband is maimed in an accident; scenting her vulnerability, the predatory moneylender makes advances to Radha, which she rebuffs. The capricious power of nature over Radha’s life and livelihood is a recurrent theme. In one of the film’s central song sequences, we see Radha working in the fields with her children, pausing to feed them a meager meal of porridge, eating none herself. But she is proud, unbowed. As the song comes to an end, storm clouds build in the sky. The sky darkens, the screen crackles with lightning, the wind rises and the rain pours. The family’s makeshift shelter collapses. Floods destroy the village. The crops lay ruined. Radha’s youngest child dies. Even in extremis, Radha makes her surviving children reject the moneylender’s offer of food. Redemption comes when the villagers fight back the flood; they come together to harvest a good crop the following season. In their dance, the camera zooms out to show us the massed villagers form the shape of a map of undivided India.47 Radha’s song implores the villagers not to abandon their land.
In opening the film with the large dam, and a vision of prosperity, Mother India suggests that India’s victory was, in part, a triumph over the monsoon. These were the freedoms that India fought for, and won: freedom from want, freedom from exploitation—and freedom from the vagaries of nature.48 The publicity pamphlet for the film used a quotation from the German Orientalist Max Mueller to encapsulate its central message: “If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow—I should point to India.”49 In Mother India, vulnerability to the weather is confined to the unhappy past; it represents an old, unchanging India, juxtaposed against an India where technology and political freedom would triumph over nature.
Mehboob Khan (1907–1964) was born in Baroda state and moved to Bombay as a young man to work for a noted horse supplier to the film industry; his first job was repairing horseshoes. He rose as a producer in the era of silent film. Khan was an active participant in the Progressive Writers Movement, a group of left-leaning writers, dramatists, and film producers who forged an Indian art that reflected the social conditions of the country. In common with many others of his generation, Khan’s strong commitment to Indian nationalism melded with an outward-looking internationalism: he was voracious in his absorption of artistic inspiration from diverse places; he believed in a sense of shared struggle, across what would come to be known as the Third World, against imperial exploitation. The logo of his production company incorporated a hammer and sickle, a symbol that was discreetly removed before the film was submitted for the Oscars.
From the start, Khan envisaged an international audience for Mother India. His initial working title was This Land Is Mine, and he wanted to work with Sabu Dastogir, an Indian actor successful in Hollywood; the plan fell through, but the ambition to reach the wider world remained.50 Mother India was not the first Hindi film to strike a chord with audiences across Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) was a global blockbuster, the story of an unfeeling and autocratic judge and his estranged son, who becomes a vagrant. The film’s strong message of social justice, its memorable theme song (“Awaara Hoon”), and its visual splendor all compelled audiences across Asia and Africa; reportedly, Mao Zedong was a fan. Mehboob Khan followed Raj Kapoor’s success with Mother India, which was popular across Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, in Ethiopia, across Asia and the Middle East, and in the Soviet Union and Greece. Egyptian audiences were enthusiastic about Mother India, which had immediate resonance in another country where dams symbolized modernity.
The film’s influence endures. Anthropologist Brian Larkin describes a scene in northern Nigeria in the 1990s, where Lebanese distributors had been importing Hindi films for four decades. “It is Friday night in Kano, and Mother India is playing at the Marhaba Cinema,” Larkin writes. “Outside, scalpers are hurriedly selling the last of their tickets to the two thousand people lucky enough to buy seats in the open-air cinema of this city on the edge of Africa’s Sahel desert.” Throughout the screening, “people sing along to the songs in Hindi, they translate the dialogue into Hausa and speak the actors’ lines for them.” Forty years after its release, Mother India’s appeal transcends generations. “I have been showing this film for decades,” a local distributor told Larkin, “it can still sell out any cinema in the north.”51
How did a Hindi film about one woman’s lifelong struggle against nature and exploitation prove so resonant across so much of the world? We are used to thinking of “development” as something imposed from on high, by all-powerful states upon unsuspecting populations. Since the 1980s, a lot of writing about “development” in the postcolonial world has been heavy with irony: we know, now, how so many of those schemes turned out. Their costs are too evident; their consequences, intended and unintended, have mounted.52 But beneath the grand plans were also simple dreams of a better life. Mother India touched millions of people because it told a humane and humanizing story about dreams of water and plenty, dreams of security—dreams of a future that was better than the past.
V
A darker reality lurked behind the glossy dreams of dams and plenty. On a rock of colonial-era legislation, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, millions of lives in independent India foundered. Passed to foster railway development, the law gave the state the right to compulsory purchase of land for “public benefit”—the law of “eminent domain,” a version of which most modern states have retained. The postcolonial state pressed the act immediately into service. Bhakra, Hirakud, the Damodar valley: each of these projects began in 1948; each of them needed more than one hundred thousand acres of land. So, too, did the new steel plants of Bhilai, Rourkela, and Durgapur.53
Even before the end of the war, intensive discussions were underway about the numbers of people who would be displaced by the Bhakra Nangal Dam. One Punjab official wrote in February 1945: “We cannot obviously allow the whole scheme to be wrecked by a few obstinate people who may refuse to move.” If the “majority” were “not strongly averse to the proposal,” then those against it would “if necessary [be] ejected by force.”54 Pieces of paper came to bear immense value; a Punjab government official dismissed cultivators’ fears of dispossession by pointing out that “they appear to have no right in the lands they cultivate at present.” He could “sympathize wholeheartedly” with those “ousted from their ancestral lands,” but the “cold truth” was that “their interests cannot be allowed to impede” a project “which, with its irrigation and hydroelectric potentialities, is likely to carry so many benefits to wide areas of the country.”55 The architects of Bhakra were under no illusions about the scale of displacement the project would cause. However attractive the alternative land offered villagers, one official wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether it will be a satisfactory form of gilt-edged security.”56 Where could people go? How would they recover their livelihoods? And what of their bonds of community—their bonds with the piece of the earth they knew best? Too often, irreversible projects ploughed ahead with those questions unasked.
Displacement never went unchallenged. In December 1950, ten thousand villagers from an area soon to be submerged by the Tungabhadra Dam came together in a public meeting. They issued a list of demands, topped by their demand for adequate compensation for their loss of land and income. Among those who needed to be resettled were not only registered landowners, but also “houseless coolies, weavers, and ryots [cultivators]” who faced the “difficult present circumstances.” Two years later, the government offered them a better deal: 30 percent over and above the amounts awarded by the Land Acquisition officers, but only to those “who withdraw their cases from the civil courts.” In this rare willingness to compromise lies a clue to just how many people fought their dispossession in the courts of independent India. A few months after the meeting of Tungabhadra villagers, a touring official wrote to Hyderabad’s minister of revenue: “I told the people gathered in a pretty large number at Manur that they should not stand in the way of the construction of the project but should consider it a great sacrifice on their part, since by the sufferings, if at all, of a small number the country is going to prosper.”57
This was the crux of the utilitarian argument—the greatest good for the greatest number—that authorized India’s great water projects at any cost: in families displaced, in villages drowned and futures ruined. Through most of the 1950s, India’s courts agreed. When the Maharaja of Darbhanga, Kameshwar Singh, tried to resist the acquisition of part of his Bihar estate, the High Court ruled that “the Legislature is the best judge of what is good for the community… and it is not possible for this Court to say that there was no public purpose behind the acquisition contemplated by the impugned state.”58 Convinced of its mission, the Indian state felt little need even to document the displaced.
The true scale of displacement would only become clear later on. Through the painstaking work of activists like Walter Fernandes and scholars like Sanjoy Chakravorty, working through fragmentary archives and court cases, we now have a sense of the numbers of people that India’s dams chased from their homes. From independence to the present day, that number is likely to exceed 40 million. It bears repeating: 40 million people in India have been displaced by dams alone. More than 50 million people have been displaced by the state’s development projects writ large. India’s adivasis have borne the brunt of this displacement, and they are also least likely to have received any form of compensation. One reason that almost every official figure vastly underestimates the numbers displaced is that they count only those who own land that has been acquired by the state through compulsory purchase. They do not include the large number of landless people in India who “depend on the acquired land for income”—tenants, wage laborers, service providers. The latter group have seldom if ever received compensation. The other way in which the true losses sustained by displaced communities exceed official calculations is that dams often submerged common property—forests, grazing grounds, and other grounds considered “wasteland” by the state. The commons were already under strain by the end of the nineteenth century, more likely than ever to be enclosed and possessed as private property—but the poorest groups in society, adivasis above all, still depended on them in the 1950s. Through a painstaking assembly of data, Chakravorty has estimated that water projects are by far the greatest cause of population displacement in independent India. The “core problem,” he writes, is that “the population that benefitted from the development projects is fundamentally different from the population that was displaced or disrupted.” The benefits of large dams have gone downstream; power from hydroelectric plants has gone to cities and factories and to farmers who “still have land [on which] to run their pumps.”59
The environmental consequences of large dams have been considerable: forests have been drowned, soils salinated, rivers blocked in midflow, deltas starved of silt, natural drainage hindered—leading, ironically, to more severe flooding. But the sheer scale of the impact of large dams on Asia’s ecology of water would only become clear toward the end of the twentieth century.60
Nehru himself began to have a change of heart at the end of the 1950s. “For some time past,” he said, speaking about India’s dam fever, “I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call ‘disease of gigantism.’” He proceeded to tell his audience of engineers that “the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places.”61 But a massive failure in the monsoons precipitated a shift in political priorities.
VI
The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) started life in Shanghai in 1947. The commission set about collecting information on economic conditions across Asia. Its first survey came out in 1948—an “incomparably more thorough and informative account of the economic life of the region” than any ever attempted—and painted a picture of a continent in ruins after the war.62 ECAFE’s original regional members were Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, and China. At a time when much of Asia remained under imperial control, “nonregional” members—the imperial powers and the Soviet Union—had a major presence, as did “associate,” nonvoting, members that were still under colonial rule or postwar occupation—Ceylon Malaya, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. The intersection of Asia’s postwar revolutions with the early Cold War created immediate political tensions. After the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, ECAFE decamped from Shanghai to Bangkok; like the rest of the UN system, it recognized the Republican government in Taiwan as the rightful representative of China.
Asia in the 1940s was torn three ways: between colonial powers still clinging to power, newly independent states hungry for the technology and financing that would allow them to realize their grand plans, and the new superpowers in competition for their allegiance. ECAFE’s deputy director, the American C. Hart Schaaf, made the bold claim that, amid these tensions, ECAFE was primarily the creature of new Asian states. He insisted that “in the most extensive and populous region on earth,” the “most conspicuous political fact” was “a new dynamic nationalism”; he suggested that ECAFE had not only “witnessed” but also “facilitated” this movement. One indication of this stance was ECAFE’s appointment of an Indian director, P. Lokanathan, a Madras University economist who had been editor of the influential periodical Eastern Economist. Invoking the judgment of an imagined “future historian of ECAFE,” Hart Schaaf argued that ECAFE’s role in the region would in time be seen as vital.63
Asia faced a “revolution of rising expectations” that cut across revolutionary and nonrevolutionary, capitalist and Communist states. ECAFE embraced water as a major regional priority, and one that could bring people together: it was an area where tangible results could be achieved. In 1950 the organization convened a meeting in Bangkok on flood control in Asia. Hydraulic engineers, city planners, and hydrologists from across the region came together to compare notes; through the mediation of international agencies, “often… a particular national project becomes regional.” In his search for a metaphor that would explain the benefits of regional cooperation, Hart Schaaf turned to “the concept of an act or event which sets in motion a cumulative process of great momentum,” adding that it was “around [this idea] that Lord Keynes and others have constructed their thinking about the ‘multiplier.’”64 ECAFE’s achievements were piecemeal, perhaps relatively small, but they were not insignificant. The agency epitomized the ideal known as “functionalism,” which Lilienthal had put forth in response to the Indus dispute: that technical matters, from public health to water management, could be removed from the political arena and solved cooperatively by experts whose professional camaraderie transcended geopolitical fault lines. But the politics of national sovereignty, like the geopolitics of superpower rivalry, could not be avoided. The very absence of the People’s Republic of China from the ECAFE table made the organization’s claims to a comprehensive regional perspective ring hollow. In 1954, for the first time, ECAFE’s Economic Survey included “Mainland China,” compiling statistics from official sources in the PRC: it was among ECAFE’s most keenly read publications, as Asian planners, economists, and statesmen had the occasion to compare their countries’ rates of “progress” with that of the revolutionary behemoth.65
The curiosity of Asia’s leaders and engineers about China—fascination combined with suspicion—went beyond the capacity of an ECAFE report to satisfy. Nowhere more so than in China’s largest neighbor, India. The government of India had been among the first to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Nehru’s first ambassador to China, the historian K. M. Panikkar, was keenly impressed by China’s revolution, and by Mao. The Chinese government’s invasion and annexation of Tibet in October 1950 alarmed and surprised India, which regarded a semi-independent and friendly Tibet as a buffer along its border with China. Nehru came under pressure from others within the Congress to take a harder line; but a realistic sense of India’s inability to intervene prevailed. Relations between the two countries warmed in the 1950s in line with Nehru’s foreign policy of nonalignment with either bloc in the Cold War. Among the Indians most keen to learn about developments in China were the country’s leading hydraulic engineers. In May 1954, Kanwar Sain, chairman of India’s Central Water Commission, and K. L. Rao embarked on an official mission to China to inspect and to report back on China’s water projects—flood control in particular. Sain and Rao were among the first outsiders to see, firsthand, China’s hydrological experiment; and because they were favorably disposed toward the Chinese government, they had extensive access to information.
Sain and Rao arrived in China on May 4, 1954, and stayed two months. They spent much of their time on the water, making many parts of their journey along the Yangzi by boat. Sain and Rao were chief protagonists of India’s own colossal efforts to control water; the scale of work in China dazzled them. They undertook their tour of China half a century after the Indian Irrigation Commission had traveled through India in search of water. Theirs was part of the same quest: the famines of the late nineteenth century had unleashed in India a desperate and continuing search for sources of water to mitigate dependence on the monsoon. Sain and Rao were trained in the colonial tradition of Indian water engineering. But now they represented an independent nation, and for inspiration they looked not to Europe but to revolutionary China. Consider the contrast between the two tours: where the irrigation commission traveled with a retinue of servants in a specially chartered train, Sain and Rao were given strictly limited foreign exchange. They were accompanied by just two interpreters and two officials. They were impressed by the modesty, the lack of ostentation they saw—and by the absence of the tight social hierarchies of India, to say nothing of caste. Another thing puzzled Sain and Rao. For generations, Indian intellectuals had believed that the most fundamental bond between India and China was Buddhism. But “to our repeated questions about the Buddha” came a standard response: “Chairman Mao is our Buddha.” In a new era, India and China needed a new language, a new basis for their interaction—it came naturally to two hydraulic engineers to see that basis in the shared problem of water.66
Distinguishing his perspective from the negativity about China that he had imbibed reading the accounts of “foreign diplomats,” Sain commented on the high standards of sanitation he saw everywhere. An austere Indian engineer in the tradition of Visvesvaraya, Sain noted with satisfaction “an absence of headlines in the newspapers highlighting murder, scandals, or disgraceful lives.” Most of all, he was impressed by the “clear-cut vision” state officials had of a “new China of their dreams,” which in turn instilled in the people “unbound faith and confidence in the wisdom, goodness, and creative policy of the government.” Sain contrasted the Shanghai he had seen in 1939, on his way home from the United States—a cosmopolitan and decadent city, in his mind—with the city he saw in 1954. “The bright lights had gone out,” he wrote, but he meant this as a compliment. Shanghai now looked “more typically Chinese,” shorn of Western concessions and colonial settlements. Like so many other port cities along the littorals of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, it was now “integrated [more] closely with the economy of the interior rather than dependent on foreign luxury trade.”67
Sain’s and Rao’s report contains an extended list of every Chinese official they met, from ministers to field engineers to water scientists at the College of Hydraulic Engineering for Eastern China, in Nanjing. They were struck by the quality of China’s hydraulic engineers. They delighted in the firm emphasis given to technical education in China. They praised the Chinese capacity for improvisation, building huge dams from local materials when imports were in short supply. Traveling through China, Sain’s and Rao’s thoughts turned naturally to comparisons with India. There were clear differences in the challenges each country faced. One sharp contrast between India and China was climatic—once again, what made India distinctive was the monsoon. “Unlike India, hemmed in by the Himalayas,” they wrote, “China is open to Central Asia”; this meant that, in the summer, “China unlike India is not the single objective of the air circulation of a whole ocean.” China received “less heavy and less concentrated rainfall” than India, and its rain was “much more equally spread across the interior.” By contrast, China’s rivers were more menacing than India’s, more prone to burst their banks. India’s great need was irrigation; China’s was flood control. Both countries eyed an industrial future, and the promise of hydroelectric power attracted them both.68
India and China shared a sense of urgency. They shared a conviction that water held the key to security and prosperity—these translated into an addiction to mammoth projects. In both countries, bigger was better. Just as the pamphlets of India’s Central Water Commission and the documentaries of its Films Division extolled the pace and the scale of dam building in India, so too did the Chinese state and its engineers take pride in their compression of time. In the five years since the liberation, they boasted, “250 major and thousands of minor irrigation projects” had begun in China, adding 9.2 million acres of irrigated land. Most striking to the Indian visitors were the “remarkable speeds of construction” China had achieved through the mobilization of labor on a scale “unknown in recent times.”69
Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s government made the Yellow River a priority. Known for centuries as “China’s sorrow,” the Yellow River was notoriously prone to flooding. Within a year after the liberation, both the Huai and Yellow rivers experienced catastrophic floods. In the interests of national reconstruction, they had to be tamed and conquered. Where India drew expertise and aid from both the Americans and the Soviets, and where Nationalist water engineers in China in the 1920s and 1930s had maintained close links with the United States and Germany, after 1949 Chinese hydraulic engineers combined Russian technical assistance with local ingenuity. In parallel with India’s race to build Bhakra Nangal, the most ambitious Chinese dam was the Sanmenxia on the Yellow River.
Like Bhakra, the Sanmenxia had its origins in the 1930s; like Bhakra, a sense of urgency that followed the revolutionary upheaval of the 1940s brought it to the top of the agenda. The dam was located near the border between Shanxi and Henan, designed by Soviet engineers. The Soviets proposed a concrete gravity dam across the Yellow River, with a reservoir 360 meters above sea level. The initial plan would have displaced more than 800,000 people from their homes, and flooded 3,500 square kilometers of land. As plans for the dam went into circulation, between 1955 and 1957, Chinese experts debated it at length. During a fleeting moment of political openness under Mao’s “Hundred Flowers” campaign, hydraulic engineer Huang Wanli—trained as a meteorologist at Cornell and Iowa in the 1930s, and then an aide at the Tennessee Valley Authority—raised the alarm. He argued in favor of a lower dam, with a smaller reservoir. He hinted that the Soviet plans had not undertaken a detailed analysis of costs and benefits. He felt that a smaller scheme, which displaced fewer people, would be less risky. He feared that the dam’s design was no match for the heavy loads of silt that the Yellow River carried: the danger, as he saw it, was that the dam’s reservoir would silt up, making the dam useless—or, worse, dangerous.
The Hundred Flowers campaign was short-lived; as people spoke more freely, Mao disliked what they said. His retribution was swift. Huang was condemned and humiliated. He was deemed a “rightist” and sent for “re-education.”70 His predictions proved uncomfortably accurate. Within a few years of the Sanmenxia Dam’s completion in 1960, it was clear that its reservoir was clogged with sediment. As Sino-Soviet relations soured after 1960, it became easier to blame a faulty Soviet design for the dam’s problems. Acknowledging the scale of the problem, Zhou Enlai ordered a reconstruction and renovation of the scheme, at huge cost. At the same time, the human cost of the dam was immense. Just as Bhakra and Hirakud began the decades-long displacement of Indians by large dams, Sanmenxia led to the forcible relocation of an estimated 280,000 people.
Other aspects of China’s experience had no parallel in India, as Sain and Rao were quick to notice. The mobilization of labor in China was on a scale unknown in India, and this also set China on a path to water engineering quite different from the one established by their Soviet allies. Mao had prevailed in the Chinese civil war because of his stunning success in mobilizing popular support and enthusiasm—first in the vanguard of the anti-Japanese resistance, and then deployed against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. This commitment to mass action never left Mao. It shaped deeply his government’s approach to water management. The first achievement of the people’s energies, mobilized at the county level, village by village, was the two-hundred-kilometer People’s Victory Canal, linking the Yellow River and the Wei. The People’s Daily ran features on the exertions of model workers who had broken records and distinguished themselves in devotion to the cause. By the mid-1950s, as China’s collectivization drive gathered pace, Mao’s government laid ever-greater emphasis on irrigation from the ground up. This fervor reached a peak during the Great Leap Forward, when every county was set to work building its own dams and irrigation ditches. Zhou Enlai made a rare official acknowledgment of the disastrous consequences of this approach in 1966, when he said, “I fear that we have made a mistake in harnessing and accumulating water and cutting down so much forest cover… Some mistakes can be remedied in a day or a year, but mistakes in the field of water conservancy and forestry cannot be reversed for years.”71
Of course, much of this took place after Sain’s and Rao’s visit. They saw no signs of danger in China’s quest for water. In table after table they compared China with India—how much concrete their dams consumed, how much water their reservoirs could hold. The speed of canal excavation was where China’s achievements were most dramatic in comparison with India’s. The Indian engineers’ conclusion was wistful: “In India, where similar human force is available, it should be possible to attain similar speeds… by proper organization and creation of enthusiasm among the people”; they chose not to mention that “proper organization” would have demanded a level of coercion that the Indian government was unwilling (or unable) to muster.72
The most revealing part of Sain’s and Rao’s report is a verbatim record of a speech by China’s director of water conservancy, given at the end of their stay, in which he sought to address the questions that had arisen during their visit. Director Hao positioned the People’s Republic firmly within an ancient tradition of water management in China. “The record of exploitation of water by the Chinese people,” he wrote, “dates back to ancient times.” But under the “corrupt” and “feudalistic” rule of a decaying empire, compounded by the failures of the Nationalist government, “the hydraulic constructions [of China] were seriously ruined owing to long years of negligence.” The Communist state claimed the mantle of imperial power over water—it was a revival as well as a revolution.73 China’s archives of water control were on display everywhere the visitors went: at Tsinghua University, they were shown an eight-hundred-year-old text “containing excellent plans” of the Yellow River. Hao spent as much time telling his Indian visitors about small projects as he did extolling the gargantuan ones. His was a story of repair and renovation as much as creation. He spoke of the myriad ponds and dikes that conveyed water to the fields of southern China. He spoke of the spread of simple technology—a “Liberation-type waterwheel” that outdid the age-old technologies still in use.74
Sain and Rao returned to India filled with enthusiasm. For all that they grasped the complexity of China’s approach to water, their message back home was a simple one: it was a message of scale, speed, and control. Their main “lesson” from the Yellow River for the management of the notoriously flood-prone Kosi River of Bihar was the lesson of centralized command; China’s intensive emphasis on small projects fell by the wayside in their accounts. Soon after his return Sain was summoned by Nehru, and “closeted with him for about an hour.” Nehru, soon to depart for China himself, asked for Sain’s impressions. Listening closely, he pressed harder: how would Sain describe China in one sentence? Sain recalls that he gave Nehru an unscripted answer: “At present China is behind India in every field, but I feel that at the rate they are progressing, China may be ahead of India in 10-15 years.” Nehru “made no comment,” Sain remembered, “but I could see from his face that he did not relish this reply.”75
India’s most eminent water engineers returned from China with a sense that the two countries shared fundamental problems, and that there were lessons they could learn from China. But there were ominous portents, too. In his speech, Director Hao had described how China’s water projects had been “extended to the border regions of our fraternal minorities and helped to promote national unity.” There was never an attempt on the Chinese side to disguise the fact that water was intrinsic to political power. The conquest of water meant the conquest of space. With the control over water came the projection of state power over peoples with a different vision of water’s uses: the people of Xinjiang, the people of Tibet. Unspoken was the thought that some day the “border regions” in question may include China’s borders with India.
Sain and Rao faced a problem when they returned with the first-ever maps of China’s water projects to be seen outside China. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs was rankled by what Sain and Rao had missed: the maps they had been given by Chinese officials claimed as Chinese territory a large swath of the borderland that the Indian state saw as integral to India. The maps were destroyed, redrawn to accord with India’s understanding of its territorial boundaries. Sain later wrote in his memoirs that he was grateful this had been caught before the volume was published—if it had not, it would have been a source of “great embarrassment” a few years later, when India and China went to war over just those borders.
One of Sain’s enduring impressions of his trip had been “how the Chinese people loved and admired the Russians.” “The bookstalls are generally full of Russian books and journals,” he wrote; Russian expertise was offered without condescension and without strings—or so it seemed. He had the opportunity to see for himself a year later, when he led an Indian delegation to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the United Nations’ Technical Assistance Administration. Again, the visit of Indian technical experts was followed by an official visit by Nehru. Sain wrote a sweeping account of just how rapid the Soviet Union’s economic progress had been since the revolution. Inspecting its hydraulic projects, he concluded that “the interests of the power engineers have been accorded pride of place,” a dominance he traced back to Lenin’s emphasis on electrification as the key to socialism—flood control and irrigation, India’s and China’s other great needs, were less valued. But Sain’s conclusion was clear: China had much more directly to teach India than the Soviets.
AS CHINA’S EXPERIENCES INSPIRED INDIA’S ENGINEERS, SO INDIA’S experiences became a model for the rest of Asia. A year after his visit to the Soviet Union, ECAFE’s director, Lokanathan, commissioned Sain to join a UN mission to survey the Mekong. Like the Brahmaputra, the Salween, and the Yangzi, the Mekong originates on the Tibetan Plateau. In the twentieth century, it has been Asia’s quintessential “transboundary river,” running through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam before spilling into the South China Sea. The Mekong, the ECAFE commission noted with understatement, was “a perennial river of great importance.” That importance was clear to the US government, which maintained an escalating financial and military presence in South Vietnam after the end of the French-Vietnamese war in 1954, which had resulted in the division of the country. The US Bureau of Reclamation, the domestic agency responsible for hydraulic engineering, had a global presence by the 1950s. Its engineers surveyed Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, looking for hydroelectric potential. They had surveyed the Mekong, too, but their initial verdict was lukewarm.76
Convinced that a substantively international effort was needed, the UN went back. Sain was joined on the commission by Y. Kubota, the president of Japan’s Nippon Koei corporation; G. Duval, a former colonial official; M. Sakaita, an engineering geologist from Japan; and the Dutchman W. J. van der Oord, a navigation specialist. They toured the Mekong in April and May 1956. The commission placed its faith in two large hydroelectric projects, one on the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, the other at Nam Lik in Laos. “The prick has gone too deep to be halted”—this is how Sain described his sense that large-scale hydraulic engineering was inevitable, now, in the Mekong as elsewhere in Asia, given the bold claims that had been made on behalf of big dams, and given the hunger for progress and development that he saw wherever he traveled. The following year, Sain joined another commission coordinated by ECAFE and led by Raymond Wheeler, former chief engineer of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Wheeler’s account of the mission harked back to the language of colonial exploration. “There were no maps of the country,” he wrote, “we had to make them… Nobody had any data on river flow, or even any idea how to keep data.” Wheeler described the Mekong as “truly a virgin river.” Historian David Biggs notes that the commission proposed “a cascade of hydroelectric dams and irrigation schemes in the valley from the Chinese border southward to the Mekong Delta.” The Mekong commission signified an opening for private interests who stood to profit from the dam-building rush; Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies, in particular, stepped in with materials and personnel.77
The Mekong commission was quickly overshadowed by the escalation of American involvement in Indochina. The US Bureau of Reclamation placed its faith in what it called “impact type projects,” the grandest of them being the Pa Mong Dam, upstream of the Laotian capital, Vientiane. Vast, ambitious, planned to the last detail—the dam never materialized, as the United States became mired in military conflict in Vietnam that engulfed Vietnam’s neighbors as well.78 There was a close bond between American support for dam building in Asia and American strategic imperatives in the Cold War. But Kanwar Sain—a patriotic Indian engineer at the pinnacle of his profession, enamored of China but with close personal and professional links to the US Bureau of Reclamation—chose to spend a decade of his career with the Mekong commission, trying to coordinate the development of Asia’s most international river. In his memoirs, he hints that the material reward of working for the United Nations was one clear incentive. But his motivations went deeper than the money. Sain believed, like so many of his generation, that taming the waters was a goal beyond national sovereignty—and beyond ideology. Working for ECAFE alongside many former colonial civil servants and engineers now turned development consultants, Sain held to a vision of Asian nations working together to claim their rightful place in the community of nations. In a memoir that is detached, even clinical, in tone, a rare moment of emotion comes when Sain describes his “pilgrimage” to the site of Angkor Wat, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, while on his first Mekong mission: “I was very much moved by the ancient glory and culture of India reflected in Angkor Wat,” he wrote.79 Just as many of India’s water engineers presented their “new temples” as standing within an ancient historical tradition of water engineering, so Sain appealed to a deep history of cultural exchange across borders to provide ballast for his vision of an Asia united by water—or by water engineers.
In a sense, Sain’s faith was eventually vindicated. The Mekong commission outlasted the American war. It received a new lease of life in the 1990s and now stands as one of the most important, if not always the most effective, river-regulating bodies in the world.
VII
The “multiplier” that ECAFE invoked to justify its work on cross-border river valley development could have the opposite effect: as projects and ambitions escalated, so did the potential for conflict. After a high point of warmth in their relationship in the mid-1950s—the era of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” (India and China are brothers)—the territorial conflict between India and China intensified. The unmarked and mountainous frontier between India and China became contentious as both states intensified their presence in the borderlands. New infrastructure brought border regions within easier reach of Beijing and Delhi; military forces were stationed there; migration from the plains brought new settlers, often ethnically distinct from the people who inhabited the uplands. The spark for conflict was the construction of a Chinese road linking Xinjiang and Tibet—a road that passed within what India considered to be its territory. Indian intelligence did not find out about the road until 1957, by which time its construction was well advanced. India insisted on the sanctity of agreements made under the British; the Chinese charged that India now stood as the beneficiary of British imperial aggression. In a pained and lengthy letter to Zhou Enlai, which was later published by the Indian government, Nehru countered that “the boundaries of India were… settled for centuries by history, geography, custom and tradition.” He turned, then, to water: “The water-parting formed by the crest of the Himalayas is the natural frontier” between India and China, “accepted for centuries as the boundary.”80
Water was not, by 1960, perceived as a source of conflict, but recently declassified Indian sources show that there were fears about the future. Rumors were rife. In exile in India after the failed Tibetan uprising of 1959, the Dalai Lama raised the alarm in a public meeting. He charged that the Chinese state was “planning to build high dams across the Brahmaputra and Indus group of rivers in the Tibet region,” and that the Chinese “had these schemes in view ever since they came to Tibet.” He asked, pointedly, “how far such projects undertaken unilaterally would be in the interests of India.” The Indian foreign ministry responded cautiously to a report on the Dalai Lama’s speech. “We have… no information so far about any proposal of the Chinese government to construct dams across the Indus or Brahmaputra before the rivers leave Tibet,” one official wrote, but he saw the “necessity of being alert in this manner.” Indian officials were well aware that “there is a great fall in the Brahmaputra just before it enters India” with “potential for power and irrigation.” But they were reassured by the thought that it would take “huge resources to make anything of it”; any plans the Chinese had “will certainly take a long time.”81 The Indian trade mission in Gyantse, Tibet—which clearly doubled as a source of intelligence—concurred. They reported to Apa Pant, the chief political officer in the Indian protectorate of Sikkim, that “construction of dams and reservoirs on the river is likely to involve huge resources including manpower, which the Chinese authorities will be able to utilize only after they have brought in large numbers of Chinese for settlement.”82
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs was concerned enough to involve colleagues in the irrigation department. In a letter marked “top secret,” K. K. Framji, chief engineer of India’s irrigation department, reassured the foreign ministry that “substantial or imminent diversions by China for irrigation purposes in the Tibet region do not appear to be practicable.” The construction of storage dams for power generation might even benefit India as they “would be helpful in mitigating floods in Assam or East Pakistan.” But he then raised a darker prospect: “If the Chinese hydro-electric schemes are so projected as to divert substantial quantities of Brahmaputra flows away from the present course into adjoining valleys,” this would be “a significant loss of valuable water resources to India, and even more so, to Pakistan.” He concluded on a hopeful note: “No doubt we will be given timely information regarding any observed or reported activities towards any such diversion.”83
Events soon overtook these concerns about the future of water. In 1959, India infuriated the Chinese government by granting asylum to the Dalai Lama; from that point, tensions on the border between India and China ran high. Both sides built up their military forces along the border; India pursued a “Forward Policy,” stationing troops north of the McMahon line, the 1914 frontier that had marked the boundary between Tibet and British India. Taking the Indians by surprise, Chinese military forces launched attacks on both the eastern and western flanks of the border region on October 20, 1962. As the world was transfixed by the Cuban missile crisis, Indian and Chinese forces fought in the high Himalayas. But it was no contest: the Indian military was no match for Chinese forces, who won decisive victories. A month after the offensive, the Chinese declared a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew their forces to the “line of actual control”—or the de facto border.
The war with China marked a humiliating defeat for India. The Indian army was ill-equipped, ill-prepared; China’s invasion seemed to mock the effort Nehru had put into fostering good relations between the two countries. Nehru’s political legitimacy at home was battered. With hindsight, 1962 appears as the beginning of the end of the Nehru era in Indian politics. In the opening pages of his first novel, Such a Long Journey, set in Bombay of the 1960s and 1970s, Rohinton Mistry evokes a widespread sense that “the war with China froze Jawaharlal Nehru’s heart, then broke it. He never recovered from what he perceived to be Chou En-lai’s betrayal.”84 Nehru’s frank, even desperate, plea for American military assistance in the war dented his commitment to nonalignment in the Cold War. India’s defeat on the international stage coincided with a rising chorus of criticism at home, raising questions about the economic and political strategy Nehru had pursued in the fifteen years since independence. Was there a better way?
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU DIED IN 1964. HIS WILL AND TESTAMENT EXPLAINED why he wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges upon his death. “I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood,” he wrote, “and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown.” The Ganges, he wrote, “is the river of India, beloved of her people”: bearer of “her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats.” Evoking the identity of the river with the very geography of India, Nehru wrote that each glimpse of the Ganges “reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast.” Nehru was adamant that “my desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance.” Water still had imaginative power to evoke the sacred, to shape nations’ perceptions of their limits. The Ganges remained the essence of India, the Himalayas India’s natural boundary, even in an age when India’s “new temples” were large dams.