EIGHT

THE OCEAN AND THE UNDERGROUND

IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS, SET IN BENGAL IN THE LATE 1960S AND early 1970s, Neel Mukherjee brings a novelist’s imaginative sympathy to evoke what it feels like to depend on the rains. Supratik, the novel’s protagonist, has become involved in the Naxalite movement, a violent revolutionary movement of Maoist inspiration, committed to rural revolution in India. As part of his work of political outreach, Supratik, a privileged city boy, spends time in the countryside, growing accustomed to its rhythms. He inhabits a rural Bengal that is impoverished, indebted, under the heel of landlords—and governed by the monsoon. As they prepare the seedbeds to transplant paddy saplings, Supratik’s host, Kanu, gazes at the sky. His questions are perennial ones: “Would it arrive this year? his eyes seemed to be asking; would it be late? would it be enough? There was both anxiety and resignation in his face.” And then, this time, the rains came. Supratik continues: “It was exactly as I remembered from childhood—sheets of water coming down for hours and hitting the ground with such force that you thought the road would dissolve—except here the ground, which is earth, does dissolve.”¹

On the surface there is little to connect this imaginative account of the lived experience of climate with the meteorological data being accumulated by international scientists at the time. Human lives and voices could not be fed into climate models, where readings of pressure and wind and moisture could. But they told different facets of the same story.

This chapter tells two intersecting stories—the connections between them were not fully evident at the time. The first is the story of monsoon science in the 1960s; the second is the political and economic history of India’s mid-1960s droughts. The International Indian Ocean Expedition ran between 1959 and 1965. It used new technology to uncover the forces underpinning the monsoon; it resituated South Asia in relation to the vastness of the Indian Ocean; it established new links between the countries along the ocean’s rim, including a web of weather-monitoring stations. The scientific expedition raised the alarm that human activity was starting to make itself felt in the oceans—perhaps even that it was altering Earth’s climate. At just the moment when Asian states were sloughing off the web of connections that linked them across borders and seas, satellites and aerial photographs and deep sea probes projected a view of Asia shaped by a vast, connected climate system—a system with very tangible consequences for the large development schemes that states around the Indian Ocean rim had embarked on.

In the same years the monsoon came urgently back into view in India, which was in the grip of drought for three pivotal years in the mid-1960s. India’s enthusiasm for the Indian Ocean Expedition, in common with many other countries in the region, was driven primarily by short-term concerns with a looming food crisis, which threatened political unrest. The Indian Ocean Expedition promised a survey of the sea as a set of “material resources to be exploited.”² Most of all, it promised more accurate weather forecasts. India’s response to the crisis of the mid-1960s was to intensify its quest for water. The dam building of the 1950s had not gone far or fast enough. Old fears of the monsoon climate resurfaced, regardless of the advances in climatic understanding that the new science promised. The government adopted a package of agricultural reforms that included high-yielding crops, vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, and the more intensive exploitation of groundwater using electric pumps.

IN HIS 1981 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL Association, on “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” historian of the Atlantic world Bernard Bailyn spoke of the relationship between what he called latent and manifest processes in history. The former he described as “events that contemporaries were not fully or clearly aware of… however much they might have been forced unwittingly to grapple with their consequences.” He described the relationship between latent and manifest events like this:

The events I am referring to were known, if at all, only vaguely by contemporaries or by previous historians to have been events; they are being discovered as particular happenings now for the first time. Taken together, they form a new landscape, a landscape like that of the ocean floor, assumed to have existed in some vague way by people struggling at the surface of the waves but never seen before as actual rocks, ravines, and cliffs. And like the newly discovered ocean floor—so rich, complex, and busy a world in itself—the world of latent events can be seen to be part of, directly involved with, the manifest history of the surface world itself.³

Bailyn’s oceanographic metaphor is especially apt in this chapter, where it takes on literal as well as symbolic meaning. We can now, for the first time, integrate the discovery of the Indian Ocean’s effects on the monsoon, the early signs of climate change, with the manifest political and economic transformations of India and other parts of Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.

The lessons of the new climate science—that Asia was intensely vulnerable, increasingly interconnected, bound by growing risks from the destabilization of its climate—went unheeded before a renewed quest to conquer nature. The 1960s and 1970s were the decades that pushed India and other parts of Asia more fully toward a crisis of water.

I

By the 1960s the Indian Ocean was largely invisible to states in South Asia who looked no further than the waters immediately off their coasts. Migrants had once traversed the sea with few restrictions, in a pattern of circular migration. Now they faced an obstacle-strewn space governed by passports and visa restrictions.⁴ As India prepared for the International Conference on the Law of the Sea, to be held in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations in early 1958, it was clear to Indian negotiators that the meeting would have what they called “far-reaching consequences.” At stake was the renegotiation of the customary three-mile limit on the extent of each state’s “territorial waters,” a legal conception that came into widespread use around this time. Lawyers at India’s Ministry of External Affairs pinpointed the core conflict: “The countries which support the three mile limit,” they noted, “own over 80% of the world tonnage and are therefore interested in maintaining freedom of the seas.” India, on the other hand, along with many developing countries, claimed a greater expanse of water of its coasts “on the ground of security or for economic reasons such as the preservation of exclusive fishing rights for their nationals.” Among the pressing reasons for a change were technological developments that allowed for the exploitation of resources further offshore, not least fishing by large trawlers. India was equally concerned with the “conditions under which the waters of a bay can be regarded as internal waters,” given the “close linking of the waters to the land domain” and the “utility of the bay to the economic needs of the country.”⁵ Although negotiations over the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea would continue through the early 1980s, the final agreement recognized the claims of countries pressing for an extended definition of territorial waters, to which was added a wider exclusive economic zone. The sea came, more and more, to resemble the land—as a form of territory.

To scientists, the Indian Ocean was “the largest unknown area on earth.” Paul Tchernia, who worked in the physical oceanography laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, described it as the “forlorn ocean.” Returning from a voyage through the Indian Ocean en route to and from the Antarctic, he suggested that an international investigation of the Indian Ocean should be incorporated into the activities of the UN’s International Geophysical Year in 1957–1958: a massive exercise in coordinated data gathering that transformed knowledge of Earth’s physical processes. Tchernia’s suggestion came too late to include the Indian Ocean in that giant program, but there was a convergence of interest in investigating the least well-studied among the world’s oceans. The catalyst came from a meeting of the Special Committee on Oceanic Research, set up by the International Council of Scientific Unions. It met for the first time at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in coastal Massachusetts in August 1958. Among its champions was the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Roger Revelle (1909–1991), a pioneer in the study of global warming and the effects of carbon emissions on the oceans.⁶

Midcentury oceanographers were drawn to the Indian Ocean for the same reason that medieval traders could cross it—the seasonal reversal of the monsoon winds. This pattern of reversing winds made the Indian Ocean unique; this made it a “model of the world ocean,” upon which scientists could test their “wind-driven models.”⁷ Many scientists who lived on the ocean’s rim, especially those in government service, had more immediate interests. The ocean’s fisheries held the potential to address concerns about food shortages in Asia and Africa; its mineral wealth had barely begun to be exploited. Unlocking the mechanism of the ocean’s influence on climate could provide the key to food security and economic development.⁸

From the start there was tension between short-term and long-term aims of the project; between the search for quick results and the patient accumulation of data on which to build scientific understanding. Oceanographer Henry Stommel approached the wild enthusiasm for the new Indian Ocean Expedition with skepticism. He published a few editions of an anonymous newsletter he called Indian Ocean Bubble—named to invoke the eighteenth-century speculative craze known as the South Sea Bubble—with the implication that his colleagues’ craze for the Indian Ocean, too, was built on speculation. Its circulation was limited to a short list of oceanographers. Its final editorial was honest to a fault. “I think there is only a very remote chance that the Expedition will help improve fisheries and alleviate the poverty of the people in many Indian Ocean countries,” Stommel wrote. He found it “disheartening” to see “oceanography join the long line of pressure groups acting—under the guise of humanitarianism—to advance their own interests.” Those “interests” were “in themselves legitimate, but essentially unrelated to the moral and ‘socio-economic’ issues which they pretend to serve.”⁹

In the end the International Indian Ocean Expedition involved forty ships from thirteen countries. Its capacious agenda encompassed what the mission’s official chronicle called “moral and ‘socio-economic issues” as well as the “interests” of oceanography in basic research. The list of countries involved does not map easily onto the geography of the Cold War. Many large states bordering the Indian Ocean were enthusiastic participants in the program, including hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, as well as Indonesia and Australia. The United States played a leading role, involving scientists from the Scripps and Woods Hole institutes of oceanography, as well as the US Weather Bureau and the navy. The British, too, were heavily involved, given that they still had a substantial colonial and strategic presence in the region in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union contributed the 6,500-ton Vityaz, the largest ship in the program. The Indian Ocean Expedition also marked the rebirth of German oceanography after the war, and it showed the resurgent scientific and technical prowess of Japan, which contributed two vessels, the Kagoshima Maru and the Umitaka Maru.¹⁰

The Indian ships on the expedition reflected—in their origins, their shape, their materials—different epochs of seafaring history. The Kistna, its “sleek lines betraying… naval origins,” as one observer put it, was built as a naval frigate in 1943, a product of the Second World War’s fillip to Indian industry.¹¹ Now armed with an Edo echo sounder with a range of six thousand fathoms, the ship was fitted for oceanographic research, but it came with a warning: “Austere living conditions; not fit for women scientists. No salt water bath fitted.” The smallest vessel in the expedition was the R.V. Conch, which belonged to the University of Kerala. It represented a much older tradition of shipbuilding: it was a small ship built of hardwood, in the long tradition of coastal craft that had threaded together India’s western coast for centuries. By contrast the trawler R.V. Varuna was brand-new, purpose-built in Norway in 1961 in connection with the Indo-Norwegian fisheries project. Despite its novelty, it came with the same “men only” warning as the naval frigate: “Women scientists cannot be housed.”¹² From the earliest days of the spice traders, the Indian Ocean was crossed predominantly by men—some things were very slow to change, and the loss to Indian Ocean science has been considerable.

The expedition’s research aims encompassed the study of ocean currents and littoral drift; an investigation of ocean chemistry, salinity, and temperature; the exploration of marine life, and especially fisheries; the study of wind and atmospheric conditions and rainfall. Much of the excitement came from the new technologies that allowed scientists to see the sea anew. Sonar technology allowed them to hear enough to map the Indian Ocean’s sea floor with heightened accuracy—their images evoked an underwater continent as varied in its topography as the land above. Advances in satellite technology provided synoptic pictures of cloud cover and precipitation. Computers allowed scientists to process quantities of data beyond all precedent: Klaus Wyrtki of the University of Hawaii oversaw the production of an oceanographic atlas, which processed data from twelve thousand hydrographic stations stored on two hundred thousand computer cards.¹³

Among all of the Indian Ocean Expedition’s endeavors, one observer wrote, “none shows more contrast between past and present than meteorology.”¹⁴ The Indian Ocean Expedition marked the most intensive investigation of the South Asian monsoon since the days of Gilbert Walker, now with a raft of new tools. Fascinating though it was to glimpse the ocean’s floor, for many scientists the most urgent priority for the Indian Ocean Expedition was to provide a better picture of Asia’s climate. Almost a century after the establishment of the Indian Meteorological Department, scientists wrote in 1962 that “inadequate knowledge of the large-scale influences on weather have always hampered weather forecasting.” The need to understand the monsoon “has become even greater and more urgent,” they argued, “in view of the large scale development plans of many of the countries in the field of agriculture, exploitation of water resources, flood control programmes, and programmes for ameliorating the consequences of weather extremes.” Economic planning, they wrote, demanded “accurate advance information on the onset of the rains, its variations from day-to-day” and “the occurrence of spells of heavy rain and breaks.”¹⁵

In his 1927 presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society, Gilbert Walker had speculated that “variations in activity of the general oceanic circulation” would likely be “far reaching and important” in understanding the world’s climate.¹⁶ It was not until the 1960s, bolstered by data collected during the International Geophysical Year and the Indian Ocean Expedition, that his insight would be developed. Walker’s pioneering work on the lateral connection between the climates of Indian Ocean and the Pacific—his Southern Oscillation—now acquired a vertical dimension. The Indian Ocean Expedition focused on understanding the exchange of energy between the ocean and the atmosphere, driven by the monsoon winds. Piece by piece, scientists sought to understand the large-scale monsoon circulation of the Indian Ocean. The reversal in the direction of the monsoon winds had been well known for centuries, but it was more difficult, one scientist wrote, to “determine the vertical limits—than the horizontal—of the monsoon influence.” Changes on Earth’s surface were linked with changes in the deep sea, and in the upper atmosphere.¹⁷

A crucial component of the Indian Ocean Expedition was the International Meteorological Centre that was set up in Bombay in 1963, at the Colaba observatory, which was first built as an astronomical observatory by the East India Company in 1826. Along with India, the project received support from Ceylon, Indonesia, Japan, the Malagasy Republic, Malaya, Mauritius, Pakistan, Thailand, the states of East Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Its prized possession was an IBM 1620 “computor” (as the word was then spelled), financed by the United Nations Special Fund. The center’s director was tropical meteorologist Colin Ramage. In 1958 Ramage moved from a position as deputy director of the Royal Observatory in Hong Kong—where he had studied the South China Sea’s typhoons—to a professorship at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he directed a US Air Force–funded research station on meteorology. “Just as every viewer has his personal rainbow,” wrote Colin Ramage, “so every meteorologist seems to possess a personal and singular understanding of what is meant by ‘monsoon.’” The one point of agreement, Ramage noted, was that the Indian monsoon is the largest and most dramatic.¹⁸ For all the international involvement, the core of the International Meteorological Centre’s personnel came directly from the Indian Meteorological Department, which contributed one hundred staff.

Already during the UN’s International Geophysical Year in 1957–1958, Indian meteorologists had made a signal contribution. Among them was Anna Mani. Born in 1918 in the princely state of Travancore, Anna Mani studied physics at Presidency College Madras and then worked at Nobel laureate C. V. Raman’s laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1945, she received a scholarship to Imperial College—I heard many stories of Anna Mani from the Indian meteorologists I met, including a story, perhaps apocryphal, of how she endured her voyage to Southampton as one of the few women on a ship full of demobilized troops. Mani joined the meteorological department in 1948, and during the International Geophysical Year, she took charge of a network of stations to measure solar radiation across India.¹⁹ Just the year before the International Meteorological Centre was established, India had augmented its research capacity with the establishment of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Poona, which remains one of the country’s preeminent institutions. Under the Indian Ocean Expedition, those most intimately familiar with the monsoon now contributed to research on a global scale.

In a pamphlet published by the World Meteorological Organization, Ramage described the Colaba center at work:

Throughout the night, staff in the small, air-conditioned communications room have been receiving broadcast coded weather reports from the Indian Ocean region in morse code and on teleprinters. Pictures of charts analysed a few minutes before in the meteorological centres at Nairobi, Moscow, Sangley Point and Canberra unroll from facsimile printers. Across the compound of Colaba Observatory in the Signal Office of the western Regional Meteorological Centre, other teleprinters disgorge figure-crammed sheets of paper containing detailed information on Indian weather, and on the weather over the whole eastern hemisphere north of the equator.²⁰

In this scene the Indian Ocean came alive, where as a zone of trade and as a political idea it was dead. The sea was connected in a new way by weather maps and the flow of data through fascimile printers. In the late nineteenth century, the expanded collection of data transmitted through the telegraph allowed the first synoptic weather maps of large regions to be drawn. The Colaba center’s work reflected a new geography as well as advances in technology. Overlaid on the old British imperial networks of weather reporting were new centers of knowledge and power, including Moscow and even Vladivostock. This nocturnal hive of activity, in a small corner of south Bombay, gave substance to the idea of the Indian Ocean as a vast weather system stretching beyond national boundaries. Not all of the exchange was unfettered. Thousands of reports came in, but “problems in radio transmission meant that the centre got less than half the observations made.” Nevertheless, Ramage was reassured, “copies of all observations were sent by mail,” furnishing a paper archive of minute observations of the Indian Ocean’s climate, even if, by the time they arrived, “they were not much good for forecasting.” More disappointing was the fate of a floating automatic weather station provided by the US government and anchored in the Bay of Bengal by the Indian navy: “After a few months, its radio quit and it was neither seen nor heard from again.”²¹

The new quest to understand the monsoon relied on two breakthroughs in technology: aerial video and satellite photography. Five research aircraft were based in Bombay to support the International Meteorological Centre’s work: one belonged to Woods Hole, the other four to the US Weather Bureau, including two large DC-6 airplanes. As in the nineteenth century, cyclones held a particular fascination for meteorologists—and now improved storm forecasting would benefit the growing numbers of people who lived in South Asia’s coastal cities. The US Weather Bureau’s two DC-6 aircraft flew the first aerial reconnaissance mission into a cyclone in the Indian Ocean (though there had been many such missions over the Atlantic): Ramage was in the scientific observer’s seat on one of them. Ramage’s plane flew through the storm at 20,000 feet; the other was way down at 1,500 feet above the ocean’s surface. “I thought the aircraft was falling to pieces,” Ramage wrote, “we dropped 300 feet in a single second”—a common complaint of nervous flyers in turbulence, but in Ramage’s case it was likely accurate. Most awesome, for this lifelong student of tropical storms, was the experience of flying into the eye of a monsoon depression. He described flying “into an amphitheatre of multi-layered nimbo-stratus cloud. In the centre only thin milky cloud above us and almost none below, and five minutes later we were once again in rain clouds.”²²

When Ramage and Indian meteorologist C. R. Raman (brother of Nobel laureate in physics C. V. Raman) produced their atlas of Indian Ocean meteorology, they were able to draw 144 charts based on 194,000 shipboard observations and 750,000 balloon ascents into the upper atmosphere. The ability to visualize the weather in new ways was especially compelling. Scientists installed cameras on commercial and military aircraft flying through the region to take time-lapse films of the clouds they encountered in flight over the Indian Ocean. Ramage described how time-lapse cameras had previously been used “spectacularly in science films to compress into a few seconds the blooming cycles of flowers”; now they were placed on aircraft to photograph clouds at the rate of one frame every three seconds. On a six-hour flight, they would record every cloud on thirty meters of 16 mm film. Watching the videos later, Ramage wrote, “The viewer gets the rather exciting impression of flying at about 50 times the speed of the aircraft.”²³

An even more promising development was underway by the end of the expedition—daily satellite photographs of the Indian Ocean. “We now have for the first time,” Ramage enthused, “the opportunity to attempt a complete description of the whole atmospheric distribution over the Indian Ocean.” That “complete description” is what Ramage and Raman attempted, chart by chart, in their meticulous work of climatic reconstruction. The most exciting prospect lay just over the horizon of possibility. The force of the monsoon came from the exchange of energy between air and sea—it was now possible to study this complex process. The promise of satellite photography was that it might “elucidate the role of the monsoons in the total atmospheric circulation.”²⁴

Despite his optimism, Ramage delivered a modest assessment of progress. The goal of Henry Blanford and Gilbert Walker—a long-range forecast of the monsoon—remained elusive. Even incremental improvements in forecasting, Ramage thought, would help in “aiding flood prevention and control and in enabling irrigation engineers to make the best possible use of stored water,” as well as helping the fishers of the Indian Ocean rim to take advantage of lulls in the monsoon, up to a week long, to take to sea. But the prospect of an accurate long-range forecast, Ramage lamented, was “as remote as ever.” The vast accumulation of data had not altered a truth well known—that “the atmosphere is turbulent and chaotic.” There was no substitute for patient observation. The best meteorologists could do was to keep doing what was embedded in their practice: to use “long climatological records and detailed statistics to come up with a sort of odds on what the next season’s rainfall will be.” His conclusion was sober:

The apparently rhythmic nature of rain-and-break, rain-and-break, during the summer monsoon encourages us to delve more deeply into the underlying causes of the rhythm and in particular the causes for interruptions or changes in the rhythm. Finding the rhythm of a total season, however, seems almost certainly beyond our immediate grasp.²⁵

MORE OMINOUS SIGNS EMERGED FROM THE INDIAN OCEAN EXPEDITION. Two years before that expedition began, Revelle had written, with his colleague the geochemist Hans Seuss, that human beings were conducting, unwittingly, a “large scale geophysical experiment” with the world’s climate. “Within a few centuries,” Revelle and Seuss wrote, “we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”²⁶ One of Revelle’s students, Charles Keeling, was the first to start systematic measurements of atmospheric carbon the following year, in 1958. Revelle and colleagues had long-range goals for their study of the Indian Ocean: they wanted to see how far the Indian Ocean was a “dump for the waste products of industrial civilization.” And they sought to determine “the role of the ocean in climatic change, especially in absorbing the carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned.”²⁷ We have forgotten how important the Indian Ocean was to documenting anthropogenic climate change, prompting early stirrings of alarm. The data from the Indian Ocean voyages suggested that the sea and the atmosphere were being affected by human activity on land. But these “long range” problems were then distant from the level of human experience. The time horizons of oceanic research were incommensurable with those of planning for food security. Because the long-range monsoon forecast remained elusive, because understandings of climate grew more complex, it was easier to focus on what could be contained and controlled—one river valley at a time.

The Indian Ocean Expedition generated a picture of the South Asian monsoon that was an integral part of the global climate system. South Asia’s climate was part of a large-scale interchange of energy and moisture between the ocean and the atmosphere. This expansion in the scale and complexity of understanding sat uneasily with the confidence, so prevalent in Asia among dam builders and planners, that nature could be anticipated, or its effects engineered away. A 1968 pamphlet on the monsoon—written by P. K. Das, director of the Indian Meteorological Department, and published as part of a National Book Trust series, “India: The Land and People”—contrasted the tendency of Indian farmers and poets to see the monsoon in vast, even cosmic, terms with “more rational techniques, such as the scientific control of river valleys.” In a sense, with its emphasis on turbulence and chaos and complexity, the new monsoon science resonated more easily with what Das saw as the superstitious view than with a view of the monsoon as simply a variable to be controlled.²⁸

II

The final year of the International Indian Ocean Expedition coincided with the worst failure of the South Asian monsoon in decades. For two successive years, in 1965 and 1966, large parts of India suffered from drought. The drought coincided with India’s first major political transition after independence, following the death of Jawaharlal Nehru at the end of May 1964, and it pushed forward a change in economic strategy that was already underway. The two years after Nehru’s death made clear the limits of India’s progress toward self-sufficiency in food.

Nehru was succeeded by the diminutive and mild-mannered Lal Bahadur Shastri, a party stalwart from the Hindi heartland of North India. When Shastri took office, alarm about India’s food situation was widespread. There had been many flare-ups of protest in the cities, dubbed “bread riots” in the media. The Congress party’s distinctive style of accommodative politics came under strain after the disaster of the China war. Groups that had long formed part of the Congress coalition—middle- and upper-caste landowners, urban workers, industrialists—were no longer content to defer to the urban elite, no longer willing to keep a lid on their conflicts with each other. Some of them found a voice outside the Congress umbrella. Under attack from left and right, Shastri, who was easy to underestimate, undertook a series of quiet but decisive reforms. Political scientist Francine Frankel, who was doing research in India at the time, describes the result: “A series of undramatic initiatives in economic policy that went virtually unnoticed at the time cumulatively altered the entire approach to India’s development strategy.”²⁹

The core of Nehru’s approach had been a push for import-substituting industrialization. India in the 1950s had developed as a mixed economy, but one in which the public sector played a leading role, especially at the “commanding heights” of the economy. This was the strategy championed in the 1950s by the planning commission, to which Nehru gave considerable autonomy under the leadership of master statistician (and sometime meteorologist) P. C. Mahalanobis, dubbed “the Professor.” The Indian countryside was given two roles to play in this “drama,” as Mahalanobis insisted that the second five-year plan must be: The first was to ensure food security to a country still scarred by the memory of colonial famines, with the ultimate aim being self-sufficiency in food grains. The second was to generate foreign exchange through the export of nonfood crops to pay for the imported machinery that India would need until its own factories could make them. Jute and cotton were two of India’s most valuable exports.

But at odds with the emphasis on self-reliance came an increasing reliance, through the 1950s, on food aid from the United States. From the time of its institution in 1954, Public Law 480, or PL-480—known widely as the “food for peace” scheme—disposed of the large agricultural surpluses of the American Midwest in the postcolonial world, on preferential terms. India was by far the largest recipient of this aid. Indian imports of American wheat grew from two hundred thousand tons in 1954 to more than 4 million tons by 1960. Given the ups and downs of the Indo-American relationship in the 1950s, this struck many Indian politicians as an uncomfortable level of dependence on an unreliable patron. The importance of American food aid was only one indication that the Indian government’s agricultural strategy had faltered. Looking back, in the late 1960s, an official report acknowledged the problem. “All the efforts at achieving self-sufficiency in foodgrain production during the three Plan periods did not fully succeed,” the Indian ministry of agriculture acknowledged; instead, a sharp drop in agricultural production in the early 1960s came as a “great shock to everyone concerned with agriculture.” After 1961, per capita income in India did not increase, and by the mid-1960s the availability of food per capita was lower than it was in 1956.³⁰

The man charged with addressing this “shock” was C. Subramaniam. He was born in 1910 to a farming family in Coimbatore district in Madras, a prosperous region of irrigated export agriculture at the edge of the Western Ghat mountains and a center of India’s textile industry. Subramaniam was a protégé of the veteran Madras leader of the Congress party, C. Rajagopalachari. He joined the Indian freedom movement as a young man; he was one of an army of Congress party workers imprisoned by the British during the Quit India movement in 1942. He spent the 1950s in the state government of Madras, until Nehru appointed him to the coveted industries portfolio in his cabinet. For Shastri to move him to agriculture, something of a Cinderella ministry, seemed a step down. But Subramaniam embraced the challenge. He came to represent a strand of economic thinking in India that had always run alongside, sometimes in tension with, the planning commission’s “industry first” approach. Subramaniam believed, contrary to the planning commission, that the Indian countryside was the key to security and progress. Subramaniam drew on ideas that had been in circulation from the late nineteenth century. They were prominent in the writings of India’s early “economic nationalists,” and found new expression in the 1920s and 1930s in detailed studies of agricultural economics.³¹

In the circumstances of the early 1960s, a rediscovery of rural India’s importance converged with a line of thought that American development experts pressed upon India. From the late 1950s the World Bank and many American government observers began to urge that India should pay more attention to agriculture, even at the expense of scaling back its grand industrial vision. Specifically, they advocated for markets to play a greater role in Indian agricultural policy, which would in turn spur investment in new technologies. They were skeptical of the Nehru government’s emphasis on agricultural cooperatives; they argued, instead, that India could boost its food production most rapidly by providing incentives to farmers with capital, those who already benefited from larger landholdings and irrigation facilities, even if this came at the price of higher levels of inequality in the countryside. Wielding the powers of persuasion and veiled threat that they gained from India’s dependence on American food aid, these outside experts gained a sympathetic hearing from within the Indian government, which had its own “America lobby” as well as pro-Soviet faction.³²

From the outset Subramaniam believed that new technologies were the key to the transformation of India. One of his first initiatives was to strengthen the moribund Indian Council for Agricultural Research, and to bolster agricultural education in India. Early in his tenure as agriculture minister, Subramaniam was impressed by reports of the stunning results shown by Rockefeller-sponsored experiments in Mexico with high-yielding varieties of maize and wheat, and by experiments with new hybrid strains of rice in Taiwan and the Philippines. Could they work in India? A team of scientists led by the Canadian plant pathologist R. Glenn Anderson had already initiated a series of experimental stations in India with pilot projects in Delhi, Ludhiana, Pusa, and Kanpur; when one hundred kilograms of seed, flown in from Mexico, arrived in India in 1964, they were ready to test them in Indian conditions. Here lay the roots of what would come to be known as the “Green Revolution,” which would transform Indian and global agriculture in the final third of the twentieth century.³³

But first Subramaniam had to prevail over his cabinet colleagues who remained committed to the Congress’s stated goal of moving toward a “socialist pattern of society”—or, at least, to rapid industrialization first and foremost. T. T. Krishnamachari was the planning commission’s most vocal proponent of focusing on heavy industry. His concern was primarily with keeping food prices down for urban workers. To achieve this, he argued for a national food distribution system based on a system of price controls and monopoly food procurement by the state. Subramaniam pointed out that this infrastructure of food control, which had its roots in the wartime economy, was “uneconomical”—government prices for compulsory procurement were so low that they gave farmers no incentive to invest in new technology. The two sides crossed swords over inequality. Subramaniam recalled in his memoirs that his opponent argued against high-yielding varieties because “this strategy would lead to greater social tension within the rural areas, because benefits would be unequally distributed.” Subramaniam’s response was to ask his critics “what other option we had.” To those who argued that he was caving to American pressure, Subramaniam countered that only a new approach to agriculture would save India from subjection, for he feared that “once we became dependent on these imported foodgrains other political strings would be attached to them.”³⁴ The turn to high-yielding varieties made Indian agriculture dependent, instead, on large imports of chemical fertilizer—and more dependent than ever on new sources of water.

The crux of Subramaniam’s strategy was to “concentrate modern inputs in irrigated areas.”³⁵ This is a prosaic way to describe a fundamental change. From the nineteenth century India’s geography of water had shaped plans for the country’s future. Now the difference between irrigated and rain-fed lands would be accepted as a necessary inequality—even a matter of strategy.

SUBRAMANIAM’S APPROACH TO AGRICULTURE GAINED A FILLIP from the overwhelming sense of economic and political crisis surrounding India in 1965. By September 1965 it was clear that the year’s summer rainfall was far short of normal: aggregate agricultural production was 17 percent down on the previous year. In a speech to persuade the chief ministers of India’s states of his policy, Subramaniam spoke of a “race against time.” Facing down criticism from the Communist H. N. Mukherjee in Parliament, who accused Subramaniam of forcing through his strategy under American pressure, the agriculture minister accused his questioner of exploiting “the psychological hour when the monsoon has failed,” and preying on the “fears” of the country.³⁶ India’s vulnerability to the monsoons, it seemed, was as deep as ever. “How helplessly we are at the mercy of the elements,” a newspaper editorial lamented in 1965, arguing that all India had to show for the previous decade of development efforts were some “shallow and tentative improvements in irrigation.”³⁷

Economic crisis merged with political turmoil. A series of military skirmishes on the border escalated into war with Pakistan, from August 5 to September 22, 1965. The catalyst was Pakistani military infiltration into Kashmir, undertaken in the hope of sparking a rebellion against Indian rule. Both sides claimed victory after a UN-brokered cease-fire; in contrast with the China war, however, the Shastri government’s military campaign was greeted as a success at home. Shastri urged struggle on both fronts with his resonant phrase: “Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!”—victory to the soldier, and victory to the farmer. An immediate consequence of the war was the abrupt cessation of American aid both to India and to Pakistan.

US president Lyndon Baines Johnson had already assumed direct charge of PL-480 shipments; with characteristic bluntness he called it the “short tether.” He would ship only enough grain to India to meet immediate needs: a direct and unabashed form of political leverage, which angered the Indian government. Subramaniam played an essential role in negotiations over restarting the shipments after the war. He had developed a reputation in Washington as an Indian leader favorable to the United States, and whose policy views tallied with American advisors’ ideas. Subramaniam forged a rapport with Orville Freeman, Johnson’s secretary of agriculture. The two men met at a UN Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Rome in November 1965 and signed a secret agreement to accelerate India’s agrarian reforms in exchange for expanded American food aid. Taking over as prime minister after Shastri’s sudden death in Tashkent, where he had gone to sign the peace treaty with Pakistan, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi visited the United States in 1966 to cement this deal. She received a warm reception from LBJ, but she felt deep humiliation at having to go to the United States as a supplicant. “I don’t ever want us to beg for food again,” Indira Gandhi told an aide in December 1966.³⁸

When the summer monsoon failed for a second successive year, in 1966, India’s food situation worsened. The state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest, was most directly affected. Facing Republican congressmen who were hostile to aid and hostile to India, the Johnson administration emphasized the scale of the food emergency in India—evoking the specter of famine for the first time since independence. In order to push through a bill boosting aid to India, Johnson told Freeman that he wanted the American public to know “that people were being hauled away dead in trucks, and that they needed food.”³⁹ By contrast Indira Gandhi’s government chose not to declare a famine in Bihar for fear of the domestic political fallout. Instead, the central government dismissed early reports of starvation from Bihar as hyperbole—just as the British imperial government had been wont to do. Famine was too much a symbol of a dark past, its conquest too vital to the political legitimacy of the Indian state, to concede this, the first famine since India’s independence. But the scale of suffering in Bihar threatened to explode and on April 20, 1967, the government of India declared the existence of famine in Palamau and Hazaribag districts; five more districts were added in time, along with others that suffered “scarcity.” The nineteenth-century Famine Codes, revised incrementally over the years, came into effect. The full force of the state swung into action to counter food shortages in Bihar. PL-480 shipments from the United States were vital, distributed in twenty thousand fair-price shops. In keeping with traditional practice, the government initiated public works on a large scale to provide employment to augment local incomes and to encourage food imports from other regions of India. Under the leadership of the socialist Jayaprakash Narain, the Bihar Relief Committee mobilized an army of volunteers, as well as donations. A year before the Biafra crisis of 1968, often held up as a watershed in the development of a global humanitarian consciousness, the Bihar crisis reached the wallets, and the television screens, of a public far away.⁴⁰

Indira Gandhi in January 1967, soon after she became India’s prime minister. CREDIT: Express Newspapers/Getty Images

By most measures, the Indian and American response to dearth in Bihar was a success. Despite major food shortages, far fewer people died than during the nineteenth-century famines; the official death toll was in the region of 2,300 people. Even if this was an underestimate, the contrast with India’s experience of famine under colonial rule was stark.

But the story has a strange and unexpected coda. Housed in the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, is an innocuously named box of archival files: “India Memos and Misc., 1 of 2, volume 8.” I learned about its contents in a fascinating article by two historians of Cold War science, Ronald Doel and Kristine Harper. Doel and Harper argue that the environmental sciences were vital to the Johnson administration’s foreign policy, and to its projection of American power overseas.⁴¹ From the 1950s, the deepening American involvement in Vietnam had generated a deepening interest in the hydrology of the Mekong River. As the US military intervened more intensively in Vietnam after 1962, mastering nature became strategically vital. American medics experimented with new drugs for the control of malaria, a prerequisite for jungle warfare: they devised mefloquine. Some went further: they had visions of intervening to alter patterns of rainfall to disrupt the agricultural base of North Vietnam. The United States had seen a long series of attempts at weather control in the twentieth century, a history characterized more by outlandish schemes than by any measurable success.⁴² Now it became a plank of military and diplomatic strategy. The Bihar drought occurred just when secret American plans for weather control in Vietnam were in testing. President Johnson connected the two, as he became the most unlikely of experts on the South Asian monsoon. Johnson would write in his memoirs that, as he looked at weather charts before approving each PL-480 shipment to India, he came to know “exactly where the rain fell and where it failed to fall in India.”⁴³

In January 1967, Pierre St. Amand arrived in Delhi with others from the Naval Ordnance Test Station on a highly classified mission; indeed, only a decade ago did the work of Doel and Harper bring it to light. Nicknamed Project Gromet, the scheme—with the secret approval of Indira Gandhi’s government—aimed to inject silver iodide into “large, high-altitude cold clouds” to force precipitation. Official acknowledgment of the program came in the form of a sly and prosaic statement: “Scientists from the United States and India are cooperating in a joint agro-meteorological research project, localized in Eastern U.P. [Uttar Pradesh] and Bihar to study the cloud physics and rain producing mechanisms over these areas of India which have incurred several droughts during the last few years.” The problem was that, in January, the skies over Bihar were virtually cloudless. They expanded their quest toward Punjab. US ambassador Chester Bowles, an Indophile, wrote in secret that “both we and the Indians want to demonstrate that if we can [force precipitation] India’s food and agriculture need not be entirely at the mercy of weather vagaries.” Soon after that, the archival trail runs cold; “GROMET quietly died,” its historians conclude.⁴⁴

Doel and Harper were interested in Project Gromet primarily for what it tells us about US foreign policy under Johnson. Seen in the light of India’s long history of struggle with the monsoon, it acquires other layers of meaning. In a sense, Project Gromet was the antithesis of the Indian Ocean Expedition. Where the new science emphasized the complexity of the monsoon climate, rooting it in teleconnected land-ocean-atmosphere interactions on a planetary scale, the attempt to make rain in Bihar epitomized the logic of control and containment. Even then, the architects of the plan feared the consequences of engineered rain in India having an unwanted impact across the border in Pakistan.

THE YEAR 1967 WAS A TURNING POINT IN INDIA’S POLITICAL HISTORY. Having ruled India with a comfortable parliamentary majority since independence, the Congress party took a drubbing at the polls in India’s third general election. While they remained in power in New Delhi, their majority was reduced—more significantly, they lost control of state governments in states including Tamil Nadu (to the regional party born of the anti-caste movement, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), Kerala (to the Communists), and West Bengal (to a coalition including the Communist Party). A generation after independence, the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru was no longer enough to muster support for the party that had led the nationalist movement. The coalition of social forces that underpinned Congress dominance was fragile; in many places it unraveled. A confidential assessment by the British High Commission in Delhi reported to London that the election results reflected “impatience with the chronic failure to deal with rising prices, low wages [and] food shortages, amounting to famine in certain areas.”⁴⁵

Occasionally, conventional accounts of this political moment include climate among their explanations for the change. India’s political and economic transformation in the 1960s, writes political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, owes much to the “serendipity of the monsoon.”⁴⁶ In recent years, it has become common once again for historians to see climate as a force underpinning political events.⁴⁷ But to think of India’s political transformation as “caused” by the failure of the monsoon would be unduly simplistic. The outcome of the 1967 elections reflected the hopes of India’s voters; it was the outcome of new languages of political mobilization deployed by India’s parties; it distilled new struggles for power and justice and recognition unleashed by mass democracy, which could no longer be contained within a dominant party system. A richer picture emerges if we see climate not as an external force determining human outcomes, but rather as a source of all-too-human fears and anxieties. Only in the context of century-long fears about India’s monsoon climate—the deep historical association of monsoon failure with famine—can we understand why so many experienced the drought of the mid-1960s as evidence of political failure.

III

Indira Gandhi was one of few heads of state to attend the UN’s first conference on the human environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972. In her rousing speech to the plenary session, she set out ecological problems that were already a matter of public discussion in India:

We share your concern at the rapid deterioration of flora and fauna. Some of our own wildlife has been wiped out, miles of forests with beautiful old trees, mute witnesses of history, have been destroyed. Even though our industrial development is in its infancy, and at its most difficult stage, we are taking various steps to deal with incipient environmental imbalances. The more so because of our concern for the human being—a species which is also imperiled. In poverty he is threatened by malnutrition and disease, in weakness by war, in richness by the pollution brought about by his own prosperity.⁴⁸

But her diagnosis of the root cause differed from that of many of the conference’s promoters, whose vision was consumed by dark Malthusian nightmares in the Third World, epitomized by biologist Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, published in 1968. The opening lines of Ehrlich’s book described a “stinking hot night” in Delhi. “As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area… the streets seemed alive with people,” he wrote: “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming… People, people, people, people.”⁴⁹

In response, Mrs. Gandhi set out a position that saw environmental degradation as primarily a problem of poverty: a problem of distribution, not of numbers. She reminded her audience that “we inhabit a divided world.” She attributed historical responsibility for the despoliation of Earth where it rightly belonged: with the wealthy countries of the world. “Many of the advanced countries of today have reached their present affluence by their domination over other races and countries,” she said, and through “the exploitation of their own natural resources.” The rich world “got a head start through sheer ruthlessness, undisturbed by feelings of compassion or by abstract theories of freedom, equality or justice.” But now the poor countries were being told that they could not do the same. “The riches and the labour of the colonized countries played no small part in the industrialization and prosperity of the West,” she reminded her audience, but in the 1970s, “as we struggle to create a better life for our people, it is in vastly different circumstances, for obviously in today’s eagle-eyed watchfulness we cannot indulge in such practices even for a worthwhile purpose.” The development of a middle class in India, or even just the provision of minimally decent standards of living to its poorest citizens, took place with a growing awareness of finite resources. “We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further,” she insisted, “and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people.” Her most resonant phrase, and the one for which her speech is remembered, was in the form of a question: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?”

She raised the stakes, asking: “How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean when their own lives are contaminated at the source?” She resisted the binary choice of development or environmental protection. “The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty,” she declared, and “nor can poverty be eradicated without the use of science and technology.” In “science and technology” lay India’s great hope.

Gandhi concluded by describing to the audience how she saw India’s quest since independence. “For the last quarter of a century,” she said, “we have been engaged in an enterprise unparalleled in human history—the provision of basic needs to one-sixth of mankind within the span of one or two generations.”⁵⁰ In this evocation of speed, urgency, and scale lay Gandhi’s recognition of the demographic and material transformation that was sweeping the world. The edge of Malthusian panic remained, despite Indira Gandhi’s eloquent rebuttal at Stockholm. In time just such a sense, that population growth was an exorable and destabilizing force, fed her own fears of conspiracy. In the context of labor unrest and judicial challenges to the legitimacy of her election victory, they underpinned the siege mentality that led her to declare a state of emergency in 1975, suspending India’s democratic constitution for the first and (so far) the only time, using a colonial-era provision. It would lead Indira Gandhi’s government to enact a brutal population control program involving gross abuses, including forced sterilizations.⁵¹

In Indira Gandhi’s vision, many disparate concerns came together to constitute an overarching problem of “the environment”—population growth and the finitude of natural resources; concerns about the impact of rapid development on human health; concerns about species extinction and disappearing habitats. The international conference coincided with the earliest attempts to confront these challenges at home in India. Mrs. Gandhi’s government sponsored the Water Act of 1974, which was among the first attempts to deal with an environmental issue on a national basis in India. The act created pollution control boards at both the state and the national levels; the boards were given the authority to determine permissible levels of pollution, setting limits on the composition and quantity of effluent that factories, for instance, could discharge into water bodies. The legislation took an expansive view of water, covering “streams, inland waters, subterranean waters, and sea or tidal waters.” But the law proved, and it continues to prove, difficult to implement. Pollution control bodies did not have the will or the power to prosecute powerful local industrialists. The Water Act faced many challenges in the courts, often on the grounds that it violated the constitutional right to carry on a trade or business. For instance, in 1981 lawyers for a firm called Aggarwal Textile Industries, challenging a ruling from Rajasthan state’s pollution control board, argued that “the problem of prevention of water pollution is a problem of vast magnitude and… it would be beyond the means of an individual to prevent or control the pollution resulting from an industry set up by him.” In a significant number of cases, offenders were allowed to continue their polluting activities.⁵²

DESPITE DAWNING AWARENESS OF THE QUESTION OF SUSTAINABILITY, the crux of India’s response to the crisis of food and population lay in a massive increase in the use of water. The early twentieth century’s faith in the possibility of expansion without limit was reinvigorated. The precondition for the growth of the Green Revolution in India was an expansion in irrigation. And the water available from surface irrigation works, however ambitious in scale, was insufficient. Cultivators in arid parts of India had known for centuries, and British administrators recognized in the nineteenth century, that South Asia’s groundwater resources provided the most immediate insurance against drought. Many regions of South Asia had ancient and elaborate systems of well irrigation, though this infrastructure had fallen into disrepair in many places by the nineteenth century. The advantages of groundwater resources are manifest in South Asia: groundwater is locally available on demand and requires far less infrastructure than surface irrigation works; groundwater is spared the large-scale water loss from evaporation that reservoirs experience. Groundwater resources are more resilient to episodic monsoon failure. Until the 1960s, groundwater could not be mobilized on a large enough scale to meet India’s food requirements. The arrival of the tubewell changed that decisively.

Tubewells are a humble technology, unlikely harbingers of a hydrological revolution. A tubewell is a well driven by an electric pump, consisting of a long stainless steel tube that is bored into an underground aquifer. Historian and architect Anthony Acciavatti argues that they represent an “inversion” of the monumental water technologies: dams and canals. In contrast with dams, the tubewell has a “minimal footprint and maximum draft of water, it creates undreamed of independence and three-dimensional chaos.”⁵³

An electric tubewell, of the kind that proliferated in India in the 1960s. CREDIT: Illustration by Matilde Grimaldi

The Indian government encouraged the adoption of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice by subsidizing the capital costs of infrastructure for the intensive exploitation of groundwater. State electricity boards reduced the cost of electricity. By the 1970s, unable to bear the cost of monitoring energy use by millions of farmers across widely dispersed areas, state electricity boards opted for flat tariffs. This gave large farmers an incentive to use as much energy as possible to extract water from underground. As a result, agriculture’s share of total energy use in India grew from 10 percent in 1970–1971 to 30 percent by 1995, even as state electricity boards accumulated huge losses. By 2009, groundwater accounted for 60 percent of India’s irrigated area, and surface irrigation for only 30 percent.⁵⁴ Just as they shared the waters of the Indus, India and Pakistan came to share a new dependence on groundwater. Embracing the same package of hybrid seeds and intensive fertilizer use, Pakistan’s food security became even more reliant on irrigation than India’s. All the while, and despite the declining importance of surface irrigation, the profusion of large dams continued. Dam construction was unstoppable, even as underground water now supplied the greater share of water for irrigation. Large dams had acquired enormous symbolic power, to the point where they epitomized the conquest of nature by technology. Three decades after India’s independence there were also many vested interests in the engineering and construction industries committed to the continued proliferation of dams. Their social and ecological costs multiplied through the 1970s; as we shall see in the next chapter, their costs provoked widespread resistance in the 1980s.

Utopian technological schemes for the capture of India’s waters flourished in the 1970s, alongside—and as though unaware of—growing understanding of the scale, power, and unpredictability of climate. Although Roger Revelle was a pioneer of oceanography and an architect of the 1960s’ Indian Ocean Expedition, he turned in the 1970s to more practical matters. Revelle moved from Scripps to Harvard to found the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. In 1975 he wrote an essay with his Indian colleague V. Lakshminarayana on what they called the “Ganges Water Machine.” They expressed concern that “deeply embedded cultural, social, and economic problems inhibit modernization of agriculture and fuller utilization of water resources” in India. They envisaged that “the introduction of technological changes on the required scale might break the chains of tradition and injustice that now bind the people in misery and poverty.” They had in mind a technological mirroring of the vast, interconnected hydraulic system that linked the monsoon rains, the Himalayan rivers, and the waters underground—an expanded network of bunds, dams, and, above all, the massive expansion of groundwater pumps. The same year, K. L. Rao, a veteran of Indian irrigation, published an even grander plan. He returned to the dream of Sir Arthur Cotton, irrigation pioneer of the nineteenth century, in proposing a large scheme to transfer water—through a network of canals—from the wettest to the driest parts of India.⁵⁵

India’s experience of water-driven growth in the 1970s found echoes across Asia. The 1970s also saw rapid growth in Chinese agriculture, as China developed its own path toward a green revolution. The unprecedented expansion in food production in China in the 1970s built upon the extension of agricultural research stations right down to the level of local communes. Like the Indian government, the Chinese state viewed the rapid growth in population and the pressure on arable land with alarm, reversing the pronatalism that characterized the first two decades after the revolution. As in India, Chinese farmers’ adoption of high-yielding seed varieties depended on large quantities of chemical fertilizer. In the 1970s, the Chinese fertilizer industry expanded through a dispersed network of small-scale factories. High-yield dwarf rice varieties spread especially rapidly in China in the 1970s, boosting harvests. And in China, as in India, the agricultural growth of the 1970s depended on mining underground water. Electric pumps played almost as significant a role in expanding irrigation in China as they did in India. In 1965, there were approximately half a million mechanized irrigation and drainage devices in China; by 1978, there were more than 5 million.⁵⁶ But in other ways, the Chinese approach to growing more food diverged from India’s. In keeping with the Maoist emphasis on mass political mobilization, China’s agricultural strategy was more broadly based than India’s. Historian Sigrid Schmalzer describes it as a “patchwork of methodologies,” in which mechanization coexisted with labor-intensive terracing, chemical fertilizer with traditional practices of night-soil collection and the application of pig manure.⁵⁷ The water- and fertilizer-fueled growth of the 1970s laid the groundwork for China’s further agricultural expansion in the 1980s; but with the end of agrarian collectivization and the arrival of market reforms, rural inequalities, too, grew wider.

IV

The water inequalities that India has always faced deepened in the 1960s and 1970s; they were accentuated by the uneven spread of tubewells. From the late 1960s, as the Green Revolution took off, the drier regions of India’s northwest and southeast emerged as the centers of agricultural growth—a result of groundwater exploitation, fueled by electrification to allow the use of high-yielding seeds. The water-rich areas of India’s northeast, by contrast, continued to rely on rainfall, utilizing relatively inefficient diesel pumps for shallow groundwater irrigation; they remained at risk of regular waterlogging, but lacked the infrastructure to use the surplus water for storage or groundwater recharge.⁵⁸ Where large dams promised to create energy through hydroelectric power, pumps used it in large quantities to mine water.

These inequalities were manifest between 1970 and 1973, when parts of western and central India experienced three successive years of drought. The western state of Maharashtra was worst affected. In the World Bank’s archives in Washington is a fifty-page typescript account of the Maharashtra drought; scrawled at the top is a handwritten instruction: “Circulate.” The author was agricultural economist Wolf Ladejinsky (1899–1975). He was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family who fled the Russian civil war to the United States in 1922. Ladejinsky studied at Columbia University and joined the US Department of Agriculture’s foreign service, coming to specialize in Asia’s agrarian problems. He served in the American occupation of Japan, where he played a key role in overseeing land reform, as he then did in Taiwan. Ladejinsky came under suspicion in the McCarthy era, but President Eisenhower defended him and appointed him to direct land reform in South Vietnam in the late 1950s, just as American involvement there was deepening. Through the 1960s, Ladejinsky continued to focus on the problems of rural Asia, working with the World Bank. He was anti-communist but saw the importance of land reform in societies where landholdings were highly concentrated in a few hands.⁵⁹

Ladejinsky had worked in India on numerous occasions, and the World Bank sent him back in 1972 to investigate a drought that threatened hunger in Maharashtra. “This is an occasion when the writer intends to keep his emotions in leash,” he promised at the outset of his note, fearing that his “credibility may suffer from dramatizing the incontrovertible cruelty of nature—no rain and no crops.” He observed that “historically the struggle of the Maharashtra farmer has been one of quest for water.” In an echo of British commentary in the late nineteenth century, he personified the monsoon as a force, as when he referred to “the monsoon playing truant.” He described his journey out to the countryside from Poona; it was not long before he found himself traveling through a landscape that “leaves one shaken about the perversity of nature.” Lack of drinking water was a problem everywhere. More than shortages of food, it was a lack of water that, Ladejinsky saw, led farmers to uproot themselves and migrate in search of work. He described the sight of water tankers surrounded by people at famine relief camps—tankers that had been donated by oil companies as an act of charity. Words mattered, Ladejinsky argued: neither the state nor the central government wished to invoke the term “famine”—seen as a relic of a dark colonial past—but their use of the mild term “scarcity” masked the severity of the crisis.⁶⁰

The drought in Maharashtra showed how little the hydrologic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s had touched many parts of rural India. In his detailed study of the drought, economist Jean Drèze noted that only 8 percent of land in the region was irrigated. For those on rain-fed lands, Drèze wrote, “the meagre harvest of coarse grains remain a gamble on the monsoon and the land offers a spectacle of desolation and dust during the slack season.” The drought led to a 14 percent drop in food availability; the threat of starvation was very real. It was averted by concerted government response, arguably one of the most effective in the history of independent India. The Food Corporation of India organized the transportation of wheat from other parts of the country. It was sold at subsidized prices through thirty thousand fair-price shops distributed across the state. At the same time, a large program of public works generated employment; up to 2 million people a day attended these works, building roads and bridges and digging wells. This boosted local incomes and in turn pushed up food prices in Maharashtra, attracting supplies from beyond the state—often illegally, since the government had barred the interstate trade in grain during the crisis. Those illicit supplies, even at inflated prices, helped to compensate for the shortfall.⁶¹

In the end it was not big technology but rather the unheralded public distribution system of India that averted catastrophe in Maharashtra. The drought showed how patchy and uneven the reach of water engineering was. It showed the importance of public policy and prompt intervention. But these were not the lessons learned. The drought did nothing to dent confidence in the idea that all India needed was irrigation, now from deeper and deeper underground.

V

Scientists’ understanding of the monsoon advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, spurred by the data collected by the Indian Ocean Expedition and by the International Geophysical Year that had preceded it, in 1957–1958. At the heart of monsoon science now were two phenomena. The first was “moist processes”—most simply, the release of latent heat and the effect of clouds on radiation. The second was the coupling of ocean and atmosphere. There was a new awareness that the monsoon system formed, as one meteorologist put it, a “complex of seemingly disparate parts: two fluids, the mobile air and the changing ocean below.” Increasingly sophisticated computer models could turn each of these processes on and off in an attempt to isolate and investigate different variables.⁶²

The most important breakthrough came with the work of Jacob Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist at UCLA—son of Vilhelm Bjerknes. Father and son were both part of the team that had, in the 1910s, discovered and named the phenomenon of polar fronts from their observatory in Bergen. Now, using data generated by the expeditions of the International Geophysical Year, Jacob Bjerknes determined the mechanism driving a phenomenon that Gilbert Walker had first observed in the 1920s, during and just after his time as director of the Indian meteorological service. Walker had called it the Southern Oscillation, an oscillating contrast in atmospheric pressure across the Pacific Ocean, as measured in Darwin and Tahiti. But Walker had been unable to determine the cause of this swing in pressure; Bjerknes discovered that the answer lay in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.