CHAPTER ONE: THE SHAPE OF MODERN ASIA
1. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 116; Pranay Lal, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2017), 258.
2. Norton Ginsburg, ed., The Pattern of Asia (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 5–6.
3. V. Ramanathan et al., “Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Impact on South Asian Climate and Hydrological Cycle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 5326–5333.
4. Asia Society, Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future, a Report by the Leadership Group on Water Security in Asia (New York: Asia Society, 2009), 9; C. J. Vörösmarty et al., “Global Threats to Human Water Security and River Biodiversity,” Nature 467 (September 30, 2010): 555–561; Chris Buckley and Vanessa Piao, “Rural Water, Not City Smog, May be China’s Pollution Nightmare,” New York Times, April 11, 2016; Malavika Vyawahare, “Not Just Scarcity, Groundwater Contamination Is India’s Hidden Crisis,” Hindustan Times, March 22, 2017.
5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Geneva: IPCC, 2014); World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013); Deepti Singh et al., “Observed Changes in Extreme Wet and Dry Spells During the South Asian Summer Monsoon,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 456–461.
6. Benjamin Strauss, “Coastal Nations, Megacities, Face 20 Feet of Sea Rise,” Climate Central, July 9, 2015, accessed January 12, 2018, www.climatecentral.org/news/nations-megacities-face-20-feet-of-sea-level-rise-19217.
7. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History, Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.
9. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
10. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).
11. Much of the scholarship on Chinese environmental history over the long term is surveyed in Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); see also Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). On India, key works include Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), and Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
12. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953), 26.
13. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” Annales, economies, sociétés, civilisations 13 (1958), 725–753; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), quotation from Braudel on p. 23.
14. “Sampling device,” from Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279.
15. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 7 (2009): 1–29.
16. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 44–63.
17. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 48.
18. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: HarperCollins, 2007).
19. Peter D. Clift and R. Alan Plumb, The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vii.
20. Sunita Narain, Science and Democracy Lecture, Harvard University, December 4, 2017.
21. Gilbert T. Walker, “The Meteorology of India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 73 (1925): 838–855, quotation on p. 839; Charles Normand, “Monsoon Seasonal Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–473, 469; A. Turner and H. Annamalai, “Climate Change and the South Asian Monsoon,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 587–595.
22. Bob Yirka, “Earliest Example of Large Hydraulic Enterprise Excavated in China,” Phys.org, December 5, 2017, accessed December 15, 2017, phys.org/news/2017-12-earliest-large-hydraulic-enterprise-excavated.amp.
CHAPTER TWO: WATER AND EMPIRE
1. “Madras Government request the Court of Directors’ sanction for the expenditure of 5000 rupees on deepening the Pamban Channel between India and Ceylon,” October 1833–March 1835, Board’s Collections: British Library [hereafter BL] India Office Records [hereafter IOR], F/4/1523/60207.
2. H. Morris, “A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District in the Presidency of Madras,” (1878): BL, IOR, V/27/66/18.
3. E. Halley, “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds and the Monsoons, Observable in the Seas Between and Near the Tropicks, with an attempt to assign the physical cause of the sail winds,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 16 (1686): 153–168.
4. The clearest explanations of the monsoon can be found in Peter J. Webster, “Monsoons,” Scientific American 245 (1981): 108–119; and Peter D. Clift and R. Alan Plumb, The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 1; Jos Gommans, “The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. AD 1100–1800,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 1–23.
6. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 632–636.
7. Diana Eck, “Ganga: The Goddess in Hindu Sacred Geography,” in The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, ed. John Hawley and Donna Wulff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 166–183; Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony, 2012); Anne Feldhaus, Connected Places: Religion, Pilgrimage and the Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
8. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957); Kathleen D. Morrison, “Dharmic Projects, Imperial Reservoirs, and New Temples of India: An Historical Perspective on Dams in India,” Conservation and Society 8 (2010): 182–195; Kathleen D. Morrison, Daroji Valley: Landscape, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System (New Delhi: Manohar Press, 2009).
9. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
10. James L. Wescoat Jr., “Early Water Systems in Mughal India,” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 2, ed. Attilo Petruccioli (Rome: Carucci Editions, 1985), 51–57.
11. Babur Nama, trans. Annette Susannah Beveridge (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 93, 264–265. For later discussion of Mughal-era irrigation, see Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707) (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 24–36.
12. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 636–637.
13. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lieberman, Strange Parallels.
14. Gommans, Mughal Warfare.
15. Gommans, Mughal Warfare; The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, vol. 3, trans. H. Beveridge (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1910), 135–136.
16. Irfan Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), reference to Kanauj on plate 8B.
17. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, “The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48 (Fall 2014): 1–19.
18. Anthony Reid, “Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 31–52.
19. Armando Coresao, trans., The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 3:92–93.
20. Sinappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 98–99.
21. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988): 401–424; Richards, The Mughal Empire; Alam and Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State; “giant pump” from Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 694–696.
22. David Ludden, “History Outside Civilisation and the Mobility of South Asia,” South Asia 17 (1994): 1–23.
23. H. V. Bowen, John McAleer, and Robert J. Blyth, Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011).
24. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
25. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1; Murari Kumar Jha, “The Rhythms of the Economy and Navigation along the Ganga River,” in From the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, ed. Satish Chandra and Himanshu Prabha Ray (New Delhi: Manohar, 2013), 221–247.
26. James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan; or, The Mogul Empire (London: M. Brown, 1788), 280.
27. T. F. Robinson, “William Roxburgh, 1751–1815: The Founding Father of Indian Botany” (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003).
28. “A Meteorological Diary, & c. Kept at Fort St. George in the East Indies. By Mr William Roxburgh, Assistant-Surgeon to the Hospital at Said Fort. Communicated by Sir John Pringle, Bart. P.R.S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 68 (1778): 180–193.
29. Robinson, “William Roxburgh.”
30. Alexander Dalrymple, ed., Oriental Repertory (London: G. Biggs, 1793–1797), 2:58–59.
31. Record of proceedings at Fort Saint George, February 8, 1793, Madras Public Consultations, January 28–March 8, 1793, BL IOR, P/241/37.
32. Letter from William Roxburgh to Joseph Banks, August 30, 1791: BL, IOR, European Manuscripts, EUR/K148, ff. 243–47; Andrew Ross cited in Robinson, “William Roxburgh,” 224n4.
33. William Roxburgh, “Remarks on the Land Winds and their Causes,” Transactions of the Medical Society of London (1810), 189–211.
34. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 399–400.
35. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
36. Letter from William Roxburgh to Andrew Ross, February 14, 1793, in Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 73.
37. Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 56; Robinson, “William Roxburgh,” quotations on pp. 237–238, 241.
38. Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 656; E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 91–112; Terje Tvedt, Water and Society: Changing Perceptions of Societal and Historical Development (London: I.B. Tauris 2016), 19–44.
39. Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains & c. (London: J. Murray, 1854), 1:87.
40. James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, 1837), 90–93; on climate and racial thinking, see David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
41. Arthur Thomas Cotton, “Report on the Irrigation, & c., of Rajahmundry District” [1844], House of Commons Sessional Papers, XLI (1850), quotation on pp. 4–5 of Cotton’s report.
42. Cotton, “Report on the Irrigation, & c., of Rajahmundry District,” 13.
43. Arthur Cotton, “On a Communication between India and China by the line of the Burhampooter and Yang-tsze,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 37 (1867): 231–239, quotation on p. 232.
44. For a detailed account of their rivalry, see Alan Robertson, Epic Engineering: Great Canals and Barrages of Victorian India, ed. Jeremy Berkoff (Melrose, UK: Beechwood Melrose Publishing, 2013).
45. Anthony Acciavatti, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (New York: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2015), 120.
46. James L. Wescoat Jr., “The Water and Landscape Heritage of Mughal Delhi,” accessed June 22, 2016, www.delhiheritagecity.org/pdfhtml/mughal/JW-the-water-and-landscape-heritage-of-mughal-delhi-Oct8.pdf.
47. Henry Yule, “A Canal Act of the Emperor Akbar, with some notes and remarks on the History of the Western Jumna Canals,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 15 (1846).
48. Proby Cautley, “On the Use of Wells, etc. in Foundations as Practiced by the Natives of the Northern Doab,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 8 (1839): 327–340.
49. Proby Cautley, Report on the Central Doab Canal, BL, IOR, V/27/733/3/1.
50. G. W. MacGeorge, Ways and Works in India: Being an Account of Public Works in that Country from the Earliest Times up to the Present Day (London: Archibald Constable & Company, 1894), 153.
51. B. H. Tremenheere, “On Public Works in the Bengal Presidency,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers 17 (1858): 483–513.
52. Proby T. Cautley, Report on the Ganges Canal Works: from their Commencement until the Opening of the Canal in 1854, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1860), 3:2.
53. Jan Lucassen, “The Brickmakers’ Strike on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849,” International Review of Social History 51 (2006) supplement: 47–83.
54. Ganges Canal Committee, A Short Account of the Ganges Canal (Calcutta: Ganges Canal Committee, 1854), 3; the Hindi version was published as Ganga Ki Nahar Ka Sankshepa Varnana (Agra: Ganges Canal Committee, 1854).
55. “Short Account of the Ganges Canal,” North American Review, October 1855, 81.
56. David Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 648–721; Mayo quoted in David Ludden, India and South Asia: A Short History (London: Oneworld, 2014), 150.
57. David Mosse (with assistance from M. Sivan), The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 29; Terje Tvedt, “‘Water Systems’: Environmental History and the Deconstruction of Nature,” Environment and History 16 (2010): 143–166, quotation on p. 160.
58. Amitav Ghosh, “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail,” Economic and Political Weekly, June 21, 2008, 56–62.
59. Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History of India’s Modernization through Science and Technology (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1960), 7–8, 13–16.
60. “Impediments to the Traffic on the Ganges and Jumna, arising from the number of customs chokeys,” (February 5, 1833), BL, IOR, F/4/1506.
61. Bernstein, Steamboats, 28–31.
62. Bernstein, Steamboats, 84–99.
63. David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
64. Bernstein, Steamboats, 99.
65. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 74; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
66. Ian Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
67. Minute by Lord Dalhousie to the Court of Directors, April 20, 1853, in Railway Construction in India: Select Documents, ed. S. Settar (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1999), 2:23–57.
68. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 221.
69. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; Edwin Merrall, A Letter to Col. Arthur Cotton, upon the Introduction of Railways in India upon the English Plan (London: E. Wilson, 1860), quotations on pp. 8 and 47.
70. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 422–426, quotation on p. 426; Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
71. C. H. Lushington, quoted in Tarasankar Banerjee, Internal Market of India, 1834–1900 (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1966), 90–91.
72. Quotation from Banerjee, Internal Market, 323; Dave Donaldson, “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure,” (working paper, MIT/NBER, 2010); Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson, “Railroads the Demise of Famine in Colonial India,” (working paper, LSE/MIT/NBER, 2012).
73. On immobility see Joya Chatterji, “On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘Age of Mobility,’” Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 511–541; quotation from Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, 110.
74. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 220–221, 358; Madhav Rao, cited in Kerr, Engines of Change, 4.
75. Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine.
76. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 328–331; Kerr, Engines of Change, 47–51.
77. Rudyard Kipling, “The Bridge Builders,” in The Day’s Work (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899), 3–50.
78. W. W. Hunter, Statistical Account of Bengal (London: Trubner & Co., 1877), 14:31. On railways and the ecology of malaria: Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), 117–139.
79. New York Observer and Chronicle, December 8, 1864.
80. J. E. Gastrell and Henry F. Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone of the 5th of October 1864 (Calcutta: O.T. Cutter, 1866), 11, 31–32.
81. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 139.
82. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 109, 127.
83. Henry Piddington, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms (London: John Wiley, 1848); description of “storm wave” in Henry Piddington, The Horn-Book of Storms for the Indian and China Seas (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1844), 20; Piddington’s inspiration was William Reid, An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms By Means of Facts (London: John Weale, 1838).
84. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 11–13.
85. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 4.
86. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 70.
87. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 14–15.
88. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 108.
89. Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 1:97.
CHAPTER THREE: THIS PARCHED LAND
1. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001); on the China famine, see Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
2. The Constitution of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and its Rules (Poona, 1870); quote from S. R. Mehrotra, “The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha: The Early Phase (1870–1880),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9 (1969): 293–321; C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
3. Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, “Famine Narrative, No. 1,” October 21, 1876.
4. Medical and Sanitary Report of the Native Army of Madras, for the Year 1875 (Madras: Government Press, 1876), 49; Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 2 vols. (London: HM Stationery Office, 1880); William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878), 1:6; W. W. Hunter, The Indian Empire: Its People, History and Products (London: Trubner & Co., 1886), 542. For a perspective from current climate science: Edward R. Cook et al., “Asian Monsoon Failure and Megadrought over the Last Millennium,” Science 328 (2010): 486–489.
5. Arup Maharatna, “Regional Variation in Demographic Consequences of Famines in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly 29 (June 4, 1994): 1399–1410; Arup Maharatna, The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Tim Dyson, “On the Demography of South Asian Famines, I,” Population Studies 45 (1991): 5–25.
6. Richard Strachey, “Physical Causes of Indian Famines,” May 18, 1877, Notices of the Proceedings of the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 8 (1879): 407–426.
7. “The Famine, Letter from the Affected Districts,” The Examiner, March 24, 1877, 363.
8. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:67–68, 1:155–156.
9. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:174–175.
10. J. Norman Lockyer and W. Hunter, “Sun-Spots and Famines,” The Nineteenth Century, (November 1877), 601.
11. Strachey, “Physical Causes,” 411.
12. Mark Elvin, “Who Was Responsible for the Weather? Moral Meteorology in Late Imperial China,” Osiris 13 (1998): 213–237; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 425–427.
13. “The Causes of Famine in India,” New York Times (NYT), August 25, 1878, 6.
14. “The Famine: Letter from the Affected Districts,” The Examiner, March 24, 1877, 363.
15. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.
16. Villiyappa Pillai, Panchalakshana Thirumukavilasam [1899] (Madurai: Sri Ramachandra Press, 1932).
17. W. G. Pedder, “Famine and Debt in India,” The Nineteenth Century (September 1877).
18. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:172–174.
19. Letter from Sarvajanik Sabha Rooms to S. C. Bayley, Additional Secretary to the Government of India, April 1, 1878, in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Journal 1 (1878).
20. “Letter from the Affected Districts” (1877), 363.
21. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [2016]).
22. Cited in Davis, Arid Lands, 83.
23. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.
24. Philindus, “Famines and Floods in India,” Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1, 1877, 236–256; George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography As Modified by Human Action (New York: Scribner, 1865).
25. “Famine Narrative no. 1,” October 21, 1876, in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Journal 1.
26. Ramachandra Guha, “An Early Environmental Debate: The Making of the 1878 Forest Act,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27 (1990): 65–84.
27. Valentine Ball, “On Jungle Products Used as Articles of Food in Chota Nagpur,” in Jungle Life in India: Or, the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (London: Thos. De La Rue & Co., 1880), 695–699.
28. George Chesney, “Indian Famines,” Nineteenth Century 2 (November 1877): 603–620.
29. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:148–150.
30. Florence Nightingale, “A Missionary Health Officer in India,” Good Words, January 20, 1879, 492–496.
31. “Causes of Famine,” NYT, August 25, 1878.
32. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty of India (London: Vincent Brooks, Day and Son, 1878), 42–43, 66.
33. See especially Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.
34. Chandrika Kaul, “Digby, William (1849–1904),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
35. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 1, Famine Relief (London: Stationery Office, 1880): 9–10; Jean Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India” (working paper 45, WIDER: United Nations University, Helsinki, 1988), 45.
36. “Wasting Public Money,” The Economist, July 4, 1874.
37. The Black Pamphlet of Calcutta. The Famine of 1874. By a Bengal Civilian (Calcutta: William Ridgeway, 1876).
38. Digby, Famine Campaign, 1:48.
39. “Letter from the Affected Districts,” (1877), 363.
40. Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron, 152–153.
41. Lance Brennan, “The Development of the Indian Famine Code,” in Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, ed. Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), 91–112.
42. Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India.”
43. On Caird, see Peter J. Gray, “Famine and Land in Ireland and India, 1845–1880: James Caird and the Political Economy of Hunger,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 193–215.
44. W. Stanley Jevons, “Sun-Spots and Commercial Crises,” Nature 19 (1879): 588–590; Lockyer and Hunter, “Sun-Spots and Famines.”
45. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 1, 7.
46. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 2, Measures of Protection and Prevention (London: Stationery Office, 1880), 9.
47. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part 2, 150–151.
48. Ira Klein, “When the Rains Failed: Famine, Relief, and Mortality in British India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 21 (1984): 185–214, quotation on p. 185.
49. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1898 (London: Stationery Office, 1898); Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1901 (London: Stationery Office, 1901).
50. George Lambert, India, the Horror-Stricken Empire: Containing a Full Account of the Famine, Plague, and Earthquake of 1896–7; including a Complete Narrative of the Relief Work through the Home and Foreign Commission (Elkhard, IN: Mennonite Publishing Co., 1898).
51. Cited in C. S. Ramage, The Great Indian Drought of 1899 (Boulder, CO: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1977), 4.
52. Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1900), 11–14, 18–19, 27, 47.
53. Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 341–347; Georgina Brewis, “‘Fill Full the Mouth of Famine’: Voluntary Action in Famine Relief in India, 1896–1901,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010): 887–918.
54. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 22, 9.
55. Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88.
56. Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson, “Railroads and the Demise of Famine in Colonial India” (working paper, 2012), available at http://dave-donaldson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Burgess_Donaldson_Volatility_Paper.pdf.
57. Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 208–209.
58. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
CHAPTER FOUR: THE AQUEOUS ATMOSPHERE
1. J. Elliott, Vizagapatam and Backergunge Cyclones (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877), 165–167. The most common spelling of his name is Eliot, which is the variant I use in the text, but in this publication it appears as Elliott.
2. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 158, 182.
3. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 159.
4. Elliott, Vizagapatam, 183.
5. Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21 (2006): 229–250; on Britain’s role, see Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Weather Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
6. Luke Howard, Essay On the Modification of Clouds [1803], 3rd ed. (London: John Churchill & Sons, 1865); Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, “Nouvelle définition des termes que j’emploie pour exprimer certaines formes des nuages qu’il importe de distinguer dans l’annotation de l’état du ciel,” Annuaire Météorologique pour l’an XIII de la République Française 3 (1805): 112–133; H. Hildebrandsson, A. Riggenbach, and L. Teisserenc de Bort, eds., Atlas International des Nuages (Paris: IMO, 1896); for further discussion, see Lorraine Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy: Describing the Indescribable,” Representations 135 (2016): 45–71, and Richard Hamblyn, Clouds: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2017).
7. University of Madras, Tamil Lexicon (Madras: University of Madras, 1924–1936), 219, 1680; William Crooke, A Glossary of North Indian Peasant Life, ed. Shahid Amin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), Appendix D, “A Calendar of Agricultural Sayings”; C. A. Benson, “Tamil Sayings and Proverbs on Agriculture,” Bulletin, Department of Agriculture, Madras No. 29, New Series (1933), paragraphs 144, 163, 168, 213, 311. I have modified some of the translations from the Tamil.
8. Henry F. Blanford, “Winds of Northern India, in Relation to the Temperature and Vapour-Constituent of the Atmosphere,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 164 (1874): 563.
9. India, Meteorological Department, Report on the Meteorology of India in 1876 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government, 1877).
10. India, Meteorological Department, Report on the Meteorology of India in 1877 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of the Government, 1878).
11. “Administrative Report of the Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India, 1884–85,” BL, IOR, V/24/3022, quotations on pp. 5–14.
12. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Mandy Bailey, “Women and the RAS: 100 Years of Fellowship,” Astronomy & Geophysics 57 (February 2016): 19–21.
13. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni: Pioneer of Science Popularisation in Punjab, ed. Narender K. Sehgal and Subodh Mahanti (New Delhi: Vigyan Prasar, 1997), 15–17.
14. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni, 16.
15. Henry F. Blanford, Meteorology of India: Being the Second Part of the Indian Meteorologist’s Vade-Mecum (Calcutta: Government Printer, 1877), 48.
16. Henry F. Blanford, A Practical Guide to the Climates and Weather of India, Ceylon and Burmah and the Storms of the Indian Seas (London: MacMillan and Co., 1889), 42.
17. Blanford, Meteorology of India, 144–145.
18. Blanford, Meteorology of India, 48.
19. Blanford, Practical Guide, 64.
20. Henry F. Blanford, The Rainfall of India, India Meteorological Memoirs vol. 3 (Calcutta: Government Printer, 1886–1888), 76.
21. Blanford, Rainfall of India, 79–81.
22. Henry F. Blanford, “On the Connexion of the Himalaya Snowfall with Dry Winds and Seasons of Drought in India,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 37 (1884): 3–22.
23. List of library holdings in “Administration Report of the Meteorological Department in Western India for the year 1880–81,” BL, IOR, V/24/3023.
24. Blanford, “On the Connexion of the Himalaya Snowfall.”
25. Richard Grove, “The East India Company, the Raj and El Niño: The Critical Role Played by Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections, 1770–1930,” in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard Grove, Vineeta Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 301–323.
26. John Eliot, Climatological Atlas of India (Edinburgh: J. Bartholomew & Co., 1906), xi–xii.
27. Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1912).
28. Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni, 23.
29. John Eliot, Handbook of Cyclonic Storms in the Bay of Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1890).
30. Rev. Jose Algué, The Cyclones of the Far East, 2nd ed. (Manila: Philippines Weather Bureau, 1904), 219.
31. Robert Hart, “Documents Relating to 1. The Establishment of Meteorological Stations in China; and 2. Proposals for Co-operation in the Publication of Meteorological Observations and Exchange of Weather News by Telegraph along the Pacific Coast of Asia” [1874], published in Chinese Maritime Customs Project Occasional Papers, no. 3, ed. Robert Bickers and Catherine Ladds (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2008); for further discussion, see Robert Bickers, “‘Throwing Light on Natural Laws’: Meteorology on the China Coast, 1869–1912,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land, and Power, ed. Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (London: Routledge, 2016), 179–200.
32. Agustín Udiás, “Meteorology of the Observatories of the Society of Jesus,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 65 (1996): 157–170; James Francis Warren, “Scientific Superman: Father José Algué, Jesuit Meteorology, and the Philippines under American Rule, 1897–1924,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 508–522.
33. Cosmos, no. 1091 (1906), 717–719: cited in Warren, “Scientific Superman,” 515.
34. Algué, Cyclones, 3.
35. Algué, Cyclones, 219–229; Eliot, Handbook of Cyclonic Storms.
36. Charles Normand, “Seasonal Monsoon Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–473; Eliot, Climatological Atlas, xiii.
37. Eliot, Climatological Atlas.
38. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 5–6, 19–22.
39. Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 1:279, 1:284.
40. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 4 (1904): 421–444.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE STRUGGLE FOR WATER
1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver [1974] (London: Vintage, 1997), 17.
2. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), 648–653.
3. M. G. Ranade, Essays in Indian Economics: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1899), quotation on p. 66.
4. R. C. Dutt, Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1900), quotations on pp. 1, 17; R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1904), 172.
5. Mary Albright Hollings, The Life of Colin Scott-Moncrieff (London: J. Murray, 1917), 298.
6. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
7. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1901–1903 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1903), 1:2–4; Hollings, Colin Scott-Moncrieff, 299.
8. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1:5–14.
9. Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1:16, 1:124–125.
10. Letter from W. C. Bennett, Director of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, North-West Provinces and Oudh, to the Secretary, Board of Revenue, NW Provinces, May 27, 1883, Maharashtra State Archives Department, Mumbai [hereafter MSA], Public Works Department: Irrigation Branch [hereafter PWD: Irrigation], v. 406 (1868–1890), M167–169.
11. Bennett to Board of Revenue, NW Provinces, May 27, 1883, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 406, M167–169.
12. Letter from W. W. Goodfellow, Superintending Engineer, Belgaum to the Secretary to the Government, Public Works Department, Bombay, October 17, 1883, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 406, M199.
13. V. Sriram, “Made in Madras,” The Hindu, November 16, 2014.
14. Letter from A. Chatterton to the Secretary to the Commissioner of Revenue Settlement, Department of Land Records and Agriculture, May 23, 1905, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 272 (1904–1909), M164–165.
15. Letter from A. Chatterton to the Director of Agriculture, Poona, July 15, 1906, MSA, PWD: Irrigation, M199–215.
16. “in reality part of the great desert”: in James Douie, “The Punjab Canal Colonies,” lecture delivered at the Royal Society of Arts on May 7, 1914, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 62 (1914): 611–623, quotation on p. 612; “irrigation was not designed”: in E. H. Calvert, The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab (Lahore, 1922), 123.
17. Douie, “Punjab Canal Colonies,” 614.
18. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
19. Douie, “Punjab Canal Colonies,” 615–616.
20. M.W. Fenton, Financial Commissioner, in 1915: quoted in Indu Agnihotri, “Ecology, Land Use, and Colonisation: The Canal Colonies of Punjab,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (1996): 37–58.
21. Quoted in David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 168.
22. Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 175–176.
23. Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
24. John F. Richards, Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
25. Hung Chung Chang, “Crop Production in China, with Special Reference to Production in Manchuria” (Master of Science thesis, University of Michigan Agricultural College, 1922).
26. Indu Agnihotri, “Ecology, Land Use, and Colonisation: The Canal Colonies of Punjab,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (1996): 37–58.
27. Petition from Sakharam Balaji, undated (ca. 1903), MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 124, “Petitions” (1899–1903).
28. “The humble memorial of the inhabitants of the within mentioned villages in the Belgaum Taluka, of the Belgaum District,” [undated, 1903], MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 124, “Petitions” (1899–1903).
29. J. Sion, Asie Des Moussons, book 9 of the Géographie Universelle, ed. P. Vidal De La Blanche (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1928), 2:363.
30. Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 114–119; Ira Klein, “Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986): 725–754; Hector Tulloch, The Water Supply of Bombay (Roorkee: Thomason College Press, 1873).
31. Indian Industrial Commission, Report (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1918).
32. Indian Industrial Commission, Report, 57–62.
33. M. Visvesvaraya, Memoirs of My Working Life [1951] (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, 1960), 9.
34. M. Visvesvaraya, Reconstructing India (London: P.S. King & Son, 1920), 127.
35. Visvesvaraya, Memoirs, 115–124.
36. S. Muthiah, “Madras Miscellany,” The Hindu, November 24, 2014.
37. Extract from an Official Note of 1899 on the Desirability of Developing the Agricultural Department, Madras Fisheries Bureau, Bulletin No. 1; F. A. Nicholson, “The Marine Fisheries of the Madras Presidency,” paper read at Lahore Industrial Conference, 1909: contained in BL, IOR, V/25/550/3.
38. F. A. Nicholson, Note on Fisheries in Japan (Madras: Government Press, 1907).
39. James Hornell, A Statistical Analysis of the Fishing Industry of Tuticorin, Madras Fisheries Bulletin vol. 11, report no. 3 (Madras: Government Press, 1917). For another perspective, see the insightful discussion of Nicholson and Hornell in Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 107–124.
40. Edward Buck, “Report on the Control and Utilization of Rivers and Draignage for the Fertilization of the Land and Mitigation of Malaria” (1907), MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 267 (1904–1909).
41. Christopher J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); the “tide of indebtedness” was a phrase used by a colonial official in Dhaka, quoted by Bose; Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change: Caste and Irrigated Lands in Tamilnadu, 1860s–1970s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996). On low yields in rain-fed agriculture, see Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy, eds., A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), 100–116.
42. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Abridged Report (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1928), 5.
43. Report of the United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929–30 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1930), 2:119, 234.
44. Report of the United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929–30 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1930), 3:137.
45. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Evidence Taken in the Bombay Presidency, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Stationery Office, 1927), 342.
46. J. S. Chakravarti, “Agricultural Insurance,” Agricultural Journal of India 12 (1917): 436–441, quotations on pp. 436–437; J. S. Chakravarti, Agricultural Insurance: A Practical Scheme Suited to Indian Conditions (Bangalore: Government Press of Mysore, 1920). The comment on Chakravarti’s prescience is from P. K. Mishra, “Is Rainfall Insurance a New Idea? Pioneering Work Revisited,” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (1995): A84–A88.
47. Indian Industrial Commission, Report, 4.
48. P. A. Sheppard, revised by Isabel Falconer, “Walker, Gilbert Thomas,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36692.
49. G. I. Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker, 1868–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 (1962): 166–174.
50. D. R. Sikka, “The Role of the India Meteorological Department, 1875–1947,” in Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c.1784–1947, ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Pearson, 2010), chapter 14.
51. Gilbert T. Walker, “The Meteorology of India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 73 (July 1925): 838–855, quotation on p. 839.
52. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in Seasonal Variations of Weather, VIII. A Preliminary Study of World-Weather,” Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Department 24, part 4 (1923): 75–131, quotation on p. 75.
53. Michael Bardecki, “Walker Circulation,” in Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change, ed. S. George Philander, 2nd ed. (New York: Sage, 2005), 1:1073.
54. Gilbert T. Walker, “On the Meteorological Evidence for Supposed Changes of Climate in India,” Indian Meteorological Memoirs 21, part 1 (1910): 1–21.
55. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in Seasonal Variations of Weather, II,” Indian Meteorological Memoirs 21, part 2 (1910): 21–45, quoted in J. M. Walker, “Pen Portraits of Past Presidents—Sir Gilbert Walker, CSI, ScD, MA, FRS,” Weather 52 (1997): 217–220, quotation on p. 219.
56. Richard W. Katz, “Sir Gilbert Walker and a Connection Between El Niño and Statistics,” Statistical Science 17 (2002): 97–112.
57. Walker, “Correlation, VIII” (1923), 109.
58. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 843.
59. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in the Seasonal Variations of Weather,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 44 (1918): 223–234; Gilbert T. Walker, “The Atlantic Ocean,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (1927): 71–113, quotations on p. 113.
60. Priya Satia, “Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the Redemption of Technology in the First World War,” Past and Present 197 (2007): 211–255.
61. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 849.
62. Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker,” 171.
63. Gilbert T. Walker, Review of Climate Through the Ages: A Study of Climatic Factors and Climatic Variations by C.W.P. Brooks, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (1927): 321–323.
64. Gilbert T. Walker, “On Monsoon Forecasting in India,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 19 (1938): 297–299.
65. Charles Normand, “Monsoon Seasonal Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–73, quotations on p. 469.
66. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 838–855, quotation on p. 848.
67. Sikka, “India Meteorological Department”; the quotations from Walker and Field draw on their papers deposited in the office of the director-general of meteorology in India, which were not available for consultation by researchers.
68. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 17.
CHAPTER SIX: WATER AND FREEDOM
1. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131.
2. Jawaharlal Nehru to B. J. K. Hallowes (Deputy Commissioner, Allahabad, and President of the Famine Relief Fund of Gonda), June 26, 1929, in The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.
3. Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Basis of Society,” Presidential Address to Bombay Youth Congress, Poona, December 12, 1928, in Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:8–10.
4. Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922).
5. Sun Yat-sen, “Third Principle of the People: People’s Livelihood,” cited in Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 117.
6. David A. Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chapter 3; quotations on pp. 93–94.
7. This account of the Mahad protest draws on Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (London: Hurst and Company, 2005), 47–48.
8. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Ideas of Freedom in Modern India,” in The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, ed. Robert H. Taylor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 120–121.
9. M. K. Gandhi, “Salt Tax,” Young India, February 27, 1930, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, 1970), 48:499–500.
10. Robert Carter and Erin McCarthy, “Watsuji Tetsurô,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2014 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/.
11. Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961), 18–20.
12. Watsuji, Climate, 25–26.
13. Watsuji, Climate, 22–23, 38.
14. Watsuji, Climate, 39.
15. Mukerjee makes an appearance in, among others: C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
16. Radhakamal Mukerjee, “Social Ecology of a River Valley,” Sociology and Social Research 12 (1927): 341–347, quotations on p. 342; Radhakamal Mukerjee, Regional Sociology (New York and London: Century and Co., 1926); Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Changing Face of Bengal: A Study in Riverine Economy (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1938).
17. Léon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et Les Grands Fleuves Historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1889); Mukerjee, “Social Ecology,” quotation on 342; William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1930).
18. Mukerjee, “Social Ecology,” 345–347.
19. C. J. Baker, “Economic Reorganization and the Slump in South and Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 325–349.
20. I explore these migrations in detail in Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), especially chapters 4 and 5.
21. Confidential letter from the Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya to the Government of India, April 3, 1933: NAI, Department of Education, Health and Lands: Overseas, file no. 206-2/32—L&O.
22. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 428.
23. “World’s Largest Dam Opened,” The Statesman, August 22, 1934.
24. Handwritten memo by “SA,” April 30, 1938, appended to the file of correspondence following the Chief Engineer’s “Note on the Beneficial Effects of the Stanley Reservoir to Cauvery Delta Irrigation,” Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai, Government Order 547-I, 27/2/1936.
25. Handwritten note in Government of Madras Public Works Department, Government Order number 375, February 24, 1938. Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai [TNSA].
26. Pietz, Yellow River, chapter 3.
27. National Planning Committee No. 2: Being an Abstract of the Proceedings and other Particulars Relating to the National Planning Committee (Bombay: K.T. Shah, 1940), 43.
28. “Burma-China Frontier: Chinese Claim to the Irrawaddy Triangle” (1933), BL, IOR, L/P&S/12/2231, enclosing William Credner’s article in Eastern Miscellany (Shanghai), January 10, 1931; P. M. R. Leonard and V. G. Robert, Report on the Fourth Expedition to the “Triangle” for the Liberation of Slaves (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1930), quotation in text from notes in archival file.
29. Madras Fisheries Bulletin, 1918–1937 (Madras: Government Printing, 1938), 2; see Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 120–124.
30. Micah Muscolino, “Yellow River Flood, 1938–47,” DisasterHistory.org, accessed March 3, 2018, www.disasterhistory.org/yellow-river-flood-1938-47; Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
31. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2004).
32. Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
33. India Meteorological Department, Hundred Years of Weather Service (1875–1975), bound typescript in the library of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai, consulted in February 2015.
34. Sunil S. Amrith, “Food and Welfare in India, c. 1900–1950,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 1010–1035; the quotation from Nehru is in a letter to B. J. K. Hallowes, June 26, 1929, see note 2 above.
35. The Ramakrishna Mission: Bengal and Orissa Cyclone Relief, 1942–44 (Howrah: Ramakrishna Mission, 1944), 1–2.
36. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 282–291.
37. Note to Famine Commission (1944): Papers of L. G. Pinnell, British Library, Asian and African Studies Collection, European Manuscripts: MSS Eur D 911/7.
38. On ecological decline, see Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2010), chapter 8. On famine, see Sugata Bose, “Starvation Amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–45,” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (1990): 699–727; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 282–291.
39. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India [1946] (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 496–498; S. G. Sardesai, Food in the United Provinces (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1944), 19, 36–37.
40. V. D. Wickizer and M. K. Bennett, The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1941), 1, 189.
41. Nehru, Discovery of India, 535; Gyan Chand, Problem of Population (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 10.
42. File note on Bhakra Dam Project, February 23, 1945, NAI, Political Department, I A Branch: file no. 21(22)—IA/45.
43. File note by T.A.W. Foy, October 31, 1946, NAI, 21(22)—IA/45.
44. Meghnad Saha, editorial, Science and Culture 1 (1935): 3–4.
45. Meghnad Saha, “Flood,” Science and Culture 9 (September 1943): 95–97.
46. Meghnad Saha and Kamalesh Ray, “Planning for the Damodar Valley” (originally published in Science and Culture, 10 [1944]), in Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, ed. Santimay Chatterjee (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1987), 2:115–144, quotations on pp. 116, 132, 135.
47. Saha and Ray, “Planning for the Damodar Valley,” 132, 135.
CHAPTER SEVEN: RIVERS DIVIDED, RIVERS DAMMED
1. The best narrative account of the period is in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); on the early Cold War in Asia, see Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), chapter 5.
2. For a concise overview, see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
3. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); for a moving set of testimonies, see Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst, 2000).
4. David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 206.
5. Government of India, Press Information Bureau, “Facts about Canal Dispute”—enclosure in a letter from S. V. Sampath to all Indian Missions abroad, September 27, 1949: National Archives of India [hereafter NAI], Ministry of External Affairs [hereafter MEA], File 6/1/7-XP (P)/49.
6. Joya Chatterji, “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 185–242.
7. Rammanohar Lohia, The Guilty Men of India’s Partition (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1960).
8. Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
9. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Yazid,” in Naked Voices: Stories and Sketches, trans. Rakhshanda Jalil (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2008), 106.
10. India Meteorological Department, Hundred Years of Weather Service (1875–1975), bound typescript in the library of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai, consulted in February 2015, p. 55.
11. C. N. Vakil, Economic Consequences of the Partition, 2nd ed. (Bombay: National Information and Publications, 1949), 3–4.
12. Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 206.
13. Daniel Haines, Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chapter 3.
14. Cited in Haines, Rivers Divided, 51.
15. India, Ministry of External Affairs, Directive on Canal Water Dispute Between India and Pakistan, NAI, MEA, File 6/1/7-XP (P)/49.
16. Directive on Canal Water Dispute, NAI, MEA, File 6/1/7-XP (P)/49.
17. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
18. Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 212; Bashir A. Malik, Indus Waters Treaty in Retrospect (Lahore: Brite Books, 2005), 104.
19. David E. Lilienthal, “Kashmir: Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?,” Collier’s 128, no. 5 (1951): 58.
20. “Today in Earthquake History: Assam, 1950,” Seismo Blog, Berkeley Seismology Lab, accessed March 1, 2018, http://seismo.berkeley.edu/blog/2017/08/15/today-in-earthquake-history-assam-1950.html; M. C. Podder, “Preliminary Report on the Assam Earthquake of 15th August 1950,” Bulletin of the Geological Survey of India, Series B 2 (1950): 1–40; Francis Kingdon Ward, “Aftermath of the Assam Earthquake of 1950,” The Geographical Journal 121 (1955): 290–303.
21. Census of India, 1951, vol. 1, Part 1A (New Delhi: Government Press, 1953).
22. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 161.
23. Census of India 1951, vol. 1, Part 1A: 126–131.
24. Census of India 1951, vol. 1, Part 1A: 150.
25. Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), see especially chapter 7.
26. Report of American Famine Mission to India, led by T. W. Schultz, cited in Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939–47 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954), 253; Government of India, Foodgrains Policy Committee, Interim Report (New Delhi, 1948); Government of India, Foodgrains Policy Committee, Final Report (New Delhi, 1948); Report of the Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, 1957 (New Delhi: Ministry of Food & Agriculture, 1957), 26–27.
27. Jawaharlal Nehru’s letter to India’s chief ministers, April 15, 1948, in Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers, 1947–1963, ed. Madhav Khosla (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2014), 147–148. On the Hirakud Dam, see Rohan D’Souza, “Damming the Mahanadi River: The Emergence of Multi-Purpose River Valley Development in India (1943–46),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 40 (2003): 81–105.
28. Henry C. Hart, New India’s Rivers (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1956), 250.
29. India, Central Water-Power, Irrigation & Navigation Commission, Quinquennial Report, April 1945–March 1950, p. 2: BL, IOR, V/24/4496.
30. There is an illuminating account of Khosla’s career in Daniel Klingensmith, One Valley and a Thousand: Dams, Nationalism, and Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
31. A. N. Khosla, “Our Plans,” Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development [IJPRVD], June 1951: 1–4.
32. India, Central Water & Power Commission, Major Water & Power Projects of India (Bhagirath Pamphlet 1, June 1957).
33. Jawharlal Nehru, speech at the opening of the Nangal Canal, July 8, 1954, in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 213–215.
34. “Nehru Shows Chou India’s Dam Project,” New York Times, January 1, 1957, 4.
35. On the history of the Films Division, see Peter Sutoris, Visions of Development: Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948–75 (London: Hurst, 2016), which includes a discussion of Ezra Mir’s career; see also, Judith Pernin et al., “The Documentary Film in India, 1948–1975,” undated, Hong Kong Baptist University, last accessed May 13, 2018, http://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/documentary-film/india.php#footnote.
36. Bhakra Nangal, dir. N.S. Thapa, Government of India Films Division (1958).
37. On Lilienthal, see Klingensmith, One Valley and a Thousand.
38. Hart, New India’s Rivers, 97.
39. Hugh Tinker, “A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6 (1975): 1–15; Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 6.
40. Letter from the Secretary to the Government of Punjab, Public Works Department, to the Secretary to the Governor General, June 18, 1945, NAI, file no. 21(22)—IA/45; Proceedings of a meeting held on January 31, 1946, between representatives of Madras and Hyderabad: Government of India, Political Branch: Hyderabad Residency; NAI, file no. 92(2), 1946.
41. Hart, New India’s Rivers, 115.
42. “Lathi Charge on Strikers,” Times of India, January 31, 1954, 9.
43. Hart, New India’s Rivers, 178–184.
44. Ashis Nandy, “Dams and Dissent: India’s First Modern Environmental Activist and His Critique of the DVC Project,” Futures 33 (2001): 709–731.
45. World Bank Group Archives, Washington DC [hereafter WBA], File no. 1787276, Indus Basin Dispute, General Negotiations, 1949–52, Correspondence; File no, 1787280, Notes of Mission, September 1–16, 1954; File no. 1787263, Chronology of Indus Waters Dispute. Files 1787269 and 1787270 (Indus Basin Dispute, Working Party, Correspondence vol. 3 & 4), for example, both had several items that had been removed as unsuitable for declassification.
46. M. V. V. Ramana, Inter-State River Water Disputes in India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992), chapter 4.
47. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 244.
48. Mother India, dir. Mehboob (1957).
49. Quoted in Ramaswamy, Goddess and the Nation, 243.
50. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 60.
51. Brian Larkin, “Bollywood Comes to Nigeria,” accessed November 14, 2017, www.samarmagazine.org/archive/articles/21.
52. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
53. Chakravorty, Price of Land, 113–114; Rohan D’Souza, “Framing India’s Hydraulic Crises: The Politics of the Modern Large Dam,” Monthly Review 60 (2008): 112–124.
54. File note, February 23, 1945, Bhakra Dam Project, Government of India, Political Department, IA Branch, NAI, file no. 21(22)—IA/45.
55. File note, Anon., March 12, 1945, Bhakra Dam Project, Government of India, Political Department, IA Branch: NAI, file no. 21(22)—IA/45.
56. File note, Anon., March 12, 1945, NAI, file no. 21(22)—IA/45.
57. Proceedings of a meeting held on January 31, 1946, between representatives of Madras and Hyderabad: Government of India, Political Branch: Hyderabad Residency; NAI, file no. 92(2), 1946, quotations from this file.
58. P. Chaturvedi and A. Dalal, Law of Special Economic Zone: National and International Perspective (Kolkata: Eastern Law House, 2009), 342, cited in Chakravorty, Price of Land, 115.
59. Walter Fernandes and Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, eds., Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1989); Esther Duflo and Rohini Pande, “Dams,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (2007): 601–646; Satyajit Singh, Taming the Waters: The Political Economy of Large Dams in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 182–203; Chakravorty, Price of Land, quotations on pp. 123–130.
60. Singh, Taming the Waters, 133–158.
61. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Social Aspects of Small and Big Projects,” Inaugural address at the 29th annual meeting of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power, New Delhi, November 17, 1958, in Baldev Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru on Science and Society: A Collection of His Writings and Speeches (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1990), 172–175.
62. United Nations, Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East, 1948 (Bangkok: ECAFE, 1949); C. Hart Schaaf, “The United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East,” International Organization 7 (1953): 463–481, quotation on p. 468.
63. Hart Schaaf, “Economic Commission for Asia” (1953).
64. Hart Schaaf, “Economic Commission for Asia” (1953), 481.
65. UN, ECAFE, Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East, 1954 (Bangkok: ECAFE, 1955); chapter 10 covers the People’s Republic of China.
66. Kanwar Sain and K. L. Rao, Report on the Recent River Valley Projects in China (New Delhi: Government of India Central Water and Power Commission, 1955), their full itinerary appears in Appendix F; “Mao is our Buddha” reported in Kanwar Sain, Reminiscences of an Engineer (New Delhi: Young Asia Publications, 1978), 208–209.
67. Sain, Reminiscences of an Engineer, 208–209.
68. Sain and Rao, River Valley Projects in China, 206–207; list of Chinese officials in Appendix G.
69. Sain and Rao, River Valley Projects in China, 154.
70. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 1.
71. Cited in Philip Ball, Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (Oxford: The Bodley Head, 2016), 225.
72. Sain and Rao, River Valley Projects in China, 162.
73. For an elaboration of the continuity argument, see Ball, Water Kingdom, chapter 8.
74. Sain and Rao, River Valley Projects in China. Hao’s speech is reproduced in Appendix A.
75. Sain, Reminiscences of an Engineer, 210.
76. Christopher Sneddon, Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).
77. Biggs, Quagmire, 172.
78. Sneddon, Concrete Revolution.
79. Sain, Reminiscences of an Engineer, 388–392.
80. Nehru’s letter to Zhou Enlai, September 26, 1959, published in India-China Conflict (New Delhi: Indian Ministry of External Affairs, 1964).
81. Letter from B. C. Mishra, Ministry of External Affairs to Apa B. Pant, Political Officer of the Government of India, Gangtok, Sikkim, October 7, 1960, in India, Ministry of External Affairs, “Construction of dam on Brahmaputra and Indus group of rivers by the Chinese”: NAI, MEA, file F no. 4(75)—T 60.
82. Letter from R. S. Kapoor, Indian trade agent, Gyantse, Tibet to Apa Pant, Political Officer of the Government of India, Gangtok, Sikkim, December 15, 1960: NAI, MEA, file F no. 4(75)—T 60.
83. Letter marked “top secret,” from K. K. Framji, Chief Engineer & Joint Secretary, Ministry of Irrigation and Power to B. C. Mishra, DS (China), Ministry of External Affairs, January 5, 1961: NAI, MEA, file F no. 4(75)—T 60.
84. Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 10.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OCEAN AND THE UNDERGROUND
1. Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others (London: Vintage, 2014), 195–197.
2. Indian National Committee on Oceanic Research [hereafter INCOR], International Indian Ocean Expedition: Indian Scientific Programmes, 1962–1965 (New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1962), 15.
3. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1–24, quotations on pp. 10–11.
4. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 7.
5. India, Ministry of External Affairs, Memorandum on the International Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Law of the Sea [undated, probably late 1957]. NAI, MEA: UN II Section, file no. 9(6) UN II/57.
6. Daniel Behrman, Assault on the Largest Unknown: The International Indian Ocean Expedition (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1981), 10–11; G. E. R. Deacon, “The Indian Ocean Expedition,” Nature 187 (August 13, 1960): 561–562.
7. Warren S. Wooster, “Indian Ocean Expedition,” Science, n.s., 150 (October 15, 1965): 290–292.
8. INCOR, International Indian Ocean Expedition, 15.
9. The Indian Ocean Bubble, issue 5, March 1, 1960, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Open Access Server, last accessed March 10, 2018, https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/218.
10. Behrman, Assault, 27.
11. Behrman, Assault, 52.
12. INCOR, International Indian Ocean Expedition, 1–5.
13. Klaus Wyrtki, Oceanographic Atlas of the International Indian Ocean Expedition (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1971).
14. Behrman, Assault, 64.
15. INCOR, International Indian Ocean Expedition, 44.
16. Gilbert T. Walker, “The Atlantic Ocean,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (1927): 113.
17. Deacon, “Indian Ocean Expedition”; INCOR, International Indian Ocean Expedition, 12; Wyrtki, Oceanographic Atlas, 7.
18. C. S. Ramage, Monsoon Meteorology (London: Academic Press, 1971), 1; Thomas A. Schroeder, “A Personal View of the History of the Department of Meteorology, University of Hawaii at Manoa” (2006), accessed June 1, 2016, www.soest.hawaii.edu/met/history.pdf.
19. Sanchari Pal, “Anna Mani Is One of India’s Greatest Woman Scientists,” The Better India, January 21, 2017, accessed May 1, 2018, https://www.thebetterindia.com/83063/anna-mani-scientist-meteorology-ozone-wind-energy/.
20. C. S. Ramage, Meteorology in the Indian Ocean (Geneva: World Meteorological Association, 1965).
21. Ramage, Meteorology in the Indian Ocean.
22. Behrman, Assault, 67.
23. Behrman, Assault, 65; C. S. Ramage and C. R. Raman, Meteorological Atlas of the International Indian Ocean Expedition (Washington, DC: US Government Printer, 1972).
24. Behrman, Assault, 66.
25. Ramage, Meteorology in the Indian Ocean.
26. Roger Revelle and H. E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades, ” Tellus 9 (1957): 18–27, quotation on pp. 19–20. On oceanography and the discovery of climate change, see Naomi Oreskes, “Changing the Mission: From the Cold War to Climate Change,” in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, ed. Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 141–187.
27. Behrman, Assault, 11–12.
28. P. K. Das, The Monsoons (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1968), 6.
29. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 247–248.
30. Statistics on Indian wheat imports from Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 144; Economic Survey of Indian Agriculture for 1966–67 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1969); Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 293.
31. David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chapter 4.
32. David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Cullather, Hungry World.
33. Cullather, Hungry World, 207.
34. C. Subramaniam, Hand of Destiny, vol. 2, The Green Revolution (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1993), 137–138.
35. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 270.
36. Subramaniam, Hand of Destiny, vol. 2, 154, 165–167.
37. “Years Before a Revolution,” Times of India, August 22, 1965.
38. Quoted in Mahesh Rangarajan, “Striving for a Balance: Nature, Power, Science and Indira Gandhi’s India, 1917–1984,” Conservation and Society 7 (2009): 299–312.
39. Cullather, Hungry World, 223.
40. Paul R. Brass, “The Political Uses of Crisis: The Bihar Famine of 1966–1967,” Journal of Asian Studies 45 (1986): 245–267, 249.
41. Ronald E. Doel and Kristine C. Harper, “Prometheus Unleashed: Science as a Diplomatic Weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration,” Osiris 21 (2006): 66–85.
42. James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Kristine C. Harper, Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
43. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 226.
44. Doel and Harper, “Prometheus Unleashed,” 80, 83.
45. Rajni Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” Asian Survey 4 (1964): 1161–1173; Confidential Despatch from British High Commission, Delhi to London, 3 March 1967, in United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA), “India—Political Affairs—Internal” FO 37/35.
46. Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57.
47. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
48. Indira Gandhi, “Man and Environment,” speech at the Plenary Session of United Nations Conference on Human Environment, Stockholm, June 14, 1972: full text available at http://lasulawsenvironmental.blogspot.com/2012/07/indira-gandhis-speech-at-stockholm.html, last accessed May 14, 2018.
49. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 15–16.
50. Indira Gandhi, “Man and Environment,” speech at the Plenary Session of United Nations Conference on Human Environment, Stockholm, June 14, 1972; Jairam Ramesh, “Poverty Is the Greatest Polluter: Remembering Indira Gandhi’s Stirring Speech in Stockholm,” The Wire, June 7, 2017, accessed November 30, 2017, https://thewire.in/144555/indira-gandhi-nature-pollution/.
51. On coercive population control in India, see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (London: Hurst, 2003).
52. Shyam Divan and Armin Rosencranz, eds., Environmental Law and Policy in India: Cases, Materials and Statutes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 167–241; the case cited is Aggarwal Textile Industries v. State of Rajasthan, S.B.C. Writ Petition No. 1375/80, March 2, 1981, presented in Divan and Rosencranz, Environmental Law, 187.
53. Anthony Acciavatti, “Re-imagining the Indian Underground: A Biography of the Tubewell,” in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, ed. Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 206–237, quotation on p. 207.
54. Tushaar Shah, Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2008); Tushaar Shah, “Climate Change and Groundwater: India’s Opportunities for Mitigation and Adaptation,” Environmental Research Letters 4 (2009): 1–13.
55. Roger Revelle and V. Lakshminarayana, “Ganges Water Machine,” Science, n.s., 188 (1975): 611–616, quotation on p. 611; K. L. Rao, India’s Water Wealth: Its Assessment, Uses, and Projections (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975).
56. Joshua Eisenman, “Building China’s 1970s Green Revolution: Responding to Population Growth, Decreasing Arable Land, and Capital Depreciation,” in China, Hong Kong, and the Long 1970s: Global Perspectives, ed. Priscilla Roberts and Odd Arne Westad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 55–86.
57. Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), quotation on p. 13.
58. Francine Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); N. K. Dubash, Tubewell Capitalism: Groundwater Development and Agrarian Change in Gujarat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Shah, “Climate Change and Groundwater.”
59. L. J. Walinsky, ed., Agrarian Reform As Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1977); G. Rosen, “Obituary: Wolf Ladejinsky (1899–1975),” Journal of Asian Studies 36 (1976): 327–328.
60. Wolf Ladejinsky, “Drought in Maharashtra (Not in a Hundred Years),” typescript contained in World Bank Archives (WBA), file number 1167800, Drought Prone Areas Project—India—Correspondence vol. 1.
61. Jean Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India” (working paper 45, WIDER: United Nations University, Helsinki, 1988), 69–75.
62. John A. Young, “Physics of the Monsoon: The Current View,” in Monsoons, ed. Jay S. Fein and Pamela L. Stephens (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), 211–243, quotation on p. 211; see the discussion of “moist processes” in Peter J. Webster, “Monsoons,” Scientific American 245 (1981): 108–119; on modeling, see Kirsten Hastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, eds., The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature (London: Routledge, 2012).
63. Jacob Bjerknes, “A Possible Response of the Atmospheric Hadley Circulation to Equatorial Anomalies of Ocean Temperature,” Tellus 18 (1966): 820–829; Jacob Bjerknes, “Atmospheric Teleconnections from the Equatorial Pacific,” Journal of Physical Oceanography 97 (1969): 163–172.
64. P. J. Webster, H. R. Chang, and V. E. Toma, Tropical Meteorology and Climate (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, in press), chapter 14.
65. R. A. Madden and P. R. Julian, “Detection of a 40–50 Day Oscillation in the Zonal Wind in the Tropical Pacific,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 28 (1971): 702–770; R. A. Madden and P. R. Julian, “Description of Global-Scale Circulation Cells in the Tropics with a 40–50 Day Period,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 29 (1972): 1109–1123.
66. David M. Lawrence and Peter J. Webster, “The Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation: Relationship between Northward and Eastward Movement of Convection,” Journal of the Atmopheric Sciences 59 (2002): 1593–1606.
67. Adam Sobel, Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future (New York: Harper Wave, 2014), 9–20.
68. On MONEX, see Behrman, Assault, 64; Webster, Chang, and Toma, Tropical Meteorology, chapter 14.
69. C. S. Ramage, The Great Indian Drought of 1899, Occasional Paper, Aspen Instiute for Humanistic Studies, Program on Science, Technology, and Humanism (1977), quotations on pp. 4, 6.
70. Declaration of the Climate Conference (Geneva: World Meteorological Organization, 1979), 1.
CHAPTER NINE: STORMY HORIZONS
1. World Bank Group, “China Overview,” accessed February 12, 2018, www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview.
2. Sumit Ganguly and Rahul Mukherjee, India Since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 3.
3. Anil Agarwal, Kalpana Sharma, and Ravi Chopra, The State of India’s Environment, 1982: A Citizens’ Report (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1982), 20.
4. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306 (December 2004): 1686.
5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Geneva: IPCC, 2014); World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013).
6. Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018), 5.
7. Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
8. Hannah Ritchie, “Yields vs. Land Use: How the Green Revolution Enabled Us to Feed a Growing Population,” Our World in Data, August 22, 2017, accessed February 10, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population.
9. Khushwant Singh, “The Indian Monsoon in Literature,” in Monsoons, ed. Jay S. Fein and Pamela L. Stephens (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), 35–50, quotations on p. 48.
10. Jyoti Bhatt, “Divination of Rainy Days: An Annual Festival in Gujarat” [1987], in Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong: Jyoti Bhatt Archive, last accessed April 24, 2018, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/jyoti-bhatt-archive-english/object/divination-of-rainy-days-an-annual-festival-in-gujarat.
11. University of Hawaii at Manoa Economics Department, “Harry T. Oshima (1918–1998),” accessed February 16, 2018, www.economics.hawaii.edu/history/faculty/oshima.html.
12. Harry T. Oshima, Economic Growth in Monsoon Asia: A Comparative Survey (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1987); Harry T. Oshima, “Seasonality and Underemployment in Monsoon Asia,” Philippine Economic Journal 19 (1971): 63–97.
13. Statistics from A. Vaidyanathan, Water Resources of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); T. Shah, “Climate Change and Groundwater: India’s Opportunities for Mitigation and Adaptation,” Environmental Research Letters 4 (2009): 1–13, quotation on p. 3.
14. Meera Subramanian, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), 9–66, on Punjab; on Gujarat, see David Hardiman, “The Politics of Water Scarcity in Gujarat,” in Amita Baviskar ed. Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 39–62.
15. Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician,” in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 13–28, quotation on p. 13.
16. Jane Qiu, “China Faces Up to Groundwater Crisis,” Nature 466 (2010): 308.
17. David A. Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 264–265; M. Webber et al., “The Yellow River in Transition,” Environmental Science and Policy 11 (2008): 422–429.
18. M. Rodell, I. Velicogna, and J. S. Famiglietti, “Satellite-Based Estimates of Groundwater Depletion in India,” Nature 460 (2009): 999–1002.
19. M. K. Gandhi, “Some Mussooree Reminiscences,” Harijan, June 23, 1946, 198; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Political Protest in the Himalaya (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
20. Kathleen D. Morrison, “Dharmic Projects, Imperial Reservoirs, and New Temples of India: An Historical Perspective on Dams in India,” Conservation and Society 8 (2010): 184.
21. Ambedkar’s statement was delivered in India’s Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948; for research on the complexity of water management in pre-modern India, see David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change: Caste and Irrigated Lands in Tamil Nadu, 1860s–1970s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996); for an overview that is skeptical of the idea that colonial rule was an absolute ecological watershed, see Mahesh Rangarajan, “Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Kenneth Pomeranz and Edmund Burke III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 229–254.
22. Agarwal, Chopra, and Sharma, The State of India’s Environment, 1982; A. Agarwal and Sunita Narain, eds., The State of India’s Environment, 1984–85: A Second Citizens’ Report (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1985), quotation from “Statement of Shared Concern”; The Centre for Science and Environment also produced a documentary film on water harvesting: Harvest of Rain, dir. Sanjay Kak (1995), Centre for Science and Environment, 1995; Tim Forsyth, “Anil Agarwal,” in Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, ed. D. Simon (London: Routledge, 2005), 9–14.
23. Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991), 11.
24. The authors of the first Indian report cite the inspiration of Penang in their preface: Agarwal, Chopra, and Sharma, State of India’s Environment, 1982; on the Third World Network, see its website, accessed February 1, 2018, www.twn.my/twnintro.htm; on the Consumers’ Association of Penang, see Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); on the rise and fall of the New International Economic Order, see Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity (Spring 2015): 1–16.
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EPILOGUE: HISTORY AND MEMORY AT THE WATER’S EDGE
1. Zadie Smith, “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons,” New York Review of Books, April 3, 2014.
2. Namrata Kala, “Learning, Adaptation, and Climate Uncertainty: Evidence from Indian Agriculture,” working paper, August 2017, accessed March 3, 2018, https://namratakala.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/kala_learning_aug2017_final.pdf, last.
3. Suprabha Seshan, “Once, the Monsoon,” June 22, 2017, accessed March 10, 2018, https://countercurrents.org/2017/06/22/once-the-monsoon/.
4. M. Rajshekhar, “Why Tamil Nadu’s Fisherfolk Can No Longer Find Fish,” Scroll, July 8, 2016, accessed April 15, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/808960/why-tamil-nadus-fisherfolk-can-no-longer-find-fish, the quotation in the text is from Rajshekhar’s report; E. Vivekanandan, “Impact of Climate Change in the Indian Marine Fisheries and Potential Adaptation Options,” in Coastal Fishery Resources of India: Conservation and Sustainable Utilisation (Cochin, India: Society of Fisheries Technologists, 2010), 169–184; Amitav Ghosh and Aaron Savio Lobo, “Bay of Bengal: Depleted Fish Stocks and Huge Dead Zone Signal Tipping Point,” The Guardian, January 31, 2017.