Book review: Sunil Amrith,Unruly Waters: How Rains,Rivers,Coasts,and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History

Borrowing from ancient maps, fictional literature, travel documents and satellite pictures, Amrith applaudably finds connections between India and the British Empire, and between the Empire and climate change (p. 10). The essence of the book is best captured in Amrith’s own words (p. 6) as

[t]he story of how the schemes of empire builders, the vision of freedom fighters, the design of engineers—and the culminative, dispersed actions of hundreds of millions of people across generations—have transformed Asia’s waters over the past two hundred years.

By inserting ‘water’ at the heart of South Asia’s history, Amrith guides his readers into an effortless comprehension of the reasons for South Asia’s extreme vulnerability to climate change. Indistinguishable from the regret expressed by Amitav Ghosh (2016) over the failure of twentieth-century literature to address climate change and its escalation, thus, is Amrith’s dissatisfaction with history. The 1970s–80s agrarian concerns which led historians to revisit the term ‘hydraulic societies’ (p. 7) for Asia was violently turned into sympathy for political and intellectual history relating to ideas of identity and freedom after the 1980s. In India, the rise of Hindu nationalism and caste-based biases grabbed historic attention, allowing abandonment of water histories (p. 7). The consequent shift to cultural history and urban politics from the rural-focused narrative opened a gap which Amrith’s book brilliantly fills by drawing a parallel between China’s water management in the form of what Wittfogel (1957: 11) called ‘hydraulic despotism’, and India’s centuries-old water preservation methods through irrigation canals and storage tanks. All of this existed alongside India’s climate marked by the vagaries of monsoon, which exposed to the British the potential to create a ‘hydraulic society’ (p. 26) in India by harnessing its water resources.

Thus, early in the book, Amrith raises the dynamics of Empire and climate change, hinged on ‘cheap nature’ and ‘coerced labour’ (p. 11). From the apprehension of William Roxburgh, Director of Calcutta’s Botanical Gardens in 1793, over possibilities of agricultural development in the Godavari delta to Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton’s realisation of the same through dams and barrages, while he was Second Lieutenant in the Madras Engineers in 1819, Amrith succinctly maps the history of making the Godavari delta cultivable (pp. 17–47). He explores the locked-horn relationship between Cotton and Proby Cautley, creator of the Ganges Canal, on the restoration of the Mughal-made Yamuna canal and implementation of the Ganges canal systems (pp. 42–3).

However, Amrith defers the opportunity to address the issue of climate change caused by the ‘will of man’ (p. 38). This might be because in those days discussions on climate change were not in vogue. Still, Amrith could have utilised the space, given that he is writing in contemporary times of the Anthropocene and had good cause to critique this issue. Instead, the conversation switches towards the uncertainty of trade through Indian waterways, shifting focus to the introduction of trains, the movement of which cannot be curtailed by floods, famine, ebb and tides.

Harping on the chronicle of the 1870s famines (p. 114), Amrith then circles back to the delayed topic of Empire’s relation to climate change in Chapter 5. Here he deals with contemporary commentary concerned with ‘moral meteorology’ (p. 72), basically the belief that benevolence and malice of sun and water are dependent on the doings of man as far as famines were concerned. If moral behaviour would fetch appropriate rainfall and sunshine, whereas immorality would either result in excessive or decreased kindness of nature, the question arose who was to blame, the ruled Indians or the British rulers? Amrith seeks to develop scientific answers to these cosmologic questions. Citing Florence Nightingale, he assigns the problems of ‘penalties of imprudent neglect’ (p. 72) to the British Empire for being negligent towards the climatic consequences by attempting to tame nature.

The aspect of revenue generation by controlling nature has been scantily addressed within the historical study of water management. Hence, the novelty of Amrith’s argumentation lies in recognising the ocean as a frontier in Asia’s water history. Drawing from Frederick Nicholson, member of the Madras Civil Service in 1869, Amrith underlines the availability of sea-based harvests, independent of seasonal catastrophes. He highlights the sudden urgency from c.1870 onwards to harvest the sea, like we harvest the land, as produce from the oceans could be a good source of revenue (pp. 131–3).

Amrith also accurately maps how South Asian policymakers in the early post-Independence years took time to assess the impact of partition and borders on the subcontinental waters. The onus of developing a strong nation depended on harnessing the respective country’s waters. Hence, in due course, particularly India took to building dams which Nehru famously saw as temples, able to serve the need for national development. India plunged into various massive dam-building activities, prominently Hirakud, Tungabhadra and the Bakra Nangal Dam. India marketed the value of dams as an important aspect of industrialisation and job creation and propagated the idea through documentaries on ‘New India’ (p. 198) and cinema, as seen in Mother India (1957).

Partition showed its nuanced effects when the meteorological institution was divided, and a duplicate of documents was sent to Pakistan. On the western side, the irregular distribution of the Punjab irrigation canals compelled conflicts between India and Pakistan over water resources (pp. 181–8). This became as urgent as the conflict between the two neighbours for authority over Kashmir (p. 185). With time, as Asian nations swelled with ambitious dreams, India was suddenly made to realise that its rivers actually originate in Chinese territory and that any cross-border flow of a river is a threat to establishing India as a ‘hydraulic society’. China out of rivalry could decrease or cut the water supplies to India from the point of origination of these rivers, on which India predominantly depends (pp. 226–8).

To conclude, Amrith’s book is a perfect response to the foundational gaps of knowledge production in the water and climate history of South Asia. The academic nature of this excellent piece of work means, however, that it fails to reach the non-elite classes, whose misfortunes are directly proportional to climate change: farmers, fishermen, honey and wax collectors, and many others. Though it performs the humongous task of the ‘climate translator’ (Mathur, 2017: 77), this book does so within very limited terrains, leaving the reader expecting the inclusion of the silent voices of history, whose livelihood still primarily depends on the vagaries of the monsoons.