The Economist - UK (2019-06-29)

The EconomistJune 29th 2019 Essay |The South Asian monsoon 41

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ashore. Long ago, they showed others what lay over the horizon.

Had sailors, traders and holy men not followed their lead on the

monsoon winds, Asia would not be the heterogenous place it has

been through history—and remains today, despite the nationalist

narratives and more strictly bordered lives its 20th-century states

forced on their newly minted citizens. Tamil merchants from

southern India put up inscribed stones in Burma (modern-day

Myanmar) and Thailand around the seventh century ad. They

seem to have reached the southern Chinese emporium of Canton

(Guangzhou) not much later. India’s influence is intense in the ex-

traordinary ninth-century Buddhist temple of Borobudur on Java.

Hindu kingdoms arose in the Indonesian archipelago. Bali repre-

sents surely the most embellished version of the Hindu faith to-

day. Via India, Islam spread east, too, after Arab merchants carried

their faith to the Malabar Coast of south-west India and, eventual-

ly, to Quanzhou on China’s eastern seaboard, where 13th-century

Muslims lie beneath gravestones inscribed in Arabic. Later, with

the Portuguese, Roman Catholicism came to Goa and then, via the

south China coast, to Japan.

Arabs, east Africans, Bengalis, Tamils, Parsis, Malays, Chinese,

“Manila men” (Filipinos) and Okinawans met and traded, some-

times sojourning in each other’s lands, sometimes returning on

the next season’s winds. When European merchant venturers—

Portuguese, Dutch, French and British—came to the region they

joined in these seasonal rhythms. The East India Company put the

monsoon winds to the service of joint-stock capitalism, as “East

Indiamen”, heavily armed merchant ships, carried Indian silks

and cottons, as well as Chinese tea, back to Europe once a year.

In the 19th century, with the coming of coal, steam and iron, the

Europeans broke with seasonal rhythms, establishing colonial

dominance over Asia by means of efficient weaponry and Suez-

crossing steamships that could defy the wind to allow a constant

flow of raw materials one way—cotton, jute, grain, timber, tin—

and returned manufactures the other. The Asian ports established

or greatly expanded at the time—Bombay (present-day Mumbai),

Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai), Batavia (Jakarta), Manila,

Shanghai—marked the birth of a fossil-fuel age. The winds were

forgotten; but they were not unchanged. As the build-up of atmo-

spheric greenhouse gases which began back then traps ever more

heat the monsoons will change; the vast clouds of pollutants

created by Asia’s now endemic use of coal and oil are affecting

them too, in ways that meteorologists do not yet understand. And

those great low-lying colonial ports will prove far more suscepti-

ble to sudden flooding and rises in sea level than older, more de-

fensible ports farther up rivers were. The 90m inhabitants of Asia’s

great seaboard cities are among the most vulnerable to the Indus-

trial Revolution’s longest legacy. 7

J

ust a fewhundred kilometres from Narayanappa’s smallhold-

ing in Chittoor lie the deltas of the Godavari and the Krishna. In-

dia’s second- and fourth-longest rivers, respectively, they rise in

the Western Ghats and flow east into the Bay of Bengal. The con-

trast between straitened Chittoor, at the mercy of its own local

rains, and the verdant deltas could not be starker. Water drawn

from the rivers and spread across their deltas allows the lowland

farmers to raise two crops a year, sometimes three. Satellite pic-

tures show their lush paddy fields of the delta as emerald patches

on the brown scrub of the Coromandel coast and the land behind.

It is a lesson in the power of water to make or break, and the power

of humans to command it.

The green of the deltas was not always so reliable. William Rox-

burgh was a surgeon who left Edinburgh in 1772 to join the East In-

dia Company. He settled in Samulcottah (modern-day Samalkota)

in the Godavari delta. As Sunil Amrith writes in “Unruly Waters”, a

fascinating new history of the monsoon, Roxburgh was one of

those who, through measured observation, laid the foundations of

modern Indian meteorology. In so doing he came to believe that

nature in India was capable of much “improvement”. The Godava-

ri’s cultivators, he pointed out, depended entirely on the rains:

“when they fail, a famine is, and must ever be the consequence.”

The solution was to harness the water that “passes annually unem-

ployed into the sea”, retaining it for farmers’ year-round use.

The British were far from the first of the rulers of the Indian

subcontinent to transform the hydraulic landscape. The water

tank known as the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro is part of an urban

complex built by rulers of the Indus valley civilisation in the third

millennium bc. In 1568adAkbar, the third Mughal emperor, had

water brought to Delhi not only to “supply the wants of the poor”

but also to “leave permanent marks of the greatness of my empire”.

He did so by restoring and enlarging a canal to the Yamuna river

first cut two centuries earlier by a 14th-century sultan. Akbar’s

works, in turn, were restored and re-engineered by the British two

and a half centuries later.

Yet no illustrious ruler had turned his attention to the Godava-

ri. Its improvement fell instead to an unassuming engineer from

Dorking in Surrey, Arthur Cotton. Thousands of Indian labourers

working under his direction built a giant barrage at Dowleswaram,

regulating the river’s flow through the use

of huge gates described at the time as “the

noblest feat of engineering skill which has

yet been accomplished in British India”. To

this day, local people lionise Cotton dora

(“Boss” Cotton) for turning the delta into

India’s rice bowl. On his birthday farmers

hang garlands on his statue.

But if India’s Victorian rulers were hap-

py to lay a restraining hand on the subcon-

tinent’s rivers, they were chillingly unwill-

ing to interrupt the free markets they

imposed on it. Growing cash crops for dis-

tant markets uprooted old community pat-

terns of mutual obligation during periods

of rain-starved stress. In the late 19th cen-

tury terrible famines linked to failed mon-

soons took tens of millions of lives in Asia.

In 1876 and 1877, when the summer rains

failed completely, India’s administrators

invoked the authority of Adam Smith to ar-

Seeing like an empire

Arabian

Sea

INDIAN OCEAN

Bay of

Bengal

TibetanPlateau

H

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m

a l

a y a s

Average rainfall^05101520

2018, mm perday

Prevailing monsoon

winds

Source: NOAA Earth System

Research Laboratory

Summer Winter