BOOKS: NATIONAL WATERS
From being a backwater where scholars lurk in murky archives, India’s environmental history is now a lively torrent, brimming with novel ideas and perspectives. A bookshelf studded with superb recent works like Thomas R. Trautmann’s Elephants and Kings and Neeladri Bhattacharya’s The Great Agrarian Conquest now bulges with two more big books: Sudipta Sen’s Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River and Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History.
Sen’s epic details, from prehistory to the present, the kingdoms and cities that rose and fell along the Ganga. For millennia, the river basin has witnessed the passage of pilgrims and traders. Its three mile deep alluvium has produced the surplus to support specialised guilds and castes. Its wealth has provided patronage to poets and sculptors. Sen eruditely documents this efflorescence. Bristling with formidable scholarship, Ganga demands the reader’s close attention. Reading it felt a lot like swotting for a school exam, trying to keep track of the rise and fall of empires and dynasties. In his focus on political history, Sen even forays at length into the realms of the Chola and Pallava kings of the south, only to make a minor point about the role of Ganga mythology in claiming legitimacy.
The river disappears from sight altogether when Sen weighs in on the question of Aryan presence in the Indus Valley Civilisation or holds forth on Kautilya’s 2nd-century BCE treatise on governance, Arthashastra. We learn a lot about the spread of Buddhism, get a guided tour of the iconography of the Sanchi stupa and the Ellora temples in central India and glimpses into Tughlaq-era government and more, but struggle to relate it to the river basin. A surfeit of information makes the book sag under the weight of its scholarship. Curiously, there’s only a sketchy account of the colonial period when agrarian life in the Ganga basin was transformed by new crops and forms of exploitation. The post-Independence period is missing altogether. There are also numerous errors, especially about flora and fauna. Ganga begins with a luminous chapter about the sacredness of the river and how its presence in cosmology, myth and metaphysics runs deeper than kingdoms and empires. But such insight, and the enduring material connections between land, water and life that inspire it, are lost in the minutiae of a tome that should have been called ‘Sen’s General History of India’.
Amrith’s Unruly Waters is more engaging, though it too bites off more than it can do justice to. Its central thread is the story of the endeavour to map the monsoons, the annual winds on which ride India’s economic fortunes. Amrith deftly describes the colonial development of meteorology through its early heroes who devised new statistical techniques and created scientific infrastructure that now spans the subcontinent. He paints a vivid backdrop of the droughts and famines that prompted these initiatives and shows how imperial measures employed a calculus of profit and loss that superseded benevolence. To make their revenues monsoon-proof, governments built dams and promoted groundwater extraction, but these eventually worsened the water crisis. Amrith persuasively shows how the hubris of technological mastery continues to propel Indian efforts, even as climate change reveals the immensity of ecological uncertainty. How China has dealt with its water crises is an interesting leitmotif running through the book.
Amrith occasionally falters when he tries to leap over large and complex events and processes: he asserts that land productivity in Bengal fell in the 20th century because of water hyacinth and railway embankments! Crucial snow-fed rivers like the Ganga and Brahmaputra barely figure in the book. A handpump is labelled an electric tubewell. Several spaces for illustrations are left blank: censored maps perhaps? Overall, though, this is a book environmentally-concerned lay readers will learn a lot from.
The reviewer is an environmental sociologist