New York: Basic Books, 2018. xv, 381 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-465-09772-2.
With the Indian subcontinent facing a looming water crisis, there has been growing interest in recent years in the history of its water and rivers. Sunil Amrith’s book fits squarely within this trend, following a well-established narrative. At the heart of this narrative is a focus on the disruptive long-term consequences of colonialism—and of the boundary-drawing nationalisms that succeeded it—on human-water relations. Like many recent scholars, Amrith is careful to avoid the romanticization of premodern relationships to water and nature. But in broad outline his narrative is one of massive modern technical interventions whose unintended negative consequences modern South Asia continues to deal with.
What gives Amrith’s book a distinctive place in this literature is the way he broadens this narrative and pushes it outward—in two key directions. First is his insistence on the grounding of the technicalisms of water control in their broader political and cultural contexts. Whatever the importance of the colonial—and later nationalist—alliance between state power and engineering, Amrith’s narrative is attentive to the popular political imaginaries surrounding the control of water—and human relationships to nature—that have accompanied these modern transformations. Drawing on literature and film, he explores the politics of water in ways that nuance any simple narrative of increasing state control over water based on technical development. The imaginaries of politics operate as a critical counterpoint to the story of engineering control, at times reinforcing them, at times challenging them, but always making for a more complex and ambiguous narrative.
Second is his pushing of the narrative outward from the Indian subcontinent in a spatial sense. As his account makes clear, the story of the Indian subcontinent’s water has long been linked to the hydrological cycles shaped by the mountains, coastlines, winds, and oceans that surround the subcontinent. One of the great ironies of colonial history—and of subsequent nationalist policy—was that, even as colonial science and technology were deployed by the British to contain and control India’s rivers as they were put to “use” for revenue and production, leading ultimately to the nationalist obsession with large dams that continues to mark South Asia today, colonial science also pointed toward the complex intersections between terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric water flows extending outside the territory of South Asia. This framing allows him to juxtapose the work of many of the great colonial canal-builders within India, such as Sir Arthur Cotton, against the work of those many British officials who committed themselves to the collection of scientific data about the larger flows of weather and rainfall in the Indian Ocean region, in the process laying the foundations for advances in the understanding of meteorology that have continued in independent India. Perhaps more important, it is this same focus which also allows Amrith to project his story as not simply an Indian one, but as an inescapably Asian one (and even a world-wide one), linked to China and Southeast Asia not only by the common flows of rivers from the Himalayas and by the atmospheric flows and ocean currents linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and the South China Sea, but also by pan-Asian (and international) flows of scientific knowledge. The history of hydrological knowledge is thus one that has operated, in Amrith’s telling, both as a foundation for large national water control projects, and, in critical respects, as a counterpoint to them.
In this sense, Amrith uses the history of water and its multiple terrestrial, atmospheric, and oceanic flows as a metaphor—indeed, as something more than a metaphor—for the tension defining the story of water in India as a history rooted in the distinctive character of a particular territory—with its own politics and culture—and, at the very same time, as one linked to hydrological flows, and flows of knowledge, reaching far beyond the subcontinent, encompassing the rest of Asia and the world. This is a complicated story, and at times Amrith’s discussions of localizing South Asian elements on the one hand, and of regionalizing and globalizing elements on the other, jostle uneasily. It is difficult in places to hold the thread of a central argument. But what ultimately binds Amrith’s book together is its central focus on the monsoon as a distinctive regional weather pattern, at once localized in its varying impact on different parts of India, and yet bound into larger Asian weather patterns (and, indeed, into global patterns as well, such as the “southern oscillation” associated with El Niño). Critical to Amrith’s contribution is his delineation of the monsoon’s history at multiple, intersecting levels of scale, and as both a climatic and a cultural phenomenon. Understanding the monsoon and its changing history is thus a key, in Amrith’s story, for how historians might understand the meanings of climate change on both scientific and cultural/political levels, and as a phenomenon that must be seen as simultaneously regional and global in its dynamics.
David Gilmartin
North Carolina State University, Raleigh