The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  Evangelical irrigation

  British India’s craze for public works began with the succession of famines that hit north and south-eastern India during the 1830s. The two worst famines of the 1830s saw the East India Company’s first great irrigation projects. The first, the south Indian famine of 1832–3, particularly affected the coastal Telugu-speaking region around Rajahmundry. It took a decade for famine to bring about any serious action. The year 1832 saw unusually high rainfall in the area. One of the country’s worst ever hurricanes hit the south-east coast in May 1833, destroying crops and cattle. Existing systems of distribution collapsed. By July, 5,000 people were being fed daily with food paid for by charities or private individuals, but the money quickly ran out. When grain was transported from one place to another, small acts of violence were common. British officers were surprised that ‘such personal anguish’ produced ‘no jacquerie, no fanatical outburst against their rulers’. The region returned to some kind of calm soon after the worst months. But persistently bad weather and the weakness of local institutions meant there was no recovery, and most people in this once prosperous region lived on at the edge of subsistence.7

  British action was not sparked by mortality but by the collapse of the Company’s revenues. The tax collected in Rajahmundry district had fallen from 1.9 million rupees in 1812 to an average of 1.5 million in the early 1840s. In March 1843, a commissioner was sent to inquire ‘into the cause of the rapid decline’. Submitting his report a year later, Henry Montgomery offered a complex account of political breakdown, particularly blaming famine on the demise of a locally accountable elite who had once protected and nurtured the fortunes of the district. Montgomery’s 206-page report was complex and nuanced, and included improving the work of the local bureaucracy as one of its many recommendations. Montgomery argued that the famine was caused by the collapse of a social system and offered a complex set of solutions. The Board of Revenue found it impossible to frame a clear plan in response.8

  But the following year the 41-year-old army officer, irrigation engineer and evangelical Christian Arthur Cotton sent them a much more straightforward report. Cotton treated the famine as a crisis caused by the uneven flow of water to cultivated land, and believed that the solution was physical, technical and therefore simple. A new ‘system of irrigation’ would ‘provide means of counteracting the irregularity of the natural supplies of water’ and increase both the productivity of the soil and the British government’s revenue by four times.9

  Later in his long life Arthur Cotton described himself as ‘a man with one idea’: irrigation. But his early years were about war not water. Born in 1803, the tenth son of an Oxfordshire officer from the army’s mail corps, Cotton was enlisted in the East India Company’s military college at Addiscombe, near Croydon, as a fifteen-year-old. Three years later he was sent as a military engineer to Madras. War between Britain and Burma broke out soon after he arrived in India, and Cotton helped to blow up enemy forts. Then, one evening while gazing up at the stars when sailing back across the Bay of Bengal, Cotton had a moment of religious conversion. Thereafter he read the Bible every day and, as his daughter later put it, ensured ‘his hours, both of toil and pleasure, were marked by a sense of the presence of the Unseen Saviour’. Arguments about irrigation were underwritten by the certain belief that he was working ‘for the glory of God . . . and the benefit of men’, and that British Christians had a peculiar destiny to improve the world. The British were, he wrote in 1854, ‘a powerful, intelligent, well instructed, and energetic European people, with unbounded means at their disposal and above all the principles of truth and righteousness taught them in the Bible’. Cotton’s commitment earned him the nickname sanyasi, or devotee, among some of the Indians who worked for him. Compared to fellow officials it gave him a rare confidence in the capacity of his work to transform India.10

  Returning from a period of convalescence in Australia, Cotton was sent to build a church and a breakwater at the port city of Vizagapatnam, 500 miles north along the coast from Madras. The work was light, so Cotton spent much of his time exploring on horseback around the coastal Telugu-speaking region. Three days’ ride south-east of Vizagapatnam he came across water flowing through a region struggling to recover from famine, and began to think about the redemptive possibilities of British power on a scale never before imagined.11

  Rising in hills seventy miles north-east of Bombay, the Godavari weaves its way nearly a thousand miles through the Deccan plateau, eventually watering the land over which Mangapati Devi and Benjamin Branfill fought in the 1790s and then falling into the Bay of Bengal in a twenty-mile-wide delta that branches out from the town of Rajahmundry. The river drains water from a 115,000-square-mile basin, once discharging three times the volume of the Nile at Cairo. Cotton saw the unpredictability of the river’s flow as both a waste of water and a test of his ingenuity. An abundance of water destroyed crops in some places and a deficiency of water caused drought elsewhere. Cotton thought God had designed the Indian landscape to cause suffering unless virtuous men acted to mitigate it.12 For the first forty years of British rule, the East India Company had presided over ‘grievous neglect’, bringing ‘disgrace to a civilised country’ through their inaction. Now, Cotton argued, they had the obligation to redeem themselves, by building dams and channels to spread the flow of water evenly throughout the countryside.13

  The East India Company in Madras was more interested in saving money than atoning for the sins of man. They commissioned Cotton to take charge of public works in the district but gave him far fewer resources than he thought were needed. Cotton estimated the work would need six officer engineers, eight sappers (junior military engineers) and 2,000 masons. He was allocated one newly arrived ‘young hand’ to teach, two apprentice surveyors and a handful of stoneworkers. These limited resources forced him to rely on old Indian techniques. To save on masonry work he copied the method of construction used in the grand ancient anicut (the word was the transliteration of the Tamil anaikkattu, or dam work) on the River Cauvery at Tanjore. Cotton created a loose pile of mud and stone on the riverbed which he then covered in lime and plastered with concrete, instead of building up entirely with stone. The Godavari anicut cost a third of his original projection, a total of £47,500. Aside from the steel in the sluice gates, everything in his waterworks would have been familiar to the labourers who first built dams in the region 1700 years earlier.

  But Arthur Cotton was trying to employ these old techniques within a grand design to transform India’s landscape that was unprecedented in scale. Pre-British irrigation systems diverted the flow of running water. Cotton’s plan was to store water and then move it across far larger distances, transporting it to places that had never seen water even in the wet season. His prophetic style of engineering led him to argue that the natural environment could be radically reshaped by divinely inspired men.

  These arguments about the scale of change under British rule influenced British policy, particularly helping shape the institutions that led the new interest in public works during the 1850s. Arthur Cotton’s most compelling critique was that the East India Company commissioned roads, irrigation schemes and railways in a haphazard fashion, losing money as a consequence. Cotton’s arguments were contained in a series of letters to senior government officers which culminated in a privately printed volume, Public Works in India, circulated in London in 1853. This book was as fierce an attack on the priorities of the imperial regime as James Mill’s History of British India had been thirty-six years earlier. Like Mill, Cotton criticized the British for being seduced by Indian ways of doing things, and thought a cadre of men who knew nothing about the subcontinent could drive forward change. The British ‘Civil Service’ had, he argued, succumbed to what he called ‘the Hindu view’ that the purpose of government was merely to collect revenue. Instead, Cotton wanted to place a new, centralized public works administration at the core of the British regime, staffed by young, energetic men who had litt
le experience of the subcontinent. A single Board of Public Works would systematically drive forward the creation of an India-wide network of canals and roads and would be cheap. Each member of the board should have a paper stand with the words ‘Do it, do it, do it’ written on it. Out in India’s districts, the central government figure would no longer be the Collector but the engineer.14

  Cotton’s hectoring led to the creation of the Public Works Department, a body which brought together the various strands of the imperial government concerned with physical infrastructure into a single organization. With a single secretariat, headed by powerful new government official to make the case for public works in the Governor-General’s Council, expenditure on roads and canals, new buildings and, eventually, railways grew. Revenue collection remained the British regime’s main priority until 1947. The Collector continued to be the supreme government official in many parts of India, and a fraction of government revenue was spent on ‘improvement’ compared to the military, for example. But physical infrastructure took up by far the largest proportion of this still relatively small sum, accounting for 9.5 per cent (or £3 million) of total government expenditure in 1854. By comparison, spending on all forms of education, from primary to university, hovered at between 0.5 and 0.7 per cent of government outgoings until the mid-1860s.15

  By 1854, three years before northern India was engulfed in a real all-out war Arthur Cotton described himself as a tired, victorious warrior. ‘The tide of Indian improvement has now fairly set in,’ he wrote in the preface to the first public edition of Public Works in India, ‘the battle has been fought and won.’ Cotton described himself as ‘an old soldier after a long battle, sitting down quietly . . . to eat his rice and talk over the incidents of the day, in the full assurance that the enemy are irrecoverably overthrown’. The danger now was not that the government did nothing, but that it funded the wrong kind of thing, railways, for example or the wrong sort of irrigation. Officials mistakenly envisaged railways ‘as a sort of infallible means of improvement’. Now that everyone had become an advocate of public works, ‘the chief difficulty is discerning friend from foe’, he said.16

  One of these foes was Sir Proby Cautley, the engineer who designed the British irrigation system on the Ganges river. From a family of wealthy clergymen, Cautley was in the same class as Cotton at the East India Company’s military school at Addiscombe. His first engineering job was to renovate the old Mughal-era canals that irrigated the doab, or triangle of land between the Ganges and Jamuna upstream from their confluence at Allahabad. Here, like Cotton, Cautley was responding to famine. These were years when northern India’s Gangetic plain seemed hotter than ever, as declining forest cover led to soil erosion and water evaporation. One observing official, Donald Butter, thought the jungles had all been ‘dried up’. Ecological decline had caused a catastrophic drought to sweep through the area from Allahabad to Delhi in 1837–8, and engendered a powerful mood in favour of a grand new scheme of waterworks. Cautley created a massive network of canals, more than 350 miles in total, which eventually opened in April 1855.

  The opening ceremony was a grand affair with water flooding into the channels to the crash of cannon fire. But like Cotton, Cautley had struggled with an imperial government which adequately funded his plans. Construction was slow, limited by a lack of materials and the absence of staff.17

  The government’s limited support had consequences, most importantly the foundation of India’s first institution for technical education. Cautley couldn’t afford to recruit technicians from England. His solution was to train men based in India, British and Indian, to do the engineering work. He established an engineering class at Roorkee, near the head of the Ganges canal, in 1845. Two years later the class became a college, teaching twenty students a year. The earliest Indian student, Munnoo Lal, graduated in 1849 and was immediately appointed as a teacher-translator of engineering textbooks into Hindustani. The college quickly became the centre for diffusing and developing engineering knowledge throughout India, inculcating the technical know-how needed to measure land and build bridges, canals and railways into its mixed-race classes of Indian and British students and producing the standard reference works on civil engineering in India. In 1851 there were fifty students studying at the college, twenty-one in Indian languages, and forty-two students had passed through ‘furnished to the service of the state’, as the college prospectus put it. In that year it was renamed the Thomason College of Civil Engineering, housed in a grand new neoclassical building, which survives today as the administrative block of Roorkee’s Indian Institute of Technology. By the mid-1850s fifty students were graduating each year.18

  The civil engineering college at Roorkee was the oldest educational institution built to introduce Western knowledge of any kind to Indian students. The few British-supported colleges built beforehand were founded to cultivate Indian forms of scholarship, and most were paid for by Indian not imperial funds. Roorkee shows us the kind of education that mid-Victorian Britons thought was most important to make their government in India work. It was technical and prosaically practical. It treated India as a physical landscape that could be remoulded by the mechanical power of the British, not a country populated by communities whose differences needed to be understood. But most importantly, this institution was created as a result of the failures and limitations of the imperial regime. The college at Roorkee came into being because the British government in India did not devote the resources to public works which Victorian engineers demanded.

  Despite their similar careers, Sir Arthur Cotton and Sir Proby Cautley argued vehemently about the direction of irrigation in India. Both men shared an evangelical belief in the capacity of British engineering to improve the subcontinent, but they also had different opinions as to how that expertise should be applied. Cautley’s schemes tapped surplus water from high up a river system, drawing it into an entirely new system of irrigation canals, leaving the main river flow diminished in force but otherwise unaffected. Cotton’s approach was cheaper but more fundamental, building massive mud and stone dams at a river’s point of greatest flow, and then effectively creating a new river system downstream. The two men made the case for their different approach in the supposedly universal language of science. In fact, the difference was a product of the different ecological conditions of the regions in which they began their careers. Cautley worked in India’s dry northern plain, where the only way to move large volumes of water was by creating a new network of canals. Cotton began his career as an irrigation engineer among India’s eastern deltas, in places where water flowed across land naturally during much of the year. Cotton’s irrigation system on the Godavari was a success, helping revive the region’s economy. Failing to understand the local context to his work, Cotton hubristically projected his approach as a universal solution to the hydrological challenges of the whole of India. His projects in drier regions, to connect rivers between Kurnool and Kadapa for example, failed badly.19

  British irrigation in mid-nineteenth-century India began with an ecological crisis and ended in only very limited success. But the history of stone dams and brick canals, of evangelical engineers like Cotton and Cautley and their intemperate antagonisms, also mark the beginning of a new notion of the power of the state in imperial India.

  In mid-Victorian Britain politicians did not see the support of public works as the responsibility of central government. Infrastructure, whether roads, railways, bridges or schools were commissioned and paid for by philanthropy or fees. Engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel were vociferously hostile to the idea that the state should do anything other than let them get on with their privately funded profit-making ventures. Until well into the late nineteenth century, central authority licensed private and local initiative, but it did not drive forward ‘improvement’ itself.

  In India the succession of crises which seemed to challenge the British presence in in the second quarter of the nineteenth century produced a different idea of
the proper power of government. There engineers demanded that public works be funded from state expenditure. Particularly after the great crisis of 1857-8, the men who governed the state agreed. Paradoxically though, the exaggerated idea of the power of government in India was produced by the absence of political leadership. The imperial state in India had a far weaker social foundation and far more limited revenue base than the government in Britain. The imperial state continually jumped from one crisis to the next. It was very poor at managing its relationship with Indian society, and increasingly anxious after the rebellion. In practice, it could do nothing that required the consent of established Indian elites and political communities. Its solution, instead, was hiring low-paid, often lower caste labour to manipulate steel and stone. But that practice allowed the ‘state’ to project an unprecedented and false idea of its power upon Indian society.

  Alice and the engineers

  Railways only became a vehicle for asserting imperial power haphazardly and belatedly. To begin with, the imperial regime shared the views of Arthur Cotton, and thought that blasting dry metal lines onto the Indian landscape was a wasteful enterprise. The driving force behind India’s first railway projects were private enthusiasts, but the absence of government support made the spread of railway lines slow.

  The first train routes opened in Britain, the USA and France between 1825 and 1828. Commercial lines were laid throughout the world, from Australia to Russia to Cuba, over the next twenty years. By 1845, all that had happened in India was the speculative gathering of rival groups of merchants, engineers and former officials to propagate a series of rival railway plans. In Calcutta, the Anglo-Indian agency houses led the campaign. The landholder and mine-owner Dwarkanath Tagore played a central role in founding the Great Western Railway Company of Bengal. The company was created to build railways to transport indigo and sugar from the lower Ganges valley to steamboats waiting at Calcutta. It did not build a single foot of track.