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| ISBN-13: | 9780520960831 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Blood and Water
The Indus River Basin in Modern History
By David Gilmartin
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96083-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Community and Environment
Changes in structures for controlling water transformed the Indus basin in the century and a half from 1850 to 2000. A largely arid region with a historical mix of varying forms of agricultural and pastoral production, the Indus basin became, by the second half of the twentieth century, one of the globe's most heavily irrigated river basins. At the time of the British departure in 1947, there were some twenty-six million acres of irrigated land within the Indus basin, which encompassed by then the largest integrated, state-controlled irrigation system in the world—and one that had made the region one of the most agriculturally productive in India. Divided between India and Pakistan by the subcontinent's partition, the Indus basin's irrigation expansion nevertheless continued apace after 1947—on both sides of the border. The Indus basin today supports a dense agricultural population whose size would be unthinkable without the transformations that extensive irrigation wrought.
The story of irrigation in the Indus basin is one of modern history's great stories of large-scale environmental transformation, but it is also a story of changing relationships between Indus basin society and the state. A large-scale environmental history of the Indus basin has yet to be written. If it were, it would focus on many of the critical processes that have transformed South Asia more generally. An environmental narrative of the Indus basin would of necessity incorporate long-term interactions among pastoralism, migration, agriculture, and trade. It would lay out changes in patterns of land use as agriculture expanded (and sometimes contracted) in response to technological and political changes, focusing on the dramatic expansion in the production of commercialized cash crops (particularly wheat, cotton, and rice) that came in the twentieth century. Yet it would also offersomething more. It would detail how the very process of environmental transformation was linked with changes in the imagining of the human communities—defined by relationships to nature—that bound visions of state power and the people of the Indus basin together.
The relationship between changing natural environments and changing structures of community lies at the heart of this book. As the British colonial state transformed the landscape of the Indus basin, it also redefined its claims to legitimacy through its reformulation of communities defined in relationship to nature. On one level, the construction of massive new physical works underscored the state's new claims to legitimacy, framed by its role as the mediator of an imagined community of producers dependent on new, scientific technologies of water control. But, on another level, the state also molded and manipulated forms of indigenous community whose relationships to nature had long shaped forms of community organization and imagining. These included not only communities of production but also communities of "blood," newly reordered through programs of large-scale settlement and of property delimitation. "Blood" and "water" came to be intimately linked, and in ways that were to have a profound impact on the state's relationship to Indus basin society. The story of the transformation of the environment is also the story of the transformation of community and of the forms of state legitimacy with which this was intimately connected.
DEBATING THE POLITICS OF NATURE'S TRANSFORMATION
As the framework for a story of modern agricultural expansion, the Indus basin's history has long been the subject of historical attention. With the region the most important focus for state investment in irrigation in British India, the degree to which the expansion of irrigation laid the groundwork for capitalist transformation—particularly in the Punjab—has been a staple of historical debates, and one that has often focused on the impact of colonial policies in either facilitating or retarding this process. But the history of the state's relationship to nature and production is important for more than the history of capitalism. Environmental history provides a critical ground for exploring the relationship between community, environment, and the structuring of legitimate political authority on a much deeper level.
The close connection between irrigation projects and state legitimacy was never far from the surface in British thinking as they undertook the major projects of environmental transformation that changed the Indus basin. This was captured nowhere more clearly than in a review of colonial irrigation undertaken for the British Council by Gerald Lacey, one of the most eminent twentieth-century British Indian water engineers, shortly after partition. Lacey, though hardly oblivious to the problems associated with British irrigation, detailed the vast transformations in land use that had irrevocably changed the Indus basin by the time of the British departure in 1947. This was a story told in part through the numbers of new works constructed by the British and the millions of acres brought under canal command. But "when irrigation is conducted on so vast a scale and works of such magnitude are involved," he wrote, "the mere repetition of figures and statistics falls on a dulled imagination." Rather, the deeper significance of British irrigation lay in its links to the larger modern "epic" (as Sir Douglas Harris put it in his foreword to Lacey's account) of man's conquest of nature for productive human advantage. With scientific knowledge of nature serving as a touchstone for the legitimacy of rule, this was a story that transcended the bounds of colonialism and, as Lacey saw it, ultimately encompassed both colonial and national forms of rule. It was a saga brought to fruition in the Indus basin by "generations of engineers," British and Indian alike. "The Indian Service of engineers in which the British and their Indian colleagues laboured for so many years has passed away," Lacey wrote, but, in independent South Asia, "the tradition remains and is a living force," continuing to shape the ongoing expansion of Indus basin irrigation in India and Pakistan. "The irrigation works of India and Pakistan, down to the smallest distributary channel, and the loneliest canal 'inspection-house,' must always remain," Lacey declared—evoking a modern archetype of nationalist sacrifice, but linked here to the disinterested profession of scientific control over nature—"a monument to the unknown engineer."
This image of irrigation patronage as a selfless and beneficent gift to the people was, for all its modern, scientific (and propaganda) emphases, one with well-established links to notions of ruling legitimacy in precolonial India. Cultural assumptions about the legitimizing significance of water control can be seen in the many indigenous, colonial-era ballads celebrating the exploits of British water engineers and casting them as water patrons, much in the mold of earlier rulers. Anand Pandian has thus described the persisting, heroic image of one colonial engineer, the man responsible for the Periyar dam in South India. Large-scale irrigation patronage found deep resonance in popular thinking, he notes, and was associated with the sympathetic delivery of nature's bounty to the people. Similar attitudes emerge in the Indus basin (whatever the regional differences in their cultural framing), as evidenced by Punjabi praise poems to nineteenth-century colonial irrigation builders and entrepreneurs, such as Popham Young, the administrator most associated with the settling of the Punjab canal colonies, or Captain L.J.H. Grey, who personally supervised the construction of a network of canals in the Punjab's Ferozepore district in the 1870s. Grey "was terrible to look at like a king," a balladeer wrote in praise, but "he performed all his works by kindness to the people." With a formerly dry country watered, he was, the poet proclaimed, "like a hundred Alexanders."
But if such works showed beneficence, they also reveal irrigation patronage as an act of power, bound up with all the moral ambiguities that the direct exercise of state power over nature inherently involved. The flip side of a vision of beneficent rule rooted in irrigation patronage was thus a vision of water control as a source of the most potentially oppressive authority. If men like Grey were praised for bringing arid lands under productive command, they were also the focus of deep controversy and complaint both from other colonial officials and from the local people. The operation of large-scale water control as a form of potentially overbearing state power was the subject of intense debate in the mid-twentieth century, extending well beyond the Indus basin. The relationship of water control (and, more broadly, of state-directed control over nature) to the dangerous authoritarian tendencies of the modern state was argued forcefully by Karl Wittfogel in the 1950s. The historical roots of modern despotisms in state-managed irrigation works lay at the root of Wittfogel's focus on what he came to call "oriental despotisms." Reliance on large-scale water works removed power from local hands and vested it in the hands of authoritarian managers, who controlled the knowledge, the powers of labor mobilization, and the military means to protect these works. Such concentrations of power in turn led to hierarchical class divisions and to the ideological structures needed to legitimize such authority. Although Wittfogel's arguments drew heavily on ancient examples, they were intended primarily as a critique of authoritarian state power in his own day and its relationship to the forms of power that water control in arid environments—and scientific control over nature—seemed to legitimize.
As a guide to the actual operation of large-scale irrigation systems, Wittfogel's arguments have proved generally unhelpful. But in directing attention to the moral ambiguities inherent in state control over irrigation, they have exerted an important influence over the debates modern irrigation has engendered. As Erik P. Eckholm noted in the 1970s, in a work inspired by the 1972 U.N. sponsored Stockholm Conference on the environment, the great irrigation works of modern times had come to dramatize the dangers inherent in efforts to expand large-scale control over nature without sufficient attention to the "ecological requisites" of nature itself. In the 1990s, Sandra Postel underscored these moral ambiguities in her discussion of the "irrigation miracle" of the twentieth century, a world-wide phenomenon in which the Indus basin's transformation played an exemplary early role. The twentieth-century explosion of irrigation transformed world agriculture on an unprecedented scale, she writes, promising a plenty of agricultural production previously unimagined. But it also entailed a vast "Faustian bargain" with nature, in which state power—and the hubris of state knowledge—was deeply morally implicated. "In return for transforming deserts into fertile fields and redirecting rivers to suit human needs," Postel suggests, nature has written its own counter-narrative, "exacting [its] price in myriad forms," a price paid by the people who have borne the brunt of ongoing environmental deterioration. Perhaps the most explicit linking of a critique of large-scale irrigation with a moral critique of the modern state is found in the work of the American environmental historian Donald Worster on the western United States. Wittfogel's central question, as Worster restates it, was "How, in the remaking of nature, do we remake ourselves?" Worster's answer followed the critique Wittfogel laid out, though he linked the rise of authoritarian control over nature not to "oriental despotism" but to modern capitalism itself. Modern large-scale irrigation works, in which the state has become a tool of the capitalist and instrumental desire to dominate nature, were, in Worster's argument, fundamentally inimical to freedom. "Democracy cannot survive," he wrote, "where technical expertise, accumulated capital, or their combination is allowed to take command." Largescale control over nature could, in such a view, only have a corrupting effect on the morality (and reciprocity) of power itself.
Such environmental critiques have, of course, come to be inflected in distinctive ways in the South Asian context—and with respect to the Indus basin—by the history of colonialism, and the forms of statecraft and community organization it encouraged. Indeed, while debates on the costs and benefits of large-scale irrigation in the Indian subcontinent have in some ways tracked debates about the environmental history of water control elsewhere, the political implications of India's irrigation development have come to be grounded in distinctive analyses of the nature of colonial rule as a political system. Such questions have taken on particular force in South Asian history precisely because large-scale projects of control over nature—such as the transformation of the Indus basin—have become touchstones for assessing the relationship between the colonial past and the new, national—and democratic—identities that succeeded, as Lacey's comments on the transition from colonial to national rule in 1947 suggested. The critique of large-scale irrigation has thus been linked for many in the South Asian context to a search for indigenous, small-scale models of adaptation to nature as an alternative genealogy for national identity, independent of the grand epic of large-scale scientific control of nature that in the Indus basin seemingly legitimized the colonial state—and whose legitimizing mantle was bequeathed to the "developmental" states that succeeded it.
It is in this context that much has been written on local, "community-based" irrigation works, on the "local knowledge" these entail, and on the ways in which they have declined under the onslaught of state-based irrigation works. Narratives of environmental decline—in the face of capitalism, "expert" knowledge, and the hubris of the modern state—though at one time a staple of environmental narratives more generally, have taken on their own distinctive valences in South Asia not only as a critique of "postcolonial governmentality" but also as a plea for more attention to be paid to South Asia's local, seemingly more "authentic" traditions of environmental adaptation. In the works of more polemical writers, such as Vandana Shiva, this narrative of decline in the face of large-scale state action has embodied the call for a more communitarian (and feminist) national ethos. But even for more mainstream environmental historians, such as Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, this narrative of environmental decline in the face of state-based technicalism offers an alternative to the grand epic of state-based science, thus suggesting the possibility of an alternative environmental morality with perhaps more democratic and participatory potential—and a less evident colonial genealogy. Indeed, such ideas exerted widespread influence in both India and Pakistan in the years after 1980 in calls for more participatory, "grassroots" developmental initiatives across a range of settings.
Yet such highly moral uses of environmental history have also provoked their own reactions. As many historians (and historically minded anthropologists) have pointed out, such environmental narratives of decline can easily romanticize small-scale irrigation, ignoring the power relations that have shaped water control on all levels and at all times, long before the great projects of the colonial era. Many recent works have thus challenged the underlying assumptions in such narratives in fundamental ways. As David Mosse has shown in his careful study of tank irrigation in South India, neither the state nor the local community can be easily understood as bounded, alternative entities in the morally charged ways that more populist environmental narratives have tended to present them. Mosse's work explores with great sophistication the history of water control as a facet of "statecraft" in the broadest sense, involving multiple players on many levels, linked historically to shifting structures of power, governance, and legitimating ideology. From such a perspective, the dichotomy of "state" versus "local community" largely dissolves—and can be seen to be as problematic as the simple dichotomy between the "indigenous" and the "colonial" as a framework for understanding different forms of management. The rejection of such dichotomies—and of the fixed boundaries of analysis they enable—has thus proved central in undermining both triumphalist narratives of colonial progress and the romanticized counter-narratives of autonomous, authentic, community-based irrigation development that arose in their place.
But as Mosse's work also suggests, the conceptual juxtaposition of opposing images of large-scale, bureaucratized irrigation, on the one hand, and small-scale irrigation adapted to local "community," on the other, has its own intellectual history, rooted in "150 years of state making" in South Asia since the mid-nineteenth century. The way these images were juxtaposed was itself a product of the structure of colonial thinking. To understand the larger political dynamics of the Indus basin's transformation, it is thus critical to begin with a historical examination of the roots of these dichotomies themselves. Indeed, it is the argument here that, if the history of "statecraft" is central to the history of irrigation, then the intellectual history of the relationship between "state" and "community" (and the "environment") as concepts must be at the heart of the history of nature's transformation under the colonial regime, for only in this context can we trace the intertwined history in the Indus basin of irrigation and modern forms of statecraft. However inadequate intellectual history may be as a framework for fully understanding the history of irrigation in all its myriad local details, the conceptual history of terms like "community" and "environment" is central to linking the large story of the Indus basin's dramatic transformation under colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the great redefinitions of state power—and its morality—that have marked the modern era. Indeed, to analyze the historical saga of Indus basin irrigation, it is necessary, I would argue, to begin with the concept of "community" itself—and the ways that its meanings were fundamentally intertwined both with the history of the state and with changing ideas about nature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood and Water by David Gilmartin. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsMaps
1. INTRODUCTION: COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENT
2. IRRIGATION AND THE BALOCH FRONTIER
3. COMMUNITY ON THE WASTE: THE VILLAGE AND THE COLONIAL PROPERTY ORDER
4. STATUTE AND CUSTOM IN WATER LAW
5. SCIENCE, THE STATE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
6. THE RIVER BASIN AND PARTITION
7. THE INDUS WATERS TREATY AND ITS AFTERLIVES
Notes
Bibliography
Index