Abstract
Water is essential to human life. The three articles that comprise this special section of the Medieval History Journal explore how this human essential was understood, managed and remembered in India, where water takes on special meaning and requires special measures because of the monsoonal climate.
Because of the monsoon, rainfall in India is concentrated in a few months of the year. For virtually the whole of the subcontinent, those months are June, July and August, when the southwest monsoon carries water-laden clouds to the Indian landmass. For southeastern India, they are November and December when the monsoon reverses course and travels from the northeast to the southwest.
Annual monsoon rainfall totals vary widely across India. On the southwest coast, it amounts to about 3,000 millimetres per year. In areas such as interior western India, the focus of the article by Yaaminey Mubayi in this special section, rainfall could be a quarter of that, or some 700 millimetres a year. And in Tamil Nadu, which R. K. K. Rajarajan writes about, annual precipitation ranges from 600 to 1,200 millimetres, depending upon the location.
The monsoon is a product of the unique relationship between sea and land in the Indian Ocean, which has no counterpart in any other place in the world. In March, April and May, the growing intensity of the sun heats the Asian landmass. The low pressure system that develops over the land, as a consequence, draws in warm and moisture laden air from the western Indian Ocean starting in May or early June. When this air hits the land, the clouds release the water they contain. These winds travel in a northeasterly direction across the Indian subcontinent until they reach the high peaks and cold air of the Himalayas when they reverse direction in November, bringing a wave of rain to southeastern India. And the following June, the cycle begins anew.
While the cycle is predictable, the amount of rainfall that is delivered in the annual monsoon varies widely from year to year. The levels of rain are dependent upon numerous factors and these included ocean temperatures in the Indian (the Indian Ocean dipole) and Pacific (the El Niño) Oceans. Social and political institutions were created to protect against shortfalls in the monsoon. These ranged from entitlements to food to systems for the storage of grain and other foodstuffs. At the same time, protections had to be in place against too much rain and the flooding that could ensue.
Another problem with the monsoon is that the bulk of the annual precipitation is concentrated in a few months of the year. The human demand for water is not confined to just those few months, and this led to the development of technologies for the storage of water. However, storage was not only a technical matter. Political and social institutions for the building and upkeep of these structures and the distribution of water had to be created and maintained.
This is by way of context for the three articles that make up this special section. Let us now turn to those articles.
In his contribution, ‘Water, the source of “Genesis” and the End: Macro and Micro Viṣṇu in the Hymns of the Āḻvārs’, R. K. K. Rajarajan looks at the ways in which water figures in the hymns of the Alvar saints of southeastern India, great devotees of Vishnu and his avatar Krishna. The Alvars numbered 10 (in some accounts 12 with the inclusion of Andal and Madhurakavi) and lived between the seventh and ninth centuries
According to Rajarajan, for the Alvars, water was central to five cosmic functions. Water figured in the stories of creation, and here he draws parallels with the Genesis story of the Old Testament. Water also served a critical function of sustenance, and it is central to the maintaining of life. And it played a role in destruction or the end. In addition to these three, water has importance in cyclic approaches to time. It is the substance that purifies and releases.
Rajarajan reveals the many references to a great flood, from which the world was formed, in many hymns of the Alvars. Such a life-giving flood is reproduced every year in the annual cycle of inundation that follows the southwest monsoon. The rivers of Tamil Nadu originate in the Western Ghats and flow from west to east. These fill with water by July and make possible the cultivation of rice along these rivers. Along the Kaveri delta, the largest and richest of these river valleys, the annual rising of the waters is celebrated in the festival, Aadi Perukku, which can be translated as the increasing or multiplying (of the Kaveri River) in the Tamil month of Aadi.
If the Kaveri increased too much and overran its banks, it became a destructive force, destroying human settlements, depositing rocks and sand on fields rendering them infertile, and sweeping away men, women, children and animals. To prevent this, embankments were built and trees and reeds planted along the banks to hold back floodwaters. And strict prohibitions were placed on the cutting of these trees and reeds.
The problem of flooding was even more severe in Bengal, in eastern India, where the volume of water that was carried on its rivers and branches was staggering. The Ganges, which empties into the Indian Ocean in Bengal, is the second largest river in the world in terms of volume, making it a true force of nature.
Ujjayan Bhattacharya, in his ‘Embankments and Inundation in Bengal: An Early Colonial Transition’, traces an eighteenth-century shift in the management of waterworks. Under Nawabi rule, the maintenance of large embankments and the embankments that protected towns and cities fell under the jurisdiction of regional political authorities. The upkeep of smaller embankments was the responsibility of zamindars, local political power holders. On occasion, the repair of the latter received the support of the Nawab’s government. The English East India Company which established it rule over Bengal from the 1760s, wanted to reduce its expenditure on the region’s waterworks and devolved the responsibility for maintaining them upon zamindars and other local political authorities, as well as revenue farmers. This resulted in the deterioration of these essential infrastructure.
The embankment work was conducted during the dry months of December to March. By December, the damage that the banks had sustained in the previous monsoon season could be determined; it was the agricultural slow season; and the dry weather gave ample time for earthen works to settle and dry. The zamindars and tax farmers who undertook this work at the local level were accustomed to receiving advances from Nawabi authorities to mobilise labour and purchase the necessary materials such as wood, bamboos and mats. Procuring sufficient supplies of labour could be difficult, especially in thinly populated areas. Labourers were recruited from long distances and even urban workers were brought into the countryside to perform these essential repairs to the rural infrastructure.
The state contribution to the development and maintenance of waterworks is remembered until even today, as is revealed in Yaaminey Mubayi’s ‘“Malik Ambar Ki Pipeline”: Reconstructing the Past Through Community Memories’. Malik Ambar is a celebrated figure in the political history of western India. Born in Ethiopia, Ambar was brought as a slave to the Indian subcontinent, where he became a major military leader. Famed for drawing the enmity of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, Ambar was memorialised in a famous painting in which Jahangir shoots arrows at his head, which has been severed from his body.
Mubayi reveals a less celebrated aspect of Ambar’s life in western India: his contribution to the famed waterworks that supplied water to the fort at Daulatabad. Daulatabad sits on a longstanding urban site in western India. It achieved greater prominence from the twelfth century when it became the capital of the Seuna Yadavas (in that period it was known as Devagiri). Extensive waterworks that collected the rainfall in the surrounding hills and channelled it to the city were constructed at that time.
In the early seventeenth century, Ambar revamped the water collection system at Daulatabad. His most significant contribution was a sophisticated network of cascading lakes and a terracotta pipeline system to carry water 2 kilometres from a rainwater storage structure, or tank in Anglo-Indian parlance, to the city.
The remains of this system may be seen today along with the hydraulic valves that were built to move water uphill as the pipeline traversed the undulating terrain. That is not the only evidence of Malik Ambar’s handiwork, for it remains in the memories of those who live in the area today. Mubayi visited the area several years ago and while walking in the vicinity of the tank outside the settlement of Daulatabad was accosted by a local farmer, B. D. Shah. Annoyed by the interruption, and expecting the man to be ignorant of history, she asked him if there were any old structures to carry water from the tank. With a smile, the man asked: ‘So you are searching for Malik Ambar’s pipeline?’ This encounter leads Mubayi to conclude that water is a powerful medium with which to bridge the past and present.
It is difficult not to feel a sense of loss in the face of these sophisticated systems for water control from the past. India is under severe water stress, which is predicted to worsen with global warming. Water and human life are linked inextricably, reflected in the songs of the Alvars, and this link is enacted every day throughout India. What does the future hold for those who inhabit the Indian subcontinent?