Abstract
Looking at the changing nature of river economy this paper tries to examine the relation between economy and environmental history. Bihar province in mid-Ganga basin has the natural advantage of many rivers converging the Ganga. During the seventeenth and the eighteenth century the province went on to get linked with the maritime economy and trade, and the center of commercial activities shifted from Ganga-Yamuna doab to eastern part of the Ganga basin. Using Patna as the case study, the paper argues that region’s orientation from west to east had grave implication on the river morphology. After 1765 when the British East India Company got the land revenue rights of the region it sought permanence in the administrative and revenue policies and to achieve this it encouraged construction of embankments and railways. It created obstruction to the natural flow of the flooding Ganga.
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Notes
- 1.
Till very late the social scientists integrated nature, specially water, in analysis of historical and social development as a background only, because they believed that social science is a subject concerned with social facts, and a social fact could only be explained by another social fact. But now environmental historians have begun to deconstruct the non-social facts such as water to explain the society. See Terja Tvedt and Richard Coopey (eds.), A History of Water, Series II, Volume 2, Rivers and Society: From Early Civilizations to Modern Times, (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 3–26. Donald Worster is also very critical of the creation of some sort of wall around history as he says ‘Somewhere, it seems, a great lawgiver has inscribed on a tablet of stone that water cycles, deforestation, animal populations, soil nutrient gains and losses are reserved for Science, while History must confine itself to tariffs, diplomatic negotiation, union-management conflict, race and gender. Science is supposed to deal with Nature; the scientists even have a journal proclaiming that fact in its title. History, on the other hand, must deal with People, Society, and Culture’. See his ‘The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences’, Environment and History 2 (1996): 5.
- 2.
In depth analysis has been done for all major rivers of the world in the recent past, be it the Mississippi in United States, the Rhine and the Rhone in Europe, the Yellow river in China, the Amazon in South America, the Nile in Egypt, the Brahmaputra and the Mahanadi in India. Few of the most persuasive studies on rivers include, Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Terje Tvedt, The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); David Blachbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, (New York: Norton, 2006); Also Petri S. Juuti, Tapio S. Katko and Eija M. Vinnari (eds.), Special issue of Environment and History, 16/2 (2010); Pierre Claude Reynard. ‘Explaining an Unstable Landscape: Claiming the Islands of the Early-Modern Rhone’. In Environment and History, 19 (2013): 40–61.
- 3.
James A. Galloway, ‘Editorial Introduction’, Environment and History, Vol. 19/2 (2013): 129.
- 4.
R. Sinha, S.K. Tandon and M.R. Gibling, ‘Shallow sub-surface stratigraphy of the Ganga Basin, Himalayan Foreland: Present Status and Future Perspectives’, Quaternary International 227 (2010): 81 accessed September 10, 2012. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2010.07.015.
- 5.
R. Sinha, S.K. Tandon, M.R. Gibling, P.S. Bhattachargee, and A.S. Dasgupta, ‘Late Quaternary geology and alluvial stratigraphy of the Ganga basin’, Himalayan Geology, Vol. 26/1 (2005): 223. Also see Lewis A. Owen, ‘Himalayan Landscapes of India’ in Vishwas S. Kale (ed.) Landscpaes and Landforms of India, pp. 4–52 (New York and London: Springer, 2014).
- 6.
James Rennell, ‘An Account of the Ganges and Burrampooter Rivers’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 71 (1781): 100.
- 7.
The Ganga has also shifted some 7 miles towards north from its earlier position over the last few decades. For recent shift near Patna see Vipul Singh, ‘Gangetic Floods: Landscape Transformation, Embankments, and Clay Brick-making’, in Ursula Münster, Shiho Satsuka and Gunnel Cederlöf (eds.), Asian Environments: Connections Across Borders, Landscapes, and Times, (Munich: Rachel Carson Center, 2014), pp. 23–28. For shift of the Kosi see Christopher V. Hill, Rivers of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in Riparian North India, 170–1994 (Michigan: Association for Asian Studies, Michigan, 1997). The fluvial tendency of the Ganga has also been discussed by Nitin Sinha, ‘Fluvial Landscape and the State: Property and the Gangetic Diaras in Colonial India, 1790–1890s’, Environment and History 20/2 (2014): 209–237. In lower Ganga basin (East Bengal), Iftekhar Iqbal gives a fascinating description of the phenomena of shift and emergence of diara or char land. See Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 28–29.
- 8.
Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur, Baburnama, II, tr. A.S. Beveridge, First published 1922 (Delhi: LPP, Reprint 2014), p. 667.
- 9.
Ancient channels of the Ganga, the Son and the Punpun and their avulsion have been shown through remote sensing technique by N.K. Maitra and N.C. Ghose, Groundwater Management (New Delhi: Asish), p. 28.
- 10.
R. Sinha et al. ‘Late Quaternary geology and alluvial stratigraphy of the Ganga basin’, Himalayan Geology 26/1(2005): 223. Accessed 6 November 2012. http://home.iitk.ac.in/~rsinha/PDF’s/2005_HimalGeol.pdf
- 11.
R. Sinha et al. ‘Late Quaternary geology’, p. 235. One of the British travelers of the mid-nineteenth century, W.W. Hunter has also recorded this character of the Indian rivers in contrast to the European rivers. ‘In its [river] first stage it runs on a lower level than the surrounding country, winding through mountains valleys and striking the base of the hills. During this long part of its career, it receives innumerable streams and tributaries from the higher country on both banks. So far it answers to our common English idea of a river. But no sooner does it reach the delta than its whole life changes. Instead of running along the lowest ground, it gradually finds itself hoisted up until banks form ridges which rise high above the adjacent country….presents a completely different set of phenomenon from those we are accustomed to in European rivers.’ Cited from Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 26.
- 12.
The grammarian of second century BCE, Patanjali in his Mahabhasya mentions these cities. Cited from Dieter Schlingloff, Fortified Cities of Ancient India: A Comparative Study (London: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 33.
- 13.
James Rennell, ‘An Account of the Ganges’: 100–101.
- 14.
Meena Bhargava, ‘Changing River Courses in North India: Calamities, Bounties, Strategies-Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries’, The Medieval History Journal, 10/1–2 (2007): 200–201.
- 15.
Extract of the Letter from the Collector Benares to the Board of Revenue, 5 Dec. 1808, Proceedings of the Board of Commissioners: Ceded and Conquered Provinces, 18 May 1809, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow.
- 16.
In the local parlance the cyclical process of river is termed as karari (that goes inside the river) and barkarari (that emerges after the receding of water flow).
- 17.
Francis Buchanan, An Account of the Districts of Bihar and Patna in 1811–12 (Patna: The Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1934), p. 537.
- 18.
Ibid, pp. 27–28.
- 19.
Bengal Government asked for Certain Papers Related to the System of Embankment, Home Department, Revenue Branch, 28 march 1851, 20/21, NAI, 32–33.
- 20.
Francis Buchanan, An Account of the Districts of Bihar and Patna, p. 535.
- 21.
Bengal Government asked for Certain Papers, 37.
- 22.
Bengal Government asked for Certain Papers, 13.
- 23.
Ibid, 38.
- 24.
Ibid, 13–14.
- 25.
Bengal Government asked for Certain Papers, 53–54.
- 26.
Ibid, 67.
- 27.
Ibid, 52–53.
- 28.
Christopher V. Hill, Rivers of Sorrow, pp. 13–14.
- 29.
Anant Sadashiv Altekar, Vijayakanta Mishra, Report on the Kumrahar Excavation, 1951–55, (Patna: Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 2005); Earlier it was James Rennell who proved that Pataliputra, as recorded by Megasthenes and Strabo is identical with present day Patna. See his Memoir of a Map of Hidoostan, p. 49.
- 30.
Dieter Schlingloff, Fortified Cities of Ancient India: A Comparative Study, (London: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 32.
- 31.
Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 139.
- 32.
Magadha corresponds to modern Patna and Gaya districts, and was bounded on the north and west by the rivers Ganga and Son, on the south by the Vindhya mountains and on the east by the river Champa. Rajagriha or Girivraja, surrounded by five hills, was the Magadhan capital. Anga in the east of Magadha roughly corresponds to the modern districts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur. The Vrijji territory lay north of the Ganga and stretched as far as the Nepal hills. Its western limit was the river Sadanira i.e. modern Gandak, and Vaishali was the capital of the Vrijji confederacy. States such as Kasi (capital at Varanasi), Kosala (capital at Shravasti), and Vatsa (capital at Kausambi) in modern day eastern Uttar Pradesh were also situated in the Ganga basin.
- 33.
Abul Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, Vol II, tr. H.S. Jarrett, First published 1927 (Delhi: LPP, Reprint 2011), p. 162.
- 34.
Irfan Habib has discussed in detail about the oppression of the peasantry under the Mughals, and how the appropriation of land revenue created the wealth of the ruling class. The revenue demand was designed to such a level that peasants were left with grains barest minimum needed for subsistence. See Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, First published 1963, Third edition 2014), pp. 366–378.
- 35.
Abul Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, Vol II, pp. 164–65.
- 36.
Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System, pp. 70–71.
- 37.
Ranjan Sinha, ‘Patna as a Manufacturing and Trading Center (1765–1865)’, in Qeyamuddin Ahmad (ed.), Patna Through the Ages (New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1988), p. 179.
- 38.
Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1985), p. 39 and f.n. Irfan Habib says that an important sea-borne trade also developed in Bengal silk through the agency of the Dutch. See Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System, pp. 78–79.
- 39.
In a different region of the mid-Ganga basin, Gorakhpur, Meena Bhargav has shown how under East India Company the existing economic prosperity of pre-modern times continued throughout the eighteenth century. Meena Bhargav, State, Society and Ecology: Gorakhpur in Transition 1750–1830 (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), chapter 7 and p. 190.
- 40.
Qeyamuddin Ahmad, ‘Commercial-cum-political Activities of the Patna Factory of the East India Company (1707–1739)’, Journal of Bihar Research Society, XLII/1–4 (1976): 168–83.
- 41.
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400–1800, (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 282.
- 42.
Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India, Bihar, 1760–1880s, (Delhi: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 79.
- 43.
Anand Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar, (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2000), pp. 26–27.
- 44.
Abul Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, Vol II, p. 162.
- 45.
The crux of natural flow regime thesis is that the natural flow of a river varies on time scales of hours, days, seasons, years, and longer. The proponents of the thesis argue that many years of observation are generally needed to describe the characteristic pattern of a river’s flow quantity, timing, and variability, i.e. its natural flow regime, and the first step toward better incorporating flow regime into the management of river ecosystems is to recognize that extensive human alteration of river flow which has resulted in widespread geomorphic and ecological changes in these ecosystems. So the history of river use is also a history of flow alteration by humans, and it is through it that we can better manage the rivers. See N. LeRoy Poff et al. ‘The Natural Flow Regime: A Paradigm for River Conservation and Restoration’, Bio Science, 47/11 (1997), pp. 769–784.
- 46.
Peter G. Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comforts: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and the British Rule in India (Richmond: Curzon, 1997); P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740–1828, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Mann, ‘A Permanent Settlement for the Ceded and Conquered provinces: Revenue administration in north India, 1801–1833’, IESHR, 32/2 (1995): 245–269.
- 47.
In a recently published paper the flawed and environmentally ignorant mechanism of the colonial state has been highlighted in the context of fluvial diara land. Nitin Sinha, ‘Fluvial Landscape’: 225–226.
- 48.
Francis Buchanan, An Account of the District of Purnea in 1809–10 (Patna: Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1928), p. 72.
- 49.
Home Department, Revenue Branch. 28 March 1851, NAI, 20/21: 27.
- 50.
R.N. Sinha, Bihar Tenantry (1783–1833) (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1968), p. 147.
- 51.
Michael Mann’s conclusion on the implication of permanent settlement that ‘the methods of revenue assessment’ altered ‘very little from the Mughal era’ is questionable as we find that the Mughal revenue administration was intense at the local level with officials like qanungo, chaudhuri, taluqdar etc., and it also ‘incorporated a degree of flexibility’. For the two contrasting views see Michael Mann, ‘A Permanent Settlement for the Ceded and Conquered provinces’ (as above); Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System (2005); Asiya Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a North Indian State: Uttar Pradesh 1819–1833, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Rohan D’Souza has also done a survey of literatures on the Mughal and Colonial system of revenue administration. See his Drowned and Dammed, (Chapter 2) pp. 51–96. In one of the recent works, however, Permanent Settlement has been shown as not been implemented in eastern Bengal because it was criticized within the colonial bureaucracy itself. See Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ch. 2.
- 52.
The legislation bearing on the subject is to be found in Regulation XXXIlI of the Code of 1793, and in two sections of Regulation VIII of that Code, which contained that provision should be made for the annual repair of embankments. For details see Henry Leland Harrison, The Bengal Embankment Manual: Containing An Account of the Action of the Government in Dealing with Embankments and Water-Course since the Permanent Settlement (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1875), p. 2.
- 53.
It would be erroneous to consider the role of Zaminadars in the embankment affair as that of significant partners as Praveen Singh has shown in the case of Kosi region in Praveen Singh, ‘The Colonial State, Zamindars and the Politics of Flood Control in North Bihar (1850–1945)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45, 2 (2008), p. 243 (hereafter IESHR). Although the obligation of the Zamindars to construct and maintain all other embankment and drainage works was distinctly recognised by the Regulations and by the particular covenants, no machinery was provided to enforce attention to these duties, and the Zamindars continued to carry on with earlier system. The government was optimistic that in their own interests the Zamindars would look after these works. As the agricultural land at that time was too much interlaced, and so in reality the Zamindars did not get involved in maintenance work. It was later in 1806 with the Embankment Regulation that the Zamindars were bound, under the conditions of the permanent settlement of the land revenue, to maintain embankments at their own expense. Henry Leland Harrison, The Bengal Embankment Manual, p. 4.
- 54.
William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and Its Application to Modern Problems (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, First Published 1930, Reprinted 1984), p. 59.
- 55.
Christof Mauch, ‘Introduction’, in Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (eds.), Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 13.
- 56.
Bernier spent 8 years in India, primarily at the court of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, from 1659 to 1667, with the intention of acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge about the country. He gained employment as a medical doctor and eventually attached himself to Dara Shikoh, brother of Aurangzeb, who was keen to learn more about Europe and its sciences. He undertook trips to Gujarat (his point of entry and exit), Kashmir, Bengal, Golkonda and Delhi, and thus developed a good understanding of the climate and ecology of India. For details see Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Race, Climate and Civilization in the Works of François Bernier’, L’Inde des Lumières: Discours, histoires, savoirs (XVIIe-XIXe siècle). eds. Marie Fourcade and Ines G. Zupanov (Paris: Collections Purusartha, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2013), pp. 53–78.
Retrieved from www.icrea.cat/Web/GetFile.asmx/Download?idFile on 18.12.2014.
- 57.
Vipul Singh, ‘Gangetic Floods’, p. 24.
- 58.
Henry Leland Harrison, The Bengal Embankment Manual, p. 1.
- 59.
William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation, pp. 7–17.
- 60.
Report on Ganges Canal Committee, Major Gen. Sir Arthur Cotton, Public Works Department, Government of India, February 1866, NAI.
- 61.
Bengal Embankment Act, 1882: 464, NAI.
- 62.
Home Department, Revenue Branch. 28 March 1851, NAI, 20/21: 14.
- 63.
Bengal Embankment Act, 1882, p. 469.
- 64.
Home Department, Revenue Branch. 28 March 1851, NAI, 20/21: 39–40.
- 65.
Vipul Singh, ‘Gangetic Floods’, p. 26. Dinapur was a completely new settlement that had come up as military cantonment to protect the commercial interest of the English East India Company. A comparative study of places mentioned in the Ain –i Akbari of the sixteenth century with that of Francis Buchanan’s account of 1811–1812 has been done by Vipul Singh, ‘Professional Brotherhood and Change in Physical Environment: The Colonial Factor in Administrative History of 18th Century Patna District’, The Geographer, 47/1, (2000: 72–73).
- 66.
Paradoxically, one of the contemporary Persian literatures, Tarikh i-Daudi, dealing with sixteenth century Afghan ruler Sher Shah mentions that the ruler believed the bank near Patna, where the Gandak river joined, was the most strategic place for the construction of a fort. The reason that he gave was that flow of the Gandak from the north would not allow the Ganga to move away northward from its place on the southern bank, and thus protect the fort permanently from one side. In fact, the fort could not be captured by the Mughal emperor Akbar despite a huge contingent sieged it from the south. Abul Fazl in his Akbarnamah describes that the fort was supplied from Hajipur fort located across the Ganga. Akbar could not cross the Ganga because of its two kos (2.2 miles) width and flow in great force and turbulence. This justifies Sher Shah’s observation. Cited from Syed Hasan Askari, ‘The City of Patna – Etymology of Place-Names’, in Qeyamuddin Ahmad (ed.), Patna Through the Ages, (New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1988), p. 72.
- 67.
Vipul Singh, ‘Gangetic Floods’, p. 24.
- 68.
Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, pp. 80–83.
- 69.
Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India Bihar: 1733–1820, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), p. 51.
- 70.
Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, pp. 170–171.
- 71.
Report on the Rajmahal Canal, Revenue Department Record, Revenue Branch, 13 January 1844, NAI, 1–3: 1–29.
- 72.
Memorandum between Water Communication between Calcutta and the Ganges, 31 July 1858, Government of India Collection, National Library, Calcutta, 12.
- 73.
Ibid, 12.
- 74.
Secretary to the Government of Bengal writes to the Secretary to the Government of India, dated 19 April 1845, Home Department. Revenue Branch, NAI, 1–3: 1–2. The letter is about construction of a railway line between Calcutta and Mirzapur – to substitute a railway line on the earlier planned canal line.
- 75.
Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, p. 213.
- 76.
Ibid, p. 214.
- 77.
Anand A. Yang, Bazaar India, p. 46.
- 78.
Ibid, p. 46.
- 79.
Few of the early works are Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘Irrigation and Railways: Irrigation’ and John M. Hurd, ‘Irrigation and Railways: Railways’ in Dharma Kumar (ed.), Cambridge Economic History of India, C. 1757–1970, Vol.2, (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 677–737 and pp. 737–761. Recent works include Anand Yang, Bazaar India (2000); J. Ian Kerr (ed.) 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007); Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c. 1780–1914 (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009); Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism (2013).
Acknowledgments
The paper is based on two different presentations, one at the colloquium of Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany, during my Carson fellowship in July 2013; and the second at WCEH, Guimarães, Portugal in July 2014. I am thankful to all those who commented on the paper on both the occasions, specially Christof Mauch, Donald Worster, Gunnel Cederlöf, Vinita Damodaran, Maurits Ertsen and Kenichi Matsui for giving extensive comments. The author is also thankful to University Grants Commission, Government of India for providing Major Research grant.
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Singh, V. (2017). Where Many Rivers Meet: River Morphology and Transformation of Pre-modern River Economy in Mid-Ganga Basin, India. In: Vaz, E., Joanaz de Melo, C., Costa Pinto, L. (eds) Environmental History in the Making. Environmental History, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41085-2_11
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