IN June 1955, a group of scholars convened in Princeton for a conference on ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.’ They were geographers, ecologists, political scientists; while most participants were American, people came from around the world, including India. They were not the first to consider this question: George Perkins Marsh, a US diplomat and geographer, had in 1864 published his Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. His influence was invoked more than once during the proceedings at Princeton. By the time of the 1955 conference, however, it was clear that the scale of ‘man’s role in changing the face of the earth’ had in the 20th century escalated beyond all precedent – a result of industrialization, urbanization and population growth.

Opening the conference proceedings, E.A. Gutkind noted that the ‘conquest of the air’ had made possible a new way of envisioning environmental change. From the air, he argued, ‘we can see side by side the different scales in time and space and the tensions arising out of the neighbourly proximity of seemingly incompatible transformations of the earth’s surface.’ This was exactly the experience of Richard Upjohn Light – neurosurgeon at Yale University’s medical school, amateur aviator, and later President of the American Geographical Society – who undertook a 29,000-mile journey around the world in a Bellanca Skyrocket seaplane two decades earlier, in the mid-1930s. His global circumnavigation took him over India and across the Bay of Bengal; the record of his aerial journey across the Gangetic plain and along the coastal arc provides a revealing snapshot of environmental change in South Asia.

Light’s aerial photographs charted the shift from dense cultivation along the river deltas to the jungles of the frontier. ‘The sight of the great delta lands aroused our particular interest’, he wrote as he described his journey up the eastern seaboard of India, from the Godavari delta towards Calcutta; ‘for this coastal belt holds one of the most concentrated populations in the world. The fields were bright green with rice paddy and dotted with giant palms and mangroves.’ From Calcutta he flew down the ‘great crescent’ of the Bay of Bengal: Light wrote that ‘the vegetation of the peninsula did not change much’ from the Bengal Delta down along Burma’s western coast up to Penang. But ‘from that point to Singapore the wild country had been tamed and given over to rubber plantations, laid out with the regularity of carefully kept gardens.’ This aerial view of the land is, as Gutkind put it, ‘like a seismograph recording the finest oscillations of man’s role in changing the face of the earth.’

 

In South Asia, as elsewhere, coastlines constitute both a human and an ecological frontier. Michael Pearson, historian of the Indian Ocean world, characterizes ‘littoral’ societies as zones of ambiguity, where ‘land and sea intertwine and merge.’ The Bengal Delta, where the great Himalayan rivers Ganga and Brahmaputra meet the sea, is quintessentially a hybrid zone of the kind Pearson describes: ‘There are no boundaries here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea’, writes Amitav Ghosh in his novel of the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide. In Ghosh’s evocative description, which stands in a deep tradition of Bangla writing about the Sundarbans, the Bengal delta is depicted as an ‘archipelago of islands’ – ‘the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari.’ Seen from a height, that flattened landscape of inter-braided channels and shifting tributaries appeared all the more striking.

But the aerial snapshot provides a partial view. At a single moment, Gutkind suggested, we can see ‘side by side the different scales in time and space’ and the ‘neighbourly proximity’ of the unchanging and the unrecognizable. But the simple juxtaposition of lands untouched and lands transformed by ‘man’s impact’ – then, as still today – can obscure as much as it reveals. It is a fundamental insight of the field of environmental history that landscapes which appear ‘natural’ are often the product of human intervention, adaptation, and appropriation.

The Bengal Delta, for instance, shaped by the enormous natural forces of silt and wind, has long been a space of human settlement, as Richard Eaton’s work has shown – ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have for centuries been entwined. The Bengal delta was an ecological as well as a religious frontier: groups of settlers led by Muslim shaikhs pioneered the transformation of eastern Bengal into a region of intensive rice cultivation, encouraged by the Mughal authorities to subdue the uncultivated, uncivilized forest. Conversely, landscapes that we take for granted as the product of human labour are often surprisingly recent products of human interactions with nature. The emergence of Bengal as a land of settled rice cultivation was in part a consequence of colonial policies – both legal interventions and hydraulic engineering – to firm up and impose a distinction between productive land and unproductive water.

 

The cultures and economies of the coast have evolved in complex relationship to the environment. Over centuries, the coasts of India have sustained a large population of coastal fishers; to this day, India is home to the largest number of coastal fishers anywhere in the world. They share many of the distinctive features of coastal societies: the reliance of fishing communities on the common property resources of the sea; the exhaustible nature of the coastal harvest, and the greater physical danger associated with coastal livelihoods compared with many forms of agriculture. The perishable nature of the sea’s produce, and the reliance of coastal communities on exchange to procure staples like rice and wheat leave their ‘exchange entitlements’ particularly vulnerable in times of crisis.

South Asia’s coastal peoples have also confronted the hazard of periodic tropical cyclones for which the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea are notorious: they have evolved ways of adapting to the furies of nature, seeing cyclones as a recurrent, expected, even a ‘normal’ hazard of coastal life – albeit a hazard that has exerted a huge toll in lives lost and livelihoods destroyed.

 

James Hornell (1865-1949) was a British fisheries official who devoted years of his life to understanding the fisheries of India’s eastern coast. At the turn of the 20th century, Hornell travelled to Ceylon to survey the marine fisheries there. From 1908 to 1924, he played a leading role in running the Madras fisheries department; he undertook detailed studies of coastal fisheries, on the economy of fishing and the changing composition of the catch; he developed a particular fascination with indigenous fishing vessels along the coasts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, on which he published over a hundred articles in his lifetime.

In 1917, he described the daily scene on the shore at Tuticorin (Thoothukudi), long a centre of India’s pearl fishing industry. ‘There is no wholesale fish market except the beach, there are no companies or large owners controlling each a number of boats, and while there are certainly some fish salesmen and traders, these men seldom or never keep any accounts’, he reported. ‘The catch is usually thrown in a heap on the beach and the "lot" as it lies is sold by auction – the buyers must appraise its value by eye, and make their bids accordingly.’

Hornell’s depiction of the fishing market as individualistic and unorganized failed to recognize the success with which local capital triumphed over both Portuguese and Dutch efforts to control the pearl fisheries. At the same time, Hornell’s admiration for the quotidian creativity and adaptive genius of local coastal communities is worth revisiting. The sense of a timeless, unchanging coastal culture does not withstand scrutiny. Coastal fishing communities in South Asia have been at the forefront of religious change – their outward orientation, their familiarity with the technologies of seafaring, put them in early contact with influences from distant shores. The Tamil-speaking Muslims of the Coromandel Coast, for instance, flourished through their contacts across the Indian Ocean: as fishers and traders, ship owners and migrants.

To this day, thousands of young men and women from the coastal fishing towns of Tamil Nadu and Kerala set out for the Gulf, or for Southeast Asia, in search of better opportunities. India’s coastal communities have developed an intimate relationship with the changing ecology of the coast: the environmental history of coastal India is also, that is to say, a social and a cultural history of the peoples who live by, and from, the sea.

 

Although they all began as coastal trading enclaves, European empires in Asia developed a terrestrial obsession in the 19th century. After 1857 the Raj consolidated its hold on the land as the basis of imperial rule: mapping, surveying and assessing territory; settling nomadic peoples; seizing common property and forest resources for the state. The impact of the colonial port cities reached simultaneously inland and overseas.

The half-century after 1870 was pivotal: a period of relentless energy that altered, permanently, the societies and the ecology of the entire coastal rim. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, steam shipping made Indian Ocean crossings cheaper, faster, and safer than ever before; undersea telegraph cables facilitated the instantaneous transmission of information – including information about markets and prices. Land and sea routes converged as radials upon port cities that pulsed with people. The commercial life of the Bay of Bengal drew the products of the land, and the sons of the soil, into its steam-powered web.

The Bay of Bengal’s circuits of migration, and the transformation of its ecology, both responded to and fuelled environmental change on a global scale. Malaya’s rubber – tapped by Tamil migrant workers – fed the American automobile industry. Malaya became the most economically valuable tropical colony across the British Empire. Burma became the largest rice exporter in the world, in a boom backed by Indian capital and drawing millions of Indian migrant workers into every sector of its economy.

There were more than twenty-eight million passenger journeys across the Bay of Bengal, in both directions, between 1840 and 1940. The region was home to one of the world’s great migrations – but almost certainly the least well known. At the same time millions moved upriver, along the Brahmaputra, to work on the tea plantations of Assam. All of these currents of migration were, in various proportions, coerced by the colonial state and planters, induced by the promises of labour recruiters, or propelled by caste, village and family networks. Migrant labour transformed the landscape of the coasts and far inland – creating precisely those contrasts and juxtapositions that the aerial photographers of the mid-20th century saw so starkly.

 

Environmental historians have written of the environmental impact of a ‘great acceleration’ in human beings’, in the second half of the 20th century – it was at the beginning of this accelerating impact that the Princeton conference on ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’ met in 1955. The American model of an energy intensive, automobile focused consumer society had an enormous footprint across the tropical world, even while it competed for global influence with the Soviet model – every bit as profligate with energy and resources. In newly independent countries across Asia and Africa, the promise of development captivated hearts and minds. Across ideological divides, a new faith in the power of technology to conquer nature underpinned massive projects of infrastructural development.

 

In the era of the developmental state, many of Asia’s states turned their backs on the sea. They turned inwards: towards the development of their resources, towards the mobilization of their workforces, towards securing themselves from the fluctuations of trade and fortune that so many remembered had proved disastrous in the 1930s and 1940s. Paradoxically, as the sea no longer provided the lifeblood of commerce and as it faded slowly from the imagination, human activity began to affect the sea itself as it transformed coastal environments at an unprecedented pace. As the political and economic connections across the Bay of Bengal came apart, a new phase in its environmental history – a new ecological interdependence – took root.

Realization of this shift was slow to dawn, until its demands became insistent and its effects undeniable. From the 1950s, and with growing force from the 1970s, the effects of population growth and land clearance, the effluents of industrialization and the damming of rivers, have changed, permanently, the very nature of the Bay of Bengal. The warming of the earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activity has already made itself felt upon the world’s seas.

The coasts are a productive site at which to consider the intersection of ecological, cultural, and economic change. Coastlines by their nature are unstable, continually shifting; the coasts of India have changed constantly. But the period since 1970 has seen a quantitative and qualitative shift – a steep change – in anthropogenic impact. The coastlines of India and the Bay of Bengal’s crescent have shifted more rapidly in the past thirty years than in the preceding millennium.

Coastal wetlands have been concreted over; natural drainage channels have been eviscerated; hydraulic engineering – dams, channels, canals, embankments – hardens the shape of fluid littoral zones. Pollutants spill into the ocean from coastal industries; the Bay has become, in the words of a recent scientific report, a ‘sink of organic and inorganic wastes.’ Because of the size and number of the rivers that feed into it, and the density of population around its rim, ‘the total amounts of nutrients reaching the Bay of Bengal …must be close to the highest in the world’, and these include, ‘metabolized drugs, medical wastes, cytotoxic, antibiotic and hormone-mimicking materials, bacteria, viruses and worms.’¹

 

The coasts are where the effects of ‘regional climate change’ – alterations in land use and water flows, changing patterns of rainfall – intersect most directly with the effects of planetary warming, with global causes: manifested above all in rising sea level, and more intensive storm surges.

Twentieth century attempts to liberate the Indian cultivator from the ‘tyranny’ of the monsoons have, through a cascade of unintended consequences, increased the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of people to rising sea levels and more intensive storm surges. The world’s great river deltas – which host some of the largest concentrations of population on earth – are sinking faster than sea levels are rising: South Asia is among the regions most acutely affected. C.J. Vörösmarty and colleagues have shown that as a result of human intervention, much less sediment reaches the river deltas than would occur naturally – sediment that is essential for the deltas to sustain and replenish themselves. The predominant role is played by projects of hydraulic engineering, epitomized by large dams, which proliferated in the second half of the 20th century.

The trapping of sediment by dams far outstrips the effects of land clearance and construction in displacing it; rather, bypassing ‘an important natural filtration system’, storm surges and floods carry displaced sediment directly to the sea, while large quantities remain trapped in reservoirs. Reservoirs have increased by six or seven hundred per cent the volume of water held by rivers. A further cause of the subsidence of deltas is the sediment compaction caused by the over-extraction of groundwater for urban and agricultural use – a perennial problem in India, Pakistan, and China – and, increasingly, the effects of removing oil and natural gas from the delta’s underlying sediments.

 

While the coast bears the scars of hydraulic engineering inland, and stands vulnerable to changes in the world’s oceans, human intervention in the immediate coastal zone plays a major role in putting people at risk. Coastal erosion in Tamil Nadu owes at least as much to local construction projects and changing land use as to larger-scale hydraulic interventions or climatic change. In particular, the massive port construction projects that line India’s eastern seaboard have led to beach erosion further up the coast.

There are currently 46 port construction projects underway in India, with a total investment of US$ 14 billion; there are over 80 on the drawing board. After decades of concentration in a few large ports, smaller ports are booming again. India’s trade with Southeast Asia has grown rapidly, though it lags far behind China’s trade with that region. As a result of Free Trade Agreements in goods and services, signed in 2009 and 2012 respectively – in the face of substantial domestic opposition in India – the value of India’s trade with Southeast Asia has more than doubled in a decade, reaching US$ 80 billion in 2012.

 

The environmental history of the coast, that is to say, is shaped by the reconfiguration of the Bay of Bengal as a region, now again connected by the movement of goods and capital and people, after a period of interruption in the mid-20th century – a new regional formation that is connected, in complex ways, to the Bay’s long history. The rush to construct thermal power plants on India’s coast has displaced fishing communities, and interferes with delicate coastal ecosystems.² The controversy surrounding the construction of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant exemplifies the tendency for local concerns over the safety and the impact of these facilities to be swept aside in Indian industries’ voracious hunger for energy.

The risks of coastal environmental change are experienced nowhere more strongly than in Asia’s coastal cities. Asia’s urban population grows by 140,000 people each day; overall, it is projected to have doubled from 1.25 billion in 2000 to 2.4 billion people in 2030. Coastal cities account for a significant part of that growth; more so if we consider the strip of land within 100 kilometers of the coast – within which 12 of the world’s 16 largest cities are situated; and which, in India, includes not only Kolkata, but fast growing cities like Surat.

Their residents face the multiple threats of sea level rise, and a predicted increase in the severity of tropical cyclones and storm surges. The natural drainage of the river deltas have been eviscerated by concrete. The land upon which they are built is sinking – Mumbai is built upon reclaimed land, as are large parts of the Pearl River Delta in China, now the world’s largest urban corridor; 35 per cent of Bangkok’s land area could be underwater by 2030. Already, the consequences have been grim.

Since 1950, more than 1.3 million people have died during cyclones in coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal; 10 million people a year across Asia are affected directly by flooding and storm surges. In an era of climate change, these risks look set to multiply. By 2070, half of the population worldwide at risk from coastal flooding will live in just ten mega-cities: nine of them are in Asia, the top three – Kolkata, Mumbai, and Dhaka – in India and Bangladesh. At the same time, the cities’ own water needs are ravenous, and they draw water from further and further away.

 

The formative text of the Indian environmental movement – The State of India’s Environment: The First Citizens’ Report – paid close attention to the economic and ecological challenges facing India’s coastal fishers. On the problems of India’s rivers, the report delivered a stark warning: ‘River pollution in India has reached a crisis point. A list of India’s polluted rivers reads like a roll of the dead.’ Ethnographic work, including Ajantha Subramanian’s fine study, has examined contests for space and livelihood on India’s coasts. Notwithstanding this, South Asia’s coasts have received little attention from environmental historians. This is, perhaps, yet another symptom of the stark division – intellectual, institutional, and imaginative – between the land and the sea.

 

Historians of the Indian Ocean have shown how long distance flows of ideas, information, and religious devotion have linked coastal regions; but they often write of port cities in abstraction from their local environments. They focus on far-flung oceanic connections while often saying little about rooted peoples – fishers and others – who live by and from the sea. By contrast, histories of power in modern South Asia have their eyes firmly on the land. They envisage power in terms of the surveying of territory, the exploitation of resources, and the immobilization of people: the development of a terrestrial governmentality, tied to a developing notion of a closed, bounded economy. In histories of South Asia, forests, not the coasts or the seas, provide the focus for accounts of the expansion of state power over nature. To redress this imbalance between histories of mobility and immobile histories of power, the coast – the liminal zone between the land and the sea – offers possibilities.

There is no question that the scale and pace of coastal environmental change are unprecedented and growing more urgent; yet natural hazards have always been a fundamental feature of coastal life, and there is much to learn from how India’s fishers and other coastal dwellers have adapted to that threat, how their understandings of the coastal environment have evolved, and how they interpret the political and scientific discourse of climate change. Similarly, there is much to learn from the history of political, economic, and cultural connections across South Asia’s coastal frontiers. In an earlier era, accelerated environmental change around the Bay of Bengal’s rim was accompanied by a rich circulation of ideas. As the environmental crisis binds the lives and fortunes of coastal peoples across national borders, history can provide an imaginative resource for new ways of imagining connection, solidarity, and shared vulnerability across space and time, and across political and cultural frontiers

 

Footnotes:

* The research for this essay received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC, Grant Agreement 284053, which I held at Birkbeck College, University of London, from 2012-2015.

1. Urusla L. Kali, ‘Review of Land-Based Sources of Pollution to the Coastal and Marine Environments of the BOBLME Region.’ Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem (BOBLME) Theme Report GCP/RAS/179/WBG.10 (March 2004).

2. See http://indiatogether.org/water-concerns-near-coastal-thermal-power-plant-krishnapattanam-cheyyur-environment, last accessed on 10 July 2015.

 

References

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, The State of India’s Environment: The First Citizens’ Report. CSE, New Delhi, 1982.

Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2013.

Centre for Science and Environment, Why Excreta Matters: How Urban India is Soaking up Water, Polluting Rivers and Drowning in its own Waste. State of India’s Environment: 7th Citizens’ Report. CSE, New Delhi, 2012.

Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993.

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide. Harper Collins, London, 2005.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2013.

Richard Upjohn Light, ‘Cruising by Airplane: Narrative of a Journey Around the World’, Geographical Review 25(4), October 1935, pp. 565-600.

Michael Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and its Problems’, Journal of World History 17(6), 2006.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble Harvest from the Sea: Managing the Pearl Fishery of Mannar, 1500-1925’, in S. Subrahmanyam and B. Stein (eds.), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1996.

Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South Asia. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009.

William L. Thomas (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956.

C. J. Vörösmarty et al, ‘Battling to Save the World’s River Deltas’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 65(2), 2009, pp. 31-43.