Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (26 page)

Nain Singh’s reports raised an
interesting geographical question. Where did the Tsangpo flow? Did it cross the
Himalayas as Singh suggested, and become the river known to Indians as the
Brahmaputra? In order to solve the mystery, the Survey decided to slip someone back
into Tibet and float something identifiable down the Tsangpo. If it turned up in the
Brahmaputra in Assam, they would know the answer.

The two man team for the job consisted
of a Chinese lama living in Darjeeling and a Sikkimese surveyor called Kinthup. The
Survey had badly misjudged the lama, who was more intent on enjoying himself than on
getting the work done, and often got drunk. The team was stuck in one village for
four months because the lama fell in love with their host’s wife. When the
affair became known, the lama had to pay Rs 25 in compensation and leave. Things did
not improve when at last they had crossed into Tibet. The lama sold Kinthup as a
slave to the headman of a Tibetan village and disappeared. From May 1881 to March
1882, Kinthup worked as a slave before taking refuge in a monastery as a novice
monk. After several months of living as a monk, he received permission to go on a
pilgrimage. He went to a place near the Tsangpo and spent many days cutting up 500
logs into a regular size. These he hid in a cave before returning to the
monastery.

A few months later, he got permission to
go to Lhasa on a pilgrimage. There he got a fellow Sikkimese to write the following
message for his bosses at the Survey:

‘Sir, The Lama who was
sent with me sold me to a Djongpen (headman) as a slave and himself fled away
with the Government things that were in his charge. On account of which the
journey proved a bad one; however, I, Kinthup, have prepared the 500 logs
according to the order of Captain Harman, and am prepared to throw them 50 logs
a day into the Tsangpo from Bipung in Pemake, from the fifth to the fifteenth
day of the tenth Tibetan month of the year called Chuhuluk, of the Tibetan
calendar’.
¹⁹

Kinthup did as he promised before
returning to India. Unfortunately, the watch on the Brahmaputra had been abandoned
by now and the letter arrived too late. Since we now know that the Tsangpo is indeed
the Brahmaputra, the logs must have floated unnoticed down to Assam and then into
Bengal. Kinthup, thus, did not receive the acclaim he deserved and he lived out his
remaining life as a tailor in Darjeeling. Such was the world that inspired Rudyard
Kipling to write tales of adventure like
The Man who would be King
and
Kim
.

Life in British India was not just
about cartographic surveys and Victorian engineering. The British also enjoyed life
in India. One of the popular pastimes of the rich and powerful was the hunt,
particularly of tigers. According to Valmik Thapar, as many as 20,000 tigers were
shot for sport between 1860 and 1960 by Indian princes and British hunting parties.
Mahesh Rangarajan separately estimates that an overall 80,000 tigers may have been
destroyed between 1875 and 1925, as
they were considered
dangerous and official bounties were paid for them.
²⁰
Despite this devastation, it is thought that the tiger population in 1900 was
between 25,000 and 40,000. So, where were the lions?

As we have seen, the British encountered
the lion quite early when Sir Thomas Roe dealt with one during Emperor
Jehangir’s time. Accounts of lion hunts in Aurangzeb’s time
suggest that the animal was still fairly common in the beginning of the eighteenth
century. However, their numbers seem to have dramatically fallen by the early
nineteenth century. My guess is that it was a combination of two important factors.
First, the rapid improvement in gun technology made it very easy to kill an animal
that prefers to live in the open. Second, the collapse of Mughal power also removed
imperial protection. Any rebel, mercenary or local despot with a gun could go out
and shoot the animal.

Still, there was a sizeable population
of lions in North India in the early 1800s. We know that William Frazer shot
eighty-four lions in the 1820s and took great pride in having been personally
responsible for the extinction of the species in Haryana
²¹
. In the 1830s, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s lancers were spearing these
cats near Lahore. There are reports of large lion populations in Central India in
the 1850s and of ten lions being shot in Kotah, Rajasthan, in 1866. Then, suddenly,
the lions virtually disappear except for a small population in Gujarat. What
happened?

In my view, habitat loss was far more
devastating than hunting. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, between
1820 and 1913, the country’s population jumped from 209 million to 303
million (not counting the rest of the
subcontinent). This meant
that agriculture had to be scaled up in order to feed this growing population. At
the same time, the railways made it possible to export agricultural commodities like
opium and raw cotton. In short, the open ranges needed by the lion (and the cheetah)
were just gobbled up by farming within a few generations. The tiger too suffered
habitat loss, but did better than the lion because it can survive in hilly and
swampy terrain that is less conducive to agriculture.

By the late nineteenth century, there
were reports that perhaps only a dozen Asiatic lions were left in the wild in the
Gir forests of Junagarh, a princely state in Gujarat. The actual number was almost
certainly larger, but at last alarm bells began to ring. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy,
heard of this and refused to go on a lion hunt in Gir during his state visit to
Junagarh in November 1900. The Nawabs of Junagarh, with the support of the colonial
government, now became the guardians of the endangered species for the next
half-century. The Gir forest was protected and hunting strictly regulated. Only the
most senior British officials and Indian princes were allowed the privilege. In
fact, there is a lot of correspondence to show that the Nawabs had to refuse
permission to many princes and British officials who wanted to hunt in Gir. It must
have been diplomatically difficult but, to their credit, the Nawabs stood their
ground. Gir is still the only place where the Asiatic lion survives in the wild with
a count of 411 in 2010. The Indian cheetah was not so lucky. The last documented
sighting of the Indian cheetah was in Madhya Pradesh in 1947, the same year that
India became independent.
²²

After the sack of 1858, Delhi dwindled
to being a mere district headquarters in Punjab province. The census of 1881 showed
that its urban population had dwindled to 173,393.
²³
The Mughal-era city of Shahjehanabad was still the main urban hub, with
European troops based inside the Red Fort and Indian troops stationed in Daryagunj.
The railways had connected the city to Lahore in the west and to Calcutta in the
east. To the north of the walled city, the British had built a Civil Lines with
large bungalows and gardens. With its numerous historical buildings,
late-nineteenth-century Delhi would have been picturesque but, compared to Bombay,
Calcutta or Madras, it was a backwater. And so it remained till 1911.

Meanwhile, tiny cracks were appearing in
the foundations of the British Raj. Yet again, the vagaries of nature were partly
responsible for this. From 1874, India suffered a series of severe droughts. At
first Bengal and Bihar were affected, but the Viceroy Lord Northbrook and famine
commissioner Sir Richard Temple dealt with it reasonably competently by importing
rice from Burma. Instead of congratulating them, however, British Prime Minster
Disraeli’s government severely criticized them for wasting money.
Northbrook resigned over his growing differences with Disraeli’s hawkish
approach. The replacement, Lord Lytton, proved a disaster.

In 1876, the rains failed for a third
year and the famine situation became acute in southern India. Lord Lytton, however,
remained focused on fiscal control and even rebuked the Governor of Madras for being
too generous. Sir Richard Temple, in the meantime, had learnt his lesson and had
become
a champion of the Malthusian approach. By 1877, the
famine had spread across the Deccan and Rajasthan to the northwest, and yet, grain
from surplus provinces was still being exported out to the rest of the world. The
Great Famine would directly or indirectly kill 5.5 million people, more than
two-thirds of them in British-controlled parts of the subcontinent. The experience
was made worse by the fact that, amidst this crisis, Lord Lytton spent extravagantly
on the Delhi Durbar of 1877, where Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in
front of all the princes of the subcontinent. It was a shock that fundamentally
undermined the moral standing of British rule in the eyes of many Indians,
especially the educated. This resentment would lead to the formation of the Indian
National Congress in 1885 and would ultimately build into the wider Independence
Movement of the early twentieth century.

As the demands for independence gathered
momentum, the colonial government began to look for ways to shore up legitimacy. One
idea that gained favour was to follow the Mughals and build a new capital in Delhi
as it was believed that the ‘idea of Delhi clings to the Mohammedan
mind’. The idea was not without its critics, but Viceroy Hardinge probably
felt that this was his best chance to be remembered as the founder of a great city.
Ultimately the factor that clinched the issue was the need for a grand sound-bite
for the Durbar held in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of George V as Emperor of
India. The proclamation was read out at Coronation Park, to the far north of the
city. This is the same spot where Queen Victoria had been declared the Empress of
India. A great stone column was raised to mark the event.
Almost
no tourist visits the place these days and one is likely to find oneself alone with
the column and the stern statutes of colonial-era worthies. King George V glares
down from a pedestal removed from the canopy opposite India Gate in the 1960s. There
are several pedestals without statues, as if their occupants were upset by years of
neglect and have walked off.

The architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert
Baker were given the job of designing the new city. The original idea was to build
the city to the north of Shahjehanabad, roughly around where Delhi University now
stands. However, after a number of ground surveys, it was decided to build the new
city to the south of the existing urban cluster. This had the symbolic advantage of
being close to the ruins of many older Delhis—Dinpanah, Indraprastha,
Feroze Shah Kotla. Note that the new city was not built as a practical hub of
commerce and industry. It was meant as a display of imperial power—a city
of magnificent processions and imposing symbolic structures.

The centrepiece was the palace of the
Viceroy built on Raisina Hill, what we now know as Rashtrapati Bhavan. There were
many opinions about what this building should look like, ranging from classical
European to Indo–Sarcenic and Mughal. Lutyens’s own opinion of
India aesthetics was closer to those of Mughal Emperor Babur, but Baker was somewhat
more sympathetic to the native style. Ultimately, the compromise was a design that
combines classical European columns with Mughal and Rajput detailing. In front of
the palace was a grand avenue called Kingsway (now Rajpath) inspired by the Mall in
Washington DC. The intention was to impress and, more than a century later, it still
impresses.

The rest of New Delhi consisted of
government offices and spacious bungalows built in the mould of a garden city. It
was a Civil Lines on a gigantic scale with a strict hierarchy. In the delightful
politically incorrect style of the time, the residential areas were clearly
demarcated on the basis of race and seniority as ‘fat white’,
‘thin white’ and ‘thin black’. Since no
senior Indian official was envisaged, there was no space for ‘fat
black’.
²⁴
The whole thing was designed for a population of less than 60,000 including
servants and other support staff. The only space for commerce was Connaught Place
and its surroundings. Dubbed as ‘Lutyens’s Delhi’,
this imperial construct serves today as the capital of the Republic of India. It is
amusing
that, after independence, over-fed politicians feigning poverty
in their white kurta-pyjamas would come to occupy the spacious bungalows meant for
the ‘fat white’.

A lot has been written about the grand
buildings and bungalows of Lutyens’s Delhi. However, if one looks at early
photographs of the cityscape in the 1920s and 1930s, it looks very different from
what we see today. It is not just that much of the city is a construction zone, but
even the completed bits look somehow naked. On second glance one realizes that the
difference is that the trees that we now associate with the city have not yet grown.
Indeed, the systematic and careful planting of trees was a very important part of
the overall design and remains a signature feature of the national capital.

The systematic planning of trees was not
new in Delhi. At its height, Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi) had several private Mughal
gardens belonging to the royal family and senior nobility. This included the Begum
Jehanara’s gardens north of Chandni Chowk and the two famous gardens
within the Red
Fort—Hayat Baksh (Life-Giver) and
Mahtab Bagh (Moonlit Garden). The British, however, took this to a totally different
level as they tried to create a garden city. There are archival records of heated
debates between foresters, horticulturists and civil servants about the ideal
species to be planted. Finally the Town Planning Committee submitted a report in
1913 with a list of thirteen trees including neem, jamun and imli that were
considered suitable for planting along the avenues of New Delhi.
²⁵
Other species would be introduced in later times, but trees from the original
shortlist still dominate many of the roads of Lutyens’s Delhi.