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Anticipating the monsoon: the necessity and impossibility of the seasonal weather forecast for South Asia, 1886–1953

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2021

Sarah Carson
Sarah Carson*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Northwestern University
*
*Corresponding author: Sarah Carson, Email: sarah.carson@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the most controversial of the activities of the India Meteorological Department (IMD): long-term seasonal forecasting for the South Asian subcontinent. Under the pressure of recurrent famines, in 1886 the imperial IMD commenced annual issue of monsoon predictions several months in advance, focused on one variable: rainfall. This state service was new to global late nineteenth-century meteorology, attempted first and most rigorously in India. Successive IMD leaders adapted the forecast in light of scientific and infrastructural developments, continuously revising the underlying methods of its production. All methods failed to achieve accurate prevision. Nevertheless, the imperatives of economic administration, empire and public demand compelled IMD scientists to continue annual publication of this unreliable product. This article contends that the seasonal forecast is best understood as an enduring ritual of good governance in a monsoonal environment. Through analysis of newspaper controversies, it suggests that although the seasonal forecast was the most compelling justification for the IMD's imperial and global importance, its limitations undercut popular trust in modern meteorology. Finally, this case illustrates the centrality of ‘tropical meteorology’ to the historical development of modern atmospheric science.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 305 - 325
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science

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References

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18 As they explained, it was ‘to some extent compelled to assume the position of a reforming Department … one of its main duties should be to take up and carry into effect such of the proposals of the Famine Commission’. GOI Revenue and Agriculture, Note of the Principal Measures of Administration under Consideration …, Calcutta: Government Printing, 1893, p. 1.

19 The commission was chaired by the formidable Anglo-Indian statesman, and Blanford's personal ally, General Richard Strachey. Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part I: Famine Relief, London, 1880, pp. 8–9.

20 On India as a ‘natural laboratory’ for meteorology see Anderson, op. cit. (3), pp. 235–84.

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23 This summary draws from Charu Singh, ‘Configuring the monsoon: meteorology and famine in colonial India’ (2010), unpublished M.Phil. thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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27 New scholarship is rethinking the fundamental role of ‘the future’ in the functioning of capitalist (and socialist) economies. See Friedman, op. cit. (26); Beckert, Jens, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pietruska, op. cit. (13).

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29 Crop forecasts were produced at the imperial level from at least 1890–1.

30 For an overview of government finances see Kumar, Dharma, ‘The fiscal system’, in Kumar, Dharma and Desai, Meghnad (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of India, c.1751–c.1970, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 905–44Google Scholar.

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32 The issue of gambling was a sensitive one for imperial governors, who had enacted controversial anti-rain-betting legislation in Calcutta in 1897. Birla, Ritu, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 144–98Google Scholar.

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38 David Day, The Weather Watchers: 100 Years of the Bureau of Meteorology, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007, pp. 17–46. In Habsburg Austria, by contrast, leading atmospheric scientists refused to engage in forecasting. Coen, op. cit. (16), pp. 197–9.

39 Medhora went on to suggest that India's national income forecast would never truly become a useful figure until it could be distinguished from the meteorological one, a feat which could only be achieved through industrial policy. Medhora, Phiroze B., ‘Economic forecasting in India’, Economic and Political Weekly (1970) 5(35), pp. M83–M88, M83Google Scholar.

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42 Blanford had begun to advance this theory in his 1882–3 administration report. GOI Department of Revenue & Agriculture (Meteorology) (subsequently R&A (Met)), December 1883, File No. 23, British Library, India Office Records (subsequently BLIOR).

43 Blanford worried that data from 1880 did not support his theory, although he ultimately determined it to be ‘an exception that proves the rule’. H.F.B., ‘An Indian weather forecast’, Nature (1883) 29, pp. 77–9.

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46 Eliot, op. cit. (45).

47 Gilbert T. Walker to GOI, 17 October 1904, GOI R&A (Met), January 1905, File No. 91 of 1904, BLIOR. Eliot had trained in mathematics and physics at Cambridge University and campaigned for his successor be a first-class mathematician. Walker, too, studied and lectured at Cambridge before his recruitment.

48 Gilbert Walker to GOI, 1 May 1907, GOI R&A (Met), June 1907, File No. 38, NAI.

49 GOI R&A (Met), January 1907, File No. 122 of 1906, BLIOR.

50 Walker, Gilbert, Statement of Actual Rainfall in June, July, August, and September 1907, Simla: Government Central Branch Press, 1907, pp. 7–8, NMLAGoogle Scholar.

51 Walker's ‘discovery’ of the southern oscillation has attracted scholarly attention. Grove, Richard, ‘The East India Company, the Raj, and the El Niño: the critical role played by colonial scientists in establishing the mechanisms of global climate teleconnections, 1770–1930’, in Grove, Richard, Damodaran, Vinita and Sangwan, Satpal (eds.), Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 301–23Google Scholar; Davis, op. cit. (2), pp. 213–38; George Adamson, ‘The discovery of ENSO’, in Richard Grove and George Adamson (eds.), El Niño in World History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 107–38.

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56 GOI Industries & Labour (Meteorology), 1934, File No. G-680(25), No. 50, NAI. This exchange came at a tense moment for the India Office, as Parliamentary negotiations over the Government of India Act were reaching a conclusion.

57 Here, I focus primarily on coverage in The Pioneer, Amrita Bazar Panjika, Friend of India, and the Times of India, using the digitized databases ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Gale Historical Newspapers and World Newspapers Archive.

58 Editorial, The Pioneer, 10 August 1899, p. 1.

59 Editorial, The Pioneer, 10 June 1899, p. 2; The Pioneer, op. cit. (58).

60 Editorial, The Pioneer, 4 October 1899, p. 1 (emphasis mine).

61 The vast world of indigenous weather forecasting authorities is becoming clearer through new research. Charu Singh has made the most significant contribution in her work on Mithalala Vyasa's ‘Vedic’ Sanskrit scientific treatise Vṛṣṭiprabodha (Rain Knowledge) (1908), subtitled ‘Indian meteorology’. It is notable that Vyasa's astrological writings found a ready audience following the 1899 IMD forecast debacle. Charu Singh, ‘Science, Hindi print, and agricultural improvement in colonial north India’ (2015), unpublished PhD dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

62 John Eliot, ‘The meteorological forecast: to the editor’, The Pioneer, 23 October 1899, p. 6 (emphasis mine).

63 ‘Meteorology and its critics’, Friend of India & Statesman, 16 November 1899, p. 4.

64 Eliot, op. cit. (62).

65 On the decision to make the forecasts confidential see GOI R&A (Met), July 1902, File No. 65, NAI.

66 Eliot, op. cit. (62).

67 Certain English-language presses published yearly forecasts by Clements between 1902 and 1914. See, for example, ‘Indian weather forecasts: the claims of Mr. Hugh Clements’, Times of India, 30 June 1902, p. 4. Clements solicited funding to come to India in 1909 to demonstrate the efficacy of his lunar techniques, but the government declined. GOI R&A (Met), October 1909, File No. 54, BLIOR.

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74 Normand, op. cit. (40), pp. 473 (emphasis mine).

75 Gilbert Walker, ‘On long-range forecasting’, in Report of the Conference of Empire Meteorologists, London, August 20–September 3, 1929, London: HM's Stationery Office, 1930, pp. 137–8.

76 In 2005, a team of India's most prominent scientists concluded that their predictions were no more accurate than they had been in 1932. Gadgil, Sulochandra, Rajeevan, M. and Nanjundiah, Ravi, ‘Monsoon prediction: why yet another failure?’, Current Science (2005) 88(9), pp. 1389–400Google Scholar.

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