Ode to an Unknown Engineer
December 19, 2016 12:57 PM   Subscribe

 
I thought this was a Rogue One reference there, for a second.
posted by My Dad at 1:11 PM on December 19, 2016


I love engineering stories like this. What an audacious project! Damming a river on the rainy side of a mountain range and tunneling through those mountains to deliver the water to the rain shadowed side of the range. I think of the Cascades, where you go from rain forest on the coast to lush forests on the western side than you go through an abrupt change to dry ponderosa pine forest to the Great basin desert. Imagine what you could do with some of the flow of the Columbia in eastern Oregon. Another Willamette valley.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:17 PM on December 19, 2016


Very interesting to see an article about a lot of places familiar to me. We've vacationed in the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary many times, and were once escorted on a tour of this dam, getting to go underneath it. The artificial lake mentioned in the article has a hotel in the middle of it where we've stayed. And my father is a member of the Madras Cricket Club (which still does not allow married women members) and I have a lot of great childhood memories of the club (one of the nice things about it was that all orders were charged to one's account, so even as a child I could wander around and order drinks in the pool or snacks next to the famous cricket grounds and feel a pleasing sense of independence).

Water rights are still a huge source of disputes in India, not just between Tamil Nadu and Kerala as mentioned, but between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Specifically, the river Cauvery passes through Karnataka on its way to Tamil Nadu and the damming of it in Karnataka has been contentious- most recently private buses registered to Tamil Nadu were burned in Bangalore, protesting Supreme Court rulings on the Cauvery issue. Even more recently, Tamil Nadu's Chief Minister, J Jayalalitha, known for taking a hard-line stance on Tamil Nadu water rights, passed away to much fanfare. It will be interesting to see what happens next vis-a-vis the water disputes. Tamil Nadu has had a tough time with water in recent times with either too much of it (flooding last year, cyclone just last week) or too little (drought conditions).
posted by peacheater at 2:17 PM on December 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


The article opens with:
The year was 1876. Madras Province was in the grip of a famine. It lasted for two years, spreading across the subcontinent. More than a million people died of starvation in Madras Province alone. Overall, the famine is estimated to have killed as many as 10 million people, a tragedy that went largely unnoticed in the rest of the world.

The Illustrated London News ran a graphic story on the Great Madras Famine; the famous English medical reformer Florence Nightingale questioned why Britain provided no relief, as it had with the Bengal famine a few years earlier.
The article makes it sound like it's just an unfortunate thing that happened, and that the extent of Britain's guilt was in not providing sufficient relief. It's kind of strange that an article elevating the works of a British occupier of India doesn't mention more of the history behind the famine of 1876-78: that the viceroy oversaw the export of hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat from Madras during that period; that the British government in India made famine relief contingent on toiling in labor camps.

The next paragraph from the article:
Enraged, William Wedderburn and A.O. Hume decided to form the Indian National Congress, as they felt that the British had lost all moral right over India, in a way laying the foundation for Indian independence in 1947. At the first session of the Congress, right after the famine, the largest contingent came from Madras Province.
Yes, people were understandably upset! But the article does not go into why.

This looks like an Indian publication, is that sort of historical background just taken as a given for English-speaking Indian audiences?
posted by indubitable at 3:25 PM on December 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis.
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:35 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


This looks like an Indian publication, is that sort of historical background just taken as a given for English-speaking Indian audiences?

I am not Indian, so I can't answer, but I really appreciate the context, indubitable.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:07 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Imagine what you could do with some of the flow of the Columbia in eastern Oregon. Another Willamette valley.

I love the engineering involved in these old-school civil projects, but ecologically these cross-basin water transfers are usually terrible. And in the case of the Columbia, the last thing it needs is to be further over-appropriated.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:22 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


just taken as a given for English-speaking Indian audiences?

Most likely yes, particularly if the author wanted to focus on the engineer and the dam thus touching upon setting the scene rather than a full on derail on the britisher rule and its issues
posted by infini at 12:59 AM on December 20, 2016


« Older wobble sproing run gambol frisk cavort   |   Wine is good, I told myself. Hot chocolate is good... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments