Water Management in Medieval India: Towards an Economic Dexterity and Ecological Sustainability

“ Water management is the planned development, distribution and use of irrigation water in accordance with pre-objectives and with respect to both quantity of the water resources. It is the specific control of all human intervention on surface and sub-terranean water. Every planning activity that has something to do with water can be looked upon as water management in the broadest sense of the term.” – International Glossary of Hydrology

‘Muslim India’, a communal characterization of the Medieval period [1] had its own method of hydraulic use and management, the outcome of which was massive agricultural productivity with a large number of food and non-food crops being raised by he Indian peasant. And Prof. Irfan Habib argues, “This set him apart from the peasants of a large portion of the globe, whose knowledge remained confined to a very few crops.”[2] The new crops and their rotation around the seasons necessitated more water especially the new summer ones such as sugar, rice and cotton and rabi crops like wheat. The old irrigation systems had fallen into decay and the areas that were watered had shrunk ; in any event, pre-Islamic methods were inadequate to meet the new agricultural revolution. The technology of water-raising devices and methods of storing, conveying and distributing water, were successfully developed and diffused.

So, irrigation can be a major theme in the history of South-Asia. J.Tambiah explores this ground in his ‘Hydraulic Society of Ceylon.’ Here, I would mainly like to focus on the medieval irrigational practices (wells, tanks, canals), the science and technology, skills involved in it in exploring the story of water-management under the Sultanates and the Mughals. Sher Shah’s sketching out of the ‘nahars’, Akbar’s initiative in the control of summer temperature in Fatehpur Sikri, the lifting of water in the Golkonda Fort by means of ‘Persian wheels’ are unique hydraulic enterprises and of course fall under the purview of water management. But here we will constrict ourselves in dealing and discussing with the focal theme of the use of water.

To supplement to the natural bounty of the monsoons, an important aspect of Indian agriculture became irrigation. The principal means employed for this purpose has been the construction of wells, tanks, and canals.

Mohammad-bin-Tughluq advanced loans to the peasants for digging wells in order to extend cultivation. Alauddin Khalji’s ‘Haus Kas’ was a remarkable development. In the fourteenth century we begin to hear of canals. The first ruler credited with digging canals for promoting agriculture was the immigrant ‘Qarauna’ Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughluq. But it was under Firuz Shah Tughluq that the biggest network of canals was created. He cut two canals known as the ‘Rajab-wah’ and ‘Ulugh-khani’, from the Yamuna river, carrying them to Hisar. He also cut the Firuz-Shahi canal from the Sutlej and one again from the Ghaggar. One canal ran from Kali river in the doab to join the Yamuna near Delhi. Hisar was so well irrigated by the new canals that while previously only the rain watered autumn crops ( kharif ) were grown here, now spring ( rabi ) crops like wheat could also be raised. Besides, these large canals there were a number of smaller canals. Some in the Multan region are said to have been dug and maintained by the local population.

How was water lifted from these wells and canals ? This involves the story of high scientific and technical skills. An improvement in one of the systems of water-lift probably belongs to this period. The ancient Indian noria, the ‘araghatta’, used to carry a string of pots fixed close to its rim ; at a larger period, it was given the rope chain enabling to reach water at some depth ( saqiya ). Finally, it was equipped with pin-drum gearing, which made it possible for it to be worked by animal power. This was the most crucial addition made before the sixteenth century when Babur offers the classic description of the complete machine in his ‘Baburnama’[3]. It was the wood-and-earthen pot ancestor of the modern metallic ‘Peersian wheel’, and might well have contributed to the extension of irrigation in the Indus basin.

During the Mughal period, in the Upper Gangetic plains wells nust have provided the chief source of irrigation. Abul Fazl’s ‘Ain-i-Akbari’ nakes mention of the fact that, “ most of the province of Lahore is cultivated with the help of well-irrigation.” This is repeated later (1695-96) by an historian ( Sujan Rai ), who himself belonged t6o that province. East of the Jhelum, in the districts of Dipalpur, Sirhind, Marwar, etc. there was the wooden ‘arhat’, or ‘rahat’ ( English: ‘Persian wheel’ ) to lift water. Around Agra and further east, the ‘charas’, or the leather bucket lifted out of water by yoked oxen, pulling rope thrown over a pulley was most common. Fryer describes the ‘dhenkli’, based on the level principle, which is generally in use wherever the water-level is close to the surface. Most of the wells were ‘kachcha’, i.e., made without use of masaonry. Pebaert attests to the fact after his survey throughout Agra. In pargana Merta, suba Ajmer, out of a very large number of wells recorded in Nainsi’s ‘Vigat’ under individual villages (1664), only a few are reported as brick-lined.

Archaeological remains testify to the great antiquity of irrigation tanks in peninsular India. In the years of Shahjahan, we find the Mughal administration proposing to advance nearly Rs.40,000 to Rs.50,000 to cultivators in Khandesh and the Painghat portion of Berar for the purpose of erecting dams or bunds. In the north, Mewar, the lake of Dhebar, sixteen kurohs in circumference, dates from our period; it is said to have supported wheat cultivation in the country around.

In the Dakhin, the practice of leading off small canals from rivers and streams was, like that of making reservoirs, an ancient one. In medieval time, thousands of canals cut from river served towns and villages and benefited cultivation; and these were probably managed according to the co-operative ‘phad’ system. Large canals were also excavated in the north. The old channel of the eastern Yamuna Canal was dug in the reign of Shahjahan and another celebrated channel on the other side of the Yamuna was repaired during the reign of Akbar, first by Shihabuddin Khan (Governor of Delhi) and later by Nuruddin Muhammad Tarkhan, as Badauni attests. It silted up again, but Shahjahan decided to re-open it from its mouth at Khizrabad, almost under the hills, down to safedon and thence to dig a new channel, some thirty kurohs or nearly seventy eight miles to serve the new city of Shahjahanabad at Delhi. This was the famous ‘Nahr-I-Birhist’ or ‘Nahr-I-Faiz’ which irrigated a considerable area.

In Punjab proper, a small system of canals was brought into existence in the Upper Bari doab. The best known of these was the ‘Shahnahr’, also excavated in the reign of Shahjahan. “Great benefit accrues to cultivation from these canals”, says A. Burnes in his ‘Travels into Bukhara’.

We also know of a small canal cut from the Tavi to irrigate Ali Mardan’s garden at Sodhra near Wazirabad in the Upper Rechna doab. The presence of canals in the Multan Sarkar is indicated by the draft of an order appointing a mir-i-ab (canal superintendent) for the area, which has survived in a collection of administrative documents. The most southerly portion of the present Sindsagar doab, lying in “the Baluch country”, was reputed for its fertility, which Auranzeb attributed to the inundations and well-irrigation[4].

In Sind, the Indus is even more prone to throw out its arms and flood channels, which extend as far eastward as the Eastern Nara. In addition to these there have been large artificial works. In 1628-29, a local zamindar, Mir Abra, cut a canal from the Indu into the waterless country of Northern Sind, enabling kharif crops to be raised in a area of 100,000 jaribs ( bighas ), besides the rabi crops[5]. In the Delta, Darya Khan, a minister of Jams, excavated the “Khan-wah” in the early years of the sixteenth century. By continuously depositing silt, the Indus raised its bed to a much higher level than that of the surrounding plains, so that it is easy to use the supply in its mainstream as well as inundation channels for irrigating the fields. The local practice has been to either cut the karizs, or ‘artificial channels’ from the rivers or canals, as Bernier tells us.

The outcome of this skilled water management was the increased productivity agriculture making the peasants adept not only to grow a multiplicity of crops, but also preparing him to accept new crops. The ‘Ain-i-Akbari’ gives revenue rates for sixteen crops of rabi and twenty-five crops of the kharif in Agra and the account of as many as forty-one crops being cultivated within the year in each locality. Again, the seventeenth century saw the introduction of two major crops – tobacco and maize, both immigrants from the New World. Economic dexterity was the consequent result.

These hydraulic enterprises and the exinious water-management skills during the medieval period, mostly under royal initiatives can be sketched and stretched back to the age-old long technological heritage of Central and West-Central Asia. “The supply of water irrigation, drinking, domestic and industrial and agricultural purposes has always been a vital consideration in Muslim lands”[6]. The ‘saqiya’ or ‘Persian wheels’ was innovated along the North African Coast which Ibn Bassal described as a standard machine for irrigation. The wind-mill’s use found in India to pump water ( also to grind corn and crush sugarcane ) was a local Persian adaptation of the horizontal water-mill as the historian of technology Robert Forbes argues. It is to be noted here that Joseph Needham says that by the sixteenth century the Islamic horizontal windmills had become well-known in Europe, and designs based on them figured largely in ‘Machinae Novae’ (New Machines) of 1615, the engineering book of the bishop and engineer Faustus Verantius. The Indian medieval Sultanate and Mughal rulers inherited the knowledge fron the Islamic heritage that before excavating a canal it was necessary to establish not only its route from start to finish. The use of ‘qanats’ ( underground system ) was learnt from the predecessors. Interestingly enough, we find specificities of areas were taken into account. Most parts of Iran was cultivated and irrigated by the use of ‘qanat’ which is different from the canal network of Baghdad.

The story changes with the colonial infiltration. It is the story of expansion and “imbued imbalence”[7]. When Benares, Rohilkhand, Central Doab, the area stretching from Ganges Valley to Punjab were “ceded and conquered” in 1835 and renamed as the “North-Western Provinces” under colonial rule, the Company was bestowed with the task of tapping its vast agricultural resources. The latest principles of British civil engineering was to be applied in case of digging irrigation canals “to preserve the people from starvation. In fact, the whole paraphernalia of a great civilized administration, according to the modern notions of what that means, had to be provided”[8]. In 1820s the building of the East Jumna Canal (which was a re-development of an old Mughal Canal line) began. By 1878, its main and branch channels, together with distributaries totaled 748 miles and irrigated 206,732 acres. It irrigated tracts in the Saharanjur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut districts. Rohilkhand canal also irrigated major tracts of the province and its sub-urbs. The dominant aim of such enterprises under the Company and the Crown was “ nowhere to make a desert blossom, but to stimulate the lagging productivity of traditional agriculture into realizing a greater and greater share of its potential wealth within the shortest space of time”.

The effects were deleterious. In 1866, W.A. Forbes and also Blair Smith noted that the inroad canals had left most wells in disuse which were less open to doubt than those of canal irrigation. The big projects under colonial rule also brought to the forefront the dangers of gross-deterioration, argues A.B. Paterson and William Sleeman. Again, more widespread and serious swamping arose from the canals’ obstruction of natural drainage lines. According to Alan Cadell, even the climate in Muzaffarnagar went worse in terms of an increasingly unhealthy humidity due to large-scale deforestation. Moreover, deforestation, the obstruction of natural drainage by public work embankments, together with lateral seepage and flush irrigation from canals exacerbated natural geological tendencies towards the accumulation of toxic quantities of alkali salts in the upper layers of the soil. Crosthwaite alarmed the spread of ‘reh’ ( white saline efflorescence ) in Etawah districts and Mr. David Roberts in Aligarh district. A depressed peasantry labored in a distorted environment.

Does the concept of ‘sustainable development’ hold ground in case of the colonial hydraulic enterprises? The ‘Bruntland Report’ by the ‘World Comission on Environment and Development’(1987) defined sustainable development as simply “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs”, The main stream sees this in terms of economic conditions primarily (David Pearce, Robert Repetto, William Nordhaus, Tom Tietenberg) whereas more critical perspectives (post-structuralist critique of development – Arturo Escobar, Ferguson, Andre Gunder Frank, and environmental Marxist school – Feshbach, Friendly, Jonathan Porritt) emphasize ecological conditions directly. It is through these perspectives we can violently utter that big is not always beautiful and pay heed to Schumacher’s argument of “Small is beautiful”.

So the medieval monarchs with the Muslim attitude to water as a precious source of life were adept enough to contribute towards the broader goal of ecological sustainability.The technology was not only advanced but auspicious and eco-friendly, not involved in the procee of “commodifying” water as also nature to extract the penultimate profit. They preached us some practical sermons and amaranth examples. No longer to look upon Medieval India as ‘Dark Age’, but time is ripen enough for us to delve deep into and learn from their dexterous activities and sustainable projects which can bore exinious fruits (of course paying due consideration to the specificities of particular regions concerned) if applied in today’s world of massive hydraulic crisis which would ultimately bring the WATER FAMINE around 2020 as to the predictions of the global environmental scientists and ecologists.
The responsibity is ours, the country is ours, the whole world is ours so it is upto us either to let it perish or to boldly assert to its survival.

End Notes:

1. Harbans Mukhia: ‘Medieval Indian History and the Communal Approach’,published in the edited volume of ‘Communalism and the Writing of Indian History’, by Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, 1969.

2.Tapan RayChowdhury and Irfan Habib (edt): ‘The Cambridge Economic History of India: 1200-1750, vol – I, 1982.

3.Translated by Beveridge,Pg-486.

4.‘Ruq’at –I-Alamgir’,Pg-29.

5.Hugh Games’s Report in Thomas ‘Memoirs on Sind’.

6.Ahmed-Y-al Hassan and Donal.R.Hill (edt): ‘Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History’,1980.

7.Elizabeth Whitcombe: ‘Agrarian Conditions in Northern India’, (Introduction), 1971.

8.J.Strachey and R.Strachey: ‘Finances and Public Works’,Pg-2.