 My name is Edward Simpson and I'm the Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute. Good afternoon, good morning or good evening, depending on where you are. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker today, who is Professor Venita Pandoran, from the University of Sussex. She is the Director of Modern South Asia and has written on numerous topics. One that endures is the history of the natural world, natural heritage, and perhaps colonial constructions of nature as well, with a focus on the northeast of India, Bihar and West Bengal. And today the title of her talk is Climate Signals, Floods and Farrant in South Asia from the 17th to the 19th century. And this is a seminar given in a series organized jointly between the SOAS South Asia Institute and the Centre of Law, Environment and Development at SOAS. So we'll have a presentation which will last approximately 40-45 minutes. And then we'll have a chaired question and answer session towards the end. Venita, welcome. Thank you. I'll just go straight to my slides and try and share the screen with you to start with. But thank you very much for inviting me, a real pleasure to be here. Just start with my first slide. So this is a very historical topic. So what I'll be looking at in this presentation, which feeds into, as I said, the larger topic on climate change and the green economy, is what does a history of a climate tell us about the current problems associated with floods, droughts, famines and cyclones. And many of you have added cyclones to the title recently, because of course as we know they're on May 21st, India and Calcutta was hit. In particular, eastern India was hit by a level five tropical cyclone, which exacted a great toll on buildings, on property and remarkably much less on human life, which is very different from 19th century, the 1864 Calcutta cyclone, which I'll talk about in this presentation. So what are the sources, methods and themes for a climate history of South Asia? And one of the things that I've been doing along with McGill and the UK Met Office is to create a climate archive for South Asia, to create a sort of climate series, a famine series, a migration series. As you know, much of the data for South Asia is limited. You have much richer data for Europe and elsewhere, but the South Asian data scene is quite limited. One of the things we are doing as part of this project is to build up the climate archive for South Asia. And the other thing that we are doing is how do we build up this archive. So one of the things is using ship logs and we are quite linked to the UK Met Office called the ACA project. We are also using pre-colonial manuscripts in the form of as part of our documentary sources. And we are looking at collecting and have collected both quantitative and qualitative data from colonial records. And what do I mean by quantitative data? This is daily, sub-daily pressure and temperature data collected, for example, on ships collected at Botanic Gardens. And we're also using qualitative data, including ethnography. And as we know, the colonial data collection was extremely rich, a veritable doomsday book of data collecting. We've also tried to collect paleo sources in order to understand, for example, how does the natural archive, for example, the Spelio-Theme record, complement the documentary archive for extreme events, for example, such as droughts and floods. More recently, climate history is becoming particularly fashionable. Of course, in the past, an old school lawyer, Radhuri, in the 60s wrote about climate. But more recently, Jeffrey Parker, David Klingsmith, Richard Grove and John F. Richards have really talked about climate and it's important for history. So bringing nature back into history, removing the unnatural nature of history. And this is not to be a climate determinist or an environmental determinist, but to give nature and climate its due place in our historical understanding. So the methods that we use for a climate history is very interdisciplinary. It has to be a collaborator project. And in this case, it is between historians, climatologists, paleo ecologists and anthropologists. So you can name them. But certainly it has to have a very strong interdisciplinary element. So what I'll be talking about today is the 17th century crisis in the context of India, and how do we equate the climate archive with Mughal Empire sources to understand what exactly is happening. We'll be looking at the 18th century on flood, droughts and famine causation. And then briefly we'll be looking at 19th century cyclones. And we'll be trying to understand what this understanding this history has for understanding adaptation and resilience for climate related events for today, for example. So the key books I was interested in, and I refer to as secondary sources, is La Duri's great work, which is 1967 times of feasts, times of famine, the history of climate since the year 1000. And of course, more recently in 2017, I don't know whether many of you have looked at this, global crisis, war, climate change and catastrophe in the 17th century, where Jeffrey Parker equates everything to the little ice age in terms of this period of crisis. And we'll come to that later on. So the importance of data collecting is very significant for us if we are trying to make the climate archive talk to the documentary archive. And I mentioned the ACA project, which is the atmospheric circulation reconstructions of the earth, which is a project set up by the Met Office, and the sort of data they're collecting, which is daily, sub-daily mean from ships logs. And they've collected, for example, 900 ship logs from 1788 to 1834. And this is sort of rich data that I think is very useful for us. The paleo sources that we've been collecting again is mainly from secondary paleo archives to looking at lake core material. And that feeds again into our natural archive data collection. And has helped form some very interesting material for, especially for our collaborators who are working on the science side. With regard to the documentary sources, again, we have tried to refine the stuff that we look at in terms of Mughal records, the VOC documents, EIC records, trying to look, for example, and trying to create a timeline of events for the 17th century. And here, for example, you can see 1589 heavy floods in Ujjain and Malwa. 1592 epidemic outbreak of colors are the sources also delineated and so on. And we are trying to make sure sources that we have are refined and are adequate to understand what is happening in the spirit. But the point about mapping climate and weather, climate and weather are very complex and both can vary temporally and spatially in their influences and impacts. Therefore, to collect useful data, you need good data courage. So how do you map this information? And in order to map this, you need lots of observation and an information flow network. The world's biggest weather phenomena are the monsoon system, the seasons and ENSO, as we know. And the importance of South Asia for global climate debates is one thing that I want to emphasize here. Through the emergence of colonial meteorological networks, because the British Empire offered a sort of vantage point to collect data on climate from a series of very, very interesting data points that they collected and mapped. South Asia helps you to understand climate mechanisms. In fact, the importance of South Asia for global climate debates is only beginning to be understood now. It also helps your empire, also helps you to map teleconnections between, say, Australia, India, South Africa, St Helena, the Cape and so on, as Richard Groves worked so admirably pointed out. The importance of empire data. And it helps challenge, for example, Eurocentrism in terms of global climate debates. And feeding this data into global climate debates, I think, is becoming extremely important. So what our project is trying to emphasize and underline is the importance of India and the Indian Ocean world for global climate. So one thing that is significant for us when we look at the Indian climate is of course the word monsoon. Monsoon from the Arabic Mosul was season. And as I said, a key to understanding world climate was understanding the monsoon. So the Indian peninsula was extremely important to understanding world climate. And this was recognized between, quite early, between 1724 by Indian civil servants, mainly both British and Indian, Scots, German and Bengali, for example, who tried to map the monsoon and try to understand how the monsoon affected both world climate, ocean temperatures affecting the monsoon and so on. And they studied it through a network that they build up. And contributions to this network were made by the rest of the British Empire and by other colonial empires. So the emergence of colonial, meteorological networks, I think, is particularly critical and important here. You can see Bradley's measurements here, which equate very much to very modern sorts of measurements on temperature and pressure data. And much of it, I think, of the colonial mapping is very useful for us today when we look at trying to document climate and weather. So the stages of this information network are quite interesting as well. Missionary networks, the Moravian missionaries, Danish and German networks are equally important. For example, missionary activity in Protestant Halle was the first to find a natural history observation. Plus we have data, as I said, from East India Company ships. And all of them measured, for example, cyclone, drought frequency, grain supply. And this data, I think, is extremely useful for us. In Madras, Geisler measured cyclones. In fact, the term cycloneology emerges in the 19th century as a result of some of the activities of these networks. Information also came from Malacca and Trancobar. So Trancobar has been known as a Danish colony. So German missionaries were also involved in the data collection. But one network I'd really like to refer you to is William Roxborough, who became the director of the Calcutta Padani Garden in the 1780s. Who understood, for the first time, these linkages in climate between India and the rest of the world. And I think Roxborough is a very, very interesting character. Someone that, both Rob Allen, who I collaborate with at the UK Met Office, has written quite extensively on Roxborough's Madras meteorological diary, which he kept in 1787, and helps us record the typhoon in Madras in 1780s. So Roxborough can be seen as the first climatologist or climate historian. And he recognized the crisis of the 1790s. Now we know that's been caused by a weather phenomenon of the warming of the oceans or the El Nino. And he also, for example, mapped the history of drought. So this character is quite an important and significant character. And he is, in some sense, is a one-man band who creates a network of understanding about South Asia and the importance of South Asia for understanding global climate. So the observation network that he, for example, inaugurated, spanned Empire. He started with the Padani Garden Observations in Calcutta and Madras. He gave weather a long-term perspective. He linked up with other people such as Alexander Beatson in St Helena. And some of the important stuff that was produced at this time was Roxborough's India Records of All India Drought in 1791. There was another publication on drought in St Helena and drought in the Caribbean in Montserrat. In 1816, it was recognized that there was a global drought. And this, I think, is quite significant. The global links, I think, are quite interesting. So the first scientists to recognize the global nature of climate was even earlier, though, Edmund Halley, who thought globally in 1676 when he estimated the amount of salt in the world oceans. Other global links were by Henry Pittington, who between 1798 and 1852, who collected information on cyclones and Charles Meldrum, who started off as the main player in the Met Office. So all these characters, I think, are interesting when we look at this empire-wide network. And here are some of the characters spanning the two centuries. William Roxborough in the 18th century, Henry Blanford in the 19th century, Charles Stort, and, of course, Gilbert Walker, who discovered Walker's circulation. So this link between Australian and Indian meteorologists or teleconnections, in terms of understanding global drought events, I think are quite interesting and important for understanding world climate. So by 1852, you had 123 weather stations in India. The centre of calculation was at Calcutta, very interestingly, then to be noted. The Himalayan data was collected by the Stratian Shrike, white brothers. The Indian Marajas were not to be left far behind. In 1836, the Raja of Travancore appointed a meteorologist. And in 1846, the Madras government started a Neil Geary Observatory. Systematized weather data collection was collected between 1848 and 1867. And this, of course, provides the instrumental record for a lot of the modelling that now gets done. But what we are also looking to collect is the pre-instrumental sort of data. 1865 to 1869, the telegraph was used to transform marine data and regional data to protect weather and cyclones especially. By 1871, weather instruments were standardised empire-wide. By 1877, William Hunter connected droughts to sunspots, interestingly. In 1878, the first photos of the sun were taken by Captain John Waterhouse. By 1877, the Indian Met Office was established, which made links with Australia. So this brings me to the discovery events and how some of the data that was collected in this period of empire data collection also links up with a more modern understanding of how the El Nino Southern Oscillation or the warming and the cooling of the oceans operates. And here, of course, many of us might be familiar with them. So it operates in two distinct faces alternating over a period of roughly two to seven years. Mainly what scientists are saying is that the number of ENSO years are intensifying as we are getting global warming. So the links between ENSO and global warming, I think, are quite interesting and important. The faces of ENSO are characterised by warming in the tropical Pacific and the Indian Ocean, which often suppresses rainfall in the western Pacific in the case of El Nino and converse in the case of La Niña, where you get more rainfall. So there's ENSO and La Niña events. El Nino and La Niña events I think are quite interesting. But one thing we need to note is that ENSO can vary in its matter of expression and centre of actions. But ENSO events are typically accompanied by extreme weather events. The other point I'd like to make is the links between El Niño and the South Asian monsoon, the structure of sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean is linked to more familiar patterns of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The most recent activity research suggests by the Indian Met Office that the Indian Ocean is warming considerably and they put down the recent cyclonic event of the Amphan Cyclone, which was the level five cyclone to the warming up of the Indian Ocean due to global warming. So ENSO is something that is quite important. But what we are trying to do is to see whether the earlier climate data recorded by these meteorologists was actually mapping what we think of today as ENSO events. So this ENSO example, for example, details the resolution of both El Nino and La Niña, which is what is known as protracted episodes, which is defined as a period of two years or more when measures of the phenomena in various precipitation extremes are intensified in an ENSO sensitive region. And this particular time series of the reconstructed South Asian summer monsoon index, which is using both heliotherm natural archives from a series of caves, maps on to much of the famine events that are recorded in the documentary archive. And I think this is very interesting. The authors of the South Asian Monsoon Index note that it captures 18 out of the 26 recorded famine events, though it's still falling short and that notably 11 of the 16 short events with duration of one to three years are accurately depicted in the reconstruction. I think this is quite interesting. And the more we refine our documentary record, the more the heliotherm data for, and now I think there is a cave in Cherapunji that they are collecting, very, very good resolution heliotherm data and mapping that on to the documentary sort of archives that are being collected, for example, by Sussex. I've just had a recent interaction with saying that it really maps absolutely beautifully to the heliotherm record, which is very, very exciting for us right now. And we are sort of collaborating with an American team on this work currently. So these are the decadal trends of reconstructed El Niño and La Niña events. If you look at 1790s, which we're quite interested in, you can see there were strong El Niños in the 1790s. And this is very useful for us when we are trying to understand what impact that had, for example, in India, when, for example, when Roxborough was keeping his Madras meteorological diary, was there, for example, La Niña, El Niño sort of event at this time. And certainly the El Niño-La Niña record tells us that there was quite a strong El Niño. So some of the, for the 17th century, some of the El Niño episodes have been mapped here 1659 to 1661, 1650 to 1652, 1618 to 1621, 1607, 1609. And the La Niña episodes are in blue 1637 to 139, 1622 to 132, 1600 to 1605. This particular slide is showing you how the delayed nature of the monsoon that is being mapped through the diary of a Bombay governor. And this is the work of Adamson and Nash in 2013 showing you how even just simple weather memoirs can allow you to build a scale of how the rainfall was sort of delayed in Bombay, successfully delayed over the years as a result of the delayed arrival of the monsoon. And that is very carefully mapped through a diary kept by the local governor of Bombay. Other material that we've looked at is the Palmer Drought Severity Index maps of the monsoon atlas of Asia. And here you can see for the Bengal famine that it was not, there was drought but not such a severe drought. The more important drought events seem to be in 1876 and 1878, the period of the Victorian dark, 1756 to 1768. So it's very interesting, how do we account for the 10 million who died in the Bengal famine of 1770, which wasn't really such a serious drought event. So again, interesting questions about whether it was caused by political or economic reasons rather than climate reasons if we merge these archives and we can ask some very, very interesting questions. So for the 17th century, when we look at the text of Jeffrey Parker, he talks about this whole idea of a general crisis. And he talks about the little ice age, which is this fundamental notion of a crisis for 17th century Europe. And what he's interested in is whether this notion of crisis, which happens in Europe in the 17th century, which he links very clearly to the downturn in global temperatures, which became known as a little ice age. How does that translate if we look at South Asia? And we then took up this challenge. He seems to suggest that South Asia was equally affected and we looked at some of the data for the 17th century. And we saw that it did have some of the weakest period of monsoons on record for that period. The Enso example also showed some protracted episodes of Enso. In the 17th century, Enso events seem to occur every 2.5 years, half the five year average. So was there really a problem with climate in the 17th century in India? And the problem we found that was that Jeffrey Parker's argument of the little ice age combined lots of very different things. So cooler temperatures and later climate variability in the 17th century was put down to reduce solar energy, increase volcanic activity, and the increasing frequency of El Nino. So there's just one of the El Nino being only one of the other two events. And the years of the little ice age coincided very well with the Mughal Empire and some of the crises of the Mughal Empire. So this was a period of severe political depression in the mid 17th century, so the documentary record argued. And for Parker, the Mughal Empire can be seen as having come close to a revolution in the 1650s, while the 17th century as a whole was a period in which wars were fought almost continuously. Droughts, floods and famines, particularly in the late 1620s and early 1630s in Gujarat and the Deccan, were cited as examples of this upheaval. So if you look at Western travelers' records like William Forsters, he recorded, for example, in South India in Nagapattam, that half the people of the area were dead and the stench of the dead and the dying was terrifying. So on the face of it, Parker's emphasis of climate drivers in the spirit of Mughal history appears justified in contemporary descriptions. But the usefulness of these descriptions without supporting statistical or demographic data or at least estimates of numbers of people affected is questionable. Furthermore, the reliability of, in particular, European descriptions has been strongly questioned by work on the development of tropes and famine reporting of the spirit. So there is a critique here of Parker's claim of exceptional violence in the 17th century from other historiographical sources. For example, John F. Richards and, of course, the esteemed Irfana Bee have described the 17th century as a period of relative calm and stability. That Parker can point to a near continuous warfare is not in itself proof of the exceptionalism of the 17th century, I could argue. So the jury is out whether the 17th century in India was a period of crisis. For historians like Clegane Smith and Jeffrey Williamson, it was the 18th century which witnessed the most significant upheavals in India's economic and political structure with the dissolution of the Mughal Empire and the regrouping and their forced regrouping of states under the East India Company. So the question then for us is what's the 18th century was, in which case the whole Parker argument is questionable. And if you look at the 18th century then, from 1765 when the British took over Bengal, to 1858, the long 18th century, to the mid 19th century, there are 12 famines and four severe scarcities. And the reasons are not far to see many Indian communities were disturbed by the interventions of the East India Company, the revenue and agricultural regimes of taxation, which encouraged the dentalization, raids, the restriction of raids, hunting and nomadism. So traditional lifestyles being restricted, for example in places that I have looked at in Kachan, the Sundarbans, areas which were resilient at one time where you had pastoralists and nomadic herdsmen, made more legible and economic terms and settled in environmental terms to aid taxation. So the East India Company's settlement policy did result in scarcity and famine. And for example, in the 1770s one commentator noted that the late famine in Bengal and the loss of 3 million inhabitants was due to that famine, due to the settlement policy of the EIC. To summarize then, it's the cultural, social, political and economic factors which loom large in the causality of the 1770 famine. So though the winter of 1772 was perhaps unusually severe, climate appears to have played a relatively insignificant role in the development of what remains one of India's most disastrous and costly famines in the 18th century. So there, I think you can say that climate was not so much a factor. And some of the sources that talk about this is Danvers' A Century of Famine, which is an important source, not just on meteorology and on famine, but it allows us to place climate and particularly rainfall variation within a larger causal framework. And Danvers stated quite interestingly that famines in India have risen from several different causes. The most general cause has been the failure of the rains. So this was the famine map of India in the 1790s. And we look at the teleconnections between India and say Australia and so on at this period and we've done, I've done a paper on this. We get some very, very interesting data. For example, here in the 1780s, if we move to the period of the 1780s, upper parts of Hindustan. So we are leaving now the 1770 famine. We are moving to the 1780s, which is seen to be a period of El Nino related events from the El Nino database that we have. 1780 seems to be a period of abnormal cessation of rain and extreme drought in western India and Lahore and Bihar, in Delhi, northward in Calcutta, the crops in the ground had been scorched and nearly destroyed. And the long drought was succeeded by great floods. And this is Danvers' sort of a century later when he's recording what happened in 1783 in eastern India. Similarly, what's happening in Australia is also quite interesting that we get a lot of detail on the settlement of Australia. At this time, we get the records of inclement, inclement tempestuous weather in 1788, making life in the new colony difficult. Here you have heavy rainfall, creating, for example, damage to property. The roads above the settlement were rendered impossible and some huts were injured and needed to be repaired. In Africa as well, you get, again, unsettled weather, preponderance of drought here. So you get drought, you get heavy rain, you get drought. So it seems to me there was an unusual forcing of conditions in the 1780s. So looking at teleconnections, I think it's very, very interesting and important to see how globally climate was operating in different periods. And the archival record helps you to map this global climate signature. And here, South Asian droughts and floods of the 1780s is a more detailed map. Here, Gurgis and Fowler have talked about this El Nino event, a protracted El Nino, La El Nino event. Of course, as we know in the documentary record, there's a Chalisa famine of 1783 and 84 and Grove has written about it. And once the famine was over, there was great floods. So what it is is a protracted El Nino. So you have a drought event followed by a flood event, which is a La Nino event. And in 1787, you get the typhoon in Bengal, which was recorded by Roxborough in his Madras meteorological diary. When a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal struck the east coast near Koringa in Andhra Pradesh, resulting in 20,000 deaths. And that's a Madras mean pressure that's been recorded at that time. I won't go through this particular slide just to say that the 1787 typhoon is very well recorded in the general letter from India from 15 December. The series of colonial records, for example, Campbell records, notes the scarcity of grain following the severe storms and the repeated inundations. So our work with Rob Allen suggests that this as it was a very period of extended and so it maps the unsettled climate that we've just bribing. And one of the aims of our research was to identify previously undescribed wet and dry periods in the pre 1900 instrumental period and examine possible relationships with the answer phenomenon. And this we were able to do quite conclusively, I think, for the 1790s. So I think this is a very important achievement for us in terms of analyzing how the impact on India resulted of this. I'll need a result in some very unsettled conditions. So in order to what does it all mean for current understanding cyclones. The recent work has argued that stronger and more frequent cyclones are likely to occur of current trends and climate change continue. And there's a sense in which there's a there's a is argued that there's a 10 to 40% increase in the frequency of tropical cyclones and that each cyclone maybe and each storm maybe 45% more powerful. This is Kerry manuals work and he is his work is based on six computer models, which uses weather data and historical records simulated with simulated 600 annual storms from 1950 to 2005. And I think in some senses going further back and that's what we've tried to do with our data set looking at 19th century cyclones. Loves us to understand the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean region much more. And given the impact of our own cyclone I think this is this work is extremely prescient and extremely important and we can also look for example at the way in which El Nino and the answer phenomenon might have been john tropical cyclone and characteristic so it's very useful to gather more documentary data. On and so related events including tropical cyclones and the impact in South Asia in the 18th and 19th century. And once again, the importance of colonial collections is here. And why and how when we collect some of these were some of this data on cyclones and another natural disasters and here is the 1819 catch earthquake. We are also able to qualitatively collect responses from communities and, and this is again useful for adaptation and resilience lessons that we can learn how communities, especially from below have adapted to what are known as more they see as natural disasters, and how the migration of these disasters leads to uncertainty of a very different sort of kind and that again you can map through the anthropological record and the ethnographic record which is what we are also trying to do for example, in these traditional lands which was destroyed by the creation of the alaband in 1819, the migration of nomadic pastoralism the bunny the Ravares and so on was was one form of response was no longer possible through various events that have happened including the partition of India and the destruction of a pastoral way of life through sedentarization and we can come to those points if necessary the question also session. Similarly the cyclone data allows us also to understand both the impact of cyclone mapping and the effect of cyclone mapping and the responses of communities if you look at the history of cyclones in eastern India. And this particular granges Brahmaputra Magna Delta and the collecting data on historical cyclones is very important for climate security and for settlement research for example the historic patterns of settlement in the delta area of Sunderbans where particular islands were left unoccupied but are now over over over time have been occupied, resulting in in flooding and destruction of lifestyle. And certainly in terms of Calcutta and South Asian cities like Bombay and Calcutta, the impact of climate change and mapping of events in the past will be very interesting. Again useful for us to understand how historically environmental change large scale reclamation for drainage has impacted on this area over over the time frame that we are looking at. Especially when we look at the impact of the unformed cyclone and here again the law of storms we've got exceedingly good data by collected by Henry Pittington who collected information of cyclones and India the sailors on book for the law of storms and there's Pittington himself in a punch cartoon. Charles Medrum who were mentioned in 1860s who started off as a main player in the Met Office also collected climate data of the Indian Ocean he is responsible for developing the term cycloneology. And I think his huge ship's logs to get a very impressive amount of data on on the southern Indian Ocean and on the path of cyclones. And this interestingly is some images that we get from the colonial archive of the 1864 cyclone which is also quite a serious cyclone which destroyed one third of Calcutta and caused the death of 48,000 people. The recent unformed cyclone hasn't had such a destructive effect on life and that's because of the responses but the cyclone data that exists in Pittington and Blanford's archive I think is very, very significant for us if you're going to be mapping the impact of cyclones and the effect of climate change on cities for example Calcutta and Bombay. So this is the inundation map of the Calcutta cyclone of 1864. The storm at a width of 100 miles is preceded 10 miles an hour its greatest damage on land was from a 15 foot storm surge. And again it would be very interesting to look at these bookend events the 1864 cyclone and the cyclone that happened last month to see what the inundation map of Calcutta looked like 48,000 people were declared dead in Calcutta so one third of the population seems to have passed away. And the official report by Blanford is biography of the cyclone. And the origins of the cyclone are mapped in a very detailed fashion where rose, how it sort of emerged, which bit of the way in which it moved is all very, the Henry Blanford's origin of the cyclone really maps the cyclone very, very carefully and the developments in colonial metrology helped to understand the nature of the cyclone. And here are some images of what happened. There was a ship blown into the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Again much of these areas will be figuring in the current cyclone as well. And the contemporary reports here are also very, very detailed. As measured by Mr. Widdell the height of the storm wave of Diamond Harbour was 4.58 feet over the top of the Bund. And then you can get the destruction of men's many of the villages close by was swept away particular areas were affected and so on and then and detailed quotations from eyewitness accounts are being used to see how. Which areas were affected. Here the result of the casualties 102 pucker houses were destroyed with 566 purely damaged 40,000 native up to a completely level and that's the that's the detail of those who died in the surrounding areas. They are shipped right logs also very important. This is Clarence survived the cyclone where James Watson gave a detailed record of the storm with early readings of wind and barometer. This again is the buildings that were affected in central Calcutta. And I think it's very interesting. One interesting thing that developed was the and Blankford had and Pittington had both warned against this. This was the creation of Port Canning and after the after the cyclone of 1864 they had been warned that do not create Port Canning but Port Canning was created to tells you about the hubris of states and governments. And of course Port Canning was destroyed and the second cyclone wiped out Port Canning so all that investment was lost. So another cyclone which has been mapped very beautifully in this book by Benjamin Kingsbury is the cyclone of 1876 where 10,000 people have died following cholera epidemic and the famine that followed. And here Kingsbury tons interpretation on its head showing that the cyclone of 1876 was not simply a natural event but shaped by exploitation and inequality in Bengali society and this of course is something that we have talked about a lot. So failure to remit taxation the salt tax of 650% the ruthless laser fare policy of Richard Temple and the temple wage the poor relief efforts. So the dead and dying numbering about 215,000 in the 1876 cyclone, including 100,000 dead by cholera. So the question that I asked our cyclones intensifying and some experts believe they are others experts suggest that we cannot yet detect an increase in the frequency of intensity of tropical cyclones. But of course we've had this unfun level four, level five cyclone that hit India on 20th of May. It's only by improving the historical weather and climate database can we provide a platform with which to address such key concerns on climate change the impact of extreme events as I said will be enormous in South Asia because of the population densities involved. So in order to conclude then the scope of historical data to refine climate anomalies under estimated large amounts remain untapped. If this is our data rescue effort that requires a seduous mining of the historical archive and and and this data can be improved dramatically improved or data policy or data poverty can be improved both through time and wider in space. So as extreme events increase the predictability of these events becomes more important and so improving the historical and climate database as I said will improve will provide a platform with which to address key concerns and climate change. At the same time you need to create an archive that deals important data on climate adaptation and resilience. So I'll just end there. I'll stop sharing. I think it's here. Sorry. It's that square square white square box. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was fascinating. It made me think many things. I really like the idea of thinking through climate and the ways in which you brought such disparate sources together in this archive retrieval project as well, which also spoke to political economy questions at the time. I have one observation and a larger question if I may to open up the discussion. You said in relation to the 18 earthquake in touch, which is something I have spent some time thinking about about how desi or vernacular sources talked about migration, transhumans and pastoralism. But what to me is really interesting about earthquake is it allowed the British to consolidate their political influence in the region. So it was a confluence natural disaster and political consolidation that seems to me mark to mark throughout history the conjunction of those two two movements natural disaster or flood and the change political regime or form of governance. So I wonder if you could comment on that relationship. And then secondly, this is a genuine question. When you look back in history through these sources, you can see cyclones and you can record their frequency and their occurrence. But when you compare that to the to the present day, you've got the climate data. But how do you deal with as a historian comparing things through time? How do you deal with the changing political economy or regulatory regimes of disaster such as improved food distribution systems that reduce the possibility of coming or early warning systems. Or flood defense systems that may be in visibilize things that were in the past disasters. I'm sure you've thought about it, but the question is, what did you think about it? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And should I can I also straight away or should I wait for? Yeah. No, I think I think both very, very significant questions. Certainly for catch one of the paper that we were just writing on catch is about making catch legible catch and the Sunderbans legible in terms of EIC and post EIC. Raj practices. So one of the ways in which they were using that moment to sedentary spatulas. They were using that the period of the 19th century to ensure that, you know, they were taxing as much as they could. They were the traditional homelands of the traditional migratory roots of the bunny herdsman was something that they began to recognize as being important only later on of course that the whole bunny grasslands were later on as we as we know destroyed by Prosopera and all sorts of invasive species of plants, but that was much more a 20th century Indian government complete lack of understanding of pastoralism. But that, you know, came alongside as I said the partition, the breakdown of migratory roots. But if you look at the way in which they saw catch, they saw catch as a landscape which was harsh, which had brackish water, which needed irrigation. Which, but while at the same time downgrading traditional modes of living in in those Rosalinds and inhabiting those areas. So these were areas which were made, as Rohan Duzuza would say, much more vulnerable through colonial practices. So I would totally agree with with that. And similarly with the settlement practices in Sundarbans where areas which historically should not have been reclaimed were reclaimed and islands which should not have been settled were settled in the interest of taxation. But at the same time also colonial policy had some very important positive features. For example in Kulna, which was prevented, which was protected by the from the cyclone recently was an area which had a very high area reserved for it with the British put into place. Precisely as a result of the activities of Richard Temple, the horrible man we encountered in the context of 1876 cyclone in Calcutta who said no, no, we need to keep those forests in the Sundarbans. So those are the forests that have protected Kulna today. In the face of the unfound cycle. Yeah. So it's the colonial practices are very, very interesting as our governance and state practices in a more contemporary period and how they respond to crises. And either they respond to it in a more sophisticated nuanced way and I think the British tried to do both somewhat unwittingly and were successful certainly in terms of restoring mangrove forests in Sundarbans. As a result of your second question about early warning system certainly again, if you look I don't know I haven't mapped the inundation map of the unfound cyclone. You know you only had 118 people who died in the region, right? So in 48,000 people died in 1864. So clearly those early warning systems have worked they've moved people out. Damage to buildings, of course, and so on. But again, there's the hubris of the nation state as well. You know, building where they shouldn't be building a port canning was something of the 1867 cyclone wiped out. It'd be interesting to see what was wiped out now, you know. So I think yes, I'm talking about the hubris of states where earlier port cities were built in much more shaded areas where you didn't get these effects of these extreme events. But now the more modern port cities are built flagrantly on coasts which get attacked by these extreme events. So I think the hubris of the modern nation state in the context of climate change and the impact of climate change on cities is something that we can really address. Thank you. So, Neil, how shall we work the questions? Shall I read them or will you solicit them? Okay, I will read them. We have one from Aditya Ramesh, who says, I've been into two questions. First, you've used the term climate change and environment and have written about the Anthropocene. How do you see these as things as different or as overlapping forms of analysis or analytics? And the second question is following on from mine. How do we marry social history, for instance, of property, mercantilism, deforestation and infrastructure with these long-duret kinds of histories? Nice questions. Thanks, Aditya. Yeah, thank you, Aditya. So climate change, I mean, again, this is something that I'm led by the interdisciplinary team that I work with. In terms of sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean and El Nino-related events, there seems to be a consensus that global warming is causing the rise of SSDs in the Indian Ocean, right? And the more frequency of cyclones could be related to that, according to some of the work that's being done now. Now that could be a climate change sort of effect of when we look at particular events such as cyclone. In terms of El Nino and La Nina events, again, the frequency of El Nino and La Nina events, I believe, is linked to global warming again and linked to climate change. So once again, and I'm not an expert here, I would be, again, looking at my collaborators who work on this in terms of using that. In terms of using the term Anthropocene, I've used the term in the past, you're absolutely right, but that has much more to do with anthropogenic climate change or a change which has been caused as a result of more carbon in the atmosphere. And there the dating of 1610 I think is very exciting. When you look at the way in which there was a whole spike in carbon stock as a result of the destruction or the death of Indians following war, following disease in the Americas. And that of course again, I mean that data is now being, there are some critiques of that. But 1610 has seemed to be a period when you do get anthropogenic climate change and a rise in carbon stock. So in that sense, that's the sense I use the term Anthropocene. In terms of social history, how does that link to the longer-duration climate history? Again, this is as good, the social history dimension is only as good as the documentary archives that you harvest. I've been contacted by this American team who are very interested in the Spieliochime record that they're getting for 1345 from India in terms of the Chalisa famines and so on. And they're getting a very, very good resolution and they want to know what the archives of Verosia Tuglerk was yielding. And this is something that we are sort of engaged in looking at the activities of Verosia Tuglerk in terms of irrigation and so on in that context. So I think it's again as the social history needs to map on to the history of climate. But that depends on the documentary archive, the richness of the archive and the historian who's looking for those sources. I don't know whether that answers your question or you do. You could type an answer. Okay, so we have a question from Meghna Metta. I don't know if you know Meghna Metta, but she also works in the Sunderband. And the question is in two parts. It's a first stab at the question, then it's a refinement of the question and the refinement makes a lot of sense. So I'll just read it. My question is how do we work with the particular landscapes to not just weather and climate, for example, the uniqueness of a shifting delta. This question of reclaiming is slightly problematic because today lots of conservative economists of conservation want a planned retreat in inverted commas of about two and a half million people. And this is problematic because even Calcutta was itself a marsh. So what about thinking of shifting villages markets and settlement, instead of the idea of fixity. And then the clarification, fixity seemed like colonial project. So now after the cyclone, the recent cyclone, all the concrete embankments have broken. And so perhaps we can think about settlements that are nomadic and people who move with shifting waters. The mangrove forest is indeed a river and new land formations are constantly forming as some are breaking with shifting chars or sandbanks. End of quote. What is that Sundarbans that inspires people to write so poetically? No, I think that's a brilliant question. I think this whole idea of island hopping char people, you know, is true for the Sundarbans. But if you look at the longer, dure history of the Sundarbans, and I'm no expert on the Sundarbans, this is only marginal to my area of research. But if you look at the documentary archive, once again, what you're getting is what Meghna is saying that there is a sense in which the land plans for the Sundarbans, for example, Schiller's plan in the latter half of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century, is all about fixing these lands, getting more invested in trying to settle particular lands and forget about the island hopping char people. So that fixity is again similar to what happens in Kutch, where the colonial state is embarking on a taxation and settlement policy through primarily embankments. And what happens in terms of the long term history of the Sundarbans then is, again, it's made much more flood vulnerable. If you use, again, Roan Duzer's sort of terminology, you get much more settlement again as a result of the impetus of settlement again is due to the partition again. The delta itself steers very clear of these forced settlement patterns and reacts. And if you look at the Indian side of the Sundarbans versus the Bangladesh side, it's quite clear that the Indian side has suffered a lot more soil erosion, has suffered a lot more flooding. And the Bangladesh side, interestingly, much more forested and that, again, as I said, goes back to some of the forest reservation policies of the British. So in answer to your question, yeah, I would agree with, you know, this is a region that has been made much more flood vulnerable. And whether you need to resettle these people, that again is a question that, you know, once you destroy a delta landscape, how do you sort of continue living on it? How do you reclaim, you know, the pastoralist way of life and catch or the char, the island hopping ways of the char people, you know, and once there is a very different way of life being imposed in this region. And it's a question that, you know, I think a detailed land use survey of how the islands were mapped, why particular islands are being settled as opposed to the higher level islands, now the lower level islands are also being settled, you know, that sort of thing. When does the settlement patterns occur? And a detailed land use history of the Sundarbans, I think, is what is required. Brilliant. So one of the features of hosting these things online is you can get some really rather pithy responses. No, I'm very true. From experts in their field, let me say, you know. So Meghna responds to you saying, maybe we could rethink fixity and property relations as we know them, a statement probably allowed to make in a face-to-face seminar because we have too many questions, but maybe we could rethink fixity and property on that basis. Yeah. There's a question from Soumya who says, are there any specific subaltern narratives that were either acknowledged in terms of ethnic graphic records to better understand climate history in ways that are different from colonial climate scientists? Yeah. So there is a detailed archive, which we are trying to tap into, and you can get that in the colonial record as well where they quote, for example, Bunny Hertzman, or where they quote the sharp communities about, you know, how you can never be certain of anything now. I mean, about changing levels of uncertainty where earlier they were able to predict uncertainty, unable to cater for uncertainties, the levels of uncertainty now are far out of the bounds of their historical, oral memory and lived, not forget about their lived experience, even in terms of the memorialized sort of landscape. And that I think is quite new in terms of both the impacts of climate change and the impacts of new extreme events. And that is what you're seeing in a lot of the local oral histories. But certainly, one thing we are trying to do is to, again, looking at these bookend events, 1819, Kachouthwek, 2009 earthquake and budge, where ethnographers have looked very in detail, for example, Lila Mehta has looked at 2009, and she's taken a series of oral quotations and histories from these communities about the impact of the earthquake. And so those narratives are also part of the project. Yeah, there is a very detailed history here to be uncovered. And that's a very good question, Samuel. Thank you. Brilliant. And then we have comments like, amazing, thanks, Vanita, and thank you, exclamation mark. General signs of appreciation have appeared in the chat box. There are no more questions, but if you don't mind, I would like to ask one. And that's about, it's not so much about your methods as a historian, but it's a question about your methods as being a team player in an interdisciplinary research project. Say something about how knowledge and power come together in a project like that, and how you managed to overcome disciplinary boundaries and conceptual languages to make sense of one another. It's been a hard learning curve for me because when I first was approached by a lot of these people, I thought, oh, God, what do they want to expect me to do? I'm a mere historian. So this whole idea that a speleothem, a paleo person approaching me, I would not be able to do justice. But actually all they were interested in was the documentary record and to have access to, I mean, which is again an expertise. So it is not so much about what we could do for them, but how this changed the way we think about history itself. So I was able then to work with them, and I think the power relationship shifted. It became much more of an equal relationship where their work also infected my work. It became a very, very collaborative exercise. For me, I gave up my fear of science as a discipline which I could not engage with, and I suddenly realized that this was just a language you had to access and use and dismiss wherever it was appropriate. And certainly that's the way in which I've looked at it, and dealing with scientists has been both informative and a salutary lesson about how there are a lot of people out there who are doing some interesting work and would like to engage with us. And so the Anthropocene debate has been hijacked by scientists, and we really need to take this debate back. Humanity is, you know, it's about Anthropocene, it's about the philosophy and the way of life and the worldviews that we really need to think about and talk about. Brilliant. Well, I'd like to thank you very much on behalf of SOAS and the South Asia Institute for coming to talk to us this afternoon. I always find, I gave a talk online last week and you just get dumped unceremoniously out the other in a minute. So I really heartily thank you for taking the talk to us and thank you for Sunil too, for organizing it. Oh, hang on, there's another comment from Meg in one moment. I know it's for me. So thanks very much, and don't take being dumped out of the other end of this meeting personally, it's just the way the technology works. And on a personal note, I hope your husband comes home and he's fine later on today. Yeah, no, that's a bit boring, but thank you very much. It's great to meet you as well. And thank you to various friends who are here that you earned and saw me and so on. Yeah. Thank you.