ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Storm Predictions and Agrarian Sayings in Nineteenth-Century Eastern India

• In Event: Weathering Science

English Abstract

In 1868, the Bengali monthly Rahasya Sandarbha published an article titled ‘Early Signs of Rain and Storms’. Founded by the polymath Rajendralal Mitra (1822-91), the periodical was a product of Mitra’s close interest in translating European scientific and medical knowledge into the vernacular. In this article, the unknown author described how variations in atmospheric pressure and cloud formations could provide peasant farmers with warning signs against storms and heavy rainfall. This was particularly crucial following the devastating cyclones of 1864 and 1867 which inundated most of lower Bengal with utmost violence. Subsequently, the government established a Meteorological Office to formulate a system of storm warnings. As a result, imperial meteorologists came to test and experiment ‘storm-science’ as it developed from the 1840s. However, there already existed oral literatures on rain and storms within Bengal’s agrarian society that were popularly known as Khanar Vacana (Sayings of Khana). Yet, the article cautioned against these sayings and instead referred to “European ways” of early warning. By analysing the publication of weather proverbs in Khanar Vacana (1875) and Collection of Agricultural Sayings (1895), this paper contests the standardisation of meteorology in colonial India. It argues that plural languages and genres of storm prediction proliferated orally and textually that were not only a product of maritime Calcutta, but more importantly, a global and commercial market. In doing so, this paper rethinks historical understandings of scientific expertise and climate data.

Author

• Varun Vivian Mallik