Fragile Ports
First in his novel, The Hungry Tide, and then in his lectures on climate change published as The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh narrates the story of ‘one of the first Cassandras of climate science’, a mid-19th century Englishman living in Calcutta, called Henry Piddington. Piddington, an amateur meteorologist, raised early alarm about a project initiated by the (British) East India Company to construct a new port city on the banks of the Matla river in Bengal. This port was envisaged as an alternative to the older Calcutta port, which, although a major centre for the Company’s shipping operations, lay further inward from the Bay of Bengal. In 1853, in a pamphlet addressed to the Governor-General of India, Piddington warned that the planned new port would be far too exposed to a storm surge:
‘[E]very one and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt-water rolling in, or rising up upon them, with such rapidity that the whole settlement will be inundated to a depth from five to fifteen feet.’
Ghosh tells this as a tale both of hubris and of forgetting. The engineers constructing Port Canning took notice neither of Piddington’s warnings, nor of the local knowledge signified by the river’s very name: matla means intoxicated or crazed in Bengali. Forgetting, says Ghosh was also at work in settlements elsewhere: in Bombay (Mumbai) and New York, Hong Kong and Singapore, all built on fragile cusps of reclaimed land open to the ocean, unlike the sheltered older ports – London, Lisbon, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Guangzhou, Malacca, Cochin, Dhaka and others; in the premiums attached to beachfront locations all over the globe; in the deliberate neglect of the tsunami warnings inscribed in medieval stone tablets placed along the Fukushima coast, saying in Japanese, ‘Do not build your homes below this point!’
Rising sea waters will flood all these great hubs of human life, impacting millions of people. Of these, the worst affected will be those who have settled there neither due to hubris nor forgetting, but because dispossessed of homes and livelihoods elsewhere. Some, among them many Bangladeshis and Syrians, will be made climate refugees twice over.
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