Sarah Carson: Negotiating Tropical Difference: The Domestication of Meteorology in India, 1880-1960
What exactly is “tropical” about tropical meteorology? Until recently, accounts of atmospheric science have taken Euro-American temperate weather as the universal field for the history of rapid conceptual and scientific developments after 1850, leading to, among other achievements, tolerably-accurate short- and medium-range forecasting. But weather in the equatorial and sub-tropical regions is distinctive, involving powerful hurricanes, pronounced intra-annual oscillations, and monsoonal seasons. With reference to the particular case of South Asia, I argue that the wide semantic field between the literary and the geophysical “tropical” opened up space for creative reinvention and redefinition of atmospheric science in the lower latitudes, lending support to an emerging consensus that meteorology is best understood as a poly-centric science.
Through the production of standardized data, leaders of the India Meteorological Department (IMD, f. 1875) sought to render the atmosphere above South Asia not only bureaucratically manageable, but also comparable across the globe, a project entailing the extension of communication and mapping technologies and the recruitment of Indians as—often reluctant—human instruments. However, architects of this data-generating apparatus repeatedly expressed concern that the tropical environment and its inhabitants made faithful transplantation of European systems impractical, even if the imperial exchequer agreed to devote adequate resources (it didn't). The first part of the talk considers instructional observer handbooks alongside the coercive figure of the traveling “inspector,” whose peculiar responsibility it was to discipline troublesome observers and calibrate their finicky, fragile instruments.
Next, I discuss the gradual replacement of expensive, often climatically-unsuitable European instruments with domestic alternatives or new inventions altogether, revealing that the trend toward substitution accelerated because of the requirements of upper-air balloon researchers and the promotion of highly-trained Indian scientists. Finally, I will investigate a short-lived IMD project to gather and statistically assess vernacular weather proverbs, an enterprise grounded in a 1950s nationalist critique of “foreign” methods for studying India’s tropical weather. These cases help us to understand how these figures’ experimentations with local materials and methods over several decades reciprocally influenced evolving theories of tropical “difference” advanced by imperialists and nationalists alike, if for quite different reasons.
Sarah Carson (Ph.D. September 2019, Princeton University) is a historian of modern South Asia studying the intersections between weather reasonings, forecasting technologies, and state-society relations. Her dissertation, “Ungovernable Winds: The Weather Sciences in South Asia, 1864-1945” charts the particular history of the India Meteorological Department alongside economic, social, and atmospheric developments in the region to argue for the centrality of “nature” to the politics of imperialism and nationalism. Sarah’s related interests include astrological knowledges, global environmental science, histories of bureaucracy, and pluralistic narratives of environmental change. As a postdoctoral fellow in Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture Program, Sarah will be expanding her dissertation into a book exploring the connections between weather knowledges and state power in India spanning the colonial period and extending into the 1950s, engaging questions surrounding the scientific invention of “the tropics,” the innovation of modern statecraft through authoritarian imperial experimentation, and the role played by weather in everyday public life. She will also begin work on her next book project, which will explore the cultures of the postcolonial earth and environmental sciences in India and Pakistan, using oral history to complement the fragmentary textual archives available.
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