Lunch with BS: Historian Sunil Amrith talks about monsoon and migration

The MacArthur "Genius" grant awardee talks to Anjali Puri about Unruly Waters, the book he has just finished writing, and why history matters even more in an era of majoritarian politics

The injunctions printed on the wall above us in determinedly quirky SodaBottleOpenerWala — “No laughing loudly”, “No feet on chair” and so on — seem funnier today because my soft-spoken guest, historian Sunil Amrith, has perfect manners. This stagey, noisy mock-up of a Mumbai Irani cafe in Delhi’s Khan Market with Irani, Parsi and Bohri food is where you go for the “experience” rather than to talk. But it feels right to be lunching with Amrith in a place that celebrates what he evokes brilliantly in his work — the creative energy of migrants.

Cambridge-educated Amrith is a professor of South Asian studies and history at Harvard University whose work at the expanding frontiers of history — migration, environmental history — have won him back to back awards, the Infosys Prize in Humanities followed last October by the even more prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Recognising “exceptional creativity”, it is popularly known as the “Genius” grant, and comes with $625,000 prize money and no little drama. Awardees are completely in the dark until they receive a mood-altering phonecall. Amrith got his while walking to his son’s nursery school. “I was astonished,” he says with modest disbelief. “I still am.”

However, he is not resting on his laurels. On sabbatical this year, Amrith has just finished writing his new book, Unruly Waters, to be published by Penguin in December. Thirty-eight-year-old Amrith, looking more graduate-student like than professorial in trousers and a short kurta, begins  describing it: “It’s partly an account of climate science and meteorology in India since the 19th century — how scientists came to understand the monsoon better…”

This, apart from upending my idea of what historians do, is a terrifying sentence for a non-expert interviewer to hear, but I am only slightly intimidated. The reason is that I’ve just finished reading Amrith’s last book, Crossing the Bay of  Bengal, published in 2013, a stunningly original piece of work, lyrical and almost novelistic in the telling. It frames a compelling tale around the Bay, of the millions who crossed these waters in colonial times, calling it one of the world’s great, forgotten migrations.

Amrith makes the journeys of Indians, mostly migrant labour, to places like Ceylon, Malaya, Burma and Singapore important and palpable by embedding jewel-like stories of human striving and suffering, of cultural yearning and adaptation, within bigger arcs — historical, economic, political, technological, cultural, ecological, even spiritual.

It seems inconceivable that Amrith would write a boring book, and that conviction grows as I hear more about his new work, 10 years in the making. The big arcs begin to take shape — how the quest to control water has shaped modern India, what are the challenges that India faces as a result of climate change, how central the monsoon has been to Indian economic and political thought. “In 1909,” Amrith recounts, “a British colonial official is reported to have said, every budget of mine is a gamble on the monsoon. You hear that right to this day.”

It’s refreshing to hear Amrith speak in a different register from the voices we usually hear in deeply polarised debates around big dams. “I do highlight their catastrophic effects,” he says, “but one of the things I avoid is projecting our own preoccupations back in time. He goes on to present a nuanced argument that there was a “humanitarian and liberatory politics to these flawed decisions.”

Where, I ask, are the enticing stories. Amrith smiles and starts telling me about his long river journeys in India and his conversations with fishermen. He mentions people I’ve never heard of – Isis Pogson, a rare woman in the world of colonial science, Kanwar Sain, who played a central role in dam-building and took Indian expertise abroad, Gilbert Walker, a meteorologist who did pioneering work on the El Nino phenomenon in India —  making some sound like great lunch companions. By the time he starts talking about the monsoon scene in Do Bigha Zamin and the dam scene in Mother India, I’m sold.

Our little table is now covered with colourful tin plates, our starters and mains having arrived in disconcertingly quick succession. Amrith, a vegetarian, has gone the Parsi way with “Aloo Auntie’s” chutnified cutlets and paneer akouri, I have landed myself with congealed chilli cheese pau but also a satisfying Bohri keema. A loud rendition of an old film song distractingly conjures up for me Zeenat Aman pretending to strum a guitar. Amrith continues to  fashion elegant sentences in his British accent without raising his voice as he fishes his cutlery out of a glass, where it has faux informally been kept. He likes the food and the buzz; it was his suggestion that we meet here. He enjoys cooking but rarely Indian dishes “because they fall short of my own standards, since I  grew up with good south Indian food.”

It’s tempting to believe that Amrith’s love for wide canvases, his transnational approach to history and his eclecticism are at least partly a result of his personal journey. The child of Tamil-speaking parents from India, an eye surgeon mother and a banker father posted in several countries, he was born in Kenya, and raised in Singapore, going to international schools with transient populations, before heading westwards, as the children of expatriates do. “I was very curious,” he says, “and I was lucky enough to travel in Southeast Asia as a schoolboy. The sharp contrasts I saw between Cambodia, which had recently had its first democratic election, and Malaysia and Indonesia got me interested in history.”  

Apart from Singapore, where his parents still live, he counts India, especially Chennai, where he has family ties, and London, where he taught for nine years, as home. A British citizen, he is married to a barrister and says his wife Ruth’s interest in environmental law was critical in drawing him into environmental history.

His keen enjoyment of diverse classrooms comes through all the time. At Birkbeck College in London, a specialist in evening degree courses which he describes as a “remarkable institution”, he taught a “cross-section of London” — many of his students in full-time jobs and older than him. He praises Harvard, where he joined in 2015,  for doing much better at attracting a diverse group of undergraduates, with financial aid, than Oxford and Cambridge.

When I ask him what is the most difficult question a student has asked,  he laughs and says, “Usually a whole series of questions revolving around, why do we really need to know this? You have to make an argument for why history matters.”

I heard him making it eloquently at a talk in Delhi while speaking about the mass expulsion of Rohingyas from Burma, which has given his work on Southeast Asian migration a dreadful new relevance. He explained that claims that the Rohingyas were “immigrants” when they had been in Burma for generations could not be interrogated without understanding the politics of migration control of  the early 20th century.

Arguing that it was especially important now for migration history to be taught widely, he said, “As long as these stories... remain buried in fragmentary archives, known only to professional historians, it will continue to be easy to distort and mobilise them.”

Is it hard to believe in the power of history when majoritarian politics is winning, I ask. Amrith points out that some of the most powerful critiques of Trump’s anti-migrant policies are coming from people in America “deeply schooled in the history of American migration”. “It seems today,” he says “that those who have learnt the lessons of history are on the losing side of political debates but that’s not to say it will always be the case.”