When a landslide dammed Sutlej for 40 days in 1782

Yet again, Himachal Pradesh, like other parts of the country, is today reeling under floods and landslides. It has happened before and at the rate we are going, it shall happen again.From the pre-colonial years, the first substantial piece of information available of a similar situation is of a huge landslide damming the Sutlej for 40 days in 1782. This was near Sunni in the erstwhile princely state of Bhajji. With hardly a trickle escaping this body of boulders and mud, people waited with bated breath for this artificial dam to burst. The greatest damage was anticipated at Bilaspur downstream.Its ruler, Devi Chand, posted men with guns at regular intervals from Bhajji down to Ropar with orders to fire when the flood came. Upstream, the dammed waters flooded all the low-lying settlements and fields, and touched Rampur. When the gathering waters exploded through the debris, Devi Chand’s palace was swept away, though most of the town of Bilaspur was saved. Two and a half centuries later, the scar on the hillside near Sunni may still be seen.Around the mid-19th century, British power was fairly well-established in Punjab and the neighbouring hills. By its very nature, colonialism was not about expenditure, but revenue. If something was spent, more was expected in return. If the item of expenditure was unlikely to yield something, it would be relegated to irrelevance. That was the case with floods and these were treated at par with famines. In Punjab, paltry relief was grudgingly given and was based on a codification of the 1880s. That famines — as also floods, to some extent — were the result of government policy did not seem to matter.Traditional knowledge about natural drainage, the ability to quickly shift the straw huts and the presence of storm-water flows, or ‘choes’, was consistently ignored in favour of canals and embankments. Canals like the Upper and Lower Bari Doab were held up for display as fine examples of progress. The ‘canal colonies’, as they came to be known, were called the granary of India and became prosperous areas.The monsoon season of 1933 was especially severe. In August-September that year, both the Sutlej and Beas breached their banks and broke through embankments. The severest-hit were Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar. Even Lahore, on the banks of the Ravi, was affected. Hundreds of small villages were inundated, crops were destroyed, and railway lines and other communications were damaged. The exact figure of deaths was never known. The relief given was meagre — some food was distributed and limited medical facilities provided to check the outbreak of diseases like malaria.No major reforms were initiated.Empathic and incisive writing on floods (and famines) in the colonial years came from an unexpected quarter: stories and poems by Rudyard Kipling, better known as the author of ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘Kim’, and often labelled as an imperial jingoist.In his story ‘The Bridge Builders’, Kipling writes of how a bridge under construction across the Ganga is threatened by a flood. Some of these stories derive from his experiences as a correspondent of the Lahore-based The Civil and Military Gazette. For example, in 1887, he had covered the opening of a bridge over the Sutlej, near Ferozepur. A year later, in July 1888, en route to Shimla, he was stuck on the banks of the Ghaggar near today’s Panchkula. In the wait, he found inspiration for ‘In Flood Time’, where the keeper of the crossing tells him: “It will rain till the dawn. Listen! The boulders are talking tonight in the bed of the river. Hear them! They would be husking your bones, Sahib, had you tried to cross.”Of all of Kipling’s stories, and of floods and landslides, it is a lesser-known story, ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’, that stands out. Here, Sir Purun Dass, the Prime Minister of a princely state, leaves for the Himalaya without warning. As a hermit who lives in cave, he becomes known to the locals as the holy man ‘Purun Bhagat’. Animals befriend him and on a night of heavy rain, they warn him of a huge landslide. Purun rushes down to the village and is able to save its people. The next day, the people find that their village has been wiped out. A dead Purun Bhagat, the man who saved them, is found sitting cross-legged against a tree. They build him a shrine and worship him as a saint.Has anything changed? Have our methods of dealing with exacerbating disasters like floods and landslides altered in any way since the time we were colonial subjects? Will fiction still give us insights into reality?— The writer is a Shimla-based author

When a landslide dammed Sutlej for 40 days in 1782

Raaja Bhasin

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