The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

The urban history of Bengal provides an interesting illustration of what I am trying to get at. Colonial Calcutta, which was for a long time the capital of the British Raj, was founded on the banks of the Hooghly River in the late seventeenth century. It had not been in existence for long before it came to be realized that the river was silting up. By the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had decided in principle that a new port would be built at a location closer to the Bay of Bengal. A site was chosen in the 1840s; it lay some 55 kilometres to the south-east of Calcutta, on the banks of a river called Matla (which means ‘crazed’ or ‘intoxicated’ in Bengali). At that time, there lived in Calcutta an Englishman by the name of Henry Piddington. A shipping inspector by profession, he dabbled promiscuously in literature, philology and the sciences until his true calling was revealed to him by a treatise, An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms, written by an American meteorologist, Col. Henry Reid. Published in 1838, the book was an ambitious study of the circular motion of tropical storms. Colonel Reid’s book inspired a great passion in Piddington, and he devoted himself to the field for the rest of his life. It was he who coined the word cyclone, and it is for this that he is best remembered today. But Piddington’s particular interest was the phenomenon of the storm surge (or ‘storm wave’ as it was then called): he would eventually compile a detailed account ...