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India’s water future is being built on myths about its medieval past

Outside the Vijayanagara king Krishna Raya's new city of Nagalapur, Hospet, Paes counted 15,000 or 20,000 labourers, crowding “like ants, so that you could not see the ground on which they walked."

In late April, on the outskirts of Visakhapatnam, the foundation stone was laid for a 600-acre, one-gigawatt Artificial Intelligence data centre—some day to be Asia’s largest digital infrastructure investment. Part of the land had belonged for generations to Dalit families in the village of Tarluvada. Through May, the women of those families refused to sign it away. A video documenting their protest crossed 2.5 million views before the government of India had Instagram restrict it under the Information Technology Act. 

Other Indian states, including Karnataka, have been bullish about data centres even amid soaring temperatures and water shortages across the country. Simultaneously, state-led water initiatives — Mission Kakatiya, Mission Amrit Sarovar, the Jal Shakti Abhiyan — are attempting to restore “traditional” hydrological methods, on the premise that precolonial systems, relying on rain-filled tanks, were more equitable and more communal than what came after. 

But is this what the historical record attests to? Looking beyond epigraphs, into oral tradition, a more chequered picture emerges. Take, for example, the Kerege Haara — a celebrated Kannada song narrating the ritual sacrifice of a Gowda chief’s daughter-in-law to ensure the construction of a tank. This is not exceptional in Kannada popular memory. Many old reservoirs in Karnataka have attached to them a song or a story of sacrifice, shortage or death, varying by caste. 

These memories are in stark contrast to the idyllic tone of medieval inscriptions, which praise the courtly patrons of rainwater tanks, and describe prosperous surrounding farms, orchards, and temples. The designers and beneficiaries of medieval water systems were not the same as the people whose hands had built the tanks and canals — in much the same way as the people signing off on data centres today are not the ones whose water is being taken away. 

Thousands of tanks were built over nearly a thousand years (c. 8th to 18th century CE). Village landscapes were frequently criss-crossed by tank channels and streams. Inscriptions recording these tanks are, on first encounter, idyllic. Take, for example, a gift made by the 12th-century Brahmin merchant Kammata Chatti-Setti. He was a trader in horses, elephants and pearls, who boasted of kings as clients. In the village of Banavur, near the town of Arasikere (literally “Queen’s Tank”), he enlarged two tanks. Other inscriptions recorded by historians GS Dikshit, GR Kuppuswamy and SK Mohan describe the environs as “filled with clusters of groves, with well-filled channels, with large tanks like seas, surrounded with growing crops, with crowds of people and splendid temples.” 

Chatti-Setti also built a large tank near the capital city of Dvarasamudra (present-day Halebidu, in Karnataka), which was home to several vast reservoirs holding the waters of the Yagache river, bearing annual harvests of sugarcane and rice. In this, he was part of a larger trend among the court elite of the Hoysalas in South Karnataka. Sanskrit eulogies praise Hoysala kings themselves as sponsoring agraharas (Brahmin settlements) without count, “multitudes of charitable tanks,” and temples that pierced the sky. 

Several highly-placed court officials are recorded commissioning tanks, each surrounded by valuable agricultural land in which they held a stake. Brahmins and merchants (sometimes the same individual could be both), Jain and Hindu, male and female members of the royal family and aristocracy, mathas, and temples were all involved in financing and benefiting from the expansion of tank agriculture. 

However, the inscriptions of this time have little to say about who actually built the tanks. How many hands were needed to move and pack all the earth? Hundreds, thousands? And how were they paid? This information was, apparently, not recorded in stone but probably on more transient materials, like palm-leaf.

In comparison, another class is much better represented in the 13th-century inscriptions. The historian Kesavan Veluthat, in his paper “Landed Magnates as State Agents: The Gavundas under the Hoysalas”,........

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