Mumbai's Extraordinary 'Concentration Of Risk' - by Amitav Ghosh

Mumbai and New York, so different in so many ways, have in common that their destinies came to be linked to the British Empire at about the same time: the 1660s.

Although Giovanni da Verrazzano landed on Manhattan in 1524, the earliest European settlements in what is now New York State were built a long way up the Hudson River, in the area around Albany. It was not till 1625 that the Dutch built Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan island; this would later become New Amsterdam and then, when the British first seized the settlement in the 1660s, New York.

The site of today's Mumbai first came under European rule in 1535 when it was ceded to the Portuguese by the ruler of Gujarat. The site consisted of an estuarine archipelago, with a couple of large hilly islands to the north, close to the mainland, and a cluster of mainly low- lying islands to the south. This being an estuarine region, the relationship between land and water was so porous that the topography of the archipelago varied with the tides and the seasons.

Networks of shrines, villages, forts, harbours and bazaars had existed on the southern islands for millennia, but they were never the site of an urban centre as such, even in the early years of European occupation. The Portuguese built several churches and fortifications on those islands, but their main settlements were located close to the mainland, at Bassein, and on Salsette.

The southern part of the archipelago passed into British control when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1661: the islands were included in her dowry (which also contained a chest of tea: this was the Pandora's box that introduced the British public to the beverage, thereby setting in motion the vast cycles of trade that would turn nineteenth-century Bombay into the world's leading opium exporting port). It was only after passing into British hands that the southern islands became the nucleus of a sprawling urban conglomeration. It was then too that a distinct line of separation between land and sea was conjured up through the application of techniques of surveying within a 'milieu of colonial power'.

The appeal of the sites of both Mumbai and New York lay partly in their proximity to deep water harbours and partly in the strategic advantages they presented: as islands, they were both easier to defend and easier to supply from the metropolis. A certain precariousness was thus etched upon them from the start by reason of their colonial origins.

The islands of south Mumbai did not long remain as they were when they were handed over to the British: links between them, in the form of causeways, bridges, embankments and reclamation projects, began to rise in the eighteenth century. The reshaping of the estuarine landscape proceeded at such a pace that by the 1860s a Marathi chronicler, Govind Narayan, was able to predict with confidence that soon it would 'never occur to anybody that Mumbai was an island once'.

Today the part of the city that is located on the former islands to the south of Salsette has a population of about 11.8 million (the population of the Greater Mumbai area is somewhere in the region of 19 to 20 million). This promontory, less than 20 kilometres in length, is the centre of many industries, including India's financial industry; the adjoining port handles more than half of the country's containerized cargo. This part of Mumbai is also home to many millionaires and billionaires: naturally many of them live along the western edge of the peninsula, which offers the finest views of the Arabian Sea.

Because of the density of its population and the importance of its institutions and industries, Mumbai represents an extraordinary, possibly unique, 'concentration of risk'. For this teeming metropolis, this great hub of economic, financial and cultural activity, sits upon a wedge of cobbled-together land that is totally exposed to the ocean. It takes only a glance at a map to be aware of this: yet it was not till 2012 when Superstorm Sandy barrelled into New York on 29 October that I began to think about the dangers of Mumbai's topography.

My wife and I were actually in Goa at the time, but since New York is also home to us we followed the storm closely, on the web and on TV, watching with mounting apprehension and disbelief as the storm swept over the city, devastating the waterfront neighbourhoods that we had flown over so many times while coming in to land at JFK airport.

As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely: both Mumbai and Goa face the Arabian Sea, which, unlike the Bay of Bengal, has not historically generated a great deal of cyclonic activity. Nor, unlike India's east coast, has the west coast had to deal with tsunamis: it was unaffected by the tsunami of 2004, for instance, which devastated large stretches of the eastern seaboard.

Still, the question intrigued me and I began to hunt for more information on the region's seismic and cyclonic profiles. Soon enough I learned that the west coast's good fortune might be merely a function of the providential protraction of geological time - for the Arabian Sea is by no means seismically inactive. A previously unknown, and probably very active, fault system was discovered in the Arabian Sea a few years ago, off the coast of Oman; the system is 800 kilometres long and faces the west coast of India. This discovery was announced in an article that concludes with these words, chilling in their understatement: 'These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean.'

Soon, I also had to rethink my assumptions about cyclones and the Arabian Sea. Reading about Hurricane Sandy, I came upon more and more evidence that climate change may indeed alter patterns of cyclonic activity around the world: Adam Sobel's Storm Surge, for example, suggests that significant changes may be in the offing. When I began to look for information on the Arabian Sea in particular, I learned that there had been an increase in cyclonic activity in those waters over the last couple of decades. Between 1998 and 2001, three cyclones had crashed into the Indian subcontinent to the north of Mumbai: they claimed over 17,000 lives. Then in 2007, the Arabian Sea generated its strongest ever recorded storm: Cyclone Gonu, a Category 5 hurricane, which hit Oman, Iran and Pakistan in June that year causing widespread damage.

What do these storms portend? Hoping to find an answer, I reached out to Adam Sobel, who is a professor of atmospheric science at Columbia University. He agreed to an interview, and on a fine October day in 2015, I made my way to his Manhattan apartment. He confirmed to me that the most up-to-date research indicates that the Arabian Sea is one of the regions of the world where cyclonic activity is indeed likely to increase: a 2012 paper by a Japanese research team predicts a 46 per cent increase in tropical cyclone frequency in the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century, with a corresponding 31 per cent decrease in the Bay of Bengal. It also predicts another change: in the past, cyclones were rare during the monsoon because wind flows in the northern Indian Ocean were not conducive to their formation in that season. Those patterns are now changing in such a way as to make cyclones more likely during and after the monsoons. Another paper, by an American research team, concludes that cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is also likely to intensify because of the cloud of dust and pollution that now hangs over the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding waters: this too is contributing to changes in the region's wind patterns.

These findings prompted me to ask Adam whether he might be willing to write a short piece assessing the risks that changing climatic patterns pose for Mumbai. He agreed and thus began a very interesting series of exchanges.

A few weeks after our meeting, Adam sent me this message:

I have been doing a little research on Mumbai storm surge risk. There seems to be very little written about it. I have found a number of vague acknowledgements that the risk exists, but nothing that quantifies it.

However, are you aware of the 1882 Mumbai cyclone? I have found only very brief accounts of it so far, but the death toll appears to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, and one source says there was a 6m storm surge, which is enormous, and I presume would account for much if not all of that! This was in one paragraph of a book that seems to be out of print. I haven't quickly found any more substantive sources online - most are single-line mentions in lists of deadly storms. I wonder if you have ever seen anything more in-depth?

It is very spooky indeed that this storm is not mentioned in the various academic studies I have dug up on storm surge risk in India.

A quick Google search produced a number of references to an 1882 Bombay cyclone (some were even accompanied by pictures). There were several mentions of a death toll upwards of 1,00,000.

The figure astounded me. Mumbai's population then was about 8,00,000, which would mean that an eighth or more of the population would have perished: an extrapolation from these figures to today's Mumbai would yield a number of over 1 million.

But then came a surprise: Adam wrote to say that the 1882 cyclone was probably a hoax or rumour. He had not been able to find a reliable record of it; nor had any of the meteorologists or historians that he had written to. I then wrote to Murali Ranganathan, an expert on nineteenth-century Bombay, and he looked up the 1882 issues of the Kaiser-i-Hind, a Bombay-based Gujarati weekly run by Parsis. He found a brief description of a storm with strong winds and heavy rain on 4 June 1882, but there was no mention of any loss of life. Evidently, there was no great storm in 1882: it is a myth that has gained a life of its own.

However, the search did confirm that colonial Bombay had been struck by cyclones several times in the past; the 1909 edition of the city's Gazetteer even notes, 'Since written history supplanted legend Bombay appears to have been visited somewhat frequently by great hurricanes and minor cyclonic storms.'

Mumbai's earliest recorded encounter with a powerful storm was on 15 May 1618. A Jesuit historian described it thus: 'The sky clouded, thunder burst, and a mighty wind arose. Towards nightfall a whirlwind raised the waves so high that the people, half dead from fear, thought that their city would be swallowed up. The whole was like the ruin at the end of all things.' Another Portuguese historian noted of this storm: 'The sea was brought into the city by the wind; the waves roared fearfully; the tops of the churches were blown off and immense stones were driven to vast distances; two thousand persons were killed.' If this figure is correct, it would suggest that the storm killed about a fifth of the population that then lived on the archipelago.

In 1740, another 'terrific storm' caused great damage to the city, and in 1783 a storm that was 'fatal to every ship in its path' killed 400 people in Bombay harbour. The city was also hit by several cyclones in the nineteenth century: the worst was in 1854, when 'property valued at half-a- million pounds sterling' was destroyed in four hours and a thousand people were killed.

Since the late nineteenth century onwards, cyclones in the region seem to have 'abated in number and intensity', but that may well be changing now. In 2009 Mumbai did experience a cyclonic storm, but fortunately its maximum wind speeds were in the region of 85 kmph, well below those of a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale. But encounters with storms of greater intensity may be forthcoming: 2015 was the first year in which the Arabian Sea is known to have generated more storms than the Bay of Bengal. This trend could tip the odds towards the recurrence of storms like those of centuries past.

Indeed, even as Adam and I were exchanging messages, Cyclone Chapala, a powerful storm, was forming in the Arabian Sea. Moving westward, it would hit the coast of Yemen on 3 November, becoming the first Category 1 cyclone in recorded history to do so: in just two days, it would deluge the coast with more rain than it would normally get in several years. And then - as if to confirm the projections - even as Chapala was still battering Yemen, another cyclone, Megh, formed in the Arabian Sea and began to move along a similar track. A few days later another cyclone began to take shape in the Bay of Bengal, so that the Indian subcontinent was flanked by cyclones on both sides, a very rare event.

Suddenly the waters around India were churning with improbable events.

Excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House India from 'The Great Derangement' by Amitav Ghosh. Order your copy here.

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