Negotiating Tropical Difference: Meteorological Infrastructures in India, 1900-1952

Drawing from literatures that reframe meteorology through the lenses of infrastructure and socio-material “assemblages,” this paper considers how the material dimensions of weather science in India were distinctive. Through the production of quantitative data, leaders of the India Meteorological Department (f. 1875) sought to render the atmosphere above South Asia not only bureaucratically manageable, but also comparable to Europe’s, a project entailing the extension of communication and mapping technologies and the recruitment of “native” observers as (often reluctant) human instruments. However, architects of this data-generating apparatus repeatedly expressed concern that the tropical environment and its inhabitants made faithful transplantation of European systems impractical, even if the imperial exchequer devoted adequate resources (it didn't). The core of the paper examines how meteorologists navigated perceived material challenges. First, it considers instructional observer handbooks alongside the coercive figure of the traveling “inspector,” whose peculiar responsibility it was to discipline troublesome observers and calibrate their finicky, fragile instruments. Next, it discusses the gradual replacement of expensive, often climatically-unsuitable European instruments with domestic alternatives or new inventions altogether, suggesting that the trend toward substitution accelerated because of the requirements of upper-air balloon researchers in Agra. Finally, it investigates the short-lived project to gather and statistically assess vernacular weather proverbs, an enterprise grounded in a 1950s nationalist critique of “foreign” methods for studying India’s weather. These cases help us to understand how the instabilities of modern weather-data networks reciprocally influenced broader theories of tropical difference advanced by imperialists and nationalists alike, if for quite different reasons.