Colonel John Pennycuick

John Pennycuick: 🤔

In 1876, Madras Province was in the grip of a famine. It lasted for two years, spreading across the subcontinent. More than a million people died of starvation in Madras Province alone. Overall, the famine is estimated to have killed as many as 10 million people, a tragedy that went largely unnoticed in the rest of the world.

Solution:

While the political solution is well known, a second solution, less famous and highly contested today, came in the form of a remarkable feat of engineering.

A tale of two rivers

Two rivers originate from the Western Ghats—the big Periyar, which flows west along with several tributaries, and the small Vaigai, which flows east into Madurai and beyond. During summer, the Vaigai often dried up, many a time never even reaching Madurai.

The Madras Province included present-day Kerala, Tamil Nadu, southern Karnataka, southern Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and southern Odisha, excluding the princely states of Pudukkotai, Mysore and Travancore.

However, a solution was formulated to tackle both problems—building a dam in the province across its largest river (the Periyar, which literally means “big river") that flowed in the forest areas (mullai): the Mullaiperiyar dam was conceived. 

If part of the Periyar, which emptied into the Arabian Sea, could be diverted eastwards, then the deaths on both sides could be prevented. 

After the Madras famine, in 1882, Pennycuick was asked to submit a revised design—with a rubble-and-concrete dam instead—that was finally approved.

Birth and Early life

John Pennycuick was the 10th child of Brigadier General John Pennycuick and Sarah Farrell Pennycuick (there were 11 children in all). He was born in Pune on 15 January 1841—the day of the harvest festival that year, celebrated across the subcontinent as Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Lohri, Uttrayana, etc.

In 1849, his father and elder brother were killed during the Second Anglo-Sikh War. 

The conflict and debt called in

And so in 1882, when he was asked to present a revised design—the one that was finally approved. The new design necessitated the chiselling of a tunnel (more than 2km long) in the Western Ghats, and a large area would be submerged in water as the course of a portion of the Periyar had to be changed—but this land belonged to the princely state of Travancore.

The British decided to call in an old debt.

The kingdom of Mysore had invaded Travancore several times in the late 18th century and early 19th century, and the kings of Travancore would go to the British in Madras Province for help. The East India Company readily sent soldiers to back them up, and Travancore managed to weather the Mysore onslaught time and again.

So, when the Madras government came to make a deal for the land, Travancore agreed to lease out 8,100 acres of uninhabitable land. They agreed to a contract of 999 years—instead of the standard 99—as the pact would be binding on all successors.

However, Travancore drove a hard bargain as they knew the British would get revenue once they built the dam. The talks lasted for almost five years, and in the end, Travancore would be paid Rs5 a year for every acre.

Today, the Tamil Nadu government pays for electricity generated by the dam, around Rs10 lakh a year, and Rs2.5 lakh in taxes to the Kerala government, apart from Rs7.5 lakh as rent for the 8,100 acres, even though the dam only uses 100 acres and the rest is administered by Kerala.

An engineering marvel

Pennycuick’s team began work in September 1887. More than 3,000 workers from all over Madras Province were recruited to stay and build the 175ft-high dam in mountainous jungle terrain, at an elevation of 3,000ft.

The site chosen was not at the mouth of the river but several hundred feet below, 11km away from the nearest mud road and 128km from the nearest railway station. Weak lines of communication with the outside world, the cold weather and several months of continuous rainfall meant cholera and malaria was the norm. Not to mention the wildlife they had to contend with—tigers, bears, elephants, snakes, etc.

The dam was opened in 1895. No one knows exactly how many people died while working on the dam and the tunnel—many were washed away, and thousands of labourers were buried in unmarked graves now overgrown with plants, their sacrifices forgotten by most, but not by Pennycuick, who always asserted that the credit for the dam should go to them.

The dam, considered an engineering marvel in 1897, caught the attention of civil engineers across the British Empire, but Pennycuick, now a colonel, received no accolades, though it is considered his legacy. It not only fed the Vaigai, but made several districts of Madras Province fertile, while new districts such as Idukki emerged from the water thanks to the diversion of the river.

Pennycuick retired after the opening of the dam. The Madras Cricket Club gave him a farewell party. He returned to Britain in 1896 with his wife and five daughters, and took up the post of president of the Royal Indian Engineering College, Cooper’s Hill, from which he resigned in 1899. (A son was born to him, another John Pennycuick, who went on to become a lawyer and was eventually knighted.) He was invited to Australia to give advice on the flooding of the Brisbane river the same year, which he did.

Pennycuick Pongal

As long as the Madras Province existed in independent India, people didn’t forget the Great Famine or John Pennycuick or the sacrifice of their ancestors. However, when it was divided into states along linguistic lines, disputes quickly broke out between Kerala and Tamil Nadu over who owns the water.

(Tamil Nadu wants the height of the dam to be increased, so that it can supply more water to the state’s farmers. Kerala argues that adding to the dam may destabilize it, and that if the dam breaks, the resulting flooding would cause widespread destruction in Kerala. So far, the Supreme Court has ruled in Tamil Nadu’s favour.)

Pennycuick and others who helped build the dam didn’t do it for glory. When he died in 1911, Pennycuick’s obituary carried no mention of the dam and read as follows: 

“COL. JOHN PENNYCUICK, C.S.I., who died at Camberley on March 9th, was born on January 15, 1841, at Poona. He did not obtain his colours at Cheltenham, but in India, where the greater part of his life was spent, he did much for the game, especially in promoting and encouraging it among the natives. In all matches during his career he scored over 12,000 runs and took considerably over 2,000 wickets."

Even today, though, Tamil farmers in districts that have benefited from the dam have elevated Pennycuick to a minor deity, offering a “Pennycuick Pongal" at harvest time (which generally coincides with Pennycuick’s birthday) as thanks for the dam that changed their lives. 

Many claim that Pennycuick sold his property and his wife’s jewels to fund the dam’s construction. However, his great-grandson, Stuart Sampson, in an email said, “It is a myth. I have no evidence of this." 

Water for elephants

The diversion of the Periyar led to the formation of the huge artificial lake—on the 8,000-odd acres leased from Travancore.

Not to mention the Periyar National Park, which emerged after the dam was built, preventing the water from submerging forests, leading to the preservation of a vast amount of biodiversity. Both Thekkady and the park lie in Kerala today, but people are quick to condemn Pennycuick there! 

His true heritage has been lost—while building the dam, thousands of people in Madras Province united in an attempt to ensure their future generations didn’t die for want of water.

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