Proby Cautley: Ganges Canal in India, an engineering marvel

The real story of a beautiful mind

Sir Proby Cautley (3 January 1802 – 25 January 1871), who conceived and built the Ganga Canal, which starts at Hardwar and passes through Roorkee on it's way across the Doab. 

Hardly anyone today has heard of Cautley, and yet surely his achievement outstrip that of many Englishmen in India - soldiers and statesmen who became famous for doing all the wrong things.

He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Roorkee college, the erstwhile Thomason College of Civil Engineering and now IIT Roorkee. One of the twelve student hostels of IIT Roorkee is named after him.

The plant genus Cautleya is named in his honour.

Cautley's Canal: an engineering marvel

Cautley came to India at the age of seventeen and joined the Bengal Artillery. In 1825, he assisted Captain Robert Smith, the engineer in charge of constructing the Eastern Yamuna Canal. By 1836, he was Superintendent - General of Canals. From the start, he worked towards his dream of building a Ganga Canal, and spent six months walking and riding through the jungles and countryside, taking each level and measurement himself, sitting up all night to transfer them to his maps. He was confident that a 500 kilometer canal was feasible. There were many objections and obstacles to his project, most of them financial, but Cautley persevered and eventually persuaded the east India Company to back him.

Digging the canal began in 1839. Cautley had to make his own bricks - millions of them - his own brick klin, and his own mortar. A hundred thousand tonnes of lime went into the mortar, the other main ingredient of which was surkhi, made by grinding over-burnt bricks to a powder. To reinforce the mortar, ghur, ground lentils and jute fibres were added to it.

Initially, opposition came from the priests in Hardwar, who felt that the waters of the holy Ganga would be imprisoned. Cautley pacified them by agreeing to leave a narrow gap in the dam through which the river water could flow unchecked. He won over the priests when he inaugurated his project with aarti, and the worship of Ganesh, God of Good Beginnings. He also undertook the the repair of the sacred bathing ghats along the river. The canal banks also to have their own ghats with steps leading down to the water.

The headworks of the canal are at the Hardwar, where the Ganga enters the plains after completing it's majestic journey through the Himalayas. Below Hardwar, Cautley had to dig new courses for some of the mountain torrents that threatened the canal. He collected them into four steams and took them over the canal by means of four passages. Near Roorkee, the land fell away sharply and here Cautley had to build an aqueduct, a masonry bridge that carries the Canal for half a kilometre across the Solani torrent - a unique engineering feat. At Roorkee the Canal is twenty-five metres higher than the parent river which flows almost parallel to it.

Most of the excavations work on the canal was done mainly by the Oads, a gypsy tribe who were professional diggers for most of the northwest India. They took great pride in their work. Through extrtemely poor, Cautley found them happy and carefree lot who worked in a very organized manner.

Watercolor (1863) titled, "The Ganges Canal, Roorkee, Saharanpur District (U.P.)." The canal was the brainchild of Sir Proby Cautley; construction began in 1840, and the canal was opened by Governor-General Lord Dalhousie in April 1854.

When canal was formally opened on the 8th April 1854, it's main channel was 348 miles long, it's branches 306 and the distributaries over 3,000. Over 767,000 acres in 5,000 villages were irrigated. One of it's main branches re-entered the Ganga at Kanpur (The main branch of the river passes Kanpur (behind IIT Kanpur campus) before breaking into several branches. A branch of it terminates Kanpur Jal Sansthan which comes from behind J. K. Temple.); it also had branches to Fatehgarh, Bulandshahar and Aligarh.

Cautley's achievements did not end there. He was also actively involved in Dr Falconer's fossil expeditions in Siwaliks. He presented to the British Museum an extensive collection of fossil mammalia - including hippopotamus and crocodile fossils, evidence that the region was once swampland or an inland sea. Other animals remain found here included the sabre-toothed tiger, Elephis ganesa, an elephant with a trunk ten-and-a-half feet long; a three-toed ancestor of the horse; the bones of a fossil ostrich; and the remains of a giant cranes and tortoises. Exciting times, exciting finds.

Nor did Cautley's interests and activities end in fossil excavation. My copy of Surgeon General Balfour's Cyclopedia of India (1873) lists a number of fascinating reports and papers by Cautley. He wrote on a submerged city, twenty feet underground, near Behut in the Doab; on the coal and lignite in the Himalayas; on gold washings in the Siwalik Hills, between the Jamuna and Sutlej rivers; on a new species of snake; on the mastodons of the Siwaliks; on the manufacture of tar; and on Panchukkis or corn mills.

How did he find time for all this, I wonder. Most of his life was spent in tents, overseeing the canal work or digging up fossils. He had a house in Mussoorie (one of the first), but he could not have spent much time in it. It is today part of the Manav Bharti School, and there is still a plaque in the office stating that Cautley lived here. Perhaps he wrote some of his reports and expositions during brief sojourns in the hills. It is said that his wife left him unable to compete against the rival attractions of canals and fossils remains.

I wonder, too, if there was any follow up on his reports of the submerged city - is it still there, waiting to be rediscovered....( by Ruskin Bond) 


References thankfully cited and shared:
#Natural History Museum

# picture credit: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proby_Cautley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges_Canal 
kelvin paul atkins at http://verydingdong.com/?cat=17 
# text credit: Ruskin Bond