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In 1937, a concerned elderly gentleman walked into the India Office in London and told a civil servant there that what he had warned would happen more than two decades back has come to fruition—the newly opened Cochin port was facing heavy siltation and may be at a risk of closure, as per newspaper reports. He even claimed that he had discussed this issue with the late King George V.
The civil servants at the India Office, a British government department that administered provinces in India, were confused by his obsessive character and the bunch of papers he had submitted to prove his point. But they gauged him to be a man of some stature and knowledge. Nevertheless, they had to inform him that there was nothing they could do other than safely store the papers, which might prove to be useful if the local authorities in Cochin reached out for help in the future.
It is not clear whether the old man pursued this issue after that. As per available information, he passed away in 1939. His name was George Elliot Browning, and he knew far more about Cochin harbour, its surroundings and the issues facing it than anyone else at that time.
For over a century, coastal erosion has ravaged houses and livelihoods of communities in the north and south of the Kochi harbour. The recent construction of a massive tetrapod seawall on the southern coast was a direct result of relentless, years-long protests by residents of Chellanam, the worst-hit coastal village.
The protection came too late, at a huge cost, both fiscal and environmental. The science behind it is now being questioned as more areas are threatened by erosion.
Around 10 km of beach, south of the harbour mouth, has already vanished. The environmental cost due to siltation is also staggering. The Cochin Port spends around Rs 140 crore annually on dredging, more than any other port in the country.
Who was George Browning?
“George Browning was the chief engineer of the Cochin (erstwhile princely) state from 1895 till sometime during 1920s. How he leaves is a bit of a mystery. But during his tenure as the chief engineer, he gets interested in the Cochin harbour project and the development of Cochin port. Over time he starts getting interested in the issue of coastal erosion and the sort of changes that are taking place around the coastline at this time,” explains historian Devika Shankar. Devika’s book, ‘An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India 1860–1950’ by Cambridge University Press, is the only published work to seriously engage with Browning and his more-than-two-decade-long research on the Cochin harbour and the sea erosion around it.
The papers he gave to those civil servants are now part of the vast India Office collection at the British Library in London, and they provide a fascinating insight into a largely underexplored period and a little known aspect of Cochin’s history. Devika, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, used them to develop her PhD thesis on the history of Cochin harbour development, which was published as the book mentioned above in December 2024.
Browning’s contribution to Cochin
For Devika, Browning is the most pivotal figure in the early years of Cochin harbour development. She adds, “He was one of the first experts interested in doing scientific investigations around the harbour. The main issue surrounding the Cochin harbour by the late 19th century was that a lot of people were asking for a port development project. The Cochin harbour had a sandbar at its mouth and lots of people were asking for that sandbar to be removed so that the port could be opened up to large steamships.”
However, this was easier said than done. The British officials were not convinced that it could be removed feasibly and kept open as a shipping channel through the monsoon months when dredging would have been difficult. “Not many studies had been conducted on how this sandbar had formed and what were the ways of dealing with it. Alongside this, by the late 19th century, there was a huge increase in coastal erosion. So, the coastline itself around Cochin started disintegrating and this was causing a lot of anxiety. But few people knew why this was happening,” says Devika.
Browning, she observes, was one of the first people to start looking at both of these questions together, on how harbour development and coast protection might be related issues. He held the view that the governments (Cochin, Travencore and Madras) involved would have to consider these issues together rather than treating them separately.
Investigating coastal erosion
Browning claims to have already been interested in Cochin harbour even before joining the service of the erstwhile Cochin state, having inherited this interest from his father Arrott Browning, who was an engineer with the Madras PWD. Therefore, he began investigating the harbour as soon as he started working for the Cochin government.
However, by this time, due to the worsening erosion in coastal regions around the harbour, people had started petitioning the state government for a solution. “As the chief engineer, a lot of these would have been coming to Browning. So, when he was looking into this issue, he started to feel strongly that it is absolutely essential to deal with this problem of coastal erosion before they start working on port development,” says Devika. He conjectured from his studies and surveys that the sandbar at the mouth of the harbour was created by the sand that was being eroded from coastal areas around the harbour mouth.
In his 1915 report to the Cochin Durbar, he points out why it would be a severe mistake to dredge the sandbar to create a deep shipping channel before implementing a comprehensive coastal protection plan: “I have already pointed out that any attempt at dredging out and keeping open the Cochin harbour, without first controlling the coast erosion, cannot possibly be a complete success, in as much as the vast amount of sand eroded from the beach at the burst of each South-West monsoon will invariably move along the coast and fill up the bar trap and channel to such an extent annually, as to necessitate an enormous recurrent amount of dredging which could very easily be avoided. It is because of that that I maintain that the general coast protection is inseparable from the proper harbour development.”
This was also pointed out in the crucial 1918 feasibility report on Cochin harbour development by the London-based engineering consultancy, Sir John Wolfe Barry, Lister and Partners. It was this report that officially kickstarted the port development project, and it was at the insistence of Browning that they were commissioned to look into the project. “They came up with various sorts of recommendations, the most important of which was much like what Browning has been saying that before the project can be initiated you need to first secure the coastline,” adds Devika. Interestingly, the High Court of Kerala ordered the implementation of coastal protection measures to protect the Fort Kochi beach from further erosion in 2015, based on this more-than-a-century-old report.
Bristow’s plan and Browning’s frustration
However, Browning’s warnings and the key recommendation of the 1918 report were ignored when the project actually took off in 1921 under Robert Bristow, who became the chief engineer of the Cochin Port project.
Bristow’s plan, which was quite different from what Browning had envisaged and Wolfe Barry report had recommended, restricted coastal protection works to the immediate vicinity of the harbour mouth, mostly to the Vypeen foreshore. Devika says, “Instead, what Bristow came up with was a very large reclamation scheme that pushed the cost of the project up and changed the configuration of the harbour.” This expensive reclamation led to the construction of what is today the Wellingdon Island on which the wharves, cruise terminal and naval base are located. Both Browning and Wolfe Barry had recommended the wharves to be constructed on mainland Ernakulam (south of the present-day Marine Drive) to save cost and for easier railway connectivity.
Although the relationship between Browning and Bristow began cordially with letters suggesting that Browning was happy to share all his study reports and recommendations with the latter, it did not last long. “Browning is really frustrated by the time the project begins. He becomes a major critic of the project itself, and starts highlighting the issues with it,” says Devika.
Browning’s severe outlook of how the harbour project was taking shape under Bristow can be gathered from the few letters and reports of his that are available post-1920. For instance, in his 1921 private letter to HH Burkitt, the British Resident to Cochin, Browning rips apart Bristow’s plans. He terms the decision to locate the docks and the railway terminal on the reclaimed land in the middle of the harbour to be “wholly wrong” and points out the enormous cost of connecting the new island to the mainland via bridges and railway viaducts. He also points out Bristow’s failure to address the serious coastal erosion, which according to his calculations had eroded the coast by an average width of more than 1000 feet along a 11-mile stretch south of the harbour mouth (present-day Chellanam and surrounding coastal areas) since 1895. It had swallowed more than 3000 feet of beach along a 5-mile stretch to the north of the harbour along the present-day Vypeen-Kuzhipilly coast.
Browning’s place in Cochin history
However, Browning’s complaints were in vain. He seems to have been pushed out, and eventually leaves the service of the Cochin government sometime during the 1920s. It is not clear what exactly happened or when he left Cochin. More than that, he also seems to have been buried in the footnotes of history in the aftermath of the construction of the port. Bristow received all the fame as the ‘man’ who created, what he himself described as, “the finest harbour in the East.”
Devika notes this was typical of how chief engineers of grand colonial projects often get mythologised in history, and Bristow wasn’t any different. “Today when projects happen, we often don’t hear or know the names of the chief engineers. However, during the colonial period there was a real sort of way in which with every major project you would know the name of the person who was behind it and it comes to be seen almost as a one-man show. But that wasn’t the case,” she adds.
Browning certainly played a huge role in shaping the Cochin harbour project despite it not turning out to be how he envisioned it. He had grand plans to make Cochin the centre of trade in South India by connecting the port via a ‘radial’ railway line to agrarian hinterlands of Cochin in the present-day Idukki and Thrissur. He also developed detailed proposals for making Cochin self-sufficient in power generation using the generous water resources of the erstwhile kingdom. Yet, he has remained an unknown figure till date. That’s a mystery for Devika as well. One of the interesting things she noticed when she started looking at some of the archival material is how Browning is everywhere in the primary records from the late 1890s. But in all sorts of retrospective accounts of the project, he is conspicuously absent. She says, “I think, partly, it had to do with the fact that he was very upset with the project once it began. He felt that he was sidelined, and he quickly emerged as a big critic of Bristow and the project under him. I think at that point he was pushed out, and the retrospective accounts for the next several years or decades underplayed his role, or just didn’t talk about him at all.” Since then, historians, or other people, who have looked at these records might not have seen the project to have anything to do with Browning, or maybe considered him as a marginal figure who wasn’t that important.
Nevertheless, as Devika says, now it is his records that provide us with a good window into some of the issues plaguing the Cochin harbour project from the very beginning.
Browning’s ideas in retrospect
But would Browning’s plan to lay groynes along miles of coastline around the harbour, and construct a long-curved breakwater at the harbour mouth, have helped stop the coastal erosion or the heavy siltation in the port? Devika is not so sure. “Groynes themselves are today considered to be a damaging coastal infrastructure. So, it is important to keep in mind that a lot of what Browning had been asking for, many coastal experts today would say that is definitely what you should not be doing. Even if sand accumulates where there are groynes, many other areas in the vicinity might start experiencing problems of coastal erosion in an even more accentuated manner,” she explains.
However, what made Browning different from others like Bristow was that he viewed the coast and the harbour as a whole. “People like Bristow had a tunnel vision where they looked at the port and the harbour, and that is what they were interested in. For Browning, the harbour couldn’t be separated from the rest of the coast. So, in that sense, his plans would have been far more comprehensive. Whether they would have been good or bad, I personally don’t feel like I have an answer for that,” adds Devika. What is certain is that, unlike Bristow, Browning would have started with an extensive coastal protection scheme before starting to dredge the sandbar and harbour.
Aswin VN is a journalist and a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds