Person · irrigation engineer
Arthur Cotton
Also known as Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton, Arthur Thomas Cotton
A Madras Army engineer who spent his life on anicuts and canals. He began the Godāvarī anicut at Dowleswaram in 1847 and finished it in 1852 — fifteen feet high and three and a half kilometres long — then did the same on the Krishnā and cut the Kurnool–Cuddapah canal. He had gone through the famine and cyclone districts of the Godāvarī first, and the works were built against that.
- Date
- 1803 - 1899 CE
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He is the only British official in this repository who receives Hindu ancestral rites. At the Godāvarī Maha Pushkaram of 2015 an MLA offered pinda to Arthur Cotton, and he is called the Delta Architect in the districts his canals water. A statue of him stands on Tank Bund in Hyderabad among the heroes of the united Andhra state; the rebuilt barrage was dedicated in his name by Indira Gandhi in 1982.
The completion date of the original anicut is given variously as 1850 and 1852 in the standard accounts, including within Wikipedia itself.
Connections (3)
- Life routeRajamahendravaram / Rajahmundry
The Godāvarī anicut at Dowleswaram, just downstream of the city, is his monument and the work he is remembered by. Begun in 1847 and completed in 1852, it raised the river enough to feed canals across both delta districts, and the famine country he had ridden through became the rice bowl of Andhra. The structure was rebuilt between 1970 and 1982 with a hundred and seventy-five bays and renamed for him.
- Imperial administration ofGodāvarī / Gautamī
The Godāvarī is the river his career was built on, and the relationship ran the other way too: he measured it, argued for it in London, and used it to prove that Indian rivers should be dammed for irrigation rather than left to flood and fail. The sacred river of the Sapta Nadi and the engineered river of the delta canals are the same water, described by two traditions that barely acknowledge each other.
- Life routeVisakhapatnam / Vizag
Before the Godavari works he drew up plans for the harbour here, in 1844. Nothing came of them for a long while — the port was developed in the twentieth century on a different scheme — but it places him on this coast three years before the anicut was begun, and it shows what an irrigation engineer in the Madras Presidency was actually asked to do: water, ports, canals and navigation, as one job.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Arthur Cotton” and “Dowleswaram Barrage”; John Henry Morris, Godavari.
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