ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a major chunk of scientists believed that climates of the world had been essentially constant over at least five thousand years.1 In the next eighty years the belief was demolished. But we still know far less about the possible effects of past climatic shifts on human activities.2 Historians have given scant regards to this aspect until in the 1950s and 1960s a number of historians notably Gustaf Utterstrom, Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie showed some willingness to pay serious attention to the possible effects of climatic change in historical situations.3 In a subsequent article on the ‘History of Rain and Fine Weather’, the Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated that, ‘the aim of climatic history is not to explain human history nor to offer simplistic accounts of this or that remarkable episode not even when such episodes prompt us with good reason to reflect upon the great disasters of history . . . (these are merely) spin off of the history of climate’. Ladurie was concerned only with producing a ‘clear picture of the changing meteorological patterns of the past ages’ in the spirit of ‘cosmological history of nature’. In this article we are not concerned with such cosmological history of nature but how climate had influenced the history of Cherrapunji, famed as the recipient of heaviest rainfall in the world and indeed reflect upon the environmental catastrophe that the place came to symbolize. Of course, even in that endeavour we have no pretension to offer conclusive explanation but like Ladurie, ‘to supply the natural scientists – meteorologists, glaciologists, climatologists, geophysicists, etc., with archival material’
as only a professional historian alone has the key to certain types of data hidden away centuries ago in bundles of illegible old documents.4
