Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the initially inspiring but ultimately melancholy tale of how the inhabitants and colonists of Asia, and of India in particular, moved from being in awe of nature and the beneficent but often destructive power of the monsoon, to gaining an understanding of the water cycle that nourishes the planet, to eventually developing a hubristic belief that they could utterly control natural resources to their own advantage.

Amrith is a professor of south Asian studies at Harvard University. In his book he focuses not on temples or the gods but on the meteorologists and water engineers who pursued scientific knowledge about weather and water during and after the British colonisation of India – from the