Cutchi Memon Digest
Kerala
ﮐﮁﻲ ﻤﻴﻤﻦ ﮢ ﺍﯿﺠﺴﭧ - ﮐﻴﺮﻻ
THE 1819 EARTHQUAKE
June 16, 1819
Earth Quake in 1819, practically two centuries ago, had a devastating effect on the entire Cutch peninsula. A vivid description of the disaster was provided by the British Resident in Bhuj and the Collector of Anjar to the Govern-ing Council / Board of the East India Company. The earth quake was so severe that it affected the entire Cutch and caused damages in faraway places like Ahmedabad, Surat, Baroch etc. and caused tremors in as far as Kolkata and Sindri. The data describe severe damage in Bhooj and Anjar (Mercalli Intensity X), and hint at similar damage in many villages of Kachchh. Shaking at Ahmed-abad and Surat was less severe (Perhaps intensity 7). In Bombay the event was scarcely felt although it was felt in Nepal and near Madras.
(Credit: http://cires.colorado.edu/~bilham/AB2007/VerbatimAccounts1819.html, downloaded on 15 Jan 2015)
The following extracts are transcribed from approximately 50 pages of handwritten minutes and letters, sent to and from the Governer's Office in Bombay, concerning the 16 June 1819 Kachchh earthquake in the days following the event. Captain James MacMurdo was the British represe-ntative (Resident) in Kachchh, and in addition to these government reports, he subsequently submitted a collection of papers describing the earthquake to the Literary Society of Bombay. These were published posthumously in Volume 3 (1823). MacMurdo died from cholera at the age of 33.
On 8th July 1819, H . Newham, the Acting Chief Secretary of Bombay reported to the secretary East India house, London: About twenty minutes past seven in the evening of the 16th June 1819, a slight shock of an earthquake was very perceptibly felt in various parts of the Island. The shock did not last above a minute and no injury appears to have been sustained from its effects, indeed the concussion was so slight that many persons did not notice it, and entertained doubts of it having taken place, but its consequences were very severely felt at the Northern Stations, particularly at Ahmedabad and also in Cutch. At the former it has destroyed the beautiful shaking minarets of the Juma Musjed which were so long the ornament and admiration of the East, and done considerable damage to other Public and Private Buildings.
At Anjar the Fort wall with its towers and Guns have been levelled to the ground with three fourths of the houses in the Town, those which have been left standing have also sustained injury and the general destruction is emphatic-ally stated by the resident to have reduced a flourishing population in one moment to wretchedness and misery. Similar damages have been done at Bhooj with an equal loss in human life.
Private letters from all parts of Guzerat and Kattywar concur in stating it to have been felt with great severity through the country. The private letters included those from Lt. Col. Colin Milnes of His Majesty's 65th Regiment and commanding the troops in Cutch, Chas Nurris the acting and Criminal Judge of Ahmedabad, which together with the accounts given in the Bombay Gazette conveyed a most lamentable picture of the effects of the Earthquake
“The Minarets of the Juma Musjid, (at Ahmedabad) the highest and most beautiful in the place, were thrown down, various other Minarets outside the walls have shared the same fate, and many of the Mosques have been otherwise shattered and much injured. One of the gates of the town has also fallen. Of the Government buildings the Adawlut, has alone been affected. None of the walls have actually fallen , but they have been cracked by the shock in several places”
Several private houses were destroyed. “During the confusion occasioned by the shock, a prisoner who was in confinement for security escaped from the Gaol, the Sepoys on guard had all left the gate in the moment of alarm and he took this opportunity to pass out unobserved.”
J Pruen from Surat wrote to the Superintendent’s office in Bombay “I have the honor to inform you at 20 before 8 PM yesterday evening the City of Surat and for some miles round and the opposite bank of the Taply, were visited by that Phenomenon Earthquake in a very awful degree. When it first began I was lying down on my Couch, being still an Invalid. I found the whole house in serious agitation. The furniture all in motion and a small table close to me so much so as to keep striking the wall the lamp moving from east to west with the house about 6 or 8 inches each way. I got down stair as fast as possible about three minutes had transpired before I got out of the house, and I felt myself a little giddy. I found a number of people collected outside looking with astonishment at my house, which stands alone, and which was in such agitation I expected it to fall every second. The earth under our feet was by this time convulsed and seemed as if it was floating on a long ground swell trying to break it away through, and from its very great motion I expected to see the ground crack. The shock lasted about 5 or 6 minutes and appeared to me to run from East to West. The inhabitants were much alarmed. Not a breath of wind was moving, with a clear sky, nor was there the least warning of its approach. On enquiry this morning I find several accidents have happened to houses, and at the village of Omer about 2 miles west, several Houses fell down. A Parsee Pagoda fell down in one side, and reports said one poor man was killed 10 minutes past 10 AM. We have just had another shock that lasted only one minute. I likewise felt two slight ones about 8:30 last night and at 10:10 am another shock. This shock stopped my watch, the glasses containing the oil in the lamp in two or three houses were upset. The well in the Jail whose water was about four feet below the earth was forced up to run over. The river water was likewise much agitated. A tank of water in the Bazar likewise threw its water out. Time alone will inform us whether it will be a partial convulsion of nature in the bowels of the Earth near this latitude caused by some great eruption at a far distant spot.”
MacMurdo wrote from Anjar on 17 June 1819:
”It is with sincere regret that I have to inform you that this place was visited by an earthquake yesterday evening at 10 minutes before 7 O'clock. The effects of the shock, which lasted nearly 2 minutes, have been the leveling of the Fort Wall to the ground. Not a hundred yards of the wall remain in any one spot, and guns, towers etc. are all hurled in one mass of ruin.
The destruction in the town has been distressing and awful. Not 1/4 of the houses are standing and those that do remain are all ruined. I cannot yet state the particulars of the losses, but I may in one word say that a flourishing population has been reduced in one moment to wretched-ness and misery. I fear we shall have to lament the loss of upwards of one hundred people besides those hurt.
Reports from the country state similar disasters in all the villages round about, and letters from Bhooj inform us that the Fort is much in the same condition as Anjar.” Slight shocks continued to be felt.
On the 19th he reported “the shock has destroyed in a greater or lesser degree, every fort and town from Arrisir to Luckput. Many of the villages round about Anjar are reduced to heaps of rubbish, and I fear that those in Cutch and Wagir generally are little less injured. Bhooj has been a great sufferer. The walls of the town level with the ground. The palace in many parts in the same state, and the private dwelling houses in ruins. The loss of lives is not exactly ascertained but the lowest calculation makes it 500 people. The Rao's family has escaped, with the exception of the old lady, the widow of Rao Raidhan. Mandavee is stated to have suffered less than other places and is said to have lost only 125 people. Accounts from Coorbee state that town to be in ruins.
Loss in Anjar has been greater than I had at first supposed. We have to lament the loss of 166 lives besides and double that number wounded, many of whom severely. Out of 4500 houses of which the town is composed, about 1500 are so completely destroyed as to not leave one stone upon another. They are overturned from the very foundation. About 1000 more are laid in ruins and so dreadful has been the shock, that of the standing some are injured and many uninhabitable. “
Milnes from Bhooj wrote: “Every three hours we feel the Earth trembling under us but in a slighter degree. The inhabitants quitted the town yesterday, and slept out last night in the plains and about the neighbouring hills. The number of lives at present ascertained to be lost is almost 500. “ Interestingly not much loss of life occurred in the British camp.
Milnes wrote on the 19th June
“The last trembling we had was at 12 o'clock this day, rather severe, so that we are still kept in dread. Between 50 and 100 missing bodies have been discovered in the Town. Before this awful event took place we had not the least warning of its approach whatever.
On the evening it occurred I took a short ride. The weather was delightful, a clear sky, a gentle breeze and perfectly cool, there having been a heavy fall of rain only a few days before. As I was returning home in a quick walk, some time after the Sun had set, when within about a quarter of a mile of the front of our camp I suddenly perceived something very unusual and extraordinary in the paces of my horse. His legs appeared to be in motion but he seemed to make no way whatever, at the same time, I felt a sort of dizziness in my head, and a sickness in my stomach, supposing this to proceed from the strange motion of the horse and that he was ill and might fall under me, I was thinking to dismount when my attention was distracted by an immense cloud of dust bursting out from the center of the hill Fort, which I took to be an explosion of gunpowder, and the first impression on me was that an accident had happened to the Magazine. But on casting my eyes to the left towards Bhooj, I observed the whole Town from one extreme to the other completely enveloped in a similar cloud, and on looking behind me I also observed the same appearance at no great distance in that quarter. I was then satisfied of its being dust and not Gunpowder, and concluded it to be some description of Typhoon or Hurricane, but still I was perplexed to account for its continuing so perfectly calm and serene about the spot where I was standing, and there not being the least symptom of a wind rising.
I was just about moving quickly into Camp when I saw Captain Wilson, the assistant resident, who had been riding with me and from whom I had parted only a few minutes before, coming towards me from the town. He acquainted me that he was entering by one of the gateways when there was a general crash and that the whole place had fallen down. Upon this I of course knew at once the cause, but until that moment had not the most distant idea of its being an earthquake. When I go to my tent I found that the Table which had been laid out for dinner was thrown over and everything on it smashed to pieces.
The deposed Rao's mother and his Father's wives were among the sufferers in town. Some part of the Palace fell upon her, the body not yet found.”
The devastation was naturally followed by acute famine and the subsequent floods must have made life miserable. This was a major reason for the inhabitants to leave Cutch in search of livelihood. Though some of the richer Cutchi Memon individuals left Cutch in about 1815, the major exodus occurred in the following 5 to 7 years coinciding with the 1819 disaster and famine. This is well corraborated by the Rabia Bai's account.
The Rann
The Ranns existed as a shallow embayment and inlets of the sea. Nevertheless, in the last two centuries, silting of the area, probably accompa-nied by elevation of the land has converted the marine embayment into dry salt covered mud flats. The earthquake caused an area of subsid-ence that formed the Sindri Lake and a local zone of uplift to the north about 80 km long, 6 km wide and 6 m high that dammed the Puram river. To distinguish it from the man-made dams that were common in the region, the uplifted area became known as the Allah Bund, or Dam of God. The mound produced had a markedly asymmetric geometry, with a shorter and steeper south-dipping margin, about 600 m wide and a dip of 0.65°, and a broader north-dipping margin over 5 km wide with a dip of only about 0.05°.
Sindri Lake, with a surface area of more than 1,000 km2, was formed due to subsidence of up to 3 m south of the Allah Bund. Initially, the lake was cut off from the river (damming further upstream had anyway stopped the flow) and was filled with seawater. On the western margin of the lake a small delta built out from the eastern part of the larger Indus Delta. After 1826 the river broke through the artificial dam and eventually broke through the bund itself, causing the lake to become freshwater again