Book review: Neeladri Bhattacharya,The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World

The reader may well ask why a book so deeply situated in the material and cultural landscapes of Punjab does not refer to the region in its title. As will become clear, this is because its subject is the larger colonial project of economic growth that evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century. It involved deep institutional transformations based on what Neeladri Bhattacharya calls the ‘agrarian imaginary’ and was implemented through a common set of bureaucratic practices across all regions of India.

The author thus re-centres the critique of colonialism from Bengal’s long duree of peasant immiserisation to Punjab, a province that was easily the showpiece of the British-Indian Empire with its highly commoditised agricultural economy, expansion of cultivated area and highest per-acre productivity. Through this book, however, Bhattacharya writes a more layered history of colonialism that can take on its apologists who are wont to citing the gifts of ‘growth and modernity’ that British colonial rule brought to a backward society.

In Punjab, as over most of North India, ‘growth’ was carried out, he argues, through a relentlessly Benthamite agenda of social transformation. In Punjab, this was combined with a distinctly benign notion of pastoral power. The first section of the book looks at the interconnected biographies and hagiographies of key Punjab officials to explain how the two distinct conceptions of power blended to develop a ‘hegemonic myth’ of authoritarian paternalism.

The framing of the book within a critique of paternalism is important, as this was touted to be the bedrock of Punjab’s exceptionalism. Bhattacharya uncovers the rhetorical strategies that went into the making of its self-congratulatory images. The trope of care, repeatedly reworked at a discursive level, is shown to both mask authoritarian practices on the ground and infantilise the colonised.

The second section of the book discusses the creation of a new agrarian order central to the agenda of ‘improvement’. It examines how rural life was reconstituted by a new valorisation of village settlement, agnatic lineage and village co-parcenary. These elements of the agrarian imaginary, derived from social evolutionism, were instrumental in making agricultural production amenable to administrative control.

The third section of the book explores how the responses of the governed to the new regime of rights altered and transformed it. Its chapters explore the voices and practices of those whose claims were diminished by the new tenures, the refiguring of customary law and the re-definition of economic rationality.

The last section studies the effects of pushing a model of intensive agriculture onto the fragile landscapes of the agrarian frontier where mobility was an important subsistence strategy. A history of dry tracts and scrublands is qualitatively new in Indian history, and these chapters make a compelling case for questioning agrarian settlement as the reigning telos of Indian historiography, ancient, medieval and modern.

Bhattacharya’s complex version of what happened under colonialism draws on the familiar archive of administrative reports and surveys but reads it in radically new ways. To an already substantial critique of colonial knowledge, Bhattacharya adds analytical perspectives drawn from anthropology and the literary turn in historical theory. An accomplished and even ‘habitual’ pedagogue, he does not fail to alert his readers to his own interpretative practices, making the book rewarding in more ways than one.

The intellectual arc begins from Bernard Cohn who first observed how deeply the colonial episteme was structured by both orientalist categories and the instrumental needs of the state. Other historians subsequently combined Cohn’s critique of colonial knowledge with Foucault to read colonial texts in a more nuanced way, producing a number of insightful histories, of caste and gender in particular. However, the ‘type’ has now become somewhat repetitive, seemingly unable to go beyond the idea of colonial ‘construction’.

Foucault’s influence is inescapable as Bhattacharya describes the technical and practical procedures of recording, mapping and surveying that enmeshed the population in bounded settlements, controlled by village bodies, docketed into tenurial categories and governed by codified custom. Yet, he is able to open up the structuring discourse of the state to criticism, to show us its erasures and to initiate recovery of alternate epistemologies and social meanings. One strategy is to keep an ear open for the anxiety of field officers about the categories into which they had to accommodate their observations and classify information from local interlocutors. Historians tend to be impatient with such ambivalences, preferring to trace the long-term trajectory rather than take seriously what seems at any given moment like hair-splitting.

The last time a historian called for paying greater attention to heterogeneity in the official voice may well have been in 1978, in Eric Stokes’, The Peasant and the Raj. Stokes, however, did not draw any significant insights from the diversity of official opinion, leaving some of his last essays an unresolved clutter of ‘on the one hand and on the other hand.’ Bhattacharya, however, makes a meal of such dissonances. In his hands, it is the key to unravelling the smooth representation of social categories in the administrative discourse. He curates fragments of unease and quibbles that are often simply interpreted as inter-departmental rivalries or personal piques. Linking them dialogically across space and time, he constructs a counter-narrative that questions the self-evident nature of social classifications. This method allows him to question the universal representation of settlements as villages and social relations of production as landlord–tenant relations, even sometimes by historians of the pre-modern.

Bhattacharya discovers for example, types of land-labour agreements in nineteenth-century Punjab where a share was given for cultivation in return for labour to clear the land, dig wells or maintain irrigation channels. These co-operative arrangements operated within a normatively defined world of reciprocity that was lost in transiting to the more hierarchical landlord-tenant relations structured around the legal notion of proprietorship. A model of production based on individual ‘ownership’ was even more devastating in the western regions of the Punjab where pastoralism on fallows, scrub and grasslands was an important supplement to agriculture. The disappearance of mobile lifeways as the state irrigated, plotted and handed over the commons to individual colonists is retrieved in the penultimate chapters on the Canal Colonies.

Perhaps the most important way in which Bhattacharya challenges the absolute notion of colonial power is by his insistence that governmentality was co-constituted by colonial interaction with its Other. In the chapters on the codification of customary law, Bhattacharya demonstrates that the categories and rules of governance were fundamentally shaped and legitimised by peasant engagement with the processes of recording. For example, the idea of the agnatic lineage as the framework of land rights and the village co-parcenary may well have derived from Henry Maine, but Bhattacharya attributes its success on the ground to its acceptance by the dominant landed castes. As land became scarce and valuable in the late nineteenth century, village patriarchs spoke out more consistently than before against the relatively fluid claims of women and the lower castes. More instrumentally, it also protected them from dispossession by urban merchant-moneylenders, on whose credit and marketing services they had become crucially dependent for commercial agriculture.

The chapter ‘Beyond the Code’ shows us how official categories could even become a site for negotiation with the state. The courts represented an unstable domain where the apparent fixity of the Benthamite code was constantly subject to reinterpretation as ‘the rule allowed space for conflicting claims, opposed readings, ambiguous definitions’ (p. 281). Because of the possibilities it opened up for strategic practice, to men and a surprisingly large number of women litigants, ‘The language of law became part of the mental world of peasants’ (p. 284).

The chapters on production showcase the enormous range of theoretical influences on Bhattacharya’s work. Thematically, they link with his long-term work on the peasant economy. In the late 1970s, along with other historians of his generation, he had argued against the then-widely accepted models of semi-feudalism and underdevelopment to insist that peasant choices in colonial India were compatible with capitalist rationality.

Returning now to the logic of peasant production, in the chapter on ‘Fear of the Fragment’, Bhattacharya combines earlier readings on the peasant farm: Lenin, Chayanov and Witold Kula, with Bourdieu’s attention to everyday practice and a Braudelian love for soil types and agricultural techniques. He questions the abstract logic of liberal economics from the standpoint of the farming household. Against the fear of fragmentation, he shows us villages where joint management of individual shares offsets the diminution of ancestral holdings by egalitarian partitioning. Against arguments for consolidation of holdings, he argues that scattered plots allowed the household to cultivate different soils with different labour requirements. State-led programmes of resource management are also set off against culturally embedded practices in the chapters on forests and the settlement of the Canal Colonies. While the state’s grand schemes of scientific forestry and canal building are shown to have damaged natural resources, local knowledge is shown to be more ecologically sustainable.

By articulating the rationality of non-reflexive peasant practices, Bhattacharya’s ethnographically and ecologically sensitive histories rescue the peasant and the nomad from what E.P. Thompson has in another context called ‘the enormous condescension of history’, a history that was largely written, even in nationalist iterations, in broad agreement with colonial ideas over what constitutes progress.