Abstract
The article aims to explicate the binary created between the two sweeteners, that is, gur (jaggery) and sugar. The focal point of this article is to understand with the analytical framework of politics of knowledge how a ‘traditional’ sweetener, that is, gur, is replaced from our diet by a ‘modern’ sweetener, that is, sugar. This framework replaces the term ‘traditional’ knowledge with ‘already existing knowledge system’ (AEKS, as spelt out by Banerjee [2021, Studies in Indian Politics, vol. 9, pp. 78–90]) and its transformation is examined in five different spaces: epistemology, political economy, historical context, state policy and collective action. In the first section, the epistemic hegemony of sugar is deconstructed through analytical understanding of technological processing; in the second, the changing political economy of sweeteners is explored. The third analyses post-colonial sugar policy showing the continuum from the colonial; and the fourth explores the politics of collective action to challenge and delegitimize the hegemony of sugar.
Introduction
In the standard discourse of development, gur (or jaggery) and white crystal sugar epitomize traditional and modern knowledge, respectively. From the developmetalist point of view, sugar epitomizes ‘modern science’/’efficiency’, while gur represents its absence and ‘backward art’ (Alvares, 1992, pp. 299–300). The epistemic hegemony of science as the reason of the modern state has bestowed high-status commodity to white crystal sugar and a low one to gur. This article raises the crucial question of how a natural sweetener like gur which is unpolished but ‘nutritious’ and an ‘immunity booster’, is replaced from our diet by an artificial sweetener like sugar which is considered pure, ‘efficient’ and almost deadly poison. Winner’s (1986) question ‘Do artefacts have politics’ posed for sugar, we would argue, would certainly be answered with a ‘yes’. The establishment of sugar as an ‘essential commodity’ and the inevitability of sugar technology as an insignia of ‘Development’ is not a linear progression of technology but subject to contestations, interests and value judgement—in short, to ‘politics’.
This article employs the analytical framework of politics of knowledge 1 to understand the hierarchy of knowledge created between these two sweeteners. This framework posits first the epistemic question of how these two sweeteners are produced; this preliminary exercise will uncover the politics of technological processing which eventually helps in locating ecologies of production and examining nutritional profiles of these two sweeteners. Next, their political economy is explored, beginning in the colonial period (the most decisive and significant) to the present, explicating when, how and for what purposes was the knowledge of technological processing transformed from an ecologically grounded to an industrial one. Subsequently, discourse analysis of policy will delineate contestations between these two knowledge of production in policy space. Finally, this article will delineate the collective action taken by different groups to de-construct and de-legitimize the hegemony of sugar production. 2
Epistemic Foundations: Technology of Producing Sweeteners
While both gur and sugar are made from the sugarcane crop, the different technological processes employed in their production make them different products with varying nutritional profiles and by-products. An epistemic hierarchy of knowledge is constructed in these two technologies of production which can be best explicated through a comparative understanding of the actual production processes of gur and sugar.
The Politics of the Production Processes
In the non-centrifugal production of gur, raw cane juice is clarified with the locally available natural vegetative agents. The heat in this process preserves the essential minerals and vitamins. Gur is actually solidified cane juice, containing a rich amount of molasses, a good source of iron and vitamins, magnesium and phosphorus. Further value and nutrition addition with various spices, condiments and dry fruits is a widespread practice, thus making it an immunity booster. Micronutrients present in gur possess antitoxic and anticarcinogenic properties. Similarly, the by-products like raab (liquid jaggery) or vinegar have medicinal value. Deploying low capital and labour-intensive 3 production, along with local inputs in its production, it is a process in harmony with nature and thereby harmony with the body. These three important economic, ecological and health parameters that establish the superiority of this particular knowledge.
The process of cane crushing, juice clarification and crystallization used for making gur till the late nineteenth century were indigenous to India. The diffusion of the new technologies from the west since the beginning of the twentieth century started changing the technological process of cane crushing and manufacturing of sweeteners in India (Yadav, 2010). Knight argues that with the advent of first industrial revolution, founded on steam power, new forms of metallurgy and their accompanying sciences marked a radical change in the manufacturing of sugar in three significant ways.
The first one is related to far reaching improvement in the processing of cane. The second concerned with revolutionary breakthrough in cleansing and reducing cane juice and processing it into sugar. The third one has important implications in transformation of sugar manufacturing from art to science. (Knight, 2014, p. 14)
Thus, steam-driven mills with iron roller hydraulic crushers of high capacity marked an unprecedented increase in extraction rates. The technology derives its technical superiority largely from its better performance in the two critical stages, that is, extraction and evaporation. The already existing technology of open pan manufacturing was gradually replaced by the modern technologies like vacuum pan sulphitation (VPS). The fundamental transformation in these processes has significant implications for our health and the health of our agro-ecology.
Basically, two chemical-driven clarification processes are employed, that is, the double sulphitation (DS) and the double carbonation (DC) process in order to achieve ‘purity’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘crystalline’ nature of sugar, despite having deadly consequences on our body. In the centrifugal production of sugar, molasses is completely separated out from sugar and this by-product is deliberately extracted for making alcohol by the mill industries. Thus, sugar gives only ‘empty calories’ that need extra heat for digestion, while it extracts the calcium and potassium already present in human body for its digestion (Table 1).
Nutritional Value of White Sugar and Gur
John Yudkin, a well-known nutritionist claims:
I can make two key statements that no one can refute: first, there is no physical requirement for sugar; all human nutritional requirements can be met in full without having to take a single spoon of white or brown sugar, on its own or in food or in drink. Secondly if only a small fraction of what is already known about sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food addictive, that material should promptly be banned. (Yudkin, 1978)
From the colonial to post-colonial India, sugar manufacturing became privileged by systematically downgrading already existing knowledge system (AEKS) of gur production. Visvanathan argues that this happens, first, through denigrating gur as impure, dirty and unhygienic. ‘Unlike Gur, sugar carries all the moral semantics of white. It is something produced by man in a white coat, clean, cool and hygienic. Gur smacks of dirt and soil, it is “muddy” and in need of refinement’. Second, it is done through the economic argument of law of scale, ‘efficiency’ and ‘science’, wherein mass production through sugar technology will naturally bring down the economic cost of producing sugar as it uses less steam in making per kilogram of sugar (Visvanathan, 2007, p. 20). This processing also realizes ‘standardization’ and ‘uniformity’ and the product thus obtained will be ‘pure’ and ‘refined’. Seshadri had warned that when the thermodynamic definition of ‘efficiency’ became the criterion of development, both non-western and Nature by definition became overnight underdeveloped or undeveloped (Alvares, 1992, p. 67; Seshadri, 1993). What needs to be recognized actually, is the paradox that the ‘efficient’ large-scale crushers and evaporators (in terms of cost–benefit analysis) overlook the health cost (of eating sugar, drinking alcohol), labour displacement rate 4 and the ‘externalities’ generated to ecology. There are the requirement of excessive water in a number of stages, effluents discharged from mills impacting on the biodiversity and soil quality, and finally, undesirable emissions produced (after burning bagasse, de-sulphitation process) impacting air quality (Cheesman, 2004). 5 Seshadri (1993) had warned that ‘the imperatives of modern technology may often lead us to emphasize the wrong values’ (Alvares, 1992). It seems clearly in evidence in the choice of cane-processing technology: the trade-off between ‘efficiency’ and ‘ecology’, ‘recovery rate’ and ‘nutrition & health’, ‘rate of return’ to ‘employment’.
The choice of technology in sugarcane processing raises several other legitimate socio-political questions, like who the technology is going to benefit and whose needs it is designed to cater to: in India’s case, the needs of the majority group of small and marginal cultivators of cane or the large landholding class. Winner argues that ‘technical artefacts have political qualities: what matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded’ (Winner, 1986, p. 20). These concerns are at the heart of the politics of knowledge between sugar and already existing sweeteners.
The Changing Political Economy of Sweeteners; Shifting Discourse Towards Sugar as an ‘Essential Commodity’
The cultivation of sugarcane and the technology to make jaggery have a history which can be dated to at least three thousand years. Sidney Mintz comments that India is the ‘ancient hearth of sugar 6 making’. The use of industrial mill-made ‘white crystal refined sugar’ as a sweetener is a relatively recent addition to our diet, dating back to only a couple of 100 years as far as general, widespread use is concerned (Poleszynski, 1982). The story of sugar even in Europe and the US is the transformation initially from medicine to extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then becoming a household ‘necessity’ only by the end of nineteenth century (Baru, 1990; Mintz, 1985). In 1791, the Black rebellion in the Caribbean regions of Hayati and Santo Domingo and the emancipation of slaves in the US in 1834, acted as a precipitating factor for European planters to shift sugar plantation in India. Also, a surge in the price of sugar was seen by planters of Caribbean region as an opportunity to export from India to European market. As a result, factories were started at Motihari, Belsand, Barrachakia in Bihar and Azizpure, Rosa, Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh (UP; Baru, 1990; Gandhi, 1934).
Damodar and Singh (2007) analysed how in UP, the initial technology in the processing of sugar was based on the refining of gur. The first factory-style gur refinery was set up in Kanpur by Begg Sutherland and company, an English-managing agency. This factory melted and refined round lumps of gur (‘bhelis’) procured from the eastern districts of Gorakhpur and Basti. The sugar obtained from factory-style gur refinery lacked consistency and uniformity in quality. To overcome this, in the year 1902, the English firm Messrs Thomson and Myln of Behea, set up the first centrifugal refineries to remove molasses from raab. The centrifugal method yielded quite white sugar, uniform in quality and recovery rate was much better. By the 1930s, with the growth of modern white sugar mills, wherein sugar was directly manufactured from sugarcane, gur refineries lost their importance (Amin, 1984).
Discourse Analysis of Sugar Policy: A Continuum from the Colonial to of the Post-colonial State
The Colonial Phase
The colonial state actively guided and promoted the sugar mill industry in India through the policy of ‘discriminating protection’, which led to the systematic exclusion and marginalization of jaggery industry. The colonial government set up the Indian sugar committee, a sugar sub-committee of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) for research and development assistance to improve cane variety suitable for sugar production, tariff protection policies, irrigation facilities to support the ‘cash crop’, etc. These attributes are discussed below.
The Indian Sugar Commission (ISC) commissioned in 1920, emphasized the importance of the sugar industry in the ‘national economy of India’ (Baru, 1983, p. 2). Another crucial intervention was the setting up of ICAR in 1929 among whose core activities were sugar, with approximately one-third of its funds going into breeding research and developing technologies for it. In 1930, ICAR also appointed a technologist, a chemist, an engineer and a sugarcane expert, sanctioning ₹125,000 to the Sugar Technology Section of the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute at Kanpur. 7 Furthermore, a sugar sub-committee was constituted in 1929, comprising technically qualified people, related government departmental nominees and representatives of sugar industry like Sir Noel Deerr of the Begg Sutherland & Co. and Seth Walchand Hirachand from Bombay Presidency, later joined by the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) 8 representatives. This worked very well for the early growth of sugar mills in India, considering it did not include any representative of the gur and khandsari 9 sectors, which did not receive any research and development support either, given they were not identified as crucial aspects of the sugar policy. This asymmetrical range of support to ‘white sugar’ contributed to the systematic decline of the gur and khandsari sectors.
In the initial years, the sugar industry faced difficulty mostly in low average sucrose content of Indian indigenous cane, inefficient cane-processing technology and inadequate investment in cane. In response, the British government established the sugarcane research stations in Coimbatore, Shahjahanpur and Patgaon, 10 and financed large and medium scale irrigation projects to foster cane cultivation, so that, the cane demand of rising sugar mills could be fulfilled. 11
The research stations responded to the sugar mills’ requirement of sugarcane for much longer period for about 6 months mostly from October to April, which the traditional varieties of cane could not provide, as they did not comprise early maturing and late maturing varieties. The development of a new variety, Co. 214, for example, marked a conflict of interest between the millers on the one hand and the growers and traditional gur makers on the other hand, because it was of low tonnage, but of high-yielding sucrose. Thus, the millers benefitted and the farmers lost out since the mills paid on a weight basis for the cane. The traditional gur makers found it a disadvantage because this new thick-rind variety of cane required a sophisticated iron roller in its crushing (Amin, 1984; Baru, 1990). Therefore, as both Amin and Baru have argued, the initial programme of the sugarcane-breeding institutes largely benefitted the sugar mills more than the peasants and the gur makers.
The sugar sub-committee played a pivotal role in the protection of sugar industry, in getting the colonial government to accede traffic protection in 1932. Three reasons worked for this: that there was no direct conflict of interest between it and the colonial economic interest; the British Indian government wanted to restrict the import of Dutch-controlled Javanese sugar by promoting the indigenous industry; and, as Baru argues, there was adequate pressure from Indian and European firms to grant this protection. This protection spawned an unprecedented increase in the number of working sugar mills from 32 in 1931–1932 to 130 in 1935–1936, making the country self-sufficient in sugar in the limited span of four years (Bagchi, 1972, p. 359; Baru, 1990, pp. 11–15), marking a watershed moment in the history of growth of sugar mills.
A very important policy move in 1933 was the idea of reserved sugarcane zone for each factory. This was meant to secure the regular and non-competitive supply of sugarcane to sugar mills. Responding to the pressure from the cane growers and widespread agrarian revolts in countryside, the colonial state accepted that cane zoning would be combined with minimum price regulation. This marked a conflict of interest as the mills found the zoning as a means of securing monopsonistic status and weakening the bargaining power of the growers, while the cultivators needed the price (Baru, 1990). The sugar conference at Shimla tried to resolve this conflict by passing a resolution securing a statutory minimum price for cane for the farmers. Unable to satisfy both groups, Sugar Factories Act of 1938 satisfied the interest of mill owners by granting official recognition to the Indian Sugar Syndicate (ISS) which in turn gave political clout to the leadership of these mills; it also provided for the licensing of new mills and capacity utilization by the ISS; it created ‘reserved’ and ‘assigned’ areas for each mill, and finally, it accepted in principle the concept of ‘fair price’ for both cane and sugar and also gave recognition to sugarcane cooperative societies. These had far reaching implications for the political economy of sugar.
In 1944, however, the adhocism of sugar sub-committees was dismantled with the appointment of a permanent statutory body named Indian Central Sugarcane Committee (ICSC). ICSC comprised 40 members mostly functioning as an instrument of millers and disregarding the interests of the gur producers. Famously, Sir Shankar Lal, an influential representative of ISMA passed a resolution in June 1947, that the ICSC should recommend to the government that the production of gur and khandsari be prohibited in sugar mill’s areas (Baru, 1983, p. 15).
Post-independent India saw a structural change in the sugar economy in three significant ways; first, a shift of the location of sugar mills from sub-tropical to the tropical areas (from UP and Bihar to Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu), both by government and business interests; second, a change in the control and ownership noted by the emergence of cooperative sector, after the first successful experiment in 1948 at Pravara Cooperative Sugar Factory in Bombay state (Attwood, 1992; Baviskar, 1980). The sugar cooperative played an instrumental role in the political transformation of regional cane-growing community (Maratha in Maharashtra, Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh, Gowdas in Mysore, etc.) becoming dominant players in agrarian politics and the sugar factories in Maharashtra became the spring boards for an aspiring political leadership (Baviskar, 1980, p. 209). Finally, an increase in the number of large capacity mills and decline of small capacity mills took place, when sugar technologists and millers began to accept that the 1,250 tcd (tonne capacity per day) plant is no longer necessarily the ‘minimum efficient size’ plant and the larger plants of about 2,500 tcd may be more ‘efficient’. The Committee on Rehabilitation and Modernization of Sugar Factories in 1965 mooted this change in the capacity of mills. Eventually, the ownership of sugar mills started getting concentrated in a few hands, resulting in sugar millers becoming more organized, having more bargaining power and effectively moulding the government’s sugar policy in their favour. For instance, in UP, nearly, 10 family business groups own a maximum number of private sector mills.
Thus, the post-colonial period marked a complex political economy of sugar, wherein it has become an arena of contestation among the governments (both central and state), sugarcane farmers and sugar mills. The issue of sugarcane and sugar has become ‘politically controversial’, myopically focused on electoral calculations. The incentives provided by the successive government have created a complex situation where the lobbying by various groups eventually helped to legitimize the hegemony of producing sugar. Further, the reserve cane area policy was carried over from the colonial state and a number of instruments served to entrench it in the realm of sweeteners in India. The U.P. Sugarcane (Regulation Supply and Purchase) Act, 1953, government regulated the supply and purchase of sugarcane required for use in sugar factories and gur, raab or khandsari sugar manufacturing units, while the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 and various state legislative acts successively fixed a ceiling of not more than 20–25 km radius around the mill. As late as 1998, the Mahajan Committee aiming to develop the sugar industry recommended a continuation of the cane area reservation policy. The Sugarcane (Control) Order, 1966, Section 7, entrusted the central government with ‘power to license power crushers, khandsari units and crushers and to regulate the purchase of sugarcane’. Thus, over a period of time, these policies became a ‘regulatory cholesterol’ for gur sector as it is frequently invoked to prohibit the farmers to sell their sugarcane to local jaggery units. Thus, these policies also allowed the sugar-producing business groups to acquire greater control over the market and eventually, for miller’s representative to run the show.
In terms of a pricing policy, a fair and remunerative price (FRP) is announced every year since 2009 by the Government of India, before the crushing season and in the respective states, state advised price (SAP) is declared by the state government since the 1970s. While FRP is recommendatory in nature and the SAP is binding on the mills, SAP is always higher than the FRP, largely because SAP is prone to degree of manipulative power, so that, greater the power of a cane grower’s lobby, the higher the SAP that would be fetched. SAP is the biggest factor in diversion of cane from gur units to sugar industry.
One of the most important determinants of the significance of sugar in the diets of common people in India was sugar being listed as an essential commodity in 1955. While sugar was defined broadly to include its many forms, it clearly excluded gur and the Essential Commodity Act, 1955, enabled the central government to regulate the production, supply, distribution, trade and commerce of sugar, so that, it can be made available to consumers at fair prices. Regulating the price at which sugar is sold in the ‘free market’ and the ‘levy sugar or rationed sugar’ price is determined by the government and a variety of subsidies are offered by it, the most important being making it available for distribution under the public distribution scheme (PDS). Thus, sugar became a mass consumption commodity from an ‘aspirational commodity’. This is indicated in Table 2.
Gur and White Sugar as Percentage of Total Sugarcane Production
In the 1990s, the installed capacity in the sugar sector grew at almost 7% annually between 1998–1999 and 2011–2012 compared with 3.3% annually between 1990–1991 and 1997–1998, 12 marking a structural change in the sugar industry from the dominance of sugar cooperatives to the private sector mills within a decade. This led to the sugar sector being delicensed in 1998. So, the country’s 525 sugar mills produced nearly 30.360 million tonnes of sugar between 1 October 2020 and 15 May 2021. ‘The sugar industry has an annual turnover of about ₹1 lakh crore and generates revenue of ₹12,000 crores for the Government exchequer’ (NITI Aayog, 2020). Thus, despite its adverse impact on our health, the production of sugar is now a marker of quality of our economic growth.
Additionally, there is a very important aspect of the privileged position of sugar, which is alcohol production. Visvanathan argues ‘Only if you make white sugar, do you make large amounts of molasses, gigantic amounts of which are used for drinking’ (Visvanathan, 2007, p. 21). Today, the sugar industry is minimally about sugar and maximally about alcohol production. Alcohol has always appeared as profitable by-product for our gross domestic product (GDP) centred economy (despite its repercussions on our body and society in general) because of its taxability. In our view then, the tragedy of white sugar is further compounded by the alcohol industry. The growing propensity towards sugar and alcohol production utterly disregards the constitutional commitment (Article 47) and the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
The colonial to the post-colonial period then shows different kinds of choices made by the state, by merchants becoming industrialists and farmers opting for it as a cash crop. These manifest many contestations—those between modernity and tradition, the agrarian and the industrial, the economy and the ecology, the organized and the unorganized.
Thus, an analysis of the discourse of sugar policy in India marks a continuity of colonial policies in supporting the growth of sugar mills and highlights the inner contradiction in sugar policies of the Indian state: the one constitutional imperative to raise the level of nutrition and to improve public health (Article 47) and the other to generate greater income. The first has prompted the formulation of various nutrition-related programmes and schemes 13 in order to raise the standard of living & improving public health. At the same time, it has actively promoted the cause of sugar industry and its allied distillery units, which have significant implications for our health and ecosystem as a whole. WHO guidelines on ‘sugar intake for adults and children’ (2015) state clearly that high levels of sugar intake are of concern because of its association with poor dietary quality, obesity and risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). So, the privileged position accorded to the manufacturer of modern sugar and alcohol, justified largely on economic grounds contradicts WHO (2015) guidelines directly.
Conclusion
In the contestations on knowledge, what is required is collective action and wisdom from the ground in order to counter the hegemonic knowledge of sugar constituted by industrial production. This collective action at the moment is disparate and dispersed in society, in terms of support to gur production, distribution and consumption from some organizations. Thus, even while it has the stronger argument in terms of health, it is not yet able to counter the hegemonic position of sugar. Gandhi too was very aware that the lack of ‘scientific’ knowledge on gur and the application of business talent and expert knowledge, would adversely affect the fortunes of the sector (Gandhi, 1949). The Gandhian economist J. C. Kumarappa wanted to provide an alternative pathway to the likes of modern sugar mills, through re-organization of a variety of potential employment generating traditional village industries like Jaggery (Kumarappa, 1984; Govindu, 2015).
In recent years, with the debates on health and nutrition gaining ground, especially among the elite and middle-class consumers, the importance of coarse grains and unpolished sweeteners is gaining ground. This makes for a real possibility of gur, among others, becoming an aspirational commodity, in a curious turnaround of tastes. Some organic groups (like Ganga Jaivik Samuh based in Muzaffarnagar, Save Our Rice group, Beejom, Noida) are in a nascent stage to provide a collective voice to upgrade gur. Hence, it needs mobilization on the ground to support and promote gur in the direction of nutrition and in this way the de-legitimization of sugar can be a possibility.
This article deduces from the analytical frame of politics of knowledge, that the development planners choosing to opt for continued support to the technology of sugar shows how deeply enamoured they are with the transformative potential of what they see as ‘big technology’. In the early days of policy formulation, its consequences to the ecology, health and the economy were not factored in. Due to the absence of any effective regulation on the labelling of packaged food items households often end up consuming large quantities of sugar unknowingly (Bera, 2021). Despite this knowledge now being available for a long time, no attempt has been made to break the trap of the existing traditional–modern binary. This politics of knowledge analysis, not only attempts to release the development discourse from this binary, but also to view the AEKS of gur making as a tangible alternative. It argues that its potential for more local production, distribution and consumption structures are mindful of both ecological aspects of natural products used in production, and also economic—in terms of use of local labour, their knowledge and local ambits of consumption. That localization is not indicative of the limitedness of a technology, but its great strength, is an idea now being actively promoted across the world. In terms of gur, it is certainly most appropriate. At the same time, it recognizes that AEKS also needs to be subject to critical analysis, so that in the contemporary scenario, an alternative and appropriate technology can be explored that can match the requirements of modern society of sweeteners that meet the requirements of ecology, economy and health.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.