Environment and History

(an essay composed originally for the Indira Gandhi Open University Economic History Syllabus)

David Ludden, 9 Aug 2003

Physical environments that directly influence Indian history stretch from Turkestan to Burma. Monsoon rhythms define the climate of South Asia proper, which embraces eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka, where natural environments enter history by defining agrarian conditions that emerge in the cycle of monsoon seasons.

Monsoon Seasons in South Asia

South Asia occupies a transition zone between arid Southwest Asia and humid Southeast Asia. As we travel east from the high, dry Sulaiman slopes, across the arid Peshawar valley, Salt Range, Punjab and Indus valley; and then east down the increasingly humid Gangetic Plain to the double delta of the Ganga and Brahmaputra Rivers; we move from arid lands dotted by fields of wheat and millet to a vast flatland of watery paddy and fish farms.

Each year, the sun moves the months of humidity and aridity that mark monsoon seasons. Winter cold and summer heat are more pronounced in the north, where they influence the extent of wheat cultivation, but otherwise do not have major implications for farming, except at high altitudes. The same crops can be grown everywhere in South Asia with suitable inputs of water. Everywhere, the agrarian calendar is pegged not to moisture.

Seasons describe a cyclical narrative, roughly as follows. In January, the sun heads north across the sky from its winter home south of the equator, as the air dries out and heats up. Days lengthen and winter rains dissipate. April and May are the hottest months when it almost never rains. In June, Himalayan snow-melt gorges rivers in the north as the summer monsoon begins. The leading edge of the monsoon moves north-west from May through July, from Myanmar into Afghanistan. By late May, monsoons hit Andaman Islands, Sri Lanka, Kerala, and Chittagong.

The earliest, heaviest, and longest monsoon season engulfs the far south (Sri Lanka and Kerala); the north-east (from Bihar to Assam and Chittagong); and the central-eastern regions of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. These are the most tropical regions with the most intense natural forest cover and extensive jungles. At the summer solstice, when the sun begins to move south again, the summer monsoon will have touched all of South Asia, providing the least rain to the arid western plains and north-west, which have the shortest, driest rainy season, and little rain to the interior of the Indian peninsula, in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats.

From July onward, the days begin to shorten and monsoon rains scatter, as a second season of rain begins, called the winter monsoon, which pours unpredictably on the south-east and north-east and often brings cyclones off the Bay of Bengal to attack Andhra and Bangladesh.[1] This fickle second monsoon lasts into January, when dry months begin again.

The seasonal calendar is marked by festivals, astrological signs, and natural phenomena, which articulate agriculture with a vast array of social activities. People enjoy the cool of December and January. As the sun moves north and summer begins, the sun becomes harsh, hot days accumulate, water bodies evaporate, the earth hardens, and farm work slackens. It is time for travel, migration, and moving herds to water and pasture in the hills; time for hunger, cholera and smallpox, skin and eye infections, malnutrition, dehydration, crying babies, and scavenging; time for trading and transporting, stealing, guarding, and fighting; time for rituals of honour and spectacle, and for building, repair, loans and debt, sometimes desperate commitments that will influence social relations of agriculture for seasons to come. Dry months are full of preparations for the rainy season sustained by the past harvest.

Crops move off the land most profusely during the second and third months of each monsoon, and the biggest harvests fill September-December. Regional differences appear most dramatically at harvest time. For example, the north-east, with its high rainfall, has three major harvest seasons. The rabi season covers March, April, and May, and yields mostly rice but in Bihar also wheat, barley, and pulses. Bhadoi crops include millets in Bihar and Chhotanagpur, in addition to rice, and arrive in August-September. The aghani season -- called kharif in north India -- covers November, December, and part of January and brings the great harvest of the year. Winter rice, called aman, “was incomparably the most important and often the sole crop grown in the districts of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa” at the end of the nineteenth century, covering almost half the total land under cultivation.[2]

By contrast, in dry western India, the agricultural year begins abruptly in May, as it does for Bhils in the Narmada basin, who after long, hot months without rain or work, “cannot sleep in the afternoon” because it would “appear indolent, and nature bestows her bounty only on those who bring it their industry as tribute.” As rains appear, “people who had migrated to the plains return home for the start of work.” Harvesting maize and bajra millets begins in August, and harvesting jowar millets and groundnuts continues through October. In November and December, “people sell chula, groundnuts, and other cash crops, carrying them to the traders.”[3]

Seasons and Economy

After every harvest, crops take new life in the realm of circulation. They assume new material forms as moveable measures and stores of grain, fruit, pulses, and vegetables, in stocks, carts, trucks, bags, head loads, and shops. Crops become food, cuisine, feasts, stocks, clothing, and adornments, and seek their symbolic potential as gifts, offerings, tribute, largesse, shares, alms, commodities, and credit advances.

Agrarian wealth arises from the articulation of two economic seasons -- of cultivation and circulation -- because prices rise before the harvest, drop at harvest time, and then rise again as the heat prolongs. Speculators seek returns accordingly. The calendar differs for animal and vegetable products, for fish, fruit, and forest products, and for different grains in every region; but everywhere, it moves to the rhythm of sun, rain, and harvest. Commodity prices and markets -- and thus profits and revenues for business and government -- move along the temporal path of agricultural seasonality. Today, seasons influence the timing and outcome of elections and set the stage for most major political decisions in South Asia.

In the hottest months, in the season of circulation, crops move off the land and people move out in search of work. In years of plenty, people on the move can find food close to home, but during droughts, they go farther afield. With predictable regularity, food becomes costlier as labour is let loose from the farm, in the hot season. For those who must work for others, this is a time of distress, when historically, seasonal workers have moved in large numbers into warfare, manufacturing, building, and hauling, all perennial options. Opportunities for hot-season non-farm work are major determinants of landless workers’ annual income.

Cheap labour, dirt roads trampled hard, and riverbeds dried up in the hot sun make dry months a good time to transport people, grain, animals, and building materials. Haulers, herders, carters, and grazing land are badly needed. Water and fodder for animals is a problem. Herders take flocks to the hills for grazing. Herds moving up and down slopes for grazing are major elements in mountain ecology, where farming and grazing often compete for land, as they do today in the Siwalik hills and higher ranges above Punjab.[4]

Supply, demand, people, goods, and news on the move travel through towns and cities, where social needs, social accumulation, and social power mingle in markets, on the streets, and under the eye of the ruler, engendering conflict, competition, negotiation, and exchange. Markets and urban centres are places where various people mingle under rulers who order the social environment and receive riches from the land in return.

The season of circulation is a time to raise armies and mobilise demonstrations in towns and cities. The land is free of crops, so this is time to mobilise gang labour for clearing jungle, digging wells and canals, and building dams, temples, mosques, monuments, palaces, and forts. When the sun is most unrelenting, bandits are desperate and feed off travellers on the road, a popular theme from ancient literature that rings true today in the tales of Chambal Valley gangs who rob passing trains. The hot season is belligerent. Benevolent rulers need force to keep the peace and ambitious rulers use hungry soldiers to increase their territory.

In late May, all eyes turn to the sky and labour moves back to the land. This time is for preparation and expectation. Cultivation begins with a promise of rain. Work preparing fields varies in timing, complexity and demand for workers, animals, and equipment, depending on the crops to be sown, soil to be planted, rainfall timing and quantity, and water supplies from other sources, like wells, tanks or streams; and also depends on the kind of assets that can be invested in anticipation of the harvest in specific places, because rich farmers can afford to make more elaborate preparations, and new technologies allow for new investments before planting begins. Expertise and experience are crucially important and highly valued. The accumulated wisdom of farmers, patriarchs, astrologers, almanacs, sutras, scientists, old sayings, magicians, holy men, textbooks, scientists, extension officers, radio, and TV pandits all come into play.

Prediction and calculation continue each day based on the amount of rain and water in rivers, streams, and reservoirs, for it is not only the amount of rainfall that determines the harvest but also its timing. Bad signs encourage conservative planting strategies for farmers living close to the margin. But farmers with extra assets often interpret rumours or signs of an impending bad monsoon or war as an indication of potential profit during subsequent scarcity and high prices; and this might stimulate a calculated gamble, extra planting. Such gambles often fail.

Whatever the expectation of rain, any extra planting or investments in potentially more profitable crops -- like cotton, jute, rice, wheat, vegetables, sugarcane, tobacco, and plantain -- often require loans. Historically, the expansion of farms into forests has typically involved credit, and the increasing capital intensity of farming (with irrigation, fertilisers, machinery, processing equipment, animals, or labour) depends upon credit.[5] For farmers close to the margin, debt may finance the next meal, and poor workers often enter the planting season already in debt because of food loans during the dry months.

The time when crops must be sown is a time of urgent investments, when gains from the past go to work, food prices are high, and people are hungry for work. Past losses hurt and farmers who have gambled and failed or lost labour in their households due to death or migration cannot carry on without help. Conflicts over resources rage at this time of year, especially over water and good land. Fights that stew for years erupt as time approaches to plough, plant, fertilise, and apply irrigation. Newly acquired assets go to work: cattle purchased at summer fairs; land bought, leased, or conquered; new fields cleared from forest; dams built and channels dug; wealth secured by marriage; the labour of growing children; and a good reputation that builds credit worthiness on solid standing in the community. Many farmers need advances of seed, food, and cash to accomplish planting, and advances may or may not enrich creditors, but the commitments they involve create social bonds that are critical on all sides.

In addition to market, social commitments within families, communities, sects, castes, and other groups enable farmers to acquire what they need to plough and plant. Reciprocity and redistribution now enter their productive phase, as horizontal solidarities and vertical bonds of loyalty and command facilitate planting. Gods also play their part and hear many promises at planting time. Many interactions that animate the heady season of ploughing and planting bring villagers into town and city folk into villages. In cities and towns, past returns from trade, taxes, and sacred donations seek returns on the land. Creditors, tax collectors, landlords, merchants, and lawyers come from town to invest in crops and ensure they will get their due.

Too many rainless days after planting bring despair and high prices. Scarcities become famines after July when past seasons have been bad and food stocks are low. The poorest people must do whatever they can for food, which often means committing themselves or their children in desperate ways -- in this context, what we call “bonded labour” can be seen as exploitation and also as protection against starvation. The scattered, unpredictable nature of monsoons and the possibility of flood or devastating storms make the maintenance of subsistence options in times of dire distress a critical life-strategy for many people.

Rains bring hope, mosquitoes, flooding, and waterborne disease. As crops mature, so do estimates of yield and calculations of payments for obligations incurred to plant. All interested parties evaluate potential returns, as speculation and negotiation proceed with uncertainty about the harvest. The connection is again being forged between wet and dry months, between seasons of cultivation and circulation, between times of investment and reward.

Crops must be protected as they ripen, and predators take many forms. Conflicting interests -- among landlords, farmers, labourers, creditors, and tax collectors -- mature with the crop. Farm labour becomes most critical as the harvest approaches. Timely work is needed for watering, weeding, cutting, hauling, winnowing, drying, and storing the crop. Disruptions to work at this climactic phase can ruin crops and spoil futures planned on predictions of yield. As a result, enmity can take a nasty turn. As the harvest begins, reliable commitments of labour become more valuable and the market value of labour increases.

At harvest time, crop prices fall as labour demand is peaking. Labour demand is highest when another crop will be sown immediately, in regions that benefit from the winter monsoon or where irrigation allows a second or third crop to be planted. The most hectic work time hits all farmers at once, in each locality, and at this time, social stability and harmony are critical for everyone invested in the crop. Conflicts also begin to intensify over the division of the crop and the fulfilment of promises.

Struggles over the crop for it into the season of circulation, especially when the yield is worse than predicted. Tax collectors, creditors, in-laws, and landlords can now become nasty. For all South Asian states that have depended on agriculture, the revenue year has conventionally begun with the summer monsoon. The fiscal (Fasli) year, derived from Mughal practice and retained by modern states, begins in July, when the summer session of the India Parliament also beings. Elections are generally timed to precede the monsoon, which makes the planting season a time of period of political promises as well.

Environments of History

Historically, a majority of social activities and institutions in South Asia have had some agricultural aspect or dimension. This is what makes a cultural environment agrarian. A region is agrarian not because farming forms the material basis for other activities, but rather because a preponderance of social activity engages agriculture in some way or another, during seasons of cultivation and circulation.

For most of human history, there has been little organised co-ordination of agricultural activity across larges expanses of agrarian space. Nature’s variability discourages overbearing, non-local control over the intimate, everyday conduct of farming. And yet, agrarian space is never haphazard. Spatial order appears in natural landscapes where many interconnected agrarian activities articulate with agriculture.

South Asian historical territories have assumed distinctive forms in six kinds of agrarian environments, which we can divide roughly, as below, into forty geographical units, all with ancient histories. In centuries circa 1500-1850, their territories came together in agrarian regions, culturally coherent, spatially organised territories of social power, which were further institutionalised, integrated, and differentiated by modern history.

Agrarian environments are not defined in part by physical qualities, but also by long-term interactions of geography, culture, technology, and social power. South Asian environments can be divided schematically into two binary oppositions: mountains versus plains, and semi-arid versus humid tropics. Most farmland lies in the semi-arid plains, including river valleys and plateaux, and most of the remainder is in the humid lowlands, which have a higher proportion of population than farmland. Divisions, interactions, and intersections of uplands and lowlands and dry and wetlands occur amidst changing conditions. Rivers change course, deserts expand and contract, dry lands receive irrigation, forests grow and disappear, cropping patterns change, human settlements alter nature, and farms give way to city streets. We can however outline spatial units of long-term historical geography that allow us to track changes in the land and changes in their human content over long spans of history in South Asia.[6]

I. Northern River Basins

1. Punjab

2. Western Ganga-Yamuna Plain (Delhi-Agra-Mathura)

3. Central Plain and Doab (Lucknow-Allahabad)

4. Eastern Ganga basin (Gorakhpur, Benares, Bihar)

5. Bengal, Ganga-Brahmaputra Deltas (West Bengal, Bangladesh)

6. Assam (Brahmaputra Basin)

The basins of the upper Indus and its tributaries, the Yamuna, Ganga, and Brahmaputra form one of the largest expanses of riverine farmland in the world. Soils are mostly alluvium. Farming is challenged and enriched by river drainage from mountains all around. Rivers bring moisture and nutrients, but floods also wreak havoc. In 1875, the notorious Kosi River destroyed all the farms in its path, and an indigo planter wrote that, “miles of rich land, once clothed with luxuriant crops of rice, indigo, and waving grain, are now barren reaches of burning sand.”[7] The Indus and Ganga provide natural routes for transit and shipping to the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea. Bounded by desert and mountains, the climate in basins changes gradually from aridity in the west to humidity in the east. Along this gradient, monsoon rainfall and drainage from the hills increase and the dominant food grains shift from wheat to rice. Since 1960, wheat and rice cropping has overlapped because quick-growing varieties have allowed farmers with adequate irrigation to grow both in rotation, and today almost a quarter of the net sown area in Bihar, West Bengal, UP, Haryana, and Punjab grows wheat-and-rice, which is very rare outside the Indo-Gangetic basin.[8]

In the north-west, separated by a low watershed from the Ganga basin (in Haryana), the Punjab is a triangular territory formed by the Indus and its tributaries (Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej), and rimmed by mountains on the west and north (Sulaiman Range, Salt Range, Panjal Range and Lesser Himalayas). Rainfall increases with proximity to the northern hills from the Jhelum eastward, and aridity increases to the west and south. Groundwater recharge is most fulsome near riverbeds and closer to mountains, and the up-river Punjab also has more alluvial soil. Moving downstream toward the base of the Punjab at the confluence of tributaries with the Indus, rain and groundwater diminish, and soils become brown and sandy, as the Punjab shades into the arid Western Plains in Rajasthan.

In Punjab, as in general throughout the northern basins, the long-term geographical spread of intensive agriculture moved outward from places where drainage is easier to use on farms to places where more strenuous controls are necessary. Thus in drier regions, like Punjab, agricultural intensification moved from naturally wetter into drier areas; whereas in the flood plains and humid tropics, it moved initially from higher and drier parts of the lowlands into the more water-logged areas at river’s edge. Everywhere, agriculture also moved up river valleys into the highlands. In the Yamuna-Ganga basin, the general trend of expansion of intensive agriculture has been from east to west and upland from the lowlands; and in the Punjab, from north-east to south-west. A major modern stage in this long process of expansion began with the construction of a vast canal network during the nineteenth century, and the most recent stage being the spread of motorised pumps and tubewells, since the 1960s.

In eastern regions of the northern basins, Bengal and Assam have the highest rainfall and volume of river water. Dense tropical jungles have historically presented the major challenges to expanding paddy cultivation. Today, the density of the human population is often seen as an obstacle to prosperity, but historically it has been more commonly a sign of the great fertility of the land. The Ganga delta shifted eastward over centuries and in 1787 joined the Brahmaputra in what is now Bangladesh. Agricultural frontiers in Bengal have moved east with the river, south into the Sunderbans, and also, as throughout the northern basins, up from the lowlands into high mountains.

Mountains border the Northern Basins on all sides, except in Rajasthan. Rivers come from the mountains, where reservoirs of timber and grazing land lie in the homelands of distinctive mountain societies. Lowland people have historically extended their power upriver into their surrounding mountains to colonise, conquer, and annex territory. Rajputs conquered up into Uttarakhand and mountains above Punjab. From ancient times, upper reaches of the Chambal and Parbati (tributaries of the Yamuna running down the craggy ravines of the Malwa Plateau) were attached to the agrarian economies of the Gangetic Plain, though they belong physically to the Central Mountains and they shade off in the west into the Western Plains.

II. High Mountains

7. Kashmir

8. Western Mountain Regions (Punjab, Himachal, Uttar Pradesh)

9. Nepal

10. Bhutan

11. Eastern Mountains (around Bengal and Assam)

From the Makran Range in the west, running north across the Sulaimans and Hindu Kush, and curving east across the Karakoram Range and Himalayas to the Naga and Manipur Hills, a vast high altitude landscape connects South Asia with Central Asia, Tibet, China, and Myanmar. It is has steeply sloping mountain terrain, sharp valleys, and countless rivers, which mark natural routes of transportation and drainage, rushing down into the plains below and leading upward to the high plateaux of inner Asia. Winters are much colder than below in the plains, and summers, much cooler, creating different, complementary ecologies for animals, vegetation, forests, farmers, and markets. Like the lowlands, climates change from extremes of aridity in the west and to extremes of humidity in the east, with attendant changes in natural vegetation and agricultural options. Run-off is rapid, snowmelt gorges rivers in the spring, and erosion is severe. Forests are basic natural resources. Agricultural territories formed in valleys and extended upward, growing wheat and millets in the west and paddy in the east. Shifting cultivation, often called jhum, has remained most prominent in the east.

Localities are connected by valleys and passes, and separated by high ridges and peaks. Large political territories have formed only in the Vale of Kashmir, Kathmandu Valley, and upper Brahmaputra basin. Great distances and obstacles to travel separate territories in the High Mountains from one another, and these territories are connected more to proximate lowland regions than to one another. In the west, Baluch and Pashtu mountain societies live in corridors between Iran, Afghanistan, the Indus basin, and Punjab. Kathmandu is at cross-roads of South Asia and Tibet. Assam is intensely engaged in the history of Northern Basins, but also participants in the history of Southeast Asia and China.

Except in Bhutan, all High Mounain societies live under the authority of elites in valleys below, but rebellions today in Nepal, Nagaland, Mizoram, Baluchistan, Kashmir, and Chittagong Hill Tracts indicate struggles for political autonomy. Across the high mountains, from Yusufsai borderlands with Afghanistan to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, cultural oppositions between peoples of the hills and lowlands are typically stark. The term "tribe" is most often applied in modern times to the smaller scale social formations that thrive in the small, relatively isolated agrarian spaces of the High Mountains.

III. Western Plains

12. Indus Valley

13. Sindh

14. Rajasthan

15. Northern Gujarat and Saurashtra

16. Malwa

Semi-arid Western Plains run into High Mountains in the west and merge gradually with Northern River basins (in Haryana) and Central Mountains (in Malwa and Gujarat). They form a connective zone for long-term historical movements of people in every direction. Rainfall is very low, and spatially, the plains are dominated by the Thar Desert. In prehistoric times, the river Saraswati ran deep into western Rajasthan before it ran west into its inland delta near the Indus; and Rajasthan, the Indus basin, and Sindh seem to have become increasingly dry over millennia. There is indirect evidence that Rajasthan dried up noticeably in medieval centuries. The scrub-covered, rocky, and scattered Aravalli hills rise abruptly from flatlands in the east, providing fortress material and drainage for adjacent valleys. Irrigation, mostly from wells, and good monsoons are more common in the east, where they create good rich farmland for bajra, maize, wheat, jowar and cotton cultivation. Soil becomes increasingly sandy to the west; and in the south, grey-brown sandy soil becomes good red loam, creating a naturally favoured zone for farming that runs along a corridor from Haryana through Jaipur and Ajmer into Gujarat.

As in all arid regions, people and animals have always travelled this landscape in search of water and wealth, and agrarian life here has always featured mobility, nomadism, pastoralism, stock rearing, and migration for trade and conquest. Medieval warriors and merchants -- most famously, Rajputs and Marwaris -- moved from old centres to acquire more wealth in regions of better farming in the east, north, and south. Dense population centres in the western plains are based on locally irrigated farms, strategic locations on trade routes, and extensions of political power embracing numerous similar centres across expanses of sparsely populated land. Trade connections to bordering regions on all sides and to sea-lanes are critical for economic vitality. Like the camel -- its characteristic pack animal -- this land has always had a tendency to wander uncontrollably into its surroundings, making its boundaries vague.

IV. Central Mountains

17. Malwa

18. Bundelkhand

19. Baghelkhand

20. Chhotanagpur and Jharkhand

21. Chhattisgarh

22. Orissa Interior

23. Bastar

24. Khandesh (Tapti Basin)

25. Berar (Waiganga Basin)

This landscape of interlacing mountains, valleys, rivers, plateaux, and plains extends from Gujarat in the west, along the rim of the Gangetic Plain in the north, to Chhotanagpur in the north-east, to the Deccan plateau in the south, and to the edges of the Godavari River basin in the south-east. Its territories have formed amidst an interlaced complex of river basins that run in every direction to feed all rivers north of the Krishna and east of the Indus. The Chambal, Parvati, Betwa, and Ken run north from the Malwa Plateau and Bundelkhand into the Yamuna; their valleys form historic highways into the Gangetic Plain. The Vindhya and Satpura Ranges form the valley of the Narmada, which like the Tapti, drains west into the Gulf of Cambay. The Mahi drains Malwa into the Gulf, arching north and then running south. East of Malwa and Bundelkhand, in Baghelkhand, waters from the Maikala, Mahadeo, and Ramgarh mountains send the river Son north-east into the Ganga; they send the Narmada west, the Mahanadi east through Chhattisgarh into Orissa and the Bay of Bengal, and the Waiganga south into the Godavari. East of Baghelkhand, the Ranchi and Hazaribagh plateaux dump the Damodar River into the Hooghly and send the Subarnarekha straight into the Bay of Bengal. Ringed by mountains, Chhattisgarh forms a bowl-shaped radial drainage basin, from which the Mahanadi flows east into the Bay of Bengal. South of Chhattisgarh lie the dense hills of Bastar and inland Orissa, from which the Indravati drains into the Godavari.

Like the High Mountains and Northern Basins, which it parallels geographically, the Central Mountains are dry in the west and wet in the east. In the west, the barren scrublands of the Chambal ravines carry torrents of mud in the monsoon and then bake hard in the summer heat. In the east and south, tropical forests cover Jharkhand, Orissa, and Bastar. Like the High Mountains, too, this landscape is dominated by interactions of mountains and valleys, forests and lowlands, and their respective societies. Farms have been cut historically into the forest to foment interactive struggles within and among communities of farmers, hunters, and pastoralists. Shifting cultivation and tribal populations are prominent; and India’s largest tribal groups live here, the Bhils (in the west), Gonds (in the central regions), and Santals (in the east).[9]

More than in the High Mountains -- because of better soils, wider valleys, longer summers, and constant invasions by agrarian powers on all sides -- the trend in land-use and social power here has strongly favoured the hegemony of lowland farming communities and the expansion of more intensive farming regimes among hill people. Farms today show great variety in techniques and options, ranging from irrigated wheat farms in the Narmada and upper Chambal valleys to rice mono-cropping in Chhattisgarh, to shifting cultivation in Bastar, and to mixed forestry and millet farming in Baghelkhand. This variety parallels the variety of social formations, which combine tribal and caste elements more widely than elsewhere. Intensive farming is most dominant where soil, water, and states favoured a few extensively controlled, homogenised tracts -- in the Narmada valley (which benefits from deposits of black cotton soil), the upper Chambal valley, the Waiganga valley (Gondwana), and Chhattisgarh. Khandesh and Berar participate in the history of the central mountains but also in that of the interior peninsula.

V. The Interior Peninsula

24. Khandesh (Tapti Basin)

25. Berar (Waiganga Basin)

26. North (Maharashtra) Deccan (Maharashtra; Godavari and Bhima Basin)

27. South (Karnataka) Deccan (Karnataka; Krisha-Tungabadra Basin)

28. Mysore Plateau (Palar Ponnaiyar Kaveri Basin, above the Ghats)

29. Telangana (Krishna-Godavari Interfluve)

30. Rayalaseema (Krishna-Pennar Interfluve and Pennar Basin)

31. Tamil uplands (Vaigai, Kaveri, Ponnaiyar, Palar Basins, below the Ghats)

This semi-arid landscape consists of river basins and interfluvial plains; its agricultural character derives from lines of drainage, seams of good soil, and underground water in the rocky substrate of the Deccan trap. Geologically, these features come from volcanoes that left behind caverns of underground rock, boulders on the land, and black soil under foot. In the south-east, rocky outcrops become the Nallamalai, Eastern Ghats, Javadi, Shevaroy, and Pachaimalai Hills, which mark the descent of the peninsula into the eastern coastal plain. Framed by the Eastern Ghats, south of the Godavari, by the Western Ghats, on the west, and by central mountains, in north-east, the interior peninsula landscape touches the western plains in Gujarat, where Saurashtra forms the north-western corner of the Deccan Trap.

South of the Tapti and Narmada, all big rivers of the peninsula drain the Western Ghats and run most of their distance across predominantly dry, flat plateaux, sloping from west to east on the NW-SE bias of the Krishna-Godavari system. Fertile black soils run in wide seams along the Narmada basin, the upper Godavari, and the Krishna and its tributaries, Bhima and Tungabadra. Outside the black soil tracts, the northern Deccan soil is predominantly medium black; and the southern soils in Karnataka and upland Tamil Nadu mix red with patches of black. All these soils are quite fertile when water is sufficient -- which it usually is not -- and the blacker the soil is, the more it can produce good crops with meagre moisture.

Getting enough water is the main problem for farmers, because most land lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, and everywhere, monsoons are fickle. Historically, intensive agriculture has expanded outward from small regions favoured by rivers water and good soil. South Asias east-west rainfall gradient here runs the north-west to south-east. In the north-west Maharashtra Deccan, wells provide most irrigation, even today, despite the spread of large river dams and canals. On the Karnataka plateau and around Hyderabad and Warangal, tank irrigation is more important, and becomes more so as we move further south-east. The gradual increase in drainage availability from north-west to south-east has allowed a parallel increase in irrigated acreage, multiple cropping, and population density; but a major hole in this overlapping set of gradations lies in the North Deccan interior and Pennar-Krishna interfluve (Anantapur, Bellary, Kurnool, Adoni, Raichur, Bijapur), where numerous tanks have long supported meagre irrigation and low population densities. There is indirect evidence of increasing desiccation in the driest parts of peninsula since the nineteenth century.

Agriculture has expanded over centuries into three forest types that distinguish the peninsula from Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Originally, dry tropical forest of deciduous trees covered the flatlands, where only scrubby savannah remains. Monsoon forests that lost their leaves in the dry season once covered high plateaux and Eastern Ghats, which were once full of teak, most now gone. Evergreen rain forest originally covered the Western Ghats, and some remains. Into each forest type, farms pushed over the centuries, and overall, the peninsula's north-west-south-east gradient organised the geographical diversity of agro-technological milieus. Pastoralism and long-fallow millet cultivation dominated the driest parts, especially north and west, into the nineteenth century. Shortening fallow and well irrigation enabled more intense dry farming to take over where rainfall, technology, and water table allow. Rainfall and drainage have long made wet paddy cultivation more prominent in the south. Variegated soil and water conditions create various cropping regions, in which, millets, cotton, and oilseeds predominate, with patches of intensive well cultivation and irrigated paddy (especially in the south), and expanses of animal raising and pastoralism, especially in the north.

VI. Coastal Plains

32. Gujarat

33. Konkan

34. Karnataka

35. Kerala

36. Sri Lanka

37. Tamil Nadu

38 Andhra

39. Orissa

40. Bengal

This composite landscape along the seacoast is formed of river valleys, plains, and deltas with adjacent interfluvial flatlands; and everywhere, it includes adjacent uplands and mountain sides, though dominated agriculturally by riverine plains, alluvial soils, and paddy fields. Its mountain border (on the west coast) and proximity (in the east) to tropical depressions that form the winter monsoon in the Bay of Bengal, bring it much more rain than the interior peninsula. On the whole, it is more tropical in appearance, even its driest parts, along the Tamil and Andhra coast. It is a borderland with the ocean, and thus includes a fishery ecology and social life along the beach that is an integral part of its history, as are coastal sea trade and connections to coasts everywhere in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Arabian Sea.

Some of its territories are relatively isolated from inland corridors -- Chittagong, Orissa, parts of Kerala, and above all, Sri Lanka -- and coastal regions communicate most intensively by sea, often more so with one another than by land with adjacent inland territories. The Tamil and Kerala coast are part of a cultural space that also embraces coastal Sri Lanka, and the cultural traffic between the South Asian littoral and Southeast Asia is constant and very influential over the centuries. Bengal’s most prominent connections have always been run along waterways to Orissa, Assam, and Bihar. Migrations are common among these coastal regions, which logically have similarities in diet, featuring more fish, and in occupations, with more fishing communities and water transportation. Rice is the dominant food grain everywhere on this watery landscape.

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[1] Damaging cyclones were recorded in Bengal in 1831, 1832, 1833, 1840, 1848, 1850, 1851, 1864, 1867, 1874, 1876, 1885, and 1942. The worst by far were in 1864, 1867, 1874, and 1942. See Arabinda Samanta, “Cyclone Hazards and Community response,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20 September 1997, p. 2425.

[2] Malabika Chakravarti, “The Lethal Connection: Winter Rice, Poverty and Famine in late 19th Century Bengal,” The Calcutta Historical Journal, 18, 1, 1996: 66-95.

[3] Amita Baviskar, “Displacement and the Bhilala Tribals of the Narmada Valley,” in Jean Dreze, Meera Samson, and Satyajit Singh, editors, The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley, Delhi, 1997, pp. 119-120.

[4] Richard P.Tucker, “The Evolution of Transhumant Grazing in the Punjab Himalaya,” Mountain Research and Development, 6, 1, 1986: 17-28.

[5] With the increasing intensity of cultivation in India since 1970, credit has risen as a percentage of total capital formation in agriculture and allied sectors in India from 19% to 33%; and compound growth rates rose from 20% during the 1970s to 35% after 1980. K.P.Agrawal, V.Puhazhendhi, and K.J.S.Satyasani, “Gearing Rural Credit for the Twenty-First Century,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 October 1997, 2717-2728, see Table 8.

[6] Historically, Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal, Assam, Khandesh, and Berar are at the intersection of landscapes, and they are thus repeated in the list of landscape subdivisions.

[7] Christopher V.Hill, River of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in Riparian North India, 1770-1994, Ann Arbor, 1997: p.11

[8] Ramesh Chand and T. Haque, “Sustainability of Rice-Wheat Crop System in Indo-Gangetic Basin,” Economic and Political Weekly, 32, 13, March 29, 1997, Review of Agriculture, A-27

[9] See K.S.Singh, People of India, National Series, Volume III, The Scheduled Tribes (Delhi: 1994) sites 1981 census figures as follows. All the groups of Bhils totalled 7,367,973 in southern Rajasthan, western Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and northern Maharashtra (p.118); the many Gond groups added up to 7,388, 463, spread over seven states but with 5,349,883 in Madhya Pradesh (p.294); and Santal groups comprised 4,260,842 people in Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, and Tripura (p.1041).