An Agrarian History of South Asia.

Chapter One

Agriculture

Most of human history in South Asia is a feature of life on the land, but most documents that we use to write agrarian history concern the state. Kautilya's Arthasastra set the tone by putting farming and herding under the heading of state revenue. Hundreds of thousands of stone and copper inscriptions appear in the first millennium of the Common Era. Scattered across the land from Nepal to Sri Lanka, they documented agrarian conditions, but their purpose was rather to constitute medieval dynasties. After 1300, official documents narrate more and more powerful states. In the sixteenth century, Mughal sultans built South Asia's first empire of agrarian taxation, and their revenue assessments, collections, and entitlements produced more data on agrarian conditions than any previous regime. In 1595, Abu-l Fazl's Ai'n-i Akbari depicted agriculture in accounts of imperial finance. After 1760, English officials did the same. After 1870, nationalists rendered the country as part of the nation, and since 1947, agriculture has been a measure of national development. For two millennia, elites have recorded facts to bolster regimes and to mobilise the opposition, so we inherit a huge archive documenting agrarian aspects of historical states.


But over the centuries, agrarian history has also moved along in farming environments, outside the institutional structure of states, almost always connected in one way or another to state authority, but embedded basically in the everyday life of agricultural communities. Dynasties expand into agrarian space. Empires incorporate farm and forest, using various degrees and types of power, gaining here, losing there, adapting to local circumstances and modifying state institutions to embrace new regions of cultivation. Modern nations appropriate agrarian identity and territory. But polities condition agriculture without determining the logic of farming or the character of agrarian life; and country folk always seem to elude state control, even as some locals are sinews of state power in the village. Rulers and farmers -- state power and agrarian social forces -- interact historically and shape one another, and in this context, states tell only part of the story of the agrarian past. Scholars need documentation outside the state and critical perspectives on official records to form the historical imagination at points of articulation between state institutions and agrarian communities.


Historicity


Maintaining this kind of perspective -- seeing agrarian history askew of state power and reading official sources against the grain -- become more difficult for the period after 1870, when documentation of all kinds becomes most plentiful. A respected modern scholarly canon and a vast modern official archive have colluded to make it difficult for scholars to imagine that agrarian history -- as distinct from timeless, age-old, village tradition and peasant culture -- has any real autonomy from the power of the state. Villagers, farmers, agricultural workers, forest cultivators, and pastoral peoples often appear in the dramas of history, but they most often appear to be moving on history's stage in reaction to state activity or in response to elite initiative, obeying or resisting controls imposed upon them by state institutions and by powerful, autonomous elites. The rustic world -- both in itself and for itself -- appears in such accounts to be an ancient repetition. Agrarian folk appear as a negative mirror image of all that is urban, industrial, and modern; not as makers of history, but rather as a inhabitants of history, endowed with mentalities and memories which can be recovered, but not with creative powers to transform their world. Such an appearance took hold in the nineteenth century, as a very long trend of increasing state power in South Asia accelerated dramatically under British rule. A turning point occurred around 1870, by which time the institutions of imperial bureaucracy, the ideologies of development, and the analytical sciences of management had been combined with industrial technology to form the material and cultural context for agrarian life which we call modernity. Until then, official documents still recorded aspects of agrarian societies which eluded state control and official understanding, but from this point onward, texts render the countryside through the lens of the modern state's minute and comprehensive, managerial empiricism. Agrarian sites now appear as standardised objects of administration, policy debate, and political struggle. Idiosyncratic local histories and old agrarian territories were effectively buried by imperial modernity under mountains of homogenous, official data, as villages, towns, districts, and provinces became standard units for conventional studies of politics, economics, culture, and society. The non-modern quality of the agrarian past became quaint stuff for gazetteers and folklore, irrelevant for history except as a reflection of archaic peasant memory and tradition -- marginalia -- cut off from the modern historical mainstream.


Modernity's understanding of the "agrarian" focused first and foremost on matters of state policy, agricultural production, law and order, and resistance and rebellion. Agrarian history appeared first as a chronicle of state policy, whose impact was measured in the endless dance of numbers on agrarian taxation, rent, debt, cropping, output, living standards, technology, demography, land holding, contracts, marketing, and other money matters. For the city folk who worked in government and in the urban public sphere -- the brains of modernity -- rustic localities became alien, peripheral, and abstract. All the places, experiences, and circumstances "out there" in the country became significant primarily as indicators of conditions and trends in modern state territory. To comprehend the country, modernity invented statistics and theories to capture the basic principles of agricultural production and rural society in parsimonious assumptions, models, and ideal types. Compact and comprehensive data informed theories of caste society, village tradition, capitalist transformations, agricultural improvement, and the market economy; these were formalised and packed into portable textbooks and handbooks. Farm statistics rolled off government presses. Official manuals codified agrarian administration. All things agrarian entered the book of the modern state. Agrarian facts entered modern minds through policy debates, statistical studies, guide books, travel maps, law reports, ethnography, news, and theories of modernity and tradition.


In this context, urban middle classes invented an agrarian discourse that was preoccupied with matters of public policy. By 1870, agrarian conditions appeared most influentially in statistics that measured economic progress and government efforts to develop agriculture. By then, policy debates about rural India animated Indian middle class intellectuals for whom modernity involved a cultural opposition between their own urbanity and the rural, rustic, tradition of the village. Already in the 1850s, when Karl Marx sat in London using East India Company dispatches to write about India for readers of the New York Tribune, a modern world information network was beginning to span urban sites of English literacy running from East Asia to Europe and the Americas; and all the English-speaking middle classes had soon formed a broadly similar sensibility toward agrarian issues, which emphasised the state's responsibility to facilitate the expansion of private production and wealth. Thus a book like Robert Mulhall's The Progress of the World in Arts, Agriculture, Commerce, Manufacture, Instruction, Railways, and Public Wealth, published in London (by Edward Stanford, in 1880) came rapidly to Philadelphia and New York; and it described economic progress in terms that typified public discourse in British India. Though many urban intellectuals in South Asia knew the countryside personally -- as landowners, merchants, bankers, and lawyers, and by their own family experience -- their public discussions and formulations of agrarian knowledge did not highlight their own direct, intimate knowledge. Their sense of agrarian territory rested firmly on official knowledge. By 1880, competing interest groups were vocal in national policy debates concerning agriculture in Europe and America; and agrarian issues in territories of the British empire (spilling over into Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean) made a good public showing in British India during policy debates about taxation, land law, money lending, tenancy reform, tariffs and trade, irrigation expenditure, commodity crops (sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, tea, and opium), bonded labour, indenture, famines, land alienation, co-operative credit, survey and settlement, agricultural sciences, and forestry. More than any direct experience of village life, these debates informed the evolution of national ideas about the historical substance of agrarian South Asia.

The modern intelligentsia found their countryside in the interwoven discourses of empire and nationality. In the major urban centres of British India, national leaders among the Indian middle classes shared with Europeans an urban identity, alienated from the countryside. But at the same time, imperial ideology lumped all the natives together as native subjects, so India's political nationality evolved as intellectuals brought town and country together in the abstract opposition of "Indian" and "British." This enabled Indian nationalists to produce a distinctively national sense of agrarian territory inside the British Empire. Nationalism protected the cultural status of urban middle classes as it united peoples of India against the oppressions of colonialism. By promulgating modern ideas about religious community, racial identity, linguistic identity, national development, and political progress, middle class leaders made the foreign character of British rule the central issue in agrarian history. They subsumed the history of all the national land and all the people of the nation into a unitary history of the Indian nation. Modern nationality made the Indian middle classes both equal to and superior to, both like and not like, their country cousins; equally native but more knowledgeable, articulate, international, and modern -- ready for leadership. Educated leaders of the nation could speak for the country, on behalf of country folk. As a literate voice for illiterate people, a national intelligentsia could present agricultural problems to the public and represent the inarticulate "rural masses." National voices expressed a distinctively middle class middleness by translating (vernacular) village tradition into the (English) language of modernity. They made problems of the country into a critique of colonial policy so as to make agrarian South Asia a colonial problem, calling out for national attention. By the 1850s, texts written along these lines appear in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras; and from the 1870s, a national agrarian imagination formed among authors like Dadabhai Naoroji, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Romesh Chandra Dutt, and M.G.Ranade. After 1870, novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and academic studies depict the national countryside more and more frequently in a set of iconic images. By the 1920s, national agrarian studies were institutionalised in universities. National culture had subsumed agrarian territories.


Between 1870 and 1930, agrarian South Asia assumed its modern intellectual appearance and acquired its own history. Old orientalist and official knowledge -- from the days of Company Raj -- were still basic. But the conjuncture of famines (and in Bengal, devastating cyclones) with the rise of the national intelligentsia in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s made a deep, lasting impression. Agrarian localism and diversity dissolved into a national history of endemic village distress, calamity, and poverty that demanded urgent attention from progressive agents of development. After 1877, stereotypes of famine spread widely and quickly. To raise funds for his relief organisation in India, George Lambert rushed to America in 1898 to publish a book entitled India, Horror-Stricken Empire (containing a full Account of the Famine, Plague, and Earthquake of 1896-7. Including a complete narration of Relief Work through the Home and Foreign Relief Commission). In 1913, a student, Alexander Loveday, wrote a prize-winning essay at Peterhouse, Cambridge, declaring sophomorically that "Poverty in England, or America, or Germany is a question of the distribution of wealth [... while in] India, it is a question of production." Loveday went on to explain India's woes by citing the quality of soil, weather, technology, and agricultural practices; and like Lambert, he opined that only massive state investment and relief, supported by enlightened, generous, public contributions, could reduce the suffering of the poor in British India. By 1900, it was firmly planted in the mind of modernity that South Asian villagers live perpetually at the edge of death and starvation, on the brink of catastrophe.

In the 1840s, we can see the early beginnings of a modern development discourse (which would provide a strong narrative center for agrarian historical studies) in petitions by critics of the East India Company against excessive, coercive taxation, and in petitions by Arthur Cotton for increased government irrigation expenditure. In 1869, Lord Mayo argued for the foundation of an imperial department of agriculture in terms that indicate the tone of public discussion:

For generations to come the progress of India ... must be directly dependent on her progress in agriculture .... There is perhaps no country in the world in which the State has so immediate and direct an interest in such questions .... Throughout the greater part of India, every measure for the improvement of the land enhances the value of the property of the State. The duties which in England are performed by a good landlord fall in India, in a great measure, upon the government. Speaking generally, the only Indian landlord who can command the requisite knowledge is the state

Nationalists used Mayo's argument against his government. They argued that Indian prosperity had become poverty under the British. Famine deaths had increased. Excess taxation had ruined agriculture. Land settlements had punished investors. Deindustrialisation had forced workers onto the land. State expenditure for improvement was paltry and the government's claim to be working in the interest of the people was at best hypocritical.

The national agrarian scene became a ground for debate, research, and political action; and in these formative decades, state institutions and urban intellectuals invented the modern sciences of development. Engineers had already captured the field of irrigation. Soil scientists, chemists, biologists, and botanists did research that would be organised under the Imperial Council for Agricultural Research and catalogued extensively in 1929 by the Royal Commission on Agriculture. State scientists made British India into a laboratory for breeding new crop varieties fifty years before the Green Revolution. Economists studied floods of official statistics on food supplies, prices, commodity crops (indigo, opium, sugarcane, tea, coffee, jute, tobacco, ground nuts, wheat, and rice), farm incomes, investment, and productivity; and they had also developed an original theory of Indian economics, which stimulated the first round of village studies in the 1920s. The science of Indian Economics was described authoritatively by Radhakamal Mukerjee, in 1916, in a textbook that began with a model of a traditional village economy disrupted by heavy tax demands, private property laws, voracious money lending, and capitalist commercialism, all imposed by the British. Commercialisation loomed large for the early economists, and drawing on data going back to the 1840s, they focused many studies on problems of coercion. This was logical because their model of a traditional village economy did not include any indigenous commercial impulse or history, so coercion would seem necessary to initiate commodity production and taxation in the countryside. Forced sales, bonded labour, coerced revenue collections, and excess land alienation were seen as colonial pathologies, producing poverty and needing to be studied and remedied. Freedom from colonialism and freedom from the coercion and disruption of capitalism became intimately connected. Basic elements of the national model of village India were not unique to India, and Gandhian ideas of village self-sufficiency, solidarity, and harmony were also found in pre-modern Britain, for instance, by Gilbert Slater, the first professor of Indian Economics at the University of Madras. Like his contemporaries, H.H.Mann and Radhakamal Mukerjee, Slater saw the village economy in Europe and Asia as a traditionally stable and coherent cultural entity, which provided what Mann called the "social framework of agriculture" -- what Karl Polanyi would later describe as the "embeddedness" of the economy in traditional society. Using this broadly accepted theory of indigenous, village India, many economists sought to keep village tradition intact and to make villagers richer at the same time, thus modifying modernisation and development to make them more authentically and effectively Indian. Gandhian and Nehruvian ideas about Indian modernity had the same scientific roots.


By 1930, historians had also nationalised agrarian India. But they took a different path. A century before the convocation of the Indian National Congress, Indologists and orientalists -- Indians and Europeans -- were composing texts that would inspire the national imagination. In the middle class college curriculum, history informed nationality. R.C.Dutt was a towering figure. He responded to W.W.Hunter's (1868) call for "rural history" with his own study of Bengal peasant conditions (1874); he wrote a serious study of ancient India (1896); and then he wrote the first nationalist history of colonial agrarian policy (1908). With Dutt, history joined the national movement, and in the 1920s, it became a national ground for debate and exhortation. History books discussed all types of national issues and formed a repository for competing accounts of national character. In this context, in 1929, William Moreland published the first academic monograph on agrarian history, The Agrarian System of Moslem India. Dutt and Naoroji had set the stage by recounting the greatness of classical India and the depredations of British rule, and Moreland confronted the nationalist critique of British land policies with a study of pre-British north India, going back to the fourteenth century, to argue that old elements from India's past explained its agricultural backwardness, not British rule. He countered the national glorification of Indian tradition with an account of pre-colonial oppression, which put Muslim rulers specifically in bad light. The "idea of agricultural development," he said, "was already present in the fourteenth century, but the political and social environment was unusually unfavourable to its fruition." Specifically, he said, from the Delhi Sultanates (1206 - 1526) through the Mughal Empire (1556 - 1707), "two figures stand out as normally masters of the peasants' fate ... the [revenue] farmer and the assignee...." who together waged "a barren struggle to divide, rather than ... to increase, the annual produce of the country," a "legacy of loss, which Moslem administrators left to their successors and which is still so far from final liquidation."


By 1930, agrarian history entered national policy debates, and ever since then, the writing of agrarian history has meshed with political disputation. Moreland pushed a line of argument which would lead to zamindari abolition in the 1950s. This argument was just gaining momentum when Jawaharlal Nehru became President of the All-India Congress Committee in 1930. He announced a radical turn in politics and academic studies in the 1930s:

the great poverty and misery of the Indian People are due, not only to foreign exploitation in India but also to the economic structure of society, which the alien rulers support so that their exploitation may continue. In order therefore to remove this poverty and misery and to ameliorate the condition of the masses, it is essential to make revolutionary changes in the present economic and social structure of society and to remove the gross inequalities. (italics added)

Nehru married history and politics; he used history politically the way Gandhi used philosophy. When he wrote The Discovery of India, in 1944, he found many lessons for the nation and its leaders in Indian history, going back to ancient times, and by 1947, Nehru's official version of agrarian history was etched into the Congress party platform:

Though poverty is widespread in India, it is essentially a rural problem, caused chiefly by overpressure on land and a lack of other wealth-producing occupations. India, under British rule, has been progressively ruralised, many of her avenues of work and employment closed, a vast mass of the population thrown on the land, which has undergone continuous fragmentation, till a very large number of holdings have become uneconomic. It is essential, therefore, that the problem of the land should be dealt with in all its aspects. Agriculture has to be improved on scientific lines and industry has to be developed rapidly in its various forms ... so as not only to produce wealth but also to absorb people from the land.... Planning must lead to maximum employment, indeed to the employment of every able- bodied person.

During the half-century after 1947, agrarian South Asia has changed dramatically. We discuss this in Chapter Four, but to explain my approach in this book, we need to note that during the 1950s and 1960s, state institutions charged with national development dominated politics and thinking about agrarian history. In these decades, historians focused primarily on state policy. Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal and Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of Mughal India both appeared in 1963, and they represent a historical perspective from which official statements of state ideology seem to determine state policy and to generate logical effects everywhere that policy reigns. The nationality of the countryside under British rule -- its national unity as agrarian territory -- seemed to be self-evident in these decades; and it was described beautifully in A.R.Desai's The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1947), S.J.Patel's Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan (1952), and many other books. But during the 1960s -- the decade of Nehru's death, of the early green revolution, and of continuing struggles for land reform -- arguments began to gain ground among historians to the effect that dominant state ideologies do not necessarily determine the content or conduct of state policy; and in addition, that states do not dictate the course of history. How ideas about history changed so radically in sixties and seventies remains to be studied. Certainly historians of South Asia expanded their appreciation of the diversity of the subcontinent and of the longevity of its disparate agrarian regions. The national unity of colonial experience came unravelled with empirical work that challenged the arguments put forth in the 1947 Congress platform. Historians began to emphasise the local diversity of social forces and political alliances in British India. Regional diversity became more politically prominent after the 1956 states' reorganisation, the rise of non-Congress state governments, and the independence of Bangladesh. An intellectual rupture also occurred in the paradigm of national development, which polarised agrarian studies. The theory and practice enshrined in the green revolution -- based on state-sponsored science and technology -- faced opposition from theorists and movements promoting revolutionary transformations based on worker and peasant mobilisation, a red revolution. During the last decade of anti-imperialist war in Vietnam, historians discovered a long history of agrarian radicalism in South Asia, and more evidence appeared which supported diverse, contrary theories of agrarian history.


By 1980, agrarian history had moved away from the state toward society. Though modern history remained officially confined to the colonial period, agrarian history continued to reach back into the medieval period and to extend to the present day; and it continued to reach beyond the limits of South Asia in its concern with poverty, revolution, imperialism, and other Third World issues. By 1985, some writing in agrarian history was still concerned primarily with national history but more and more work focused on local, subaltern, peasant, pastoral, and tribal experience. When Ranajit Guha's first volume of Subaltern Studies appeared in 1981 and Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India arrived in 1983, it was clear that a major shift in historical thinking had occurred since 1963. In the 1980s and 1990s, the study of the state was further displaced by studies of social power. This trend was not confined to South Asia. The historical profession in general turned away from politics and economics toward society and culture. In these decades, national states also lost power in their own national territories as structural adjustment and economic liberalisation reduced the role of the state in development. Nationalism became an object of academic and cultural criticism. State-centred development strategies came under attack; people-centred, grassroots development became prominent. Environmentalism, feminism, and indigenous people's movements challenged old development agendas. Again, South Asia was not alone. A modern world regime of economic development which began to emerge in the 1920s -- centred on the complementary opposition of capitalism and socialism -- crumbled in the 1980s (though some of its old players -- the World Bank, IMF, huge foundations, multinational corporations, and big capitalist countries -- are still thriving today). In South Asia, new social movements arose as the Congress Party declined. Battles in Punjab, Jharkhand, Telengana, Bihar, Jaffna, Kashmir, Assam, the Chittagong Hill Tracts and elsewhere turned attention toward regional and local issues. Many scholars who would have been looking for the roots of revolution during the 1970s turned instead in the 1990s to localised, often doggedly individualistic resistance among subaltern peoples. Historians began to look at both capitalist and socialist states with a new critical eye, "from the bottom up," which gave the state a new kind of theoretical meaning. The state now came to be studied not so much from the inside -- from the centre of state policy thinking -- but from the margin, from points of critical perspective outside the state and its policy consciousness.


These intellectual trends have left scholars in a better position to explore social power in state territories and everyday life. We can now use history to illuminate contemporary conditions and bring history down to the present, rather than stopping history in 1947. This book considers a long history of social power in many agrarian environments rather than treating agrarian history as a feature of nationality, nationalism, or nationhood. It combines research in number of different theoretical paradigms to form a comparative history of regions and localities. It does not attempt to represent authentic local voices in agrarian societies, subaltern or otherwise. Recent efforts to capture subaltern voices are salutary, but they pinpoint historical situations rather than describing agrarian change, and they have little to say about patterns of diversity. Everyday life obscures patterns of change across generations and across landscapes of disparate local circumstances. As we accumulate more accounts of local experience, we need to step back periodically to assess patterns and trends, and that is my intention here. Moreover, studies of existing consciousness do not confront the veracity of ideas about the agrarian past, and old ideas tend to survive in popular discourse long after scholars have shown them to be untrue. For instance, a fallacious assumption still remains that basic stability characterised the agrarian world before colonialism. This sturdy idea leads many authors, even today, to imagine the nineteenth century as it was theorised by Karl Marx, R.C.Dutt, and Radhakamal Mukerjee, as a time of radical disjuncture and discontinuity imposed on stable village society, culture, and economy by European conquest and colonial domination. Agrarian history has other stories to tell.


Seasons


South Asia includes well over a billion people, a quarter of the world's population, and eight of ten live in places classified officially as "rural," surrounded by agriculture. A much smaller proportion works on the land and non-agricultural employment is growing rapidly, but a substantial majority still depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Agrarian history is not just a local matter, therefore, even though farming is always local in its everyday conduct: the agrarian past has conditioned states as well as most other social institutions. For historical study, we can define agriculture as the social organisation of physical powers to produce organic material for human use. Animal and forest products fall within this definition, so agriculture includes not only farming but also animal husbandry, pastoralism, fishing, and harvesting the forest (though not mining, manufacturing, trade, transportation, banking, ritual activity, history writing, and other related occupations). This broad definition is useful because many specialised types of production are tightly intertwined in agrarian environments and we need one term to embrace many specialists even as we consider their situations separately. To historicise agriculture, we need to map its complexity as a social phenomenon involving the daily exertion of energy and intelligence by many individuals. Agrarian space is at once political, social, and cultural. It is political because power and resistance constitute work on the land, effect control over assets, and distribute products. Farms are also sites of culture. As the words "culture" and "cultivation" indicate, farming is embedded within powers to "civilise" land, and agriculture entails symbolic and dramatic activity that might seem to have little to do with farming -- including religious rituals, urban spectacles, and even history writing. Agriculture is obviously economic in the original household sense, but also in the modern sense that farms represent individual rationality and sustain national wealth. Farming is full of input-output rationality and calculations that do not necessarily obey the economists. Farms are physically built into specific bits of land to create landscapes that farmers change over time, so farming falls into the realm of natural and physical science in addition to social science. No one academic discipline controls the study of agriculture.


We can bring together all the various dimensions of agriculture by focusing on landscapes of social power. Farming is the point of contact between the human powers that organise agriculture and the changing natural environment. No other occupation changes the land so much as farming. It is the major engine of ecological change in human history. State institutions enclose and influence social power in agricultural territory, and though historians often appreciate the changes wrought by states on human living conditions, the powers of transformation in agriculture come primarily from the activity of farming itself. Farms change the land and produce new possibilities for the future. Agriculture articulates broadly with nature and civilisation, but its specificity as a historical phenomenon comes from the character of farming as a social activity. Other kinds of social action occur on the land, so decisions about their conduct are often located consciously within a specific physical setting, but none so much as farming. And none is so dedicated to its time and place in the seasons of the year. In many other types of social activity, the land provides symbolism, context. But every act in farming directly implicates the soil -- so that nature is an active participant -- in a particular place -- from which farming cannot be detached -- and local conditions shape the conduct and outcome of human activity in farming, in two senses: nature is perceived as an agent in farming by farmers themselves, within culture; and nature also works outside culture -- behind its back -- because seeds, rain, and soil, like human bodies, have logics to which people must simply adjust. Agrarian cultures accept and rationalise this behind-the-back quality of nature in their famous pragmatism, experimentalism, fatalism, and common sense.


Farming mingles social labour with nature, like the rain with the soil, and in the process, physical and cognitive aspects of agriculture give the land cultural meaning, conditioning how people think about landscapes. Agricultural landscapes emerge over long periods of time from farming activity that conditions the natural world of human aesthetics. Agriculture creates thereby a cultural text for the human experience of nature. Farming defines nature, how it feels and looks in practice. Agriculture is civilisation at work on the land, humanising nature and naturalising the powers that human societies exert upon nature. Territorial concepts, powers, and social forms are built into landscapes to define the land as an agricultural aspect of nature. But agriculture also changes nature to create the physical characteristics of spaces in which people carry on social life, changing over time how people think about their world. Agriculture is humanity sculpting the earth, designing habitats, making a landscape as a kind of architecture, and producing symbolic domains that form the spatial attributes of civilisation.


Farms mark time at the point of contact between human powers and natural forces outside human control. Agrarian history unfolds in the seasons of everyday life in agricultural societies. Farming moves to the rhythm of holiday seasons, wedding seasons, rainy seasons, and seasons of fruits, vegetables, and grains; seasons of war, famine, and state pageants; and seasons of opportunity and hunger, which embrace whole territories of civilisation. Seasonal time seems to be cyclical, because ideas about seasons are modelled on patterns of natural repetition. But seasonality is also historical, because its cultural construction moves back to the future, as people predict and gamble based on their remembered experience. The understanding of seasonal patterns comes from observation and past predictions, apprehensions of the future; it encodes memory and evidence from past events. The regularity of seasonal rhythms -- which define the calendar of human activities in each farm setting -- allows investment to occur in one season with the hope and probabilistic expectation that dividends will accrue in the next. Correct action today creates future dearth or prosperity, depending on what the future brings. Lost opportunities and bad times can hurt for years. Understanding today's condition always requires dredging up the past, to see what went right or wrong. Any loss or accumulation represents the yield of the past. The cyclical quality of seasons thus encourages thinking about the future and the past, together, and calculations of past yield for making future-oriented decisions. Family incomes, state revenues, and capitalist profit depend on the predictability and the unpredictability of price movements across the seasons.


Agrarian time has physical substance and human emotion. Its content arises in part from the influence of seasons on the timing and the outcome of decision-making and in part from cultural experience. We know when we have entered a new kind of territory when the season has a different character, when local wisdom treats the same time of year very differently. The synchronisation of social life with nature means that big decisions must take the season into account; and decisions can effect the future drastically. War, migration, industrialisation, state building, irrigation building, urbanisation, and rebellion represent decisions by many individuals in seasons of their own agrarian space; and decisions accumulate to alter the experience and reality of seasonality. The flood, the famine, the drought, the plague, and all the big events in agrarian life are always connected culturally and experientially to the nature of the harvest and to human entitlements to the fruit of the land. Every year, a harvest consists of perishable produce with a limited, predictable life span, which not only feeds people in the present but also influences the future size, health, and activity of a population; and the harvest also determines prices for a period of time. Harvests affect prices very widely even in industrial economies and thus influence social experience and exchange relations throughout society; so that harvests influence the building and repair of cities and also the conduct of war, rituals, weddings, manufacturing, and commerce. Predictions and plans for future production on the farm are tied up tightly with seasonal planning for marriages and other events in the production of kinship and community. Plans for new planting and farm investments are tied up not only with predictions about rain but also with political gossip and economic prognostication. Daily decisions on the farm are inflected by big decisions in capital cities, where rulers need funds and support from the countryside. Historically, therefore, a great many elements influence the size, character, and feeling of agricultural space, in addition to the boundaries of states, empires, and nations.


Seasons connect farming time to natural time and divinity. Agriculture co-ordinates heaven and earth. Repetitive seasons -- readable in the skies -- display signs that forecast and stimulate the conduct and outcome of many kinds of social activity which intersect in farming. Agriculture's seasonality provides a temporal pattern of predictability, calculation, expectation, and planning for agrarian society as a whole. Seasonal uncertainty likewise provides a temporal framework in which to calculate risk and provisioning: it provides a temporal logic for social exertions of control, co-operation, solidarity, and initiatives to protect against catastrophe. Agriculture constitutes a history of experience that informs thinking about survival and prosperity, investment and success. Each season is a day in the life of all the many social institutions that intermingle with farming in agricultural territories.


The physical quality of seasons in South Asia form a huge transition zone between the aridity of Southwest Asia and the humidity of Southeast Asia.. As we travel east from the high, dry Sulaiman slopes, across the arid Peshawar valley, the Salt Range, the Punjab and the Indus valley; and then 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. Looking outward from South Asia to the west and east, we see its semi-tropical pattern of monsoons giving way in Afghanistan to a temperate zone pattern of hot summers and cold winters, with less rain all year, and giving way in Myanmar to the humid tropics' cycle of long, heavy rainy seasons with high average temperature and humidity. Chittagong is ecologically on the borderland of Southeast Asia. Kabul, at the border of Central Asia. The sun moves the months of humidity and aridity that define agricultural time in South Asia. 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 the activity of farming, except at high altitudes. The same crops can be grown in all the plains and valleys of South Asia with suitable inputs of water. Temperature regimes differ somewhat but we find the same seasonal pattern in Kashmir, Assam, the Konkan Coast, and Sri Lanka -- all rice-growing regions. North-south differences are less pronounced in South Asian than across comparable distances between Scotland and Italy, Beijing and Hong Kong, or New England and Florida. Everywhere (except at very high altitudes), the calendar and historic rhythms of farming in South Asia are pegged not to temperature but rather to moisture. In general terms that apply to the long expanse of agrarian history, the seasonal pattern can be described as a cyclical narrative, roughly as follows. The physical substance of the seasons organises a vast range of variation in South Asia and sets it apart from other agricultural environments in Eurasia.


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 and it almost never rains. In June, Himalayan snow-melt gorges the rivers in the north and the summer monsoon begins. The leading edge of the monsoon moves north-west from May through July, from Myanmar into Afghanistan. By late May, the monsoon has hit the Andaman Islands and Sri Lanka, and it then hits Kerala and Chittagong at about the same time. 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. But it provides the least rain to the arid western plains and north-west, which have the shortest, driest rainy season; and it brings very little rain to the interior of the central peninsula, which lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats. These are dry regions of savannah, scrub, and desert. As the days begin to shorten, from July onward, the rains continue but scatter more and more, week by week, though it can still be raining periodically in October, when 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 the coast between Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh.[1] This fickle second monsoon lasts into January, when five months of dry days 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 the summer sets in, 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 spectacles, and for building, repair, loans and debt, sometimes desperate commitments that will influence social relations of agriculture for seasons to come. The dry months of the year are full of preparations for the next rainy season, sustained by the immediate yield of the harvest.


Crops move off the land at different times of the year, but most profusely during the second and third months after the start of each monsoon, and the biggest harvest period is September-December. For example, in the north-east, with its high rainfall, running from June into January, there are three major harvest seasons. Rabi crops are mostly rice but include wheat, barley, and pulses in Bihar, and the rabi season covers March, April, and May. Bhadoi crops, which include millets in Bihar and Chhotanagpur in addition to rice, 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. By contrast, in the dry hills of western India, for the Bhils in the Narmada River basin, at the western tip of the Vindhya mountains, the agricultural year begins abruptly in May, after long, hot months without rain or local work, and now "people 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." Anticipating rain, "people who had migrated to the plains return home for the start of work" and harrowing and planting start with the rain in June. 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." After every harvest, crops take new life in the realm of circulation. They assume new material forms as moveable measures and as piled-up 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; to realise their symbolic potential as gifts, offerings, tribute, largesse, shares, alms, commodities, and credit advances. In this realm, in the season of circulation, investments by the buyers of farm produce, made in anticipation of the harvest, when crops were in the ground, seek dividends; because prices drop at harvest time and then rise predictably as the heat prolongs, and by June, predictions about the coming monsoon also begin to effect prices. Speculators seek returns accordingly. Agrarian wealth arises from the social powers that articulate these two great seasons -- of cultivation and circulation -- in the life of agricultural produce. 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 the sun, the rain, and the harvest cycle. Commodity prices and markets -- and thus profits and revenues for business and government -- move along the temporal path of agricultural seasonality; and today, farm 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, as crops move off the land, people also move out in search of work. Families that do not grow enough food on their own land to support their diets for the whole year have always constituted a large proportion of the farm population; and when farming is done and the heat is intense, many go out in search of sustenance. Their numbers and trajectories vary with the season. In years of plenty, they can find food close to home, and during droughts they go farther afield. But with predictable regularity, food becomes more costly 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. For those who have powers to employ, it is a time to acquire workers for seasonal off-farm labour; and people with stores of food and money do just that. Today, land owners with year-round supplies of irrigation water from mechanical pumps, wells, and canals in Punjab bring workers all the way from Bihar, and as we will see, such inequalities in the distribution of capital and labour have had a major influence on patterns of social power and economic development over the centuries. Historically, seasonal workers have moved in large numbers into warfare, manufacturing, building, and hauling, all perennial options. They transport and process crops in the season of circulation. The expansion and contraction of opportunities for such non-farm work in the hot season is a major determinant of workers' annual income. Dirt roads trampled hard and riverbeds dried up in the hot sun make this a good time to transport workers, grain, animals, and building materials. Haulers, herders, carters, and grazing land are badly needed during the season of circulation. Water and fodder for animals is a problem. Transhumant animal keepers take their flocks to the hills for grazing, and herds moving up and down the 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.


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 and competition as well as negotiation and exchange. Markets and urban centres are places where all the various people of the countryside mingle with one another -- causing endless problems -- under an umbrella of power held by the people who order the world and receive the riches of the land in return. Holding that power is a magical dream. In the mangala kavyas of eighteenth century Bengal, for instance, the poets "sing ecstatically of vakula trees in blossom, and cows grazing on the river-banks and water-birds and lotuses and peacocks ...." but rustic heroes go to town in search of wealth and crave to be king. In the eighteenth century, when Bijayram Sen travelled from Bengal to Banares, he described each town as a place of temporal authority and also of homage and piety; and in his travelogue, the Tirthamangala, divinity and authority dissolve into one another. "He describes, for instance, how the whole contingent stops to pay obeisance to the patron Krishnachandra's family deity at Gokulganj and [at] the marketplace established by his brother, Gokul Ghoshal, agent to Verelst, president of the Board of Revenue of the East India Company:

One by one we prostrated before all the gods

And came back after offering expenses of worship.

The season of circulation is also a time to raise armies and to 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 -- this is a popular theme from ancient Tamil literature that rings true today in the tales of Chambal Valley gangs who rob passing trains, and in the tales of Phoolan Devi. The hot season is belligerent. Benevolent rulers need force to keep the peace and ambitious rulers can use hungry soldiers to increase their territory.


In late May, all eyes turn to the skies and labour moves back to the land. This time is for preparation and expectation. Cultivation begins with the promise of rain. Work preparing fields for the crops varies in its 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 it 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. Calculating all of these variables, their interaction, and their risks and benefits consumes massive intellectual energy, endless hours of debate, argument, and negotiation during the season of cultivation. 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 rains that come and the level of water in rivers, streams, and reservoirs, for it is not only the total amount of rain that will determine the harvest but also the timing of rain and water supply as they affect each type of seed and soil on each bit of ground. Bad signs dictate conservative strategies for farmers living close to the margin. But for farmers with extra assets, rumours or signs of an impending bad monsoon or war might indicate potential profit during a subsequent season of 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 -- such as cotton, jute, rice, wheat, vegetables, sugarcane, tobacco, and plantain -- often require a loan. As we will see, historically the expansion of farms into forests and scrub lands has typically involved credit extended in the expectation of future yields; and increasing the capital intensity of farming -- by the addition of irrigation, fertilisers, machinery, processing equipment, animals, or labour -- usually depends upon credit. For farmers living 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. At planting time, old sayings and common sense generally dictate that farmers must follow conservative strategies, and it is typically seen as being better to secure some returns at harvest time than to lose everything with a bad bet. But old sayings on this subject are prominent because they are so often disobeyed, and a great many conflicts arise from gambles that do go bad -- especially, perhaps, in the home -- and the ruination of the improvident farmer and his family is a poignant theme in literature.


At the time of urgent investments when summer crops must be sown, gains from the past go to work, and the price of food is high when people are hungry for work. Past losses now hurt the most and farmers who have gambled and failed or lost labour in their households due to death or migration feel the pain of being unable to carry on without help, which can be humiliating. 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 the planting, and advances may or may not enrich creditors, but the commitments they involve do create social bonds that are critical, and often lasting, for both sides. Social commitments within families, communities, sects, castes, and other groups -- cemented during ritual events that punctuate the calendar -- enable farmers to acquire what they need to plough and plant. Reciprocity and redistribution enter a productive phase: horizontal solidarities and vertical bonds of loyalty and command facilitate planting, and look for returns. Gods also play their part. Supernatural beings take ritual offerings and hear lots of promises. In sacred sites, human fear and hope meet the natural powers that fix the fate of the crop. Omens are discussed. 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 their productivity on the land. Creditors, tax collectors, landlords, merchants, and lawyers come from town to invest in the crop and to make sure they will get their due.


Too many rainless days bring despair and high prices. Scarcities that become famines set in 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 in many places, and the possibility of flood or devastating storms in others, make the maintenance of subsistence options in times of dire distress a critical life-strategy for many people.


Rains bring hope, mosquitoes, malaria, flooding and waterborne disease. As the crops sprout and mature, so do estimates of their yield and the calculation of payments to be made for obligations incurred to do the planting. Farmers, creditors, landlords, and state officials evaluate their potential returns. Speculation and negotiation proceed along with uncertainty about the outcome of the season. The connection is again being forged between the 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. The immediate labour of village people on the farm itself -- required to bring the crop to fruition -- becomes most critical as the harvest approaches. Farm labour is needed at just the right time for timely watering, weeding, cutting, hauling, winnowing, drying, and storing the crop. Disruptions to the work at hand during this climactic phase of cultivation can ruin the crop and spoil the future that is planned based on predictions of yield. As a result, enmity can take a nasty turn. The reliable commitment of labour to the farm becomes most valuable now; and the real market value of labour increases as the harvest begins. At harvest time, prices fall as labour demand is peaking, and labour demand is particularly high when another crop will be immediately sown, which is often the case in regions that benefit from the winter monsoon; and irrigation often allows a second or third crop to be planted. The most hectic work time hits all the farmers at once in each locality, and at this time, stability and harmony in social relations -- so prized in agricultural communities around the world -- become critical for determining dividends for everyone who has invested in the crop. This is also a time when conflicts intensify over the division of the crop and over the fulfilment of past promises.


Festivals, rituals, and weddings follow the harvest and bring relief from work and tension. But struggles over the division of the produce follow it into its season of circulation, especially when the yield is worse than predicted and expectations are frustrated. This is a time when tax collectors, creditors, in-laws, and landlords can become nasty. The big harvest festivals mark the completion of the agricultural year and the reproduction of the social basis for another cycle of seasons. Each year influences the next by providing the material and social assets with which all the many participants in agriculture face one another in the negotiations of everyday life. Among these assets, the divine blessing is basic, and gods get lots of attention when the harvest is done.


Because it controls the seasons, the sun exerts general control over agricultural time. In popular mythology, Surya drives a chariot pulled by seven white horses, and turns around among the stars to head north in January, moving into the celestial house of Makara (Capricorn). The turn of the solar year occurs during the overlapping months of the summer and winter harvests (between November and February) and it is celebrated everywhere in South Asia. But the start of the cultivation year actually falls at the end of the hot season, in June. For all the agrarian states which have pinned their financial well-being and their revenue calendar on the seasons of agriculture, financial transactions with the farmers continue throughout the solar cycle and the revenue year has conventionally started with the summer monsoon. The fiscal year -- or Fasli (revenue settlement) year, which is derived from Mughal practice and retained by modern states -- runs from the middle of one solar year (July) to the next. In India today, the summer session of Parliament also starts in July, and elections are timed to precede the monsoon, which makes the planting season a time of period of political promises as well. In the drier parts of South Asia, the harvest from the summer crop is much more prominent than the winter harvest and thus for the agricultural population, the farming year effectively ends in December, a popular time for marriages. October and November also witness major festivals: Dassara, Durga Puja, and Navaratri. The winter crop season is most prominent in wetter regions and where irrigation is abundant, and here there is greater emphasis on festivities in January-February, as in Tamil Nadu, where Pongal marks the new year and also celebrates the harvest. Everywhere, the solar cycle is the basis for calendrical timings for festivals of many kinds which punctuate the social life of agriculture. (Regional patterns and historical change in the intermeshed calendars of agriculture and ritual is a much under-explored area of scholarly investigation.)


The more we investigate agriculture, the harder it is to draw definite boundaries around it. In seasons of farming, farm families and others involved in farming do essential work on and off the land, and what they do in the mosque, in the bank, or at court may be as important as work in the field to their survival and to the harvest. If we define "farming" to include every activity that directly determines what is accomplished on a bit of farmland, then it must include off-farm and non-farm work by farm family members (including all the work inside the household); and it must also include activity by non-farmers that immediately affects farming -- such as irrigation-building, negotiating rental arrangements, collecting taxes, making loans, repaying debts, settling property disputes, and mobilising labour. Farming thus involves a wide range of social activities, but even defined in this broad way, it still constitutes only a small proportion of agricultural activity, which is more widely dispersed among many social settings. It is little wonder that vernacular texts in South Asia from ancient times to the present describe "agriculture" very vaguely and broadly, treating ritual and astrology, for instance, as critical features of agricultural knowledge. Modern mentalities may assign prayer, worship, myth, marriage, and pilgrimage to the realm of religion; genetics, hydrology, engineering, medicine, meteorology, astrology, and alchemy to the realm of science; metal working, carpentry, spinning, weaving, and pot making to the realm manufacturing; and trade, banking, war, herding, migration, politics, poetry, drama, adjudication, administration, and policing each to their separate realms of social activity. But all these are part of agriculture. They contain essential agricultural activity..


Historically, a majority of social activities and institutions in South Asia have had some agricultural aspect or dimension. This is what makes a social space and cultural environment agrarian. A region or social space 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. In this respect, industrialism has overtaken agriculture very slowly and partially around the world. Industry and urbanism may be identified with modernity, but vast areas inside industrial, urban countries remain agrarian today; and most of the modern world is in fact agrarian as measured by the use of its land, the work of its populations, and the origins of gross domestic product . Agrarian histories intersect the history of modernity everywhere. South Asian history involves a broad mix of agricultural and industrial activities and a constant mingling of rural and urban environments. But modernity's urban middle classes around the world detached themselves from agrarian life and took history with them, so that agrarian history now seems smaller -- more compact, specialised, and marginal -- than the political, cultural, and social history within which the urban middle classes find their own past.


To analyse the history of social power in agriculture and its articulation with states and environments, we can look for dispersed activities that constitute agriculture and are scattered across agrarian space. For long periods and in large territories of agrarian history, there was little if any organisational power to co-ordinate agricultural activity in much of agrarian space. Nowhere in the world do we ever find one overarching systemic intelligence holding all the physical elements and forms of social power together which constitute agriculture, even today, even in the most centrally controlled agricultural regimes. Nature's variability discourages any overbearing, non-local control over the intimate, everyday conduct of farming. A single farm -- or a slave plantation, or a commune -- might be tightly organised, but controlling farming activity minutely in a large territory is impossible. As we will see, the organised effort to establish large-scale institutional mechanisms to control farming locally is a basic project of modernity, and it dominates the process of agricultural development. From this perspective, Moreland was quite wrong, for what he called "development" in the Delhi Sultanates and Mughal Empire was a very different kind of project from the modernisation that he had promulgated as a Uttar Pradesh agricultural officer in the 1920s. Even though both could be said to be state projects of agricultural improvement, pre-modern projects involved no state power worth mentioning inside the operation of the farm itself. State powers mobilised under British rule were of a much greater magnitude, they had deeper local penetration, and they were designed to influence the operation of individual farms. They had some success. After 1947, national states extended their local powers considerably, and since 1980, international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank have been striving to supersede the organisational powers which national institutions have exercised over farm production, as they seek to harness farms everywhere to the discipline of world markets. Institutions of control over production form a large part of agrarian history.


Cultivation and circulation are never haphazard in agrarian space, even in the absence of centralised controls. Regularities form within natural landscapes and interconnected agrarian activities articulate variously self-conscious social powers that organise agriculture in the circumscribed spaces that we can call agrarian territory. A single logic or dominant form of social power may not control agriculture in such territory, but the markings of agrarian territorialism can be mapped, and their changing formations of social power can be charted chronologically. Mapping patterns of control and order, including internal resistance and external disruptions, defines the historical geography of agriculture. States help to organise agriculture by forming zones of power which co-ordinate many kinds of social activity that intersect on the farm. But many types of circulating elements inhabit agrarian space. Farms are only the most immediate point of contact between land and labour -- the most tangible site of production -- and most of what constitutes agriculture circulates far beyond the boundaries of the farm and well beyond boundaries of cultivation. Institutions that organise the movement of materials and activities into and out of farm land -- including the state -- organise social power in agriculture.


States exert their powers by defining, enclosing, and regulating territorial units of agricultural organisation. Describing territory and legitimating state authority in agrarian space constitutes essential work for state elites and affects the character of social power in farming. We can see documentary traces of this activity from the time of the Mauryas onwards, but the ideas about territory which modern historians routinely impose on the land in South Asia derive from colonial times. As the East India Company drew state boundaries for the Raj, it also "settled" farming regions with laws of landed property and policies of revenue collection that regulated agrarian territory. By 1815, the Raj had settled upon the village as the basic unit of agrarian administration. Within the boundaries of British India, authors enshrined the village community as the core political, economic, and social unit. Initially, this accompanied blatant efforts to discredit previous rulers and to eliminate their territorial traces. But as modern ideas developed about civilisations of the Orient, evidence accumulated that the peasant village community had survived through all the ages of empire and calamity before British rule. Ideologically, the village came to represent a survival of agrarian tradition and the administrative foundation of agrarian modernity. Modern authors then constructed a civilisation territory within the territory of British India, and this defined the national heritage for the peoples of modern South Asia. Nepal, for instance, would not be the territory it is today without a specific set of victories in wars with the East India Company, but today, this nation state marks a civilisation territory with an ancient heritage. Modernity invented traditions of civilisations and within them, village territories where individual peasant families farmed their own land with their own self-possessed resources. The territory called "India" became traditional and the village and family farm became its elemental units. The cultural construct called "India" came to rest on the idea that one basic cultural logic did in fact organise agriculture with all its constituent (village) territories from ancient to modern times. Debates have raged as to whether this unitary logic should be understood in terms of exploitation or consensus, but within all the national territories of modernity in South Asia, stable, traditional village societies were taken to be territories of ancient agrarian civilisation which had survived basically unchanged over the millennia before colonialism.


The modern invention of civilisation territories continues a very old elite project of using narration to organise agrarian territories. Modern imperialists projected the map of British India back into histories of ancient times to legitimate their authority over all the villages in this agrarian territory and to authorise their own ability to speak for the poor, downtrodden, country folk. Nehru's Discovery of India, like the Akbarnama, narrates geography and genealogy to inscribe territorial order and authority. The modern master narrative of Indian civilisation thus bestows upon leaders of the modern state the charisma of epic heroes and classical emperors. This narrative begins with Aryans and Vedas and moves on to a "classical age" led by the Mauryas and Guptas, so that a linear evolution of civilisation defines the land of Bharat. In the ancient past, classical traditions came into place which are presumed to have filled out the civilisational space of Bharat, so that later migrations into this territory can be seen as "foreign invasions." After "foreign conquests" by the Hunas, our civilisation narrative recounts the fall of the Guptas and the onset of a medieval period of political fragmentation and regionalization, which spans about twelve hundred years. Before 1290, we learn, Hindu kings established vibrant regional cultures, but then once again foreign conquerors came from Central Asia and began the epoch of Muslim rule. Still another political fragmentation followed the end of Mughal imperium, which led to another foreign invasion and conquest -- by the British -- and thus to all the transformations and disruptions of modernity. In the modern period, the master narrative concludes, the natives in this civilisation-territory drove out the British, and by 1971, popular national movements had created the independent states of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Notwithstanding differences among these states, their official histories agree that their boundaries are inscribed on the land from ancient times. They also agree that basic traditional forms of village society remained intact from ancient to modern times.


The core continuity in this official narrative -- that the village represents a constant unit of agrarian order from ancient times to the present -- indicates how ideologically important village tradition is for modern states. The scale of conceptual control over agrarian territory exercised in this linear narrative by the people who claim to represent the true legacy of this civilisation also indicates the importance of old empires for modern states. Though this master narrative pertains to the legacy of nations, and describes neither the chronology nor the geography of agrarian history, its rendition of civilising power does indicate some contours of the institutional environment within which social powers have sought to organise agriculture over the centuries. Elites who define civilisation in their own image are also designing agrarian territories in moral, political, and mythological terms. Mythology helps to sustain institutions of social power on the land. Civilising power is controlling, imaginative, mythical and magical. We can jettison ideas about there being one (or any fixed number) of civilisation(s) in South Asia, and view South Asia instead as a geographical space in which many elements of civilising power have been combined historically, including cities, states, high culture, organised religion, elites, manufacturing, merchants, science, and philosophical reflections on the nature of the universe. Such powers do exert control over agricultural activities and define agrarian space, giving agrarian territory subtle substance, because culture instigates powers of control over nature and over work on the farm.


Maps


Physically, work on the farm is mostly lifting, pushing, pulling, cutting, pouring, hauling, pumping, chopping, digging, and otherwise moving things around. Farms seem to be fixed in space, but even the plants in the ground only turn into crops when they move into the realm of circulation. Historical geography needs to consider not only changing farm areas over time but also the moving elements that must converge at moments-in-space to make farming happen. The powers that people exert to confine these elements spatially and temporally mark agricultural territories; but confinements which form boundaries and borderlands are always porous and partial. Think about water. It defines farm environments of South Asia more than any other physical element. Nature distributes water but does not determine its agricultural geography. Water moving in the sky, on the ground, and under the ground creates the timing and location of aridity and humidity. Farms control water. Farming in South Asia means putting elements in place that will make the most of water when it arrives. Water never stops moving and changing form: it percolates, evaporates, falls, runs, freezes, and melts. Its local supply and its local effects on farms might seem to be simply the product of rain falling on the ground -- as the old saying would have it, "Farming is a gamble on the monsoon" -- but agriculture is not simply a series of bets about chance occurrences. Irrigated agriculture is a massive social project, which people in South Asia have engaged since ancient times. Today, the expansion of irrigation by pumping water from deeper and deeper levels and by extending controls over the length of every river are prime strategies to increase farm productivity. Irrigation defines agrarian space not only by its landscape architecture and physical powers over water above and below the ground, but also by its institutions and social formations. The social institutions that bring drainage and subsoil water onto farmland always implicate elite non-farmers in cities and towns across regions that stretch miles away from the site of irrigation itself. The historical geography of irrigated agriculture includes the physical distribution of surface and sub-surface water, the territorial configuration of institutions that bring that water onto farms, and the movement of ideas about technology, power, and justice that make those institutions work.


So-called dry farms have no irrigation, but they also depend on complex social institutions that control agricultural elements circulating in territories that surround dry fields and villages. Getting seeds into the ground in time for the rain requires labour, equipment for ploughing, and materials like seeds and manure which need to be applied in a timely fashion -- timing is critical -- even if the farmer does not have the necessary resources immediately at hand and nothing is left in store from the previous season to supply these inputs. Seasonal circumstances or chronic shortages often require external finance before ploughing can begin; financing must somehow move into the farm nexus and facilitate the movement of necessary goods and services onto a farmer's land. All farms, moreover, depend on seeds bred over centuries to catch the moisture and make the most of the rain as it moves from the sky down into the ground and evaporates back out into the atmosphere. Seeds and seed breeding represent technology for controlling the local effects of water mingled with nurturing elements in the soil. Farmers seek seeds that yield more with less water, grow faster to make the most of scarce water supplies, or like the primeval arid-zone crop -- pearl millet -- produce something with almost no rain. The green revolution is based on seeds that can be made to yield much more than older varieties with additional inputs of water and fertiliser; it is an old strategy that is being bent toward increasing productivity with the assumption of higher inputs of moisture and plant nutrition. Seed selection and breeding activities must occur in wide agricultural spaces before they are applied on specific bits of land. Though in the short run, seeds that a farmer plants might come from the yield of the previous season, promiscuity makes pollination creative and adaptive. Over the years, the selection and breeding of crops must occur within wide zones of pollination in order to be effective for any individual farmer, even as farmers restrict the breeds and breeding in their own fields. Adding organic material to the soil makes the most of water at hand, whether by adding silt and minerals with irrigation water, grazing animals to make grass and stubble into manure, ploughing in organic matter brought from forests, or applying chemicals. These materials come to the farm from outside, and institutional arrangements for their movement are critical in farming. Wooded lands for green manure have been very often controlled by communities, rulers, and landlords, rather than by individual farmers. Nomads or transhumant shepherds often bring animals to graze on the fields. Chemical fertilisers come from petrochemical plants, state industries, and multinational corporations. The origin, control, and terms of trade that bring added fertility to the land make a big difference in everyday farm life.


Knowledge is a critical element in farming and brings the other elements together in the organisation of agriculture. Texts depict territories of social power. Ideas moving among farmers create territories of knowledge. An elusive geography of ideas surrounds farmers who need to know how to make the best (or even safest and simplest) gamble with the rains. Each farmer needs to know about soil preparation, seed selection, planting, watering, manuring, and weeding for the specific combination of water, crops, soil, and labour conditions on each farm. Ways of knowing come from generations of learning in wide regions. Every individual calculation and decision on each farm is the result of conversations among many farmers and other people, which accumulate over generations. Textual representations of old forms of agricultural knowledge can be found in Sanskrit texts from the first millennium CE, like the Krisiparasara and Varahamihira's Brhat Samhita, which give astrologers and people who control powerful mantras and rituals key roles in agriculture. Brhat Samita verses say that all astrologers must know "indications of the approach of the monsoon ... signs of immediate rainfall, prognostication through the growth of flowers and creepers ... [celestial influences on the] fluctuation in the prices of commodities [and] growth of crops ... treatment and fertilising of trees, water-divination [etc.]"[#16] Because deities enjoy trees and water [#537], the astrologer needs to know signs on the earth that indicate water sources below [#499-61]. He needs to know portents of famine: sunspots are a dire signal, but also certain rainbows [#29], shapes on the moon's face [#36-8], eclipses [#58], dust storms [#67], appearances of Venus [#105], and comets [#146- 51]. The Brhat Samhita introduces its treatment of portents of rain with phrasing that we often find in old texts: "As food forms the very life of living beings, and as food is dependent on the monsoon, [the monsoon] should be investigated carefully."[#230] Seven chapters consider rain signs -- and just like Tamil proverbs recorded in the 1890s -- focus on configurations of the planets and signs like rainbows, cloud shapes, insect and animal behaviour, the sounds and shapes of thunder and lightning, and rainfall during each divisions of the solar and lunar calendar. Many agricultural proverbs recorded in modern times refer to the wisdom of astrologers, who provided guidance for farmers. In 1802, Benjamin Heyne found a set of instruments in Mysore for measuring rain that were used to compile almanacs and to presage "the quantity of rain allotted to each country"; and the Brhat Samhita shows astrologers how to make such rainfall measurements accurately [#245-6]. The Krishiparasa gives mantras to ward off insect and animal pests from the field, while the Sarangadharapadhati describes effective natural pesticides. In the 1870s, Lal Behari Day recorded a range of local curses, omens, and magical powers at work on Bengal farms.


Geographies of labour mobility also define agrarian territory. For most farmers, most of the time, moving labour onto the land at the right time to do the right thing is no mean feat. Effective control over material and labour matched to specific bits of farm land is never been merely a gamble, nor is it determined on a single farm. Patriarchy, labour markets, and other elements in the micro-politics of labour control link together many farms and sites of power in agrarian territories. Historically, moreover, a vast amount of agricultural production in South Asia has involved moving labour over the land in patterns that are not typical of what we think of as sedentary agriculture. Slash-and-burn farming, long- and short-fallow farming (in which fields are planted over a range of fallowing intervals), and alternating field use under different crops, grasses, and animals have been prominent for centuries. Many farming communities have moved as whole communities around an agricultural territory to define its shifting boundaries and to relocate their farms over seasons and generations. And over the long-term, as we will see, migrations of labour and capital have changed the landscape by creating farms where there were none before, and by replacing one type of farm with another. Moving labour onto a particular bit of farmland in each season is an activity that occurs within wide movements of labour, and all these nested geographies of labour mobility are not necessarily confined by the village or by political boundaries that appear on ordinary maps. Very often, labour moves away from farming activity altogether -- into manufacturing, transportation, military, and other occupations -- and needs to be brought back to the farm in time for the planting; or if it moves away permanently, it needs to be replaced, perhaps by using cash remittances sent by children from far away places. Turning income derived from non-farm work and from other investments into assets which can be deployed effectively on the farm has long been a key to prosperity in farming.


Prices define another moving, elusive geography. The cost of farm inputs, the exchange value of outputs, and the quantity of produce that remains in the hands of a farmer at year's end, to be applied the next year -- all these are in part determined in wider spatial domains than are defined by the farm, village, cultural region, state, or empire. Farm families are almost never content to consume only what grows on the farm and they are often unable to sustain themselves with their own farm products or income, so that off-farm labour and non-farm products are important for the reproduction of the most self-sufficient farm families, whose local entitlements typically depend upon prices.


Finally, mythologies and sacred geographies define agrarian space, because no farming population has ever believed that activity on the farm itself is sufficient for success in farming. Propitiating deities, paying homage to holy persona, visiting sacred places, and gathering with one's own people to create ritual conditions for success on the farm are essential in agriculture.


Agriculture thus involves the exertion of powers of control over many moving elements -- including esoteric knowledge, supernatural beings, human migrations, prices, commodities, and elements of nature -- within which farmers apply labour on the land. Control over the means of production is thus no simple function of property rights, caste, or class structure. Agriculture is an aspect of social institutions and power relations within which farms and farmers work. It is an aspect of civilisation which generates, combines, and focuses physical powers over naturally moving and socially moveable objects in production. The historical geography of agriculture is therefore not simply described by the extent of fields and farms, or by the boundaries of states, or by cultural regions, although fields, farm territory, and political and cultural powers do mark territorial boundaries in agrarian space.


Agrarian territory is that part of agrarian space which can be effectively bounded, physically and culturally, marked as a spatial domain for organised social power and activity. Agrarian territory is reproduced over time by the reproduction of social power within social institutions. The state is a collection of institutions which have central points and figures of authority. State institutions are those most directly under the control of people in official hierarchies of authority. There are many kinds of state institutions -- military, fiscal, legal, and managerial -- and they vary in their ability to organise social power in agriculture. Social power in agriculture is by definition distributed unequally, not only in amount but in quality, because it is constituted by effective decisions which direct the movement of the elements that are combined productively in farming. Power meets resistance. Physical power meets physical resistance. Forest growth resists the expansion of farm land. Animals fought back in the Sunderbans and became the scourge of Bengal settlers there. Water constantly resists control and seems at times to want to flood the land and to hide in the earth. Physical force can also be used to overcome resistance from people. But coercion is not the only kind of interaction between social power and social resistance. The various qualities of social power interact in various combinations, negotiations, alliances, exchanges, accommodations, and forms of conflict. These interactions form patterns within the institutions of agrarian territoriality. Because all the moving elements in agriculture resist control, agrarian territoriality -- like nationality -- is always an on-going project, and movements into and out of institutional territories are constantly problematic. Within agrarian territory, control is always relative. On one end of the spectrum, natural phenomena -- such as monsoons, topography, evaporation, photosynthesis, and soil types --resist human control absolutely. Prices, knowledge, beliefs, and migration are nearly as hard to control as the wind, but efforts to control them have long been objects of territorial ambition. On the other end of the spectrum, humans do control things like cropping patterns, wage rates, marriage choices, occupational options, state institutions, and the like. Such controllable items form the visible landmarks of territoriality in agrarian space.


Institutions define agrarian territory with social routines of control over dispersed, moving elements in agricultural production. As we will see, violence is prominent in agrarian South Asia and it is critical in Ranajit Guha's brief treatment of territoriality, which can serve as a benchmark. Guha defines a peasant in British India as a subaltern subject of a semi-feudal regime controlled by landlords, moneylenders, bankers, high castes, and colonial officials. These elites form a "composite apparatus of dominance over the peasant." He argues that peasant consciousness appears in "the general form of peasant resistance," and that territoriality is an elementary aspect (a basic component) of peasant insurgency; expressing resistance and consciousness. Inscribed in peasant thought and action, peasant territoriality facilitates and circumscribes insurgency. It is distinctly subaltern, wholly outside the state, analytically and politically opposed to elite identity and control. Relatively small in extent, peasant territoriality is fluid, anti-geometrical, and logically opposed to modern boundary definitions. Formed in natural landscapes by social networks, sacred places, myths, and personal alliances, territoriality is inscribed in peasant consciousness by social and cultural history, and by old logics of social action that Guha finds manifest in violent uprisings in colonial times. Guha indicates that insurgency is one fleeting rendition of a cultural map that is drawn by many means over centuries of life on the land. He does not, however, explore the history of peasant territoriality. Is it historical, that is, produced by conscious human agency over time, changing, mutable, and recorded in evidence from the past? Guha says that the "dye of a traditional culture was yet to wash off the peasant's consciousness," so it would seem that peasants inherit territory as tradition. But we could propose that histories of various kinds -- involving kinship, religion, trade, migration, and states -- constructed old territories in the peasant world. Peasant territorialism had utility and meaning in activities other than insurgency, for instance, in farming, trade, marriage, war, pilgrimage, and diplomacy. These uprisings were actually part of a long history of territorial conflict on frontiers of intensive agriculture as it pushed into more extensive tribal regimes of cultivation. Peasant insurgencies were violent formations of social power that the mostly tribal insurgents produced to conquer people who were taking away their land. From a long-term perspective within agrarian history, such insurgency is a moment of territorialisation. In the late twentieth century, descendants of the insurgents fight for their land in elections, courts, and international agencies.


Territorial institutions -- including caste groups, lineages, clans, tribal groups, village communities, armies, sects, businesses, states, and war -- inscribe their identity on agrarian space and constitute social power in agrarian territory. The nation is one such institution. Agrarian history is informed most copiously by the records and other traces (including the sculpting of the land itself) that territorial institutions leave behind. Social institutions may not be able to control monsoons, but they can (1) control elements like water, finances, and commodities, (2) determine rules for entitlements to means of production, (3) accumulate wealth and finance technologies that increase the total pool of farm assets, and (4) organise power for the benefit of specific groups in agrarian society. Agrarian institutions leave texts behind which indicate that they have changed radically over millennia, in part because of the fluidity, permeability, and reconfiguration of their territories. Mobility across territories seems to be a major threat when seen from inside territorial institutions; but from the outside, we can see that such mobility provides the very reason for the existence of boundaries among territories and the powers that define them. The extent of mobility influencing agrarian South Asia has never been confined to the subcontinent, conventional images of Indian civilisation notwithstanding. Interlaced trajectories, networks, circuits, zones, and regions of mobility connect western, eastern, and southern Eurasia from prehistoric to modern times. All agrarian territories in South Asia have distinctive features which have been imparted by their location within zones of mobility that define southern Eurasia by land and sea.


One zone of mobility defines South Asia overland inside inland southern Asia. This zone includes two broad corridors: one connects the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta in the east with Iran and the Palestine in the west; the other runs north-south from central Asia into central India and the southern peninsula. These corridors intersect in two strategic regions: Kabul, Herat, and Mashad lie astride corridors that connect south, central, and west Asia; Delhi, Ajmer, and Bhopal lie astride the intersecting corridors that connect Kabul, Bengal, and Gujarat with the Deccan and southern peninsula. Though mountains are often seen as natural boundaries to mobility -- most prominently, the Himalayas and Vindhyas -- they do not so much obstruct as channel the movement of elements that influence agrarian history. Travels across Nepal to and from the Gangetic plain have always been less prominent than along routes running through Kashmir; and overland treks from Assam into China are fewer still. But to the west and north-west, barriers to mobility across the Hindu Kush, Iran, Central Asia, China have been erected mostly by military force -- by Mauryan against the Indo-Greeks, Turk and Afghan against the Mongols, and British against the Russians. In the east, dense tropical jungles have restricted transportation over the high mountains, but in the west, battle lines have been more effective determinants transport costs along the inland corridors of southern Asia.


A second zone of mobility defines South Asia in the Indian Ocean. The sea is not a barrier but a watery terrain of low transportation costs. It creates a historical geogaphy of shorelines that runn from East Africa and the Red Sea to Southeast Asia and China. Over the centuries, technological change dramatically lowered transport costs. Long distance and bulk transportation were always cheaper, safer, and quicker, until the railway; and in Roman times, waterways connected South Asia with the Mediterranean and South China. In the day of Delhi Sultans, sea routes spanned Eurasia. By Akbar's time, they crossed the Atlantic and Pacific to connect coastal regions around the world. Coastal South Asia spread north along waterways in Bengal past Dhaka and west up the Ganga as far as Patna, as the Ganga also formed a highway inland up to Agra, along which flowed the Mughal revenue. Along the coastal shore lands, boats could land anywhere, moving with monsoon wind. Waterways formed open zones of interaction all along the coast, but some inland areas were much better connected to sea than others. From the mouth of the Indus to the Konkan, and from Kanya Kumari to Chittagong, the inland areas are more accessible to the sea, but Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Nepal are very distant. The coast of Myanmar-Malaysia is cut off by mountain forest and jungle from the inland corridors of southern Asia. The coastal regions of Orissa and Kerala are also relatively isolated by mountain forests from the inland corridors.


These connected zones of extensive mobility -- rather than any fixed territorial expanse of Indic civilisation -- have defined a world which has continuously shaped agrarian institutions in South Asia. Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are at the eastern edge of an urban region that was strung along land and sea routes running from the Mediterranean to Indus. During the millennium


before the Mauryas, archaeological and linguistic data describe an extensive zone of settlement and cultural movement running from the Mediterranean to the eastern Ganga basin; and new regions of material culture are indicated by distributions of painted grey ware, black and polished ware, cists, urns, and cairns in the Indo-Gangetic plains and the southern peninsula. Under the Mauryas, data from literature, archaeology, travellers' accounts, and other sources describe networks and centres of mobility running from Iran to Bengal and from the Oxus to the Narmada; and in this inland zone, a political boundary was drawn west of the Indus, dividing Maurya domains from those of the Achaemenids and Indo-Greeks. This boundary -- pivoting in the north-west around Taksila and Gandhara, where Panini was born -- divided eastern and western regions of southern Eurasia; but mobility across this boundary made it so politically important, and Panini's Astadhyayi indicates increasing commercial connections across the inland routes of southern Eurasia under the Mauryas. Mobility across this political divide would shape agrarian history on both sides without interruption from Mauryan times onward.


At the start of the first millennium CE -- when Sangam literature was being composed in the southern peninsula -- texts to inform history multiplied rapidly east of the Sulaiman Range. This resulted from new powers in agrarian states over the movement of people, goods and ideas. A proliferation of texts resulted particularly from the activity of Brahman literati who moved among and settled in regions of intensive agriculture. Agricultural intensification, state expansion, and cultural production accelerated together under the Guptas, who put an imperial model of Indian civilisation, first invented by the Mauryas, firmly in place. Imperial Gangetic dynasties sanctified the Ganga and made their own core political territory into a heartland of universal authority. In the second half of the first millennium, many dynasties used technologies of power produced by the Guptas to create boundaries in the agrarian lowlands. But inland corridors of mobility across Eurasia remain visible under the Mauryas and Kusanas, under Gupta and Hunas, and they appear again in the tenth and eleventh centuries in data that mark the overlapping ambitions of Ghaznavids, Hindu Shahis, Candellas, Later Kalacuris, Paramaras, and Ghorids. Inter-regional political competition to control inland corridors made Kabul and Delhi strategic places around which military competition would revolve from then on. Beginning with the Ghaznavids -- then with Ghorids, Mamluks, Khaljis, Tughluqs, Lodis, and Mughals -- people who came from west of the Indus increasingly controlled the inland corridors; and for the Brahman literati in medieval states, this fact took on the appearance of foreign invasion and rising Muslim power. But from an agrarian perspective, the transformation of southern Asia during first half of the second millennium looks rather different.


In centuries just before 1300, agrarian territories were expanding all across Eurasia, from western Europe to China. Networks of trade connected territories from England to Shanghai, by land across the Silk Road and by sea across the Indian ocean. Strong, compact, expansive regional states all across southern Asia generated and drew upon assets in that part of this trading system which embraced the inland corridors and the maritime zone of the Indian ocean. For the Paramaras in Malwa (10-13th century), Hoysalas in Mysore (11-14th century), Caulukyas in Gujarat (10-13th century), Warangal Kakatiyas in Andhra (12-14th century), Devagiri Yadavas in Maharashtra (13th century), Gahadavalas in Kasi (12th century), Cahamanas in Rajasthan (10-12th century), Gangas in Orissa (11-15th century), Kalyani Calukyas in the Deccan (11-12th century), Cholas in Tamil country (10-13th century), and Senas in Bengal (12-13th century), dynastic wealth expanded along routes that ran north and south overland, to the coast, and overseas. Later medieval rulers, based at the cross-roads of the inland zone, around Delhi, rose to power within the interactive history of regions along the inland corridors. The Delhi Sultans facilitated and depended upon widening movements of people and goods by land and sea, which brought travellers, settlers, warriors, and sufis into the subcontinent. All competing states in southern Asia expanded in size and power amidst the expanding mobility after 1100. Old agrarian territories continued to grow under the impress of the new military and organisational powers brought to bear by late medieval rulers. The Ghorids (12th century), Mamluks (13th century), Khaljis and Tughluqs (14th century) worked within a vast political region which the Gurjara-Pratiharas had previously built, running south beyond Malwa into the peninsula; and north-south mobility along the inland corridors became even more important for all states south of the Narmada after 1300. The old regional boundaries drawn by Cholas and Calukyas were drawn again by more powerful Vijayanagar, Bijapur, and Bahmani states in the fifteenth century. Territories of agricultural expansion developed continuously in Rajasthan, Bengal, Punjab, Malwa, Orissa, and the Ganga plain as they were incorporated into later medieval states. Babur lived in this world of state power. The powers that built the Mughal empire ran along the full expanse of southern Eurasia.


Agrarian elites left many texts to indicate that they experienced their changing medieval context as an age of foreign invasion and conquest. Along the Ganga plain, in Malwa and the Deccan, and south to Kanya Kumari, the end of the thirteenth century marked the end of an age dominated by ruling elites whose institutional powers descended from the age of the Guptas. Historians have many documents from temples, bards, pandits, and artists that describe invasions of their sacred space and violations of their sacred order. In the view of the literary elites, the earlier medieval conquests which had produced their own social power represented morality and cultural florescence; and the new warriors and intellectuals who came from afar -- whose networks and identities covered great distances -- brought the end of their golden age. But as we will see, agrarian history is marked by striking continuities in the dynamics of power from the last of the Guptas to the rise of the Mughals. Continuities remain after 1550, but Mughal conquest and administration put in place new territorial institutions. The inland zone of southern Asia was integrated as never before by Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which dramatically increased mobility, east and west. Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires depended for their wealth on networks of trade that linked them to one another by land and sea. Records at Bursa reveal that the bulk of its sixteenth century eastern imports came from India, including spices but predominantly textiles. Across southern Eurasia, the net flow of manufactured goods and spices moved from the east to the west; and the net flow of precious metals moved in the opposite direction, a reciprocal movement which connected London, Istanbul, Bursa, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Isfahan, Multan, Dhaka, Surat, Hyderabad, and Madurai, as well as all the ports of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. As early as the 1470s, the Bahmani sultans organised a trade initiative at Bursa, and Bahmani correspondence with Malwa sultans proposed joint control over sea trade to the west. Inland trade to the west justified great Mughal expense to keep the mountain passes to Kabul open for safe travel. At the same time, the Portuguese brought new crops -- among them chillies, tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, and coffee.


It is appropriate, therefore, to study agrarian regions in South Asia during the centuries after 1500 in a historical context that is not formed by an enclosed a civilisation territory but rather is defined by extensive, fluid zones and corridors of mobility stretching overland to Syria and China and overseas to Europe and the New World. It is quite inappropriate to imagine agrarian South Asia as being a closed, tradition-bound territory, fixed in its territorial definition during the medieval period, which was invaded and conquered by Muslims and later by Europeans. By 1750, people from western Eurasia were long-standing participants in the urban cultures of the coast and in the maritime zones of southern Asia. The cultural economy of the South Asian coast, and particularly its urban centres, were in many respects more similar to other littoral territories along the Indian Ocean rim than to the agro-urban territories of the Mughal heartland, which were more closely attached culturally to the interior zones of mobility running across Iran and Uzbekistan. Well before 1200, moreover, agrarian elites in South Asia exercised their power and gained their wealth in corridors of mobility that criss-crossed southern Eurasia, by land and sea, and they continued to do so under all the later regimes as well.





Landscapes


Agrarian territories took distinctive forms in six kinds of environments, which we can divide roughly into forty geographical units. All have ancient traces of agrarian activity. They housed medieval agrarian territories of various types, discussed in the Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, we see how in the early modern period, circa 1500-1850, farming territories were brought together to form agrarian regions -- culturally coherent, spatially organised territories of social power -- and in Chapter Four, we see how these regions were institutionalised, integrated, and differentiated by modernity. Farming landscapes are therefore not defined primarily by their physical or environmental qualities, but rather by the long term interaction of geography, culture, technology, and social power. Environmentally, they can be divided rather simply between two sets of binary oppositions, according to elevation and humidity, whose combination and transitions define much of the physical setting: mountains versus plains, and semi-arid versus humid tropics. Most farm land lies in the semi-arid plains, including river valleys and plateaux; and almost all of the remainder is in the humid lowlands, which have a higher proportion of population than of farm land. But all the divisions, interactions, and intersections of uplands and lowlands and dry and wet lands occur in historical space and amidst changing conditions of social power which alter the land over time. 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 need to describe the landscape in ways that allow us to track changes in the land and changes in the human content of agrarian territory. This outline of agrarian landscapes endeavours to combine all the various elements of agrarian territory to define spatial units for the long-term historical geography of agriculture in South Asia. 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.





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 wreak havoc in places with frightening regularity. In 1784, the whole of Sylhet was under flood water and animal carcasses were floating like boats on the sea as the population fled to the hills. In 1875, the notorious Kosi River destroyed all the farm land in its path; 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." The Indus and Ganga provided natural routes for transit and shipping to the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea. Bounded by desert and mountains, the climate in the riverine flatlands 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.


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 the riverbeds and closer to the 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 then sandy, as the Punjab shades into the arid Western Plains in Rajasthan and the lower Indus basin. In Punjab, as in general throughout the northern basins, the long-term geographical spread of intensive agriculture moved outward from places where drainage is simpler to harness to places where more strenuous controls are necessary. In drier regions like Punjab, this means that 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. The wet lands of riverine Bihar were ancient sites of intensive cultivation; and since 1880, naturally arid lands in Rajasthan have had the highest rate of increase in cultivated area of any lowland region in South Asia because of new irrigation.


In the eastern regions of the northern basins, Bengal and Assam have the highest rainfall regime; and the great volume of river water and density of 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 the centuries and in the eighteenth century 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 basin landscape, up from the lowlands into the high mountains. High tropical mountains have always had their distinctive, tribal farming societies, whose interaction with farmers in the lowlands is one of the most complex, difficult subjects in agrarian history, for there is a broad, shifting historical and geographical borderland between hills and plains. Our documentation comes primarily from the plains and indicates constant interaction with upland peoples and constant integration of uplands into agrarian regions centred in the lowlands.


The Northern Basins are bordered by mountains on all sides, except in Rajasthan. Down the mountains, their rivers flow. In the mountains lie reservoirs of timber and grazing land; and the mountains are the homeland for many tribal societies. As we will see, 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, with Assam, into Myanmar







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 and then Myanmar, 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, climate changes from extreme aridity in the west and to heavy rains and humid in the east, with attendant changes in natural vegetation and agricultural options. Run-off is rapid, snow melt gorges the rivers in the spring, and erosion is severe. Geologists have found huge boulders from the prehistoric Himalayas as far south as Jaipur, and satellite photos show Himalayan silt spilling from the Ganga under the Bay of Bengal almost as far as Sri Lanka. Forests have always defined a basic natural resource for human settlements in the high mountains. Agricultural territories formed in valleys have extended up the slopes, growing wheat and millets in the west and paddy in the east. Agricultural spaces are connected by valleys and passes and separated by high ridges and peaks, along routes of trade and migration. Large agricultural territories have formed in the Vale of Kashmir, Kathmandu Valley, and upper Brahmaputra basin; and in all three, rice is the dominant food grain among a great variety of crops. Great distances and obstacles to travel separate agrarian 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 the corridors between Iran, Afghanistan, the Indus basin, and Punjab. The Brahmaputra valley is so intensely engaged in the history of Northern Basins as to form a semi-detached part of that landscape; though it also participants in the history of Southeast Asia and China. Various forms and qualities of attachment to adjacent lowlands define agrarian regions in high mountain valleys. Except for Nepal and Bhutan, all are today political parts of lowland states, but a long period of rebellion in Nagaland and Mizoram indicates a continuous struggle for political autonomy, which is also visible in Baluchistan, Kashmir, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Kathmandu Basin has always maintained a separate political identity at the cross-roads of South Asia and Tibet. Though separated from the Indo-Gangetic lowlands, its institutions of agrarian power still derive from the history of migration and settlement that it shares with the rest of South Asia. All across the high mountains, from Yusufsai borderlands with Afghanistan to the Chittagong Hill Tracts between Bangladesh and Myanmar, cultural oppositions and separations between peoples of the hills and of the 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




The semi-arid western plains abut the high mountains in the west and they merge so gradually with the northern river basins in the Indo-Gangetic watershed (Haryana) and with the central mountains (in Malwa and Gujarat) that we can see them as a set of expansive, connective zones for the long term historical movement of people in every direction. Rainfall is very low and spatially the plains are dominated by the aridity of 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, as we will see, that Rajasthan dried up noticeably during medieval centuries. The scrub-covered, rocky, and scattered Aravalli hills rise abruptly from the 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 farm land 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 travel often 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 the sea lanes are critical for the vitality of population centres. 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. Today it includes all of Madhya Pradesh, most of Bihar south of the Ganga, and all of Orissa outside the coastal plain. Its agrarian regions 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 Rivers 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 River, which like the Tapti to the south of the Satpuras, drains west into the Gulf of Cambay. The Mahi also drains Malwa into the Gulf, by 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, into which streams enter from all sides before joining the Mahanadi and running 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 the northern basins, which it parallels geographically, the central mountain climate is dry in the west and wet in the east. In the west, the barren scrublands of the Chambal ravines -- on the edge of Rajasthan -- run with torrents of mud in the monsoon only to bake into red brick in the summer heat. In the east and south, tropical forests cover Jharkhand, Orissa, and Bastar. Like the high mountains, too, agrarian history in this landscape is dominated by interactions between mountains and valleys, forests and lowlands, and their respective farming communities. Farms have been cut historically into the forest -- dry scrub in the west and tropical jungle in the east -- fomenting interactive struggles within and among farmers, hunters, and pastoralists. This is a landscape in which shifting cultivation and tribal populations have been most prominent; and the largest tribal groups live here, the Bhils (in the west), Gonds (in the central regions), and Santals (in the east). 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 vast rice mono-cropping in Chhattisgarh, to shifting cultivation in Bastar, and to mixed forestry and millet farming in Baghelkhand. This variety parallels the great variety of social formations, which combine tribal and caste elements more widely and intensely than anywhere in South Asia. Intensive farming is most dominant where soil, water, and states have favoured the formation of 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, and its agricultural character derives from lines of drainage, seams of good soil, and underground water tucked away in the rocky substrate of the Deccan trap. Geologically, these features come from the volcanoes which left behind caverns of underground rock, boulders on the land, and black soil under food. The Deccan Trap holds water to facilitate labour-intense but rich cultivation under well irrigation. The peninsula is cross-cut by the Ajanta and Balaghat mountains in the north, and its surface is strewn with sometimes dramatic rock outcroppings and disconnected mountains. In the south-east, the outcrops become the Nallamalais, Eastern Ghats, Javadi Hills, Shevaroy Hills, 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 the big rivers of the peninsula drain the Western Ghats and run for most of their distance across predominantly dry, flat plateaux, which slope from west to east behind the Western Ghats, on the NW-SE bias of the Krishna-Godavari system. Fertile black soils run in wide seams along the Narmada basin, the upper Godavari river in Maharashtra, and all along the Krishna river and its tributaries in Karnataka, the 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 are mixtures of 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 of this land lies in the rain shadow of the western Ghats; and everywhere, the monsoon is fickle. Historically, intensive agriculture has therefore expanded outward from small regions favoured by rivers and good soils. As in other landscapes, there is a rainfall gradient running east and west, but here the gradient is more north-west-south-east, inscribed across the peninsula by an increasing availability of drainage for irrigation. In the Maharashtra Deccan, wells provide most irrigation, even today, after the spread of large river dams and canals. But on the Karnataka plateau and north-east to Hyderabad and Warangal, tank irrigation becomes more important; and it multiplies further in the south-east. The gradual increase in drainage availability from north-west to south-east has allowed parallel increases in irrigated acreage, multiple cropping, and population density; but a major hole in this overlapping set of gradations lies in the very dry North Deccan interior and in the Pennar-Krishna interfluve (Anantapur, Bellary, Kurnool, Adoni, Raichur, Bijapur), where numerous tanks have long supported meagre irrigation and low population densities. As we will see, there is indirect evidence of increasing desiccation in the driest parts of the interior peninsula since the early nineteenth century.


Agriculture has expanded over centuries into three forest types that distinguish the peninsula from the natural steppe land of thorny shrubs in Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Originally, dry tropical forest of deciduous trees covered the flatlands. By 1900, it was reduced to more or less tree-covered savannah. Monsoon forests that lost their leaves in the dry season (providing natural manure) once covered the slopes of the high plateaux and Eastern Ghats; and they were once full of teak, most of which is now gone. Rain forest, evergreen, covered the Western Ghats historically, and much of it 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 sea coast is formed of river valleys, plains, and deltas and their adjacent interfluvial flatlands; and everywhere, it includes the immediately adjacent uplands and mountain sides, though it is dominated agriculturally by the riverine plains, alluvial soils, and paddy fields. Its mountain border (on the west coast) and its proximity (in the east) to the tropical depressions that form the winter monsoon in the Bay of Bengal, bring this landscape much more rain than the interior peninsula. On the whole, it is more tropical in appearance, and its driest part is along the Tamil and Andhra coast, in the south-east. It is a borderland with the ocean, and this creates a fishery ecology and social life along the beach that is an integral part of agrarian history, as are the coastal sea trade and its connections to sea coasts everywhere in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Arabian Sea. Some of its constituent territories are also 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 thus 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 water ways 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] In 29 October, 1999, a massive cyclone hit central Orissa, sweeping 30 kilometers inland with windspeeds of 160 miles per hour at Bhubaneshwar, the capital of Orissa state, and tidal waves seven metres high. It killed 20,000 people and 700,000 cattle, made 20 million people homeless, and rendered three million acres of farmland unproductive. It is said to have set the rural economy in many places back fifty years.