Abstract
It is a rare privilege for this reviewer to bring forth here impressions garnered from two books published with titles suggesting a common research interest. The two scholars examine the trajectory of science with singular attention paid by both historians to the culture of indigo in plantations of the Tirhut region of Bihar in eastern India during the colonial regime.
The thoroughness of their research is backed up by an impressive ‘whetting’ process which, in the case of Prakash Kumar, is evident from his acknowledgements to intellectuals right across the world, while Kerkhoff presents an impressive 170 pages of unusual sources which enable her to challenge accepted conclusions of other historians of colonial Bihar, and there are some fascinating instances provided by her. Inadvertently reviewing them together, one cannot fail to notice that, even though the authors share a common field of enquiry, their approach is fresh and their analytical conclusions and factual data serve to complement each other. Such serendipity is unusual, considering that both authors have chosen to examine familiar complex socio-political institutions, but they seldom overlap.
Their treatment of the subject complements in terms of the difference in the scale of focus and the degree of their emphasis. While Kanthinka Kerkhoff stresses colonisation of one plant, tobacco, she considers the process in relation to that of other plants, like indigo, sugar cane and poppy, and also factors in changes in the economic as well as socio-cultural value people attach to plants; she also associates this with unequal power among people to resist agricultural engineering, which took place in the country-side during roughly two centuries covered in her study. Similarly, the term ‘colonisation of a plant’ used by Kerkhoff, is, by definition, a process which ‘encompassed’ a whole range—that of ‘commerce and industry as well as that it included knowledge systems, science and technology’ on p. 2 in Kerkhoff’s analysis. Kumar introduces the framework of his book by what he defines as ‘The Odyssey of Indigo’ which was really its ever-widening link with Western scientific experiments and transfer of such knowledge, generated world-wide, to colonial India starting from the second millennium
Therefore, valuable as this complementarity is, the task of laying it out as a composite collage contributed by the two authors at any one point of time and then to delineate change over time becomes difficult, because both authors have taken some liberty to break out of the ‘conventional’ terminology used in historical analysis. For example, words like ‘colony, ‘colonisation’, ‘imagined empire’, ‘social’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘native’ are used by them with connotations very special and specific to what they intended to convey. Given such circumstances, comparison can be inaccurate and even unfair. Just to give one example—the term ‘colony’ is used seamlessly between different contexts in the same study: ‘South Asia as a region, a colony’ (p. 14) in Prakash Kumar’s Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India; whereas for the other author Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff the ‘region’ is Tirhut which forms the central place of action’ in Colonising Plants in Bihar (1760–1950) (p. 3).
Consequently, it may be a good idea also to make reference to the special contributions of each author separately as a measurement of appreciation:
First, to understand why indigo in Bihar is such a historical ‘draw’ for research scholars in the context of science and nature, even in contemporary times, given that, not so long ago, the state under the scanner was included by a well-known demographer to be one of the BIMARU states of India (an acronym for Bihar, MP, Andhra, Rajasthan and UP).
Second, both the authors provide evidence that language differences were no barriers to the phenomenon of global mobility of knowledge, people and plants in the past centuries even though the technology for conveying thoughts and written evidence across vast regions was in its infancy. However this may be, it is this process of knowledge transfer which is brilliantly described in Prakash Kumar’s fascinating discourse of how ‘the imperial framework and colonial relation were foundational...to the launch of Bengal indigo plantations’ and that this was because ‘science moved forward at two specific moments in the history of indigo’ (p. 16): ‘one by the publication of an indigo treatise, (the first of its kind) by Jean Baptise Labat’, a French naturalist in the seventeenth century and the other was the birth of the synthetic dye in Germany in 1897’ (ibid.).
Third, despite the difficulties of constructing a composite picture mentioned above, the individual contributions of the scholars provide the reader with ‘unintended’ building blocks to reconstruct a history of the ‘spread effect’ of science globally as a ‘tool of empire’ which, at some rare points, meant that Western science engaged with native knowledge systems. While Kumar sees ‘in this larger agenda that the field of colonial science approaches the “social”’. Kerkhoff ‘concentrates on tobacco improvement schemes in colonial Bihar (till 1912 part of Bengal) which were part of an immense agricultural project in India which she defines as ‘plant colonisation’, which, according to her, ‘encompassed commerce and industry as well as knowledge systems, science and technology’.
Fourth, such a spread of science raises questions whose answers are to be found through the valuable building blocks these two authors provide to understand the nature of several ‘elements of quasi-feudal layers of compulsions’ in land relations and a complex mix of socio-political tensions which marked the countryside of Tirhut, in Bihar which Kerkhoff details in her book; while Kumar exposes the world of politicking in colonial scientific endeavour both in the West and in India. It is through the prism of such factors that the authors analyse the historical introduction of botanical species like indigo, tobacco, sugar and poppy, which were cultured and experimented on by scientists in Pusa and documented by the famous botanical gardens of England and India. Through such a window it is possible to perceive why science could have a ‘spread effect’ world-wide on exploitation of plant species in history. Yet, in 1877, Kerkhoff quotes from the British commissioner of Patna Division report that plantation culture of indigo ‘had enriched a few hundred Europeans and some thousands of zamindars, to impoverish the peasantry’ and so gives a clue to assess why the process failed to ‘trickle down’ to the masses of peasants and so also failed to establish a ‘scientific temperament’ in post-independent India—a much cherished dream of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Fifth, taken together these studies reveal the flip-side of political decisions of a colonial Government of India to sponsor science and scientific institutions like that of the Pusa Institute in Bihar. For example, Kerkhoff underscored James Scott’s hypothesis from his book Seeing Like a State (p. 1), that the colonial schemes to ‘improve tobacco’ for the people failed because it was the way a state saw ‘agricultural science’ without considering the ecological linkages of various plants like food crops, fodder and marketable crops like poppy, indigo and sugar cane. Hence, she emphasised that the scheme for scientific improvement of tobacco was a ‘technocratic solution rather than the means to remove the social and political obstacles to sustain agricultural growth in Bihar’. Kerkhoff’s study highlights that some of this was critically challenged by non-official publications in England through the period of colonial rule, but the established unequal power relations in the country-side of Bihar could afford to ignore these. Further, these stories reveal the deepening of trends in exploitation of nature through change in land-use patterns and tenurial rights governed by a proactive colonial governance which fostered scientific endeavour in support of the culture of plants by private enterprise, both of a chartered monopoly and by European non-official planters. However, as Kerkhoff points out, a shift occurred in favour of Imperial interests when indigo production was geared not only to counter the competition in the global market but also to stand up to the race for supremacy in global science itself, which had produced the synthetic product which substituted ingotin, a product of the natural plant. Here again it is Kumar’s book which provides us with incisive details of the politicking ‘behind the scenes’ that took place both in Europe and in India.
Sixth, both the authors conclude that, although science did have a separate, if not always independent, momentum of its own, which they meticulously document but it is a historical reality too that global markets were powerful catalytic agents to instigate the patronage that science got from the European governments which the Government of British India could not ignore. Nor could it prevent the complex socio-political relationships both in the international arena and increasingly within India itself from growing nationalist sentiment. Each one of these trends came to a head—or ‘defining moments’ to borrow from Prakash Kumar’s colourful expression. Invariably all the circumstances had to do with institutions of governance at several levels—those that took care of access, use and decision making in land use and property rights in the land as in the case of planters and peasants, be they to intellectual property rights, like patents in science or tenurial conditions in agriculture. While both touch upon tenurial factors affecting choice in cropping patterns but neither could dwell upon the institutional lacunae which a law of contract could have instituted. In fact the Government of India was aware of these lacunae since 1862 ever since Sir Henry Sumner Maine had been appointed as legal adviser to the Viceroy: perhaps it is too much to expect either author to deal with this aspect of indigo plantations as well.
And finally, the conclusions of the two authors reveal how refreshing such complementarity in analysis of the same phenomenon can be. Kerkhoff colourfully concludes that colonisation of plants took Bihar into the world and had brought the world into Bihar, but colonisation of plants also contributed to unequal power among those who cultivated those plants as well as among people who resisted agricultural engineering in a unique fashion, for example, in tobacco cultivation which turned away from producing for the Western world; instead they cultivated tobacco for the swadeshi market for bidi and tobacco leaves for the hookah. And her final conclusion echoes scientist Albert Howard’s prediction: that for any plant improvement project to be a success, plants have to be researched in their ‘whole’ contexts, that is, beside plant-related sciences and local notions of plant cultivation we also have to take into account the socio-economic, cultural-political factors and unequal power structures in which plants grow.
Juxtaposed against this, Prakash Kumar concludes that ‘overall the history of indigo conveys a mode of knowledge formation that was remarkably more cosmopolitan in the early phase. The onset of developments associated with the arrival of synthetic dyes marked a transition to a more colonial form of knowledge generation’ (p. 298).