Abstract
This book is a study of political practice and social and economic change taking place in a dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship with environment. Environmental history has taken great strides in the past few decades, in the global as well as the South Asian context, yet, apart from peripheral regions, such as forests and hills, ecological questions remain absent from the broader history of South Asia and many other parts of the world. With a long-term historical focus on the Bengal Delta, which approximates to today’s Bangladesh, this book argues that an understanding of the ecology of plains is essential for any analysis of the politics and society of colonial South Asia. (Figure 1.1 shows Bengal and neighbouring territories; Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show the geological setting of the Bengal Delta and the Himalayas and the water regime that defines the region.)
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Notes
‘Diaras and Chars often first appear as thin slivers of sand. On this is deposited layers of silt till a low bank is consolidated. Tamarisk bushes, a spiny grass, establish a foot-hold and accretions as soon as the river recedes in winter; the river flows being considerably seasonal. For several years the Diara and Char may be cultivable only in winter, till with a fresh flood either the level is raised above the normal flood level or the accretion is diluvated completely’ (Haroun er Rashid, Geography of Bangladesh (Dhaka, 1991), p. 18).
For notes on geological processes of land formation and sedimentation in the Bengal delta, see W.W. Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 4 (London, 1885), pp. 24–8; Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Changing Face of Bengal: a Study in Riverine Economy (Calcutta, 1938), pp. 228–9; Colin D. Woodroffe, Coasts: Form, Process and Evolution (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 340, 351; Ashraf Uddin and Neil Lundberg, ‘Cenozoic History of the Himalayan-Bengal System: Sand Composition in the Bengal Basin, Bangladesh’, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 110 (4) (April 1998): 497–511; Liz Wilson and Brant Wilson, ‘Welcome to the Himalayan Orogeny’, http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo5xx/geo527/Himalayas/, last accessed 17 December 2009.
Harry W. Blair, ‘Local Government and Rural Development in the Bengal Sundarbans: an Enquiry in Managing Common Property Resources’, Agriculture and Human Values, 7(2) (1990): 40.
Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (Berkeley and London, 1993), pp. 24–7.
For notes on the geological changes in the region, see J.E. Webster, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteer: Noakhali (Allahabad, 1911), p. 41; W.H. Arden Wood, ‘Rivers and Man in the Indus-Ganges Alluvial Plain’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 40(1) (1924): 10; J. Seidensticker and A. Hai, The Sundarbans Wildlife Management Plan: Conservation in the Bangladesh Coastal Zone (Gland, 1983), p. 120; Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 11–12.
Sidney Burrard, ‘Movements of the Ground Level in Bengal’, Royal Engineers Journal, XLVII (1933): 234.
Prestage Franklin, ‘The Ganges and the Hooghly — How to Connect These Rivers by Converting the Matabanga into a Navigable Canal’, in Sunil Sen Sharma (ed.), Farakka — A Gordian Knot: Problems on Sharing Ganges Waters (Calcutta, 1986), p. 20. (First published in 1861.)
S. Bhattacharya, ‘Eastern India’, in Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. II (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 270–1. For a general description of changes in the deltaic river system of Bengal and their influence on agricultural production, see Mukerjee, The Changing Face of Bengal.
For two powerful manifestations of these debates, see Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: an Ecological History of India (Delhi, 1992) and Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995). The debate was more recently rekindled in Gregory Barton’s Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2002).
The focus on forests and dams, wildlife and livestock or peripheral hills in environmental-historical work on South Asia is reflected in several recent works including Anu Jalais, ‘The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?’, Conservation and Society, 5(3) (2007): 1–8; Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism, and Flood Control in Eastern India (Delhi, 2006); Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds), Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (Seattle, 2006); David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Collective Action in South Asia (Oxford, 2003); Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnans (eds), Agrarian Environments (Durham, NC and London, 2000); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Oxford, 1999); Willem van Schendel, ‘The Invention of the Jummas: State Formation and Ethnicity in Southeastern Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, 26(1) (1992): 95–128.
Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Modernizing Nature. Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950 (New Delhi, 1999), p. 206.
Christopher V. Hill, South Asia: an Environmental History (Santa Barbara, 2008). Hill suggests: ‘because India has always been primarily [a] peasant society, environmental histories, in deed if not in word, have been produced in South Asia for far longer than there has been an official discipline for them’ (pp. xx).
Introduced in 1793, the Permanent Settlement was set to collect about £3 million annually from the zamindars of Bengal and Bihar. P.J. Marshall, Bengal: the British Bridgehead, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, reprinted 1990), p. 123.
For a major study of the ideological origins of the Permanent Settlement, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: an Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963); for tenural, legal and economic aspects of the settlement, see S. Gopal, The Permanent Settlement in Bengal and its Results (London, 1948); Sirajul Islam, Permanent Settlement in Bengal 1790–1819 (Dhaka, 1979); Badruddin Umar, The Bengal Peasantry under the Permanent Settlement (Dacca, 1972) (in Bengali); Akinobu Kawai, Landlords and Imperial Rule: Change in Agrarian Bengal Society, c1885–1940, 2 vols (Tokyo, 1986–1987). Works that trace the legacy of present-day rural underdevelopment to the Permanent Settlement include James Boyce, Agrarian Impasse in Bengal: Institutional Constraints to Technological Change (Oxford, 1987); F. Thomasson Jannuzi, The Agrarian Structure of Bangladesh: an Impediment to Development (Boulder, 1980).
As envisioned in the late 1960s by Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (New York, 1978).
Ratnalekha Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society (New Delhi, 1979).
Rajat Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875–1927 (New Delhi and Oxford, 1984), p. 51. See also Nariaki Nakazato, Agrarian System of Eastern Bengal, c. 1870–1910 (Calcutta, 1994).
Bose’s arguments, from the 1980s on, are summarized in Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital, pp. 84–90, 130–4, 162–9. For reinforcement of the view of the rich peasants role as rent-receivers, see Bidyut Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–1947: Contour of Freedom (London and New York, 2004), pp. 36–41.
Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 162–4. See also Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital, p. 89. A similar argument is extended by Partha Chatterjee in The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism (Delhi, 1997), pp. 59–64 and in ‘The Colonial State and Peasant Resistance in Bengal’, Past and Present, 110(1) (1986): 182–9; Saugata Mukherji, ‘Agrarian Class Formation in Modern Bengal 1931–1951’, Occasional Paper no. 75, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1985.
See Partha Chatterjee’s review of Bose’s Agrarian Bengal, in Journal of Asian Studies 47(3) (1988): 670–2.
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–35’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies 1: Writing on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1982), p. 18.
A common term in the historiography of modern India, ‘bhadralok’ refers to a category in colonial Bengal that represents a hybrid constellation of upper caste, English-educated to illiterate, poorer to elite, salaried to rentseeking, leftist to rightwing, world-class intellectual to mediocre, and orthodox imperialist to perennial nationalists. For debates on the definition and scope of the term, see M.N. Roy, ‘Bourgeois Nationalism’, Vanguard, 3(1) (1923); J.H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 5–13; Gordon Johnson, ‘Partition, Agitation and Congress: Bengal 1904–1908’, Modern Asian Studies, 7(3) (1973): 534–5; Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 3–7.
For a book-length narrative of the East Bengal peasant’s ‘false consciousness’, see Taj Hashmi, Peasant Utopia: the Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920–1947 (Boulder, 1992).
David Ludden, ‘Introduction: a Brief History of Subalternity’, in David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia (Delhi and London, 2002), pp. 6–7.
David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge, 1999), p. 2.
Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review, 99 (December 1994): 1475–90. For a summary of the critique and the changes within the subalternist group regarding this question, see Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies, pp. 13–20. See also Arild Engelsen Ruud, ‘The Indian Hierarchy: Culture, Ideology and Consciousness in Bengali Village Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, 33(3) (1999): 689–732.
See for instance, Gautam Bhadra, Iman O Nishan: Unish shotoke bangaly krishak chaitanyer ek adhyay, c. 1800–1850 (Calcutta, 1994).
For instance, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven and London, 1998).
C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983).
Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of the Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India (Basingstoke, 2008).
Gunnel Cederlöf, Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature (Ranikhet, New Delhi, 2008).
A.D.B. Gomess, Commissioner of the Sundarbans, in Report on the Census of Bengal, 1871 (Calcutta, 1872), p. xi; it may be noted that Europeans were given the right to take leases of land in this region in 1829.
Bayly suggests that the long depression seems to have stimulated the structural changes that were already taking place in the Indian economy, paving the way for a ‘levelling down of elite strata in Indian society and creation of a more homogeneous peasantry’. See C.A. Bayly, ‘State and Economy in India over Seven Hundred Years’, Economic History Review, n.s., 38(4) (1985): 591.
R.P. Tucker and J.F. Richards (eds), Editors’ Introduction, Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (Durham, 1983), pp. xi–xv.
D.K. Fieldhouse, ‘Colonialism: Economic’, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (New York, 1968), p. 9.
See Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison, 1974).
Bose, Peasant Labour, pp. 48–51; Muin-ud-Din Ahmad Khan, History of the Fara’idi Movement in Bengal, 1818–1906 (Karachi, 1965); Narahari Kaviraj, Wahabi and Farazi Rebels of Bengal (New Delhi, 1982).
For a perceptive study of the governance of nature for ‘development’ in modern Britain and its imperial implications, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government. Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London, 2000).
Samir Amin, ‘Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?’, in Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée (Boulder and London, 2004), p. 15.
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Iqbal, I. (2010). Introduction. In: The Bengal Delta. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_1
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