Alumna Update: Girija Joshi — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Jul 14

Jul 14 Alumna Update: Girija Joshi

Girija Joshi is a 2012 scholar. With the Inlaks scholarship she attended a M.Res in History at the University of Leiden. She is currently pursuing her Phd at the Leiden University, Netherlands. Her doctoral research seeks to understand the relationship between patterns of mobility and migration on the one hand, and community and identity-formation on the other. Her dissertation focuses upon the 'peasantization' of the Indo-Gangetic divide ('the Delhi frontier').

In this week’s post she transports us back to the 18th century as she maps the shift from pastoralism to agriculture as caused by the East India Company.

A foreign landscape

In 1803, the English East India Company annexed the city of Delhi and the surrounding hinterland stretching south-west to Rohtak, Hisar, and Sirsa. Having defeated the Maratha armies of Daulat Rao Shinde, the Company appointed itself the nominal representative of the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II. The question of how to govern its new territories, however, was a difficult one. The Company’s finances were precarious, and it was uncertain that this arid countryside would in fact yield anything considerable in terms of agrarian revenues. Moreover, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the extent of settled cultivation in this region was quite limited. The effects of the Chalisa famine of 1783-4, which had led to large-scale migrations and widespread starvation, were still visible in the area. While there were signs of a very gradual repopulation, this process was anything but linear, rural populations continuing to migrate when drought threatened to turn into famine. Then as now, agrarian fortunes were closely tied to the monsoons, which, in this subsistence frontier, were both meagre and unreliable.

That agriculture was a marginal occupation does not, however, mean that the rural economy offered no opportunities for profit. To the contrary, there was a thriving trade in livestock, including cattle, camels, sheep, and horses. In much of what now constitutes Haryana and eastern Punjab, cultivation remained a secondary occupation practiced alongside pastoralism. The latter was less vulnerable to the uncertainties that beset sedentary agriculture; in fact, many of the nutritious fodder grasses and shrubs that grew in this region were drought-resistant. These included, for example, a bush known locally as jharberi (Zizyphus nummularia), which cattle would graze on, while camels preferred the karil (Capparis aphylla) shrub, whose fruit (pinju) were gathered and pickled for human consumption. Livestock were traded for their meat, milk, and hide, but also for military purposes. Quality bullocks and horses, in particular, were crucial to premodern armies, the former for the purposes of carrying ordnance, and the latter for cavalry. In light of the value of livestock, resources such as grazing grounds and watering holes were of crucial importance to pastoral communities, and disputes over their use could boil over into armed conflict.

In addition to rearing animals, and perhaps cultivating a little land, rural populations supplemented their incomes through soldiering. There were a number of different states competing for power in the region at the end of the eighteenth century. These varied from relatively large kingdoms like Patiala, to small principalities such as Ballabhgarh, Thanesar, Sonipat, Khetri, Alwar, Kunjpura, Maler Kotla, and many more. Several of these states had been established by powerful warlords, who had risen from ordinary husbanding origins to serving in different royal armies, and ultimately become powerful enough to declare themselves autonomous princes. Others, supported by their network of kin and dependents, had led successful careers as brigands. In practice, many new states were borne of an intersection of these two trajectories; successful warlords were sought out by larger states for their military skill. This in turn lent them power and prestige, and served as a stepping-stone to eventual princehood.

In the context of the eighteenth century, raiding was not, as the East India Company was inclined to see it, a form of ‘criminality’, but rather a mode of political consolidation. In the absence of a stable revenue base, many states used raids upon neighbouring territories as a means to provision their armies, and provide for their retinues. Cattle raids were also a common way for rival communities to settle disputes with each other. Raiding was considered an honourable occupation, not only because of the courage and martial skill it called for, but also because it was a way for communities to provide for their own. Indeed, to be able to attract followers to his ranks, a warlord would have to demonstrate his raiding skills, without which he would have little credibility as a patron. Raiding and generosity were thus each other’s natural counterparts.

From the East India Company’s perspective, however, pastoralism and soldiering, both itinerant occupations, were highly inconvenient. The state preferred its subjects sedentary and peaceable, to be better able to tax them. Colonial governance thus proceeded apace with what the state euphemistically called ‘pacification’, which amounted to the systematic undermining of the raiding economy in its newly-acquired territories. This was combined with efforts to settle peripatetic rural populations on the land, and compel them to bring it under regular, continuous cultivation. So doing, the state was convinced it was creating a prosperous agrarian landscape from a supposedly marginal and war-torn desert. What it was in fact doing, however, was dismantling the channels through which wealth had hitherto circulated in the rural economy, and thereby disrupting the social and political networks that this economy had sustained. Far from a Pax Britannica, the colonial state was undermining the ability of rural populations to provide for themselves.

In addition to the disruption caused to the pastoral and raiding economy, the state’s attempts at extending the agrarian frontier came at a steep environmental cost. The Western Yamuna Canal, which was an extension of an old, defunct channel built by Firuz Shah Tughlaq in the fourteenth century, caused widespread waterlogging and soil degradation. This was partly because of the canal’s faulty alignment, which could be corrected; but there was also damage that engineering could not undo. As the state progressively sealed all avenues of subsistence save agriculture, the pressure on the land rose enormously. Grazing grounds rapidly depleted, and the water-table steadily receded. Scarcity was built into the structure of the new rural economy. On average, famine struck south-eastern Punjab roughly once a decade during the nineteenth century, indicating that many rural communities lived on the very edge of subsistence. This remains true in the present day as well.

The experience of colonialism in south-eastern Punjab holds many lessons that remain pertinent in the present. It highlights the tension between intensive, do-fasli agriculture on the one hand, and sustainable land-use on the other. It reminds us that pastoralism, which continues to be viewed as a marginal and inconvenient form of subsistence, is in fact better suited to arid savannah environments than is settled cultivation. The Rabaris, Gadarias, and Gujars who continue to graze their cattle on what is left of pasturelands in Haryana, are reminders of an older economy, one that was more resilient to the vagaries of nature, and less taxing on the land. Lastly, looking back beyond Haryana’s colonial encounter, we find a landscape so foreign to us as to be barely recognizable. Perhaps the past is always a foreign country; but precolonial pasts are rendered all the more alien by our continued reliance on colonial tools to understand them. To inhabit the life-worlds of eighteenth-century pastoralists might be an unrealizable ambition; but to understand what they lost, and to better appreciate the costs of colonization, we have at least to try.