Abstract
The colonial state’s liberal attitude towards the peasants in East Bengal, as described in the previous chapter, was largely informed by the inaccessibility of the region’s fluid deltaic frontier. But ecology was also significant in the way it induced the state to maximize and commercialize cultivation for supplying the domestic and international market. It is important to examine the way in which agrarian society responded to the complex situation emerging through the state’s inability to restrict the peasants’ access to ecological resources on the one hand, and its compulsion to generate tax and trade on the other. This chapter examines these issues through focusing on three broad themes. First, it looks at the way in which the ecology of the region provided for the production and commercialization of crops that were acceptable to both the peasants and the state. The second set of issues relates to the impact of ecology and the commercialization of agriculture on the economic and physical well-being of the peasantry. Third, the chapter will examine the process by which agricultural development and human well-being influenced agrarian social formations in the region. This approach should help unravel the myth and reality of ‘Sonar Bangla’ in the colonial era.1
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Notes
A recent major report on the global environment uses the term ‘eco-system services’ to refer to those ‘benefits people obtain from ecosystems’ which include ‘provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling’. See Preface to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis (Washington DC, 2005).
For a description of geo-morphological influences on East Bengal’s landscape, soil fertility and fluvial system, particularly in comparison to Western Bengal, the Indus Valley and the Punjab, see Arthur Geddes, ‘Alluvial Morphology of the Indo-Gangetic Plain’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), 28 (1960): 253–76. For an overview of the effects of changes in the river system on salinity, see H. Viles and T. Spencer, Coastal Problems: Geomorphology, Ecology and Society at the Coast (London, 1995).
Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals (London, 1854), p. 339.
W.S. Seton-Karr, ‘Agriculture in Lower Bengal’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 16 (March 1883): 419.
W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, 2 vols (London, 1875), vol. I, p. 288.
For a narrative of the interplay of the economy at better and worse periods during the second half of the eighteenth century, see Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market. Commercialization in Rural Bengal c.1760–1800 (New Delhi, 2000), esp. pp. 238–71.
G.E. Gastrell, Geographical and Statistical Report of the Districts of Jessore, Fureedpore and Backergunge (Calcutta, 1868), p. 6.
‘…[in the Sundarbans] you look over one vast plain, stretching for miles upon each side, laded with golden grain: a homestead is dotted about here and there, and the course of the rivers is traced by the fringes of low brushwood that grow upon their banks; but with these exceptions one sees in many places one unbroken sea of waving dhan [paddy], up to the point where the distant forest bounds the horizon’ (James Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore: its Antiquities, its History, and its Commerce, 2nd edn (Calcutta, 1874), p. 182).
Gordon T. Stewart, Jute and Empire: the Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire (Manchester, 1998), p. 38.
Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital. Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 53; for a statistics of spectacular growth of trade in jute between 1828 and 1873, see Hem Chunder Kerr, Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Jute in Bengal, (Calcutta, 1877), p. 71.
D.R. Lyall, Comm of Chittagong Div, to Secy to GoB, 28 Apr 1888, in the Report on the Condition of the Lower Classes of Population in Bengal (Calcutta, 1888).
The Calcutta and Eastern canals and Tolley’s Nullah constituted the major natural-cum-artificial navigation system. By the 1850s the system not only catered to ‘the whole trade of eastern districts which was daily growing in importance’, but in the dry season it also saw many trading boats from the Northwest Frontier provinces, which were unable to sail at this time through the western Bengal rivers. According to one estimate, this network of canals facilitated the traffic of about a million tons of goods per annum in the first decade of the twentieth century. The value of these goods was estimated at nearly four million pounds sterling. See W. Hunter ed., Imperial Gazetteerof India, vol. IX (London: Trübner & Co., 1881–85), p. 287. These figures are also quoted in James Rennell, Journal of Major James Rennell, ed. T.H.D. La Touche, in Bengal Asiatic Society Memoirs III (1910–14), footnote by the editor, p. 20.
H.J.S. Cotton, ‘The Rice Trade in Bengal’, Calcutta Review, CXV (January, 1874): 174–8. For an important account of the external and internal factors and patterns of commercialization of agriculture in Bengal, see Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, ‘Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal — 1859–1885’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 7(1) (1970), 25–60.
C. Addams Williams, History of the Rivers in the Gangetic Delta 1750–1918 (Calcutta, 1919, reprinted Dacca, 1966).
Lal Behari Day, Bengal Peasant Life (London, 1892), pp. 169–70.
This is for the year 1882–83. See W.W. Hunter, The Indian Empire: its People, History, and Products (London, 1893), p. 48.
Richard Temple, Men and Events of my Time in India (London, 1882), pp. 417–18.
Henry Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj: its History and Statistics (London, 1876), p. 284.
Abdur Rahim, Akaler Puthi [Songs of Famine] (Mymensingh, 1875), pp. 13–14.
S.A. Latif, Economic Aspect of the Indian Rice Export Trade (Calcutta: Dasgupta & Co., 1923), p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 20–1.
Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market; Tilottama Mukherjee, ‘Markets, Transport and the State in the Bengal Economy, c.1750–1800’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004; Sayako Miki, ‘Merchants, Markets and the Monopoly of the East India Company: the Salt Trade in Bengal under Colonial Control, c.1790–1836’, unpublished PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2005.
Willem van Schendel and Aminul Haque Faraizi, Rural Labourers in Bengal, 1880 to 1980 (Rotterdam, 1984).
Report on the Condition of the Lower Classes (also known as the Dufferin Report). For a summary of the report, specific to the conditions of the labourers, see Willem van Schendel, ‘Economy of Working Classes’, in Sirajul Islam (ed.), History of Bangladesh, vol 2 (Dhaka, 1997), pp. 637–43.
This is a fairly liberal estimate. Raja Ram Mohun Roy found the requirement to be between 1 and 1.5 lb, which was about the same amount. See Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India (London, 1832), p. 106.
J.C. Jack, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operation in the Bakarganj District, 1900–1908 (Calcutta, 1915), p. 45. See also Eaton, ‘Human Settlement and Colonization in the Sundarbans’, Agriculture and Human Values, 7(2) (1990): 12.
It may be noted that although the government periodically attempted to restrict the fishermen’s traditional right to fish in riparian commons such as beels and rivers, it was not able to do so until the 1880s or in some cases until the end of the century. See Bob Pokrant, Peter Reeves and John McGuire, ‘Bengal Fishers and Fisheries: a Historiographical Essay’, in Shekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Rethinking History. Essays in Historiography (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 96–101.
A.C. Tute, offg collector of Pabna, to W.W. Hunter, Movements of the People and Land Reclamation Schemes (Calcutta, 1885), p. 11, 5 August 1885, p. 12.
Evidence of M.L. Hare, Comm of Dacca, to Indian Famine Commission 1898, Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1898, appendix vol. 1: Evidence of witness, Bengal (Calcutta, 1898), p. 124.
William J. Collins, ‘Labour Mobility, Market Integration, and Wage Convergence in Late 19th Century India’, Explorations in Economic History, 36(3) (1999): 246–77.
Tirthankar Roy, ‘Globalization, Factor Prices and Poverty in Colonial India’, Australian Economic Review, 47(1) (2007): 81.
Richard Temple, quoted in the Bengal Times, 29 January 1876: 68.
R.C. Dutta, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, vol. II (London, 1904), pp. vi–vii; also quoted in Bose, Peasant Labour, pp. 120–1.
William Twining, Clinical Illustrations of the More Important Diseases of Bengal, vol. I (2nd edn, Calcutta, 1835), p. 6.
Ibid., pp. 8–9.
John M’Clelland, Sketch of the Medical Topography or Climate and Soils, of Bengal and the N.W. Provinces (London, 1859), pp. 42, 47–8.
Kazi Ihtesham, ‘Malaria in Bengal from 1860 to 1920: a Historical Study in a Colonial Setting’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1986, p. 239. Also note this comment: ‘Barring a few districts, Eastern Bengal as a whole enjoyed advantages in term of health and economic prosperity for which it would be difficult to find a parallel in any part of India.’ Quoted in Arabinda Samanta, Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal 1820–1939: Social History of an Epidemic (Kolkata, 2002), p. 23.
Kanny Loll Dey, Hindu Social Laws and Habits Viewed in Relation to Health (Calcutta, 1866), pp. 3–5.
Baboo Isser Chunder Mitter Roy, ‘A Few Facts Concerning Village Life’, The Bengal Social Science Association Meeting, 1877 (Calcutta, 1877), p. 3.
Hunter, Statistical Account, vol.1, pp. 160–1.
Principal Heads of the History and Statistics of the Dacca Division (Calcutta, 1868), p. 139.
Sumit Guha, ‘Agrarian Bengal, 1850–1947: Issues and Problems’, Studies in History, n.s., 11(1) (1995): 125; see also James Alexander, ‘On the Tenures and Fiscal Relations of the Owners, and Occupants of the Soil in Bengal, Behar, and Orissa’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, XIV (July–December, 1845): 536–7.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: the Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (London, 1997), p. 22.
For a comprehensive account of the emergence and rise of the Namasudras in eastern Bengal, see ibid., pp. 15–29; see also R. Carstairs, The Little World of an Indian District Officer (London, 1912), p. 58; For a note on the background of the rise of the non-elite tilling groups in India in the nineteenth century, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 108–10, 200–2.
Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (Berkeley and London, 1993).
Siddik Ali, Siddik Alir Puthi, 1244 BS (1837 AD).
J.E. Webster, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteer: Noakhali (Allahabad, 1911), p. 279.
Muzaffar Ahmad, Myself and the Communist Party of India (Calcutta, 1970), pp. 1–5.
Aftab-i-hidayat (Mymensingh, 1877).
Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, 1983); Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: a Quest for Identity (Delhi, 1981).
Shahid Amin, ‘Dimensions of Dependence’, in Ludden (ed.), Agricultural Production and Indian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 239–66.
For a gloomy narrative of the nineteenth century, see Mike Davis, The Late Victorian Holocausts. El Nino Famines and the Making of the New World (London and New York, 2001).
Eric Stokes, ‘The Return of the Peasant to South Asian History’, South Asia, 6(1) (1976): 96–111; for Hardiman’s observations on this, see David Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914 (Delhi, 1992), p. 3.
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Iqbal, I. (2010). Economy and Society: the Myth and Reality of ‘Sonar Bangla’. In: The Bengal Delta. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_3
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