The great agrarian conquest: the colonial reshaping of a rural world

Up through the 1980s, agrarian history constituted a central subject matter in the study of colonial South Asia. Assuming that virtually everyone in the Indian countryside had always been settled agriculturalists who lived in villages, agrarian history was often informed by Marxist approaches focusing on class formation and rural immiseration and it regarded the institution of colonial property and the workings of capitalism as the main driving forces of change. Agrarian history lost ground during the 1990s as scholarship shifted to examining the role of the colonial state in cultural processes and to exploring urban history. Environmental history, which devoted its attention to the impact of change on non-agrarian spaces like forests and on non-peasants like hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, and pastoralists, also began to thrive. In this study, Neeladri Bhattacharya returns to agrarian history, but with a totally novel approach that is informed in part by the insights of environmental history and even more strongly by the literature on colonial discourse and ethnographic knowledge. Based upon impressive research in colonial archives, Bhattacharya focuses on the Punjab after the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the history of a landscape that previously had been characterized by extensive shrublands, common lands, and pastoral tracts. Agrarian society in Bhattacharya’s rendering was created by colonialism instead of having existed in some readymade form that was then subjected to colonial influences. The main driving force in Bhattacharya’s narrative is not capitalism per se, but the workings of the British state. He particularly discusses the effects of the colonial rulers’ concerns with refashioning the countryside in light of their understandings of what would create productive rural spaces and of what constituted “customary practice.” The book thus convincingly portrays the agrarian conquest of the Punjab as a highly disruptive, even violent process, but in a very different way from older Marxist approaches.