Most people agree that organic farming started in India. That’s where Sir Albert Howard, often referred to as the “father of organic farming,” developed the Indore Method of composting, which was cited by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, J. I. Rodale, and practically every other early organic farmer in the United States. But what was the original historical context of Howard’s research work? What was a British scientist doing in India in the first place? And what are we to make of the fact that the origins of organic farming were in a colonial research station?
Most historians are in agreement that colonialism was bad for Indian farmers. Beginning in the 1600s, traders from the British East India Company began building forts, mobilizing armies, and eventually seizing outright control of Indian land. Two centuries later, in response to the “mutiny” of 1857 in which Muslims and Hindus briefly united to protest British rule, the British government formally took political control of India. India remained part of the British Empire until 1947, at which time the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent countries—India and Pakistan. East Pakistan later became Bangladesh.
During the colonial period, a series of horrendous famines struck India, killing somewhere between 12 and 30 million people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century alone. The root cause of these famines, historian John Wilson argues in his 2016 book The Chaos of Empire, was that the British imposed such high revenues on peasant farmers—often half to two-thirds of their total production—that they had no food left to eat during drought years. Also, Shashi Tharoor argues in his 2016 book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India that the British destroyed India’s textile industry, forcing artisans into subsistence farming and eliminating the supplementary income that families had previously relied on during droughts.
After a series of half-hearted and underfunded investigations into the problem, the British finally decided to do some serious work to try to prevent future famines by improving Indian agriculture. As Zaheer Baber argues in his 1996 book The Science of Empire, “Scientific research and technological projects were increasingly deployed as technical solutions for social problems, such as continuing famines, which had emerged as a consequence of colonial rule. The dominant perspective was that the intervention of scientific and technological forces could be substitutes for the structural changes that would be contrary to colonial interests.”
In the 1890s, the British agricultural chemist John Voelcker traveled through India and concluded that Indian agriculture was “wonderfully good” in many areas. He recommended in his 1893 book Improvement of Indian Agriculture that the best way to improve agriculture across the country was “from an enquiry into native agriculture, and from the extension of the better indigenous methods to parts where they are not known or employed.” After carefully studying existing agricultural methods, scientists could “explain the rationale of the practice” with modern science and then make recommendations based on “the happy combination of science and practice.”
Following Voelcker’s recommendations, the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, established the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, Bihar in 1905. And the first Imperial Economic Botanist hired at Pusa was Sir Albert Howard, who wrote in his 1909 book Wheat in India that his goal was to apply “Western Scientific methods to the local conditions so as to improve Indian agriculture on its own lines.”
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