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Overview
Subordinating developmental goals to its political and military imperatives, the colonial state cooperated with the dominant social classes, the members of which became the major beneficiaries of agricultural colonization. Even while the rulers tried to use the vast resources of the Punjab to advance imperial purposes, they were themselves being used by their collaborators to advance implacable private interests. Such processes effectively retarded both nationalism and social change and resulted in the continued backwardness of the region even after the departure of the British.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691631868 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #923 |
| Pages: | 278 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885â"1947
By Imran Ali
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05527-5
CHAPTER 1
A New Agrarian Frontier
This is the story of agricultural colonisation in the Punjab during the period of British rule. The Punjab, a province lying in the northwestern part of the British Indian empire, experienced rapid and extensive economic growth from the late nineteenth century onward. This resulted from the development of canal irrigation, accompanied by a process of migratory settlement in its western parts, in the area that came to be known as the "canal colonies." This part of the Punjab did not benefit, as did the eastern parts of the province, from monsoonal rains of sufficient strength to support settled agriculture. Cultivated lands, as a result, were confined to areas accessible to irrigation, which was derived either from groundwater sources through wells, or from seasonal canals utilising river water.
The laying out of an extensive network of canals based on perennial irrigation, with water drawn from the rivers through permanent weirs and head works, has in the past century transformed this region from desert waste, or at best pastoral savanna, to one of the major centres of commercialised agriculture in South Asia. The sizeable in-migration from other parts of the Punjab that followed upon canal construction, and the ensuing extension in agricultural activity, has made the canal colonies a phenomenon of major importance in the recent history of this part of the world. For the British, under whose supervision they were founded, the canal colonies were the most potent of the many benefits that they believed their rule had brought to the people of this province. This new agrarian frontier could be held up as the crowning achievement of what they regarded as their benevolent participation in South Asian society. For the Punjabis themselves it became a major demographic outlet, with the opening up of the harsh lands of the western doabs posing a formidable challenge to their spirit of enterprise and initiative.
The Punjab had been annexed by the British in 1849. This event followed a century of turbulence that saw the collapse of the Mughal empire, a period of semi-anarchy during which confederacies based on peasant caste and tribal alignments fought for territorial control, and a feudal reaction within the warbands that resulted in the establishment of a number of petty princely states. It was the largest of these successor states, the adventurer Ranjit Singh's kingdom of Lahore, that the British overcame in 1849, thereby asserting their control over the entire province. British rule brought stability to the Punjab. Ruling groups, if they had desisted from provocation against British interests, were not replaced but confirmed as useful intermediaries between the state and the people. This partnership was consolidated with the Punjabis' vital intervention on the side of the British in the armed struggle of 1857-1858. The Punjabis went on to contribute manpower and logistic support for imperialism's conflicts on the northwest frontier, and also helped Britain to conquer and police far-flung overseas territories. Such cooperation continued throughout the period of imperialist rule, and with it the military became an important source of employment for Punjabis. About half the British Indian army came to be recruited from the Punjab; the British were fond of calling the people of this province "the martial races of India."
As soon as their administrative presence was established, the British undertook revenue settlements in each district. This regularised extraction from agriculture, which was by far the most important source of income for the state. Surveys were conducted to assess the revenue-paying capacity of each estate. Though state demand was generally fixed lower than the excessive rates imposed by previous governments, emphasis on ensuring efficient collection meant that the British extracted as much revenue, if not more, than their predecessors. Revenue assessments also served as a means of establishing proprietary status. They encouraged individualisation in property rights, which was a marked shift from the collective ownership by village communities and other complex forms of property that had existed in the pre-British period.
The process of individualisation created, probably for the first time, the prospect of alienation of land rights. With the increase in marketing of agricultural produce, aided by the development of road and rail transport, land came to have a monetary value. Agricultural owners realised that they possessed an asset that could be readily converted to more direct means of enjoying social expenditure and conspicuous consumption. After 1880 there was a considerable increase in land sales in the Punjab, but much of this alienation was forced rather than voluntary. As agriculturists entered more into the money economy, they fell deeper into debt to nonagricultural moneylending and commercial castes, though increasingly creditors also came from the ranks of the agriculturists themselves. Debt entailed mortgaging the only asset they possessed: their land. Unredeemed mortgages were converted to alienations by recourse to another institution introduced by the British, a civil and penal code. The new laws gave exceptional powers of manipulation to moneylenders, and turned law courts into arenas of agrarian conflict.
The British were greatly perturbed by these trends, which they regarded as undermining the position of the landowning "agricultural castes" on whom they relied for political support, revenue returns, and military recruitment. In 1900 they passed a remarkable piece of paternalistic legislation, the Punjab Alienation of Land Act. This forbade the passing of land from agricultural to nonagricultural castes, and allowed land transfers only within related agricultural caste groups in each district. This effort to shore up the landowning classes was followed in the remaining period of British rule by other legislative acts designed to protect agriculturists from inroads by commercial elements and the disruptive impact of market forces.
These processes suggest that the period of British rule in the Punjab was dominated by three major themes: political entrenchment, revenue extraction, and military requirements. These themes maintained their importance in the history of the region, even with the advent of significant changes in its economic structure. From 1885 on, the economy of the Punjab began to be reshaped by the unprecedented extension in agricultural production brought about by canal colonisation. In the western Punjab, the part that is now included in Pakistan, the emergence of a hydraulic society, combined with extensive irrigation schemes in the neighbouring province of Sind, has led to the establishment of one of the largest irrigation systems in the world.
The canal colonies resulted from the desire of the ruling authority to extend cultivation to the virgin lands of the western doabs. Existing irrigation systems were confined to tracts contiguous to rivers, but evidence of former habitations and earthworks in the slightly raised interfluves indicated the existence of irrigation networks in the past. The British had throughout evinced an interest in opening up the agrarian frontier in the west: from the early 1860s, not long after their annexation of the Punjab, they began to consider proposals for irrigation channels in the Rechna Doab. Several schemes were proposed before the final one for perennial irrigation from the Lower Chenab Canal took shape. This supplied irrigation water for what was to become the largest canal colony. Experience with colonisation had already been gained from smaller projects in the Bari Doab, namely, the Sidhnai, Sohag Para, and Chunian colonies, and later colonies emerged as the momentum of migration and settlement subsided in one doab and was taken up in another. In this way three other large colonies were founded: Jhelum, Lower Bari Doab, and NiIi Bar, as well as two smaller ones, Upper Chenab and Upper Jhelum colonies.
There were nine canal colonies in all, and they absorbed the available lands of the Bari, Rechna, and Jech doabs. The westernmost doab, known as the Sind Sagar, lying between the Jhelum and Indus rivers, remained unconquered during British rule. Repeated projections for its colonisation failed to achieve fruition, owing largely to the unevenness of the terrain. It was not until the technology of the bulldozer was introduced after 1947 that the last doab of the Punjab was also colonised.
The historiography of this region is sadly underdeveloped (one reason for neglect being that the old Punjab province now comprises four different provinces in two nations, Pakistan and India), and there has been no overview of the emergence of hydraulic society in the western Punjab. Such a study, which is being undertaken here, furnishes a unique set of historical problems and involves areas of inquiry that have to date received little attention from scholars. There was established in the Punjab an entirely new society on barren wasteland, under the aegis of state authority but with the active involvement of the native population. The chief purpose of this study is to give this important experiment in social and economic engineering its due recognition in the history of the region. In so doing, light can be shed first on the nature of imperialist rule and second on the response and preparedness of the indigenous population in utilising the valuable opportunity for economic transformation that came its way.
The ramifications of agricultural colonisation are assessed here not from the perspective of economic theory but through the historian's craft. Lessons from the historical experience of one particular agrarian economy can provide insights into the wider problems of development and underdevelopment. The Punjab, like many other colonised economies, suffered the fate of retarded development and even underdevelopment. Yet this outcome was reached in the Punjab through a virtually unique process, one predicated on economic expansion rather than stagnation or decline. This theme of the coexistence of significant growth with continued backwardness is explored here to indicate that it may be as pervasive in its effects on the poorer economies of the world as the more generally acknowledged relationship between the lack of growth and economic backwardness.
The structure of this study follows certain themes that portray significant aspects of economy and society in the canal colonies. The emergence of each of the nine canal projects is traced in the chapter on colonisation, with an analysis of state policy, the different forms of land utilisation, and the social and regional composition of the recipients of land. In the subsequent chapters are discussed issues emanating from the colonisation process.
The chapter on entrenchment deals with the political benefits that accrued to the state from its control over the distribution of land, and also with the consequences of the differential access to colony land that social inequalities produced. The next chapter, on militarisation, examines the efforts of the state to channel colony land toward the fulfilment of military needs. The study then concentrates on aspects of production and distribution, enabling an assessment of the degree to which the potential for change was being realised. The chapter on extraction addresses questions relating to the state revenue structure, and to the social relations of production as revealed by patterns of cultivating occupancy. The next chapter, on production, examines efforts at achieving agrarian improvement, and then surveys some broad features of cropping and cultivation in the canal colonies. The insights gathered, and summed up in the final chapter, will reveal some significant reasons for the simultaneity of growth and underdevelopment in a society such as the Punjab's, whose failure to overcome economic backwardness now stands in stark contrast to the success of other regions, affluent and industrialised, in a world greatly polarised between rich and poor.
CHAPTER 2Colonisation
The Canal Colonies
The process of agricultural colonisation commenced in the western Punjab from 1885, and it was to continue into the final years of British rule. The nine canal colonies developed in this period were situated in the interfluves west of the Beas-Sutlej and east of the Jhelum rivers. These tracts — the Bari, Rechna, and Jech doabs, lay between the Beas-Sutlej and Ravi rivers, the Ravi and Chenab rivers, and the Chenab and Jhelum rivers, respectively (see Table 2.1). The colonisation projects were based on the construction of a network of canals that took off from the rivers, with branches and distributaries spread over the flat, alluvial plains of the western Punjab. The canals were laid out primarily on uncultivated land, which was but sparsely inhabited by a semi-nomadic population of cattle graziers and camel owners. This made possible the migration into this area of people from other parts of the Punjab.
It was this element of colonisation, born out of the inadequate demographic resources of these doabs, that distinguished canal construction in the western Punjab from that further east. In other parts of northern India, such as the United Provinces, the canals constructed during British rule brought irrigation to already settled tracts. They supplemented existing agricultural systems based on barani (rain-fed) cultivation, and did not therefore require any in-migration. In the western Punjab, owing to the insufficiency of rainfall, agriculture was far more dependent on irrigation, and traditional irrigation systems relied on wells and seasonal inundation, traditionally allowing cultivation only in tracts contiguous to rivers. The extensive interfluves, left elevated through river action, remained unirrigated. The irrigation network that emerged after 1885 was based on perennial canals that led off from river-spanning weirs and headworks. This rendered cultivable the upland plains that had hitherto remained inaccessible to the smaller-scale and technologically less sophisticated traditional irrigation methods. The combination of migratory colonisation with the great dependence of cultivation on canal water supplied by a centralised authority created in this region a truly "hydraulic" society, such as could only exist in a diluted form further east because of the preponderate influence of barani agriculture.
Between 1885 and the end of British rule in 1947, the canal-irrigated area in the Punjab, excluding the princely states, increased from under 3,000,000 to around 14,000,000 acres. The great bulk of this increase took place in the canal colonies, which experienced thereby the greatest expansion in agricultural production in any part of South Asia under the British. The vast landed resources thus created in the canal colonies had a profound impact on economy and society in the Punjab. From the significant economic growth that ensued, the Punjab obtained its most promising prospects of economic development in recent history. The extent to which agricultural growth allowed the preconditions for successful development to emerge was greatly influenced by the nature of land utilisation in the canal colonies. "Colonisation," or the motives and methods involved in the settlement of these new lands, determined the character of the emergent society and the degree to which that society was capable of structural transformation from its existing state of economic backwardness.
The colonisation process was moulded by two forces: the state and the social structure. The former was important because it controlled land distribution: the canal colonies were situated in tracts designated as crown waste lands. This transferred ownership of these areas to the state, and allowed it to dispose of the land according to its discretion. Since the state also controlled the canal system and the water source, agriculture itself became dependent on the will of the ruling authority. The ownership of both land and water gave the central power virtual control over the means of production, thus greatly enhancing its authority over society. The role of the state was made manifest in the colonisation policy that provided the framework for land distribution in the canal colonies. State policy determined matters both great and small, ranging from the formulation of the general principles governing land distribution to the implementation of measures in the minute circumstances of the local arena. Here was an interventionist imperialism, extensively engaged in demographic and economic change.
The end product of state policy was the structure of landholding that emerged in the canal colonies. Colonisation had a major impact on people and society in the Punjab, since the manpower for agrarian growth came almost entirely from within the province. Existing stratifications and hierarchies in the Punjabi population were bound to be projected onto the new sphere. In rural society there existed extremes of wealth between large landowners on the one hand and poor cultivators and landless labourers on the other. Between these were intermediate layers of richer peasants and medium-sized landlords and, in addition, the urban-based strata of the bourgeoisie and working class. Only the last, constricted in size and preindustrial in nature, was unimportant to colonisation until colony towns came into their own.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885â"1947 by Imran Ali. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. v
- LIST OF TABLES, pg. vi
- PREFACE, pg. vii
- ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xi
- Chapter One. A New Agrarian Frontier, pg. 1
- Chapter Two. Colonisation, pg. 8
- Chapter Three. Entrenchment, pg. 62
- Chapter Four. Militarisation, pg. 109
- Chapter Five. Extraction, pg. 158
- Chapter Six. Production, pg. 206
- Chapter Seven. Growth and Underdevelopment, pg. 237
- GLOSSARY, pg. 245
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 249
- INDEX, pg. 257