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ID: 178164

American Modernisers and the Cow Question in Colonial and Nationalist India / Kumar, Prakash

Kumar, Prakash	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

The cattle modernisation sought by American missionaries in colonial North India advanced a productivist argument around the efficiency of cattle and their contribution to agriculture. On the face of it, by criticising the excessive supply of cattle in North India, this position went against the core preservationist concerns of the cow protectionists. But in reality, these modernisers struck a range of correlations with colonial and nationalist positions on the management of livestock and, ironically, even some limited space with the cow protectionists in treating India’s cattle as productive beings that were beneficial to the nation. These American prescriptions were stable constructs that became visible once again in the American food aid apparatus in India after Independence and shared overlapping concerns with ongoing cattle productivity debates in India. This paper illuminates the overlaps between the advocacy of the multiple constituents and a recurrence of certain patterns of contestation that were constitutive of the very paradigm of agrarian modernisation.

Key Words

Modernisation ; Agricultural Production ; Food Aid ; Animal Husbandry ; Cattle Breeding ; Pests ;
US–India Relations

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ID: 131806

Planters and naturalists: transnational knowledge on colonial Indigo plantations in south Asia / Kumar, Prakash

Kumar, Prakash	Journal Article
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2014.

Summary/Abstract

The knowledge of indigo culture that developed on indigo plantations in colonial Bengal was remarkably cosmopolitan in its borrowings. The protean knowledge that was assembled in the first plantations in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century had roots in various peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in the world. French naturalists committed this knowledge to texts, making them legible and portable whilst the needs of European empires ensured the perfection of this knowledge on separate continents even as it picked up heterogeneous forms at numerous sites. The heterogeneity of the knowledge attached to the practice of indigo manufacture was reproduced on the Indian subcontinent when indigo was reinvented as a colonial commodity. European planters generously drew on the texts describing indigo-making that were easily available, as the practice of dye making continued to evolve in the colonial locality. Some surviving peasant traditions of indigo culture on the subcontinent also impinged on the evolving knowledge. Thus multiple logics rather than the single colonial logic lay beneath the development of colonial indigo plantations in Bengal. An understanding of the process requires attention to the global genealogies of this knowledge system.

Key Words

Europe ; Caribbean ; Colonial Bengal ; Knowledge System ; Indigo Culture ; Indigo Plantations ;
Colonial Commodity

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