Granary of the Province”: Science and Subjects in Colonial and Post-Colonial India.

India embraced a “new strategy” in agriculture to raise yield around high-yielding variety seeds of wheat and paddy between 1964 and 1966. This adoption of a package program involving credit facilities, government’s support price and subsidies and infrastructures led to the beginning of a new line of productive agriculture that arguably helped India become a food secure nation. The phenomenon got celebrated globally as the US-backed “green revolution” of the Asias. My book takes the lens of the green revolution to write a broad-based history of rural and agrarian modernization in India in the 1950s and 1960s. The book’s fundamental argument is that this history cannot be told without reference to colonial histories. The particular nature of colonial science and politics set the architecture for the agrarian futures of post-independence era. Neither can this history be told without reference to India’s experience of partition and influx of refugees that merged with the effort to build communities in India, including making of productive agricultural communities. Demobilized soldiers, refugees from Pakistan, and development subjects undergirded the effort towards launching the so-called green revolution. My talk will consider some of these efforts in the Tarai, the Himalayan foothills where forests were cleared for the expansion of this extractive form of agriculture. Located in the new state of Uttarakhand now, the land of the Tarai was itself a subject of science-backed green revolution. India’s first agricultural university that was set up in Tarai in 1960 with the aid of University of Illinois catalyzed the conversion of Tarai into a zone for producing the seeds of the green revolution.

This event is co-sponsored by the East Asian Studies Program.