Even as the last decade and a half has witnessed a revitalization of the problems of the economy within South Asian historiography, the once-thriving field of agrarian history seemed to have been left behind by this turn towards new histories of capitalism.1 Neeladri Bhattacharya’s long-awaited The Great Agrarian Conquest. The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World wades into this sparse terrain with a tour de force of archival heft and theoretical insight. Bhattacharya’s book focuses on Punjab in western British India in the period beginning from the British conquest of the region in the mid-nineteenth century. The book, a culmination of decades of research and teaching, draws on a vast array of archival material and explicates how this colonial project involved a radical transformation of social customs, institutions and practices that undergirded the agrarian Punjabi society.

The great strength of the book lays in its ability to balance granular, microscopic archival details on colonial Punjab with the broader sweep of analytical rigour relevant to wider South Asian historiography. Bhattacharya draws on his outstanding grasp of the debates in South Asian agrarian history to bring it into a fruitful conversation with historical methodologies that have developed in the last three decades. The book draws from insights on social structures and village traditions from Indian sociology, engages with the debates within Marxist histories on the agrarian question, and builds on the work of the Subaltern Studies-inspired turn to literary and discourse analysis.2

The book is divided into four sections, with a total of ten chapters and an introduction and epilogue. The first section „Governing the Rural“ includes a single chapter that lays out the ideological underpinnings of British rule in Punjab. By the time of the British conquest of the region in 1849, large parts of the Indian subcontinent had already been under company rule. The peculiarity of the Punjab experience stemmed from the ideational framework within which its agrarian landscape was reimagined and refigured. The chapter considers the motivations of key colonial administrators in the early days of colonial rule in Punjab. Bhattacharya lays out how the contradictory pulls of revenue extraction and paternalistic benevolence were often smoothed over by acts of brutal violence. While „masculine paternalism“ came to be one of the defining attributes of British rule in Punjab, the author delineates how this engagement with the natives marked a shift from the British experience in Bengal. The codification of laws in Bengal were dependent on native informants and sacred texts, while in Punjab officials obsessed over discovering customary practices as they „saw custom as embodied in practices rather than ancient text“ (p. 189).

The next section titled „The Agrarian Imaginary“ delineates the historical processes that underpin many of the foundational categories uncritically used in much of South Asian agrarian history. An overarching concern in this section comprising four chapters is to sketch out how „colonial power in the countryside was built through a new regime of categories“ (p. 109). The classificatory logic crucial to the framing, ordering and eventual appropriation of the rural landscape was rendered legible through the creation of a semantic vocabulary of categories. Mapping and surveying undertaken in the mid-nineteenth century assisted in constituting the idea of the village as the universal rural. The transformation of the landscape through an enclosing of the commons was at once constitutive of bounded villages even as it laid out its defining characteristics.

A persistent endeavour in this section is to sketch out the historical processes in the making of the various categories of revenue assessment and land settlement. The British enunciation of the types of village tenures as well as their understanding of patrilineal inheritance, for instance, were part of a series of attempts to classify and enumerate the agrarian landscape of Punjab. What such a move entailed was the very creation of landed-owners within bounded spaces, practising a particular form of settled agriculture, under codified customary laws. These sections elaborate on how revenue settlement surveys, mapping of village boundaries, and the codifying of customary practices were very intrinsic to the creation of peasants as fiscal subjects.

The third section „From Code to Practice“ lays bare the working of the categories of the agrarian, and of its negotiation by the very people whom it sought to control. This move, to grapple with the dialogic attributes of historical processes, enables Bhattacharya to tease out the co-constitutive nature of colonial power and the sketching of rural social structures. In arguably the most riveting chapter of the book titled „Fear of the Fragment“, Bhattacharya explicates the colonial paranoia over the fragmentation of landholdings in Punjab in the aftermath of the great mapping and ordering of villages. Accustomed to a legal system that practised primogeniture, British revenue officials found it impossible to grasp the logic of equitable partible inheritance. Through specific case studies of landholdings held by peasants over decades, Bhattacharya elaborates the fascinating ways in which farmers sought to circumvent „inheritance customs and the disintegrative impact of the market“ (p. 301).

The final section of the book „From the ‚Primitive‘ to the Modern“ examines „a more dramatic form of agrarian conquest“ (p. 15). Two chapters focus on the radical transformation of the pasturelands, and the promises and crisis in the creation of Punjab’s distinctive Canal Colonies. The chapter „Colonising the Commons“ focusses on the expansion of the agrarian frontier; it highlights the interrelated histories of agrarian landscapes through an examination of the ways in which nomads were compelled to be settled pastoralists, and scrublands, grass fields and forests were brought within the ambit of colonial power. By bringing in the problem of pasturelands within the domain of the agrarian, the chapter examines how such an appropriation was not just a narrative of dispossession and displacement, but that it also refigured the nature of state practice.

The final chapter considers the book‘s arguments, another instance of social engineering whereby the state impulse to intensive agriculture led to the digging of a series of canals in eastern Punjab. Peasants from west Punjab were brought into the newly demarcated water-fed cultivating zones, who soon got into conflict with pastoralists with a historical claim on these lands. In a tale that would echo decades later under the banner of Green Revolution, an initial burst in agricultural productivity was followed by waterlogged soils and changes in cropping practices, as well as pest and insect attacks on crops.

The only gripe this reviewer has about this book of otherwise great scholarship is that it effaces the early decades of the twentieth century from the narrative of South Asian agrarian history. Like other works on South Asian agrarian studies from which The Great Agrarian Conquest draws its intellectual lineage, Bhattacharya’s narrative thins out as the story moves into the nationalist phase of British colonial rule in India.3 Even as the chapter on the canal colonies foreshadows the wretched legacies of the Green Revolution, the anxieties of the postcolonial nation-state are left to seek explanations in the colonial agrarian ventures of the nineteenth century. Often times, this intellectual leap feels like a gap too far to be bridged.

Perhaps the enduring contribution of the book is its nuanced examination of various categories that are taken as self-evident by many historians of modern South Asia. At a methodological level, The Great Agrarian Conquest paves the way to fruitfully engage with questions of the agrarian without being straitjacketed in the confines of traditional economic history. Finally, the book is a testament to the historian’s craft – the inner logics and dissonances of colonial rule are elaborated through a thick description of „the everyday experience of small confrontations“ (p. 365). In Bhattacharya’s deft hands, the logic of colonial rule is laid bare under the weight of its own contradictions.

Notes:
1 For two illustrative works from this period that engage with the question of economy, Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital. Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Duke 2009; Manu Goswami, Producing India. From Colonial Economy to National Space, Hyderabad 2004.
2 For a recent iteration of some the long-drawn debates, Clive Dewey, Changing the Guard. The Dissolution of the Nationalist-Marxist Orthodoxy in the Agrarian and Agricultural History of India, in: The Indian Economic & Social History Review 56 (2019), 4, pp. 489–509.
3 This is true for some of the core texts of South Asian agrarian history. Consider, David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton 1985; Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj. Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, Cambridge 1978.