Colonising Plants in Bihar (1760-1950): Tobacco Betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane by Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff

Author:Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781482839104
Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
Published: 2015-02-08T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

New Ventures in Sugar Cane and Tobacco Improvement in Bihar

By 1950, British plant colonisers had all but vanished from Bihar’s landscape. Though the Monghyr factory remained and was still under British management, tobacco leaf for cigarette blending was not any longer grown in Bihar. The factory now acquired this from present-day Andhra Pradesh in southern India. Not only had the ILTDC abandoned its plant improvement scheme in Bihar, however. Pusa’s Imperial Agricultural Research Institute’s slow withdrawal from tobacco colonisation in Bihar had, in fact, started as soon as the Howards had engineered the desired seed that did produce, provided certain cultivation and curing methods were observed, some quite acceptable quality of cigarette tobacco leaf. The legacy these British officials and ‘non-officials’ such as planters and ILTDC managers left behind was, however, more than abandoned bungalows, ruins of indigo vats, earthquake-destroyed remains of the old Imperial Agricultural Research Institute’s premises, tobacco redrying factories, and graveyards. In this concluding chapter, I show that the changes that took places at Imperial Pusa during the 1920s and 1930s announced the beginning of yet another plant colonisation scheme that in the Republic of India continued without the British. Importantly, these changes at Pusa caused the imperial government to look for other places within and outside India where they could continue their efforts at tobacco colonisation. And as analysed in this chapter, the imperial withdrawal from tobacco improvement in Bihar created space for the newly formed government of Bihar to start improving their ‘own’ deshi (country) tobacco in an independent India and for its home market.

The End of Imperial Pusa and Its Tobacco Improvement Project in Bihar

The outcomes of agricultural research conducted at the Imperial Institute at Pusa were meant to be used not only in Bihar but also in many other parts in India, such as Bengal, Punjab, and the United Provinces, in fact in the whole of British India as well as Burma and even in other parts of the British Empire. This implied that what was researched was also dictated by (economic) needs existing outside Bihar or even India. Research at Imperial Pusa could, therefore, be useful to cultivators in the, in 1912, created province of Bihar (and Orissa till 1936) but did not necessarily have to be so in order to be pronounced ‘successful’.773

Till the end of the 1910s, Imperial Pusa did not face much resistance against this state of affairs from within as well as from outside India. Yet by 1918–19 and under severe political pressure from the provinces in India (including the provinces of Bihar and Orissa), the Government of India Act of 1919 had been implemented. These so-called Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms allowed progressive responsibility to Indians for executive government, and the first steps were, as Peter Robb detailed, ‘territorial constituencies’ and ‘partial responsible government (diarchy) in the provinces’.774 These reforms had, as David Arnold analysed, ‘far-reaching effects on the organisation, funding and political complexion of late colonial science’. As a result of this decentralisation effort, Imperial Pusa, instead of

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