Short essay on recent historiography

In the new historical studies of science, technology and environment that emerged in the 1990s several key themes and questions provided a sophisticated framework of discussion.

Commentaries on recent historical writings have pointed out that the above-mentioned concerns were not entirely new. In fact, the same issues had implicitly formed a part of imperial, nationalist and popular discussions and sayings. Let us take a few instances.

For one, imperial planners who laid down the railways, among them Bartle Frere of Bombay in 1863 proclaimed clearly that the railways would quadruple the British Military strength in India. For another, one strand of nationalist opinion, represented by Gandhi in 1908, declared openly: ‘Railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished the country, so much so that, if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined.’ To take a third and rather interesting instance, there had been attempts to study the popular response to the innovations of the modern age among the nineteenth century folk songs collected by William Crooke.

One was on the train and it ran as follows: ‘Eating no corn, drinking water / by the force of steam it goes on plain road, on rods of iron it goes / In front of the engines, behind the cars, bhak, bhak they go.’ The attitude reflects neither approval nor rejection, just a strange new addition accepted as part of the landscape, it has been argued.

Earlier discussions of science and technology had not always shown good, critical sense. On the one hand, patriotic Indians sought to upstage Western Science and Technology by claiming to have discovered everything in the Vedas. On the other hand, colonial statements on scientific and technological progress were simply and approvingly reproduced by some historians without examining the motives behind those statements.

Among recent works on science and technology which have all focused in one way or the other on the question of power and politics may be mentioned. Dipak Kumar, Science and The Raj; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley, 1993); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason : Science and The Imagination of Modern India; David Arnold, Science. Technology and Medicine in Colonial India; Arnold and Prakash, both belonging to the Subalterns school, regarded science as an integral part of the political sphere.

Arnold brought science under the technique of colonial discourse analysis; Prakash on the other hand, treated science as part of the discourse of imagining the nation as a modern, rational body of people. Both saw the new technology as a means of forging ‘a link between space and the state’ and science, therefore, as very much a matter of power and domination. In the name of science, the colonial administration pursued policies of domination biased towards maintaining imperial authority and not the welfare of the colonized.

In the name of science again, the nationalist movement and the Indian scientists sympathetic to that movement bought an alternative centre of power, an imagined community called the nation that would liberate itself by means of the modern spirit of scientific rationality. As for the colonized themselves the subalternists speculated that popular resistance to colonial domination might arise from the people’s mental association of railways and telegraphs with calamities such as famines and epidemics.

There emerged historical studies of the mortality caused by plague, malaria, small-pox, cholera and the influenza epidemic of 1918; the political unrest and administrative chaos caused by disease; and the popular response to harsh colonial public health policies. Ecological history, which emerged as a separate branch of history in the 1990s, was a response to the world-wide environmental movement.

In 1987, C.A. Bayly declared in Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, New Cambridge History of India, ‘Ecological change in India is the coming subject, but no overview has appeared.’ Bayly himself concluded that the hundred years following 1780 witnessed ‘the beginnings of extensive deforestation in the subcontinent.

The first work of the new ecological history, Ramchandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya concerned itself with the Subalterns theme of domination and resistance rather than with the actual tracking of environmental change over the long duration. It was a study of the emergence of a popular movement in the Himalayan foothills against the commercial exploitation of the forest resources of the Himalayas.

The next work, Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil’s This Fissured Land: an Ecological History of India was wider in scope, and it took the following position: ‘In India the ongoing struggle between the peasant and industrial modes of resource use has come in two stages: colonial and post-colonial. It has left in its wake a fissured land, ecologically and socially fragmented beyond belief and, to some observers, beyond repair.’

Other works, which focused on conservation and the adverse ecological consequences of colonial policies, included Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Eden’s, and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600 – 1860 and Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces 1860-1914 (New Delhi, 1996).

The loss of the rights of the forest-dwellers was a principal theme of ecological history, as was the development of resistance and of efforts at conservation. More conventional economic histories had already focused on the impact of colonial rule on the environment.

The advance of the agricultural frontier and irrigation canals, with the attendant problems of salivation, water-logging and spread of disease, were studied, among others, by Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India: the United Provinces under British Rule, 1860-1900 (Berkeley, 1972); Ian Stone, Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy and M. Mufakharul Islam, Irrigation, Agriculture and the Raj: Punjab 1887-1947 roads and canals interrupted the natural watercourses, yet on balance it could not be denied that irrigation increased agricultural productivity.

A study of the impact of the railways, by Robert Varady among others, shows that the railways depleted the Himalayan timber region, wiped out the remaining jungles on the plains, and could carry on only because of the advent of cheap coal. Roads and railways formed disease-laden puddles, spread epidemics and speeded up soil erosion. Nevertheless, economic historians such as John Hurd and Mukul Mukherjee, have concluded that the railways promoted internal trade, reduced seasonal fluctuations and inter-market price differentials for grain and cotton, and integrated the market in bulk commodities.

Economic historians, rather than ecological historians, have mapped the long-term recession of forest and pasture under the onslaught of agriculture in Indian history. Shireen Moosvi, in her Man and Nature in the Mughal Era established that cultivation doubled between 1601 and 1909 at the expense of pasture and waste in Northern India.

A balanced picture emerges when we take together the work of the mainstream economic historians and the new historians of science, technology and environment. New dimensions of history have emerged, the harmful effects of modern science and technology on environment have been highlighted, yet the benefits have also been stressed.