Technology and Culture

This book is the latest work of Professor Emeritus Peter Robb, a distinguished historian of South Asia who has contributed immensely to colonial studies on Bihar, India. In this prodigious work, Robb traces agrarian development under the British Raj, which was propelled by scientific experts, jurisprudence, and colonial policymakers who shaped Bihar in the particular ways that we know today. [End Page 374]

The book challenges the common assumption that India's underdevelopment is linked to imperialism, an account that Robb finds simplistic, as it misses the ways in which British laws and governance in India, which fitted badly with local conventions and habits, came to serve private interests of local go-betweens rather than the common good (p. 3). The book therefore turns its attention to state intervention, Western science, and modern governance techniques that paid less attention to indigenous societies in Bihar. The book focuses on policymaking in relation to canal irrigation technologies and ideas of improvement in agriculture, which involved a contest between revenue officials and irrigation engineers. Divided into three parts, the book explores the interface between property, law, science, and governance of Bihar. Central to Robb's historical sketch is the role science played in Indian society during the nineteenth century as an aid to the "civilizing mission" and as a paternalistic form of power to classify, protect, and improve the condition of the colonized subjects. The book therefore investigates the "state's role in development" and "development as an aspect of modernization" (p. 8).

Theoretically, the work inspires us to look beyond colonial categories and examine how different modes of production coexisted in Bihar's agrarian landscape. This problematizes the dichotomy developed by several historians who have investigated the problem of improvement through a linear vision of development versus backwardness. As Robb poignantly points out, the core schema of the book is to examine the "ways 'colonialism' worked under Indian conditions and upon Indians" (p. 13).

The skeleton of the present book can be discovered in Robb's previous chef d'oeuvre, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort (1997), in which he discusses the state of society in India during 1870–1920, with a focus on Patna Division. The new book reflects less on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 but focuses more on the politics of rule makers and the technological experts who worked in connivance with state-appointed chowkidars (policemen) to manage the affairs of the state—land, agriculture, and peasantry. Agrarian Development in Colonial India is partly an abridged edition of the former publication in which the author engages with a diverse set of issues related to trade in agricultural commodities—cash crops, irrigation, and debt mitigation during periods of natural calamities such as droughts and floods. But it also makes some new contributions to the previous work. For instance, it focuses on plantation crops, such as sugar, indigo, and opium, and the ways colonial policies were shaped by local mediators on the one hand and by the technical experts who worked as government agents on the other. Therefore, Robb's principal argument is that development policies were shaped and informed by the actors and actants working to bring about improvements in Bihar and that colonial intervention was often a negotiated outcome of imperial foresight and local aspiration.

While there are great merits in Robb's argument, his scholarship does not include the multiple voices that shaped colonial policymaking in Bihar, [End Page 375] as they did elsewhere in the colonies. Firstly, Robb limits his scope to disagreements between irrigation engineers and revenue officials, although policymaking was also informed by weather experts, soil scientists, and botanists, whose voices he does not account for in his analysis. For example, environmental historians such as the late Richard Grove (Green Imperialism, 1994) and Ravi Rajan (Modernising Nature, 2006) highlight in their work the importance of the imperial annual conferences, where different colonial experts gathered and deliberated on the key agroecological issues that shaped colonial policymaking and intervention in the colonies. Secondly...