Histories of Economic Life

Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta

Tariq Omar Ali

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889280
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

1

Cultivating Jute

PEASANT CHOICE, LABOR, AND HUNGER

BETWEEN THE CRIMEAN WAR (1853–56) and World War I (1914–18), jute cultivation in Bengal expanded exponentially. In 1850 approximately 50,000 acres of Bengal’s land was sown with jute; in 1906 jute cultivation reached its historic high of close to four million acres.1 From an insignificant commodity of international trade, jute became Bengal’s leading export. In 1829, the first year that jute exports were enumerated by customs authorities in Calcutta, Bengal exported just eighteen tons of raw fiber valued at about 62 pounds sterling.2 In 1910 Bengal exported thirteen million tons of raw jute valued at 13 million Indian rupees and another 17 million rupees of jute manufactures.3 The enormous increase in jute cultivation was concentrated in a relatively small part of the province: the active delta of the Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Meghna river systems of eastern and northern Bengal, comprising the districts of Rangpur, Pabna, Bogra, Faridpur, Dacca, Mymensingh, and Tipperah (see map 1). This region of silt and alluvium, annual floods, and shifting soil, mud, and water produced between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s jute.4 When jute cultivation reached its historical high during the 1900s, more than 20 percent of these districts’ cultivated lands were sown with fiber.5

The enormous increase in jute production took place without colonial coercion, or even incentives and subsidies. The colonial government of Bengal was, in fact, taken by surprise by the new commodity. In 1873, after jute was already established as Bengal’s leading commercial crop, Bengal’s lieutenant governer expressed embarrassed and profound ignorance regarding fiber: “Gentlemen who have come from home with a practical interest in such questions [about jute] have lately asked His Honor to answer some of them, and he has been unable to answer them. . . . Mr. Campbell does not know to what language the word jute belongs, nor what it really means.”6 Unlike other contemporary commodities of empire, jute cultivation was not accompanied by enslavement, genocide, the violent enforcement of rigged contracts, massive irrigation projects, large-scale ecological engineering schemes, or the distribution of subsidized credit, seeds, and production technologies. The expansion of jute cultivation took place entirely through peasant choice, through the autonomous and independent decisions of tens of thousands of peasant households in the Bengal delta to devote increasing quantities of land and labor to fiber.

Economic historians of the delta have established that peasant decisions to grow jute were driven by markets, prices, and profits. Sugata Bose describes the expansion of jute as the “second phase” in the commercialization of agriculture, as the statist and capitalist coercion that characterized indigo cultivation in the early nineteenth century gave way to market forces and pressures during the late nineteenth century.7 Omkar Goswami has shown, through careful statistical analysis of admittedly flawed colonial agricultural data that year-to-year variations in jute acreage corresponded to fluctuations in the price of fiber, at least prior to the Great Depression of 1930.8 The close correspondence between acreage and price is revealed in the expansion of fiber over time: jute acreage increased in bursts, with spikes in global prices followed by periods of rapid expansion. Between the Crimean War and World War I, there were three booms in jute cultivation: between the mid-1860s and 1873, from the mid-1880s to 1890, and, finally, between 1905 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. These periods of rapid expansion closely corresponded with booms and busts in global capital.

The first jute boom took place during the late 1860s and the early 1870s, as jute prices increased sharply driven by the enormous increase in demand from Dundee manufacturers. Calcutta’s fiber exports increased from 2.3 million tons in 1866 to 7 million tons in 1873. In several jute-growing districts in the delta—for instance, Pabna, Mymensingh, Dacca, and Faridpur—commercial jute cultivation began in the early to mid-1860s.9 When prices reached a record high in 1872, cultivators responded by “[taking] up whatever land was ready at hand” and extended acreage by 30 percent from the previous year, to 760,000 acres. This was a fifteenfold increase from the estimated 50,000 acres sown with jute in 1850.10 In a pattern that was repeated over the coming decades, prices collapsed in August and September 1872, just as cultivators were preparing to harvest their record crop. The Long Depression had set in, and prices would remain depressed for the remainder of the decade. Jute cultivators abandoned their crops, allowing the plants to rot in the fields, and sharply reduced jute acreage the following year.

Jute acreage recovered to 1872 levels only at the end of the decade, reaching an estimated 795,000 acres in 1880. Cultivation then began to expand rapidly, as prices doubled from an average of 2 rupees and 11 annas per maund in 1882 to 4 rupees and 15 annas in 1890. Jute acreage expanded sharply at the end of the decade, from 1.45 million in 1888 to 2 million acres in 1890. When prices collapsed again in 1890, falling by 35 percent, cultivators responded as they had done in 1872—allowing standing crops to rot and sharply reducing acreage the following year, by 12.5 percent to 1.75 million acres.11

TABLE 1.1. Variations in Acreage and Price of Jute in Bengal, 1904–1915

	Acreage^*		Price^**
	Acres	Percentage change	Rupees per maund	Percentage change
1904	2,850,000		5.375
1905	3,090,700	8.4%	6.875	27.9%
1906	3,434,000	11.1%	8.875	29.1%
1907	3,846,500	12.0%	6.625	-25.4%
1908	2,766,300	-28.1%	5.5625	-16.0%
1909	2,773,100	0.2%	5.625	1.1%
1910	2,841,600	2.5%	5.5	-2.2%
1911	2,737,600	-3.7%	6.5625	19.3%
1912	2,536,900	-7.3%	8.375	27.6%
1913	2,456,600	-3.2%	10.5	25.4%
1914	2,872,600	16.9%	6.25	-40.5%
1915	2,086,300	-27.4%	6.9375	11.0%

* The acreage is for the entire province of Bengal. The Bengal delta accounted for more than 80% of the province’s acreage. These figures are from Department of Statistics, Estimates of Area and Yield of Principal Crops in India, 1914–15, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing Press, 1915, p. 11.

** This is the average price of fiber in markets across Bengal during a fiscal year, that is from July to July. The prices are compiled from Government of Bengal, Reports on Trade Carried by Rail and River in Bengal during the Years 1904/5 to 1914/15, Calcutta, 1905 to 1916.

Jute acreage averaged at just above 2 million acres between 1890 and 1905, when increases in prices led cultivators to amp up jute production. Calcutta prices rose sharply in 1905, a 28 percent increase followed by a 29 percent increase the following year. Increased acreage followed on the heels of high prices, rising by 11 percent in 1906 and then 13 percent in 1907. The 3.9 million acres sown with jute in 1907 was a historic high (see table 1.1). When prices fell again in 1907, cultivators reduced acreage. The increase in prices after 1911, and the record prices of 1913—10 rupees and 8 annas a maund—spurred an increase of 17 percent in acreage in 1914. However, just as cultivators were preparing to harvest their crop in August 1914, World War I commenced, global trade came to a temporary standstill, the German market disappeared, and prices plummeted. This time, jute cultivators did not allow their crops to rot in the field, as they had during previous price busts. Instead, they relied on women and children rather than wageworkers to harvest fiber and tried desperately to sell their produce at whatever prices were available. The price collapse of World War I began a rapid and thorough process of peasant immiseration in the Bengal delta.

These statistics of acreage and price do not, however, reveal the extent to which peasant households had to reorganize the distribution of plants over farmlands and rearrange rhythms of work and leisure in order to accommodate fiber. In and of themselves, statistics do not explain why cultivators could respond to price busts by allowing their crops to rot in 1873 and 1891 but not in 1914. This chapter goes beyond statistical analyses of market responsiveness to explore what decisions to grow more jute entailed in terms of agrarian space and time. Peasant decisions to grow more jute were, simultaneously, decisions to not grow rice. Jute competed for peasant land and labor with the delta’s two major rice crops—winter or aman paddy and spring or aus paddy. Choices between commercial fiber and subsistence grain dominated peasant economic life and were the most consequential decisions made by peasant households during the agrarian year. This chapter examines how peasant households responded to global markets by adapting to rhythms of work, ecologies of smallholdings, seasons of rain, sunshine, and monsoons, and the growth cycles of plants to produce combinations of jute for global markets and rice for household subsistence.

Jute remained inextricably tied to the soil of the Bengal delta. Nineteenth-century attempts to transfer jute cultivation to other parts of the world failed. In 1873 the Queensland society in Australia requested and received jute seeds from Bengal, though little seems to have come out of it.12 A more concerted attempt to introduce jute cultivation in Louisiana, in the Mississippi delta, during the same period also failed—though it caused consternation among colonial officials in Bengal.13 A report by the US Department of Agriculture noted success in growing the plant in the Mississippi delta but concluded that unless the process of extracting the fiber from plants was mechanized, farmers would not take up large-scale cultivation.14 In other words, white settler farmers in the United States and Australia were not willing to adapt rhythms of life and agrarian ecologies to the demands of jute—to exploit household labor or to risk hunger, as the Bengal peasantry did in growing jute.

The first section of this chapt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Histories of Economic Life
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Cultivating Jute: Peasant Choice, Labor, and Hunger
• 2. Consumption and Self-Fashioning: The Politics of Peasant Consumerism
• 3. The Spaces of Jute: Metropolis, Hinterland, and Mofussil
• 4. Immiseration
• 5. Agrarian Forms of Islam : The Politics of Peasant Immiseration
• 6. Peasant Populism: Electoral Politics and the “Rural Muhammadan”
• 7. Pakistan and Partition: Peasant Utopia and Disillusion
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Histories of Economic Life
• A Note on the Type