“Kans is king and the cultivator is his subject”: environmental history and agrarian development in modern India
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Accepted manuscript
Date
2021-01-01
Authors
Siegel, Benjamin
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
B. Siegel. 2021. "“Kans Is King and the Cultivator Is His Subject”: Environmental History and Agrarian Development in Modern India." Environmental History, Volume 26, Issue 1, pp. 102 - 126. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emaa060
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultivators and administrators in
India contended with the ravages of kans grass (Saccharum spontaneum), a deeply-rooted wild
sugarcane that rendered productive land wholly barren. Difficult to eliminate and endemic
throughout India, kans proved particularly destructive in north and central India, particularly in
the regions of Jhansi, Bundelkhand, and the Himalayan Terai. Yet the fight against this
ecological antagonist was bound up in broader political transformations. As India’s colonial
agriculture grew increasingly tied to global markets in the late nineteenth century, and these dry
regions offered new possible spaces for settled agriculture, imperial administrators grew
increasingly certain that mechanical tractors held the solution to its eradication. And as
postcolonial Indian nationalists cast the production of abundant food as central to their political
legitimacy, they held out the eradication of kans as a national aim, enlisting the World Bank as a
partner. Yet by the 1960s, kans grass “disappeared” as an environmental foe, as faith in the
promises of large-scale postcolonial planning were eclipsed by alternate visions of agricultural
productivity. Pushing beyond the forests and waterways that have overwhelmingly characterized
environmental history in South Asia, this article demonstrates how the ostensibly natural world
could confound plans for agricultural development and the notions of state power which
underwrote them. By taking up the region’s agroecosystems, this essay underscores the
inexorability of ecological concerns to settled agriculture, and offers a reminder that weeds open
windows into the intertwined histories of political and environmental change.