Mr. Rees Philipps is now in India, and I have not been able to test or Missions to Mr. W. Rees Philipps, of the Forest Department, Madras. verify all his dates and statements. £ 100 109 2,403 90,226 1,109 41,219 74,834 Exclusive of special funds; and of all Including appropri- 1335 43 63 882 72,848 491 17,891 40,824 (Excluding (Excluding dioceses of The following are the statistics of four important Societies: CHAPTER XVI. Agricul ture. The work of almost the whole people. AGRICULTURE AND PRODUCTS. THE cultivation of the soil forms the occupation of the Indian people, in a sense which it is difficult to realize in England. As the land tax forms the mainstay of the imperial revenue, so the ráyat or cultivator constitutes the unit of the social system. The village community contains many members besides the cultivator, but they all exist for his benefit, and all are maintained from the produce of the village fields. Even in considerable towns, the traders and handicraftsmen almost always possess plots of land of their own, on which they raise sufficient grain to supply their families with food. According to the returns of the general Census of 1872, the adult males directly engaged in agriculture amount to nearly 35 millions, or 562 per cent. of the total. To these must be added almost all the day - labourers, who number 7 million males, or 123 per cent.; thus raising the total of persons directly supported by cultivation to 68.5 per cent.; being more than two-thirds of the whole adult males. The number of persons indirectly connected with agriculture. is also very great. The Famine Commissioners estimate that 90 per cent. of the rural population live more or less by the tillage of the soil. India is, therefore, almost exclusively a country of peasant farmers. Even the so-called towns are merely groups of villages, in the midst of which the ploughman drives his cattle a-field, and all the operations of agriculture go on. The increase in the population has, however, developed a large landless class. The cultivated area no longer suffices to allow a plot of land for each peasant; and multitudes now find themselves ousted from the soil. They earn a poor livelihood as day-labourers; and according to the census of 1872, comprise one-eighth of the entire population. There is still enough land in India for the whole people, but the Indian peasant clings to his native District, however overcrowded. Migration or emigration has hitherto worked on too small a scale to afford a solution of the difficulty. Agriculture is carried on in the different Provinces with an Various infinite variety of detail. Everywhere the same perpetual systems of agriassiduity is found, but the inherited experience of generations culture. has taught the cultivators to adapt their simple methods to differing circumstances. The deltaic swamps of Bengal and Burma, the dry uplands of the Karnatic, the black-soil plains of the Deccan, the strong clays of the Punjab, the desert sand of Sind or Rájputána, require their separate modes of agriculture. In each case the Indian peasant has learned, without scientific instruction, to grow the crops best suited to the soil. His light plough, which he may be seen carrying a-field on his shoulders, makes but superficial scratches; but what the furrows lack in depth, they gain by repetition, and in the end pulverize every particle of mould. Where irrigation is Irrigation. necessary, native ingenuity has devised the means. The inundation channels in Sind, the wells in the Punjab and the Deccan, the tanks in the Karnatic, the terraces cut on every hillside, water at the present day a far larger area than is commanded by Government canals. Manure is copiously applied Manure. to the more valuable crops, whenever manure is available; its use being limited only by poverty and not by ignorance. The scientific rotation of crops is not adopted as a prin- Rotation of crops. ciple of cultivation. But in practice it is well known that a succession of exhausting crops cannot be taken in consecutive seasons from the same field, and the advantage of fallows is widely recognised. A mutation of crops takes the place of their rotation. The petite culture of Indian husbandmen is in many respects well adapted to the soil, the climate, and the social conditions. of the people. The periodicity of the seasons usually allows of two, and in some places of three, harvests in the year. For inexhaustible fertility, and for retentiveness of moisture in a dry season, no soil in the world can surpass the regar or 'black cotton-soil' of the Deccan. In the broad river basins, the inundations deposit annually a fresh top-dressing of silt, thus superseding the necessity of manures. The burning sun and the heavy rains of the tropics combine, as in a natural forcinghouse, to extract the utmost from the soil. I shall speak hereafter of possible improvements in Indian agriculture1-improvePost, pp. 407-409. Rice. Statistics of rice cul tivation, ments now necessary to support the increasing population. As the means of communication improve and blunt the edge of local scarcity, India is perhaps destined to compete with America as the granary of Great Britain. The name of rice has from time immemorial been closely associated with Indian agriculture. The rice-eating population is estimated at 67 millions, or over one-third of the whole.1 If, however, we except the deltas of the great rivers, and the long strip of land fringing the coast, rice may be called a rare crop throughout the remainder of the peninsula. But where rice. is grown, it is in an almost exclusive sense the staple crop. In British Burma, in a total cultivated area of 2,833,520 acres, in 1877-78, as many as 2,554,853 acres, or 90 per cent., were under rice. Independent Burma, on the other hand, grows no rice, but imports largely from British territory. For Bengal, unfortunately, no general statistics are available. But taking Rangpur as a typical District, it was there found that 14 million acres, out of a classified total of a little more than 1 million acres, or 88 per cent., were devoted to rice. Similar proportions hold good for the Province of Orissa, the deltas of the Godavari, Kistna, and Káveri (Cauvery), and the lowlands of Travancore, in different Malabar, Kánara, and the Konkan. In the North-Western Provinces. Provinces and Oudh, rice is grown in damp localities, or with Methods of rice cultivation : the help of irrigation, and forms a favourite food for the upper classes; but the local supply requires to be supplemented by importation from Bengal. Throughout the interior of the country, except in Assam, which is agriculturally a continuation of the Bengal delta, the cultivation of rice occupies but a subordinate place. In Madras generally, the area under rice amounts to about 33 per cent. of the whole food-grain area. In Bombay proper, the corresponding proportion is only 10 per cent., and in the outlying Province of Sind, 17 per cent. In the Central Provinces, the proportion rises as high as 34 per cent., but in the Punjab it falls to 5 per cent. In scarcely any of the Native States, which cover the centre of the peninsula, is rice grown to a large extent. Rice is in fact a local crop, which can only be cultivated profitably under exceptional circumstances, although under those circumstances it returns a larger pecuniary yield than in Madras; any other food-grain in India. According to the Madras system of classification, rice is a wet crop,' ie. it demands constant irrigation. In a few favoured tracts, the requisite irrigation is supplied by local rainfall, but more commonly by the periodi1 Report of the Indian Famine Commission, part ii. p. 81 (1880). C of rice. cal overflow of the rivers, either directly or indirectly through artificial channels. It has been estimated that the rice crop requires 40 inches of water in order to reach its full development. But more important than the total amount of water is the period over which that amount is distributed. While the seedlings are in an early stage of growth, 2 inches of water are ample; but when the stem is strong, high floods are unable to drown it. In some Districts of Bengal, a long-stemmed in Bengal. variety of rice is grown, which will keep its head above 12 feet of water. Throughout Bengal, there are two main harvests of rice in the year - (1) the áus or early crop, sown on comparatively high lands, during the spring showers, and reaped between July and September; (2) the áman or winter crop, sown in low-lying lands, from June to August, usually transplanted, and reaped from November to January. The latter crop comprises the finer varieties, but the former is chiefly retained by the cultivators for their own food supply. Besides these two great rice harvests of the Bengal year, there are intermediate ones in various localities. The returns from Rangpur District specify no fewer than 295 varieties of rice.1 The average out-turn per acre in Bengal has been esti- Out-turn mated at 15 maunds, or 1200 lbs., of cleaned rice. In 1877-78, when famine was raging in Southern India, the exports of rice from Calcutta (much of it to Madras) amounted to nearly 17 million cwts. In British Burma, there is but a single harvest in the year, corresponding to the áman of Bengal. The grain is reddish in colour, and of a coarse quality; but the average out-turn is much higher than in Bengal, reaching in some places an average of 2000 and 2500 lbs. per acre. In 1877-78, the Burmese export of rice exceeded 13 million cwts. Besides being practically the sole crop grown in the deltaic swamps, rice is also cultivated on all the hills of India, from Coorg to the Himalayas. The hill tribes practise one of two Hill cultimethods of cultivation. They either cut the mountain slopes vation. into terraces, to which sufficient water is conveyed by an ingenious system of petty canals; or they trust to the abundant rainfall, and scatter their seeds on clearings formed by burning patches of the jungle. In both cases, rice is the staple crop, where the moisture permits. It figures largely in the nomadic system of hill cultivation, described at pages 417-419. The table on the next page shows the comparative area under rice and the two great other classes of food-grains. The figures must be taken as approximate estimates only. 1 See my Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. vii. pp. 234-237 (1875) |