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Reviews
Annam
Bahu Kurvita
India - Once Plentiful
Records reveal British schemes diminished crops and
dismantled a native system of abundance
Hinduism
Today, May 1997
“Most of us college-educated Indians were taught that
inefficient technologies and low productivities pervaded
through long ages in practically all parts of India,” states
Dr. J. K. Bajaj, director of the Centre for Policy Studies,
a Chennai think tank. In the 1920s Gandhi’s Young India
presented some proof of a rich and prosperous pre-British
India. Then in the 1960s, the Centre’s founder, historian
Sri Dharampal, discovered at the Thanjavur Tamil University
a set of palmleaf records documenting a British survey of
2,000 villages of Chengalpattu, a large area surrounding
present-day Chennai. “Startling features of Tamil society in
the 18th century emerge from these palmleaf accounts,” said
Bajaj. “Between 1762 and 1766 there were villages which
produced up to 12 tons of paddy a hectare. This level of
productivity can be obtained only in the best of the Green
Revolution areas of the country, with the most advanced,
expensive and often environmentally ruinous technologies.
The annual availability of all food averaged five tons per
household; the national average in India today is
three-quarters ton. Whatever the ways of pre-British Indian
society, they were definitely neither ineffective nor
inefficient.”
Food production is just one aspect of the colonial impact
being addressed by the Centre. The Chengalpattu records are
part of Dharampal’s research which has uncovered a
politically, technologically and economically vibrant Indian
society of the 18th century. “That society was dismantled
and atomized by the British, by force,” states the Centre’s
brochure, “and the diverse skills of the Indian people were
pushed out of the public sphere and made to rust and decay.
For India to become a vibrant and dynamic nation again, we
only need to re-awaken the political, economic and
technological skills of our people.” The records are
especially useful for understanding how Hindu religious
institutions were originally supported, and why they
declined under British rule.
Dharampal
believes Indians must rediscover their nation’s traditional
sense of chitta, mind, and flow of time, kala. “Since we
have lost practically all contact with our tradition, and
all comprehension of our chitta and kala, there are no
standards and norms on the basis of which to answer
questions that arise in ordinary social living. Ordinary
Indians perhaps still retain an innate understanding of
right action and right thought, but our elite society seems
to have lost all touch with any stable norms of behavior and
thinking. The present attempt at imitating the world and
following every passing fad can hardly lead us anywhere. We
shall have no options until we evolve a conceptual framework
of our own, based on chitta and kala, to discriminate
between right and wrong, what is useful for us and what is
futile.”
The Centre’s three main researchers are: M.D. Srinivas, a
theoretical physicist teaching at the University of Madras,
who specializes in Indian science; T.M. Mukundan, a
mechanical engineer specializing in technologies such as
water management and iron smelting; and J.K. Bajaj, also a
theoretical physicist, now involved in economy, agriculture
and energy.
The Chengalpattu data was a Godsend for the Centre, and has
allowed them to support many of their central theories about
pre-British India. The accounts detail a complete economic,
social, administrative and religious picture of the society.
Every temple, pond, garden and grove in a locality is
listed, the occupation, family size, home and lot size of
62,500 households meticulously recorded. Crop yields between
1762 and 66 are tallied. Per capita production of food in
this region (which is of average fertility) was more than
five times that achieved on average today.
Bajaj and his associates didn’t do all their work in a
library. The team set off in person across the Chengalpattu
region to verify the picture presented in the leafs. They
found most of these villages deserted--perhaps since the
beginning of the 19th century--by all who had any resources,
education or skills. Inhabitants had left behind their
palatial houses, their temples and groves. Abandoned as well
were the eyrs--the irrigation tanks and channels--often cut
across by British-built roads which left dry land on one
side and stagnant water on the other. Their on-the-ground
inspection confirmed many aspects of the inscribed leaves.
Of importance to Hindu history is how the religious
institutions were maintained. Lands called manyam were
assigned for the support of various functions, including
religious activities. Certain percentages of the production
from this land were divided among the various public
functions, such as administration, army, education and
religious institutions. Small temples received income from
nearby villages. Larger ones, such as those of the great
center of Kanchipuram, received income from over a thousand
villages. The amount dedicated to religion from the manyam
lands, according to the leaves, was a substantial four
percent of the total produce of the region. It supported
temples, academies of learning, dancers and musicians. A
portion was also provided for Muslim and Jain institutions.
This system resulted in the vast network of temples, most
now neglected, seen across South India.
The British government changed this system. In some areas
they calculated a percentage figure of total tax revenue
going to the institutions and fixed it as a dollar amount,
in 1799 dollars. Some institutions still receive this same
government allotment--worth next to nothing today. Others
became owners of the land from which a share of production
once came. This introduced its own set of problems, also
still with us today, where temples are unable to collect the
rent. The collective result was that the great religious and
cultural institutions of the 18th century decayed and lost
touch with the community. The British taxes were so high
there was no money left to support the administration or
cultural establishments. School teachers, musicians,
dancers, keepers of the irrigation works, moved away, or
took to farming. By 1871, 80% of the area was engaged in
agriculture (up from less than 50% earlier), and many of the
services and industrial activities that dominated the
Chengalpattu society of the 1770s ceased to exist.
The value of the Centre’s research is obvious: India, and
Hinduism with it, flourished in the not-so-distant
past--without the Green Revolution or the Industrial
Revolution or the Worker’s Revolution. Dharampal, Bajaj and
their associates want India to look back at this time,
dissect and understand it, and use that indigenous knowledge
to reinvigorate the world’s largest democracy.
How the Green Revolution failed
Dr. Ramon De La Peña of the University of Hawaii is one of
the world’s foremost experts on rice. He also happens to be
a neighbor of the ashram from which Hinduism Today is
produced. Asked to comment on the Chengalpattu reports, he
said: “Such yields as 12 tons per hectare were definitely
possible with the old methods and two crops a year. The best
modern US production is eight to nine tons per hectare (one
annual crop). The world average is presently three to five
tons/hectare. Before the Green Revolution [which introduced
new, high-yielding strains] the average was one to
one-and-a-half tons/hectare. The Green Revolution worked in
some areas but not in others. The short variety of rice
developed for it grew just one meter high. To be productive,
it needed fertilizer, and the fields had to be kept weed
free. The old varieties were two meters high, not so
susceptible to weed competition, resistant to insects and
did not need fertilizer. If the new varieties are not
managed correctly--with fertilizers, pesticides and
insecticides--the harvest is less than with the old methods
of minimum input. New is not always better.”
Dharma’s Foundation
Dr. J. K. Bajaj lauds duty to create and share abundance
All reliable statistics indicate that the average
availability and consumption of food in our country is among
the lowest in the world. We on the average eat at least
one-third less of staple foods than the norm in almost every
other part of the world. And India is perhaps the only major
country of the world where cattle do not share in the
produce of the lands. The Indian people and cattle are
living in a state of hunger while highly fertile Indian
lands, even those that fall in the plains of the great
life-giving rivers, such as the Ganga, are lying idle. This
has been the situation of India for about two hundred years.
India was never so callous about scarcity and hunger.
Growing an abundance of food and sharing it in plenty,
annabahulya and annadana, have always constituted the
foundation of dharma. All else, even the search for moksha,
liberation, is built on this foundation. We believe that if
India is to come into her own and assert her civilizational
greatness in the present-day world, then first of all we
have to overcome scarcity and recover the traditional
discipline of ensuring plentiful food to share with all.
In order to propagate and make this discipline a national
priority, we invited prominent saints to the temple of Sri
Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh, on October 11, 1996. Srimat
Kaliyan Vanamamali Ramanuja Jeer Swami told our gathering
that scarcity in India is not merely an economic failure, it
is a moral failure. Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Shankaracharya said
we neither need to learn anything fresh from anywhere, nor
establish any new institution. We only have to recollect the
memory of the discipline that has always been with us.
Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanam’s executive officer, M.K.R.
Vinayak, said annadana was discontinued not due to a lack of
foodgrains, but a lack of moral values. The assembled saints
unanimously blessed the release of our book, Annan Bahu
Kurvita, in Hindi, Tamil and English, which treats all
aspects of annabahulya and annadana.
Annan Bahu Kurvita is available from: Centre for Policy
Studies, 27 Rajasekharan Street, Mylapore, Chennai – 600 004
and 60 North Avenue, New Delhi – 110 001
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