'Your Foreign Plants are Very Delicate' Peasant Crop Ecologies and the Subversion of Colonial Cotton Designs in Dharwar, western India, 1830 1880.
As in other cotton growing agrarian environments colonised by Europeans,1 the onset of British colonial rule in rural western India was accompanied by pressures on local peasants to adopt and cultivate new foreign varieties of cotton so as to transform the species into one of the main commodities for the export market. Moreover, the potential of raw cotton to generate high land revenue assessments in western India was held to be considerable; indeed, the entire structure of colonial rule at local rural level was organised around the levy and collection of land revenue, which comprised the colonial state's primary source of income.2 In 1835, revenue officials of the Government of Bombay, anxious to find out why the raiyats (peasant cultivators) of the district of Dharwar had not taken advantage of opportunities to grow 'superior' allegedly more profitable, foreign (mainly American) cottons, in preference to their 'country cotton' sent out local mamlatdars (junior indigenous revenue officials) to each taluka (district administrative sub division) to investigate the possible reasons. The responses of the peasants articulated their understandings of the social and ecological dynamics that lay at the heart of their farming practices.