Indigo and Commercial Agriculture

Detailed chapter description

Indigo was one of the clearest ways in which colonial commercial agriculture entered the agrarian society created under permanent settlement. The crop linked cultivators and labourers in Bihar to European capital, Calcutta agency houses, factory processing, long-distance transport and volatile international dye markets. Yet the system was not uniform. Indigo could be grown directly on factory-controlled land, by tenants under advance-and-contract arrangements, or by independent cultivators. North Bihar—especially Tirhut, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Saran and Champaran—became the principal European indigo zone during the nineteenth century, while Bhagalpur and Monghyr also supported significant production. This chapter therefore treats indigo as both a crop and an agrarian institution: it altered land use, credit, labour, rents, contracts and the distribution of risk. It also traces the technological and market crisis created by synthetic indigo after 1897 and the distinct Champaran conflict that culminated in the 1917 inquiry and the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918. Indigofera plants produced a dye whose value depended on far more than acreage. The crop had to be cut at the correct stage, processed rapidly in vats, oxidized, settled, boiled or pressed and dried into cakes of marketable quality. The commodity therefore joined field cultivation to factory manufacture. A bad crop, delayed cutting, weak fermentation or falling London prices could affect the entire chain. For cultivators the relevant question was different: what land, labour and credit had to be diverted from food production in order to satisfy the factory. Indigo is best understood as a combined agricultural-industrial institution. European-supervised indigo manufacture expanded in eastern India from the late eighteenth century, drawing on export demand, Calcutta commercial finance and the Company state. Early concentration lay in Bengal, but Bihar became increasingly important during the nineteenth century. The chronology should not be simplified into a single founding date for the region. Factories appeared at different times, often through local leases, partnerships and estate connections. By the mid-nineteenth century North Bihar had become a major field for European planting enterprise.