Review for South Asia Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840-1943, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

The major contribution of this book is to weave ecology into social and economic history. The idea that nature affects history still suffers the stigma of environmental determinism, and because human action appears to account for most historically visible ecological change, environmental historians thus focus on human impact, concentrating particularly on areas and times where it has been most dramatic and controversial, where data and documentation are most abundant. This is certainly true for South Asia, where scholars normally assume that nature defines a relatively stable, though diverse, ecological environment for human history over long spans of time, though stripping mountains in modern times followed millennia of less visible environmental change caused by slow-but-steady deforestation, dessication, and desertification; and likewise, modern irrigation, dam, road, railway, and city building has accelerated change of the same kind, at a lower register, since pre-historic times. Nature itself appears to do heavy work to change natural environments of human history only in select times and places, typically at shattering moments of rupture, when earthquakes, storms, plagues, or fires destroy old ecologies and make new ones, often leaving traces for historians and archaeologists. In South Asia, this kind of rupture belongs mostly to archaeology, but the monsoon is nature’s everyday army at work changing the land, in mostly undramatic, but very visible ways, every year, though these are as yet still very little studied by historians. Areas of intense river, wind, and sea action most notably rebutt the common assumption of environmental stability, especially when combined with seismic activity. Such

turbulent areas concentrate near the coast and below mountains draining heavy rain and snowmelt and rising above sites of tectonic activity. The largest region of this sort, filled with nature-driven ecological change, forms deltaic lowlands where the Ganga, Meghna, and Brahmaputra rivers join the sea, draining the highest rainfall and snowmelt regions of the Himalayas, and rocked with episodic regularity by land-changing earthquakes. This uniquely mobile, turbulent, changing, watery space of ecological history is now the land of Bangladesh. Richard Eaton unveiled deltaic river history as an active force in South Asia’s cultural history with his study of Islam spreading across the eastward moving farming frontiers of the Gangetic lowlands, from the thirteenth to eighteenth century, 1 and Iftekhar Iqbal is now a pioneer among historians who appreciate long-term ecological change as a feature of agrarian environments in modern Bengal. Yet we still have no history of the deltaic land-and-river-scape itself, which does not receive direct attention in this book, but rather appears, in all the chapters, as stable ecology working off-stage to shape the drama of agrarian history in eastern regions of Bengal Presidency. The book proceeds from the idea that a series of earthquakes which had shifted river courses so as to complete the unification of the three deltas in the late eighteenth century ended in the 1820s. The period under study can thus appear as the final product of nature’s handiwork, the delta now being “exposed only to seasonal disasters such as tidal upsurges and cyclones.” (p.42) Such disasters and accompanying floods, shifting rivers, erosion, siltation, violent destruction, and moving populations would thus seem to have settled into a patterned regularity of ecological stability with no historicity. That seems 1

Richard M. Eaton, The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, 1204-1760. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

unrealistic in light of earthquakes that shook the delta from epicenters running from Dhaka north to Assam east to Burma, triggered at nearby India-Eurasia tectonic plate margins, in 1828, 1852, 1869, 1885, 1897, 1918, 1930, and 1934. 2 How drastically “seasonal disaster” altered ecologies remains to be seen. The book thus opens but then closes the door on ecological history in the delta as an account of nature’s force – typically glossed as “disaster” – challenging powers of human adaptation, tilting the course of history, right down to the present day, mostly in ways that historians have yet to explore, though indicated by the role that the 1970 hurricane played in the politics of Bangladesh independence. Having described a uniquely challenging though relatively stable ecological environment, Iftekhar Iqbal then considers a series of established themes, working through archives of British India, and focusing on the southern delta and Sundarbans, thus adding regional detail to historical understandings of Bengal, but without highlighting that geographical contribution or putting most relevant place names in the index. Technically, most of Bangladesh is deltaic, so it makes sense that in this book the delta generally merges vaguely with Eastern Bengal, but in the best parts of the book, the region of study is more literally deltaic, filled with rivers shifting, eroding, flooding, flushing, making and remaking the land downstream of the vast confluence (mohona) of the Meghna and Brahmaputra. The overall theme for the first half of the book is dynamic localized agricultural expansion on nineteenth century deltaic frontiers, which explains the initial imperfection

2

See Md.Hossai Ali, “Earthquake Database and Seismic Zoning of Bangladesh,” http://www.eird.org/cd/building-codes/pdf/eng/doc12294/doc12294-contenido.pdf (accessed 27 June 2011), pp.59-62 67, also Indian Society of Earthquake Technology, Catalogue of Earthquakes in India and Neighborhood, Roorkee, 1993.

and rapid, conflict-ridden demise of the 1793 Permanent Settlement in this region. The instability of the land and the vast expanses of low jungle and new alluvium ready for cultivation undermined the permanence of property claims by distant state authorities and by landlords not immediately on the spot. Farm land was expanding and with it grew the state’s desire for new revenues from new acreage that would not be settled permanently. Deltaic ecology thus strengthened the hand of self-cultivating peasant families and entrepid contractors, whose productivity fostered lively trade along rivers, the main arteries of travel and commerce, described nicely if too briefly as a social world of boats, another topic crying out for more research. This growing agrarian prosperity is then the theme of a chapter pegged to the 1888 Dufferin Commission Report, whose account of prosperous deltaic peasants farming jute, rice, and numerous cash crops receives detailed discussion and qualification to account for impoverished sectors of deltaic society. Agrarian dynamism in the deltaic ecology bolstered the Faraizi Movement, which Iftekhar Iqbal illuminates afresh by focusing on its agrarian activism. It is well known that this puritanical movement flourished for much of the nineteenth century most actively in southern districts, and that it organized peasant opposition to zamindars and indigo planters, but here we find that organizing deltaic peasants to protect their growing prosperity from zamindar and planter claims, which were backed by state authority, made the Faraizi a distinctively deltaic peasant movement. Though it did spread elsewhere, the movement was most productively rooted in deltaic farming frontiers, where it declined in part because of declining peasant prosperity, as frontier conditions gave way to modern forms of economic development, epitomized by the railway, under modern modes of state discipline, represented by the Arms Act of 1878, which was designed to disarm Faraizis

and Santhals, and with the arrival modern politics, based in urban centers. Thus in several connected ways, Faraizi decline marks the onset of twentieth century modernity and what Iqbal calls “the loss of social and economic autarky in agrarian East Bengal.” (p.89) The twentieth century demolition of localized deltaic dynamism provides the central theme for the last four chapters, which begin with a surprise: after 1901, urbane high-caste Hindu bhadralok families began moving into the delta more frequently, pushed by unemployment in the city and pulled by opportunities in the hinterland, where they became increasingly important, not as old-fashioned zamindars, but rather as investors in land rights, commerce, and credit markets. Census data indicates that between 1901 and 1931, the bhadralok caste population increased about 190% in Chittagong (p.98), considerably faster than elsewhere in Bengal, and that in 1931, Kayasthas and Brahmans in the east concentrated most of all in southern districts, including areas around Dhaka city. The other major aagrarian Hindu group was the Namasudras, former Chandals, concentrated heavily in Barisal and southern Faridpur, 3 where they had prospered as frontier farmers alongside Muslims in the delta. (pp.62-3) Richard Eaton is therefore wrong to suggests that the eastward shifting live delta became predominantly Muslim by the eighteenth century. The population remained very mixed, and became more so, with large Hindu concentrations in the countryside and urban areas. In 1911, Dhaka had a larger proportion of Hindus and bhadralok castes than Calcutta. The new twentieth century bhadralok arrivals in the delta entered a closing agrarian frontier that pressed upon Hindu and Muslim peasants alike, as “frontier fertile rice lands were already becoming subject of a scramble by a fast-growing peasant population.”

3

S.P. Chatterjee, Bengal in Maps: A Geographical Analysis of Resource Distribution in West Bengal and Eastern Pakistan. Calcutta, 1949, Maps 32, 35, 36, pp. 49, 55.

(p.115) Backed by state authority and bolstered by urban assets and connections, the new arrivals prospered as new farm acreage stopped growing, indebtedness increased, and landless worker and share-cropper populations grew. The closing frontier at the end of the century is a general theme in agrarian South Asia, but “the return of the bhadralok” that Iftekhar Iqbal describes imparts ominous communal coloration to later decades of relative ecological and economic decline and increasing class differentiation in the delta, which he describes in the following chapters. In two chapters that elaborate the well-established theme of ecological mayhem produced by modern development schemes and by globalization, we learn how railway embankments disrupted the intricate silt-and-life-giving deltaic river system, which was further clogged and poisoned by an invasion of water hyacinth. At the end of the book, we learn that both these problems continue to plague Bangladesh, now further aggravated by roads, bridges, flood control embankments, pollution, and urban sprawl. And we find government still compounding at least as much as solving such problems, which now include poisonous shrimp farming in the Sundarbans, pushed by politicians to serve global markets. Nevertheless, in the old tradition of South Asian historiography, Iftekhar Iqbal ends his story before 1947, with a chapter on the 1943 Bengal Famine, which pivots on arguments by Amatya Sen, 4 though he models his own “prehistory” of the famine more on the lines of Paul Greenough. 5 Whereas arguments by and with Sen focus on the opposition of Food Availability Decline (FAD) and entitlement collapse as competing explanations for mass famine death, Iftekhar Iqbal shows that, in deltaic eastern Bengal, 4

Amartya K. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation. New York: Oxford University Press; 1981. 5 Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-1944. New York: Oxford University Press; 1982.

decades of declining per capita availability accompanied agricultural stagnation and deteriorating economic conditions among the growing population of landless poor that would suffer collapse not only in their entitlements to food but in their capacity to resist infectious disease. This chapter on the Great Bengal Famine is a useful addition to the literature because it includes disease mortality aggravated by declining public health and focuses empirical on trends specifically in eastern Bengal. Though it is surely possible to read this book as yet another good agrarian history of colonial Bengal, a solid first book based on a Cambridge dissertation, 6 I think that reading it that way does the book injustice. Iftekhar Iqbal has methodically but very modestly openned new frontiers of historical study, which beckon others to follow. District Records hold mountains of local documentation concerning everyday life and work on agricultural frontiers. Comparative work on other regions remains to begin. Histories of most regions in Bangladesh and Bengal Presidency have yet to appear. Histories of changing environments and landscapes remain to be written. The social worlds of rivers, boats, frontier farming, and ways of life on the water where rivers meet the sea -- all await exploration. Many exciting topics open up in this book. The last is the most important, in my view: moving historical studies beyond the boundary of 1947 across the full expanse of the last several centuries, down to the present, promises to liberate modern South Asian historiography from its archaic colonial straight-jacket and take historians beyond their long and dutiful service to the nation, to make history a much more useful discipline for understanding today in the world of globalization. 6

Peter Robb, review of The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840-1943, (review no. 1083) URL: http://dev.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1083. Date accessed: Sat 25 June 2011 4:26:54 BST

David Ludden New York University 27 June 2011