Christian Subjects: Presbyterian Missionaries and Agricultural Engineering in Colonial India

The agricultural modernization program by American Presbyterian missionaries in colonial India intersected in complicated ways with the colonial state’s efforts towards agricultural and rural “improvement.” At Allahabad Agricultural Institute in the United Provinces, the institutional beacon of these initiatives, missionaries launched efforts towards uplifting India’s “destitute” rural populace. The missionary program of agricultural modernization emanating from Allahabad formed ambivalent linkages with both the colonial framework and with nationalizing India. In the 1920s and 30s AAI Presbyterians discoursed with Gandhi about the state of agriculture in India and worked with Nehru to formalize a municipal arrangement to discharge Allahabad’s city sewage into the institute’s farmlands. They received the patronage of the colonial government, and in turn coordinated their actions with provincial and central colonial state officials. But their program also marked a significant chasm with nationalist and colonial programs of agricultural development by focusing specifically on the needs of the small farmer. They forsook the goal of an all out mechanization and irrigation through tube wells that were the hallmark of efforts by the provincial agricultural engineering department in the United Provinces. The AAI instead pursued design and mass production of cheap and simple “improved implements” that individual farmers could purchase and own to work on their individual tracts. In this drive the missionaries were envisioning a class of small-scale farmers working within a market framework. The focus on the individual farmer was symptomatic of certain social science inspirations of American parentage. But the focus on the individual farmer as a capitalist agent also signaled towards the commonality with colonial measures. In the end, the projects evoking Christian subjects and colonial subjects shared ample grounds working under the overall aegis of colonial capitalism.