Historicizing the "Energy-Irrigation Nexus" in Indian Agriculture: 1930s–1970s

This project scripts a history of the agricultural transformation in the north-Indian countryside in the middle decades of the twentieth century by locating it within the intersection of two key "transitions"—an energy transition involving the use of electricity and a hydrological transition, as this electricity went into powering tube-wells to deliver a speedy mode of irrigating food crops. It begins with late-colonial experimentations that first made possible this kind of intersection. Subsequently the project tries to follow what of this "colonial’ legacy" became relevant to the braiding together of the new modes of energizing and watering crop-production through later post-colonial developments till the decades of the 1970s, this period marking the consolidation of triumphalist international claims about an Indian "green revolution." In tracing this, the project contributes to a growing body of work that assigns both a longer and more critical history to the agricultural transformation that has been claimed by the innovation-centric story of the "green revolution." In bringing into focus the energetic-hydrological basis of changes in agricultural production regimes, this project tries instead to think of the politics of scale-making that constitute processes of agricultural growth. In turn it tries to uncover how "non-scalable" futures come to be articulated and folded in within techno-economic propositions of scalar expansion, rather than remaining their critical outsides.