Gentlemen, husbandmen, and industrious wives: The role of gender in imagining Indian agriculture

The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI), founded in 1820, remains the most important producer of English-language knowledge regarding the cultivation of plants in colonial India. Members included missionaries, colonial officials, tea and indigo planters, merchants and bankers, as well as the Bengali bhadralok elites of Calcutta and some Indian princes. The writings it produced were highly gendered. Often they focus on how “improving” the political economy and agricultural productivity would create masculine identities, such as gentlemen landowners and industrious peasant husbandman. Yet I also argue that women’s agricultural work was fundamental in imagining this path towards “improvement.” Using descriptions of Indian farming and labor practices from the Society’s meeting minutes and published transactions, as well as additional writings by its members and missionary founders, I show how many European members of the Society viewed women working outside of domestic pursuits as a sign of Indian inferiority. At the same time, many argued for the benefits of women’s work, which they viewed as fundamental in making Indian households more productive. Women and their labor were a lynchpin in creating the idea of the effeminate Indian man as well as the solution for improving him. It was this intersection of race with gender which helped to define agriculture as a discipline much closer to practical knowledge than abstract science. While some European women were able to participate in the Society’s production of scientific knowledge because of agriculture’s practical nature, Indian knowledge (whether from men or women) tended to be openly dismissed as tradition or habit rather than truly practical. The overlap of gender with race consequently helped to create a hierarchy between practical knowledge and tradition.