1

Chapter 1 1. Introduction

When I tell someone about my research, one of the first things that I do is to ask whether them if they are familiar with ’s Ibis Trilogy. These three novels are set in the first half of the nineteenth century and they deal with the trade between India and China. One of the main protagonists is Deeti, a Bihari opium peasant. I read about Deeti and her husband, who worked in the nearby opium factory, only shortly after I had started to develop an academic interest in the peasant production of opium in nineteenth-century India. I was delighted when I found out that Amitav Ghosh was already working on the two sequels of the trilogy, which meant that his novels would accompany me during my research in the subsequent years. (2008), (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) were not just a joyous supplement to a serious corpus of academic texts. But these novels are so profoundly researched and well-written that I consider them among the best material available on the subject. The following quote from Sea of Poppies summarises this book:

In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be sated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign asámi contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the opium and would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.1

Ghosh’s protagonist was one of many North Indian peasants producing crude opium for the British Indian government. At the height of the colonial opium industry almost 1.5 million small peasant

1 Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 30–31. 2 households cultivated the highly labour intensive poppy plant on their fields and they then delivered the harvested raw opium to the nearest government opium office. A few thousand workers—men, women and children—manufactured the peasants’ produce in two large opium factories on the river Ganges. They dried and mixed the semi-liquid substance, formed it into cakes the size of a melon and then packed the opium balls into chests made of mango wood. The government’s opium industry was one of the largest enterprises on the subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year—a similar output to Afghanistan’s notorious opium industry today, which supplies the global market for heroin. However, unlike the illicit trade in Afghanistan, India’s colonial opium economy was a legal business that was not only sanctioned but organised and actively promoted by the state. The profits yielded by the sales of the drug to private traders at auctions in Calcutta were categorised as public revenue. Opium was, for the largest part of the nineteenth century, the second most important source of revenue for the colonial state and it was only outmatched by the taxes that the government collected on land. The question then arises of how the British would have financed their colonial enterprise on the subcontinent without opium. Although opium has had a long history in the region as both a medicinal and recreational drug, it was only under British rule that it became a major item of trade. Exports increased from 4,000 chests per year at the beginning of the nineteenth century to over 60,000 chests in the 1880s. The success of the opium trade was partly achieved by military means. Two wars forced China to open its doors for British Indian opium. Within India, a large and well-organised bureaucratic apparatus was mainly responsible for the growth and the longevity of the colonial opium business. At the end of the eighteenth century, the (EIC) declared a monopoly on opium, which actually also involved monopsony control. All production of opium was for the state and all sale was done through the state. The EIC installed an Opium Department which administered and controlled the monopoly. The Department—or Opium Agency—was among the most visible colonial institutions in rural India with about one hundred offices spread over an area reaching from the north-eastern corner of today’s Uttar Pradesh to the south-western corner of Bihar. Its ca. 2.500 clerks monitored the poppy cultivators closely, enforced contracts and ensured that quality standards were met. While in other major sectors of India’s economy, like indigo or textiles, entrepreneurs faced regular setbacks and final defeats, the state-run opium industry remained in place and without major interruptions for over a century.2 One important reason for this success was

2 See Kranton and Swamy “Contracts,” and Roy and Swamy, Law, 130–34. 3 without a doubt the fact that the Opium Department was a strong governmental institution, which was backed up by a legislature that equipped its clerks with a police-like authority. The Department was an institution that had the means to enforce opium upon India’s peasantry. This book is about the North Indian peasants who cultivated poppy for the Opium Department. It is about the millions of people who sowed their most fertile plot of land with a plant that demanded an extraordinarily high input of resources and labour. I am centrally concerned with the economic conditions under which these peasants produced opium for the British Indian government, particularly with whether they cultivated at a loss or whether they yielded a commensurate income. So far, historians have been rather vague about the situation of North India’s poppy cultivators. Carl Trocki, for example, writes that ‘opium could not be cultivated at a profit by most Indian ryots [peasants]’ and that they ‘appear to have been unwilling to cultivate opium’.3 However, Trocki’s assessment lacks an empirical test and thus remains rather speculative. John F. Richards, who without doubt has made the most important contributions to the topic, also seemed to be insecure with regards to the poppy cultivators’ situation. In a paper of 2007, he wrote that poppy cultivation was a ‘profitable activity for peasant farmers’, while 26 years earlier he was less optimistic and argued that ‘the state monopoly did keep the price of crude opium just on the economic edge’.4 Coming to a more definitive conclusion about the economic conditions of poppy cultivation is relevant for a few reasons. First, because it had an impact on the lives of around 10 million people in North India.5 In the region administered by the Bihar Division of the Opium Department, every other household produced opium. Second, the fact that opium was a major cash-crop affecting a large part of the rural population made it a central element in arguments about the transformation of India’s economy during British rule. Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of incorporation, which describes the process of India, among other regions, being forcibly turned into a producer of cheap raw materials, relies heavily on the assumption that cash-crop production (in general) and opium production (in particular) worsened the peasant producers’ livelihood.6 ‘Cash-crop production’, Wallerstein argues,

3 Trocki, Opium, 66. 4 Richards, “Moral Economy,” 75 and Idem., “Indian Empire,” 78. 5 At the height of the industry, almost 1.5 million peasants were registered as poppy cultivators. Behind each of these registered cultivators was a household of an average of seven persons. Thus, I conclude that poppy cultivation affected around 10 million people. 6 Wallerstein refers to four major cash-crop in the context of India’s incorporation: indigo, cotton, silk and opium. Wallerstein, World-System III, 153. 4

‘[…] offered little intrinsic attraction, since it inevitably reduced the time for and physical availability of all sorts of subsistence practices which offered guarantees of survival and even of relative well- being.’7 However, the way that Wallerstein underpins his argument is somewhat problematic. With reference to the works of Irfan Habib and Percival Spear, he shows that per capita agricultural output and the standard of food consumption were higher in Mughal India than around 1900, from which he seems to conclude that the commercialisation of agriculture during British rule led to a general decline of agricultural productivity and living standards.8 Wallerstein’s macro-level approach is symptomatic for other major studies concerned with the economic impact of British rule on the subcontinent.9 A macro-level perspective, although useful for the grand narratives of these authors, is problematic because it cannot grasp the many details of peasant production that are necessary to determine the impact of agricultural commercialisation on the peasant producers. In this book, I intend to take a different approach—I will conduct an empirical study of the peasant production of opium on a regional level. This book deals with the nitty-gritty details of peasant agriculture, such as the harvest calendar or cropping patterns. It takes important features of rural life in North India into account, such as topography, the caste system or the distribution of land. Understanding the context in which the peasant production of opium was embedded allows me not only to locate the poppy cultivators within rural India’s society but to reconstruct the effort in terms of labour and capital that went into poppy cultivation. A core section of this book is devoted to just that. The available evidence strongly suggests that the peasants were exploited by the British Indian government. Based on numerous contemporary accounts that list the outlays of poppy cultivation in detail, such as payments for rent, irrigation or additional hired labour, I made an assessment of the total costs that were involved in the peasant production of opium and contrasted them with the gross income the cultivators received from the Opium Department. The result of this assessment is unambiguous—even if we take the highest possible gross income and the lowest possible costs of

7 Ibid., 157. 8 Ibid., 157–58. See also Habib, “Capitalistic Development,” 35 and Spear, History of India, 47. 9 See for example Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts (2001). A central argument in Davis’ book is that agricultural commercialisation led to a pauperisation of rural India and, thus, explains the high frequency and intensity of famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. ‘And where were the profits of the great export booms that transformed the subcontinent’s agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century? Here, if anywhere in rural Asia, integration into the world market should have resulted in significant local increases in agricultural productivity and profitability. […] Yet […] “[m]odernization” and commercialization were accompanied by pauperization.’ Davis, Holocausts, 312. 5 poppy cultivation, we must conclude that the peasants produced opium at a loss. While this result itself may not be surprising—other contributors to this subject made the same proposition—it is the richer empirical foundation that distinguishes this study from previous works on the subject.10 The peasant production of opium in British India is a prime example of the process of agricultural commercialisation that many rural zones in the Global South underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the course of this transformation, the peasants were turned into cultivators of cash-crops and into producers of agricultural commodities for a global market. This was not a smooth transformation and it involved ‘massive state efforts’ and ‘new forms of coercion’, as Eric Vanhaute points out.11 In the case of India’s opium industry, these features were particularly strong. The opium monopoly was one of the most direct forms of state intervention possible. It implied not only total control over the manufacturing and sale of the drug but also deep intrusions into the peasant economy. The government’s Opium Department dictated the total amount of opium to be produced and its local agents made sure that enough peasants cultivated poppy in order to meet this target. As poppy cultivators, these peasants were not free agents who could decide whether or not to produce opium, but were forced to submit part of their land and labour to the colonial government’s export strategy. The state introduced a legal framework and it built a large administrative apparatus, both of which enabled the government’s agents to enforce the rapid expansion of poppy cultivation to the disadvantage of the peasantry. This study goes beyond a mere reconstruction of the economic conditions of poppy cultivation. It also examines the mechanics of coercion in India’s opium industry. While numerous scholars identify coercion as a crucial element in poppy cultivation, or agricultural commercialisation in general, few have gone beyond the rather simplistic explanation of ‘debt-bondage’. A chronically indebted peasantry, the argument goes, accepted cash advances from the Opium Department (or other manufacturers and traders) and thus agreed to the unfavourable conditions of poppy cultivation for the benefit of the short-term relief of its financial needs. It is not my intention to wipe away this argument because, as Marcel van der Linden convincingly argues, debt can indeed be a major reason why someone enters into a coerced labour relationship.12 However, I do not think the

10 For other contributions to the subject that came to the same conclusion see Trocki, Opium, 66 and Richards, “Empire,” 78. 11 Vanhaute, “Agriculture,” 232. 12 Van der Linden lists ‘debt’ as one of ten reasons, why workers enter a coerced labour relationship. See Van der Linden, “Coerced Labor,” 300. 6 debt-bondage argument is a sufficient explanation for why so many peasant households cultivated poppy at a loss for over a century. The mechanisms of coercion, I argue, go far beyond debt. One strand of coercive measures came from within the Opium Department, exercised by its local agents in form of blunt threats, harassments and physical violence. This book refers to documented incidents in which peasants were kidnapped, harassed with the destruction of their crops or threatened with criminal prosecution and imprisonment if they refused to cultivate poppy. The opium laws equipped the Department’s agents with an executive power that enabled them to break open doors, search houses and arrest people. While these laws were primarily passed to protect the monopoly and prevent the illegal sale of opium, they also formed the legal basis of a highly coercive system. At the ground level, the Department only employed Indians who were familiar with the local dialects and had knowledge about the socio-economic conditions—the kind of know-how that was necessary to forcibly expand poppy cultivation. And they had a strong incentive to do so because a part of their salary was paid in the form of a commission on every seer of opium delivered in their beat. However, the Department’s employees were not the only ones profiting from the peasant production of opium. A second strand of coercive measures was executed by the local village elites— that is, the landowners. This book connects the opium system with the social power relations at the village level and can thus show how the Opium Department formed a symbiotic relationship with the rural elite. The latter became the extended arms of the Department in the villages and they helped to expand poppy cultivation. The landlords had a strong incentive to push their tenants to sow poppy because they could collect a higher rent from poppy cultivators. The advance payments that the cultivators received from the Department came at the time when the rent was due and, frequently, the full amount of these payments was transferred directly from the Department to the landlords. This study has also carved out the low social and economic status of the poppy cultivators themselves, who typically had no occupancy-rights on their land, which left them entirely at the mercy of their landlords. The latter utilised their power over their tenants and threatened, for example, with eviction in case the peasants refused to produce opium. Thinking about coercion in labour relations frequently leads to having plantations and chattel slavery in mind. One thinks of a person who threatens another person with physical harm or death. However, the kind of coercion that this book deals with is often less direct but it is nonetheless very effective. The political philosopher Alan Wertheimer, who developed a theory of coercion, argued 7 that the standard case of coercion is not one of direct interpersonal threats, such as someone pointing a gun at an other’s head, but is instead a situation of constrained choices.13 A person chooses to do something because he or she regards it as the most attractive alternative available to him or her. A peasant who was faced by eviction from his or her plot by the landlord, probably chose to work for the Department despite the highly unfavourable conditions because this was still the better option to having no land at all. In this book I will argue that even though the peasants of North India made a rational choice to produce opium for the government, it was a highly constrained choice situation that forced them to do so.14 My research draws on many excellent studies on the agricultural history of colonial India. I would particularly like to mention Shahid Amin’s Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur (1984), which has been an important role model for this book. Amin’s book showed me the benefits of working with ethnographic material available in the District Settlement Records and it introduced me to the writings of William Crooke, J.R. Reid and George A. Grierson. The latter’s Bihar Peasant Life (1885), for example, is an extensive agricultural glossary in which the author ‘carefully lists native terms for an exhaustive range of categories—soils, implements of production, agricultural seasons, forms of labour, wages, marriage rituals—in all their regionally variant forms, and provides their meanings.’ If these detailed descriptions are ‘pieced together, one can form a total picture of rural society.’15 Grierson’s work was largely based on William Crooke’s Materials for a Rural and Agricultural Glossary of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1879) and J.R. Reid’s Azamgarh Settlement Report (1881), both of which have been edited and published by Shahid Amin in A Concise Encyclopaedia of North Indian Peasant Life (2nd edition, 2005). Crooke and Reid were two young colonial civil servants whose writings went far beyond the standard administrative report of the time. They spoke the local languages and dialects, such as Bhojpuri, and they described all aspects of rural life in north India using words, phrases, even songs and fables of the particular region. These ethnographic materials were extremely helpful for my own study because they allow not only a detailed reconstruction on agricultural operations and the harvest calendar but also contain valuable information on power relations within rural society. Furthermore, these materials enabled me to confirm the peasants’

13 Wertheim, Coercion, 9. 14 Many recent studies in global labour history came to a similar conclusion. I find Marcel Van der Linden’s contribution “Dissecting Coerced Labour” particularly helpful, when it comes to classifying various forms of coercion in labour relations. See Van der Linden “Coerced Labour”. 15 Prakash, Bonded Histories, 40. 8 claim that they had rather high outlays in poppy cultivation for additional labour costs. While some colonial administrators have claimed that poppy cultivation was done with unpaid family labour only, these materials clearly suggest that additional labour was hired for various steps in the production process, such as irrigation, ploughing or harvesting. Besides these detailed ethnographic materials on rural life in north India, the Report of the Royal Commission on Opium (RCO) was the most valuable primary source for this book. The RCO, which was published in seven volumes in 1895, was the result of a parliamentary commission that made an extensive inquiry into ‘two key issues: first, that of the actual consumption and use of opium—for medicinal and for mood-altering purposes—within Indian society and second, the means by which the Government of India regulated both the production and consumption of opium.’16 The 2,500 pages in the RCO contain over 28,000 questions and witness responses, in addition to numerous appendices, notes and memoranda. John F. Richards, who used the RCO for his work on the Indian opium industry and wrote a paper on the Commission and its members, argues that the RCO ‘is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire’ and that it is ‘one of the most valuable sources we possess for studying all aspects of opium in India in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.’17 Despite the richness of this material, it is indeed somewhat surprising that, as Richards points out, ‘historians have largely ignored the massive documentation produced by the Commission’s hearings.’18 One explanation for the lack of attention that the RCO has received so far could be its alleged bias in favour of the opium monopoly. Indeed, the Government of India tried to influence its outcome, if only by presenting witnesses who were clearly in favour of the monopoly. This is no surprise that the abolition of the opium industry would have threatened the government’s budget considerably.19 However, the nine members of the commission were appointed in such a way as to guarantee rather fair sessions, which means that the pro- and anti-opium camps were equally represented. The most active members of the commission were Henry Wilson (1833–1914), who was a liberal Member of Parliament and a fierce opponent of the opium monopoly, and James Lyall (1838–1916), a former high-ranked Indian civil servant and strong advocate of Indian opium. Both men tried to shape the commission’s outcome by finding witnesses in support of their agenda. While

16 Richards, “Royal Commission,” 382. 17 Ibid., 375 and 382. 18 Ibid. Joyce A. Madancy’s paper is a notable exception. Her focus is on the ‘ways in which gendered language in the testimony and report of the Royal Commission on Opium […] was used to both defend and decry the Indian opium trade and its impact on China, India and Burma.’ Madancy, “Smoke,” 37. 19 For an assessment of opium’s role as a source of revenue see chapter 2.3. 9

Lyall might have had the easier task because he could rely on the help of the Government of India, Wilson also managed to organise a large number of witnesses who were critical of the opium monopoly. His anti-opium camp invited 152 persons, or over one-fifth of the total number of witnesses to give evidence.20 Eventually, the pro-opium camp won—at least in the short-term—and the RCO concluded that the opium industry in British India ought to continue.21 What makes the RCO such a valuable document is the fact that the commission left room for a large number of critics of the government’s opium industry. Consequently, it contains more critical voices of the ruling elite discourse than most of the official documents that were produced at that time. In the 83 days of its journey through India and Burma, the commission questioned 723 witnesses. While many belonged to the ruling class of India, who documented and assessed colonial rule anyway, some witnesses belonged to social groups who typically remained unheard in colonial documents, including small poppy cultivators.22 When writing about opium, one is tempted to sensationalise the topic by drawing parallels to present-day conceptions of drugs and crime, social misery and death. Surrounded by today’s rhetoric of the war on drugs, some historians have given in to the sensationalism and moral judgements that are currently connected with the label ‘narcotics’.23 I am certain that my book is not free from these ‘presentist blinders’, but I think the focus of my study leaves less room for drug war rhetoric.24 I am less concerned with the story of British India as a large-scale opium producer and seller than I am with the impact of this peculiar kind of cash-crop production on over one million peasant households in North India. I am interested in the livelihood of those Bihari peasants who cultivated poppies for the government’s Opium Department. The fact that they cultivated Papaver somniferum, the plant from which opium is extracted, and not potatoes might make the story spicier but it does not change my overall argument. I study opium because I argue that as a cash-crop it had a long-

20 Richards, “Royal Commission,“ 395. 21 In its final report the Commission concluded: ‘It has not been shown to be necessary, or to be demanded by the people, that the growth of the poppy and manufacture and sale of opium in British India should be prohibited except for medical purposes.’ RCO VI, 95. 22 ‘Broken down by occupation the largest category of witnesses included 161 (22.3%) physicians […]; followed by 133 (18.4%) Government of India civilian officials or military officers […]; 100 (13.8%) landowners, planters, and tenant cultivators; 87 (12%) heads of officials of Indian states; 83 (11.5%) merchants or millowners; 52 (7.2%) representatives of both pro- and anti-opium voluntary associations; 47 (6.5%) Christian missionaries or catechists […]; and 27 (3.7%) lawyers.’ Richards, “Royal Commission”, 395. For more details on the composition of the witnesses see RCO VI, 14. 23 Examples of scholarly works that more or less sensationalized the history of opium in India and China are Derks, Opium Problem, Trocki, Opium and Haq, Drugs. 24 Richards, “Moral Economy,” 73. 10 lasting negative impact on the lives of millions. Consequently, rather than a history of drug epidemics or British drug dealers, my wish is that this book will join the series of studies on cash- crop production in colonial India. The rest of this book is structured as follows: the second chapter deals with the chronology of the opium monopoly, and it explains the phases of expansion and stagnation of the industry throughout the long nineteenth century. It includes a comparison of Western India’s free opium economy and it concludes that that the monopoly system in the north of India was comparatively cost-inefficient. Furthermore, this chapter assesses opium’s important role for British India as a revenue generating source. It ends with an account of the sales of opium at the auctions in Calcutta and the manufacturing of crude opium in the Sudder Factories. Chapter 3 is concerned with how the Opium Department procured raw opium from the peasants. It describes the centralised structure of the Opium Department and it places particular focus on the Department’s local offices and its employees. These local opium agents, I argue, were central when it came to the enforcement of the contracts with the poppy cultivators. This chapter also contains a section on the opium laws and their execution by the opium agents. Chapter 4 offers a local-level analysis of an opium district— Saran in North Bihar. This micro-level approach is particularly useful for understanding the details of rural life, in general, and agricultural production, in particular. It involves an analysis of the topography, rural society—with a focus on the caste system—, the distribution of land and cropping patterns. This closer look at one opium producing district has made it possible to locate the poppy cultivators within rural society and it embeds the peasant production of opium within the wider rural economy. Chapters 5 and 6 are the core of this book. They contain the empirical analysis which forms the basis for my main argument—North India’s peasants produced poppy against a substantial loss and they were coerced to do so by the mechanics of a vicious triangle of debt, power and dependency relations.