Teaching development: Debates on ‘scientific agriculture’ and ‘rural reconstruction’ at Khalsa College, Amritsar, c. 1915–47

Abstract

The article looks at the planning, introduction and expansion of agricultural education, farming, dairying, co-operation and other related rural economy schemes at Khalsa College, Amritsar (KCA), the first and biggest Sikh higher educational institution in the colonial Punjab, between ca. 1915 and 1947. It examines a set of agricultural initiatives started in the second half of the 1910s as an early attempt at rural reconstruction, and analyses how they were debated among the contemporary paternalist Punjab administration as well as among advocates of ‘rural reconstruction’ across India. The article scrutinises in particular how the Khalsa College had to look for new ways to reinforce its claim of being a lighthouse institution for the dissemination of ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ agricultural knowledge under the dyarchy system of the interwar years. Through a detailed reconstruction of the college’s engagement with both a national and a transnational development discourse in the final decades of the colonial period, it is shown that ‘agricultural science’ was understood at the KCA as a universal tool for development. As it was not perceived as inherently ‘Western’, there was no need to ‘vernacularise’ it. Revealingly, the USA in particular became a popular destination and point of reference for higher studies in agriculture and rural economics. The college’s various agricultural schemes were consistently legitimised by the well-entrenched orientalist narrative of the supposedly ‘rural’ and ‘practical’ character of the Sikh, the KCA and its ideas on rural development regularly shifted between imperial, nationalist and communal concerns. At the same time, however, its focus on the education of a class of scientifically trained rural specialists paralleled the state-led and expert-driven approaches shared by most nationalist enterprises and the colonial state.