BOOKS

A long-awaited South Asian atlas

PARVATHI MENON

Ecological and Agrarian Regions of South Asia, circa 1930 edited by Daniel Thorner; Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1996; pages 148; Pakistan Rs.1,700.

THIS atlas, which depicts the agrarian and ecological landscape of the Indian subcontinent in 1930 from a regional-historical perspective, has been published by the Oxford University Press, Karachi. A remarkable product of collaborative scholarship, it was planned, edited and fully prepared for the press by 1965 under the supervision of Daniel Thorner, eminent economic historian, well-known to generations of Indian students, researchers and government officers. Publication, however, was held up until 1996, more than 20 years after Thorner's death.

The core of the project is a definitive monograph on regional development in the Indian subcontinent, researched and written in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the Chinese historian Chen Han-seng.

The monograph, "the most thorough and penetrating analysis known to me of the data pertaining to regional differentiation in South Asia," as Daniel Thorner wrote in his preface, is presented in full in the Regions. The other important aspect of the book - cartographic illustration of Chen's 21 regions and the accompanying tables - was an idea that matured and bore fruit after Thorner joined the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris as a Visiting Professor in 1960 (he was subsequently elected to a permanent Chair). A research team set up within the Institute gathered, sifted and consolidated the crop and land use information reproduced in the tables as well as the additional data on irrigation systems, population of towns and so on, shown on the maps.

There are two maps - one displaying topography, water resources, roads, railways and cities and the other providing district-wise crop patterns - for each of Chen's 21 geographical regions. The only work to which this may be compared is the path-breaking Atlas of the Mughal Empire by Irfan Habib, depicting the economic and political contours of 17th century India. The striking difference between the two is, of course, the more consistent data sources upon which the present work could draw, material which became available only with the statistical proclivities of the British raj.

Given the subcontinent's shared past, it should not come as a surprise that an atlas on South Asia has been published in Pakistan. Ideally, such a work should have been brought out simultaneously in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three contemporary nations whose common economic history it documents. In fact the road to Karachi was paved with Daniel Thorner's successive attempts to place the manuscript with publishing houses in Mumbai, the Netherlands and England, and, after his death in 1974, the herculean efforts made by Alice Thorner, Daniel Thorner's widow, a social and economic historian herself, to bring out the Atlas in India. In her foreword to the book, she tells but one part of the publication story.

Alice Thorner, who spoke to Frontline in Bangalore during her recent visit to India, recounted the final segment of this story - her experiences with bureaucratic rigidity and incompetence which effectively drove out of India the printing and publication of a splendid book of both topical and reference interest. Since the volume may not legally be imported into this country, most Indian readers are effectively denied access to this work.

Chen Han-seng, the author of the original monograph, came to India in the early 1940s as a pro-Communist refugee from Kuomintang oppression in China. He had studied history in Germany and the United States and had been associated with Mme Sun-Yat- Sen's Shanghai group. Chen was a major contributor to a volume on the agrarian regions of China, brought out by the Institute of Pacific Relations in the 1930s. It was in Delhi in 1944 that he met Daniel Thorner, who had come to India as a member of the U.S. Lend-Lease Mission. The variety and complexity of agrarian regimes in the subcontinent proved to be an area of shared interest, and they quickly became good friends. The ever-curious Chen travelled extensively in India, asking questions wherever he went and learning about crops, wages, prices, crafts and so on. He came into contact with a number of Indian intellectuals, notably the Kisan Sabha leader N.G. Ranga who frequently took him along on his rural tours. "Chen had a fantastic memory. He noticed everything and remembered everything," recalled Alice Thorner.

In 1948, when Daniel Thorner joined the faculty of the South Asia Regional Studies Programme at the University of Pennsylvania as Assistant Professor, he recommended Chen's name for a senior research fellowship to work on a regional approach to the Indian agrarian question. The distinguished Sanskritist W. Norman Brown, who had created the programme, the first of its kind in the U.S., agreed. By 1952, Chen had succeeded in completing a manuscript, two copies of which he left with Thorner before he returned to China. He was given an honoured place in the Chinese academic world and became one of the editors of the glossy journal China Reconstructs.

Chen and Daniel Thorner did not meet again, although they remained in touch through mutual friends. In 1952, Thorner was given a sabbatical year which he planned to spend in India. Shortly before leaving he was summoned to testify before the Committee headed by Senator Pat McCarran, which was investigating the allegedly pro-Communist activities of the Sinologist Owen Lattimore, and was accordingly interrogating persons who had been associated with him. Thorner refused to cooperate with the Committee. When he finally arrived in India in October 1952, Thorner carried a copy of the Chen manuscript with him. The second manuscript, which he had left in a file cabinet in his office in the University, never reached him, although the rest of his books and papers were eventually shipped to him in Mumbai.

The Thorners remained in India until 1960, when Daniel Thorner was invited as a Visiting Professor to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. It was here that he met Jacques Bertin, Director of the Cartographic Laboratory of the Ecole. Between the two of them the idea of illustrating Chen's text in map form took shape. Although the work on the maps, the statistical tables and the graphic representations as well as Chen's text was completed by 1965, all of Thorner's negotiations with prospective publishers came to naught. When he died in 1974, three publishing concerns had successively taken up and dropped the work, largely for reasons of cost.

THE second part of the story begins after Daniel Thorner's death, when Alice Thorner visited India in 1975, bringing with her a sample of the text and maps. The perspicacious Member-Secretary of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), F. P. Naik, called together a number of economists and geographers from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), who enthusiastically recommended prompt publication of the manuscript. Alice Thorner gave the copyright to the ICSSR and assigned to the Council any proceeds. The ICSSR, in turn, signed a contract with a Delhi publisher.

"From that moment on anything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong," said Alice Thorner. After a series of avoidable delays, one of the owners of the publication house finally sent the maps to the Survey of India for permission to print. He neglected to mention that the maps were historical. The Survey refused permission on the grounds that the district boundaries were wrongly drawn, the rivers, deltas and coastlines inaccurate and above all, the international boundaries with Bangladesh and Pakistan did not appear. (The maps in fact pertained to the year 1930, when neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh existed.) It was at this point that an important person involved in the project - "an eminent geographer from the JNU," in Alice Thorner's words - sent a "draftsman" to the Survey of India office to "correct" the maps. Sitting in the Survey headquarters in Dehra Dun, this young man "who had no notion of map making," said Alice Thorner, effectively mutilated the elegantly designed pages. He inserted the Pakistan and Bangladesh frontiers and redrew stretches of rivers as well as the entire coastlines in thick black strokes. Originally these had been delineated in a light grey to highlight other features such as contour, forest cover and command of irrigation works. Apparently the Survey staff did not realise that they were dealing with maps drawn on an earlier projection used by the Survey itself in the years before 1930. "As a result the newly added borders ran through pie graphs and legends, coastal cities like Porbander and Veraval in Gujarat left out in the sea, symbols for trees in the Sunderbans were removed and so forth," recounted Alice Thorner. Neither she nor any member of the French cartographic team was informed of these alterations.

In December 1981 the publishers presented her with a printed-up version of the text, tables and disgracefully disfigured maps. "I wrote a seven or eight page memo in cold fury, indicating that there was no question of publication," she said. The ICSSR then appointed a committee, which, after a year of deliberations, recommended that four of the maps might be reprinted. Nothing happened at all for another five years until Alice Thorner succeeded in redeeming the manuscript and handing it over to the Oxford University Press in New Delhi. New negotiations with the Survey of India resulted in new stalemates. At long last, OUP Pakistan agreed to take over the job; it did an excellent job of printing and binding.

Chen's written text - precise, concise and well-documented - bears the unmistakable impress of a qualitative input as well, one that reflects his familiarity with the Indian reality as well as the printed material available. Chen's single-most important source was the huge body of Evidence (14 volumes) presented to the Royal Commission on Agriculture (the Linlithgow Commission, 1928). Chen's 21 economic regions were based essentially upon five criteria: the topographical situation, water supply (rainfall and all forms of irrigation), crop patterns, landholding systems, and general economic development (transport and communication, urbanisation and population growth). The maps illustrate four out of the five criteria. Land relationships, an important aspect of each of Chen's chapters, could not, of course be represented in the maps. As Thorner wrote: "For the agrarian problem these relationships are of course central, but statistically they are well nigh intractable."

The crop pattern maps and tables on land utilisation are based upon statistics taken from the Agricultural Statistics of India, 1930-31. Chen's text, on the other hand, reflects the agrarian situation up to 1950-51, and to that extent there is in certain areas a mismatch between the text and maps. For example, the Mettur dam, discussed by Chen in his text, does not appear in the topographical map of the Tamil Region (page 52). That does not, however, in any way diminish the value of the maps and tables, which provide a valuable benchmark study on the regional agrarian economy of India.