Telling otherwise: A historical anthropology of tank irrigation technology in south india

Technology and Culture

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 652-674

  Shah, Esha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 50949111742     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0054     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. The Voddas, known as tank builders, belong to a lower caste.
2. Folktales like this one often omit crucial details; here, it is not clear why the reservoir didn't fill. There might have been a number of technical or weather-related reasons, the most likely of which would be insufficient rainfall and/or runoff.
3. Esha Shah, Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India (Hyderabad, 2003).
4. Studies asserting the superiority of traditional knowledge systems include Nirmal Sengupta, "Irrigation: Traditional vs. Modern," Economic and Political Weekly 20, nos. 45-47 (1985): 1919-38;
5. Uma Shankari, "Tanks: Major Problems in Minor Irrigation," Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 39 (1991): A-115-25;
6. Uma Shankari and Esha Shah, Water Management Traditions in India (Chennai, 1993);
7. Somashekara Reddy, Forfeited Treasure: A Study on the Status of Irrigation Tanks in Karnataka (Bangalore, 1991);
8. and T. M. Mukundan, "The Ery Systems of South India," in Traditional Water Harvesting Systems: An Ecological Survey, ed. Bhuban C. Barah (New Delhi, 1996). For reviews of indigenous knowledge of water management, see Nirmal Sengupta, User-Friendly Irrigation Design (New Delhi, 1993), and Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall, and Potential of India's Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (New Delhi, 1997).
9. For further discussion of the decline of tanks, see P. Tippaiah, Study of Causes for the Shrinkage of Tank-Irrigated Area in Karnataka (Bangalore, 1997);
10. S. Janakarajan, "Characteristics and Functioning of Traditional Irrigation Institutions," Management of Renewable Resources 19, no. 12 (1989): 81-101; MIDS, Tank Irrigation in Tamil Nadu: Some Macro and Micro Perspectives (Madras, 1983);
11. Shankari, "Tanks: Major Problems in Minor Irrigation"; Nirmal Sengupta, "The Rise of the Bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu: Water Control vs. Management," Water Nepal 5, no. 2 (1997): 125-35;
12. and T. M. Mukundan, "The Ery Systems of South India," PPST Bulletin 16 (1988): 38. The post-independence state has likewise been criticized for neglecting indigenous irrigation resources in favor of modern irrigation schemes; see, for example, Agarwal and Narain, Dying Wisdom.
13. David Mosse traces the origin of the imagined tradition to colonial times; see Mosse, "Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of Community Management: The Case of Tank Irrigation Development in South India," Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 2 (1999): 303-38. For further discussion of the political, cultural, and ecological meaning of water management and tanks, see David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India (New Delhi, 2003).
14. For a tenacious challenge to the divide between indigenous and modern knowledge systems, see Arun Agrawal, "Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge," Development and Change 26, no. 3 (1995).
15. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 2 (quote).
16. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, N.J., 1991).
17. See also Lansing's latest book on the same subject, Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton, N.J., 2006).
18. Sandra Harding, "Is Science Multicultural? Challenges, Resources, Opportunities, and Uncertainties," Configurations 2, no. 2 (1994), 301-30.
19. Ibid.
20. Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India (New Delhi, 2003).
21. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj (New Delhi, 1997);
22. Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture: ad 1498-1707 (New Delhi, 1998);
23. Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilisation, and Colonial Rule in India (New Delhi, 1998);
24. Deepak Kumar, ed., Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, 1700-1947 (New Delhi, 1991);
25. and Claude Alvares, Decolonising History: Technology and Culture in India, China, and the West from 1492 to the Present Day (Goa, India, 1991).
26. The number of temple inscriptions runs in the tens of thousands during the millennium before the colonial conquest.
27. James Heitzman, "State Formation in South India: 850-1280," in The State in India, 1000-1700, ed. Herman Kulke (New Delhi, 1997), 165.
28. James Heitzman, Gifts of Power: Lordship in an Early Indian State (New Delhi, 2001).
29. It is not rare to come across the "we know little" claim in south Indian historiography. For example: "The largest of these irrigation works must have involved labor forces in their construction," but" [w]e have a limited understanding of how these laborers were recruited" (Carla Sinopoli and Kathleen Morrison, "Dimensions of Imperial Control: The Vijayanagara Capital," American Anthropologist 97, no. 1 [1995]: 83-96); "There are inscriptional references to the demand for compulsory labour, [but] it is not clear whether this demand was imposed on all members of subaltern classes" (Ravi Palat, "The Vijayanagara Empire," in Early State Dynamics, ed. Henri J. M. Claessen and Pieter van De Velde [Leiden, 1987], 177). David Ludden also fleetingly mentions that"[coerced labor] was not unique to the nineteenth century and perhaps was also convenient during temple and tank construction over the centuries," but he does not provide any evidence;
30. see Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 82-83.
31. Carol Breckenridge, "Social Storage and the Extension of Agriculture in South India: 1350 to 1750," in Vijayanagara City and Empire: New Currents of Research, ed. A. L. Dallapiccola (Stuttgart, 1985).
32. One debate that touches on the question of technological change arose in response to Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi, 1980), 29, in which he argued that the technology of south India had remained fundamentally unchanged for a thousand years. For a critique of his position, see R. Champakalakshmi, "Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India: A Review Article," Indian Economic and Social History Review 18, nos. 3-4 (1981): 411-27.
33. Shigehisa Kuriyama, "On Knowledge and the Diversity of Cultures: Comment on Harding," Configurations 2, no. 2 (1994): 337-42.
34. For further discussion of oral history, see Michael Kenny, "A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History," Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 3 (1999): 420-37;
35. Alistair Thomson, "Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History," Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 581-95;
36. and Patrick Hutton, "Recent Scholarship on Memory and History," History Teacher 33, no. 4 (2000): 533-48.
37. Paul Ricoeur, "Memory and Forgetting," in Questioning Ethics, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London, 1999), 9 (emphasis in original).
38. The earliest written records available on the construction of tanks date from the third century BC. The earliest record of a tank in south India refers to the tank that existed at Inamgoan, near Pune, in 1500 BC. See T. M. Srinivasan, Irrigation and Water Supply: South India, 200 BC-1600 ad (Chennai, 1991);
39. G. S. Dikshit, G. R. Kuppuswamy, and S. K. Mohan, Tank Irrigation in Karnataka: A Historical Survey (Bangalore, 1993);
40. and R. Gurukkal, "Aspects of Reservoir System of Irrigation in the Early Pandya State," Studies in History 2, no. 2 (1986): 155-64.
41. These statistics are drawn from a survey conducted in 1986-87;
42. see A. Vaidyanathan, Tanks of South India (Chennai, 1998), 6-7.
43. Organized forms of irrigation, such as short channels, seasonal dams, cisterns, sluices, and tanks, first emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries ad in Tamil-speaking south India. Before that, between the third and sixth centuries ad, rice paddy was cultivated in the lowlands by inundating fields with water diverted from rivers in various ways; see Ludden, Peasant History in South India (n. 17 above).
44. The historical literature on south India generally refers to three ecotypes: wet, dry, and garden (or mixed). Historians of the area argue that different ecotypes follow different courses of sociocultural history, and that the availability of water is a key determinant. For further discussion of the matter, see Stein (n. 19 above); Ludden, Peasant History in South India, 26; Heitzman, "State Formation in South India" (n. 15 above), 193; David Mosse, "The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History, Ecology, and Locality in a Tank-Irrigated Landscape in South India," Development and Change 28, no. 3 (1997): 467-504; and Breckenridge (n. 18 above), 50.
45. Shah (n. 3 above), chap. 2.
46. Historians of early and medieval south India have intensely debated three models of the state-society relationship: bureaucratic, feudal, and segmentary. While it is not possible to summarize the debate here, some of the key works relating to it include: Y. Subbarayalu, Political Geography of the Chola Country (Madras, 1973);
47. Stein; James Heitzman, "Socioeconomic Formations in Premodern South India: Case Studies and Methodology," Peasant Studies 13 (1985): 47-60;
48. Heitzman, "State Formation in South India"; Heitzman, Gifts of Power (n. 16 above); Ludden, Peasant History in South India; Sinopoli and Morrison (n. 17 above); Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honour, and Redistribution," Contributions to Indian Sociology 10, no. 2 (1976): 187-211.
49. See Stein. Heitzman ("State Formation in South India"), following Stein, locates the agency of early state formation in the ecological and productive relationships within distinct ecotypes.
50. Breckenridge.
51. The social organization was slightly different in the upland areas, away from the fertile river valleys. Unlike in the mixed and wet zones, upland emperors granted the right to collect a share of the produce and taxes directly from the local elites, who had been recruited as royal officers or warrior chiefs called nayakas. In return, the local elites passed on a part of the surplus to the royal treasury and also contributed to and fought for the military establishments. Since the fifteenth century, when agriculture expanded to these marginal areas, the warrior chiefs competed to invest in local tank systems and asked for a direct share of the proceeds from the land in return for the military protection they provided to the cultivating communities.
52. T. S. Rajappa, ed., Kere Hunnamma Mattu Ittare Lavanigalu (Bangalore, 1974).
53. The practice of some form of coerced labor seems more institutionalized in the stories that were told not by Voddas, but by the higher-caste farmers or by priests of local temples and in the folksongs now sung by the lower-caste women.
54. Paraphrased from Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of South India (Bombay, 1909).
55. Tejaswini Yarlagadda, "Social Groups and Economic Change: 7th-13th Century a.d.," in Social and Economic History of Early Deccan, ed. Aparajita Parasher-Sen (New Delhi, 1993), 158-81.
56. The term settlement refers to the post-construction, subsequent shrinking of earthen structures caused by the slow elimination of the pores and voids that occur during construction. Because the process of consolidation or settlement is not controlled, and because it causes uneven movement of various structural parts, it could seriously endanger the safety of the structure. Post-construction settlement and the persistence of permeability are the most frequently encountered reasons for the breaching of earthen embankments.
57. W. G. Bligh, The Practical Design of Irrigation Works (London, 1907).
58. Kathleen Morrison, "Transforming the Agricultural Landscape: Intensification of Production at Vijayanagara, India" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992), 87.
59. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Local Power (New Haven, Conn., 1957). Over the course of a decade several scholars refuted one of Wittfogel's main arguments: that the large-scale creation of an irrigation infrastructure needed a centralized bureaucracy and a despotic state to control coerced labor. E. R. Leach and other south Indian historians argued that although the irrigation works required a colossal investment of labor, their construction was haphazard, discontinuous, and spread over many centuries without requiring a centralized bureaucracy at any historical moment;
60. see Leach, "Hydraulic Society in Ceylon," Past and Present 15 (1959): 2-26, and David Ludden, "Patronage and Irrigation in Tamil Nadu: A Long-term View," Indian Economic and Social History Review 63, no. 3 (1979): 347-65.
61. See, for example, Robert C. Hunt and Eva Hunt, "Canal Organization and Local Social Organization," Current Anthropology 17, no. 3 (1976): 389-410;
62. M. S. S. Pandian, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Nanchilnadu, 1880-1939 (New Delhi, 1990);
63. David Hardiman, "Small-Dam Systems of Sahyadris," in Nature, Culture, Imperialism, ed. David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (New Delhi, 1998).
64. This debate has been recently revived with regard to the question of whether the pre-modern Balinese state was involved in constructing and managing irrigation facilities, or whether management was decentralized, democratized, and spontaneously selforganized. See Stephen Lansing, Perfect Order (n. 9 above), and Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, "The Precolonial Balinese State Reconsidered: A Critical Evaluation of Theory Construction on the Relationship between Irrigation, the State, and Ritual," Current Anthropology 44, no. 2 (2003): 153-82.
65. Breckenridge (n. 18 above).
66. R. E. Playfair, A Paper on Irrigation in the Deccan and Southern Maratha Country (Bombay, 1866).
67. Alan Dundes describes the traditional ballad as a narrative song whose drama depends upon acts of love and violence. He further argues that traditional ballads and folk legends about human sacrifice have Indo-European origins, where the foundation sacrifice motif tells of technological vulnerability in medieval times across the Indo-European region. In western and northern Europe, there are legends about the sacrifice of illegitimate or fatherless children in the foundations of bridges, dikes, monasteries, palaces, and churches, whereas in southeastern and eastern Europe it is always the sacrifice of women for similar purposes. See Dundes, "Preface," in Walled-up Wife: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison, Wisc., 1996), and Paul G. Brewster, "The Foundation Sacrifice Motif in Legend, Folksong, Game, and Dance," in Walled-up Wife, 35-62.
68. A new genre began in Kannada literature with the independence movement (known as the Navodaya movement). In this renewed Kannada literature, the song "Kerege Haara" occupies a prominent place. For an English translation of it, see T. N. Srikantaiah, '"Kerege Haara'-A Tribute," in Walled-up Wife, 126-32. For Kannada versions of two songs, "Madagada Kenchamma" and "Kere Hunnamma," see G. S. Paramshivaiya and B. Hanumanthappa, eds., Madagada Kenchamma (Bangalore, 1994), and Rajappa (n. 32 above).
69. Some of these songs are published in Rajappa.
70. D. N. Dhanagare, "Green Revolution and Social Inequalities in Rural India," in Social Inequality in India: Profiles of Caste, Class, Power, and Social Mobility, ed. K. L. Sharma (New Delhi, 1995).
71. See several chapters in Shah (n. 3 above), which argue that tank technology and tank irrigation policy have changed as a result of the recursive-that is, mutually transforming-roles played by the state and society in the political economy of agrarian change.