Paper short abstract:

The paper studies the transition from animal muscle-run wells to inorganic enenrgy-run tube-wells in North Indian agriculture between the end of the 19th c and the beginning of the 20th c., to understand how the transition in energy forms was conceived in tandem with a new hydrological imagination.

Paper long abstract:

My paper aims to describe a genealogy of the ‘energy-irrigation nexus’ in Indian agriculture. This refers to the expanded use of tubewells energized mostly by electricity (and diesel) to draw groundwater for meeting two-thirds of the irrigation needs in the region. The paper will analyse the transition from wells to tube wells as modalities of irrigation between 1870s and 1930s in North Indian agriculture. I will trace this transition through how it was effectuated by a shift in energy regimes from animal labour/muscle to electricity/fossil fuels and via the concurrent changes in the meaning of groundwater usage and its ecology within colonial economic and legal understanding. I will analyse how proponents of mechanically-powered tubewells cast well-based irrigation as arrested by apparently natural limits - those of the cycle of land-based production feeding the primary drivers of wells, the cattle. When they instead suggested the new use of fossil fuel to power wells, this proposition was in turn combined with the imagination of apparently unlimited groundwater in the region. Together this fostered a new vision of North Indian agriculture as a kind of production beyond the parameters of natural cycles. I will also show the alternatives proposed against this vision that suggested that well irrigation should be re-embedded within natural sequentiality of water replenishment by recycling water from rainfall, canals and surface drainage and by improving water use in styles of cropping. This competition of ideas marked the complex genealogy of the 'energy-irrigation nexus' in Indian agriculture