From cotton to paddy: Political crops in the Indian Punjab

Abstract

Unlike the rest of the state of Punjab in India, cotton remained the dominant monsoon crop in the southwest region till the 1990s. As it has been increasingly replaced by paddy in recent decades, this paper asks what this shift in cropping pattern reflects about the state’s agrarian capitalism. Towards an analysis of this question, it builds on James Scott’s idea of ‘political crops’ in the earliest states and places it in conversation with scholarship in critical agrarian studies, political ecology and commodity studies to account for relations of power under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on intensive primary research in the region, the paper contrasts the power relations generated by the production and circulation of the two crops. It shows that larger farmers are more likely to cultivate paddy due to better access to irrigation, and that the shift to paddy is threatening to make redundant the labour of landless Dalit women, who do cotton-picking, and increasing dependence on migrant male labour for paddy-transplanting. It also demonstrates how the different end uses of the two crops and the predominance of the private sector in the cotton markets versus the hitherto state-led nature of the paddy markets produce differential risks for farmers and traders. The paper concludes by suggesting that the shift from cotton to paddy represents capital intensification in response to Punjab’s mature capitalist conditions in agriculture but also results in new contradictions and axes of political struggle.