Harold Mann: Pioneer of rural reforms in Colonial India

A few scientists and officers, however, worked hard to endorse reform ideals and streamline agricultural education in India

Agricultural development and reforms represented a major justification for the British occupation of India. However, agrarian reforms in colonial India proved to be checkered, complex, and uneven. They scrimped on mass education and did not transform capital markets.

Dr Harold H Mann was the first Principal of the Poona Agricultural College after its separation from the College of Science.  (HT)

A few scientists and officers, however, worked hard to endorse reform ideals and streamline agricultural education in India. One of them was Dr Harold H Mann, who was the first Principal of the Poona Agricultural College after its separation from the College of Science.

Mann was, during his lifetime, not only an acknowledged authority on applied science and agriculture in England, the Middle East, and India, but was also equally distinguished by his work in social sciences. He pioneered modern-style village and urban surveys in both England and India. He broke new ground in his remarkable first-hand research on agricultural labour, village economy, depressed or so-called “untouchable” classes in town and country, and human and industrial relations in Jamshedpur. His career as a research worker was as remarkable for its range and diversity as for its duration. He was an active and productive experimenter for sixty-eight years.

Mann graduated in Chemistry from Yorkshire College in 1892, when he was twenty, and with the award of an “1851 Exhibition” went to work in Paris at the Pasteur Institute. There, he showed considerable insight in applying his chemical training to studying the action of antiseptics, work that introduced him to biology and may well have had a decisive influence in determining the course of his career.

His introduction to agriculture came in 1895 when he was appointed assistant to Dr JA Voelcker, then Chemist to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, and even more directly in 1898 when he went as the first resident researcher at the Society’s Experimental Station at Woburn. He was soon appointed Scientific Officer to the Indian Tea Association at Calcutta.

It was in India that his versatility, industry, and productivity became fully evident. His work provided much-needed information for the development of the Indian tea industry and established him as the world authority on the tea crop. He wrote several books on tea, including “Blister Blight of Tea”, “The Factors which determine the Quality of tea”, and “Mosquito Blights of Tea”.

He moved from Calcutta to Poona in 1907 upon his appointment as principal of the Agricultural College and Agricultural Chemist for the Bombay Presidency. For the ensuing twenty years, Poona remained his headquarters.

Mann’s personal research diminished because of his teaching and administrative duties at the Agricultural College; even so, he was more productive than most people would have been engaged in full-time research, and his annual reports contain many results and valuable recommendations on the growing, manuring, and diseases of various crops.

His versatility is shown by his publications of this period, which range from the chemistry and physiology of the leaves of the betel vine, through safflower as a drying oil, to the composition of the milk produced by cows and buffaloes. Outstanding in this period was his study of the “Rab” system of cultivating rice.

He did valuable research on problems as different as diseases of potato, the cultivation of fodder crops and genetic variability in cotton. However, later, his writings became less concerned with specific problems of individual crops and more with the general need to increase yields and to adopt agricultural practices that would not only maintain but also increase soil fertility.

After taking time to familiarise himself with the dry Maharashtrian setting of the Deccan, Mann launched an intensive investigation of Poona as a characteristic Deccan town. His friend, Patrick Geddes, encouraged him to undertake the survey.

In the same period, he published a study titled “The ‘Mahars’ of a Deccan Village”, which dealt with Saswad. This was the first modern, quantitative study of the so-called “untouchables”.

Mann’s most celebrated social enquiries were his two village studies in the Deccan.

The topics covered in the surveys included physical features of the village (rainfall, geology, soil etc); the land and its divisions (tenures, history of land revenue, landholdings); vegetation, crops, and cultivation (all the crops are noted with brief descriptions of methods of cultivation, amount of village land under the crops, value, etc); agricultural stock of the village (number and kinds of animals and value); the people of the village (brief descriptions of the castes, their activities, and extensive discussion of their income and expenditures).

When the results of his first survey of Pimple Saudagar became public, a storm broke loose. He had concluded that only 35% of the families of the village could make do from agriculture alone. A finding of this sort by an Englishman, in fact, a government official, was considered by many of his compatriots as a bad case of “letting the side down”. A more serious and thoughtful criticism put forward at the same time was that Pimple Saudagar might be an unrepresentative village because it was located near the important government arms factory of Kirkee.

Mann acknowledged the justice of this argument and set about the study of another and much more isolated village, Jategaon Budruk, 25 miles away from Poona. The economic data gathered in this far-off village yielded results which differed in no significant respect from those obtained in Pimple Saudagar.

Mann’s study was an example of truly subversive work in Engelsian spirit, revealing the worsening plight of tenants, agricultural labourers, and the peasantry under colonial rule. He pointed to the horrendous levels of indebtedness of the peasants, often to local moneylenders.

He knew that there was a larger context in which these studies were important. That context was the poverty of India, in his eyes, the unnecessary poverty. He believed that with the existing land and available manure, the agricultural output of India could be raised by 50%.

For Mann, the future of India would be determined by poor peasants, rather than by a few leaders drawn from the urban, educated, English-speaking elite who were then a conspicuous part of the British colonial legacy. According to him, unlike those whose definition of economic progress was largely urban and industrial, it was obvious that the economic development of India would have to be based on an agricultural revolution that conferred hope, increased opportunity, and new dignity to India’s rural majority. He believed that India’s future was dependent less on whether British-inspired parliamentary institutions took hold and were ritualistically perpetuated than on the ability of the newly independent state to lift the mass of the people out of poverty.

Mann’s writings demonstrated that India’s independence and political freedom would be without much substance if its rural majority did not experience personally the benefits of economic emancipation.

Mann retired in October 1927 and died in 1961.