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The Salvation Army’s forgotten agricultural mission in India
Founded in London in 1865 by William Booth, The Salvation Army emerged as a Protestant Christian philanthropic organisation committed to addressing poverty through practical social work.
Pune: The history of agriculture is also a history of institutions. Alongside governments, religious and philanthropic organisations have often shaped rural economies through experiments in cultivation, land settlement and agricultural education.
In 19th-century colonial India, the British government often encouraged and sometimes actively supported evangelical organisations such as the Serampore Mission and the Church Missionary Society to participate in agricultural improvement programmes. Their work extended beyond introducing new crops. Missionaries established model farms and rural settlements where cultivators were introduced to improved cultivation methods, agricultural implements, and various systems of farm management. In several instances, missions were granted land on which these experiments could be undertaken and demonstrated to neighbouring communities.
The Salvation Army was among the organisations that sought to tackle rural distress through agricultural reform.
Founded in London in 1865 by William Booth, The Salvation Army emerged as a Protestant Christian philanthropic organisation committed to addressing poverty through practical social work. Best known for its evangelical origins, by the late 19th century, it had increasingly expanded its activities to include relief work, education, labour programmes, and schemes for the economic rehabilitation of the poor.
A large audience assembled at the Poona Gymkhana on a Saturday evening in December 1895 to listen to a discourse from Booth, the founder of The Salvation Army. The focus of his address was the Peasant Settlement Scheme and the Agricultural Banks he hoped to establish in the Deccan. An account of the meeting was published in ‘The War Cry’, the official magazine of The Salvation Army, on 28 March, 1896.
Dr Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, the eminent reformer and scholar, had taken the chair. Introducing Booth and the work of The Salvation Army, Bhandarkar highlighted the organisation’s humanitarian activities. He pointed out that it had established institutions in Europe to help women leave prostitution, assist former prisoners in rebuilding their lives after release, and provide support to the poor so that they could earn a livelihood independently.
The Salvation Army had extended these efforts to India, where it became concerned with the condition of the peasantry and devised schemes intended to protect cultivators from the exploitative practices of moneylenders. Bhandarkar argued that the difficulties faced by Indian agriculturists arose not only from the burden of land revenue but also, and perhaps more significantly, from the heavy debts and financial pressures imposed by moneylenders.
Booth visited India twice. During his first visit, he travelled widely to study the country’s social conditions and to identify areas in which the organisation could intervene. When he returned in December 1895, he arrived with a more clearly defined scheme centred on what he called “Peasant Settlements” and “Village Banks”.
Looking back on his earlier visit, Booth remarked that evening that India’s suffering appeared to fall under three broad heads: destitution, vice, and crime. In his Poona address, however, he chose to confine himself to the first of these. After outlining the conditions in which The Salvation Army would have to work, Booth explained that his programme for India consisted of four parts. The first was the Peasant Settlement Scheme. It addressed what Booth regarded as the problem of overcrowded villages in the Deccan.
He argued that rural congestion presented difficulties no less serious than those associated with overcrowded towns in the West. In many villages, he noted, people lacked the means to maintain themselves. He proposed to settle such peasants on land where they could earn a livelihood and support their families.
Agricultural education formed the second part of the proposal. Booth proposed the establishment of agricultural schools where children would receive the practical training required to become, in his words, “industrious peasants”. He believed such institutions would help create a self-reliant and “honest peasantry”.
Rural indebtedness lay at the heart of Booth’s scheme. He regarded this as the most ambitious and the most difficult part, though he remained convinced that it could succeed. Describing usury as one of the gravest burdens borne by the poorest cultivators, Booth argued that moneylenders, rather than the state, were often responsible for keeping peasants in perpetual debt. Citing information he had received from a senior official in the Madras Revenue Department, he claimed that many cultivators in the Presidency paid interest rates as high as 80 percent, and sometimes even more.
He went on to describe a system under which landlords appropriated the bulk of the agricultural produce. According to him, the harvest was split into five parts. One part went to the landlord “for the honour of being the landlord”, while two further parts were taken as rent for the land. The remaining two parts were left to the cultivator, who had tilled the entire holding. If the value of this share proved insufficient to meet the principal and accumulated interest on his debt, the landlord seized the whole crop and required the cultivator to execute a fresh bond, mortgaging the produce of the following year’s harvest. Booth cited this as an example of the cycle of indebtedness from which, he believed, the Indian peasantry had to be rescued.
Booth’s views echoed a growing belief among many colonial officials and social reformers that rural indebtedness posed a greater danger to the peasantry than land revenue alone.
Booth anticipated criticism that the scheme was little more than a vehicle for missionary work. But, in his view, most people would place greater trust in a person guided by religious conviction than in one with no religious beliefs at all. At the same time, he was careful to insist that The Salvation Army’s proposal was not conceived as a means of active proselytisation. Its primary purpose, he maintained, was the relief and rehabilitation of those living in distress rather than religious conversion.
The distinguishing feature of Booth’s scheme was the integration of agricultural education, land access, and rural credit into a single, unified programme.
Booth’s proposals were still largely theoretical when he presented them in Poona. Over the following decade, however, The Salvation Army attempted to translate several of these ideas into practice through a series of agricultural colonies.
One of the earliest experiments was established in Gujarat, where the government allotted several hundred acres to the Salvation Army for the settlement of members of the Dhed, or weaver, community. Named Muktipur, the colony sought to provide landless families with the opportunity to own and cultivate land.
The colony was slow to take shape and encountered numerous setbacks during its early years. The weavers had to be taught agricultural pursuits. By the second decade of the 20th century, however, Muktipur had developed into a settlement of around 500 people. It possessed remarkably fine herds of draught cattle and milk buffaloes for which Gujarat was famous.
Another, much larger colony was established at Shantipur in Punjab, which successfully elevated a class of Punjabi villagers from serfdom to landownership.
The Salvation Army’s efforts had been directed towards securing on favourable terms tracts of land which people who were, so to speak, crowded out of the ordinary village occupation, could own and cultivate. It bought and put into cultivation some land in Shiroor and Talegaon Dhamdhere near Poona in the early 1900s.
While the Poona settlements never achieved the scale of Muktipur or Shantipur, they nevertheless illustrate the Salvation Army’s attempt to address rural poverty through land settlement, agricultural training, and access to rural credit.
