Cultivating Time: Agency, Assemblage and the Sugarcane Cropscape in Colonial North India

What does it mean to say that sugarcane in North India was not a plantation crop but was cultivated under peasant agriculture and remained so throughout the colonial period? This article explores this question by analysing the mutually constitutive elements of peasant production. It argues that although constrained by the interlinked power of landlord-creditors and capitalists, peasants exercised meaningful control over the production process through techniques such as fallowing, land preparation, and cultivar selection, among others. By focusing on the temporality of sugarcane cultivation as intermeshed with the temporal constraints and affordances of the sugarcane crop, other crops, and the rent/revenue demand, it questions historiographical accounts that locate peasant indebtedness and dependency in a fixed conflict between the inflexible colonial revenue calendar and agricultural cycle. The article contributes to debates on agrarian change by suggesting that peasant agriculture persisted because peasants adapted their practices to shifting demands.