Tales of Rice: Kuttanad, Southwest India

This monograph seeks to advance a new framework of writing economic history. It suggests that economic history should open conversations with varied branches of human sciences for a better understanding of the economic past. Currently dominant in economic history of South Asia are the macro narratives of economic change. These unravel the central tendencies of economic epochs of large regions by drawing analytic inputs primarily from economic theory. Without discounting the relevance of such narratives, the monograph argues in favour of a transdisciplinary framework that explores the economic traces: observing the micro regions, actors, processes, relationships, technologies, ideas, and commodities; tracking their passage through time; generating a multi-layered narrative of economic life capable of capturing nuances otherwise missed. The feasibility of the framework is demonstrated through a study of the rice-lands of Kuttanad in the former princely state of Travancore on India’s southwest coast. The inquiry focuses on the period beginning from the mid-19th century to World War II. The analysis has two planks. First, the monograph situates the emergence of Kuttanad within the larger processes of the capitalist world- economy. Alongside the global and political economic, locally specific elements influenced the making of the Kuttanad rice-bowl. The second plank of the analysis, therefore, is the ecology, ethnography, and cultural geography of rice production in Kuttanad. This also takes the inquiry to reclaiming traces within traces: the nether economies of piracy and theft; the technology of human sacrifice.