Calcutta, India.
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XXII
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE
In the rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabitants are farmers, who fare afield each morning with their so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bullocks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen inches long, but only a fraction of it projects from the wooden block into which it is fastened, and the ordinary plowing consists only of scratching the two or three inches of the soil's upper crust.
The Allabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest the farmers in better implements, and its Official Handbook, in calling attention to the exhibit of improved plows, declared:
"The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of breaking up land properly."
The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions for the primitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would buy the complete cultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I saw men cutting up bullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the threshing methods are centuries old; the little sugarcane mills {219} I found in operation here and there could have been put into bushel baskets. The big ox carts, which together with camel carts meet all the requirements of travel and transportation, are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels as big as we should use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheels are without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one of the carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25.
As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I cannot perhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest statistics as to the number of acres planted to each as I obtained them from the government authorities in Calcutta.
| Rice | 73,000,000 |
| Wheat | 21,000,000 |
| Barley | 8,000,000 |
| Millets | 41,000,000 |
| Maize | 7,000.000 |
| Other grains | 47,000,000 |
| Fodder crops | 5,000,000 |
| Oilseeds: linseed, mustard, sesamum, etc. | 14,000,000 |
| Sugarcane | 2,250,000 |
| Cotton | 13,000,000 |
| Jute | 3,000,000 |
| Opium (for China) | 416,000 |
| Tobacco | 1,000,000 |
| Orchard and garden | 5,000,000 |