Colonialism and the Countryside
Reading Buchanan
Identify Buchanan's idea of development in his own words.
Much of what we know about this region comes from Francis Buchanan, a physician who surveyed the areas under the Company's control. But he was a Company employee: the Company paid for his surveys and told him what to record.
He travelled with a large team: draughtsmen, surveyors, palanquin bearers and coolies. Local people saw him as an agent of the sarkar (government).
He was told to look for resources the Company could use, and he recorded rocks and minerals in detail: iron ore, mica, granite, saltpetre.
He imagined how the landscape could be transformed to make it productive: forests cleared and turned into farmland, and Asan and Palas trees planted to rear tassar silkworms and lac for commercial use.
So his vision was shaped by the Company's commercial interests, and by Western ideas of progress, in which forests were 'waste' and settled farming was 'improvement'. He often did not see things as local forest-dwellers saw them. What he saw was what the Company wanted.
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