The Pathaayam as Economic Archive
In the villages of southern India, one could once find a wooden storage box known as the pathaayam. Today, these boxes sit largely forgotten in the corners of elderly farmers’ homes. But in their time, they functioned as something far more significant than mere storage containers. They were, in effect, banks.
When Zoho’s Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu recently drew attention to the pathaayam on social media, he articulated an economic reality that has since been erased from collective memory. He noted that rice paddy was not merely food in these communities—it was currency. Transactions within villages were denominated in rice units. Farmers generated wealth during the harvest and drew upon it throughout the year. They were not simply cultivators of grain; they were the primary drivers of the local economy, the central actors in the circulation of value.
Over the past five decades, however, this system has unraveled. Rural economies became increasingly dependent on externally produced goods—tractors, motorcycles, manufactured products—all of which required cash rather than rice. The pathaayam emptied. Rice was, in effect, demonetized, reduced from a currency to a tradable commodity. Farmers moved from being at the centre of economic life to occupying the periphery of supply chains they no longer controlled.
This transformation is the entry point into a larger historical narrative about how rice has been systematically appropriated, transformed, and exploited through centuries of colonialism, industrial agriculture, and corporate monopolization. In that narrative lie stories of loss, resistance, and the urgent imperative to reclaim agricultural sovereignty.
Rice as Currency and Sacred Symbol
The concept of rice as currency was not unique to India. In Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge era when the state abolished money, villagers spontaneously turned to rice as their primary medium of exchange. Its ease of transport, storage, and standardized measurement made it a functional currency in an economy stripped of formal monetary systems. But in India, and particularly in Bengal, rice has occupied a role that transcends its economic function. It is embedded in the cultural and spiritual fabric of society. Consider the annaprashana ceremony. In Bengali Hindu tradition, this ritual—colloquially known as mukhe bhat, or “rice in the mouth”—marks an infant’s first intake of solid food. The child is adorned in traditional attire, seated on the maternal uncle’s lap, and fed their first rice.
Then there is alpana. Across Bengal, women have for generations drawn intricate patterns on floors and courtyards using rice flour paste. These designs are not decorative embellishments. They are ritual expressions. When communities prayed for rain, the patterns invoked the rain gods. When they prayed for a bountiful harvest, the motifsdepicted overflowing granaries. For the goddess Lakshmi, they drew owls, conch shells, and lotus—all symbols of abundance and prosperity.
In this worldview, rice is simultaneously currency, sacred offering, artistic medium, and prayer.
Colonialism and the Destruction of Rice Diversity
The colonial encounter fundamentally disrupted this integrated system. Scholars such as Bibhuti Bhushan Mitra have employed the term “eco-colonialism” to describe how colonial powers systematically dismantled agricultural diversity across the colonized world. Indigenous, locally adapted food crops were displaced by single cash crops cultivated for European markets. Consider the case of Gambia. Rice cultivation was historically widespread. Under colonial rule, however, the most fertile lands were converted to groundnut production for export. Rice had to be imported. The result was a growing vulnerability to famine. In India, the British pursued a parallel strategy, but with an additional dimension: they identified valuable indigenous rice varieties and sought to monopolize them. Kalanamak, the scented black pearl of eastern Uttar Pradesh, offers a striking example. Legend holds that Gautam Buddha gifted this rice to the people of Kapilavastu, assuring them that its lingering aroma would preserve his memory. Archaeological excavations near the site have indeed uncovered grains of this variety. In the nineteenth century, British officials recognized its commercial potential. Using bonded labour, they constructed canals and reservoirs to intensify cultivation. The grain was exported to Britain, where it commanded a substantial market. When a group of Gujarati traders attempted to establish a competing market, the British leveraged their control over rail infrastructure to dominate trade.
In the garb of commercial competition, it was a project of monopolistic control over biological and agricultural resources.
The Bengal Famine—Manufactured Catastrophe
The culmination of these transformations came in 1943 with the Bengal Famine. Three million people perished. What distinguishes this famine from other major famines in Indian history is that it was not caused by drought. A 2019 study led by Vimal Mishra of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar analysed soil records from six major famines between 1870 and 1943. Five were correlated with drought conditions. The Bengal Famine of 1943, however, occurred during a period of above-average rainfall. The famine was the result of policy failure compounded by wartime priorities. The Japanese occupation of Burma in 1942 had cut off a critical source of rice imports. Rather than implementing conservation measures, the colonial administration prioritized militarysupply chains over civilian needs. Rice was removed from coastal districts under the pretext of a feared Japanese invasion. The “boat denial policy” destroyed the fishing vessels on which coastal communities depended, obliterating livelihoods overnight. Rice imports were halted. A formal famine declaration was refused even as bodies accumulated in the streets. Most damningly, between January and July 1943, as the famine took hold, India exported more than 70,000 tons of rice. Winston Churchill’s response to appeals for assistance has become infamous. He dismissed Indians as “breeding like rabbits” and claimed they were receiving a million rupees a day from Britain for contributing nothing to the war effort. The famine was not a natural disaster. It was a manufactured catastrophe made possible by the prior transformation of rice from a community-held resource into a commodity subject to imperial extraction.
Tebhaga—Peasant Resistance
But these conditions also generated resistance. In 1946, as the trauma of the famine remained fresh, the Tebhaga movement emerged across Bengal. Its demand was deceptively simple: under the existing system, sharecroppers were compelled to surrender half their harvest to landlords. Tebhaga, literally meaning “sharing by thirds”, demanded that this be reduced to one-third. However, the law was never fully implemented. It took decades of continued struggle, and the eventual rise of the Left Front government in 1977, for meaningful land reforms to take shape. Yet the spirit of Tebhaga endures as a reminder that when the means of subsistence are seized, organized resistance can reclaim them.
Neocolonialism and Seed Monopolies
Which brings us to the present. While formal colonialism has ended, new forms of control have emerged, what Vandana Shiva has termed “bio-imperialism.” The scale of loss is staggering. Until the 1970s, India was home to more than 110,000 documented varieties of rice. Today, that number has been reduced to a fraction. The late Dr. R.H. Richharia, often described as the “global grandfather of rice research,” estimated that there were once as many as 200,000 distinct ecotype varieties of rice worldwide. Each possessed unique characteristics: distinct flavours, aromas, medicinal properties, and adaptations to local ecological conditions. What precipitated this collapse? The Green Revolution. The promotion of high-yielding hybrid varieties, often coupled with subsidies and policy pressures, displaced traditional cultivation. Farmers were encouraged (and in some cases compelled) to abandon their heritage varieties in favour of a handful of uniform, chemically dependent crops. Diversity was sacrificed for yield. With it disappeared millennia of accumulated agricultural knowledge, as well as the nutritional resilience embedded in diverse grain systems. The irony is acute. The hybrid varieties cultivated today are nutritionally inferior. Consequently, governments spend billions fortifying them with iron and zinc, nutrients thatindigenous varieties contained naturally. Kalanamak, for instance, contains three times the iron of common hybrid rice. Assam’s jengoni contains fifteen times the iron. But the contemporary crisis extends beyond nutrition. Today, four multinational agribusiness corporations control over 54 per cent of the global seed trade. They patent seed varieties, asserting proprietary ownership over living organisms. Under the framework of intellectual property, they prohibit farmers from saving and replanting seeds—a practice that has been central to agriculture for ten millennia. This constitutes a new form of colonialism. Rather than appropriating land, it appropriates genetic material. Rather than exporting grain, it patents genomes. The language of innovation and property rights obscures a structure of extraction. The Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch—the India Seed Sovereignty Alliance—articulated this contradiction in a recent open letter: “Why should nations of the Global South hand over on a platter our rich genetic treasures and genomic information to seed companies of the Global North that staunchly assert their own intellectual property rights, prioritizing profits over people, while neglecting ecological health and sustainability?”
Reclaiming Agricultural Sovereignty
I began with the pathaayam—the wooden box that once served as a bank. That system cannot be resurrected in its original form. But its significance lies in what it represented: a world in which rice was not a commodity to be extracted but a common resource to be cultivated, shared, and sustained across generations. Reclaiming that principle requires concrete action. It requires reviving indigenous rice varieties. In Kerala, njavara rice is valued in Ayurveda for its medicinal properties. In Manipur, chakao varieties carry deep cultural significance. In the Northeast, red rice genotypes such as jengoni contain iron levels fifteen times higher than common hybrid varieties. These are not museum pieces. They are living genetic resources with the potential to restore both nutrition and resilience. It requires protecting seed sovereignty. The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act was intended to safeguard farmers’ rights, but its implementation has enabled corporate patenting of heritage varieties. A robust legal and political defence of the agricultural commons is essential. And it requires remembering the lessons of Tebhaga. When peasants demanded one-third, they were not seeking charity. They were asserting a fundamental principle of justice.
Today, the same principle applies. Farmers who have conserved and enriched agricultural biodiversity for generations are entitled to compensation, to participation in decision- making, and to control over the fruits of their labour. Rice has assumed many forms across history: currency, sacred offering, instrument of empire, weapon of famine, rallying cry for resistance. Today, it stands at the centre of a global struggle over the ownership of life itself.The question is whether rice will remain a commodity controlled by a handful of corporations, or whether it will once again become what it was for millennia—a commons, a heritage, a source of life for the communities who have nurtured it.
The answer depends on the choices we make now.
References:
2. https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-22421
3.https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-intl-scli-gbr
7. https://historyireland.com/demographic-crisis-revisiting-the-bengal-famine-of-1943-4/
8.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebhaga_movement
10.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292121001318
Author – Souvick
Photograph – Priyanka
Artist – Subhabrata
Jaladarsha 