Sir Albert Howard’s Indore Method of composting eventually founded the organic farming movement in the English-speaking world. There’s been a lot written on how it inspired farmers in England, the United States, Australia, and other countries to develop their own composting methods. But how much impact did it have in India where it was developed?
It turns out that composting by the Indore Method was widely recognized in India as the most practical way to replenish soil fertility and boost crop yields in the 1930s and 1940s. Most Indian agricultural writers during this time period recommended composting, pointing out that chemical fertilizers were too expensive for the average Indian farmer. While they may have failed in actually implementing the large-scale composting of town and agricultural wastes, government officials both before and immediately after Indian independence in 1947 strongly favored composting.
Among the promoters of composting in the late 1930s was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who reprinted a detailed leaflet about composting from Indore in a 1935 issue of his periodical Harijan. Reprinted in his 1949 book Food Shortage & Agriculture, this was the first of many mentions of composting and organic farming methods in this publication.
By 1947, Gandhi and his close followers were very familiar with all the British organic farming literature. They cited Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, Sir Robert McCarrison, Lord Northbourne, and Friend Sykes. Indian organic farmers were dismayed that their new government was “pushing with the promotion and extension of artificial fertilizer factories,” warning that only composting “will provide us with health-giving food and save us from the unscrupulous exploiters who, regardless of the harm they are causing the people, consider accumulation of wealth the one and only objective in life.”
How did these Indian organic farmers feel about the fact that organic farming and the Indore method had been developed by the British, their colonial oppressors? Intriguingly, it was that very fact that appealed to them the most. “British farmers who have mechanized their agricultural operations have many lessons to teach us, admit it is up to us to profit by what they themselves admit to be their mistakes,” one Indian organic farming advocate wrote in 1946. “No greater misfortune could perhaps befall the people of India than that their land should be poisoned with artificial fertilizers, the use of which has been condemned by British authority on agriculture themselves.”
As Gandhi himself emphasized in his 1938 manifesto Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, he didn’t see the British people themselves as evil—it was their narrow definition of “civilization” that was the problem. “It is my deliberate opinion that India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization,” he clarified. And so when British organic farmers criticized aspects of that environmentally destructive civilization, he saw it as confirmation that even the English were beginning to see and turn from the error of their ways. It didn’t bother him at all that the Indore Method had been developed by an Englishman. The important thing was that it had been inspired by the traditional composting of China and Japan and that it provided a practical way for India to be independent of chemical fertilizer imports from that deadly civilization that he was trying to escape.
Comments