Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultivators and administrators in India contended with the ravages of kans grass (Saccharum spontaneum), a deeply rooted wild sugarcane capable of rendering productive land wholly barren. Difficult to eliminate and endemic throughout India, kans disrupted agricultural efforts in north and central India, particularly in the regions of Jhansi, Bundelkhand, and the Himalayan Terai. Yet the fight against this ecological antagonist was bound up in broader political transformations. As India’s colonial agriculture grew increasingly tied to global markets in the late nineteenth century, and dry regions offered new possible spaces for settled agriculture, imperial administrators grew certain that mechanical tractors held the solution to its eradication. Likewise, postcolonial Indian agronomists cast the production of abundant food as central to their political legitimacy, and they made the eradication of kans a national aim, enlisting the World Bank as a partner. British administrators, nationalist Indians and their postcolonial successors, as well as the World Bank all found a mechanized approach to the eradication of kans politically expedient, at the expense of heeding local ecological and social conditions. The remarkable resilience of kans defied efforts at mechanical removal, and the project foundered until the political economy of Indian agriculture shifted to emphasize chemical pesticides and decentralized control.

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“坎斯是国王，耕种者是他的主题”：现代印度的环境史与农业发展

在整个19世纪和20世纪，印度的耕种者和管理者都与堪萨斯草（Saccharum spontaneum），一种根深蒂固的野生甘蔗，能够使生产性土地完全贫瘠。堪萨斯人难以在印度各地消除和流行，因此扰乱了印度北部和中部的农业努力，特别是在詹西，邦德尔汉德和喜马拉雅特莱地区。然而，与这一生态敌对者的斗争被束缚在更广泛的政治变革中。随着19世纪后期印度的殖民农业日益与全球市场联系在一起，干旱地区为定居农业提供了新的可能空间，帝国管理者越来越确信机械拖拉机为根除农业提供了解决方案。同样，后殖民时期的印度农艺师将丰富的食物生产视为其政治合法性的核心，他们将消灭s族列为国家目标，招募世界银行作为合作伙伴。英国行政人员，民族主义印第安人及其后殖民者继任者，以及世界银行，都在政治上权宜之计下找到了一种机械化的方式来消灭堪萨斯人，但以牺牲当地的生态和社会条件为代价。堪萨斯人的非凡弹性使他们无视机械清除的努力，直到印度农业的政治经济转向强调化学杀虫剂和分散控制，该项目才告一段落。