The Other History of the Green Revolution

India embraced high yielding variety seeds of wheat and paddy, developed by Rockefeller breeders, in the 1960s to usher in a period of food security, and the subsequent rise in yield came to be characterized as the green revolution. This so-called green revolution has many histories. This talk embeds the history of the green revolution within path dependency of colonial era trends and technocratic beliefs, in the rise of agrarian regions, and in India’s partition-era inflected development. The historiographical and activist pitch to bind the green revolution to the arrival of Mexican seeds alone cannot explain the truth hiding in plain sight that HYVs were progressively introduced in most other regions of India in the 1960s and 1970s where they failed to succeed. A history attendant to India’s agro-technological pasts explains this anomaly. My talk will steer the conversation away from a focus on episodes and moments of the 1960s and towards that deeper, thicker history. This longer past was folded into the history of the green revolution and its present and accounts for current ambivalences toward such agrarian transitions to productivity.