Rethinking the Green Revolution: Continuity and the Japanese Method in Postcolonial India

Histories of agrarian modernization in postcolonial India have largely treated the Green Revolution as a decisive technological rupture centered on the introduction of high-yielding seeds in the mid-1960s. Recovering the earlier adoption of the Japanese method of rice cultivation reveals a different trajectory. Many practices later associated with the Green Revolution-including improved rice varieties, intensive fertilizer use, and assured irrigation-were first assembled and tested through this Japanese-inspired technological package. As these techniques moved through experimental stations, government programs, and village communities, they were selectively adapted, recombined, and absorbed into subsequent agricultural interventions. The history of the Japanese method thus uncovers a longer genealogy of agrarian modernization, one in which continuity, rather than rupture, shaped the making and diffusion of agricultural technology in postcolonial India.