The father of modern agriculture in India

In late November 1903, a young American missionary sat somewhat nervously in the annual meeting of his organisation being held at Ludhiana. Sam Higginbottom had arrived in India only a couple of weeks earlier. Disembarking in Calcutta and travelling to Allahabad via Banaras, he soon accompanied Dr Arthur H Ewing, the principal of Allahabad Christian College, to the Presbyterian synod in Punjab.

Things were happening far too quickly for young Sam. In January that year, just before his graduation in theology from Princeton University, he had accidentally run into Henry Forman in New Jersey. Henry was the son of the great Punjab educationist and missionary, Charles Forman, after whom is named the Forman Christian College of Lahore. Henry was himself a missionary in Etah, a small town in the United Provinces, and was looking for a recruit for the mission work among the poor untouchables of his area.

He asked young Sam if he was interested in India. Sam had heard about the legendary intellectual nimbleness of the Indian philosophers and even though he had studied philosophy, he was uncertain of keeping up with the Indian counterparts. He had been mulling over to go to China, South America or Africa as a missionary.

As providence would have it, in less than a year, he was in India, and sitting in a Ludhiana bungalow, he was hoping to get his formal allotment to Etah. To his chagrin, he was asked to teach in Allahabad Christian College. Sam wanted to be a missionary and not a teacher of economics and biology. Ewing prevailed upon him. He told him that higher education offered by mission institutions had taken a massive hit after the 1857 mutiny, and now was the time to rebuild it on Christian foundations. Sam wasn’t convinced, yet submitted to the board’s decision. This perhaps was the second-most important development brought about by Presbyterian missionaries from the USA in Ludhiana.

The first was, of course, the arrival of John C Lowrie, another young American missionary, who had arrived in Ludhiana in November of 1834, and laid the foundation of Christian educational and humanitarian work on north Indian soil.

Sam Higginbottom accepted the charge of education. As a teacher of economics, he got the opportunity to look closely at the roots of rural deprivation in India. He knew that the area around the Jamuna river, where his college was situated, was well irrigated, had the most fertile soil, and the climate made it possible to harvest multiple crops in a year; yet, the region was food scarce and people struggled perpetually with malnutrition. His diagnosis was simple and straightforward — India needed scientific farming, and agricultural education must become an integral part of the Indian education system.

Higginbottom resented the popular idea that “any old fool knew how to farm and that there was nothing that could be taught to the farmer from the book”. He later wrote in his little masterpiece of a book, ‘The Gospel and the Plow’, that “the farm, the ultimate source of food, as the supplier of food for the toilers in the busy cities, is worth the best brains a country can produce”.

Despite opposition from his own co-workers, he decided to go back to the USA to formally study agriculture himself. He returned to Allahabad with a BSc in agriculture and thirty-thousand US dollars, which he had collected from common Americans, to begin the agricultural wing of the Christian college. Soon, he had a separate institution, called the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, which in time became the first institution in Asia to offer a course in agricultural engineering.

The institution close to Sangam in Allahabad was soon a national curiosity, visited by Madan Mohan Malviya, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Rabindranath Tagore sent members of his family to learn agriculture. Malviya invited Higginbottom to help him begin the agriculture department in his newly founded Banaras Hindu University in 1916. That’s where Higginbottom met Mahatma Gandhi for the first time, and both became lifetime admirers of each other’s work.

Gandhi even suggested that Higginbottom become the economic adviser to the Congress, an offer Higginbottom politely declined as he wished to strengthen the institute. In time, the institute, affiliated to the University of Allahabad, grew to become a deemed university and is today a state-aided university continuing the mission of its founder, “Serve the Land, Feed the Hungry”.

A great family man, a supervisor of the leprosy asylum in Allahabad, a friend of the freedom fighters, Dr Sam Higginbottom has a legacy that lives on.

— The writer teaches English at the Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Prayagraj (Allahabad)