From potatoes and plums to cauliflowers and carrots, how AHSI has influenced what we grow & eat

According to food lore, biryani in Kolkata contains potatoes because of Wajid Ali Shah, the nawab of Awadh. After the British deposed him in 1856 and he came to live in the city that was their centre of power in India, his cooks struggled to feed his huge retinue on curtailed funds, so took to adding potatoes to bulk out their biryani.

They had the Agri-Horticultural Society of India (AHSI) to thank for having potatoes in the first place. Potatoes were being grown in Bengal in the 18th century, but mainly for British consumption. As Rebecca Earle notes in Feeding the People, her study of the politics of potatoes, AHSI wanted Indians to grow them too, and for this purpose imported and distributed seed potatoes. It monitored “the tuber’s reception among India’s different religious communities, and was pleased when particular villages embraced the potato”.

The English East India Company supported a botanical garden as early as 1787, but its focus was on the British community. William Carey, a missionary and Sanskrit scholar at Serampore, was an enthusiastic gardener who wanted to extend the benefits of Western gardening knowledge and plants. He felt Indian agricultural skills were severely lacking, which led to frequent famines, and lobbied Company officials for support. They were receptive, possibly because they needed to counter the increasing criticism of their rule in India with evidence of beneficial projects.


The AHSI was launched in 1820 and, among the many events that Covid-19 has crowded out this year is a proper celebration of the bicentennial of an institution that has had a profound influence on the food habits of India. This is detailed in a document on the society’s website written by TK Bose, one of India’s leading horticulturists and an erstwhile AHSI secretary. Many of the society’s early reports are also available online and make for interesting reading on the introduction of new crops to India.

Bose notes that the AHSI set up committees to focus on particular plants. Not all were edible — among the most important efforts of the society was the import of high-quality cotton and tobacco seeds from the US. This would prove critical decades later when the American Civil War stopped supply to British mills, enabling Indian cotton to break in. By then Bombay had an Agri-Horticultural Society of Western India to propagate these seeds. Bose writes that AHSI established branches across India, from Meerut to Madras, and even as far away as Colombo and Singapore. Many are still functioning at the heart of these cities, like Pune’s Empress Garden, or the Chennai society near the US consulate.

Some idea of the support AHSI was able to command comes from a long report in the Bombay Times & Journal of Commerce (later the Times of India) in January 1839, just a few months after it first started. It contrasted how the Calcutta Presidency supported AHSI with a Rs 20,000 donation, plus Rs 4,500 for buildings and a further annual grant of Rs 10,000 while “the similar Society in this Presidency has derived from the Government Eleven Hundred and Fifty Rupees per annum with 100 Rupees per mensem for office expenses”. AHSI had top officials as patrons, like chief justices of the Supreme Court, and later the governor general himself. This tradition has continued till today, with leading industrialists taking up the role. LN Birla was a past president, and Sunil Kanoria is the current one.

Bose details many examples of food crops that AHSI imported from around the world. Some, like cotton, were already grown in India, but AHSI obtained commercially superior varieties, like the yellow Otaheite sugarcane from Mauritius.

Maize, apples, peaches and plums came from the US, wheat from Australia, litchis from China and a variety of vegetables, including cauliflower, cabbage and carrots, from the UK and South Africa (where ships to India stopped). AHSI sold seeds to farmers and encouraged them to grow better produce with a popular system of competitions where even the malis who did the hard work could win cash prizes.

It is a remarkable heritage, and yet it came with a certain constraint. AHSI continued to propagate a negative view of Indian agriculture, either for well-meaning reasons, like Carey’s desire to prevent famines, or from the more dubious aim of justifying Britain’s role in “improving” India. The counter to this, ironically, would come when the British government finally got directly involved in agriculture and set up the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute in Pusa in Bihar (later destroyed in an earthquake, and relocated to Delhi). This was meant to propagate Western crops and techniques as AHSI had done.

However, a young British botanist named Albert Howard, recruited to work there, started thinking differently. He was a farmer’s son and did not come with a prejudiced view of Indian farmers. As he worked in the institute’s fields, he noticed that the plants in the plots of the peasants alongside often seemed healthier, even though they received none of the fertilisers, pesticides and other modern products that he used. These observations led him to develop the principles of organic farming which emphasise natural means of maintaining soil health.

Howard’s theories proved too radical for the British establishment, but luckily the maharaja of Indore stepped in to create an agricultural institute for him. An Agricultural Testament, the book he wrote in 1940 based on his Indian work, has become over the last 80 years a foundational text for a very different vision of agriculture from the kind initially promoted by AHSI.

This does not negate the importance of what AHSI did and continues to do through its encouragement of gardening and horticulture. Both approaches have their value, and together affirm the transformational power that plants can bring to the life of a nation.

Covid-19 might prevent a proper celebration of AHSI’s 200 years, but perhaps we could all cook a properly potato-laden Kolkata biryani in tribute to how it changed how we eat.