139 



Rice is, on the whole, the moi'e uncertain in its return the less the 

 area grown : and being a crop of small cultivators there is a need of 

 securing co-operation in working the larger areas. The great plains 

 of Lower Bengal have been worked for rice for ages and cany 

 such a population that the produce is only exported in the years 

 when the yield is considex^able. In the course of time these 

 plains have acquired a peculiar flora and a peculiar fauna, in response 

 to the annual submei-ging of the surface of the land, which keeps 

 out the dry-land weeds of more than ephemeral duration, and 

 excludes by rendering homeless all ground-nesting animals or insects 

 which pass one stage of their life underground. Thus it has come 

 about that these Bengal plains are relatively without x-ats, and when 

 plague established itself in Calcutta the villages long enjoyed 

 immunity on account of their isolation. As they are relatively 

 without rats, so are they relatively without some other pests which 

 are known to do great damage here. The long ages of cultivation, 

 its persistence and its completeness have thus wrought changes 

 favourable to the crop in its relationship to other life. Rats in 

 Malaya are possibly the worst pests of small areas of rice, and birds 

 next : after them come insects. As regards birds it is obvious that 

 the more cleared the land the freer it may be ; and the same also in 

 respect of elephants and wild pigs : so that the wide co-operative 

 area in a large way escapes these. 



Co-operation is wanted for irrigation. 



It is most interesting to observe with the eye of an ethnologist 

 how in Malaya this needed co-operation has been obtained — how in 

 Java, for instance, much of the land is held by the village collectively 

 and parcelled out annually for rice-growing : how in the Malay 

 Peninsula religious ceremonies have been adopted as a means of 

 bringing the owners to work collectively. The fumigation of the 

 seed with benzoin, and the prayers in the mosque, and all the poetry 

 gathei-ed about the soul of the rice is an equivalent for the 

 prosaic scrap of paper on which a District Officer is empowered to 

 write thou shalt repair thy runnels on this date and plant thy paddy 

 on that. Whatever our feelings may be in regard to the liberty of 

 the subject, I anticipate that no one will wish to contest the argu- 

 ment that the sawah is an unit, and that it is wise to coerce tlie 

 cultivatoi's of it just as they have been coerced in the past; 

 because the State is the better off for the complete cultivation of 

 any area of rice land. 



The next matter is the extension of the rice lands. 



Rice cultivation, bendang or wet rice cultivation and not ladang 

 or dry rice cultivation, has established for itself two vigorous centres 

 in the Peninsula, the one in the north, the other in the neighbour- 

 hood of Malacca. To the north it came as an extension onl3^ Great 

 and wonderfully settled kingdoms once existed from the Bay of 

 Bengal to the China Sea across the belt of land from Rangoon to 



