There’s a National Agricultural Science Museum on ICAR’s the Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Pusa Campus ((In a separate post I’ll explain why it’s called the Pusa Campus.)) and I spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering around it during my recent visit to Delhi. One floor takes the visitor on a whirlwind tour of agriculture on the subcontinent from the Neolithic to the Green Revolution. Then you go down some stairs for exhibits on the current state of Indian agriculture. The displays and eye-catching, informative and well-arranged. My only complaint would be about the lack of explicit references to the importance of agrobiodiversity, its conservation and use, for sustainable agriculture, apart from a poster on the Green Revolution. But then the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources has its own museum.
Taking photographs was not allowed, so I can’t show you the wonderful diorama of a Mughal garden, and other great exhibits. I do hope the museum goes online sometime. Best I can do at the moment is this scan of the brochure that is handed out as you leave (click to enlarge).
One little snippet of information, almost a throw-away, very much intrigued me, and I later did some research on it. In the section on agriculture during the colonial period there was — inevitably — a reference to Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal (1773-1785). This was mainly to do with the granaries which he commissioned in response to a failed monsoon and the famine it caused. The only one that was actually built was the one at Patna, which looks pretty impressive.
Anyway, the point is that along with this discussion of the Gola of Patna also came a reference to Hastings’ interest in — and experimentation with — a bit of agricultural biodiversity he called “barley-wheat.” No further explanation of that name is given in the museum display. That really intrigued me, because attempts to hybridize these two species didn’t start until much later, almost a century in fact. So what was this “barley-wheat,” if not some kind of hybrid?
Well, it seems in fact to have been plain old naked barley, as a later mention of Hastings’ experiments shows. Naked or hulless barley has an exposed kernel, due to a single recessive gene. It is…
…distributed widely in the world, but there is a higher preference for naked barleys in East Asian countries such as China, Korea and Japan and it is especially high in Tibet and the northern parts of Nepal, India and Pakistan. Since the frequency is low in the west, Vavilov (1926) considered southeastern Asia to be a centre of origin for naked barley. It has, however, become clear that naked barley was grown in Anatolia (Turkey) and in northern Europe already in ancient times (Hunter, 1952; Helbaek, 1969).
Some of the naked barleys of Oriental origin have a glutinous endosperm which segregates as a simple recessive gene to starchy endosperm (Kashiwada, 1930). In these areas, barley is used as a major human diet and naked barley is preferred. In the southwestern part of Japan, a special semi-dwarf type called “uzu”, earlier covering about 80% of the whole barley acreage in Japan, is now used mainly in the naked form (Takahashi, 1951). The smaller kernel of the uzu type is preferred to cook together with rice in Japan due to the similar sizes of the two cereals.
Now, I can’t work out whether Hastings came across naked barley for the first time out east, or knew about it beforehand, but he must have been really taken with it, as it seems he continued experimenting with it on his own farm when he returned to England. There may be a clue to the reasons for his intense interest in the crop in his observation in a letter that it “makes very bad bread and very good malt.” A man after my own heart.