Although it's possible to show tractors roaring through the fields of the Punjab, the commoner sight in India is the age-old one of a man behind draft animals. All those animals require fodder; hence the attention to neatly thatched fodder stacks.
Puddling a field near Karnal, Haryana, so it will hold water during the paddy season. Across the road, a tractor might do the same work. The transition from hand labor to machinery isn't always welcomed, especially by the laborers whom the machinery displaces.
Cultivation south of Hissar, Haryana.
Nearby, a neighbor cultivates with a camel. To the south it's no great distance to the Great Indian Desert, or Thar.
Straw is protected during the rainy season by ingenious, water-shedding stacks.
As fodder is needed, the stacks are broken open.
And this?
Here's an earlier stage in construction: cowdung cakes neatly stacked and ready for a protective wrap.
Still earlier.
It's an industry in itself.
The first step is forming and drying the cakes. They burn slowly and so are a very desirable domestic fuel, even though experts keen on using dung as fertilizer have castigated their use as fuel for well over a century.
Indian or British? These grain mills, at a drop along the East Jumna Canal, are found in virtually the same design throughout northern India and Pakistan. For pictures of the same kind of device there, see Pakistan: Swat.
The winds of change: tractors for sale in Hissar, a town in an irrigated district west of Delhi.
Rice harvesting by combine, west of Karnal. The brand-name is Swaraj, "self-rule," but though that name alludes to Gandhi, the machine itself echoes American harvesters.
A portable thresher works the paddy harvest at Villupuram, west of Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu.
Getting ready to move on to the next village.
A more specialized crop: sugarcane growing against the rough countryside near the ruins of Vijayanagar. In the foreground, a boiler pan for the juice expressed by the bullock-driven crusher behind it.
The British introduced steel-roller crushing machines. Between the drums at the left, a bit of crushed cane emerges.
The juice will be poured into large pancakes to dry, then pressed into blocks. There are plenty of flies in the neighborhood, but the product—locally called gur but more widely known in India as jaggery—is very tasty, at least for anyone with a sweet tooth.
