History of Rice in India

India is an important center of rice cultivation. The rice is cultivated on the largest areas in India. The country has the world’s largest area and is the second highest producer of rice. The crop is grown under varying climatic and soil conditions under diverse ecologies spread over about 43 million hectares.

Historians believe that while the indica variety of rice was first domesticated in the area covering the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas (i.e., north-eastern India), stretching through Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Southern China, the japonica variety was domesticated from wild rice in southern China which was introduced to India.

Combining archaeobotany and genetics suggests that O. sativa subsp. indica emerged through hybridization from a proto-indica that was managed in a morphologically wild state with introduced domesticated japonica rice, perhaps circa 2000 BC.

Archaeological work in India uncovered at the Neolithic site Lahuradewa in the Ganges Valley containing evidence of rice consumption dating to 7000 – 5000 BC.

Clear domesticated rice began to become widespread across northern India between 2000 and 1500 BC.

Perennial wild rice still grows in Assam and Nepal. It seems to have appeared around 1400 BC in southern India after its domestication in the northern plains. It then spread to all the fertile alluvial plains watered by rivers. Some says that the word rice is derived from the Tamil word arisi.

Arab traders took arisi with them and called it al-ruz or arruz in Arabic. This became arroz in Spanish and oriza in Greek.

Rice is first mentioned in the Yajur Veda (c. 1500-800 BC) and then is frequently referred to in Sanskrit texts. In India there is a saying that grains of rice should be like two brothers, close but not stuck together.

Asian rice cultivation spread to become a major agricultural staple throughout much of monsoon Asia between 1000 and 0 BCE, and it also began to be adopted on a smaller scale as a crop in Mesopotamia. One author has proposed that rice was introduced to lower Mesopotamia from India during the Achaemenid period, probably on the strength of a 4th century BC description by Diodorus of rice among military provisions at Susa.

The crop may well have been introduced to Greece and the neighboring areas of the Mediterranean by returning members of Alexander the Great’s expedition to India around 344-324 BC.

Rice was a major crop in Sri Lanka as early as 1000 BC. Before entering Sri Lanka in 543 BC, indica rice made their way to Malaya and from here to the Indonesian island of Java.
History of Rice in India

Food History: Rice cultivation in Yangtze Basin

Rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the most important crops in the world and it was most likely part of the diet as far back as 15,000 years BP. Prehistorical agriculture in China can be primarily divided into two major cultural areas based on the main crop types. Taking the Qinling Mountains - Huaihe River Line as an approximate boundary, to the north is millet agriculture along the Yellow River, and to the south is rice paddy agriculture along the Yangtze River.

Archeologists have found evidence that rice was an important the Yangtze Basin in the late Neolithic period. The Lower Yangtze River is densely distributed with Neolithic sites and is widely regarded as a core area where rice agriculture originated.

These cultural sequences comprise the Shangshan (11,000-8500 BP), Kuhuqiao (8000 7400 BP), Majiabang (7000-6000 BP), and Hemudu Culture (7000-5300 BP) during the early to middle Holocene.

The Neolithic site at Hemudu is the most significant when early rice cultivation is concerned. The Hemudu culture is the most significant Neolithic culture in southern China. The Hemudu culture flourished at south Hangzhou Bay in Yuyao city, Zhejiang Province, and was discovered in 1973.

The Hemudu culture is the most significant Neolithic culture and is identified by its distinct style of pile dwellings and rice remains in southern China, which are distributed primarily in the eastern coastal area and divided into two main periods with a remarkable interruption and dispersal around 6000 BP.

The Majiabang culture coexisted with the Hemudu culture for about two thousand years as two separate and distinct cultures, with cultural transmissions between them. Majiabang people cultivated rice.

Development of irrigation technology to construct flooded farms gave strong bases for stable rice-cultivating society, which in the end formulated the rise of ancient kingdoms of Yue and Wu in China in BC 6th -5th centuries. They were direct descendants of those people who had developed the unique rice cultivation from the era of Hemudu culture.
Food History: Rice cultivation in Yangtze Basin

Food History: Rice cultivation in Indus Valley Civilization

Agriculture emerged in the Indus River Valley when foraging Harappan communities settled in the lush lands between the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains in present-day Pakistan.

At its height, around 2600 BC, the Indus Civilization included nearly a thousand sites dispersed throughout northwestern India and Pakistan, ranging from village farming communities and small towns to several fully developed city complexes housing large populations, with tens of thousands of people.

Rice is the crop of Ganga Valley region and its presence in the economy of pre-Harappan, Harappan and contemporaneous Ahar culture (Banas Valley Culture) in the northwestern part of the subcontinent has also been recorded earlier. The evidence of rice at Kanmer was recorded from Mature and Late Harappan phases.

New research on three archaeological sites of the famed Indus Valley civilization (3000-1500 BC) in north-west India has revealed that domesticated rice farming in South Asia began far earlier than previously believed. A research team led by University of Cambridge archaeologists found evidence of domesticated rice in South Asia as much as 430 years earlier. The evidence for rice has come from Lothal and Rangpur in the form of husks embedded in pottery.

The team’s findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and the journal Antiquity, also confirm that Indus farmers were the earliest people to use multi-cropping strategies across both seasons, growing foods during summer (rice, millets and beans) and winter (wheat, barley and pulses), which required different watering regimes.

There is clear-cut evidence of rice dispersal from China to India in the form of indica at eastern India or Gangetic basin. This process of crops transformation can be called a process of loans of Chinese crops towards India. A Chinese legend depicts that during the 12thcentury B.C, the trade of India with ancient China occurred. This trade may have crucial in the spreading of ancient crops, especially ancient rice.

Fertile soils and a steady water supply supported the cultivation of crops, and the river also provided transportation, enabling commerce. Rice and millet agriculture became widespread in regions watered by the monsoon rains, the use of iron tools, the horse and camel became commonplace.
Food History: Rice cultivation in Indus Valley Civilization

Origin of rice

Rice is a unique crop of great antiquity an akin to progress in human civilization. Archeological excavations throughout Asia indicate that the domestication of rice Oryza sativa, occurred some seven thousand years ago.

Current opinion now suggests that the first domestications of rice occured at more than one place in Asia. Asian rice was first domesticated on flood-plains as a shallow or deep water crop, with cultivation later extended to the rain-fed uplands.

Augustin Pyrame de Candolle in 1882 postulated in his book that rice culture first occurred in China where historical records were the earliest.

Rice cultivation is thought to have started in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and then spread gradually both northwards and southwards.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov in 1951 considered that rice domestication occurred in India. The references to rice appear in ancient Hindu script (estimated to be 1500 to 1000 BC. Up- to the 1950s, the oldest excavation of rice grains was found at Hasthinapur at between 1000 an 750 BC.
Origin of rice

History of Rice in the West

History of Rice in the West
For along time, western Europe regarded rice as another kind of spice. It was certainly reaching England before the middle of the thirteenth century; the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the word is from the household accounts of King Henry III in 1234, and we know that between Christmas 1264 and the following Easter the Countess of Leicester’s household got through 110 pounds of rice, costing 1.5 pence a pound, a high price which explained the careful book keeping and the fact that the rice was locked in the spice cupboard.

At about same time, the accounts of the Duke of Savoy that rice ‘for sweets’ cost 13 imperials a pound, whereas honey was only 8 imperials.

In Milan rice was heavily taxed as ‘spice brought through Greece from Asia’.

The black death , which ravaged Italy from 1348 to 1352, and then recurred at irregular intervals as bubonic plague, has been credited with the introduction of rice to the northern Mediterranean.

The workforce had been reduced by perhaps one third, and the low yields of wheat and barley were hardly enough to keep people alive.

Rice was a high-yielding, energy giving crop that required far less labor per sack of grain harvested.

Gian Gleazzo Sforza sent a sack of rice to the Duke d’Este of Ferrara in 1475, with a letter telling him that one sack of seed would produce twelve sacks of food grain.

According to present day Italian writers, however large tracts of the Piedmont and Lombardy plains had been turned into paddy fields several decades before this famous letter, with the export of seed grain already strictly prohibited as a state secret.

In England, in 1585, rice stepped in cow’s milk with white breadcrumbs, powdered fennel seed and a little sugar was thought good for increasing the flow of milk in a nursing mother’s breasts. But by the seventeenth century rice was no longer a magical luxury.

A century or so later, it was being imported to Britain in large enough quantities to be considered quite an ordinary item of diet – usually milk puddings.

Then the availability of cheap rice from new possessions overseas drove this former luxury food further and further down the British market.

Rice was being taken to countries very remote from where it grew. Far, workers in nineteenth century Norway ate porridge of water and barley on working days, milk and barley on Sundays, but milk and rice for feats and celebrations.

In Finland, rice porridge was served as dessert in Christmas Eve, and Christmas lunch began with the leftover sliced thick and fried.
History of Rice in the West

History of rice in Mississippi

In United States, the first commercial planting occurred in South Carolina in about 1685.

The more technologically sophisticated method of rice cultivation, which became increasingly common after 1750, made use of the natural rise and fall of water near tidal estuaries.

Rex L. Kimbriel, a Mississippi delta cotton farmer, first experimented with a small crop of rice in 1947 and in 1948 with four neighboring farmer planted 400 acres of rice.

Pumping probes and an early frost ruined their crop, but the potential was clear. In 1949, Kimbriel and other delta farmers planted 1800 acres in rice, built their own rice dryer.

Rice growing had spread to over one and a half million acres in several states by 1950.

Mississippi had fallen behind neighboring states in developing it, but the use of new methods of drying, combine harvesting and chemical insect control seemed about to launch rice as a major Delta crop.

Rice research done at the Delta Branch Experiment Station led to the development of optimal varieties and cultural practices for Mississippi rice farming. Mississippi rice farming was expanding rapidly by the middle of 1970s.
History of rice in Mississippi

History of rice cooker

First invented in 1955, conventional electric rice cookers are inexpensive and ideal for beginners.

Toshiba Corporation of Japan invented the first cook and shut off rice cooker in 1955. Within the first year, Toshiba producing some 200,000 rice cookers per month, and by automatic rice cookers could be in half of all Japanese households.

Matsushita Corporation introduced its own model soon after and brought the rice cooker to the US market in 1957.

The earliest automatic rice cookers bear a resemblance to slow cookers used for stewing, with an electric element in a cylindrical base applying heat to a removable cooking vessel.

A thermostat triggers a power shut off when the vessel temperature exceeds the boiling point of water, ensuring that the cooked rice does not scorch.

Over the high-growth decades the three big electrical appliance producers, Toshiba, Matsushita and Hitachi – together with other niche players such as Zojirushi and Tiger Corporation, further developed the technology of their electric rice cookers for consumption on the Japanese markets.
History of rice cooker

Basmati rice

Basmati meaning fragrant is India’s best quality rice, yielding long, thin, fluffy grains with a delicate aroma.

Rice originated in Southeast Asia and southern China, but it quickly spread throughout the world as invaders brought the precious grain with them.

Archeological and historical evidence indicate basmati rice to have evolved in northern India around 8000 years before the present time.

The origin of basmati has been traced back to the Kalar tract of Punjab, Pakistan, where it has been grown for centuries.

The history has also been documented in ancient texts such Atharva-Veda and passed through folklore. The other text mentions of basmati rice is in the epic Heer Ranjha, composed in 1766.

In 2000, the Indian government protest the issue of Rice Tech Inc patent at the World Trade Organization. Indian authorities challenged the US Patent Office’ 1997 RiceTec patent, fearing the impact of its specialty, climate–specific export.

In 2001 the Patent Office rejected the patent because the new variety was ‘substantially identical’ to the old one.

The most widely used rice variety – basmati 370 was selected from local collections and released for commercial cultivation in 1933 at the Rice Research Station Kalashah Kaku.

Basmati rice

Rice Cultivation

Rice Cultivation
The most commonly cultivated rice species, Oryza sativa (Asian or paddy rice), is grown primarily in the humid topics and subtropics, with some cultivation on flooded upland sites, such as central California.

Another less important rice, Oryza glaberrima (African rice), is grown in east Africa, but is being replaced by Oryza sativa.

The cultivated rices and their ancestors are considered to be diploid (2n = 24), although their high chromosome number indicates that they could be ancient, diploidized polyploids.

Ten genomes have been identified among the various sections of Oryza, based on chromosome pairing relationships, molecular markers and sequencing.

The cultivated species and their closest relatives carry the A genome and form what is referred to as the sativa complex. The A genome is further divided with superscripts to denote small pairing aberrations and partial sterility among the various diploid species.

The origins of Asian rice cultivation are also clouded. Many authorities consider India to be its cradle, but strong cases have been made for much earlier origin in central China and South East Asia.

From its beginning somewhere in Central Asia around 10,000 BC, rice cultivation probably moved into Korean and Japan by 3000 BC. The cultivation of African rice probably began in the Niger delta about 3500 years ago and spread gradually across tropical East Africa.

Asian rices arrived in Africa about 2000 BC. Rice found its way to the New World in 1647, when its cultivation was begin in the Carolinas.
Rice Cultivation

History of Rice

Food History
The greatest variety of rice is found in the zone of monsoonal rainfall extending from eastern India through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, northern Vietnam, and into southern China. This diversity of species, including those considered by many to have been involved in the original domestication process, lends support to the argument for mainland Southeast Asia as the heartland of rice cultivation.

Linguistic evidence also points to the early origin of cultivated rice in this same Asian arc. In several regional languages the general terms for rice and food, or for rice and agriculture, are synonymous. Such is not the case in any other part of the world. Religious writings and practices are also seen as evidence of the longevity of rice as a staple item of the diet. Both Hindu and Buddhist scriptures make frequent reference to rice, and in both religions the grain is used as a major offering to the gods. In contrast, there is no correspondingly early reference to rice in Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament, and no references exist in early Egyptian records.

Archeologists have found evidence that rice was an important food in Mohenjo-Daro as early as 2500 B.C. and in the Yangtze Basin in the late Neolithic period.

The earliest and most convincing archeological evidence for domestication of rice in Southeast Asia was discovered by Wilhelm G. Solheim II in 1966. Pottery shards bearing the imprint of both grains and husks of O. sativa were discovered at Non Nok Tha in the Korat area of Thailand. These remains have been confirmed by 14C and thermoluminescence testing as dating from at least 4000 B.C. This evidence not only pushed back the documented origin of cultivated rice but, when viewed in conjunction with plant remains from 10,000 B.C. discovered in Spirit Cave on the Thailand-Myanmar border, suggests that agriculture itself may be older than was previously thought. No parallel evidence has been uncovered in Egyptian tombs or from Chaldean excavations.

From an early beginning somewhere in the Asian arc, the process of diffusion has carried rice in all directions until today it is cultivated on every continent save Antarctica. In this early hearth area, rice was grown in forest clearing under a system of shifting cultivation. The crop was grown by direct seeding and without standing water. Rice was grown on "farms" under conditions only slightly different from those to which wild rice was subject.

A similar but independent pattern of the incorporation of wild rices into an agricultural system may well have taken place in one or more locations in Africa at approximately the same time. It was in China that the processes of puddling soil and transplanting seedlings were likely refined. Both operations became integral pats of rice farming and remain very widely practiced to this day. Puddling breaks down the internal structure of soils, making them much less subject to water loss through percolation. In this respect, it can be thought of as a way of extending the utility of a limited supply of water. Transplanting is the planting of 1- to 6- wk-old seedlings in standing water. Under these conditions, the rice plants have an important head start over a very wide range of competing weeds, which leads to higher yields.

Transplanting, like puddling, provides the farmer with the ability to better accommodate the rice crop to a finite and fickle water supply by shortening the field duration (since seedlings are grown separately, and a higher density) and adjusting the planting calendar. With the development of puddling and transplanting, rice became truly domesticated. In China, the history of rice in river valleys and low-lying areas is longer that its history as a dryland crop.

In Southeast Asia, by contrast, rice was originally produced under dryland conditions in the uplands, and only recently did it come to occupy the vast river deltas. Migrant peoples from South China or perhaps northern Vietnam carried the traditions of wetland rice cultivation to the Philippines during the second millennium B.C., and Deutero-Malays carried the practice to Indonesia about 1500 B.C. From China or Korea, the crop was introduced to Japan no later than 100 B.C. Movement to western India and south to Sri Lanka was also accomplished very early.

The date of 2500 B.C. has already been mentioned for Mohenjo-Daro, while in Sri Lanka, rice was a major crop as early as 1000 B.C. The crop may well have been introduced to Greece and neighboring areas of the Mediterranean by the returning members of Alexander the Great's expedition to India ca. 344-324 B.C. From a center in Greece and Sicily, rice spread gradually throughout the southern portions of Europe and to a few locations in North Africa.

Interestingly enough, medical geographers in the 16th century played an important role in limiting the adoption of rice as a major crop in the Mediterranean area. During the 16th and early 17th centuries, malaria was a major disease in southern Europe, and it was believed to be spread by the bad air (hence the origin of the name) of swampy areas. Major drainage projects were undertaken in southern Italy, and wetland rice cultivation was discouraged in some regions. In fact, it was actually forbidden on the outskirts of a number of large towns. Such measures were a significant barrier to the diffusion of rice in Europe.
Food History