Page:Vizagapatam.djvu/122

VIZAGAPATAM. land, the acreage sown is not ascertainable with exactness but has been computed at 49,000 acres. Deep ploughing and plentiful manuring improve the product. Two crops are grown, of which the first is sown in May and June and reaped in August or September, and the second is put down in June and July. The former is much the less important of the two; its fibre is shorter than that of the latter, but, as water is plentiful when it is harvested, is better cleaned. The cleaning is always done by soaking the whole plant in water for a fortnight or three weeks and then beating it on a stone to loosen the outer bark. The fibre thus obtained is again washed and then dried and taken either to Kalingapatam or (more generally) to Bimlipatam. Some of it is pressed into bales by machinery and exported, and the rest is spun and woven into gunny at Messrs. Arbuthnot's steam mill (see p.228) at Chittivalasa. The hemp is well known in the markets in Europe, where it is considered as good as the Calcutta jute. The rise in price is already, however, leading to extreme carelessness among the ryots in cleaning the fibre. Wheat is raised on the hills as a dry crop, but is poor stuff. Niger, mustard and turmeric are other characteristic crops in the Agency. The Rája of Vizianagram has a coffee plantation under European supervision at Anantagiri, about 3,000 feet up the hill below Gálikonda.

The ryots of the district divide the agricultural year into three seasons; namely, punása, the period of the south-west monsoon, when the staple dry grains are sown; pedda panta, the regular wet-crop season from August to December; and payira, the period from November to April when the second dry crop is raised with the aid of the north-east monsoon. The year is also divided into the 27 kárles or asterisms of the lunar zodiac, and the ryots commonly hold that each of these asterisms is the proper season for certain agricultural operations and believe that if, owing to want of rain or other preventing cause, that season is allowed to pass, the particular operation cannot afterwards be carried out with equal chances of success. The joint result is that (see p. 151) cultivation operations of some sort are proceeding for ten months out of the twelve. Tables of the dates of seed-time and harvest appear in G,0. No. 784, Revenue, dated 15th September 1897. The punása crops are by far the most important, as they comprise cambu and ragi, the staple food of the mass of the people, and a failure of the south-west monsoon is a serious calamity. 102