4. Culture, Conflict, and Violence in Gangetic India

Kshatriya reform represented an aggressive Gangetic populism in which a newly formed peasant and artisanal elite encouraged a full-scale examination of the historical and mythological underpinnings of their personal and jati identities. Among those engaged in this reform effort, Yadav, Kushvaha, and Kurmi kshatriyas were the most visible and numerically powerful. Strong in numbers and agrarian skill, many were small landholders and powerful tenants, but their numbers included a few large landowners as well as tenant-laborers. Most of them had toiled for generations in the rich Gangetic alluvial soils and as a result of that hard work and an intimate knowledge of local agricultural practice, had amassed significant rural wealth and power. This newfound influence is what enabled them, by the early 1900s, to mount the claim that they were not shudra but kshatriya, descended from the proudest and oldest families imaginable, the families of Ramchandra and Krishna, and to sustain that claim with annual meetings and colorful publications. Yet the language of varna—in which brahmans were expert and upon which British understanding of Indian society relied—continued to describe these communities as shudra, or servile, by virtue of the physical labor implicit in their professions.

But increasingly the voices of the peasants could be heard above the din of imputed identities, voices asserting a new conception of themselves. By demanding a modicum of personal dignity and by claiming and articulating a noble kshatriya past, the ideologues of these communities challenged both the political economy and political culture of Gangetic India in a language that everyone was sure to understand. This challenge was quick to draw immediate attention and equally quick attempts at refutation from the social elite. Perhaps the first printed manifestation of this emergent antipathy was an anti–kshatriya reform booklet in both English and Hindi in 1907 authored by Kunvar Chheda Sinha, published and widely circulated by the Rajput Anglo-Oriental Press. In what must have seemed an infuriating manner to the new peasant kshatriyas, Sinha bemoaned the fact that “even after a century of English rule and the spread of Western education the question of jati is still so heavily debated, especially given the fact that modern education and progress have given some jatis not only the opportunity but also the right to better their lot.”^[1] Sinha ignored the cultural and economic transformations that had occurred to bring about social reform; rather, he tied the rising concern with caste pedigree to policies of hierarchical ranking in the census office and to a desire on the part of jati activists to attain high posts in the colonial government. In so doing, he inverted the arguments of the kshatriya reformers themselves, who cited military and government service by leading community figures not only as a professional aspiration but as evidence of the distinct abilities of the jati as a whole.^[2]

Sinha’s logic, which endowed the colonial, census-based discourse of caste with historical agency in social and religious reform, has been employed in more recent analyses of caste movements in colonial India. Most striking in this regard is the assertion that “the censuses themselves instigated mobility aspirations and they do not necessarily reflect the actual processes taking place in society.”^[3] This general argument has been widely circulated and characteristically describes the 1901 census as “a powerful stimulus to the formation of modern, provincewide and even countrywide caste associations and the development of broader solidarities.”^[4] The perception that the colonial fixation with status inspired jati reform relies for the most part on an aggressive interpretation of census department records, particularly those sections of decennial reports that detailed the very real concerns of jati activists with the official representation of regional caste hierarchy. Of particular importance are the reflections of officials like L. S. S. O’Malley, director of the 1911 census in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, who noted that

there was a general idea in Bengal—that the object of the census was not to show the number of persons belonging to each caste, but to fix the relative status of different castes and to deal with the question of social superiority.…The feeling on the subject was largely the result of castes having been classified in the last census report in order of social precedence.…Many castes were aggrieved at the position assigned them, and complained that it lowered them in the public estimation.…Others thought it was a good opportunity to advance new claims.^[5]

The question that must be raised, of course, is whether census classificatory practices actually inspired the campaigns for respectability and status or, conversely, whether such census practices merely attracted the attention of reformers, thus inspiring them to bury the responsible census officials in supplicatory memoranda. There is nothing in the observations of O’Malley to suggest the former case. The tendency was, rather, for colonial administrators to acknowledge that the hierarchical mindset of the census “greatly agitated” communities undergoing social and religious reform.^[6]

The assessment of social and religious reform as a reaction to census whims does point, however, to the importance of official opinion for kshatriya publicists. Some kind of authoritative sanction was crucial for the assertion and maintenance of social status, and the frequency with which kshatriya-reform memoranda were dispatched to the census office reflects the ease with which elite representatives of peasant jatis could enter into a sensitive dialogue with British officialdom. Indeed, notwithstanding the sharp contrast between those who composed the “memorials” in a showy panegyric that bordered on sycophancy and those who received and read them with a highly skeptical eye, the correspondence over varna status in the census should be seen as part of a larger process of colonial culture in the making.^[7] To argue that census opinion alone inspired and directed movements for social reform not only suggests that the reform ideologies implicit to the kshatriya movements were somehow inauthentic but ignores the religious dimensions of the history of social reform and the very real fact that a new elite had emerged among the peasantry that sought to avail itself of connections to the colonial political arena. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, social reform on behalf of shudras and untouchables in the Gangetic north was manifest in a semiorganized form at least since the early nineteenth century under the rubric of Vaishnava (and primarily Ramanandi) monasticism. In addition, sporadic peasant claims to kshatriya status had been articulated as early as the late eighteenth century in Awadh and the early nineteenth century in Bihar. The institutional heirs to such early reform efforts were the caste associations (mahasabhas) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which combined the demand for high (usually kshatriya) status with a potent Vaishnava rhetorical content. Kshatriyatva (the essence of being kshatriya, or valor) constituted an important component of this new political framework for reform, in part because the martial element contained therein fit a colonial ideology that placed a premium on virility and power.^[8]

In this light, the formulation that “the censuses themselves instigated mobility aspirations and they do not necessarily reflect the actual processes taking place in society” deserves closer scrutiny.^[9] The profusion of census-directed jati memorials are depicted as false indicators of social change, and historians are therefore encouraged to ignore the wider cultural history that both occasioned and accompanied that change. The argumentation employed by Sinha in 1907 and refined by historians and sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s presents an image of entire caste mahasabha organizations involving countless thousands of members devoted only to garnering the crumbs of status and position from the British imperial table. There can be no doubt that kshatriya reformers were all too concerned with the political legitimization of their sociocultural identity, but this must be seen primarily as a symptomatic feature of the larger movement for respectability. The image of the scurrying, low-level babu (clerk) overlooks, consciously or unconsciously, the main agenda of these organizations: education, religious reform, economic frugality, physical integrity, and most important of all, personal dignity. These are goals that generally would not have been made explicit in petitions to census officials but which emerge clearly in the vernacular literature espousing both the religious and social reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From Cowherd to Kshatriya

Despite the challenge to the social status quo implicit in kshatriya reform movements among groups heretofore accorded low status, kshatriya reformers saw themselves as an integral part of a larger Hindu universe. The rupturing of ties to superordinate groups was secondary to the object of community respect expressed in terms of kshatriya identity. Nevertheless, the increasing urgency of claims to kshatriya status served to offend many established high-status communities, primarily because of the social and cultural proximity such claims implied. Social reform would thus inevitably produce social strife. Strife, however, implies past cohesion. Such cohesion can be seen to have existed in the 1890s at certain levels, and was expressed in a particularly ardent manner by Goala peasant-pastoralists as a cultural solidarity with the landed, social elite during cow-protection agitation. Three decades later, that agrarian cohesion would be rendered obsolete by the strident call for Yadav-kshatriya identity.^[10]

Organized primarily in opposition to the slaughter of cows and the consumption of beef during Muslim festivals and holidays, the cow-protection—or gauraksha—movement represented an important phase of a growing political and cultural activism in late nineteenth-century north India. This activism, the historian John McLane has suggested, was evident as well in the mobilizational systemics of the early Indian National Congress and in the increased competition between Hindu and Muslim elites for secular power.^[11] National elite competition became intertwined with popular religious practice at the regional level, a combination that ultimately erupted in the Gangetic heartland over the issue of cow slaughter. This controversy peaked in 1893 as angry Hindus attacked entire Muslim village centers, assaulting butchers as well as low-status Hindus viewed as complicit in marketing beef. The cow-protection cause found enthusiastic support in cities and towns as well as villages, as agitators employed both local trade networks and powerful religious symbols to divide Hindus from Muslims as well as the British.^[12] As gau-mata (mother cow) evolved into a unifying “Hindu” political symbol, the urban elites that peopled the Indian National Congress increasingly looked to it to develop a rural base, “despite the refusal of Congress leaders to allow the Congress to support cow protection.”^[13] McLane even suggests that it became “inevitable that the Congress, standing as it did for majority rule and parliamentary government, should have attracted advocates of restrictions upon cow slaughter.”

The shifting agrarian tensions that accompanied the late nineteenth-century price rise in the Gangetic north, it has been argued, made cow protection an opportune issue for a kind of makeshift agrarian unity involving increasingly less powerful Hindu zamindars and increasingly more assertive Hindu tenants.^[14] Gyanendra Pandey has investigated the nature of that agrarian unity from the perspective of the tenants and has argued that “the prevention of cow-slaughter became a major object of the Ahirs [generally synonymous with Goalas] as they advanced their bid for a higher social status.” Pandey’s data and observations concern the Bhojpuri region of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar where, he argues, “the agitation appears to have acquired its greatest social depth and an unexpected militancy.” Citing official reports of the physical participation of Goalas in mob violence directed against Muslims and others involved in the sacrifice of cattle, as well as records of subsequent trials in which Goalas received sentencing, Pandey suggests “that we have evidence here of a relatively independent force that added a good deal of power to cow-protection activities in the Bhojpuri region—marginally ‘clean’ castes who aspired to full ‘cleanness’ by emphasizing the purity of their faith and the strictness of ritual adherence to it on the issue of cow-slaughter. In the case of the Ahirs this motive would certainly have been reinforced by their traditional and continued association with the business of tending cattle.”^[15] Pandey’s observations reflect the importance of cow-protection violence to Goala/Ahir conceptions of status and identity, expressed here as a function of ritual cleanliness. His use of the term “marginal” highlights the notion that Goalas, like other peasants, straddled the fine line between shudra and elite in the political economy of the Gangetic heartland and were committed to the exploitation of that precarious stance to their fullest advantage.

Pandey makes brief reference to agitation in Patna and Gaya Districts and argues that these districts—adjacent to the eastern extension of Bhojpur into Gangetic south Bihar—experienced significant cow-protection activity in the early 1890s. The evidence of official reports bears out this assertion and, as in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Goalas played an important grassroots role in advancing the cause of gauraksha.^[16] For instance, of the twelve cases of forcible seizure of cattle reported in the first five months of 1893 in Gaya District, six cited Goalas as the offending party (of the remaining six cases, four failed to identify the jati of the accused). Inasmuch as most of the twelve incidents occurred during or after the Bisua village cattle fair held that year on April 12, it is not unlikely that Goalas, as cowherds and dairy farmers, were involved in some of the other incidents as well. The following description of an incident at the mela, extracted from the judicial record, is typical of the activities of Goalas working for cow-protection:

In this case the complainant, who is a [Muslim] butcher, says he bought two cows at the Bisua Mela [fair] for Rs. 7–1 through one Dodal Chamar, because he was afraid that Hindus would not sell cattle to Muhammedans.

The first purchase was duly recorded by the owner of the Mela, and the usual receipt checque was granted. But when the Chamar was going back along with both cows to have the second purchase recorded, he was suddenly stopped by the accused [Gopi Goala] and several others, and accused of buying cows for butchers. The cattle were snatched and carried off by the accused. Sub-Inspector Zahir Khan, of town Gaya, having received information that the accused and cattle were near the place where cattle sales were being recorded, went to the spot and managed to arrest accused Gopi Goala.

This description, and others like it, characterize Goalas as the shock troops of cow protection. The above case is of added interest because of the complicity of Dodal Chamar, an untouchable, in purchasing the cattle for the butcher Mangor Kassai, a Muslim. Such alliances were apparently not uncommon in the Gangetic core: in eastern Uttar Pradesh “the Chamar, far from being actively involved in the Cow-Protection movement, was in fact the target of a good deal of Gaurakshinist vilification and attack.”^[17] Consequently, a list of sixteen rules drawn up at a meeting of cow-protection activists in Gorakhpur District included the explicit message that “Chamars and others buy cows and sell them to butchers; and Musalmans and others are the very cause of the slaughter of cows. Cows shall not be sold into the hands of any such persons, and if any kind of cow die the owner shall sell its skin to a proper person, and apply the money to cow-protection.”^[18] Ironically, inasmuch as Chamars worked with leather, they would also be the “proper persons” to which the manifesto refers. By supporting the “Hindu establishment” in its cause célèbre, the protection of cows, Goalas symbolically allied themselves with the landed and powerful while distancing themselves from those socially and economically beneath them (“Chamars and others”) in the Gangetic core. Goala aspirations in the 1890s drew on the cowherd ethos of Krishna’s childhood milieu, albeit at the expense of Muslim religious custom. So long as Goala participation in cow-protection agitation remained devoid of any specific transformative, status-oriented rhetoric, the tenuous agrarian unity between landlord and tenant remained intact. However, a loosely expressed dedication to the Vaishnava world of Krishna would soon evolve by the early 1910s and 1920s into a commitment to a historical exegesis of that world in the form of Yadav-kshatriya identity, an identity that would serve to drive a wedge between Goalas and other cultivators on the margin of land control, on the one hand, and the landed elite on the other.

Conflict between the landed elite and marginal cultivators became manifest as physical confrontation in the teens and twenties of the present century. Official police reports of the 1920s describe in substantial detail the tensions and occasional violence between Goalas forwarding a Yadav-kshatriya identity and the landed elite who felt threatened by that new identity. This threat was perceived as economic as well as social, inasmuch as the systemics of varna provided the cultural justification for the agrarian perquisites demanded of cultivating tenants. While the Muslim elite also challenged the Yadav-kshatriya identity, they did so on purely economic and not religious grounds, and Yadav kshatriyas responded in kind. These tensions culminated with the threat of serious bloodletting on May 27, 1925, when a group of three thousand “Goalas” (Yadav kshatriyas) and an equal number of heavily armed “Babhans” (Bhumihar brahmans) faced each other at Lakho Chak village near Lakhisarai town, Monghyr District, in central Bihar.^[19] Though official reports tended to employ the appellations Goala and Babhan, I have chosen to refer to the two parties in my description of this extended conflict simply as Yadavs and Bhumihars, terms that reflect both their own conception of themselves as well as the current usage. These and other reports make clear that the Lakho Chak showdown was only the most visible manifestation of a conflict that had been simmering for several years.^[20]

The Lakho Chak riot itself was precipitated by the decision of local Bhumihar zamindars of Monghyr District to attack a panchayat (council meeting) of Yadavs that had convened in the village of Lakho Chak to discuss jati reform. The description of the riot in the official report indicates the formidable force brought to bear by the Bhumihars and that, if not for the timely intervention of local and district police to protect the peaceable Yadav meeting, serious violence would have been the likely result.

On the morning of the 27th, before the arrival of the armed police at Lakho Chak, a large body of rioters advanced upon the village. The local police intervened to expostulate and were at once surrounded, the Sub-Inspector and Chaukidar [village watchman] received grievous injuries and the other constables of the party were hurt. After ill-treating the local police, the rioters retired temporarily but returned to the attack soon after the arrival of the S.P. [Superintendent of Police] with his force. The Superintendent and S.D.O [Subdivisional District Officer] went out to meet the advancing rioters and attempted to parley with them. The attacking party, however, to the number of about 3000 armed with lathis [heavy, metal tipped bamboo truncheons], axes, and spears continued to advance and the police were forced to fire to protect themselves and the Goalas. Although temporarily checked by the fire, the Babhan party continued to advance as they outflanked the police on both sides, the police were forced to retire fighting to the village site three or four hundred yards to their rear. The retirement was effected in good order and after the defending party reached the village the rioters withdrew.^[21]

The dramatic crisis that unfolded in 1925 under the hot May sun on the outskirts of Lakho Chak village was in fact the most recent and explosive act in the construction of a Yadav-kshatriya identity that had begun in the nineteenth century with claims of genealogical ties to Krishna. The movement took on a more urgent and organized form throughout the Gangetic north in the early twentieth century with the emergence of large-scale associations and active propaganda. In a lengthy note to his superior Y. A. Godbole, the district officer of Purnea, S.D.O Phanindra Nath Mukherji noted that he “first came across the Goala movement in the Patna district in the year 1912.”

The leader was Babu Damodar Prasad—a Goala landlord of Pachchimdarwaza in Patna City. A huge meeting called the “Gope Jatiya Mahasabha” was held in Kankarbagh and domestic service was eschewed except for tending cattle, sacred threads taken—and ceremonial purity was, I believe, put down at 15 days. I have to depend on memory—other meetings were held at Dinapur, Maner, and Mussorhi [Masaurhi]. I do not know if the movement had preceded elsewhere but I read in the papers of meetings in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and elsewhere.^[22]

Mukherji provided the above description by way of historical background. His subsequent portrayal of his own experiences in dealing with the “Goala movement” in Purnea District in 1924 and 1925 demonstrate both the importance of economic advancement to Yadavs as well as the subtle techniques employed by them in mobilizing a kshatriya identity.

The movement in this district has spread within the last year or so. The material condition of the Goalas in the western and southern portions of the district is very prosperous. In fact in wealth measured in terms of cattle, land, etc. they are in no way inferior to the average Bhumihars and Brahmins and Chhatris [local variant of kshatriya, in reference to Rajputs]. The movement in this district was I used to hear being fostered by Babu Swyambara Das, late Deputy Inspector of schools in this district. He had lecturers brought in from other districts and there were meetings held at Ghansurpur, Dhamdaha, Rupauli and several centres. The Goalas began to call themselves Jadavs, took sacred threads and gave out that they will do the ceremonial purification of Sradh after 13 days. The Bhumihars resented this as did the Brahmins and Chhatris. An attempt was made to break up the meeting at Ghansurpur but the police got timely notice and occurrence [sic] took place. The Bhumihars later refused to allow the Goalas to draw water from the village wells and I had to go to Ghansurpur. I warned the leading Bhumihars and with my privilege as a Brahmin I pointed out to them that the Bhumihars themselves had reduced the period of ceremonial purification from 15 to 13 days in several districts within living memory and that . . . their ancestors called themselves Bavans [variant of Babhans].^[23]

Mukherji noted in addition that in many villages in Purnea District the dominant caste—whether Bhumihar brahman, Maithil brahman, or Rajput—organized a social boycott of Yadavs, with the object of making it extremely difficult for the latter to perform the rituals prescribed for kshatriya status. This obstacle was circumvented without much difficulty, as “the richer sections [of Yadavs] have come to the help of the poorer section and have either got Brahmins from Madhipura in Bhagalpur district where there are many Goala landlords or managed to win over opposition by making it worthwhile for the Brahmins and barbers to officiate.”^[24] It is clear from Mukherji’s description, then, that pockets of Yadav economic power in Bihar played a large role not only in inspiring changing attitudes toward their sociocultural identity but in ensuring that the new identity being advanced stayed alive despite rural pressure to obliterate it. Nevertheless, economic contradictions internal to the Yadav community inevitably became manifest as, according to Mukherji, “The better off wanted to insist that the women-folk of the poor section will not sell Goetha (fuel cakes made from cowdung) or milk in the hats (weekly markets) and bazars. And that the women should follow in all respects the practices of the women of the higher castes. This gave rise to a few criminal cases but then the inexorable economic laws acted and the women folk of the poorer section are again selling cowdung cakes and milk.”^[25] The conclusion that must be reached, then, is that in the short term the consolidation of Yadav-kshatriya identity succeeded only to the extent that economic considerations allowed. Better-off Yadavs could not entirely subvent the incomes of their less-fortunate jati brothers and, importantly, sisters, but they certainly were able, as Mukherji’s observations on ritual officiates indicate, to at least mobilize the wherewithal either to bring brahmans from a neighboring district or to increase the economic reward for local brahmans and hajjams (barbers) to perform the necessary ceremonial functions.

This glimpse into the household economics of Yadavs struggling to live up to a new Vaishnava and kshatriya ideal of dignity introduces an important element of caste reform, namely, a strictly circumscribed redefinition of acceptable female social, religious, and economic behavior. Such an imposition of male control over female lives is all the more striking given that many of the peasant families involved in the identity campaigns had benefited economically from the lack of any cultural proscription of women working in the field as well as in the home—in stark contrast to the mores of elite society. Hence the mid nineteenth-century adage, “A good caste is the Kunbin [Kurmi woman]; with hoe in hand, they weed the fields together with their husbands.”^[26] However, kshatriya reformers generally viewed the centrality of women in the economic success of the peasant family as an entrée to female independence and thus a serious threat to the integrity of not only the immediate household but the entire jati community. Baijnath Prasad Yadav of Banaras claimed, not atypically, that “the root cause of all the needless household expenses is the fickle greed of women” and urged “men to put a halt to the rule of women in the home.” Yadav also argued against allowing women to sing in public, against permitting women to view the barat (the procession of the groom with his friends and male family members), and “against allowing women to attend the big festivals, where they would run the risk of being dishonored by one of the many low jatis that roam the crowds, which would thus bring dishonor upon our jati.” Extending this particular line of reasoning, he vehemently criticized women who purchased glass bangles from “lascivious vendors, who are only too willing to grab our women’s wrists and help them try on their wares.”^[27] Swami Abhayananda Saraswati, also of Banaras, cautioned Kurmis against educating their women, maintaining that such education could only have a negative effect on the children, on household work, and on the development of a loving relationship between a husband and wife.^[28]

While women did take part in the reform movements, the greatest challenge they faced was to redress the growing male conceptualization of women as property to be manipulated and polished for the sake of a positive and powerful kshatriya image.^[29] The participation of women in the organizational apparatus of kshatriya reform rhetoric was relegated, in the main, to the activities of mahila sammelans (women’s conferences), which usually occurred in conjunction with the regional and national meetings of the jati. These organizations pushed for government legislation against polygamy and for mahasabha resolutions providing for the education of boys and girls.^[30] Nevertheless, it is doubtful that women involved in upgrading their gender status made much headway vis-à-vis the kshatriya-focused attitudes of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.

That the control over the life and death of women was of paramount importance to the success of kshatriya identity can be seen in the boast by Nauvat Ray, the Kahar ideologue of Agra, that “many of our women even become sati,” which can mean both becoming loyal wives and immolating themselves upon the husband’s funeral pyre (the tone of the passage indicates that the latter meaning is intended).^[31] This conceptualization of women as martyrs to the cause of community status extended as well into the nascent Hindi literary movement. An example is Gangaprasad, the Kushvaha-kshatriya historian cited in the previous chapter, who also published historical fiction under the name Gangaprasad Gupta. One of his novels, entitled Vir Jaymal (Valiant Defense), glorified the courage of Rajputs in battle against Muslims during the reign of Akbar. Of particular note, however, was his narrative of the death of Raja Prithviraj of Delhi and the self-immolation of his bereaved queen, Sanyogita, entitled Vir Patni (Brave Wife). Gangaprasad portrayed female martyrdom as an important embodiment of a kshatriya tradition that combined steadfast loyalty to husband with patriotic devotion to country, a evocation of the sacrificing female that he also perceived to be extant in Victorian literature of the previous century. Hence his translation of “The Young Fishermen,” a story by the Victorian romance author George W. M. Reynolds (1814–1879), which Gangaprasad entitled Kile ki Rani (Queen of the Fort).^[32]

While economic power enabled Yadavs to forge a kshatriya identity campaign, it is equally the case that a major aim of that campaign was an improvement of the economic position of Yadavs vis-à-vis superordinate landlords. This dilemma, in a sense, reflected the essence of the marginal status of Yadavs in society: having tasted some of the fruits of economic strength, they demanded more. The forced, unremunerative labor known as begari was the ground on which the battle for equal economic status was fought. The caste implications of begari were such that elite landlords expected it of nonelite (whether shudra or untouchable) fellow villagers. Labor in this context referred not only to agricultural work but, especially in the Yadav context, to nonremunerative efforts such as providing milk and ghi (clarified butter) at reduced rates or even free of charge. Thus, S. A. Khan, a district officer of Bhagalpur, noted in an official correspondence that “The low caste Hindus generally do some kind of ‘begari’ work for their landlords. A people wearing the sacred thread are taken as respectable and are exempt from gratis service of this type. They would also take it to be very much derogatory to work as daily labourers or even as hired ploughmen.”^[33]

The official record tells of an important meeting convened by Babu Shri Ballab Das in 1921 that was attended by approximately sixteen hundred Yadavs. Among the resolutions passed at this meeting was a plea to the government to take note of conflict “between the zamindars (landlords) and the Gope Jotiya having arisen over the begari question over which the latter have been oppressed by the zamindars, so much so that in several places several lives have been lost.” This file also tells of a related incident several months earlier in which a rural council of Yadavs in Islampur Thana, Patna District, refused to allow members of the jati to provide ghi and goats to a Muslim landlord for a wedding feast. However, in contrast to the earlier cow-protection activity, anti-Muslim rhetoric was severely curtailed in the language of the resolution. The meeting specifically stated that “in the coming Bakr-Id this community will not create any disturbance in connection with the cow-killing and if, unfortunately, any engineered by other caste [sic] would happen, this community would have no hand in it.”^[34]

Two factors are important in understanding the Yadav disavowal of the anti-Muslim stance that they had so strongly advocated during the cow-protection agitation. First, and probably most importantly, the calculated and willful articulation of a kshatriya identity called for a refinement of the Yadav sociocultural position vis-à-vis superordinate and subordinate actors in the agrarian environment. No longer would it be sufficient to express vague designs for high status through open attacks on Muslims; a well-crafted kshatriya identity immediately placed Yadavs (and other cultivators) in social, economic, and cultural conflict with the twice-born elite, requiring a realigned, refined political program devoid of any content directed against a particular religious community. Naturally, those likely to be most offended by the culture of upward mobility implicit to Yadav identity would be the dominant Hindu groups. Second, and closely related, the characterization of the Yadav movement in positive class terms relative to zamindars was more likely to win the official support of the colonial administration, primarily because Yadavs could easily portray themselves as the victims of socioeconomic oppression rather than as perpetrators of anti-Muslim mob violence. The simple assumption of an aggressive kshatriya identity by Yadavs placed the onus upon superordinates to react violently, thereby casting the latter in the role of lawbreakers. This tactic had near-immediate results; according to the sociologist Hetukar Jha, “The reports [contained in file 171 of 1925] though written by government employees are not biased in favour of zamindars or in favour of government officers. The reporters did not hesitate to point out when they found that an officer of the rank of S.D.O. had sided with the zamindars at Samastipur (then a subdivision of Darbhanga) against peasants without conducting a proper enquiry.”^[35]

The essentially nonpartisan judgment of district officers in itself constituted a major victory for marginal peasants. Indeed, if anything, the reports expressed a significant degree of sympathy for the aims of the kshatriya reformers. It has already been noted that the local police force of Lakhisarai and the district police of Monghyr had come to the aid of the Yadav meeting being held in Lakho Chak village in 1925. In addition, Subdivisional District Officer Phanindra Nath Mukherji, cited at length above, had gone to great pains to convince the Bhumihar landlords of Purnea District to refrain from harassing Yadav peasants; indeed, he even lorded his own brahman status over the Bhumihars to remind them of their own upward social mobility. Most reports described the begari demanded by the landlords not as customary and benign agrarian perquisites but as oppressive “exactions.”^[36] Commenting on what was perceived as an unjust economic arrangement, Commissioner J. A. Hubback of Bhagalpur Division noted caustically that “the higher castes (in that tract [South Monghyr] mainly Babhans) derive livelihood from the land, and do as little as they can to earn it.”^[37] Hubback’s phraseology indicates that he was not simply directing a pointed criticism at Bhumihars but was describing what he perceived as a nonproductive elite class that survived off the sweat of “sturdy” peasants.

These official characterizations reflected the subtle alliance that was being forged between the new kshatriya peasants on the one hand and regional and local administrators (the former mostly British, the latter mostly Indian) on the other. This alliance was spurred along by frequent appeals to and representations of “sarkar” as a benevolent, caring government. The efforts by government as sarkar to protect the new kshatriyas from the abuses and threats of physical violence by the outraged elite, and at the same time to mollify that outrage with reasoned pleas for peaceful behavior, make clear that district officials and cultivators at the productive core of Indian society were speaking to and regenerating each other in ideal terms. This emergent alliance extended as well into the agrarian political context described above, as marginal peasants reacted favorably to what they understood as the nonpartisan spirit of British rule and the judicious exercise of administrative force. The most telling example of this perception in the jati reform literature is without question the contention of Gangaprasad, who wrote on behalf of Kushvaha kshatriyas, that “now this is the age of British rule. The lion and the lamb can drink from the same pond and no one can say to another, ‘thus a shudra is born.’”^[38] Another example of this sentiment is found in a pamphlet arguing kshatriya status for Kahars authored by Nauvat Ray, who praised British rule as “an age of light from which darkness can only flee.”^[39]

Notwithstanding what they perceived as the benevolence of British officials, however, the new kshatriyas still had to contend with opposition to their social, cultural, and economic advancement organized by the established landed elite. Perhaps the most galling element of this form of resistance to Yadav-kshatriya identity were the “abuses, taunts and jokes . . . hurled on the Goalas.”^[40] Particularly insulting, according to S. A. Khan (a district officer of Bhagalpur), were ten thousand printed copies of a leaflet of Bihari verse “sung by hired boys in the mofussil [countryside],” in which “Goalas are asked to stick to their old faith and customs.”^[41] The author of this leaflet gave his name as Bahuran of Ram Patti village north of Singheshwar dham [pilgrimage center] near Saharsa in northern Bhagalpur District and described himself as “a reputed Brahman.” The distributor of the leaflet, however, was listed as one Raghunandan Jha (Jha is a well-known Maithil brahman surname) of the same address, suggesting Bahuran’s likely identity.

Bahuran prefaced his verse with a short Sanskrit dedication to Radha and Krishna, which he concluded with the patronizing affront that he was merely “narrating the conduct of the Gopas to increase their knowledge.” Indeed, throughout the leaflet Bahuran referred to Yadavs as Gopas, the traditional term for the idealized, innocent cowherds of Krishna’s mytho-historical boyhood in Mathura-Vrindaban. After dedicating several lines to descriptions of the eminence of Radha and Krishna and their exploits, Bahuran settled down to the serious business of persuading the Yadav community to renounce its upstart behavior. His efforts concentrated on several themes, the most important of which was the Yadav practice of donning the sacred thread and performing the shraddh funerary ceremony only thirteen days after the death of a family member:

While you flaunt a sacred thread on your shoulders,
    your women wake up to milk cows and herd calves.
You work the plough while wearing the thread,
    and force your women to labor in the fields.
You’ve bought up all the weavers’ cotton,^[42]
    and the scarcity has made cloth dear.
Gwalins [Goala women] sell milk and curd all day long,
    they wouldn’t know how to spin thread.
......
[How can] two opposing customs prevail in one family:
    one-month shraddh and thirteen-day shraddh?
......
Read the Laws of Manu wherein Gopas are said to be shudra,
    and abandon shraddh after thirteen days.
Be united and accept a one-month shraddh,
this should be the only reform of the Gopa jati.
......
Your ancestors in Kashi, Vrindaban, Awadh, and Gokul,
    have crammed full the stomachs of all the sadhus.
[This is how] they are allowed to wear the sacred thread
    and perform thirteen-day shraddh.
......
Think for yourselves in groups of ten or twenty,
    and give up the spread of the sacred thread.

As a purposefully insulting document, Bahuran’s verse reveals much about the political economy of caste in the Gangetic north. His reference to Goalas ploughing, milking cows, and performing other menial tasks while wearing the sacred thread reflects the profound socioeconomic challenge that the kshatriya (not to mention Vaishnava) reconsideration of dignified labor held for the social elite. His advice to gather in “groups of ten or twenty” was surely calculated to foment divisiveness within the Yadav-kshatriya movement, the periodic meetings of which were attended by Yadavs numbering in the thousands. The reference to ÒGwalinsÓ spending their entire days milking cows, chasing cattle, and marketing their wares was surely meant to ridicule Yadav women as immodest and Yadav men as lazy good-for-nothings who relax while their wives do all the work. On this point, Bahuran chastised Yadav men for letting their “mothers cut grass” and their “sisters sell milk in the villages, towns, and markets.” But he could not have been more derisive than with the taunt that

When your elder brother dies,
    you make his widow a happy bride.
Whenever the husbands of your daughters and sisters expire,
    you once again marry off their wives.

Another important theme in the text of the verse centered around Bahuran’s claim that the root cause of the Yadav-kshatriya campaign was the work of Swami Dayanand and the Arya Samaj. However, while Dayanand’s ideas probably influenced kshatriya reform, there was a great deal of institutional ambivalence regarding the role of Arya Samajis in the reform movement itself.^[43] It is in this context that Bahuran’s comments should be understood. He pointedly accused Yadavs of having “abandoned your family duties for the ideas of Dayanand and . . . thus destroyed your good name,” and he urged them in turn to “abandon the ways of Dayanand, Gopas, for difficult times lie ahead.” These verses were intended as an affront to Yadav sensibilities, semantically calculated to imply that support for kshatriya identity was synonymous with an affinity for the Arya Samaj.

Goala unity, which emerged in the political arena in 1893 as an amorphous dedication to Krishna and cows and expressed itself in anti-Muslim rioting, had become by 1925 a well-organized call for a Yadav-kshatriya identity that offended the twice-born sensibilities and socioeconomic power of village elites. As the new kshatriyas—Yadavs as well as Kurmis and Kushvahas—flexed their social, economic, and cultural muscles in the early twentieth century, they began to take a closer look at the political landscape around them. From their agrarian perspective, the most important political institutions were the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (peasant association) and the Indian National Congress, especially insofar as each body developed an “agrarian program.” That they responded to those dominant organizations by joining together to form their own political front, the Triveni Sangh, confirms the increasingly independent posture of kshatriya reformers in the early twentieth century.

Political Peasants

Mahatma Gandhi’s great achievement was to revitalize the Indian National Congress in the late teens and twenties of this century by drawing in the support of what historians and political scientists—with some important, and relatively recent, exceptions—have called “the masses.” Thus Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph write that Gandhi transformed “the Indian National Congress from a body narrowly concerned with the interests of an anglicized elite to a socially concerned mass organization” by using “traditional symbols and language to convey new meanings and to reconstitute social action.”^[44] It cannot be denied that the rich cultural idiom that Gandhi drew upon throughout his political career proved profoundly effective in providing the Congress with a much broader base. Nevertheless, the “masses” that became involved in the Congress were far from undifferentiated. The aim of this section is to review the class dimensions of Indian nationalism and the caste dimensions of peasant radicalism, and to discern how both intersected with the sociocultural agenda of kshatriya reform.

Perhaps the best evidence of this fact in the Gangetic core is the growth in the 1920s and 1930s of the Kisan Sabha, which came to articulate a distinct peasant interest in contrast to the agrarian policies advanced by the Congress. An understanding of the political events of this period hinges to a great extent on the ideas and work of one remarkable man, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. Born Navrang Ray in 1889, a Jujhautia brahman of Ghazipur District, Sahajanand Saraswati took the vows of sanyas at the age of eighteen (1907) and became a Dasnami sanyasi.^[45] Sahajanand became involved in social reform activity when, in 1914 at the age of twenty-five, he was asked to address the annual conference of the Bhumihar Brahman Mahasabha held at Ballia in eastern Uttar Pradesh. After some determined reflection on his role as a sanyasi involved in social action, Sahajanand decided to devote himself fully to the cause of defining and maintaining a Bhumihar brahman identity for “Babhans.” In response to the denigrations of Bhumihars by Maithil brahmans and others, Sahajanand cited a broad range of Sanskrit and orientalist authorities to argue that “the acceptance of charity and the discharge of priestly duties are not inevitably necessary for the brahmans.” Rather, “even for the brahman, agriculture is preferable to the priesthood, and only in the absence of agriculture does the brahman have the right to perform the functions of the priest.”^[46] However, being brahman required a knowledge of Sanskrit and priestly ritual (karmakand), two assets in short supply among the Bhumihar community. Therefore, the founding of the Sitaram Ashram [sanctuary] to train students at Bihta, about sixteen miles west of Patna on the East India Railway line, signified the culminating achievement in Sahajanand’s efforts to build a Bhumihar brahman identity.^[47]

Sahajanand’s role in the political history of Gangetic north India was, to a large extent, a reflection of his unsurpassed ability to bridge differences in sociocultural, religious, and economic background. And he was able to overcome those barriers in exciting ways, creating new patterns of social and political organization. For instance, even though Sahajanand was a Dasnami sanyasi, it is clear from his own work that he was heavily influenced by the Vaishnava discourse of reform. And it was precisely the social imperative of that Vaishnava discourse that pushed him increasingly toward political radicalism. According to the historian Walter Hauser, Sahajanand’s reading of the Bhagavat Purana, a text central to Vaishnava bhakti, “made it explicit that to serve the people was like service and devotion to God.”^[48] Sahajanand also wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, published as Gita Hriday (The Heart of the Gita), which still stands as a remarkable personal testimony of socialist idealism founded on core Vaishnava tenets of correct social action.^[49]

Sahajanand was influenced by Vaishnava belief in more mundane ways as well. The land and buildings that formed the original nucleus of the Sitaram Ashram Sahajanand received from a Bhumihar Ramanandi named Sitaram Das, whose wish in old age was to “create a brahmacharya [student] ashram where Bhumihar brahman boys can come to study the Vedas, Shastras, and other sacred texts.”^[50] However, the Swami’s principled dedication to the common man and his keen commitment to social and economic justice no matter what the cost thrust him increasingly into a position contrary to that of the Bhumihar Brahman Mahasabha’s image as an organization designed to represent the “aristocratic, powerful, landowning elite.”^[51] This emerges nowhere more clearly than in Sahajanand’s own remarks describing the formative events of 1927:

The countless Bhumihar brahman benefactors, who in fact kept the ashram from closing with their total yearly subscriptions of thousands of rupees, nevertheless eventually became the sworn enemies of the ashram. Indeed, many of them lived near the ashram itself. This [their hatred] was due to the fact that I sided with the anguished Goalas and other kisans [peasants] who came to me, and raised a storm against their oppressive zamindars. If anyone goes to that area today to see for themselves the downtrodden people there, regardless of their jati or religion, he will be in total agreement with me and, therefore, the ashram. Indeed, there the question of jati does not arise.^[52]

From this point on, Sahajanand would only perceive agrarian conflict as that between landlords and peasants: “Caste and class had merged into a single category of social and economic exploitation. The Sitaram Ashram had become in his words a ‘symbol of revolution.’”^[53] It will be remembered that the term “Sitaram” possessed symbolic power in nearby Awadh during the Baba Ramchandra–led peasant struggle of 1919–1921. The name of the ashram alone may well have played a significant role in convincing many local cultivators of western Patna District that, in fact, the Swami would lend a sympathetic ear to their complaints. That the buildings and land for the ashram had been donated by a Ramanandi sadhu could only have furthered this perception. To complete the image, the Swami had by this time already developed a begrudged reputation among his landlord critics of being “nothing if . . . not progressive.”^[54]

While it is exceedingly difficult to arrive at any clear sense of the socioeconomic composition of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, it is likely—especially given the willingness of local Yadav tenants to seek the aid of the Swami in the transformative year of 1927—that peasants on the tenancy/proprietorship margin became involved in one way or another through the late 1920s and 1930s. This impression is reinforced by Hauser’s own earlier reading of the caste dimensions of the leadership of the Kisan Sabha, which included a dominant group of Bhumihars in addition to Rajputs and Kayasths, “with occasional Muslims and lower caste cultivating peasants, primarily Kurmis and Koeris.”^[55] Emphasizing the anti-landlord, pro-tenant stance of the organization, Hauser points out that “While most Kisan Sabha leaders were Bhumihars, so were most of the major zamindars, including the ones who came under sharpest attack by the Kisan Sabha. On the other hand, while there are some Bhumihar tenants in Bihar it is estimated that upwards of 90 per cent are not, and of course many of the best peasant cultivators in the province are Kurmis and Koeris.”^[56]

Nevertheless, while the Kisan Sabha may have satisfied temporarily the political aspirations of many marginally elite cultivators, the rise of the Triveni Sangh organization confirms that many Kurmi, Kushvaha, and Yadav kshatriyas felt a growing need for distinct political representation.^[57] Though the precise chronology of the emergence of the Triveni Sangh is as yet unclear—one scholar placing its organizational origins in the mid-1920s, other observers dating the formal naming of the organization to 1934—early signs of political cohesion between Yadavs, Kurmis, and Kushvahas can be seen as early as 1930.^[58] In that year a district-level meeting of Kushvahas and Yadavs was held in the village of Garve in central Shahabad District in southwest Bihar and was presided over by Sheopujan Prasad Singh, a Kurmi-kshatriya leader. Individual Kushvahas (Tapsi Ram of Begampur, Raghu Vir Singh of Dumraon) and Yadavs (Sheopujan Singh of Jitaura, Nandkishore Singh of Tenuni) cooperated in contesting the local district board elections in that and the following year, but fared badly. The Triveni Sangh was formally constituted in 1934 at another Shahabad District conference. A third district conference was held in 1936, when membership was estimated at approximately one million based on the number of Kushvahas, Yadavs, and Kurmis who had paid the four-anna (one-quarter of a rupee) fee to join the organization.^[59]

The movement expanded to the provincial level—partly in an effort to court Congress support in the upcoming elections of 1937—under the leadership of Guru Sahay Lal (who would later become a “backward caste” leader and who, according to one account, had suffered severe personal humiliation by the high-caste elite) and Dasu Singh (a Kurmi).^[60] Meanwhile, after 1935 the Congress was busy forming the Backward Classes Federation to counter what they viewed as the dangerous class features of the Triveni Sangh and Kisan Sabha movements. This federation groomed future “backward” leaders by co-opting men like Birchand Patel (a Kurmi), Sheonandan Mandal, and later Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav. Having thus guaranteed its “backward class” “vote bank,” the Congress subsequently refused to grant Triveni Sangh candidates tickets to contest the upcoming elections. Furious at what they could only perceive as the underhanded trickery of local Congress party bosses, the Triveni Sangh leaders pledged electoral war against the “cursed Congressites.”^[61] Following a hotly contested election in which two Triveni Sanghis emerged victorious in Shahabad District (Tapsi Mahto from Arrah constituency and Nandkishore Singh from Piro constituency), the war that had been waged with the ballot reverted to more violent means as high-status landlords reigned vengeful terror on whole Kurmi, Kushvaha, and Yadav villages. Conversely, in areas where the Triveni Sangh had not won, supporters consoled themselves with the ominous solace, “we lost by the vote, but we hadn’t lost our lathis.”^[62]

The rift between Congress and the Triveni Sangh, while sizable, was not insurmountable, as the latter merged with the Congress-sponsored Backward Classes Federation in 1948. While this certainly signified the end of the Triveni Sangh as a distinct political entity, it should not be viewed as the decline of Kushvaha-Kurmi-Yadav political power. Triveni Sangh leaders were being given posts in the Bihar Congress as early as 1940, and Kurmis, Kushvahas, and Yadavs contested seats in the 1946 election on Congress tickets. Thus, what Triveni Sanghis lost in terms of the symbolic power inherent in their kshatriya identities they gained in terms of direct access to political power. And while Congress gained access to a formidable rural vote bank, the social and economic tensions they were able to contain during the heady days of the new republic would eventually rise to the surface to define the quality of Indian politics in the post-1947 era.^[63]

Conversely, the failure to produce any sort of union between the Kisan Sabha and the Triveni Sangh in the 1930s, despite common economic interests, can only be explained by the historical antagonisms that existed between powerful Bhumihar landlords on the one hand and marginal Yadav, Kurmi, and Kushvaha peasants on the other. This basic enmity surfaces in a politically and socially charged description of the tenuous relationship between the Sangh and the Sabha:

The bridge between the Bhumihar messiah, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, and [the] ideologues of the Triveni Sangh was never built. Despite the fact that members of the Sangh flocked to listen to the Swami’s message of common struggle, the Bhumihar label stuck. When Kesari “Master” [a Triveni Sangh leader] visited the Swami’s ashram at Bihta in Patna district, night had fallen. Looking around he saw that those who surrounded the Swami were all upper-caste Bhumihars. Horrified, the backward-caste leader crept away under the cover of darkness.^[64]

This episode is recounted in a language and tone familiar to observers of late twentieth-century Bihar politics, but adjectives like “backward-caste” would have had little meaning in the 1920s and 1930s, when Sahajanand was making his overtures to the broad base of tenant-cultivators and the tenant-cultivators themselves—the new peasant kshatriyas—were joining to explore new modes of political expression. Master Keshari, the hardened Triveni Sangh orator, shrank from the overpowering Bhumihar presence in Sahajanand’s Sitaram Ashram not because they were “upper-caste Bhumihars” and he was a “backward-caste leader,” but because the memory of staunch Bhumihar opposition to peasant-kshatriya reform was too fresh in the minds of all Kurmis, Kushvahas, and Yadavs. Only in the 1940s and especially after Independence did such politically inspired labels as “backward” and “forward” become superimposed on the older and, by then, antiquated conflicts over varna.

Identity and Class

The 1890s began with the rise of anti-Muslim mob violence, perpetrated in large part by gangs of Goalas set on associating themselves with what they perceived as the respectable desire to prohibit the slaughter of cows. As such, this phenomenon constituted an expression, albeit vague, of Goala solidarity with the landed elite who led the gauraksha movement. This tenuous solidarity began to develop cracks by the beginning of the twentieth century, as marginal elites in general and Goalas in particular launched campaigns articulating kshatriya identities. At the core of the kshatriya reform movements resided a direct challenge to the social and economic supremacy of the twice-born elite, and as these movements progressed, cultural confrontation became physical conflict.

Importantly, however, as old solidarities grew obsolete, new cohesive forms began to emerge. The Triveni Sangh represented the political union of Bihar’s three most populous peasant communities—Yadav, Kushvaha, and Kurmi kshatriyas. In addition to the fact that they possessed common economic interests, these three communities had exercised a common cultural logic to regenerate their identities. The electoral power of this union was clearly demonstrated in 1937, as was its potential for class formation. As we shall see in the next chapter, nationalist politicians, anxious to minimize the growth of class antagonisms that would not only threaten the fragile unified opposition to British rule but also their own superordinate status, worked successfully to co-opt Triveni Sanghis as part of an undifferentiated “backward class” component of the Indian National Congress.

But if it can be argued that the Congress benefited electorally from what those elite members of Congress saw as a broadly agrarian class element in its organizational structure, the counterargument can certainly be made that the new peasant kshatriyas gained in proportion access to power and policy formation. Indeed, the political power that ex-Triveni Sanghis wielded in the elite Congress ranks would have been understood reflexively as another example of the heights to which they themselves had successfully aspired in their programs for social reform. And when the limits of Congress’s political vision (not to mention social semantics) could no longer accommodate the aspirations of its “backward” contingent, the latter would break away to create new political forms to articulate, once again, a distinct economic and social message. This is evident most recently in the emergence of the Janata Dal (People’s Party) and in the increasingly independent political action of leaders like Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav, the late Karpoori Thakur, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Laloo Yadav.^[65] In a sense, and understandably given the urgency of the nationalist movement, Congress leaders sacrificed long-term political cohesiveness for the short-term goal of delaying political discontent among peasants.

Social and cultural conflict did not end, therefore, with independence in 1947. Kurmis, Kushvahas, and Yadavs first flexed their unfettered political muscle in the late 1970s with demands for greater representation in the state bureaucracy under the controversial extension of the “reservations” policy for a vaguely defined list of “other backward classes.”^[66] The reservation of political offices, administrative posts, and educational opportunities for “depressed communities” was enshrined in the Indian constitution, but only made explicit in state-by-state lists (“schedules”) for untouchables and tribals; “other backward classes” would include a heavy preponderance of Kurmi, Yadav, and Kushvaha kshatriyas. Following the cessation of sporadic violence engendered by and in response to the backward classes movement, the 1980s would witness the emergence of overt, armed warfare over the control of land, spearheaded by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).^[67] Termed “Naxalite” after the initial experiments in militant landgrabbing conducted in the Naxalbari area of west Bengal, the movement now features Kurmis, Yadavs, and Kushvahas in Bihar as both victims and perpetrators of violence (though, significantly, never in the same case) directed against the landed, and retaliatory attacks by the landed against the landless. Historically, Kurmi, Yadav, and Kushvaha kshatriyas have been positioned on both sides of the margin of land tenancy and land ownership. This is a socioeconomic fact that, to a large extent, has hindered the formation of subordinate and superordinate class groups purely on the basis of jati distinctions.

The Yadav move from cowherd to kshatriya from the 1890s to the 1920s and the politics of Kurmi, Kushvaha, and Yadav involvement in agrarian radicalism from the 1920s to the 1940s together reveal the shifting nature of the caste fissures that inform the history of Gangetic north India. Whether or not the “mobility aspirations” of low-status peasants and artisans reflected “actual processes taking place in society,” kshatriya reform brought about real political and cultural change. And the degree to which kshatriya reformers were successful in creating an impression among those poised above them in the political and social economy of Gangetic north India can be measured by the willingness of agrarian elites to respond to their claims both with harsh words and violent deeds, and by the fact that the politics of kshatriya identity determined to a large extent the history of agrarian politics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Notes