Chapter 4—
The Rural Places of Exchange:
Markets in the Age of Gandhi
"Gandhi kijai " (Long Live Gandhi) echoed in many marketplaces in the early 1920s, when the bazaar became both a scene and site of contention. Its reverberations throughout the Bihar countryside signaled the transformation of the nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress into a mass organization. It was a development reflected in the rise of the Noncooperation and Khilafat Movement in 1921–22 and in the movement's changing emphasis. For one thing, many Muslims were won over because of the pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement, which championed the case of the Ottoman caliph (khalifa) . A campaign that began with students quitting government-run educational institutions and with lawyers and others withdrawing from official institutions progressed to involve people in a boycott of foreign cloth and later in a struggle for complete independence. The ultimate objective was the Gandhian ideal—a postcolonial nation and community without harmful divisions of caste, class, religion, or gender. But the "emphasis. . . on unifying issues and on trying to cut across or reconcile class divisions"[1] necessarily entailed negotiating the problematic contradiction of forging a unified nation by "disciplining" its many dividing communities. In the very process of widening its constituency, as
[1] Sumit Sarkar, ModernIndia , 1885-1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), p. 209.
Ranajit Guha argues, the Congress-organized nationalist movement sharpened the "contradiction between the elite and the subaltern domains of politics and of an increasing elite concern to deal more effectively with it."[2]
Along with its insistence on nonviolence, the Noncooperation Movement, at the national and regional levels, couched its rhetoric from the outset in terms of "unifying issues," advocating causes that averted social and economic confrontations stemming from such potentially volatile issues as nonpayment of taxes to government and of rent to landholders. Gandhi pointedly spoke out against looting markets and withholding taxes from government and rent from landlords.[3]
Contrast these "officially" sanctioned concerns and actions with popular pronouncements in Bihar. "Speeches" given by followers of Noncooperation (termed asahayogis , from the term asahayog , meaning noncooperation) , or "Volunteers" (the appellation favored in government records) of the movement, provide apposite entre into this rhetoric because they "capture" (an especially fitting term to use because they were recorded by government informants or preserved in pamphlets proscribed by government) the voices of the grassroots, both leaders and rank and file. One especially valuable compilation of such speeches is a confidential government document of 1922, which conveys a vivid sense of the popular vocabulary of Noncooperation, although some of the flavor of the vernacular is no doubt lost in translation (the document exists only in English translation). This compendium, apparently only "a fraction of the volume of abuse and vituperation. . . poured forth in this province," identifies none of its authors and lists "speeches" only by date and district of origin-which serves to accent the heteroglossic nature of this discourse.[4]
[2] A DisciplinaryAspectofIndian Nationalism (Santa Cruz: Merrill Publications, University of California, 1990), p. 39.
[3] Mahatma Gandhi, TheCollectedWorksof MahatmaGandhi , vol. 19, (November 1920-April1921) (Ahmedabad: Government of India, 1966), pp. 312-13, 419-20.
[4] The only identification tags used are in the prefatory note describing "various agitators" as: "some earnest workers inspired by the zeal of fanaticism: some paid professional agitators: some mere notoriety hunters. . . " B & O, SelectionsfromSpeeches , ActivitiesofVolunteers , etc ., duringthepastsix monthsinBiharandOrissa (Patna: Govt. Printing, 1922). Some speakers can be identified from newspapers, such as the Searchlight , which gave extensive coverage to Congress activities, and confidential government sources, such as, B & O, TheNon-Cooperation andKhilafatMovementsinBihar andOrissa (Secret) (Patna: Govt. Printing, 1925).
Nationalistic publications, on the other hand, are best in documenting the history of the movement's local chapter and local heroes. Largely absent from this record are details about episodes and events that did not conform to the official story. For the standard nationalist materials were not the mediums through which "abuse and vituperation" flowed; this was much more likely to have occurred in the kinds of extemporaneous speeches delivered to local audiences and preserved for later observers by government informants.[5]
According to the Muzaffarpur Congress Committee, the Noncooperation Movement was waged on ten fronts: (1) boycott of government schools and establishment of nationalist schools, (2) relinquishment of government and legal positions, (3) boycott of foreign cloth, (4) relinquishment of all government degrees and titles, (5) establishment of village councils (panchayats ), (6) use of spinning wheels and homespun cloth (khadi ), (7) ban on intoxicating substances, (8) recruitment of rank-and-file Congress members, (9) collection of Tilak Swaraj Funds, and (10) collection of a muthia (handful of grain) from every household.[6]
Notwithstanding Gandhi's estimation that the Noncooperation Movement in Bihar was well attuned to his ideal of nonviolence and notable for its successes in creating alternative schools, boycotting government-controlled liquor, and popularizing homespun cloth, local leaders diverged substantially from the Gandhian path. "Volunteers" openly broached the possibility of violence and injected agrarian issues into their campaign, with the result that their rhetoric and actions were aimed at the colonial state as well as its local allies and coadjutors. And the marketing centers of the region, the bazaars, became both the scene and site of contention. The market as an "extraterritorial" space recurred with acts of inversion and subversion,[7] including thirty-five documented cases of "hat [haat , periodic market] -looting in Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Monghyr and Purnea in January 1921 (with men who claimed to be Gandhi's disciples trying to enforce just prices at some places) . . . and widespread tension in Champaran and Muzaffarpur
[5] E.g., see Jagdish Prasad Shramik, Muzaffarpurzillaaurswadhintasangram(ZillaCongress kamitikasankshiptitihas) (Hajipur: Congress Swaran Jayanti, 1935).
[6] Ibid.
[7] Stallybrass and White, ThePoliticsof Transgression , p. 28. This use of the term refers to Bakhtin's notion of the marketplace which, at fair time, develops a popular domain placing it beyond the ken of "official order and official ideology." See Mikahil Bakhtin, Rabelaisand HisWorld , trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 154, 187–88.
districts over appropriation of traditional village pastures by zamindars and indigo planters."[8]
The Noncooperation Movement staked out a presence in the "extraterritorial" space of the market because its objective and strategy centered on territoriality: inclusion as well as exclusion. The bazaar, this choice locale for articulating the imagined greater community, was a venue par excellence where the colonial state encountered indigenous society literally and figuratively. Furthermore, the bazaar was part of a system of markets that bound villages into localities and small communities into larger communities. Indeed, the key themes of separation and boycott highlighted the commonalties between different categories of people who commingled in the bazaar. In other words, the project was to forge a nationalist community defined ideologically, ethnically, and spatially, a community whose construction entailed distinguishing those who were committed to the nationalist cause from those who were not. Demarcation was one of its principal strategies, boycott one of its major tactics.
Ironically, however, the "unifying" project of Noncooperation itself opened up the divisions, for the bazaar constituted the "epitome of a spatial boundary," a "space where local society materially and culturally reproduced itself," a "vernacular" space that was a "social nexus," a "typical site of collective discourse," a container of solidarities as well as of antagonisms and contradictions. Therefore, local dramas of Noncooperation, although scripted in accordance with the nationalist project, gave rise to local variants of the agrarian struggle, in a narrative that pitted peasants and petty landholders against local magnates. In addition, the boycott of British products, particularly textiles, also fed the contention in the marketplace because it embroiled traders and merchants in disputes over the use of foreign goods. This was after all a group that was increasingly staking out prominent roles in the towns and bazaars of north India; the bazaar was their locus of activity.9 Political "sedition" against the state and social and economic agitation against local elites therefore went hand in glove, a combination threatening enough to attract the attention of the official documentation pro-
[8] R. T. Dundas, I.G., Police, B & O, to Chief Secy., no. 244-I.G. 22, June 7, 1922, B & 0 Polit. Procs., Police, 1922, June, no. 50.
[9] Sarkar, India , p. 221; J. C. Jha, "The Khilafat and the Non-Cooperation Movement in Bihar (1919–22)," in HistoryoftheIndianNational CongressinBihar , 1885–1985 , general editor P. N. Ojha (Patna: Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 1985), chap. 6; Agnew, WorldsApart , p. 33.
ject. Ostensibly a record of "unruly" subjects engaged in "criminal misconduct" disruptive of "law and order" and "peace and security," the colonial archive resonates with words and agendas that suggest a "hidden transcript" pointing to the bazaar itself as the locus of conflict. Occasionally loud and clear, but always audible beneath the surface of the official transcript, are voices that speak not only in the nationalistic and anticolonial idiom but also in the vocabulary of subaltern resistance.[10]
Appropriately enough, the disjuncture between popular and elite notions surfaces in the bazaar, the setting in which these conflicting ideas were negotiated and in which they gained their currency. For nowhere were the contradictions of the Movement more visible than in the bazaar, that "hybrid place" where "a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed [occur]: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low."[11] This clash of ideas, furthermore, reflects the extent to which popular culture and popular ideas more generally intersected in the bazaar.
This chapter will consider the popular rhetoric of Noncooperation and then turn to the popular action and behavior that placed the bazaar at the center stage. It will reconstruct the drama as it was enacted in three different locales in the region in 1921–22: the Katia and Bhorey area in Saran; the Sitamarhi area in Muzaffarpur; and the thanas of Bagaha, Dhanaha, Jogapatti, and Lauriya in Bettiah subdivision, Champaran. These three sets of incidents serve to identify the popular constituency of Noncooperation: they fuse the political with the social and economic agenda, as they unfold in the bazaar. Moreover, these particular localities were closely scrutinized by the documentary and surveillance project of the colonial state and the documentary and advocacy project of the nationalist movement. The enterprises together—the former concerned with recording and establishing the occurrence of acts of "sedition" and the latter with documenting and celebrating the rising tide of nationalist sentiment—have left the historian a record that speaks in the contrary voices of these antagonistic projects. Thus, the
[10] Scott, DominationandResistance . Also Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma," for an insightful analysis of the contradictions between popular notions and those adhered to by the local leadership and enunciated by Gandhi. Gandhi called off the Movement in February 1922 after the violent torching of a police station in Chauri Chaura (Gorakhpur). See also Amin, Event , Metaphor , Memory:ChauriChaura , 1922–1992 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
[11] Stallybrass and White, ThePoliticsof Transgression , p. 27 .
data on the events of Noncooperation in these localities is especially rich. To view this drama so closely is to see its social, economic, and cultural scripts, which grew out of the political text of Noncooperation and were textualized by the "hybrid" place, the bazaar.
The local drama in Saran, in particular, speaks to the question of why the bazaar became the scene and site of both Noncooperation and agrarian conflict. Specifically, I will set the incidents that occurred in Katia and Bhorey against the backdrop of the marketing system of that locality. In teasing out the workings and meanings of the local marketing system of Saran, I can trace the dynamics of this system more generally, down to the lowest level ordered around periodic markets (haats) , and thereby illustrate spatially the organization and interrelationships of markets. This taxonomy of sites as well as of their hierarchical relationships will also be filled in by detailing the pattern of horizontal and vertical trade, the movement of local agricultural and craft commodities and of nonlocal products from higher-level to lower-level markets.
This reconstruction of the structure and functioning of a local marketing system underscores the extent to which the unfolding of the dramatic events of 1920–22 in the bazaar represented a historical process of increasing marketization and commoditization embodied in the growth of a full-fledged marketing system. By focusing on Katia and Bhorey, my intention is not only to detail its workings within the specific setting of one district, but also to show how these were tied to the changing nature of agrarian relations and conflict—for the spatial grids organized by the marketing system shaped and were shaped by the power of both the colonial state and local landholders. The local experiences of Noncooperation, plotted against the backdrop of the local marketing system, therefore portray the bazaar in the round: as a place for political as well as economic, social, and cultural transactions.
The chapter concludes by mapping the spatial and social coordinates generated by the marketing system along which a notion of community was constructed. It was, however, a system with dual capacities: to embrace the national ideal espoused by Congress leaders and to divide into more particularistic identities and groups shaped by caste and class. The dynamics of the local marketing system reveal that markets were units of economic, social, and political organization, within which power and influence were wielded and contested: not just the power of the colonial state, but also that articulated by local controllers and elites. This "hybrid place" thus provided the nexus in
which attempts to create a community both succeeded and failed: anticolonial sentiment fostered a sense of nation while also sharpening existing contradictions among the many constituent communities of the region.
Let us eavesdrop in the marketplace. Asahayogis , or "volunteers," frequently spoke of "our duty .. .to liberate India," to attain "Swaraj" (self-rule) from British rule, demonized as a "Satanic Government." There was growing consensus about this message, as Noncooperation coupled with Khilafat enabled Congress to build up a mass base in 1920-22. Speeches warning Hindus and Muslims that their religion was "in danger" were aimed at this larger constituency, as were specific calls for people to come together as Indians. "Hindus and Muhammadans must unite," urged one speaker in Patna in February 1922, a message reinforced on another occasion by the charge that the British had deliberately fomented quarrels "between Hindus and Muhammadans. . . [in order] to remain themselves in peace."[12]
Ironically, this very attempt to bridge the religious divide in the Noncooperation era of 1920-22 led subsequently to a phase in which distinct communal sentiments came to prevail.[13] The message of Noncooperation was a mixed one: it was uttered with appropriate religious coding to speak to "unifying issues," but in a vocabulary that also emphasized the distinctiveness of Hindu and Muslim traditions. Consider the characterization of the evil government and "Hatyachar Raj [destructive rule]" as a "Rawan Raj"-as a tyrannical force and a religious threat set in stark contrast to the ideal government and polity embodied in the notion of "Ram Raj." No doubt, for the Shiite Muslims in the audience, this speaker also equated the present government with "that of Yazid of the ancient times." On another occasion at Patna, a "Volunteer," obviously appealing to the religious sensibilities of his audience, remarked: "Do the Hindus think that this Satanic government will not use the same shells and shot against their sacred places as they
[12] Speeches , p. 11. Hindu-Muslim clashes, sporadic in Bihar in the nineteenth century, erupted with ferocity in Shahabad in 1917. See Pandey, ConstructionofCommunalism , pp. 189-96, 201-4; Peter G. Robb, TheEvolutionofBritishPolicytowardsIndian Politics , 1880-1920 (Westwood, Mass.: Riverdale, 1992), pp. 325-52; Md. Muzaffar Imam, RoleofMuslimsintheNationalMovement (1912-1930)(AStudyofBihar) (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1987), esp. chap. 4.
[13] Sandria B. Freitag, CollectiveActionand Community:PublicArenasandtheEmergenceofCommunalismin NorthIndia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), esp. chap. 7; Pandey, ConstructionofCommunalism , chaps. 5-6.
had used against the sacred places of Islam?" Presumably addressing Muslims, another speaker, also at Patna but on a different date, reminded his listeners that the sacred cities of "Mecca and Medina are no longer in your possession."[14]
Such talk had the desired effect: it greatly alarmed the government. Local authorities reacted with concern to what they construed to be "appeals to racial antagonisms or religious fanaticism," a concern that resonated with their long-standing fear of religion-based opposition to their rule. Although they came from different perspectives, Ghulam Husain and Veeraswamy shared in common a view of their superordinates that was partly informed by their religious outlooks. Indeed, from the very outset of colonial rule but particularly in the aftermath of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, government had trained a wary eye on religious issues because it considered religion in India to constitute the bedrock of popular consciousness. Moreover, the religious coloring of "abuse and vituperation" in the Noncooperation era was especially volatile because it attracted a wide audience; in fact, "in the rural areas, the more outspoken the appeal the more popular is its reception."[15] As yet ignored in both Congress and government understanding of this rhetoric, was the possibility that an "outspoken" religious ideology would eventuate in a religious divide rather than a broadbased nationalist community.
Another Bihar variant of Noncooperation also alarmed the government—its divergence from the Gandhian credo of nonviolence, as the following speech in the official record reveals: "I cannot agree with Gandhiji inhis creedofnon-violentnon-co-operation . If you agree with me[,] Oh Rajputs' sons and Brahmans' sons[,] get up and try your best to root out this dishonest Government at any cost."[16] Others, too, broached the possibility of violence, although not explicitly. Few, however, would have missed the meaning of the following allusion to the
[14] Speeches , pp. 4, 1–2, 25. Yazid for the Shiites is the epitome of evil. In the popular Hindu epic of the Ramayana , Ram is the beloved god; Ravana is the mythological evil demon. Such characterizations were apparently commonplace (e.g., see BeharHerald , Feb. 26, 1921) and echoed the vocabulary used by Gandhi (e.g., see his speeches in Bihar in Dec. 1920 in CollectedWorks , vol. 19, pp. 61–68.
[15] Speeches , p. i. For a study of the religious idiom of popular mentalités , see my "A Conversation of Rumors," pp. 485–505. See above, pp. 102–5, 155–56, regarding Ghulam Husain, Veeraswamy, and the colonial image of Patna as a hotbed of anti-Christian sentiment.
[16] Speeches , p. 11. Emphasis in the original. A "certain Ram nath Pandey" is identified as the source of this speech. See Non-CooperationinBihar , p. 70.
virtuous king who destroyed the demon king and villain: "If the present Government. . . [is] Ravan Raj then you must do all that Maharaja Ram Chandra did to destroy the Ravan Raj." No less ambiguous must have been the answer to the rhetorical question "Do you know what should be done where thousands of cows are killed? Blood should be shed." The same message was conveyed in entreaties to set fire to the rakshas (demons), to "drive them [the British] away by beating," and "to tear the jail to pieces and burn it." Violence was also suggested by a speaker who informed his Patna audience that the ulama (Muslim religious and legal authorities) had declared "Jehad [holy war], but that it be non-violent for the present." But he then added, "I may, however, warn you that Jehad with sword may be declared by the Ulamas before long and that you should be ready to join it if they want you to do so. But until then you must be non-violent."[17]
Local violations of the Gandhian conception of nonviolence assumed other forms as well. Although local practitioners of Noncooperation followed the nationalist leadership in urging supporters to withdraw from government jobs and withhold services from government and its representatives, they also sought to extend noncooperation to areas specifically forbidden by Gandhi. Whereas the Mahatma deliberately elected not to make the payment of taxes an issue, local Volunteers openly took it on. "Stop payment of taxes" was the unequivocal call issued in Saran in December 1921. A similar plea in Muzaffarpur in August of that year targeted the chaukidari tax, collected to defray the expenses of maintaining chaukidars , or night watchmen. By this act, the movement became embroiled in agrarian issues, because night watchmen were, in part, village-level representatives of the police and, in part, petty servants of landholders tied to estate and village systems of control.[18]
The conflation of political, social, and economic issues also surfaced in attacks against wealth and privilege that were leveled not only at perquisites accumulating to the British but also at those enjoyed by their local allies, the so-called principal zemindars and other elite land-
[17] Speeches , pp. 11, 15, 19. See also Freitag, CollectiveActionandCommunity , esp. chaps. 5-6, regarding the increasing popular use of religious symbolism (Ram, sacred cow, etc.) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[18] Speeches , pp. 12, 19, 25. "Service in Police and Army is haram (forbidden)" was one local expression of this idea. Haram in this context has more of a moral connotation to it-of being forbidden or improper. See also my LimitedRaj , pp. 103-11, for an analysis of chaukidars as functionaries in estate and village systems of control.
holding families. As one speaker asserted in Shahabad, "This Government is for the rich, because the rich become members of the Council. This Government is not for the labourers." On another occasion, the maharaja of Dumraon, Shahabad's largest landholder, was singled out for criticism because he was said to have contributed a sizable amount of money in honor of the visit of the Prince of Wales.[19]
Boycott of foreign cloth and the reliance on homespun cloth (khadi) also had the potential of being divisive because they were directed against both the consumer and the seller. Trade in cloth in north India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was increasingly in the hands of the rising bania groups, many of whom had established themselves in Bihar over the course of the nineteenth century and many of whom both there and elsewhere had attached themselves to Gandhi. But it was an issue that had widespread resonance as well, because many people were aware, and had been aware since the late nineteenth century (e.g., Bholanauth Chunder), that indigenous and artisanal products in general had been declining because of foreign competition. Deindustrialization was not known by that name, but its adverse effects were familiar to many.
The boycott campaign rested on two pillars: (1) the economic, or the notion of the drain of wealth, that India's once robust textile industry had been shattered by the rise of machine-made goods mass produced inexpensively by the mills of England, and (2) the semiotic, or the Gandhian stress on self-reliance. Consequently, cloth took on several layers of signification relating to national identity and difference.
The belief that the indigenous cloth industry had declined as a direct result of British design and sabotage was widespread. As one speaker declared, "Cloths of superior quality were woven in India. The thumbs of 1,400 Jolahas were cut away[,] and since then the weaving of good cloths in Bengal came to an end. Gradually we became accustomed to foreign cloths. Every art and manufacture became extinct, for he who was the protector turned out to be the destroyer. Everything was destroyed as soon as we were deprived of arts and trade."[20] The much-sung ode of Noncooperation addressed to "Firangia"-Veeraswamy had employed the pejorative "phirangi" in referring to the British almost a hundred years earlier-lamented: "If cloth does not come from foreign coun-
[19] Speeches , pp. 8, 10.
[20] Ibid., pp. 16, 19-21.
tries we shall have to live naked, O Firangia. Cotton is purchased cheap from us and there from [sic] cloth is manufactured and sold to us, O Firangia. In this way India's wealth is plundered and sent away to foreign countries, O Firangia."[21]
Gandhi's championing of indigenous products therefore appealed to a wide audience. For it "articulated and elaborated on the theme that the Indian people would only be free from European domination, both politically and economically, when the masses took to spinning, weaving, and wearing homespun cotton cloth, khadi . To give substance to these theories, he created the enduring symbols of the Indian nationalist movement; the chakra (spinning wheel), which appeared on the Indian National Congress flag and . . . the wearing of a khadi 'uniform,' a white handspun cotton dhoti , sari , or pajama , kurta and a small white cap."[22]
Cloth was the dressing on the larger issue of "ruin" that many considered to have been inflicted on their country by the "nation of Hatwearers." In a tenor remarkably similar to the cry taken up by Patna writers during the era of revolution, the chant repeated in the bazaar evoked an image of a "once beautiful and charming" India that had, in the words of the "Firangia," been "turned into a burning ghat":
Grains, wealth, men, strength and wisdom all have been destroyed; no traces of any remains, O Firangia.
The country some times ago yielded lakhs of maunds of grains and rice, O Firangia. . . .
Where the people were fully fed and satisfied now there rages famine always, O Firangia. . . .
Commerce and trade have all disappeared and have been ruined. . .
For trifling things we have to look to the foreigners' faces . . . .
If this state continues some time longer, India will be ruined . . .
No regard is paid to one's honour, flattering words are uttered . . .
Day and night the sahibs are flattered and foreigners' feet are licked, O Firangia.[23]
[21] Ek Asahayog, Firangia (Ballia: Harihar Press, 1921).
[22] Bernard S. Cohn, "Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century," in ClothandHumanExperience , ed. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), p. 343. Khadi thus became the "uniform" of the nationalists. See Susan S. Bean, "Gandhi and Khacli, the Fabric of Indian Independence," in this same volume, pp. 355-76; C. A. Bayly, "The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700-1930," in TheSocialLifeofThings , ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 284-321.
[23] Firangia . Each line ends with "O Firangia."
Yet even as the advocates of Noncooperation faulted the regime for causing "ruin," as had their Patna ancestors more than a century earlier, their lament was pitched in a distinctly Hindu vocabulary. The opening line about "burning ghat" refers to a Hindu practice of cremating their dead; the role models upheld were Rana Pratap Singh and Shivaji, both historical figures renowned for their active resistance to Muslim rule; and the pantheon of heroes invoked was drawn from the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata .[24]
Active resistance—and the contradictions of Noncooperation—surfaced in the bazaar, too. A delineation of the workings of the local marketing system of Saran can help explain why the bazaar became host to Noncooperation as well as to related incidents of agrarian violence.
It is significant that the most dramatic events in Saran occurred in Katia and Bhorey, northwestern localities far removed from the major markets of the district and from the central place of Patna; the pattern of related events in Champaran and Muzaffarpur was similar. These incidents occurred in geographically peripheral areas, which highlights the shift in the growing popular base of the nationalist movement. Having sprung to life initially in the late nineteenth century in the metropolitan centers and port cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, the movement spread inland, first to the urban centers in the interior and then to the countryside. The political mobilization of the hinterland, in other words, corresponded to the reticulations facilitated by the spread of markets into the interior.
The distinctions drawn here between different levels of markets follow the classification used previously to sketch the Patna marketing system. The top two rungs in this formulation are occupied by the "central market" and "intermediate" market town, or qasba . Standard markets, constituting the third tier, were generally the termination point of goods "imported" in for peasant consumption. Consequently, this level of markets represented the lowest echelon of the local marketing hierarchy that received the foreign goods targeted by the Noncooperation Movement.
Neither Katia nor Bhorey was among the 68 marketing settlements identified in the district as existing prior to 1765 (see Map 3).[25] By
[24] Ibid.
[25] A. Montgomerie, Colltr., to William Cowper, President and Members, BOR, Aug. 10, 1791, Bengal BOR Procs., Sayer, 1792, May 23 (hereafter Montgomerie report). The transfer of pargana Kasmar from Tirhut to Saran added another six markets. SeeR. Bathurst, Colltr., Tirhut, to BOR, Bengal BOR Procs., Aug. 3 to Nov. 30, 1792, Sayer, Sept. 7, no. 2, enclosure.
1793, however, both had emerged as markets, 2 of the 179 so identified as markets in the district. Katia, a ganj according to the police tax rolls, was primarily a grain market occupied by "braziers, mercers, suttrunjees [carpet] sellers, confectioners, cloth dyers and venders of oil, fish, rice, pease, sautoo [parched gram, a coarse grain consumed especially by the poor], beetleleaf [sic] , tobacco and herbs," whereas Bhorey was described as a "bazaar. . . [of] merchants, oilmen, choorywalas [bangle sellers] and sellers of spices, rice, pease, beetleleaf, salt and tobacco."[26]
Over the next century and a half with the district population steadily rising—by as much as 0.9 percent per year in the nineteenth century—many more settlements took on marketing functions. Comprehensive village-by-village data produced by the revisional settlement of the district in 1915–21 reveal that by the early twentieth century, Saran supported 364 markets, more than twice the 1793 total.[27]
This expansion in the number of markets—as in Patna districtreflected the proliferation of periodic markets in particular; the two highest levels of the marketing system in the district saw no numerical or compositional change over the colonial period. As in 1793, so in 1921: only one site ranked as the central market town—Chapra, the district headquarters. The same constancy shows up in the second rung of the marketing hierarchy as Siwan, Revelganj, Mirganj, Maharajganj, Goldinganj, Manjhi, Darauli, and Gopalganj persisted as the eight intermediate towns. (Again the comparison with Patna district is instructive.) This continuity, however, conceals the fact that their importance in relation to one another and to Chapra did not remain constant. Continuity with change is even more striking in the case of standard markets, whose number remained fixed at 32 throughout the colonial pe-
[26] J. Lumsden, Acting Colltr., to G. H. Barlow, Subsecy., Aug. 30, 1793, Bengal Rev. Jdcl. Consltns., Sept. 6 to 27, 1793, Sept. 13, no. 15 (hereafter Lumsden report). This report identifies the amount of taxes paid by each marketing settlement and by different professions. Rates varied according to type of establishment and goods transacted, e.g., cloth shops and bakers' houses along with shroffs, grain dealers, confectioners, and braziers paid a tax of two pice; smaller traders such as tanners or grass sellers or blacksmiths, one pice. The highest tax, four pice, was levied on salt merchants and salt godown owners. Although the tally of "marketing settlements" was 497, I have compressed this to 179 sociologically discrete and distinct markets by aggregating together as single markets those settlements that were counted separately because they coincided with the revenue definition of a "village."
[27] SVN; LimitedRaj . See also SDG1930 , pp. 162–77, for a slightly lower total341 marketing settlements.
riod but whose roster was altered significantly. Only 9 of the 32 standard markets from 1793 continued in that role in the twentieth century; 23, in other words, were supplanted by new ones. The most dramatic change occurred, however, at the level of periodic markets, which rose in number from 138 in 1793 to 323 in 1921.[28]
In Saran, as in Patna, the remarkable expansion in number of haats ensured a more even geographical distribution of markets across the district. The following information showing percentage of population in each thana relative to overall district population, and the percentage of periodic markets in each thana relative to the district total, indicates that the share of markets located in each thana relative to its proportion of population was predominantly even, except in the case of Chapra and Manjhi thanas . A slight distortion existed there because of the clustering of marketing functions in and around Chapra.
Katia and Bhorey were part of an area, thana Mirganj—as were the thanas of Chapra, Manjhi, and Basantpur—whose share of the overall number of markets (16.3 percent) exceeded its relative proportion of population (16.1 percent). Contrast this pattern with that of thana Gopalganj, where the percentage of haats evenly matched the percentage of population residing there, or the thanas of Mashrak, Parsa, Sonepur, Darauli, and Siwan, where the percentage of population exceeded their proportion of the overall population. But in terms of number of people per periodic market, Mirganj's figure of I haat for every 7,319 persons was surpassed only by Chapra (1:9,526), Manjhi (1:10,669), and Basantpur (1:7,742). In the remaining six thanas of the district, periodic markets were far more abundant relative to population: Mashrak thana returned the best ratio at 1 haat for every 5,621 persons.
The sizable proportion of people and periodic markets in Mirganj was the result of developments in the colonial period. One of the least inhabited areas in the late eighteenth century—along with Gopalganjit comprised part of the northern tract, which experienced the largest expansion of cultivation and presumably of population over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Kalyanpur Kuari (Mirganj was carved out of this pargana) , this locality appar-
[28] I have made qualitative and quantitative distinctions between different levels of markets based on information provided by the Lumsden and Montgomerie reports on the amount of police tax levied on a market and the kind and range of professions aggregated in it.
ently had only two markets before 1765 and six in the 1790s, four of which were standard markets (Katia was one) and two periodic markets—Bhorey was not one of these two. In the early twentieth century, however, Bhorey was one of fifty-two periodic markets enumerated for Mirganj. The adjoining thana of Gopalganj followed a similar upward trend, its thirty-seven haats in 1921 constituting more than double the number that existed in the late eighteenth century in the two parganas of Sipah and Dangsi from which it had been formed.[29]
The increase in markets in the northern tracts came in the wake of a spurt in the late eighteenth century that had added markets to the southern portion of Saran, particularly to the interior localities away from its riverine boundaries. This phase was characterized by phenomenal rates of market growth in the southern and central parganas: a 500 percent increase in Goa, more than 280 percent in Bal, a 175 percent increase in Marhal, and more than 85 percent in Barrai; parganas Pachlakh and Bara experienced a rise of 75 percent.[30]
The steady push toward marketing symmetry can also be plotted according to the relationship of higher-order markets to one another and to lower-order markets. Particularly telling in this respect are two interrelated processes: the declining centrality of Chapra, on the one hand, and the growing importance of towns in the interior, on the other hand. Both trends reflect the rising force of central-place symmetry, which resulted in the widespread distribution of markets throughout the hinterland, in Saran and, as has already been discussed, in Patna.
A village when the Mughal emperor Babar halted there in the late sixteenth century, Chapra prospered into a town. Its commercial prospects, especially trade in saltpeter, attracted Europeans as early as the seventeenth century. By 1793, in the words of the Saran collector, it was "the residence of wealthy shroffs and other individuals of property, and is much frequented by travellers."[31] Although not comparable in size and scale to the city of Patna, its ganjs and bazaars together rated
[29] Part of Sipah was included in Siwan thana . Other areas of significant growth were Siwan (carved out of parganas Pachlakh, Bara, and the southern part of Sipah) and Darauli (constituted out of portions of Chaubara, Andar, and Narhan) which, although not lacking in periodic markets in the eighteenth century, experienced at least a twofold increase to reach their twentieth-century tallies of 50 and 35, respectively. Montgomerie report; Lumsden report; Yang, LimitedRaj , pp. 34-35.
[30] Montgomerie report; Lumsden report.
[31] Lumsden to Barlow, May 4, 1793, Bengal Jdcl. Consltns., May 3 to 31, 1793, May 31, no. 17; P. C. Roy Choudhury, SarkarSaran (Patna: Free Press, 1956), pp. ix, 1-2; SDG 1930, p. 23; SDG1908 , p. 133.
the highest police tax in the district—Rs. 1,439-10 annas (Patna was assessed Rs. 28,287)—levied on "traders and shopkeepers of every description" and on merchants and bankers. Shops in Chapra dealt in every kind of grain, especially rice and sattu (parched gram), and vegetables and fruits. Other shops specialized in spices, salt, fish, and meats. And because it was the marketing center of the district, it provided goods and services not readily found elsewhere. Among its specialty shopkeepers, traders, and skilled workers were sellers of cloth and silk, betel leaf and tobacco, hookas, lac, toddy, mats, rope and twine, oil, and sweetmeats (confectioners); goldsmiths, braziers, and cloth dyers also plied their trade in this town.
Converging on Chapra was trade flowing along the Ganges and Gogra. Chapra also commanded the trade headed across the Ganges to Patna and to other parts of southern Bihar. As one early-nineteenthcentury Chapra resident recalled, "Large quantities of cotton, Cashmere shawls, and Benares brocades, &c. are imported from the North-West for shipment to Calcutta; while English goods, such as woolens, cottons, chintzes, &c. are brought up from the Eastward for the Chupra market, and the interior of the district."[32] A late-nineteenth-century source placed the value of piece goods and cotton brought into Chapra for redistribution in the district and in Champaran, Gorakhpur, and Nepal at Rs. 600,000. No wonder it was considered in its heyday to be "one of the largest emporia of commerce in Behar. . . [,] the centre of five well-marked streams of trade . . . from Champarun, Muzafferpur, Nepal, Gorakhpur, and a river borne import from. . . the North Western Provinces."[33]
The pull of Chapra was further enhanced by the fact that it constituted the core of a definable agglomeration of two highest-order markets clustered along a twelve-mile stretch on the Ganges and Gogra. Goldinganj occupied the eastern extremity, Chapra was six miles away, almost the middle, and to the west, also six miles from the district headquarters, was Revelganj. "To the east," observed one resident, "Chuprah unites with another considerable town called Sahibgunge [a muhalla of Chapra]. This town again joins Gobingunge [another muhalla] , and Gobingunge unites with Cherau[n]d and Dooregunge [muhallas of Goldinganj]; from the river they resemble one long strag-
[32] . Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p . 4.
[33] "Irrigation and Railway Communication in Sarun," CalcuttaReview 68, 136 (1879): 375. Compare this figure with Rs. 44,651,000, the value of imports into Patna.
gling Town, extending from Dooregunge to Revelgunge, a distance of fourteen miles."[34]
Local inhabitants termed this cluster of settlements with Chapra as the focal point Chirand-Chapra. Chirand, six miles east of Chapra, lent its name to this marketing complex because it formed part of Goldinganj, which in the late eighteenth century was an emerging intermediate market. And like Goldinganj, Revelganj, near the confluence of the Ganges and the Gogra, was a rapidly rising market. By the early nineteenth century it was considered a "great mart for saltpetre and grain of every description . . . imported from the interior, as well as from adjoining districts for shipment to Patna in the East, and Ghazeepoor, Benares and Mirzapoor in the North-West."[35]
Chapra's marketing pull in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was also signaled by the presence of a heavier concentration of higher- and lower-order markets in the south and southwestern part of the district than in the north and northeastern sector (except for Dangsi and Marhal). Well into the early twentieth century , a large number of markets, especially periodic and standard ones, were clustered in the southern and southwestern areas extending over Chapra subdivision, particularly Chapra, Parsa, and Mashrak thanas (the old Bal, Manjhi, Goa, and Makair parganas) , and Basantpur and Darauli thanas in Siwan subdivision (portions of parganas Bal, Bara, and Barrai, and Chaubara and Andar). To one local resident, the imbalance was perceptible: "The southern and the eastern parts. . . i.e., the Gogra-Gangetic Valley and the Gandak Valley, present such an admirably striking contrast that it seems as if nature has equipoised her gifts of good and evil to this district. The Southern Valley. . . [is studded] with places of bustling trade and commerce, and it is inhabited by whatever classes of sturdy cultivators, traders and men of intelligence and education the district can boast of.. . . The Gandak Valley exhibits quite a diametrically opposite picture .. . . Not much trade is carried on by the river, and there is scarcely a single Bazar [sic] worth the name on its banks."[36]
[34] Rankine, TopographyofSaran , p. zz. It became a major center of trade in the wake of Henry Revel who had been deputed there in 1788 to serve as a collector of government customs and who founded the bazaar, which was named after him.
[35] Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p . 4 .
[36] G. Dutt, "Further Notes on the Bhojpuri Dialects spoken in Saran," JournaloftheAsiaticSociety ofBengal 73 (1907): 247-48.
The primacy of Chapra was also epitomized by its relatively large population. Police returns for 1813 enumerated 8,700 houses in the town, and with each calculated to lodge 5 residents, its population was estimated at 43,500. Settlements at the intermediate marketing level—Siwan, Revelganj, Goldinganj, Maharajganj, Mirganj, and Darauli—had far fewer inhabitants. Siwan, where the next largest aggregation of people lived (1,768 houses, 8,840 people) constituted only one-fifth of Chapra's numbers; Mirganj, a rapidly growing market in the nineteenth century, had only 1,640 inhabitants (328 houses).[37]
In the late nineteenth century, however, Chapra increasingly followed the Patna pattern of economic decline, a decline precipitated by the interrelated factors of changes in modes of communication and in the spatial patterning of markets. In part its decline was ushered in by a shift in the course of the Ganges and Gogra. By the early nineteenth century, the main stream of the Ganges, which formerly had run close to Chapra, veered in the direction of Shahabad. And by the end of the century the Gogra had also shifted course. Coupled with the declining fortunes of the saltpeter and indigo industries, two commodities whose trade was centered in Chapra, the town's commercial importance was clearly fading at the turn of the twentieth century.
This downward spiral was reflected in its changing relationship with Revelganj, which had emerged as a major commercial entrepôt in the nineteenth century. Although inhabited by only 13,500 people, it was, in the words of an 1873 report, the "most important centre of trade" in north Bihar, "the chief place of export for the surplus produce of Sarun and Chumparun, and. . . of the North-Western Provinces. . . [, from which] a great deal of produce which comes . .. in smaller boats is transhipped.. . . It is also the mart whence these districts draw their supplies of salt, piece-goods, and other foreign commodities."[38] An estimate of the trade conducted between Revelganj and Calcutta showed a total tonnage of 37,000 (or over 1 million maunds) in 1872-73 (a figure that does not include goods flowing between Revelganj and the North-Western Provinces or between Revelganj and the rest of Patna Division). In addition to this through trade between Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, Revelganj also served as the principal local port of imports and exports for Saran as well as for Champaran
[37] Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Procs., 1813
[38] C. Bernard, Offg. Secy., GOB, Statistical Dept., to Secy., GOI, PWD, no. 3263, Nov. 1, 1873 , P.C. Basta no. zz8, Important Bundles, Alphabet T and W, nos. 65–75.
and Nepal. Along with Patna, Revelganj dominated the trade in oilseeds, a commodity transported there from Bihar and the North-Western Provinces for purchase by agents of "down-country merchants," including a branch firm of the European agency of Messrs. Ralli and Valletta (who were also stationed in Patna) and large numbers of Bengali traders buying for the Calcutta market. Earlier in the century, the firm of Messrs. Wharton, Cleave, and Flough had been in Revelganj to trade in wheat, hides, and other commodities.[39]
Revelganj's star rose only momentarily, however, since its fortunes also began to fade. In the case of Revelganj as well, the decline as a prime trading center was related to the rivers shifting course, receding toward the bank away from the town; the Ganges-Gogra junction also shifted—eastward. Census figures point to the chronology of Revelganj's decline: in 1872, 13,415 people were enumerated there; by 1921 that number had fallen to 8,186, a 39 percent loss, in a "once . . . thriving trade centre. . . now fallen on bad times."[40]
Even with these adverse effects on trade, the severest blow to the commercial health of Chapra and Revelganj was in fact dealt by the development of the railways, whose lines rapidly became the main arteries of trade. By the early 1890s water traffic accounted for only 25 percent of the overall trade of the district.
The "bad times" affected the entire Chirand-Chapra complex, which began to lose some of its primacy in the district. Goldinganj's fortunes were mirrored by the fate of its grain market of Dariaganj (Doriganj), which by the early twentieth century was memorable merely for its past as "a large grain-market."[41]
Although also located along the river—twelve and forty-four miles, respectively, northwest of Revelganj along the Gogra—Manjhi and Darauli, both thriving market settlements in the late eighteenth century, were affected differently by the hard times of Chirand-Chapra. Manjhi faded in part because the Manjhi zamindars lost their fortunes over the course of the nineteenth century. Darauli continued to prosper, how-
[39] R. Brownlow, Offg. Magte, Saran, to C. Tucker, Cornmr., Patna, Apr. 9, 1837, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Procs., Apr. 18 to 25, 1837, Apr. 18, no. 79; TradeofBengal , 1876–77 , p. 217; Hunter, AccountofSaran , p. 260; "Railway in Sarun," p. 376.
[40] P. C. Tallents, CensusofIndia , 1 921, vol. 7, BiharandOrissa , Part I, Report (Patna: Govt. Printing, 1923), p. 83.
[41] SDG1930 , pp. 138, 109, 143, 161–62; AGRPD 1892–93, p. 22; Hunter, AccountofSaran , pp. 258–59; J. B. Elliot to J. F. Shakespear, Suptd., Mar. 12, 1816, S.C., Letters Issued from 6–1–1815 to 11–4– 1816.
ever, its centrality defined not solely by its dependence on a river-borne trade but also by its importance in the traffic of merchandise flowing between Saran and the North-Western Provinces.[42]
Contrast the decline of these southern marketing centers, whose fortunes were partly tied to the river-based Chapra trade of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries with the rising prosperity of inland markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a prosperity that thrust the hinterland into the vortex of nationalist politics in the early 1920s. Siwan, Maharajganj, Mirganj, and Gopalganj, the four intermediate markets in the interior, were strategically located to service the trade flowing across the district on an east-west axis as well as toward Nepal in the north: Siwan lay approximately forty miles northwest of Chapra, Gopalganj twenty-one miles northeast of Siwan, Mirganj ten miles northwest of Gopalganj; and Maharajganj stood almost in the center of the district—twenty-five miles northwest of Chapra and ten miles southwest of Siwan. Like Chapra, each of these settlements served not only as a collection point for goods produced locally but also as a transshipment center for goods being moved in either direction: between north Bihar and Bengal on the one side and the North-Western Provinces on the other. As long as trade flowed primarily along the rivers, these interior markets commanded little of it. Nor were these sites well connected by roads until the late nineteenth century. However, the development of roads followed by the extension of railways into the interior in the late nineteenth century enhanced the status of these markets, as did the rising force of central-place symmetry, buoyed undoubtedly by the weakening pull of the Chirand-Chapra complex.[43]
As these markets grew in importance, they were able to offer a range of goods and services comparable to what could be obtained in Chapra. Some items were available only in Chapra; but even in the eighteenth century, intermediate markets trafficked in their own specialties. Siwan, for example, had long been a center of artisanal manufactures: of pottery and brass manufacture and of articles made of phul (a white metal of copper, saltpeter, and a small admixture of zinc); calico cloth, birdcages,
[42] Rankine, TopographyofSaran , p. 28; SDG 1908 , pp. 138, 147–48 , 150 , 158–59; Hunter, AccountofSaran , pp. 328–31.
[43] N. Sturt, Colltr., to BOR, July 4, 1800, S.C., Letters Sent, from Colltr. to Rev. Board, 1799–1801; SDG1908 , pp. 146–66; Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p . 3. See also above, chap. 1.
soap, and silver links were other notable products. An early-twentieth-century inventory of its industries indicates that it continued to support its special and highly skilled pottery, its glassblowing, its brass works, its sugar factory, and its tikuli making (glass plates encrusted with gold leaves). Maharajganj, for its part, possessed "a considerable iron industry," which produced iron for utensils and other products.[44]
Siwan had a head start on the other three intermediate markets because it was a "very large" settlement in the late eighteenth century. To continue in the words of the district magistrate of 1794, "[M]any bankers and merchants of considerable property reside there, and it is the place where the merchants trading from Benares and all parts of the Behar Province to Nepaul assemble and proceed from thence in bodies to dispose of their goods in Nepaul."[45] By 1872 its population stood at 11,099, and by 1891 it had peaked at 17,709. Although by 1921 its population, estimated at 11,862, had followed the downward trend that characterized towns throughout north Bihar in the 1890s and early 1900s, its role as a major intermediate market remained undiminished, indeed, was even enhanced by the advent of the railways.[46]
The qasba of Maharajganj-about which sufficient detail exists to highlight its role as an intermediate market vis-à-vis lower-order markets and the hinterland generally-is another instructive example of the changing spatial and hierarchical configuration of markets, as well as of the extensive links tying interior markets to extralocal networks. Furthermore, it once again highlights the patronage role of landholders in the development of markets.
This qasba's beginnings lie in Pasnauli village, which was given to Raja Murlidhar as a birtbrahmotar (rent-free grant to a Brahmin) in 1766-67. On taking possession of this largely uninhabited village, the raja "expended a large amount on some uncultivated ground upon which he erected and peopled a new gunge [ganj ]."[47] By 1791 it was already recognized as one of the principal ganjs of the district. By the late
[44] SDG1908 , pp. 158, 165; Lumsden Report; B. Jagadananda Sinha, "The Industries of Siwan," in Patna College, Chankya Society , 6thAnnualReport , 1915-16 , pp. 39-41; Behar Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition Committee, Industriesofthe PatnaDivision (Bankipore: Khadga Vilas Press, 1908), p. 73.
[45] C. Boddam, Magte, to Sir John Shore, G.G., May 5, 1794, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Apr. 11 to May 30, 1794, May 23, no. 10. Siwan and Maharajganj were located in pargana Bara, Mirganj in Kalyanpur Kuari, and Gopalganj in Sipah.
[46] SDG1930 , p . 1 53.
[47] Arzee from Himmut Bahadur, PFR, Jan. 2 to Dec. 28, 1775.
nineteenth century it had emerged as one of the largest bazaars in the district, perhaps second only to Revelganj. A visitor in 1870 found it "very thickly inhabited" and "a tolerably flourishing place." Available at its shops were maize (makai) , paddy, wheat, country sugar, and cotton, as well as, according to one informant, about a thousand strips of gunny (thirty feet long by one foot wide) and iron brought in from Gaya. The presence of vast quantities of spices convinced this 1870 visitor that it was "a great spice Bazaar-probably the largest in the district." In his estimation, Maharajganj's annual transactions totaled two thousand to three thousand rupees.48
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Maharajganj served as a focal point of trade for the entire region, from Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, as well as from Nepal. A primary collection point for surplus produce and a goods-and-service center for a marketing area extending over a five- to six-mile radius in every direction, particularly to the north, south, and west, it catered to those needs of the local population that could not be met by the periodic or standard markets in the locality. To the south, people from villages as far as six miles away came to sell their produce. To the east, the presence of the Gandaki River and of other markets reduced its pull. Village-by-village data for 1915-21 indicate that at least 161 villages were nested in its intermediate marketing area, which was inhabited by over eighty-six thousand people.49
For inhabitants of Manichapra, who had easy access to the standard markets of Rasulpur and Ekma, Maharajganj was the place for their "bigger purchases." And as the collection point for its intermediate area, it was the focal point of the surplus produce of the locality. Villagers from Khajuhan, for example, two miles away, carried their jute and molasses there for sale; from Tesuar, cultivators brought molasses, barley, and wheat, and from Atarsan molasses, potatoes, brinjals, and mustard seed. And from Ramapali, whose Dhanuks were known for their production of jute strips, jute was prepared for the Maharajaganj
[48] Diary of C. B. Garrett, Feb. 1 to 24, 1870, P.C. records, uncataloged. See also Hunter, AccountofSaran , p. 261; 1791 list; Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun .
[49] Compiled from Siwan and Basantpur thana village notes, SVN; J. B. Bourdillon, Magte., Saran, to Commr., no. 1562, June 16-17, 1892, P.C. Gen. Colltn., vol. 306, 1892.
market. Corn was supplied from other villages, such as Ramgarha and Lakipur.[50]
Maharajganj was a magnet for other reasons as well: it was the site of the locality's police station, dispensary, middle English school, post office, and a district board inspection bungalow. Like most higher-order markets, its economic and administrative salience was further enhanced by its religious importance: Maharajganj was the site of a Brahmasthan (sthan means place) , Kalisthan, Satisthan, a math (monastery), and several temples.[51]
These characteristics of the intermediate market of Maharajganj reiterate the differences between the three lowest rungs of the local marketing system. Because of the range and volume of goods and services available at each of these levels, the relative pull exerted by intermediate, standard, and periodic markets in their locality differed markedly. Compare, for instance, the spatial dimensions of Maharajganj's marketing area with that of the standard market of Pachrukhi or the periodic market of Jigrawan located within its intermediate marketing area. Maharajganj commanded the attention of buyers and sellers living in 161 villages scattered over an area spanning five or six miles. The marketing area of Pachrukhi, by contrast, essentially comprised a primary service area of 3 5 villages largely located within a three- to four-mile radius.[52]
Within the intermediate marketing area of Maharajganj were five haats—Jigrawan , Bhikhaban (Basantpur thana no. 144), Harpur (Siwan thana no. 396), Bishambharpur (Siwan thana no. 400), and Tarwara (Siwan thana no. 538). Except for Bhikhaban, which was one mile from Maharajganj, the other periodic markets in the marketing area focusing on Maharajganj were farther away, generally along the periphery of the marketing area. These different level markets were generally not in competition with one another. First, each offered a very
[50] Ramapali, Ramgarha and Lakipur village, Basantpur thana nos. 162, 170, and 171 respectively; Manichapra, Khajuhan, Tesuar, Atarsan village, Manjhi thana nos. 115, 1, 3, and 6, respectively, SVN.
[51] SDG1908 , p. 158; Siwan thana , SVN.
[52] Compiled from SVN, Siwan thana nos. 201–300, 301–400, 401–500, 501–588. For special purposes, such as the movement of gur from producing villages to markets, traders came from as far away as fourteen to sixteen miles. See, e.g., Panjwar village, Darauli thana no. 353, SVN, from where gur was transported to Maharajganj (sixteen miles away) and Pachrukhi (fourteen miles).
different range and volume of goods and services; second, the various haats were open on different days.[53]
Standard markets in the late eighteenth century typically offered agricultural products, both those grown in their locality and those brought in from the outside, as well as goods and services generally not available in the periodic markets. The police tax registers of 1793 reveal that this level of market was typically levied taxes ranging from as little as fifty rupees to as much as two hundred rupees, or approximately one twenty-eighth to one-seventh the amount collected from the Chapra market. The tax rolls for the standard market of Hassanpura, for instance, identify goldsmiths, sellers of oil, cloth dyers, cotton beaters, and confectioners as its taxpayers. At the standard market of Bagoura, shoppers were likely to find goldsmiths, sellers of oil, sellers of cotton, curriers and sellers of silk, cloth dyers, confectioners, bangle sellers, and cotton beaters, in addition to the usual range of shops devoted to selling agricultural produce.[54]
Detailed information from the early twentieth century presents a similar picture of standard markets, one that highlights their growing significance in rural society and ultimately their emergence as sites of contention during the Noncooperation Movement. The standard market of Basantpur counted 175 families in 1917, most of whom were engaged in trade and only a few nominally in cultivation. Of these, the principal families involved in trade were 7 Rauniar families, 5 Rastogi families dealing in cloth, 2 Barawar families in the spice trade, 20 Kalwar families, and 56 Madhesia Kandu families in grain, spices, and minor articles. Three Sonar families (2 of whom were nonresidents) also maintained shops where they carried on their traditional trade as goldsmiths. As a standard market, some goods were imported by cloth merchants who bought their material wholesale from Calcutta. Many from nearby villages offered their vegetables, spices, and other produce
[53] Jigrawan; Bhikhaban, Basantpur thana no. 144; Harpur, Siwan thana no. 396, Bishambharpur, Siwan thana no. 400, Tarwara, Siwan thana no. 538, SVN.
[54] Lumsden Report. See also J. R. Elphinstone, Colltr., to Thomas Graham, BOR, Nov. 23, 1802, S.C., Letters sent to BOR, June 27, 1801, to Dec. 26, 1802, on Barragaon, a standard market, which declined after 1802, when it was no longer home to a British battalion stationed there to combat the rebel Raja of Huseypur. In 1802 it supported twenty-one vendors of rice and dal or grain merchants, four curriers, five confectioners (halwais) , six betel leaf preparers and sellers (tamulis) , five druggists (pauseries) , six tobacconists, five silversmiths, nine fruit sellers, two money changers, nine vendors of milk, two naichabands (pipestem-makers), five cloth dealers, six vendors of wood, five shoemakers, and twenty-one butchers.
for sale at Basantpur. Much the same dimensions of a standard market in the early twentieth century characterized Bithuna, which lay in the vicinity of Basantpur and was frequented by people whose marketing needs were not met by their nearby periodic market. This 1918 source estimated an attendance of some four hundred people and seventy to eighty stalls and shops.[55]
Pachrukhi is another example of a standard market. It emerged because its landholder took advantage of its location on the railway line between Siwan and Chapra to establish a Monday and Thursday haat that made its mark by enticing traders from Maharajganj to use it as a place to purchase gur (unrefined sugar) from "surrounding villages." Within a fifteen-year period, it became a standard market, a collection point for as much as two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand rupees' worth of sugar purchased there annually for export to other marketing centers. In addition to serving as a bulking center for gur , it also had fifteen shops selling other goods, including grains, spices, and sweetmeats.[56]
Haats occupied the lowest rung of the marketing system. The police tax register for 1793 shows that these periodic markets paid as little as a few annas in taxes and at most fifty rupees. Panapur, identifiable as a haat in 1793, and again from the records of 1915 -21, was not unusual for this kind of market in that its shops only dealt in the sale of cloth and coarse grain (sattu) . Much more diversified was the periodic market of Kalyanpur in the vicinity of Bhorey, its shops offering in addition oil, fish, rice, peas, betel leaf, tobacco, and herbs.[57]
Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century data provide similar profiles. The haat of Nagra, largely populated and controlled by Muslims, bustled on Tuesdays and Thursdays, its customers coming to make purchases of "every sort of ordinary things." In the neighboring village of Kadirpur, in the 1890s, there sprang up a few shops run by people from nearby villages. These shops had the makings of a nascent haat and sold fish, vegetables, and oil. Two decades later this had turned into a regular biweekly haat (Tuesdays and Fridays), in contrast to the Tuesday and Thursday schedule of neighboring Nagra. The haat
[55] Bithuna and Basantpur villages, Basantpur thana nos. 294 and 358, SVN.
[56] Siwan thana no. 412.
[57] Lumsden report; Panapur, Mashrak thana no. 70, and Kalyanpur, Mirganj thana no. 364, SVN. Fifty rupees and above, according to the 1793 tax rolls, appears to have been a rough indication of a standard market.
at Dumri, held every Wednesday and Saturday at "a central spot in the village," is another example of a periodic market, albeit a large one. One visitor encountered twenty shops, of which three dealt in cloth, two in grain, and the rest in miscellaneous items. Of these he estimated that perhaps five or six may have had capital of more than one hundred rupees a year; the rest fell far below that level. Aphaur was yet another village with the essential elements of a haat . Also a market where "articles of ordinary daily use [were] sold," its population of almost twenty-five hundred people included a range of cultivating, landholding, moneylending, and laboring castes. But as its village note writer observed, the existence of the market also meant the presence of an oil presser (Teli), a tailor (Darzi), an ironsmith (Lohar), a weaver (Jolaha), and a Bania.[58]
As this reconstruction of the marketing system of Saran indicates, the bazaar at all its different levels was a venue of "a commingling of categories." Therefore the local dramas of Noncooperation staged at these places magnified the contradictions of local society, which surfaced in actions that were textualized as an agrarian script. Throughout 1921 and in the first months of 1922, the Sitamarhi area of Muzaffarpur became the "storm-centre of non-cooperation activity in the province." To cite the inflammatory language of a police report, it was in a state of "violence and general lawlessness brought about by agitators of the non-co-operation cult."[59] According to police reports, local leaders insisted that neither the chaukidari tax nor the land revenue be paid; shopkeepers selling "English cloth" were told not to engage in that business, with the warning that their shops would be looted if they did. The burning of bideshi (foreign) cloth and the picketing of shops, usually of toddy, cloth, liquor, and ganja (hemp), were common occurrences. A confidential police diary reported that a complete hartal (strike) called for April 6, 1921, led to "not a single shop . . [doing] any business and even the big Pethia [market] being deserted."[60]
In this charged atmosphere, a "general hatred" developed in Sitamarhi, particularly toward the police, who, according to one report,
[58] Aphaur and Kadirpur villages, Chapra thana nos. 389, 385, SVN; Nagra and Kadirpur villages, Chapra thana nos. 384 and 385, respectively, SVN, 1893-1901; "Report. . .on Village Dumri. . .," ChanakyaSociety , 5thAnnualReport , 1914-15 , pp. 65-66 .
[59] Wilson, Suptd., to Commr., Nov. 28, 1921, B & O Polit. Procs., Police, 1922, May, no. 1, enclosure; Non-Cooperationin Bihar , p. 94.
[60] "Confidential diary .. 9 th April 1921," B & 0 Police Procs., May 1922, no. 1.
were "daily being abused in filthy language." Local administrators found themselves deprived of the services and provisions customarily provided them when they were on tour in the countryside. The consequence of such a boycott, as one subdivisional officer discovered, was that he had to cut short his rounds as he "could get no help to erect his tent, or anything to eat, so had to return to Sitamarhi for his food. Europeans driving through the Subdivision are frequently pelted with bricks, mud or sticks." Frequent were the incidents involving the local European population, mostly indigo planters. At the Sitamarhi Mela in April 1921, a group of Europeans was "surrounded by a frenzied crowd, crying out 'Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai."'[61]
In Champaran in 1921 the name of Gandhi filled the air in the thanas of Bagaha, Lauriya, Dhanaha, and Jogapatti. The Noncooperation Movement in this district, as in Muzaffapur, led to "systematic antagonism against Government and Europeans," that is, against administrators and their functionaries, especially the police, and the local European indigo planters who played prominent roles in the political, social, and economic life of the district.
Police reports cite numerous instances of "large mobs numbering several thousands" marching in the vicinity of indigo factories shouting "Gandhijee-ki-jai." Repeated attempts were made to induce factory workers to leave their service, in one case, resulting in a group of ten men beating up a factory servant who refused to quit. In February 1921, employees of the Majowah factory in Bagaha were attacked. In July a "mob" pursued the patwari (village accountant) of Baikunthpur Factory in Dhanaha thana from village to village, finally catching him and assaulting him. Factory property also came under attack: on three separate occasions in November 1921 parts of the Chauterwa factory were set on fire.[62]
But in Muzaffarpur as well as in Champaran, the Noncooperation Movement triggered actions sparked by local agrarian conflicts. As the
[61] Suptd., Muzaffarpur, to Commr., Nov. 28, 1921, in ibid., no. 1, enclosure; P.T. Mansfield letters, Apr. 4, 1921 , Box IA, vol. 3, July 31, 1920–29.
[62] Notes by F. S. McNamara, Suptd., Police, Champaran, Nov. 18 and 19, 1921, and Suptd., Champaran, to I.G., Police, B & O, no. 2281, Nov. 6, 1921, B & O Polit. Procs., Police, 1922, June, no. 3, enclosure, and no. 1. See also Girish Mishra, Agrarian ProblemsofPermanentSettlement:ACaseStudyofChamparan (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1978); Jacques Pouchepadass, PlanteursetPaysansdansL'IndeColoniale:L'lndigoduBiharetleMouvementGandhiendu Champaran(1917–1918) (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1986), for the antecedents of this antagonism.
Congress newspaper, Searchlight , remarked, the "unrest among the masses. . . is largely agrarian, directed more against the landlords and planters than against the Government." P. T. Mansfield, the Sitamarhi subdivisional officer, echoed this finding. "People entirely disregard authority," he noted, referring not only to the activities associated with the Noncooperation Movement but also to such incidents as the attempt to rescue a "debtor from the custody of two civil court peons" and the difficulty landlords experienced in collecting rent in Belsand thana .[63]
The "spirit of lawlessness" also assumed the form of haat looting in Muzaffarpur in early 1921; the government sought to pin the blame on the "sympathisers" of the movement, but, as the Congress newspaper pointed out, its volunteers had tried to stop it. These cases generally involved people of low castes and of little means attempting to enforce lower prices. At Sakri Saraya, ten people were said to have looted the market in January because prices were not lowered. Two men claiming to speak for the government demanded that fish be sold in the market of Pakri at the reduced price of one anna per seer. Threats were also leveled at sellers at another market; they were warned that their fish and meat would be looted if they did not reduce prices.[64]
Similarly, the Noncooperation Movement in Champaran developed an agrarian "complex" as "systematic antagonism against Government and Europeans [was] . . . extended to all loyal zemindars and raiyats." The bazaar became, as in Muzaffapur, the locus of activity, particularly in the southern portion of the district, as "a general attack on all bazaars owned by Europeans [ensued,] with the object of breaking them up and causing loss. The idea being that if these Europeans are caused loss they will leave the country."[65]
In four different localities of Champaran, "noncooperators" attempted to establish haats to compete with those controlled by the indigo factories. Through persuasion or coercion, they sought to direct local inhabitants away from the old markets and toward the new ones. In the name of Gandhi acts of "haat looting" were also carried out.
[63] Note with W. Swain, Offg. I.G., Police, B & O, to Chief Secy., B & O, no. 8400-A, Dec. 10, 1921, B & O Police Procs., May 1922, no. 2, enclosure; Mansfield letters, vol. 3, 1920-29; Searchlight , Feb. 2, 1921.
[64] Non-CooperationinBihar , pp. 214, 216, 222; Searchlight , Jan. 28, 1921; telegram from Viceroy, Jan. 21, 1921, GOI, Public and Judicial, L/P&J/6/1730 , J&P 486/21.
[65] Suptd. to I.G., Police, B & O, no. 2281, Nov. 6, 1921, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 1, enclosure.
Typically, these incidents involved people marching into markets and imposing and enforcing just prices; on many occasions goods were looted when prices were not lowered. There were a number of instances of "haat looting" of fish and meat in Champaran.[66]
Another issue that manifested a decidedly agrarian character was the conflict over the payment of abwabs , or cesses. This conflict was centered in precisely those areas of Bettiah subdivision that had "for many years past been notorious for the friction and ill-feeling between the landlords who hold villages under lease from the Bettiah and Ramnagar estates and their tenants."[67]
The agrarian script in Saran was enacted in the Katia and Bhorey area. Over a twelve-month period in 1921 and 1922 a wave of "lawlessness," attributed by local authorities to the nationalist movement, swept thirty-eight villages in the locality, which was dominated by the great estate of Hathwa. But along with the picketing of liquor shops and the attacks on the police, including several cases of arson involving police stations, there were also assaults on chaukidars and attempts to interfere with the collection of the chaukidari tax. One police station diary recorded as many as fifty-three complaints of "threats against the rural police" filed between January and November 1921.
No less conspicuous were the overt and open expressions of hostility directed at the maharaja of Hathwa by his tenants, who were increasingly recalcitrant about paying their rent. According to a police diary of April 1922, the estate's patwaris (accountants) were "threatened with assault or arson" on four separate occasions; in other instances, various other officials of the estate were attacked. Throughout the area—a locality where disputes between the local population and the estate dated back to the early nineteenth century—conflicts with tenants were commonplace.[68]
Although geographically peripheral—far removed from Patna and even farther removed from the Chirand-Chapra area—Katia and Bhorey
[66] E. L. L. Hammond, Chief Secy., GOB&O, to Secy., GOI, Home, Nov. 6, 1921, Public and Judicial, L/P&J/6/1775 , J & P 7363/21; Non-CooperationinBihar , pp. 225–29; Stephen Henningham, PeasantMovementsinColonialIndia , NorthBihar , 1917–1942 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1982), pp. 98–99.
[67] Hammond to Secy., no. 4364P-C, Nov. 6, 1921, L/P&J/6/1775, 1921.
[68] Comments of A. P. Middleton, Magte., cited in H. W. P. Scroope, Commr., Tirhut, to I.G., no. J-19 87 , May 22, 1922, and E. A. O. Perkin, Suptd., Police, Saran, to P.A. of I.G., Police, B & O., no. 3168, May 8, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50. See also my LimitedRaj , pp. 222-24, for additional details regarding these disputes.
were choice targets for Noncooperation because two of the seven police stations in Gopalganj subdivision were located there. These places, that is, were more than marketing centers: they were home to the deepest extension of the colonial state, the machinery of the police. Both Katia and Bhorey, however, were distant police outposts. Thus, the official response to the outbreak of "lawlessness" in these localities "completely cut off from the rest of the district" was to impose a punitive police presence. Local administrators were aware that Katia "police-station is badly situated being nearly 80 miles from headquarters [Chapra], 25 by road from the nearest railway station [Mirganj], and 14 from any Telegraph office [Hathwa]. Bhore police-station is not much better situated."[69]
Such distance existed (and persisted), notwithstanding growing marketing symmetry, because the gravitational pull of the southeastern quadrant centered on Chapra remained compelling, its drawing power reinforced by its administrative salience. From the outset of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century, Chapra was the designated headquarters. All the "public offices" staffed by the British were located there except for that of Henry Revel, the collector of government customs, whose posting at Godna led to its subsequent emergence as Revelganj. From this commercial-cum-administrative apex, the state gradually extended its reach into the interior over the course of nineteenth century. This never extended much beyond the subdivisional level, however. In addition to Chapra a second administrative jurisdiction was created in 1848, with the founding of Siwan subdivision; a third subdivision, with Gopalganj as the headquarters, was carved out in 1875.[70]
The most intrusive and coercive machinery of the state was its system of police organized by police thanas (a police circle that was generally a smaller unit than the revenue thana) and outposts. Confined initially to such intermediate markets as Siwan, Goldinganj, Manjhi, and Darauli, the thanas were subsequently expanded, the headquar-
[69] Scroope to I.G., no. J-1987, May 22, 1922, and note by C. W. T. Feilman, Offg. Deputy I.G., B & 0 Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50.
[70] For revenue purposes, subdivisions were further organized into thanas . In the mid-nineteenth century the district had ten thanas: Chapra, Dighwara, Parsa, Manjhi, Basantpur, Mashrak, Siwan, Darauli, Baragaon, and Barauli. Later in the century, Sonepur replaced Dighwara; and Baragaon and Barauli gave way to Katia and Bhorey. Chapra, Manjhi, Mashrakh, Parsa, and Sonepur formed Chapra subdivision; Siwan, Basantpur, and Darauli constituted Siwan subdivision; and Gopalganj and Mirganj—both Katia and Bhorey were part of Mirganj thana—made up Gopalganj.
ters of many of them established in settlements that were standard markets. In the 1920s the district had twenty-eight "independent" police stations in all: twelve in Chapra subdivision, nine in Siwan, and seven in Gopalganj.
"Formal government," as Hagen states, "roughly coincided with market place levels.. . . [These] stood out obviously as the backbone of settlement patterns and human interaction down which trickled a modest formal government. The informal political context, or hierarchies of control, on the other hand, had a more equal but complex relationship with the economic system."[71] The superimposition of an administrative grid on higher-order markets, in other words, was a regular feature of the Indian landscape. Thus, colonial administration was designed to fit in with the higher-order markets and to reach down to the level of standard markets.
The maintenance of an administrative presence at the higher levels of the local marketing system and the siting of administrative headquarters in towns and other large settlements reflected the ambition of the colonial state to prevent competing centers of power from flourishing at the highest-order marketing nodes. In part, government's goal was to safeguard its share of the revenue, which it facilitated by taking up residence in the main centers of commerce; in part, it sought to preserve law and order. But the control network of the state clearly tapered off sharply at the intermediate, and especially the standard, market level; lower-order markets and their hinterlands were largely beyond the pale of direct government control.
The events of Katia and Bhorey in 1921-22 therefore point to another principle underlying the dynamics of the local marketing system: the relationship of bazaars to landholders and their networks of control and power. To focus on this aspect requires looking at the ties that bound Katia and Bhorey to Hathwa, the seat of the great estate of Hathwa and not coincidentally also the site of a standard market. Bhorey, in fact, was one of the administrative and rent collection points for the great estate. These two localities, moreover, were problem areas for Hathwa, a consideration that made at least one local administrator hesitate to assign punitive police there, because, as he observed, the estate was "on bad terms with its tenants. . . and though the [Hathwa]
[71] Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," p. 145; SDG1930 , pp. 120, 158-59; Hunter, AccountofSaran , p. 344.
Raj as Zamindar would have to bear its share of the cost, the assessment of the entire areas would tend to create the idea that it is specially directed against recalcitrant tenants of the Raj."[72]
This conflict grew out of deep-rooted animosities in the Bhorey area. An early chapter of this history of conflict was the so-called internal rising of 1844, when Bujahawan Misra, a Brahmin of Bhorey, supported by Bhumihar Brahmins and peasants of his locality, claimed an extensive tract of land, including the former zamindari headquarters of Huseypur, as his rent-free grant (birt) . In the ensuing conflict, several clashes took place before government intervened on behalf of Hathwa and quelled the disturbance. By the early twentieth century, the village was riven by a factionalism that pitted a group of Bhumihar Brahmins against a group of Brahmins, a conflict echoing the historic tensions in the locality between the Bhumihar landholder of the area, the maharaja of Hathwa, and the village-level elite, the Brahmins. Where the twentieth-century version differs from the early-nineteenth-century story is in the ostensibly more caste-centered alignment of the opposing groups, for the earlier struggle had involved the Brahmin supporters of the ousted Bhumihar Huseypur raja and their multicaste tenants, on the one side, and the Bhumihar cadet line of the Huseypur family, the Hathwa raja, on the other.[73]
No wonder the political struggle for independence in Katia and Bhorey was infused with local social and economic issues of a distinctly agrarian complex, a weaving together of conditions and causes that ultimately underlined Hathwa dominance throughout Gopalganj subdivision, as well as the involvement of landholders in the founding and control of markets. Both of these aspects are well illustrated by the links between Katia and Bhorey, on the one hand, and Hathwa, on the other, connections that yet again reiterate the extent to which the market structured events and processes.
Tied to one another by a metaled road built in the late nineteenth century, Katia and Bhorey were also connected to Hathwa, and all
[72] Scroope to I.G, no. J-19 87 , May 22, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50; G. J. S. Hodgkinson, Manager, Court of Wards, Hathwa, to C. B. Garrett, Colltr., no. A, Feb. 20, 1872, Bengal Rev. Procs., Jan.-Apr. 1872, Apr., no. 149; A. M. Markham, Manager, Hathwa, to Colltr., no. 240, Apr. 26, 1899, Bengal Rev. Procs., Sept.-Oct. 1899, Sept., nos. 93–94, appendix E.
[73] LimitedRaj , pp. 141–54, 223; Bhorey village, Mirganj thana no. 230, SVN. Bhorey was also the area from where desertions repeatedly took place in the late nineteenth century.
three to the intermediate market of Mirganj. Contrast these ties cemented literally by a major road with the fact that neither Katia nor Bhorey was as well connected by roads to its subdivision headquarters of Gopalganj. On the contrary, from Katia the way to Gopalaganj was mostly via a third-class road; and from Bhorey, the best route was to take the first-class road south to Mirganj and then head north to Gopalganj, which was roughly on the same latitude.
A haat in 1793, Hathwa's stature as a marketing settlement rose with its emergence as the headquarters village of the great estate. Formerly known as the Huseypur raj, the estate had been based in Huseypur (thana no. 362), sixteen miles to the northwest of Hathwa, an important standard market more prosperous than either Katia or Bhorey.[74]
By the 1840s Hathwa was described as having "large bazaars" and biweekly markets. Fort, palace, and bazaar: all the markers reflecting and exercising the power and authority of this great estate were thus in place by the early nineteenth century. In the 1870s the buildings and bazaar surrounding the Hathwa fort where the raja resided were razed and a new bazaar erected at great expense: the bazaar alone cost over Rs. 5,700 to build. An early-twentieth-century account describes Hathwa as an impressive standard market, its shops offering a range of agricultural and consumer goods and its specialists providing a variety of services. The presence of schools and temples further accentuated its centrality in the locality. Its salience-and its value to the estate-can also be quantified: the estate collected Rs. 1,400 per annum as professional tax from traders stationed there.[75]
The strongest link tying Katia and Bhorey to Hathwa was the network shaped by the great estate's system of control. Because Hathwa was the hub, it was the seat of the raja's residential palace; and Hathwa and its nearby villages housed most of the key retainers of the estate. In addition to the estate kachcheri (office), located in the Hathwa cluster
[74] Although it persisted as a standard market in the early twentieth century, when it was characterized as a "big village" with a haat featuring foodstuffs, vegetables, utensils, spices, sweetmeats, clothes, meat, and fish, it was no longer on a par with Katia or Bhorey. Katia's market rental was Rs. 790 per annum, or more than three times that of Huseypur (Rs. 250). Huseypur and Katia village, Mirganj thana nos. 362 and 446, SVN; Lumsden report.
[75] Mirganj thana nos. 1001 to 1064, 901 to 1000, esp. Hathwa, no. 1008, SVN; Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p. 10; "Management of the Hutwa Estate during 1873-74," Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1873-75, Aug. 1874, nos. 2-3.
of villages, were the estate manager's bungalow, the diwan's house, the Hathwa Eden school, the post office, the raj dispensary, and the temple called Gopalmandir.
Like Katia and Bhorey, Hathwa was not only a standard market but also part of a larger economic system, in this case centering on the intermediate market of Mirganj. Proximity made the tie to Hathwa closer—Mirganj is only two and one-half miles away; Katia and Bhorey were farther afield at twenty-two and fifteen miles, respectively. A Sunday and Thursday market, Hathwa relied on Mirganj's Tuesday and Friday market that emerged in the nineteenth century as an intermediate market with a much wider range of goods and services. Consider the roster of shops existing in the two markets. Hathwa bazaar had two retail cloth shops, eleven confectioners' shops, twenty-five kanjurais(kunjras , Muslim vegetable seller) shops, fifteen grain (galdar) shops, four betel shops, eight tailor's shops, three dyer's shops, and one ganja and opium shop. Mirganj, on the other hand, had seventeen retail cloth shops, nineteen grain golas , three metal dealers, six spice shops, twenty pulse shops, six confectioners, ten oil shops, seven shops selling miscellaneous commodities, eleven silk makers, twelve tailor shops, seven meat butchers, three ghee shops, four iron shops, twelve jewelers, and three betel shops. Cattle were also sold. It was, in addition, an entrepôt for grain from the north and northwest, which was then exported to Patna and elsewhere. Furthermore, several Patna merchants stationed agents there for linseed, cotton, and gur .[76]
As a standard market, Hathwa was linked to but also overshadowed by the intermediate market of Mirganj. Their complementary economic relationship was reinforced by their communication links. The so-called Hathwa railway station was in Mirganj—the branch line of the Bengal and North-Western Railway linking Siwan to Thawe intersected it—as were the police station and subregistry office for the locality. In other words, Mirganj was part of the Hathwa system of control; its very development stemmed from Hathwa efforts.[77] Moreover, the
[76] Hathwa and Mirganj, Mirganj thana nos. 1008, 1021; also nos. 1–100; SDG1930 , p. 148; Limited Raj , pp. 119–21. The shift from Huseypur to Hathwa occurred in the wake of the rebellion of the Huseypur raja, Fateh Sahi, in 1767, which led to the transfer of this great estate to the cadet line of the family. Turned over in 1791 to his kinsman, Chatterdhari Sahi, the new raja, on attaining his majority in 1802, shifted the headquarters of the estate to Hathwa—a place that does not show up in the 1793 tax rolls of markets—where he built a fort and a palace.
[77] Mirganj village, Mirganj thana no. 1021, also nos. 1008–21, SVN; SDG , 1930 , pp. 148, 159, 162–77; LimitedRaj , pp. 121–22.
role of Mirganj as the main marketing node in the vicinity of Hathwa reflected the dominant presence of the great estate in another respect: Mirganj allowed the Hathwa raj to keep the state at a distance, at arm's length from its seat of power, a feat that would have been far more difficult to accomplish had Hathwa developed into an intermediate market and therefore attracted the attention of state power. Higher-order marketing nodes naturally drew government attention: the siting of a police station in Mirganj is one illustration of this rule. A similar process no doubt explains the symbolic connotations of the act of situating the Hathwa bazaar at a remove from the Hathwa fort, where the raja resided.
The lengths to which zamindars, especially great landholders, were willing to go to keep government at bay is illustrated by a wellknown nineteenth-century case involving the maharaja of Bettiah, whose estate extended across much of Champaran. When government sought to station an assistant or deputy magistrate in Bettiah in 1845, the raja refused to provide space, conceding only that he "could grant no allotment of ground nearer than 2 coss or 4 miles from Bettiah." To continue in the words of this district administrator, the raja consistently endeavored "to prevent as much as he possibly can, the confirmation of the Government order; indeed, were I to believe one half of the reports that are current, he would give a lack [lakh] of rupees to have the cutcherry [office] removed some distance from Bettiah."[78]
Fifteen years later, in 1860, local administrators were still trying to stake out an official presence in this "large Native Town" of almost fifteen thousand people that stood at the center of the lines of trade and traffic of the district. Furthermore, Bagaha thana , an area of intense activity in 1921-22, was at a distance of sixty miles from the district headquarters of Motihari. As the magistrate observed:
In Bettiah the word of the Rajah or his seal is the law. It is true there is a Darogah [police officer] there but what can he do? If he does his duty he has all the Rajah's Amla [retainers] against him. They will, by perpetually bringing frivolous or false charges, sooner or later prejudice the Magistrate against him. If they fail with one Magistrate, they will succeed with another. . .
[78] H. Alexander, Joint Magte., Champaran, to Secy., GOB, no. 121, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., May 14 to June 4, 1845, June 4, no. 45 .
On the other hand, if the Darogah does not do his duty he risks his appointment. Bettiah is thirty miles from Moteeharry.[79]
Chaukidars in Bettiah, as the commissioner noted, consulted with the raja or with his agents before conveying information to the police.[80]
Although this episode ends with the great estate capitulating to the demands of government, its details rightly point to another significant feature relating to the emergence of the bazaar as the site and scene of social and political action: the significant involvement of landholders in the affairs of the bazaar, as also in the establishment and maintenance of fairs. The Hathwa hand, so visible because of its size and activity, can be clearly seen at work in developing markets throughout its estate. Much of the intensification of markets that has been traced for the north and northwestern thanas of Mirganj and Gopalganj in the nineteenth century can be attributed to the emergence of this great estate. Because of its political and social control of the area, as well as its considerable economic resources, the estate was instrumental in having this formerly market-poor subdivision of Gopalganj catch up with the rest of the district in number of markets.[81]
Hathwa's attention to markets was not confined to its residential village or to settlements in the heart of its estate. As early as 1794 the estate's strategy of expansion was to "purchase . . . lands."[82] Chapra and Revelganj were two places where it acquired substantial interests during the course of the nineteenth century. In 1873–74, for instance, the estate sank Rs. 108,200 into the purchase of a half-share of Ratanpura, a hamlet of Chapra. By 1886 Hathwa had gained control of the entire village. It also secured substantial interests in Revelganj, particularly in Godna, where it first erected a bungalow and then proceeded to purchase nearby lands, which became the site of its bazaar and grain golas .[83]
[79] H. H. Robinson, Magte., Champaran, to Commr., Patna, no. 97, May 21, 1860, Bengal Jdcl. Procs., Jan 1861, no. 142.
[80] H. D. H. Fergusson, Commr., Patna, to Secy., GOB, no. 192, June 18, 1860, ibid., no. 141. See also J. F. Lynch, Deputy Magte., Bettiah, to F. M. Halliday, Magte., Champaran, no. 66, July 19, 1862, Bengal Jdcl. Consltns., Mar. 1863, no. 131, for an official who preferred to reside in Motihari than live in Bettiah, where he claimed he could not secure a place to stay and where he would have had to contend with the powerful influence of its Maharaja.
[81] Mirganj and Gopalganj thana village notes, SVN; Lumsden report; Montgomerie report.
[82] F. Hawkins, Colltr., Saran, to BOR, Nov. 17, 1794, Bengal BOR Procs., Wards, July 4 to Dec. 11, 1794, Dec. 11.
[83] "Management of Hutwa during 1873–74"; Chapra thana nos. 283, 215 and 216, SVN, 1893–1901; and J. MacLeod, Deputy Colltr., to J.J. Grey, Colltr., Sept. 21,1865, S.C., Letters Sent to the Commr. of Patna, Aug. 16, 1865 to Oct. 1866. Bettiah, Champaran's major landholder, was a long-standing rival of Hathwa and the primary proprietor of the main Revelganj market.
Hathwa was not alone in playing the market strategy. One dynamic underlying the growing symmetry in distribution of markets was the active role of landholders in establishing them. Maharajganj and Pachrukhi, discussed earlier to highlight the dimensions of an intermediate and a standard market respectively, provide two clear-cut examples of landholders purposively taking on the task of building up markets. The substantial market of Maharajganj, as already noted, grew out of the village of Pasnauli in the 1760s, when its landholder established a ganj on its uncultivated land. Similarly, Pachrukhi, founded in 1901, sprang to life because its "proprietor," Moti Chand, took advantage of its location on the railway line to erect some houses on the parti (waste or uncultivated land) area near the village's railway station. By enticing traders from Maharajganj to frequent the village to purchase gur from "surrounding villages," he managed in the course of fifteen years to turn the village into a standard market.[84]
Classical central-place theory, as these two illustrations suggest and additional data confirm, can only partly explain the geographical pattern of markets; it certainly cannot satisfactorily account for all the forces that led to a particular geographical distribution of markets; nor can it resolve why some areas of the south and the east had a higher clustering of marketing nodes than others. Instructive examples are provided by the parganas of Bal and Goa (latter-day thanas of Chapra, Parsa, and Mashrak) at the turn of the nineteenth century, an area by then already highly cultivated, well populated, and intersected by some of the district's best communication lines. Also significant about this area is that its settlement and landholding patterns endowed certain families with decisive power in these localities. Pargana Bal was the area in which related Eksaria Bhumihar Brahmin families established residential headquarters at Parsa, Chainpur, and Bagoura, zamindari centers that also became the prime marketing settlements in their localities. As one contemporary observer noted, the zamindars of Parsa, Chainpur, and Bagoura "exercised great influence over the inhabitants of this Pergunnah."[85] Their "influence"
[84] Pachrukhi village, Siwan thana no. 412, SVN; Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p. 11 ; 1792 list.
[85] Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , p. 7; Manjha Family history, unpublished ms., compiled by N. K. Roy, Assistant Manager and Treasury Officer, n.d., interview with Hari Surendra Sahi, Rusi Kothi, Chapra, Saran, May 1974.
was spelled out in the late-eighteenth-century tax roster of markets, which recorded their proprietorship over many of Bal's markets. Branches of this clan, which had set up additional zamindaris in Rusi, Khaira, Manjha (Dangsi), and Salempur, commanded markets in parganas Bara, Barrai, and Dangsi (Siwan subdivision), three other areas with large numbers of markets.[86]
Amnaur, Mashrak, Tajpur, and Makair are other notable examples of zamindari centers that doubled as standard markets. In south India, too, landholder involvement with markets was commonplace, many markets convening at or near the residences of zamindars. Throughout the subcontinent, as Richard G. Fox writes, "much of the history of town formation has to do with a local raja , navab , or big zamindar who established a town or created a market. This sort of petty nobility or local strong men endowed towns and began market places and, traditionally, provided supra-caste integration to them."[87] The development of market settlements as zamindari centers in north India "was probably internal to the process of growth in the marketing system. This was because Rajput, Bhumihar or Jat lineage elites and rajas founded markets where there was already a good degree of peasant interaction and where merchants would be expected to gather. While most central places combined several functions, political circumstances or temporary economic situations related to non-local trade might determine that some were overwhelmingly more important in one function than others."[88]
Markets in Saran above the periodic and standard size, except for Darauli, which formed part of the large estate of the Gorakhpur-based raja of Majhauli, and Manjhi, which belonged to the Muslim Manjhi family of Shahamat Ali Khan, were, however, generally not the property of individual landholders. Higher-order markets were too big and too complex to remain intact in the hands of one family, especially given the fact that the standard nineteenth-century experience of many Saran estates was that of increasing fissioning and subdivisions. Moreover, except for Hathwa and a few large zamindars, the district was largely in the hands of many small landholders.
[86] 1792 list; TheLimitedRaj .
[87] FromZamindartoBallotBox , p. 70; Christopher Baker, "Tamilnad Estates in the zoth Century," IESHR 13 (1976):14.
[88] C. A. Bayly, "The Small Town and Islamic Gentry in North India: The Case of Kara," in TheCityinSouth Asia , p. 21.
Because of the pattern of landholding in the district, the role of small landholders in the intensification of markets cannot be ignored. Pargana Goa's markets typify this pattern of growth. In the late eighteenth century its markets were in the hands of many, a trend also discernible from the early-twentieth-century information on thanas Mashrak and Parsa, areas which encompassed that pargana and which remained rich in markets. Most thanas characterized by large numbers of small landholders—Sonepur, where the average estate size was four acres, and Parsa, Mashrak, Siwan, and Darauli, where it was seven, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, respectively—were also localities with the highest shares of markets.[89]
One manifestation of landholder involvement in the founding, development, and control of markets was the intense competition waged by rival zamindars, a rivalry that often erupted into open conflict. As early as 1789, local administrators had to enforce as "an established usage, that no market shall be erected in the vicinity of another, or be held on the same day, to its prejudice.. . . [But the] word 'vicinity' must be construed by the collector, and give rise to numberless disputes."[90] Typical of such cases was the dispute between Subh Narain and Bhore Narain, referred to the civil courts in 1802, because the latter had started a new haat in "Hoosypoor" village that threatened to disrupt the business of the long-standing minor market of the former in adjoining "Simurdah." The presiding official noted that "frequent complaints. . . [were made] by zemindars. . . relative to the institution of Hauts or markets, in the neighbourhood of others which have been established for many years."[91]
The establishment of new haats and the disputes that ensued in the wake of their founding continued to be sources of conflict well into the twentieth century. Such confrontations, well documented in the criminal records, frequently turned violent. In the words of one police report, an enduring source of criminality was the "trouble arising from
[89] SSR , p. 129; LimitedRaj , pp. 76–77. Chapra was another thana with small estates—nine acres; Basantpur, thirteen; Darauli, thirteen. For example, the large zamindari of Manjhi (the third largest revenue payer in 1793, responsible for over 8 percent of the district revenue), was faced increasingly with the breakup of the estate into smaller and smaller shares due to rising numbers of heirs whose mismanagement and internal bickering led to villages being sold off to outside interests.
[90] Thomas Law, ASketchofSomeLate Arrangements , andaViewof theRisingResourcesinBengal (London: John Stockdale, 1792), p. 114.
[91] C. Boddam, Judge, Sarun, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy., Jdcl., Bengal Civil Jdcl. Consltns., Apr. 22 to June 24, 1802, Apr. 29, no. 5.
the quarrels of rival setters-up of markets."[92] Representative of this kind of "trouble" is the 1863 case involving the maliks (proprietors, owners) of Alhunpore, who attempted to construct a new haat next to an existing one at Khodaibagh. In the "serious disturbance" that ensued, "several men were wounded. Some of the rioters have been punished by imprisonment for two years and Rs. zoo fine each."[93]
The Noncooperation Movement in Champaran pursued a deliberate strategy of establishing new markets to compete with existing ones. Time and again attempts were made to prevent people from patronizing markets controlled by European indigo planters. In many instances, rival haats were founded. Local officials, seeking to disband these new, rival markets, prosecuted people under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allowed magisterial officers to issue "temporary orders in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger," the "danger" and "nuisance" stemming from the new markets competing with and even displacing existing ones. People implicated in these incidents were charged with unlawfully restraining others from resorting to old markets, illegally starting new ones in the ambit of existing markets, and violating orders not to establish new ones.[94]
Zamindars vied with one another for the control of markets-as they also did for melas-because they were a reliable source of income and prestige: they allowed landholders to play the role of patron. Especially in lower-order markets, where the influence and power of landholders was most prevalent, the opportunities for profit were manifold. With the state largely absent at this level of society (and indeed, only nominally represented at even the higher-order markets) the only challenge to their supremacy was that posed by rival landholders.
Official interest in markets was largely defined by revenue and considerations of law and order. Government's stake in them was otherwise minimal and had been so from the outset of colonial rule. As articulated by one district official in 1771, in a voice almost suggestive of disinterest, markets were the "property of the zemindars in whose Districts they are, and included in their Agreements [with government]." On another occasion, this same official declared that there were no
[92] "Resolution," Bengal Police Procs., June 1873, p. 118.
[93] GOB, ReportonthePoliceofthePatnaDivisionfortheYear 1863 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Office, 1864), p. 61.
[94] Non-cooperationinBihar , pp. 224-29.
markets "dependent on government," nor were there any that did not belong to landholders.[95]
Contrast the limited presence of the state in the operations of markets with the elaborate mechanisms and processes of control maintained by the zamindars. The 1790s case of the intermediate market of Goldinganj, whose zamindar was prosecuted for continuing to collect dues in the market even though government had assumed "all gunges, bazars [sic] and hauts," provides a telling example. The Goldinganj zamindar, Mulchand, was singled out for punishment because his case was to serve as an example of the state's prerogative to restrict the rights of landholder to collect dues—because the practice of sayer (taxes on nonland items such as on markets and customs and transit duties) had been abolished. However, this was only one instance, and a rare exception to the rule of allowing landholders a free rein over their markets. Other than the targeting of a few landholders for illegally collecting market dues in the early 1790s, government never again made any concerted effort to stamp out the practice.[96]
Government's investigation into the practices obtaining at Goldinganj revealed that every shop was required to pay a "ground rent" to the market darogha (steward), who collected on behalf of his employer. In addition, as Beni Bakkal, the market weighman, testified, fees were also levied on a variety of transactions. Merchants importing salt for sale at this market paid a few copper coins (two falus and twelve dams) per maund. Additional collections were made by Mulchand's retainers (amla) from buyers and shopkeepers who came to buy, as well as from sellers who came to offer their wares. The rates varied from item to item: for example, purchasers of gur and sugar paid nine dams and three couries per rupee, while those selling these goods paid less, six dams per rupee. Grain sellers were charged by the bullock load, one seer for every load. Other fees were levied to subsidize the pay of the market staff: for the weighmen, who numbered eight in all, for the chaudhuri , whose job was "to collect from moodies and other sellers of goods in gunge and to encourage and protect beoparries," and for the
[95] E. Golding to G. Vansittart, Chief &c Council of Rev., Patna, May 3, 1772, PFR, Jan. 2 to Mar. 30, 1772, vol. 3; Golding, Supervisor, Sarun, to J. Jekyll, Chief &c. Council of Rev., Patna, 6 Oct. 1771, PFR, Aug. 3, 1771 to Mar. 30, 1772. See also Law, Sketch ofArrangements , pp. 154–59.
[96] Montgomerie, Colltr., to C. Stuart, Pres. &c. BOR, July 6, 1790, Bengal BOR Procs., Salt, Sayer, Opium, and Customs, May 3 to Dec. 29, 1790, Sept. 8.
peons, mutasaddis (writers), and pasabans (watchmen) who comprised the rest of the staff.[97] According to Mulchand, the charges levied at the market had been agreed upon by mutual consent when "beoparries and mahajuns" (traders and moneylenders or bankers) came to him en masse to seek his protection. Other than ground rent, he claimed, the rest of the monies collected was used to defray various expenses: paying the market staff, maintaining a godown for the storage of salt, hauling water to the market, or transporting sepoy battalions of the East India Company across the Ganges. And whatever sums remained were given to charity. In the estimation of the police tax rolls, Goldinganj earned at least one thousand rupees per annum for its landholder.[98]
The prosecution of the Goldinganj zamindar in 1793-he was fined three thousand rupees and imprisoned for six months-did little to stop the levying of "illegal cesses" (abwabs) . Throughout the colonial period landholders continued to impose and collect a wide variety of illegal imposts. Markets in particular were valuable sources of income for their holders, who profited from the collection of ground rent and from fees or dues levied on practically every type of establishment set up there, as well as on every form of transaction enacted there. Typically, fees were levied on stalls erected in haats . In Dumuria each stall paid kouri , a nominal fee of one and a half pies per haat day (twelve pies = one anna; sixteen annas = one rupee). In Bishunpore, vegetable, sattu, and oil shops each paid one-half pice (three pie = one pice; four pice = one anna); the vegetable shop also gave some vegetables. Rice, gram, wheat, and presumably other grain shops offered a "handful of grains," while cloth shops, which must have made the most money on their sales, were levied the highest fee-one anna per month. At Barahima shopkeepers selling goods brought by them personally had to pay one quarter of a dhegua (or twelve kauris per head) and those who used bullocks to transport their goods paid twice as much, half a dhegua or twenty-four kauris each. Every cartload of merchandise brought in for sale paid six pies; cloth dealers gave three pies per shop. At Mirganj the Hathwa raj charged four annas for each cartload of
[97] Deposition of Benee Bukkaul, weighman, and of Moolchund, chaudhuri , with J. Lumsden, Colltr., Saran, to Wm. Cowper &c., BOR, Bengal BOR Procs., 1793, Sayer, Apr. 19.
[98] Letter of "Moolchund," zamindar, Mar. 23, 1793, and BOR to Marquis Cornwallis, n.d., in ibid.; Lumsden report.
potatoes brought in for sale and six pies for that of onions. Fees were charged for both buying and selling cattle, a comparatively high rate of two annas per head of cattle. And if shops dealt in large quantities of vegetables, a rate of one-half anna was added on to the fee of supplying a one-half seer to the thikadar .[99]
A lengthy list of illegal cesses compiled specifically for Patna Division in the late nineteenth century can be divided into four categories: Those imposed on shops or shopkeepers had a rate varying from area to area and also according to the kind of merchandise they dealt in. Some were imposed on the actual producers of goods marketed and on the purchasers of the merchandise. Others were levied on the products themselves. And finally there were levies on the modes of transportation used to bring goods to the market.
To take the illegal cesses on shops and shopkeepers first: The practice of pethiya in Tirhut targeted dealers in haats . They had to pay a fee, in cash or in kind, prorated according to the value of goods they sold. Another general cess termed ugahi was directed at anybody who offered goods for a sale at a market. The tendency in some localities was to levy a higher abwab on shopkeepers holding land in a marketing settlement than on those who were nonresident shopkeepers, a distinction no doubt intended to entice outside entrepreneurs. Fees were also levied on specific types of shops: in Patna district, for instance, abkari dictated that every toddy shop contribute one pot of toddy on various occasions.[100]
Another set of cesses that persisted throughout the colonial era was directed at peasants who marketed their produce. Mauginchutki referred to a cess in Tirhut imposed on villagers selling grain retail; it essentially targeted the sellers (and producers) of small amounts of grain. Another cess called hati taxed cultivators—and those buying from them—for trading in the "staple articles of the village": two pies per rupee from the seller and four pies per rupee from the buyer. And if peasants were engaged in selling vegetables and fruits they paid an annual cess of two to four annas. Similarly, tobacco growers were charged from one anna and four pies to five annas for every bigha
[99] See, e.g., Mirganj thana no. 1021. Also Dumuria, Bishunpore and Barahima, Gopalganj thana nos. 26, 264 and 408, SVN, respectively.
[100] S. C. Bayley, Offg. Commr., Patna to Secy., GOB, no. 251, July 2, 1872, Bengal Rev. Procs., 1873–75, July 1874, nos. 13–14 (hereafter Bayley report). See also MSR , pp. 186–93; SSR , pp. 64–65.
(roughly one-third of an acre) of land devoted to tobacco. Growers of cash crops were invariably taxed—the price of cultivating crops promising better returns than did the price of ordinary foodcrops.[101]
Such cesses were not restricted to producers of agricultural goods. People engaged in the making of virtually every kind of marketable item were subjected to some form of illegal cesses. Considered a ground rent in part, mutharfa was actually a "tax on trade. . . levied by proprietors on residents of their estates for allowing them to carry on their respective trades or to perform social and religious ceremonies in peace."[102]Mutharfa in Muzaffarpur in the 1890s was imposed on weavers for working their looms (tana) , on oil pressers for operating each oil press (chiragi ), on lac makers for trading in lac-made items and bangles (lahi) , on Chamars for skinning dead cattle and dealing in hides (charsa ), and on the weighman of a market for conducting his business (haat or haatwai ).[103]
Other taxes, termed dundidari , were imposed on buyers—typically petty banias and traders purchasing small amounts—who came from outside the village to buy grain from cultivators. Still other cesses were imposed on sellers and buyers dealing in larger transactions. Wholesale grain dealers (usually at ganjs) not only paid rent for their stalls but also paid golamundpie , a cess of one-quarter of a seer for every maund of grain they had in storage. In many marketing settlements of Patna a "bazar [sic] duty" was exacted on every article brought into the bazaar. Even goods passing through a landholder's area were subject to cesses. For instance, there was a tobacco and grain duty to be paid to the area's landholder on every bundle and every bag of grain transported through a locality. Bardana in Patna necessitated a fee of one-half anna on the maund for every article brought in for sale on pack bullocks; bardana in Tirhut was a levy of five to six annas per bullock. Loading or unloading a boat at a ganj in Saran cost another illegal cess—one anna on every boat according to the practice of kistibojhai—as did every bullock or pony that carried a load—each animal paid three or four annas per annum. A fee called chutti in Tirhut was levied on grain
[101] Bayley report; MSR , pp. 188, 191; SSR , p . 65 . Khunti and khapta were cesses levied on cultivators at the rate of twelve annas to one rupee–four annas per bigha for raising tobacco and for growing special crops respectively. The latter, generally directed at Koeris, was aimed at intercepting their profits from opium cultivation—a crop they were principally involved with—and market-gardening.
[102] MSR , p. 192.
[103] Ibid., pp. 192–93. Another cess was bardana—see discussion below.
in ganjs unloaded from boats or carts and stocked in sacks or kept on the ground outside a shop. Even owning a cart in Tirhut subjected a person to a cess: eight to ten annas per cart, or garihana .[104]
Although abwabs had been declared illegal in 1793, the government made little effort to enforce the law. On the contrary, its official position was to allow landholders the right to exact, with few exceptions, whatever claims and dues they could from the rest of the population: "If a person not entitled to levy dues levies them in any thoroughfare or public place, he shall be liable to fine. If the village hat is held on the high road passing through the village, or on ground which the public have an undoubted right to use for the purpose, the exaction of dues should be prohibited.. . . But when it is held, as is most commonly the case, on land which is the private property of the zamindar, or on land over which the public may perhaps have the right of way, but not a prescriptive right to use the land for the purpose of holding a market, no special legislative or executive interference appears to be called for."[105]
Such dues were considered beyond official purview even in cases where government had granted compensation to landholders for the abolition of duties at the time of the Permanent Settlement. According to the Bengal authorities, "It is not uncommon for the proprietor, on establishing a new market, to promise that no dues shall be taken for a year or two, with the object of attracting buyers and sellers to the market. But in the great majority of cases tolls are levied either in cash or in kind, and frequently in both of these forms; and it does not appear that in any case the levy of dues is forgone upon the acknowledged ground that compensation for their abolition has been granted."[106] Local officials were unanimous in recommending that government not interpose in this matter, as the custom had existed "from time immemorial, and [is] willingly acquiesced in by the people, and [the] imposition [of taxes] does not in any way interfere with the healthy growth of trade in hats and market."[107]
Government's unwillingness to legislate against the practice of levying cesses also continued in the face of evidence it uncovered that in the past the custom had been the price people paid to landholders for pro-
[104] Bayley report.
[105] H.J. Reynolds, Offg. Secy., GOB, Rev., to Secy., GOI, Home, no. 163, Jan. 4, 1876, Bengal Rev. Procs., 1876–78, Miscellaneous, Mar. 1876, 16.
[106] Ibid.
[107] Ibid.
tection and that that was still the case. Government nevertheless opposed making the practice a "criminal offence," believing that the "main security for the public . . . is the free trade in hauts, that is, in the multitude of hauts, and the freedom of people to go to this market, or to that."[108] The lone dissenting view was proffered by the Patna collector, who did not see the practice as one submitted to by the people without "murmur or inconvenience." On the contrary, he noted, the burden of these tolls or duties was felt greatly by the poorer classes and was also responsible for enhancing the price of commodities. Nonetheless, he, too, believed that special legislation was unnecessary.[109]
Another factor contributing to the events of 1921-22 unfolding in the bazaar was the fundamental dynamic of the local marketing system, which defined the local community. Both the colonial state and the landholders understood and exploited this dynamic. It was this very structure and functioning that enabled the people of the localities of Katia and Bhorey to organize as a community and to identify their targets: the colonial state and the great estate of Hathwa.
Moreover, the forging of a community based on the networks of the local marketing system was an emerging pattern in the late nineteenth century. This mobilization of a "a shared sense of community,"[110] documented as well for other parts of north India, is evident in the Cow Protection Movement of the late nineteenth century. My previous study of the movement in Saran focuses on the 1893 Basantpur "riot" to show that this event turned out a crowd—drawn largely from the standard marketing area of Basantpur—who took up the cause of cow protection and rioted over the issue of cow killing. Not only did the market at Basantpur provide the opportunity to organize a crowd—the riot occurred on a Wednesday, a marketing day, when the presence of large numbers of people would go unremarked—but it also provided the community itself. A standard market, Basantpur was the "only market of any importance in this elaka (locality)."[111]
[108] "Resolution," Jdcl. Dept., GOB, Police, June 27, 1873, Bengal Police Procs., 1873–74, June 1873, 118.
[109] "Abstract from Commissioners' Replies"; ibid.
[110] Freitag, CollectiveActionandCommunity , p. 96.
[111] . Basantpur, Basantpur thana no. 358, SVN; A. Forbes, Commr., Patna, to Chief Secy., GOB, Oct. 27, 1893, L/P&J/6/365, no. 257, encl. 7. The following analysis of the Basantpur riot draws on my "Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the 'Anti–Cow Killing' Riot of 1893," CSSH2 2 (1980): 576–96.
The settlement of Basantpur in 1893 had approximately sixteen hundred inhabitants who were engaged principally in trade and only nominally in cultivation. More than 50 percent of its population—consisting of Madhesia Kandus (31 percent), Kalwars (11), Telis (5), Rauniars (4), Rastogis (2), Buruwars (1), and Sonars (0.5)—can be identified as traders. In addition some nonresident Sonars also kept shops there. Of the remaining residents, many had small shops or worked as artisans: Turhas (4 percent) were vegetable growers and sellers, Barais (2) were betel leaf growers and sellers, Lohars (1) were blacksmiths, Darzis (2) were tailors, and Jolahas (2) were cotton weavers. The Rastogis, Rauniars, Buruwars, Kalwars, and Madhesia Kandus were "the principal trading class." Madhesia Kandus traded in various agricultural goods, including grain and spices. The latter item was also the specialty of Buruwars; Rastogis were the major cloth merchants.
Basantpur was a collection and distribution point that received the grains, spices, vegetables, and other agricultural produce from many villages in the locality. Sujad Hossein, for example, went there every harvest to sell some of the ten to fifteen maunds of grain he produced. Basantpur was also the distribution point for grain from outside of the district that made its way there via such higher-level markets as Siwan, Mairwa, and Maharajganj. Cloth, the other major import, was purchased wholesale from Calcutta—another example of the direct trade links forged to standard markets instead of connections via higher-order markets.
Several service functions were also clustered in Basantpur. In 1871 it had become the headquarters of a thana that assumed its name. Along with a police station, it also supported a dispensary and an inspection bungalow. The opening of a subregistry office in December 1892 lent it further administrative importance. Such services established Basantpur not only as a center for filling many needs of the locality but also as a magnet for people like Khub Narain, who moved there to take up the profession of writing documents for people who wished to register them.[112]
The marketing center of Basantpur included in its orbit at least forty-four villages, giving it a total population of over ten thousand people. Since our sources identify only the market used most frequently,
[112] Basantpur thana no. 358, SVN; "Trial of the Basantpur Riot Case in the Court of the Sessions Judge of Saran, 1893," with L/P&J/6/370, 1894, no. 560.
they often do not note the fact that most villagers relied on more than one market, certainly more than their neighborhood haat . Therefore, for many villages in the vicinity of Basantpur the only information offered is that they focused on this or that minor market. Yet as the data suggest, as in the case of Babhanauli, its residents frequented the haat of Khawaspur but also went to Basantpur to make "larger purchases," for haats that were in its marketing area were comparable neither in size nor in the range of goods offered. Bala, for instance, provided vegetables and rice, but it was a "small bazaar. . . [and] cloth shops seldom opened here."[113]
The villages considered "most guilty" in the riot lay within the standard marketing area of Basantpur. To the north were seven villages along the Salempur Ghat road; their inhabitants had participated in all the incidents beginning with the mass meeting of the Gaurakshini Sabha, which preceded the riot at Basantpur. The ringleaders were from these villages: Lakhnowrah, Narharpur, Bala, Shampur, Khawaspur, Basawan, and Madarpur. Two other clusters of "guilty" villages lay immediately to the west and northwest of Basantpur. One of these was almost adjacent to the market, the other a little removed. Only the fourth cluster of villages lay outside the immediate marketing area of Basantpur: it was nested in the intermediate marketing area of Maharajganj, which served as a major conduit of grain and other goods for various markets, including Basantpur.
The faces in the crowd can also be traced to Basantpur and its marketing locality. The seven principals accused in the riot case were residents of Lakhnowrah, Narharpur, Shampur, Bala, and Madarpur—"men of influence in the neighbourhood," or, as the local police inspector addressed them, "you are the raises of the district, respectable men."[114] They were either resident zamindars or petty officials of their villages, in two cases they were both landholders and cloth merchants in Basantpur. That witnesses easily identified members of the crowd is testimony not only to its distinguished composition but also to the fact that participants and bystanders alike were drawn from the "neighborhood" defined by the marketing system.
These social dimensions of Basantpur's marketing area were repeatedly alluded to at the trial. Time and again local residents appearing as
[113] Khawaspur, Basantpur, and Bala, Basantpur thana nos. 319, 358 and 59, SVN.
[114] Testimony of Ali Hossein, constable, "Basantpur Trial," p. 51; SDG 1908 , p. 99.
witnesses explained they knew this or that person "by name as well as by their features." What they meant by this is that both acquaintances and friendships were delimited by the marketing area of a locality. One local inhabitant named Sujad Hossein explained that he and Rahmat Ali lived in the same village but were not good friends. Occasionally when they met they would walk together, as they did on the day of the Basantpur riot. The latter put it more directly when he followed his nonfriend's testimony: "There is no dosti [friendship] between me and the last witness.. . . We never go to the bazar [sic] together." [115] Similarly Bindeshri Prasad pointed to the dynamics of the marketing networks in explaining his ability to identify one of the accused: "I came to know him in the ordinary way, having seen him coming and going about not in any particular manner.. . . I came to know him well during the last eight or nine months. I have seen him going to and coming from the market, and that is how I came to know him. When a person comes to a place, he does not get acquainted with all the people there at once. I asked him his name, and he told me. We were going along the road when I asked him his name."[116]
In short, the locus of the Basantpur riot was the standard marketing community, and leadership, whether at the local Cow Protection Movement meeting or at the head of the crowd, was comprised of men who were the influential figures within this area. They were the supporters of the movement and played the primary role in the collective action. These petty maliks and substantial raiyats operating at the level of the standard marketing area were thus the key to control and conflict in local society.
A similar investigation of the Katia and Bhorey incidents again turns up a local community defined by its markets. According to a lead furnished by police reports, the principal activists involved in the various incidents were supplied by thirty-eight "guilty villages." Ten of these villages can be identified incontrovertibly as belonging to the standard marketing area of Katia, six to that of Bhorey, and the remaining twenty-two, by virtue of their location and relation to their periodic markets, can be tied to the marketing areas of one or the other.[117]
[115] "Basantpur Trial," pp. 21, 54.
[116] Ibid., p. 57.
[117] Dundas to Secy., no. 244-I.G. 22, June 7, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50. Mirganj's notes were compiled in 1916-17 by, among others, P.T. Mansfield, who was later the Sitamarhi subdivisional officer during the period of Noncooperation. See Mirganj thana village notes, nos. 1-1064, 11 volumes, esp. Katia village, Mirganj thana no. 446, SVN. Sixty-nine is probably a low number, because my information isdrawn only from Saran; it does not take into account those people who frequented markets in neighboring Gorakhpur.
Important enough to justify the stationing of a police thana , which became the target of several attacks during the period of "lawlessness," the standard marketing center of Katia constituted, according to its village note of 1917, a "big market" whose "advantage" was taken "by numerous villages." By my reckoning, its "advantage" extended to an area whose farthest limits were four or even five miles away—precisely the zone within which many of the remaining twenty-two villages were located—although its immediate and regular customers came from a cluster of sixty-nine villages within about a three-mile radius. Ten of the so-called guilty villages can be placed squarely within this area.[118]
Bhorey, the other focal point of the incidents of 1921–22, was also a "big village," its five hamlets of some 350 households rounded out to a total population of seventeen hundred people. As in the case of Katia, its significance as a nodal point was recognized in the late nineteenth century by the establishment of a police station and a dispensary there. Six "guilty villages" were situated within its marketing area encompassing a total of twenty-seven villages largely within a two-mile radius.[119]
Virtually all of the remaining twenty-two villages said to be infected with "a spirit of lawlessness" can be traced to the gravitational field of Katia or Bhorey or tied to them through links to the minor markets clustered around them. The evidence for the "guilty" village of Kurthia (thana no. 199) is irrefutable: its village note indicates that its people frequented both the Katia and Bhorey markets, each of which lay at a distance of about four miles. A link can also be established for Deuria (no. 413), the scene of a "sensational case" involving a woman who was paraded around naked and blackened, as well as for the villages of Shamdas Bagahi (no. 410) and Ram Das Bagahi (no. 392), from which people turned out in great numbers to riot against the police sent in to investigate the case. Although all three of these villages, as well as the four neighboring "guilty" villages Dharmagta (no. 412), Indarpatti (no. 429), Semaria (no. 43 ), and Rupi Bagahi (no. 433), are not specifically identified in the village notes as being within the marketing area of Katia, they clearly formed part of the wider area serviced by
[118] Mirganj thana village notes, esp. nos. 1– 500. Village notes generally report the primary or "minor" market used, not secondary ones, and not typically the higher-order markets that people resorted to for larger purchases.
[119] Mirganj village notes, esp. Bhorey village, Mirganj thana no. 230, SVN.
Katia, a standard market. Furthermore, Deuria, Semaria, and Rupi Bagahi can be distinctly placed in the minor marketing area of Indarpatti; the remaining three of the seven "guilty" villages can be clustered together as well because Ram Das Bagahi and Dharmagta belonged to the marketing area of Shamdas Bagahi. Whereas Shamdas Bagahi was a minor market of some note—its market yielded fees of Rs. 135 per annum—Indarpatti was a smaller haat earning a meager income of only Rs. 6 a year, and, whereas the former counted twenty-four villages in its marketing area, the latter included only twelve. Shamdas Bagahi was a place for purchasing local necessities—grain, salt, tobacco, vegetables, and meat. All transactions were retail, and sellers were sometimes both banias (professional shopkeepers) and cultivators, although this latter group primarily sold its grain to the banias . Indarpatti was a market of a different scale: its trade focused primarily on salt, tobacco, and vegetables and did not, as its village note reveals, deal in grain. The proximity and the different capacities of these markets meant that their constituencies overlapped considerably. Moreover, the markets operated on different schedules. Shamdas Bagahi convened on Tuesday and Friday, Indarpatti on Tuesday and Saturday. Furthermore, both of these overlapped with yet another periodic market in the vicinity: the "minor" market of Jamunha (no. 424), which had an income closer to that of Shamdas Bagahi than to that of Indarpatti because it, too, was largely a grain market. Jamunha's marketing days were on Wednesday and Sunday, meaning that people could, if they wanted to, frequent all three markets.[120]
These three areas were all tied to Katia, which was literally the focal point of the locality because the district roads converged on it. The inhabitants of Pakarian (no. 477), for instance, could frequent their local haat for everyday necessities but go to Katia for "bigger purchases." Whereas Shamdas Bagahi, Indarpatti, and Jamunha offered their customers grain and other foodstuffs, Katia offered much more, a volume and a range suggested by its annual lease amounting to Rs. 790, or almost six times the income of Shamdas Bagahi, and by its population of 1,842, or almost five times that of Shamdas Bagahi and nine times that of Jamunha. Another index of difference in scale is the number of people engaged in trade. Indarpatti had four houses of banias , Jamunha
[120] Jamunha market counted another two "guilty" villages (Natwa (no. 527) and Chhitauna (no. 404)) in its marketing zone. The income from the haat and nimaksayer (salt cess) totaled Rs. 82. SDG1930 , p. 177.
had ten, and Shamdas Bagahi four. By contrast, Katia, boasted a range of trading castes: eight houses of Umuar Banias, twelve of Banna Banias, three of Kasarwani Banias, seven of Agrahris, twenty-seven of Kalwars, and one of Marwaris. These groups provided many of the market's cloth vendors and moneylenders. The difference between minor markets and intermediate markets can also be gauged from the castes involved in other service occupations. Shamdas Bagahi had six Churihar families who made bangles for the local market, Jamunha had one toddy vendor, and Indarpatti had four Churihars and one tailor. Contrast these totals with that of Katia, which numbered one confectioner, three tailors, six dyers, and three bangle makers. Local labor was also abundant in Katia. [121]
Katia and Bhorey were also home to service facilities developed there in the late nineteenth century. In the early 1870s Katia became the site of one of the district's ten middle vernacular schools. Subsequently, the Hathwa raj established a primary school there and another one at Bhorey. Furthermore, both of these marketing settlements were singled out administratively to become the sites of police outposts, two of the twenty-eight police stations scattered across the district. Bhorey was also one of six places in the district that had a medical dispensary, a facility maintained and supported by Hathwa.[122]
Government and Hathwa connections to these two standard markets therefore explain why they became significant sites of conflict and why the incidents occurring there mobilized such large numbers of people. In the aftermath of the "sensational" Deuria incident, the investigating police force was confronted by a crowd of two thousand men. Most of these were identified as hailing from thirteen villages, Shamdas Bagahi (no. 410), Ramdas Bagahi (no. 392), Rupi Bagahi (no. 433, identified in the government records as Bagahi Bindoe), Deuria (no. 413), Indarpatti (no. 429), Patkhauli (no. 171), Belwa Dube (no. 180), Dharmagta (no. 412), Natwa (no. 527), Semaria (no. 431), Motipur (no. 494), Gaura (no. 468), and Chhitauna (no. 404). These villages were inhabited by a total population of more than six thousand. All,
[121] Compiled from Mirganj thana village notes, SVN.
[122] "Management of Hutwa during 1873–74"; AGRPD 1876–77 and 1877–78; SDG1930 , p . 1 20; "Report on Progress of Education in Saran for 1871/72," J. S. Drummond, Offg. Colltr., no. 95, June 1, 1872, P.C. Loose Uncatalogued Basta; Mahomed Jan, Subinspector, Schools, Siwan to SDO, Siwan, Apr. 10, 1873, P.C. Basta no. 221, Important Bundles, Rev. Dept., C, D & E. The population of Katia was estimated to be 1,250, that of Bhorey, 900.
except for Natwa (no. 527) and Gaura (no. 468), were part of the periodic marketing system of Indarpatti or Shamdas Bagahi, and all thirteen were in the standard marketing area of Katia.
The structure of the market can also be identified in the April 1922 attack on the Katia police station. Most of the offenders were identified residents of Ijra (no. 203), Bari Sujawal (no. zoz), Panan Khas (no. zoo), Banian Chhapar (no. 197), Sonhnaria (no. 192), Baikunthpur (no. 189), and Dumrauna (no. 75). These seven villages had a total population of 1,770 and were located within three or four miles of Katia, that is, within its standard marketing area.[123]
The relationship between numbers and the dynamics of the local marketing system is clear. Consider again the details for Saran. Periodicity, a defining characteristic of haats , encouraged the people of a locality to congregate only on days set aside for exchange: local leaders capitalized on this fact in their efforts to mobilize numbers. The overwhelming number of markets followed this periodic pattern, the exceptions being Chapra and some of the intermediate markets. Indeed, only larger markets met daily. According to one source, 88.3 percent of the district's markets met twice a week; of the rest, 7.1 percent convened triweekly, 3.6 percent once a week, and .9 percent four times a week. There is considerable correlation between frequency, size, and importance. While haats and standard markets typically followed biweekly schedules, markets convening only once a week were among the smallest of periodic markets. For instance, the Friday haat of Chakla was "small" (Siwan no. 163), that of Gosain Chapra (Siwan no. 343), also a Friday market, was a "very poor bazaar," and that of Bhelpur (Siwan no. 499), a Sunday market, was only for selling paddy and other grains. The intermediate market of Manjhi was held five days a week; and the three markets—Garkha, Paighambarpur, and Harpur—open four days a week were among the district's larger standard markets.[124]
[123] Suptd. to I.G., no. 3168, May 8, 1922, B & O Police Procs.,June 1922; Mirganj thana village notes, nos. 101–600, SVN.
[124] Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun;SDG1930 , Table 5, pp. 162–77. Fridays ( 6 percent) and Mondays (14.8 percent) were the most popular market days, with Saturdays (14.3), Wednesdays (14.1), Tuesdays (13.8), Sundays (13.4), and Thursdays (13.2) following closely behind. There is little here to suggest that marketing days were synchronized to the religious calendar, because Tuesday, considered the holy day of the week in the Bhojpur region, was not a day avoided. For information regarding this tradition I am indebted to Bradley Hertel, personal communication.
Moreover, this had been the pattern throughout the colonial period. According to an early-nineteenth-century source that listed the marketing periodicity for twenty-four markets (most of which were standard markets), the lower-order markets generally convened twice a week. Mirganj, an intermediate market, is described by the same account as meeting daily, whereas Darauli, Manjhi, and Gopalganj met biweekly. Over time, however, these last three markets developed into standing bazaars, following a well-known pattern of adding marketing days to settlements that become more central and complex marketing nodes. The configuration of markets in the district reveals that this transformation was more the exception than the rule, however. More typically, the enhanced demand created by population increases was accommodated by the substantial rise in number of biweekly haat s.[125]
Periodicity—especially the two-day schedule—was a standard feature of Saran's markets because that was sufficient to meet local demand, even of large numbers of people. The marketing needs of peasants in a subsistence economy were simply limited. Furthermore, poor transportation and communications infrastructure of the eighteenth and at least the first half of the nineteenth century probably meant that most markets served limited geographical areas. Even in the early twentieth century most buyers and sellers frequented markets within a four-to-six-mile radius, a distance most people could comfortably travel back and forth over in a day. Thus, periodicity went hand in glove with dense market distribution, both serving to reduce the "friction of space and time" in the local society. Markets in the same locality therefore almost always met on different days of the week; for instance, Mangarpal Nuran's haat convened on Thursdays and Sundays, whereas Mangalpal Murtuza's met on Wednesdays and Saturdays.[126]
This system enabled most villagers to use multiple markets. Residents of Sheikhpura, Dumouma, Durgauli, Jajauli, Bahuara, and Bishunpura, for instance, frequented several markets within a three-mile radius: the haats of Deoria, Maghar, and Bilashpur for routine transactions and the standard market of Mashrak for a wider range of goods and services. Access to multiple markets also served the interests of
[125] Wyatt, StatisticsofSarun , pp. 3–12; SDG1930 , pp. 162–77.
[126] Mangarpal Nuran and Mangalpal Murtuza, Parsa thana nos. 543 and 559, SVN. See also Skinner, "Marketing in China," pp. 10–11; Robert H. T. Smith, "Periodic Market-places, Periodic Marketing, and Travelling Traders," in PeriodicMarkets , Hawkers , andTradersinAfrica , Asia , andLatinAmerica , ed. Robert H. T. Smith (Vancouver: Centre for Transportation Studies, 1978), pp. 114–20.
peasants who were producers and sellers of their surplus agricultural commodities or those who engaged in artisanal industries.[127]
Periodicity was much less "related to the mobility of individual 'firms."' Unlike in China, where the "itinerant entrepreneur" was a characteristic feature of rural markets, periodicity therefore fulfilling the valuable function of "concentrating the demand for his product at restricted localities on certain specific days. . [so that] he can arrange to be in each town in the circuit on its market day," the typical shopkeeper or trader in Saran was a local—if not of the marketing settlement itself then of a nearby village. Thus, many of the shopkeepers in the periodic market of Jano were drawn from its 1,443 residents; others came from the outside, such as the three Dhunia families from neighboring Bhabri village who were involved in cotton and rice trade, another Dhunia family who dealt in horses and ponies, and a Kandhu who maintained a tobacco store.[128]
Markets therefore attracted large numbers of people. As the average figures for Mirganj thana (in which Katia and Bhorey were located) indicate, even periodic markets had the possibility of reaching several thousand; there was typically a haat for every 7,319 people. Such numbers were the reason why the "volunteers" of Noncooperation invariably made the rounds of the marketplaces, big and small. In the small markets of Muzaffarpur, audiences numbering between 1,000 and 2,000 were commonplace: 2,000 at Rasulpur on April 3, 1,000 at Pupri on August 1, and 2,000 at Sursand on the same day. On three occasions, crowds at Sursand numbered 1,500, 2,000, and even 3,000. Not surprisingly, the largest gatherings were in the town of Sitamarhi: Mahanth Sia Ram Das drew 5,000 in April 1921, and Ramanandan Singh, another local leader, attracted an even larger gathering of 6,000 in February of the same year. But the biggest assembly by far was in Sitamarhi, on April 6, the day of the hartal , which featured a procession of 15–20,000 marchers. No wonder "volunteers" such as Mathura Prasad Dikshit had restraining orders placed on them barring them "from
[127] E.g., Andhar Bari, Mashrak thana no. 264, whose villagers used Chainpur and Taraiya for buying and selling. Also Sheikhpura, Dumouma, Durgauli, Jajauli, Bahuara, and Bishunpura, Mashrak thana nos. 80–85, SVN.
[128] Bhabri and Jano, Basantpur thana nos. 2 and 3, SVN; Skinner, "Marketing in China," p. 10. Jajmani arrangements, involving well-to-do and artisan and service caste people in patron-client relationships, presumably also reduced the need for outside entrepreneurs.
speaking in any bazar [sic ] . . . [where] in the opinion of the magistrate . . . speeches are likely to lead to a breach of the peace."[129]
The men and women who typically converged on a local market generally enjoyed some level of dosti (friendship) or familiarity with one another. For many the bazaar was a place for both "commerce and festivity." It was a "social as well as an economic nexus. It was the place," in India, as in eighteenth-century Britain or France, "where one-hundred-and-one social and personal transactions went on; where news was passed, rumour and gossip flew around.. . . [It] was the place where people, because they were numerous felt for a moment they were strong."[130] And as places where people routinely gathered in large numbers to traffic in social, cultural, and economic exchanges, they naturally attracted government attention. In other words, market towns typically doubled as administrative centers, where the functionaries of the colonial state regularly established their district and subdistrict headquarters. How appropriate therefore that a movement that sought to keep categories—patriotic Indians and alien rulers and their coadjutors—"separate and opposed" was played out largely in the bazaar.
The hybrid quality of the bazaar also surfaced in the ways in which its crowds were linked to "festivity," to popular culture. For the movement consistently sought to mobilize people to join its cause through a variety of activities. In addition to the rhetoric, with its popular vocabulary and cadences, there were the participatory rituals of celebrations employed to involve crowds another means. The recitation of the Delhi fatwa was a collective chanting, as was the practice of "non-cooperators in the streets and bazaars singing national songs in chorus."[131] Processions, such as on hartal-day in Sitamarhi, when everyone carried pictures of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders "garlanded with flowers," provided another vehicle for people to define themselves as a community.
Arrayed against this imagined community was the colonial state and its administrators and coadjutors, an "us and them" distinction vividly played out in popular demonstrations combining theatrics with crowd
[129] Searchlight , Feb. 2, 1921; Commr., Tirhut, to I.G., no. J–1987, May 22, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50.
[130] E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," PastandPresent 50 (1971): 135.
[131] Suptd. to Commr., Nov. 28, 1921 B & O Police Procs., May 1922, no. 1, enclosure.
participation. Two entries from a police report offer a glimpse of such occasions, though without conveying any sense of the mood or spirit of the gathering: "On 30th July 1921 the non-co-operator volunteers dressed up a bamboo with a hat, coat, etc., like an European in the Sitamarhi Hat-all had pot-shots at it, who cared to.. . . On 30th September 1921, Bishun Mahtha, Luchman Mahtha and Ram Lakhan Gupta dressed up a figure like a European, sitting on a chair which the crowd spat on, pulled its ear and eventually burnt it on a bonfire."[132]
Both the sense of the crowd in the bazaar and its awareness of the hybrid and separative quality of the market figured in the many incidents involving attempts to enforce the code of Noncooperation among the local population. At its most concrete level, this aspect of the bazaar was played up in crowd efforts to prevent customers from patronizing "liquor and other excise shops, and snatching away their purchase." After all, two objectives of Noncooperation was to stop the distribution of goods considered anathema to the nationalist project and to deny goods and services to functionaries of the colonial state. The bazaar was necessarily targeted because it was the place where foreign-made cloth and liquor, to name two of the principal goods singled out for attack, exchanged hands. Volunteers therefore urged their supporters to picket cloth and liquor shops. Not surprisingly, much of the crowd action in the markets involved attempts to close down such shops or attack people who indulged in these taboo products. The report by the Muzaffapur police that foreign cloth "is being burnt all over the place and each toddy, cloth, liquor and ganja shop has its picket of national volunteers" and that "bullock carts carrying drums of liquor are stopped, people entering excise shops are assaulted" was a scenario repeated time and again throughout the region. Another product-related issue was the effort to prevent goods and services from the bazaar flowing into the hands of the functionaries of the "evil" Empire. "Volunteers are endeavouring," as one confidential government document noted, "to induce bazaar people to stop all supplies to the police."[133]
The bazaar was also the place where people assembled in numbers and exerted their strength and unity of purpose in actions that were liter-
[132] Ibid. Plays were also staged in Bagaha ridiculing government officials and Europeans.
[133] Non-cooperationinBihar , pp. 39, 45, and 45-47, for similar incidents elsewhere in the region; Suptd. to Commr., Nov. 28, 1921, B & O Police Procs., May 1922, no. 1, enclosure.
ally and figuratively designed to humiliate wrongdoers, actions that were charivaris. In the wake of the "sensational" Deuria case of February 1921, when the "exponents of non-violence painted a woman black and took her naked round [the] village," the investigating police subinspector "was attacked by about 2,000 men and he and his force were beaten and put to flight. As a result 56 men were prosecuted and 33 convicted."[134]
This woman had apparently incurred the wrath of the crowd because she had violated the discipline of Noncooperation—her initial "wrong" was to refuse to pay a fine levied on her by a council (panchayat) set up to enforce the code of Noncooperation—and then filed a case with police.[135] Much more typical, however, were cases of offenders apprehended in flagrante delicto and promptly handed out rough justice. Gope Kahar was seized by his fellow Kahars and other townspeople for refusing to give up drinking and paraded around town in black face. The crowd handled most offenders in this manner. For having imbibed liquor at a haat , a person "had his face smeared with blacking [and] a shoe hung round his neck." Numerous were the incidents involving "violators" who were paraded around the town or marketplace "mounted backwards on a donkey." A variation of this form of humiliation—in this case the offender's head was shaved prior to the ritual parading—was inflicted on a chaukidar in Champaran for having consumed liquor.[136]
Official reports tended to attribute outbreaks to outside agitators. The comings and goings of Gandhi were scrupulously monitored as were those of other leaders such as Rajendra Prasad, the leading Congress figure in Bihar. In addition, there were always the usual suspects at the district level. Bindeshri Prasad, for example, was said to be "the leading Saran non-cooperator," and his movements were invariably linked to incidents of Noncooperation.[137]
The overwhelming majority of participants in the events associated with Noncooperation were drawn from the local population, however.
[134] Perkin to I.G., no. 3168, May 8, 1922, ibid., July, no. 50. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, SocietyandCulturein EarlyModernFrance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 97–123, for an excellent discussion of charivaris, "a noisy, masked demonstration to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community."
[135] Non-cooperationinBihar , p. 232; Nagendra Kumar, IndianNationalMovement(withSpecialReferencetothe DistrictofOldSaran , Bihar) 1857–1947 (Patna: Janaki Prakashan, 1979), p. 40.
[136] Non-cooperationinBihar , pp. 42–43, 45, 67–68; Speeches , pp. 40–41.
[137] Perkin to Personal Asst., no. 3168, May 8, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50; Kumar, IndianNational Movement , pp. 36–61.
As many as two thousand people "armed with lathis [staffs], spears, etc." were said to be involved in the attack on the police who came to investigate the "sensational" Katia case. Of the fifty-seven men (one died later in jail) singled out for prosecution from this "mob," the largest numbers were Koeris (seventeen people), Brahmins (fourteen), Bhumihar Brahmins (nine), Jolahas (six), and Ahirs (five); the rest were Banias (two), Bhar (one), Nonia (one), Teli (one), and one whose caste cannot be identified from his name. One can glean additional details regarding these people by looking at the locality from which the crowd originated. Both those singled out by name for being the "leading" noncooperators (that is, thirty-two out of the fifty-seven who were actually sentenced) and those comprising the so-called volunteer masses were drawn from thirteen villages clustered around the market of Katia. The village notes of 1915-21 reveal that Brahmins were the dominant caste in six villages; in three villages they were the most prominent caste along with the Bhumihar Brahmins. No upper castes resided in the remaining four villages; Koeris were the most prosperous caste in those places, some among them prosperous enough to serve as the village moneylenders. Brahmins were also the most prominent inhabitants of the seven villages that manned the ranks of attackers of the Katia police station on April 26, 1922. In six of the seven villages they were the dominant caste; in the remaining village Rajputs were the most salient caste. In four out of the seven villages, Ahirs were numerically preponderant.[138]
Similar configurations of supravillage elite--mostly upper-caste men with significant standing in the locality of periodic markets-and the more prosperous cultivating castes, such as Koeris, Kurmis, and Ahirs, can be identified among the principals involved in clashes over markets in Champaran. Acchey Lal and Mathura Prasad, two Kayasths, were at the forefront of the group that sought to establish a market to compete with Ghorasahan bazaar, controlled by the Purnahi factory, a branch of the Motihari indigo concern. And implicated with them were a few other people of high caste but also many with trading and agricultural caste backgrounds.[139]
[138] Mirganj thana nos. 75, 189, 192, 197, 200, 202, and 203. Also nos. 171, 180, 392, 404, 410, 412, 413, 429, 431, 433, 468, 494, and 527 for the other thirteen "guilty" Mirganj villages, SVN; Perkin to Personal I.G., no. 3168, May 8, 1922, B & O Police Procs., June 1922, no. 50
[139] Caste identifications drawn up from names of people charged in these cases. Non-CooperationinBihar , pp. 224-25; Searchlight , Nov. 23, 1921. See also DistrictCensusReports , 1891 , PatnaDivision , Champaran (1898), p. 97 , regarding the prominence of Kayasths in the district as a landholding and prosperous tenant group.
An alliance of upper landholding and substantial peasant castes and lower-caste peasants also characterized the "Hindu community" that took up the cause of cow protection in the 1890s and the second decade of the twentieth century in the Bhojpur region extending across Bihar into eastern United Provinces. In the late nineteenth century these groups had also become conspicuous presence "on the road," thus adding to the growing traffic of pilgrims and mela-goers. Whereas they sought to team up with Muslims under the flag of Noncooperation and Khilafat in the 1920s, here they mobilized against the small local Muslim population in the name of saving the cow. Within the "Hindu community" itself, however, there were divisions. As Gyan Pandey notes, "In the 1910s and '20s .. when the Koeris, Kurmis and Ahirs became better organized and increasingly militant in pressing the demands for a more respectable status[,] the upper-caste Hindu zamindars joined hands with the upper-caste Muslim zamindars of the region to keep these 'upstart' peasant castes in their place.. . . That divide between upper and lower castes and classes, and the strife attendant upon it, remained the predominant feature of the rural political scene in eastern U.P. and Bihar, more marked than any perceptible rift between local Hindus and Muslims, at least until the 1940s."[140]
Indeed, upper-caste and some cultivating lower-caste groups (in the incidents referred to here consisting principally of Brahmins, Bhumihar Brahmins, and Rajputs on the one hand and Kurmis and Ahirs on the other hand) were increasingly asserting their rising power and influence at the local periodic market and village level, often assuming leadership roles in challenging the authority of the colonial state or the local magnate. In many areas, these groups were joined by petty traders and moneylenders—many of whom were drawn from precisely these groups—who were prominently featured Noncooperation Movement; they could be found on both sides of the struggle.[141] How these groups emerged from the age of revolution to attain featured roles in the "rural political scene" of the early twentieth century forms the focus of the next chapter.
[140] ConstructionofCommunalismin India , p. zoo .
[141] In the market of Bagaha, Marwaris instituted a complaint against local Noncooperation leaders. Notes by McNamara, with no. 7956A, Nov. 23, 1921, B & O Police Procs., June 1921, no. 3, enclosure.