Liberation Theology in Avadh

During the latter part of 1920, a peasant revolt erupted in three districts of what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh—the area that had constituted the pre-1857 kingdom of Avadh (Oudh).^[80] Mass demonstrations led to police firings and a state of near-anarchy as peasants abused their landlords and refused to pay rent. Law and order deteriorated to such a

[78] Hein, The Miracle Plays of Mathura , 100.

[79] Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics , 6.

[80] The account given here is based on Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism."

degree that the British governor of the United Provinces speculated that he was witnessing "the beginnings of something like revolution."^[81] Prominent leaders of the Indian National Congress were equally concerned and rushed to the affected districts. Yet the rhetoric of the peasant leaders was not of revolution but of Ramraj , and their aim was not the overthrow of the state or even of the state-supported system of revenue farming. Instead, they sought a return to an order that had been disturbed by changes in the rural economy and by the depredations of a new class of absentee landlords.

Within the Kisan Sabhas (cultivators' societies) that formed the organizational basis of the agitation, the influence of the Manas and its themes was pervasive. The most influential spokesmen for these groups were two Vaishnava sadhus, Baba Ramchandra and Baba Janaki Das; the former had been an indentured laborer in Fiji before returning to his homeland and assuming sadhu's garb to become a wandering kathavacak and peasant organizer. He was, in short, one of the "millenarian stump orators" noted by Bayly, who flourished in the region during the latter part of the First World War amid a catastrophic influenza epidemic and wild rumors of the imminent collapse of the British Empire.^[82] It is clear from a description of their activities that, even in the context of the Kisan Sabhas, Ramchandra and his cohorts remained kathavacaks : "At the early peasant meetings Ramchandra and others commonly recited excerpts from Tulsidas' Ramcaritmanas , the favorite religious epic of the Hindus in northern India, and especially beloved of people in this region: their own language, Avadhi, was after all the language of Tulsidas' composition, and places like Ayodhya (a few miles from Faizabad), the seat of Ram's kingdom, very much part of their world."^[83] So important was Ramayan symbolism to the movement that the establishment of the first Kisan Sabha, in the village of Rure, was explained by citing a half-line from the epic that could be interpreted to contain the name of that village.^[84] For the first large-scale meeting of the

[81] Ibid., 143.

[82] Ibid., 164; Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics, 105. On the tremendous impact of the influenza epidemic, see Clark, "Mortality and Fertility in the Gangetic Plain."

[83] Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism," 168-69.

[84] Ibid., 171; the line is rajasamajavirajata rure (1.241.3), which occurs in the context of Janak's bow sacrifice, at which Ram and Lakshman "appear resplendent in the assembly of kings." By reading the word rure (resplendent) as a proper noun, however, the line can be ingeniously construed to mean "the royal assembly appears in Rure," thus implying that the brothers visited the village. As noted earlier, this kind of playfully strained interpretation of Manas verses is common in Katha performance.

movement in December 1920, the organizers selected the pilgrimage city of Ayodhya, the mythical capital of Ramraj , and mustered eighty thousand supporters.

The peasants had evident faith in the liberating power of Ram's name and made it the rallying cry of their movement. One of the early objectives of Baba Ramchandra (who seems hardly to have been distinguished from Ram himself in the minds of some supporters) was to change the customary local form of greeting: "When he first came to Avadh, the greeting salaam (usually addressed by one in an inferior station to one in a superior) was widely used. He promoted the use of the alternative, 'Sita-Ram,' which did away with such discrimination on grounds of status, and thus earned the displeasure of 'many of the praiseworthy (sic.) and respectable folk of the upper castes.'"^[85] Once the cultivators' movement got under way, the new greeting became one of its most potent organizing tools; "it was enough for Ramchandra to raise the slogan 'Sita-Ram': the cry was promptly taken up in one village after another, and thus in a remarkably short space of time thousands would assemble." To worried British officials, "Sita-Ram ki jay!" (Victory to Sita-Ram!) was a "war-cry . . . the cry of discontent." Yet Ramchandra's use of the name was hardly the maneuver of a sophisticated politician—his memoirs bear witness to his ingenuous faith in its power both to turn back club-wielding policemen and to cause sickly mango trees to yield fruit. Rather it was a natural invocation of an established symbol that had both social and religious resonance. "In the most difficult of situations, the peasants turned to the slogan 'Sita-Ram,'" recalled Ramchandra, "and the slogan fulfilled their many different desires. As a result the organization grew ever stronger."^[86]

The objectives of the Kisan Sabha movement must be understood in the context of the region's political and economic history. After the revolt of 1857, nearly three-fifths of the cultivated land in Avadh was assigned to some 280 landlord families who had proved their loyalty to the British and were designated "natural leaders." The assignment of such unprecedented privileges, now protected by the strong arm of the colonial regime, led to their widespread abuse of "inferior right holders" (various categories of tenants intermediary between the landlords and the peasants) and the actual—and generally landless—cultivators.

[85] Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism," 169; the embedded quote is from Baba Ramchandra's memoirs.

[86] Ibid., 169-71.

These abuses were worsened by economic changes, especially by the rise of an urban mercantile and banking class that, under British law, acquired the control of large estates in repayment of debts. These new landlords lived away from their estates and accepted none of the reciprocal responsibilities of the old aristocracy; instead, they made rapacious demands on the tenantry through abusive estate agents and their armed guards. It was against the oppression of these (in Nehru's words) "spoilt children of the British Government" that the peasants of Avadh arose.^[87]

To the peasants Ramraj did not mean the overthrow of the landholding system, but it did mean lower rents and fairer treatment. In Gyan Pandey's analysis of the peasants' views, "exploitation as such was not unjust. It was inevitable that some ruled and some conducted prayers and some owned the land and some laboured, and all lived off the fruits of that labour. But it was important that everyone in the society made a living out of the resources that were available."^[88] Yet even such modest objectives were too threatening for the colonial regime. While official reports coldly detailed the wretchedness of the peasants on the estates and the unwillingness of the landlords to contemplate any loosening of their hold and even while the government publicized its promise to investigate and press for reforms, the full weight of its most autocratic powers of police and judiciary was pressed into action to crush the revolt and imprison its leaders. By April 1922, the agitation was successfully suppressed.

But it was not the government alone that felt threatened. Nationalist leaders, including Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, after showing initial sympathy for the peasants' demands, withdrew their support and abandoned the movement to its unsung demise. Their ostensible motive was fear that the revolt would turn violent and wreck their peaceful Noncooperation Movement. They stressed instead the need for peasants and landlords to forget their differences and present a "united front" against imperialism. Pandey has incisively analyzed the implicit logic of this strategy as well as its portent for the future of Congress government:

[87] Apart from the usual exorbitant rents—often in excess of 50 percent of the harvest-peasants were expected to fill the landlord's own fields and perform free labor for him, as well as to periodically meet special assessments such as a motorana tax, levied when the landlord desired to purchase an automobile; Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism," 161, 172.

[88] Ibid., 171.

The Congress' insistence in 1921-2 on a united front of landlords as well as peasants and others, was a statement in favour of the status quo and against any radical change in the social set-up when the British finally handed over the reins of power. The advice to peasants to give up organizing "meetings" and "disturbances" and to leave politics to the professionals, was a statement against mass participatory democracy and in favour of the idea of "trustee-ship"—the landlords and princes acting as trustees in the economic sphere, Gandhi and company in the political.^[89]

It was also the reflection of an economic reality, for many of the absentee landlords against whom the Avadh peasants directed their protests were the same "new men" who provided the financial backing for the Congress.

Pandey's analysis of the Congress position suggests one of the possible readings of Ramraj : a paternalistic autocracy of natural leaders and cooperative subjects. The peasants' actions suggested the possibility of another view: a Ramraj of mass participatory democracy insuring a fairer distribution of wealth. It was ironic, as we shall see, that Mohandas Gandhi should have been drawn, in this instance, to favor the former interpretation; it is less surprising that it has remained dominant in post-Independence Indian politics.