Chapter 2—
The "City of Discontent":
Patna in the Age of "Revolution"

The city of Patna: what better way to begin this bazaar narrative than with the central place of the region, and what better way to recount its initial colonial career beginning in the eighteenth-century age of "revolution" than to turn to a map drawn by Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai (1727-28 to 1797-98), who lived in that era as both observer and participant. His magnificent, multivolume chronicle—familiar to subsequent generations as TheSeirMutaqherin , orViewofModernTimes—has much to say about the inqilab , or revolution, of the eighteenth century, which led to the decline of the Mughal Empire, the rise and fall of the successor state of the nawabs of Bengal, and the triumph of the East India Company in north India.^[1] Many other contemporary voices, Indian and British, also represent the tumultuous events of the times as a revolution or an upheaval, not in the sense of a social revolution but as "a change in rulers, a change of dynasties, a reversal

[1] E.g., see Seir , vol. 3, p. 161. The four-volume history—written in Persian in the early 1780s and translated into English as early as 1789—covers the period from 1707 to 1782. See M. A. Rahim, "Historian Ghulam Husain Tabatabai," Journalof theAsiaticSocietyofPakistan 8 (1963): 117-29. The date of Ghulam Husain's death is a matter of some controversy. I have used 1798-99, the date given in R. M. Tilghman, Secy., BOR, to Holt Mackenzie, Secy., May 2, 1823, Bengal Rev. Consltns., June 12-19, 1823, June 19, no. 23.

of luck or fate" resulting in "a destruction of the old economic order, a distortion of the old social order."^[2]

To add context to these voices and to fill in their silences, I have also drawn on colonial records. As the historian of ModernTimes was aware—the "English" themselves referred to him as "the historian" (an appellation intended to distinguish him from his namesake who was the landholder of Sherghati)^[3] —his "English" followed "some practices" that were novel for his countrymen, such as their "custom" of gathering information: "counting the inhabitants of every town and city, and examining how much they may have earned, and how much spent; how many are dead, and how many are their children and how many their old men."^[4] Such data collection about the Other, a critical imperative in the development of the colonial state, centered on a series of "investigative modalities" relating to "the observational, the historiographic and the museological" as well as the "survey," "enumerative," "surveillance," and "sanitary" modalities. Each of these was vital to the collection "of a body of information, needed in a governing project."^[5]

By locating contemporary local voices in the socioeconomic setting that can be sketched from the colonial documentation project, this chapter intends to look both at the poetics and politics of the revolution as articulated in contemporary written texts and at its effects on the human and physical landscape as represented in the lived text that was the city of Patna.^[6] The initial focus here is on the experiences of the elite inhabitants of Patna, whose downfall was lamented and proclaimed by many voices. Indeed, to follow the leads furnished by Ghulam Husain and his contemporaries is to converge on three major developments defining the "modern times" of the city: the diminution in power and influence of its elite, the rise in power of zamindars, or land-

[2] Frederick Louis Lehmann, "The Eighteenth Century Transition in India: Responses of Some Bihar Intellectuals," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1967, pp. 18- 9, 170; P. J. Marshall, New CambridgeHistoryofIndia , II , 2,Bengal:TheBritish Bridgehead , EasternIndia1740-1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 1.

[3] Thomas Law, Colltr., Gaya, to S. Charters, Pres. and Members, Calcutta Committee, Sept. 3, 1785, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Feb. 2-23, 1786, Feb. 2, no. 146

[4] Seir , vol. 3, p. 162. To rephrase this in Said's terms, Orientalism is predisposed to "engage in the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts." Orientalism , p. 22 . Also see Arjun Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in PostcolonialPredicament , chap. 10, for a discussion of the uniquely colonial character of "enumerative strategies."

[5] Cohn, "Anthropology of a Colonial State."

[6] Useful here and in other sections are the ideas of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ThePoliticsandPoetics ofTransgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

holders, and the economic decline of the city and the region as a result of changes—termed deindustrialization by some scholars—that had dire consequences for the livelihood of large numbers of ordinary men and women as well. A scrutiny of these developments highlights the current historiographical debate about the kind of rupture colonial rule generated in the fabric of South Asian society, culture, and economy.^[7]

To what extent these developments can be discerned by tracing the career of the city of Patna as the central place of the region forms another focus of this chapter. In part this requires surveying its changing relationship with its hinterland, as the region and subcontinent became incorporated into an expanding world system, and in part it entails focusing on the city itself—its built environment. To locate this historically, I will contextualize Ghulam Husain's view of his "modern times" by extending his history backward and forward in time, to the precolonial era as well as to the colonial period that he did not live to witness.

The ostensible purpose of Ghulam Husain's Modern Times was to provide "an insight into the phenomena of the Almighty Artist's full powers, and a glimpse into the most glorious part of the Creator's performance"; it also aimed at offering the "public at some distant time hereafter, an idea of the preceding reigns; and to prevent his being stopped short, as by a chasm, on discovering that links are wanting from the chain of past events."^[8]

Revelation and genealogy—in other words, history—were the underlying principles of this work. Apprenticed to the same master narrative, both principles served to outline an identical political plot, tracing the fall of the old order of the historian's countrymen and coreligionists and the rise of the lineage of the Company, or British Raj. And as a historian who preferred to retell events that he had personally witnessed or heard about, Ghulam Husain constructed his "chain of past events" along a narrow "idea of preceding reigns." His history opens with high drama: the death in 1707 of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, which engendered a war of succession over the throne in Delhi, and the emergence of a host of regional contenders in the provinces.^[9]

Lacking a longuedurée perspective, Ghulam Husain's ModernTimes ignores earlier "revolutions," thus leaving in the dark the many up-

[7] For a discussion of this debate, see Bayly, IndianSociety , pp. 1-6.

[8] Seir , vol. 1, pp. 24-25.

[9] Ibid., p. 1. The geographical focus of his work is also restricted, essentially confined to his home province of Bengal, which then included Bihar.

heavals that the region had experienced during "preceding reigns," as well as the long career of Patna.^[10] Nevertheless, its past as the ancient capital, Pataliputra, formed part of the historical consciousness of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: a site of remembrance although not as yet a site of archaeology. Buried under layers of history, the Pataliputra of ancient greatness had to await the archaeologist's spade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only with the coming of the "museological modality" could it surface as a physical site; and even then it was excavated at the outskirts of the "modern" city, an appropriately distant, ghostly reminder of an almost irrecoverable past.^[11]

Like eighteenth-century Patna, Pataliputra was a riverine city. However, unlike Ghulam Husain's Patna, it was situated not only on the Ganges and the Son, but near the confluence of the Gogra and Gandak as well. Its centrality was also sustained by a hinterland that had long enjoyed agricultural prosperity and a high population density. From the sixth century B.C.E. until the beginning of the Christian era, the kingdom of Magadh (roughly Patna and Gaya districts) constituted the major center of power in north India: five successive dynasties based in this area formed in these centuries supraregional or pan-Indian empires. A more productive resource base enabled the Gangetic plain generally and the Magadh area specifically to exercise hegemony over the rest of the subcontinent in the ancient period.^[12]

From the very outset the rise of Patna as a central place was tied to a political act: the establishment by a Magadh ruler of a fort in the village of Patali in the fifth century B.C.E. Pataliputra emerged from this site to become the capital of the Mauryan dynasty in the fourth century B.C.E. and the core of the first centralized empire under King Ashoka, who transformed the dynasty into an all-India empire.^[13] Although still

[10] The longuedurée approach favored by the Annales school of historians looks at structures over the long term in order to highlight "the continuities, the immobilities, the structures." Fernand Braudel, OnHistory , trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 122; E. LeRoy Ladurie, TheTerritoryof theHistorian , trans. Ben and Sian Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

[11] B. P. Sinha and Lala Aditya Narain, PataliputraExcavation , 1955–56 (Patna Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, 1970), pp. 6–7; Manoranjan Ghosh, The Pataliputra (Patna: Patna Law Press, 1919). The first concerted attempts to locate the city were made by Major Rennell in the 1780s.

[12] Joseph E. Schwartzberg, ed., AHistoricalAtlas ofSouthAsia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 254–59; Ahmad, Bihar Geography , p. 210.

[13] Diwakar, BiharthroughtheAges , pp. 186–89; B. P. Sinha, "Social and Economic Conditions (Mauryan Period)," in ComprehensiveHistoryof Bihar , vol. 1, 1, pp. 692–93. See also Gideon Sjoberg, ThePreindustrialCity:PastandPresent (New York: Free Press,1960), p. 68, on the close relationship between growth in preindustrial cities and the "consolidation or extension of a political apparatus, be the result a kingdom or an empire."

at the heart of an empire under the Guptas (ca. 320-647 C.E.), it diminished in importance during this era because the center of gravity of north Indian power shifted westward toward Banaras. The breakup of the empire into many kingdoms, each with its own strategic central place, added to this growing peripheralization of Magadh. Pataliputra's star, tied as it was to the careers of its political masters, faded after almost a millennium of brilliance. The locus of power continued to migrate westward, eventually coming to rest in the Delhi-Agra region, where it has remained for almost the last five centuries, except for much of the colonial period discussed here, during which Calcutta was the capital of the empire.^[14]

Ghulam Husain's history is also silent on the fate of Pataliputra from the time of the Guptas to the initial Muslim presence in the region, a historical "chasm" that has remained largely unfilled because of a paucity of information. Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji's successful conquest of the region at the end of the twelfth century extended Turkish rule into the area, but the new rulers shifted their base from the town of Bihar (also known as Biharsharif) to Lakhnauti (Malda district) in Bengal. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the region was a contested frontier area, the object of political and military jockeying between the sultans of Delhi and the independent kings of Lakhnauti. The rise of the kingdom of Jaunpur (North-Western Provinces) in the fifteenth century added another player to the conflict. Throughout much of this period (1206-1526) Patna was a secondary settlement, subordinated to the town of Bihar, whose primacy was acknowledged by the fact that the entire province was named after it.^[15]

Nor does the historian of Modern Times identify the "preceding reigns" that led to the rebirth of Pataliputra as Patna, an omission that is all the more glaring because the monuments of his age were conspicuous relics of the remembered and quotidian landscape of the eighteenth century. Although the rise of the Mughals in the early sixteenth century led to the formation of a subcontinent-wide empire centered in

[14] Schwartzberg, HistoricalAtlas , pp. 258-59.

[15] Qeyamuddin Ahmad, "Aspects of the Historical Geography of Medieval Bihar," and Jagdish Narayan Sarkar, "Economic Life in Early Medieval Bihar, 1206-1526," in ComprehensiveHistoryof Bihar , vol. 2, part 1, ed. Syed Hasan Askari and Qeyamuddin Ahmad (Patna: Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 1983), pp. 1-11 , 445.

north India, Bihar was initially only nominally under their government. Different groups of Afghans carved out regional kingdoms in eastern India that effectively resisted the direct control of Delhi. By 1540 the most notable of these kingdoms, under the leadership of Sher Shah, had managed to wrest control of much of north India from the Delhi rulers. During his short-lived Sur dynasty, Pataliputra emerged as "Pattana"—meaning a place of commercial importance, a mart—and gained ascendancy over the town of Bihar. Sher Shah built a fort to encompass the city; its extant eastern and western gates stand a mile and half apart. Mughal victories over his heirs eventually led to the imposition of direct Mughal rule over Bihar by the 1570s: this new political reality was reflected in the organization of the region as one of the provinces (subahs) of the empire in 1580.^[16]

With Delhi wearing the crown during the Mughal period, Patna became the seat of the region. Abdul Latif compared it favorably in 1608 with his prosperous hometown of Ahmedabad in western India. Noting that it had supplanted the town of Bihar and become the capital and residence of the Mughal governor, he termed it the "best [city] of the province. . . . All kinds of articles needed . . . for food and clothing are twice or thrice as cheap and abundant here as in other places. In truth, it is a place fit to live in; hence many traders and comfort-loving men have chosen it for their homes. In no other city of India can be seen so many men of Iraq and Khurasan, as have taken up their residence here."^[17]

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Persians, Central Asians, and Armenian traders were active in the city, as were members of several business communities, including Khatris from the north and Jains from the west. The well-known eighteenth-century banking house of Jagat Seth had its beginnings in Patna in the seventeenth century. Banarsidas, the early-seventeenth-century Jaunpur merchant, made both Patna and Banaras major stops on his business circuit.^[18]

Missing from Ghulam Husain's "chain of past events" is also a "link" about his so-called English who appear suddenly in the 1756–57

[16] Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, "Patna and Its Environs in the Seventeenth Century—a Study in Economic History," JBRS 33 (1947): 126; Lehman, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," p. 22; Qeyamuddin Ahmad, CorpusofArabicandPersian InscriptionsofBihar(A .H . 640–1200) (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1973).

[17] Cited in Jadunath Sarkar, "Travels in Bihar, 1608 A.D.," JBORS 5 (1919): 598–99.

[18] Banarsidas, Ardhakathana , p. 67; Surendra Gopal, Patnain19thCentury (Calcutta: Naya Prokash, 1982), p. 2; Naqvi, UrbanCentresinIndia , pp. 92–94.

phase of his history and who are already powerful enough to intrude dramatically onto the Bengal stage to play a critical role in the overthrow of its nawab, Siraj-ud-daula. Yet long before this Plassey Revolution—made possible by the British victory over the nawab at the famous Battle of Plassey in 1757—established the British as a major political force in the region, Europeans had been making inroads into the regional economy. In fact, a considerable portion of the Bengal economy was in European hands in the early eighteenth century. Rather than view this development as indicating the beginning of deindustrialization, some scholars have proposed that direct European intervention and involvement in textile production "was part of a process, later transferred to agriculture, which led to the incorporation of South Asia within the world economy and the establishment of British colonialism."^[19]

Europeans had been knocking on Patna's commercial doors as early as the late sixteenth century. By 1620 the English East India Company had set up a factory to purchase calicoes and to process raw silk obtained from Bengal. Although the factory was closed within a year, the Company returned in 1632, when Peter Mundy, accompanied by an Indian broker, sought a market for quicksilver and vermilion in Patna, with the goal of investing the returns in the purchase of articles of trade. Notwithstanding this second failed attempt, the Company organized a branch factory at Patna in 1657, which became its outlet for local trade. Increasingly, the Company's main focus was saltpeter, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of gunpowder, which was collected in Patna from the entire region and which was of interest to several European powers; it also sold broadcloth, lead, and quicksilver.^[20]

Patna also enjoyed a reputation in the seventeenth century as a center of trade in cotton and silk goods; the hinterland within a fifty-mile radius of the city was engaged in cotton production. It was particularly well-known for two types of cotton cloth: "emmerties" and "calicoes." Manucci found many merchants in Patna's "bazaars" in 1683 trading in fine white cloth and other products. Silk was produced locally at

[19] Jim Matson, "Deindustrialization or Peripheralization?: The Case of Cotton Textiles in India, 1750-1950," in SouthAsia andWorldCapitalism , p. 215; Marshall, Bengal , p. 80.

[20] N. N. Raye, TheAnnalsoftheEarlyEnglishSettlementinBihar (Calcutta: Kamala Book Depot, 1927), pp. 65-90; Narayan Prasad Singh, TheEastIndiaCompany'sMonopolyIndustriesinBihar (Muzaffarpur: Sarvodaya Vangmaya, 1980); Sarkar, "Patna in the Seventeenth Century," p. 126 .

Baikunthpur, as well as imported from Bengal. Two other valuable products were rice and opium.^[21]

Ghulam Husain's Patna had therefore been a rising political and economic center for almost a century and a half before the revolution. Furthermore—although not the focus of his history either—the city had received a considerable fillip in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Prince Azim-us-Shah, the grandson of Emperor Aurangzeb and the governor of Bengal (including Bihar) in 1703-7, decided to settle in Patna. While his plans to transform it into another Delhi never got off the ground, Patna, now renamed Azimabad after him, prospered, as his courtiers and nobles flocked to the city to live in the presence of their prince. Azimabad, moreover, persisted as the name of the city until the turn of the nineteenth century; it was the name used by Ghulam Husain.

Nor did the declining power of the Mughals put an immediate brake on this pace. On the contrary, with Delhi's hold over the region weakening, Bihar, although subordinated to and "not as wealthy an area" as Bengal, attracted in-migration. Lehmann explains that "a regular flow of nobles, poets, soldiers, Sufi saints, and other people came in from Delhi and other parts. . . . The result was that the city of Patna blossomed forth as a major center of Mughal culture in the eighteenth century. "^[22]

Patna became home to one of the so-called regional "bazaar schools" of painting that developed as art patronage in Delhi faded with the decline of the Mughal Empire. According to the family tradition of the Patna kalam (school of painters), their roots in the city date to about 1760. They apparently settled in Patna not because it was in the throes of a revolution but because it was a prosperous city offering them the patronage they needed in order to survive as painters. Their paintings, featured in this study, focus particularly on bazaar scenes and festivals, vivid historical vistas that can be only partly evoked from textual

[21] Raye, TheEnglishinBihar , pp. 43-46; A. K. Sinha, TransitioninTextileIndustry (Delhi: Capital Publishing House, 1984), pp. 9-12; A. Sami, "Evolution of Commercial Centres in Patna," JBRS , L .N . MishraCommemorationVolume 63-64 (1977-78): 640-41; Shafaat Ahmad Khan, ed., John MarshallinIndia:Notesand ObservationsinBengal , 1668-1672 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1927), pp. 23-24.

[22] Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," pp. 22-23; G. PS., "Patna, during the Last Days of the Mahomedans," CalcuttaReview 147 (1882): 115. A separate province (subah) in the Mughal period, Bihar was absorbed into Bengal in the early eighteenth century.

sources. Supported by both Indian and colonial patrons, this school continued to thrive well into the late nineteenth century^[23] —further evidence of the economic vibrancy that characterized the city long after the age of revolution.

Thus the perspective of ModernTimes , with its focus on the decline of the city, was a backward look at a century that began with Patna reaching new heights of prosperity and prominence as Azimabad, and one that closed with a city seemingly reeling from the shock of the revolution. The retrospective gaze of this historian was therefore circumscribed (as it is for any historian), in part by his "genealogy" as a historian representing a specific moment in time, and in part by his specific personal outlook. As an elite member of "Hindostan"—the north Indian heartland—and as a Muslim, his concept of revelation and genealogy was shaped by the extraordinary events that had led to the demise of an Indo-Islamic empire and a regional kingdom and the birth of a new power. This turn of events necessarily foregrounded the contradictions stemming from Ghulam Husain's own faith as a Muslim—sometimes specifically as a Shiite Muslim—and from the other religions of the historical actors of his ModernTimes .^[24] To this set of contradictions were added the further complications of his multiple personal and family attachments to, at one time or another, the Mughal Empire, the successor state of Bengal, and, for him personally, the East India Company. Critical of the old order, particularly that of the nawabs of Bengal with whom he had had the most direct contact, he nevertheless lamented its passing because it led to the triumph of the "nation of Hat-wearers." To him, the British were "alien to this country," in his words, "both in customs and manners; and quite strangers to the methods of raising tribute as well as to the maxims of estimating the revenues, or of comprehending the ways of tax-gathering."^[25]

[23] It is a dying art form now. See my "Visualizing Patna: History and the Patna School of Painting," paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Los Angeles, Mar. 25–28, 1993.

[24] These categories are used here to indicate the multiple layers of identity that defined any person or group in this era, and are not meant to be equated with the communal identities that emerged a century later. See Gyanendra Pandey, TheConstructionofCommunalisminColonialNorthIndia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 1–22, on the "historical character of 'communalism."'

[25] At the time he wrote his history—early 1780s—he was already a believer in the "permanence" of British rule. Seir , vol. 3, p. 162; vol. 2, pp. 155, 231. Rahim, "Ghulam Husain," pp. 125–26, emphasizes his pro-British sympathies; Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," pp. 66–91, recognizes the multivocality of his history.

Ghulam Husain was not alone in ruing the social structural ruptures caused by the upheavals of the eighteenth century. Consider the Shahr-i-Ashob , or "a poem on a ruined city" or the "city of discontent" written in the 1750s or 1760s by Shah Ayatullah Jauhari (1714?-96) in the style of a narrative poem (mathnavi) . Its most striking note concerns the fact that "the times are changing, everything is contrary, bearing the impression of changing fortune." "Worthy men, good fortune, prosperity" in the new epoch, he intones, "all are gone from this world. Friendship and love have dwindled, and beastly avarice has increased."^[26]

A similar lament was penned by Ghulam Ali Rasikh (c. 1749-1823) in his narrative poem entitled "Description of the Times of Upheaval [Inqilab] and Lamentation to Heaven, and a Summary Statement of the Circumstances of the Inhabitants of the Town of Azimabad." His evocation of a "ruined city" describes a time when "the inhabitants . . . have become men of bad conduct." So rampant was corruption that the "city [had] been visited with [the] cholera epidemic."^[27]

Azimabad, in Rasikh's metaphor, formerly a "rose-bed," had been transformed into "a garden of thorns," "a garden . . . [with] a shockingly different color" where "spring" had "turned into autumn." The poet laments,

Now this garden is leafless, a place of warning; nothing remains of those wonderful days. 
There is no opulent man in this garden, no man of wealth to perfume it like a flower. 
Everyone is crushed by poverty; everyone is imprisoned in that condition. 
Oh, where is the life of luxury and where the strolls in the garden? 
Who can think of such pleasures now, and who has the leisure? 
All hope for silver and gold is gone; but now the people have yellowish faces and silvery tears. 
The formerly wealthy are now all searching for the evening meal; gentlemen of means have become beggars. 
Emperor and Ministers have now become paupers; those who were once wealthy do not even get alms today.

[26] See Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," pp. 154, 140; and pp. 152-54, for a complete translation of all twenty-seven couplets of this poem.

[27] Ibid., pp. 173-83; Khan Bahadur Saiyid Zamir-ud-din Ahmad, "Ghulam 'Ali Rasikh,"' JBRS 4 (1918): 44-61. Lehmann has rightly attributed this poem to the last years of Rasikh's life. The cholera epidemic referred to in the poem occurred in 1818. See James Jameson, ReportontheEpidemickCholeraMorbus (Calcutta: A. G. Balfour, 1820), pp. 5-10.

Now it is the dust of the road on the foreheads of people who were once covered with jewels from head to toe. 
Fine ermine carpets were once theirs to have and hold, who now cannot afford even a palm-leaf mat for a bed. 
Those who once were gentlemen, with a hundred slave-girls and slave-boys, are now selling themselves for life. 
Those who enjoyed good fortunes in palaces and mansions now have cobwebs for their home.^[28]

A "different color" also characterized the condition of agriculture and commerce. To turn once again to Rasikh's words:

The profession of agriculture also is without lustre, its goals are now unattainable. 
When does this profession enrich anyone? 
It is impossible to flourish in it. 
There is the constant danger of drought in it, and where there is flooding, it is a destructive typhoon. 
Where is there any commercial capital? 
There is nothing remaining, except the ready money of life itself. 
Now there is a good business only in poverty, and this business proceeds only with sighs of despair. 
The platform for a commercial shop is gone, for there are neither sellers nor buyers.^[29]

But was the sense of "ruin" and "discontent" overdetermined by the fact that the historian and poets had their fingers on the pulse of the aristocracy but not on that of the rest of their society? And being all Muslims, were their voices attuned only to the Muslim segment of the elite? Not that these "facts" necessarily vitiate the "facticity" of their observations, but surely they heightened the tone of urgency and despair. For the pall that set in toward the close of the eighteenth century was largely cast over their predominantly Indo-Islamic "garden" of Azimabad.

Small wonder that Jauhari and Rasikh equated the passing of the aristocracy with a moral and religious breakdown in society. For Jauhari especially, "ruin" and "discontent" stemmed from the declining position of Islam in the city as a political power but also as a religious faith. And along with displacement came replacement, Islam giving way to a resurgent Hinduism. As Rasikh saw it,

[28] Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," pp. 174–75; 169.

[29] Ibid., pp. 178–79.

God's house is dark. . . . 
Look where you will, and in every temple the gongs are sounding; 
Few hear the call to prayer and go to the mosque. 
The Brahmans, wearing their sect-marks, are respected in these times. 
The use of the (Hindu) rosary is common, instead of recitation of the name of God. 
The cavalry of Lalahs and Babus goes with such a tumult, 
That the Subahdar is a Hindu, and a Hindu holds the Diwani.^[30]

In Jauhari's estimation, Hindus occupied the center stage and the British were poised in the wings. "Christians are their protectors," he believed, "and they are the protectors of the Christians; The life of Musulmans has fallen into the hands of their two great enemies."^[31]

The disparate religious hues in the pictures of "ruin" and "discontent" painted by Jauhari and Rasikh may in part reflect their different moments in time. As the reference to a Hindu subahdar (governor) and a Hindu diwan (chief officer) suggests, the former's perspective dated back to the mid-eighteenth century, when Janaki Ram and Ram Narayan held high offices in Bihar, the centralized Mughal Empire and its successor state in Bengal appeared to be on the wane, and British power was on the rise. However, by the time of Rasikh's composition—probably sometime between 1818 and his death in 1823—the British were the supreme political power in the subcontinent. Nevertheless, Rasikh, although ever the "opportunist"—he was known to have dedicated some of his verses to the new regime, at one point describing himself as "a great well-wisher of the Company"^[32] —is clearly implicitly if not explicitly indicting the existing regime for having transformed his city and his society into a "garden" of "a shockingly different color."

Although both poets took exception to what they perceived as a displacement of the aristocracy, Jauhari's Shahr-i-Ashob was decidedly more religious in its lament. Lehmann attributes this distinction to their different personal experiences and background. "Both . . . had their origins in Sufism but Jauhari remained in a Sufi religious establishment in the small town of Phulwari Sharif, while Rasikh joined in the social and literary circles in the big cities."^[33]

[30] Ibid., p. 154. See below, chap. 3, regarding pilgrimages and melas as manifestations of this resurgent Hinduism.

[31] Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," p. 153.

[32] Ibid., p. 163; Muzaffar Alam, "Eastern India in the Early Eighteenth Century 'Crisis': Some Evidence from Bihar," IESHR2 8 (1991): 70-71.

[33] Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," p. 169.

The "shockingly different color" apparently affected everyone and everything in the "garden" because of the multiple roles the aristocracy of Azimabad played in the local and regional society and economy by virtue of their power, prestige, and patronage. The decline in aristocratic fortunes cut a wide swath: "Everyone is unemployed . . .Masters of learning and skill are wandering from door to door with begging bowls. People with skills are heart-sick, there is no business to help them now." Rasikh's catalog of "everyone" included "saints . . . fearfully enduring misfortune," calligraphers "constantly shedding tears upon the writing of their own fate," teachers "fed up with life," poets "cowardly, greedy. . . shameless," advocates no longer "in a flourishing state," physicians "fatigued," and soldiers without even "a toy clay horse" to command; peasants and traders, too, suffered. Poets were especially affected because their livelihood, as Rasikh avers, depended on the patronage of such elites who "controlled government and patronized the arts and trades of the professional and middle classes."^[34]

The poetic language of despair thus issued from a specific "discontent": the passing of an ancien régime that supported a natural hierarchy (naturally) headed by an aristocracy. For when "kings" were turned into "beggars," according to Rasikh, the garden was turned "upside down. "^[35]

But not all "kings" turned into "beggars." Because the imagined revolution of Ghulam Husain and of Jauhari and Rasikh was fundamentally about the passing of a system of rule, specifically an Indo-Islamic order, the change it produced was by no means a social revolution. Rather, its major consequence was a turnover in personnel; a change that targeted in particular a generation of elites—many of whom were Muslims—whose lives spanned the transitional decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Kumkum Chatterjee's recent work shows, the "aristocracy" of the region, comprising the highest level of bureaucrats, merchants, and banking magnates, was adversely affected by the upheavals of the eighteenth century. In Azimabad this "aristocracy" consisted of the elite, with its shared status, wealth, respect, and lifestyle, which set it apart from the rest of society.^[36]

[34] Ibid., pp. 170, 174-79.

[35] Ibid., p. 162.

[36] "Intimations of Crisis: The Elite of Azimabad-Patna," paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, Mar. 24-27, 1994; and her forthcoming book on "Merchants, Politics and Society: Eastern India, 1733-1820." Bayly, IndianSociety , p. 72, attributes the decline of Muslim influence to the "dismantling of Mughal administrative forms . . . [and] the failure of Muslims to participate in the new commercial opportunities which the Company and European private trade had opened up."

Contrast this downward trend of the Patna elite with the rise of a "new" aristocracy that Ghulam Husain bore testimony to, both as a historian and as a historical actor caught up in the latter process. His account of this "new" aristocracy also serves as a contrast to Rasikh's dire pronouncement on the decline of the "profession of agriculture":

Under the English Government the principal Zemindars being now their own masters, and the hinges of all business in their own lands; and having been so lucky as to carry [sic] some favour with their masters; and all this in contrariety to former institutes, which held it as an invariable maxim, to keep them low; these people do now just as they please, and in what manner they please; nor do they make any thing of fighting amongst themselves, and killing and slaughtering their subjects; whilst the Fojdar [head police officer] dares not to quarrel with them, and is even afraid to give them an order, or to revenge the oppressed ones upon those tyrants, or even to reclaim from their hands the property of those travellers whom they have despoiled.^[37]

The "overgrowing power of the Zemindars, and . . . their being trusted too much" was a source of great vexation to Ghulam Husain—he considered them an "incorrigible" and "malevolent race" who were "to a man, a refractory, short-sighted, faithless set of people, that mind nothing but present interest, and require always a strict hand." Notwithstanding "rules of old standing . . . [and] the most approved opinions held equally by eminent merchants, as well as by knowing Princes," "English rulers," he believed, treated them indulgently, even equating them with "Zemindars and land-holders of their own."^[38]

Personal experience involving the family's holding in pargana Japla, no doubt, exacerbated this negative outlook. (Japla, an earlier designation for Hussainabad, was developed by his father (Hedayat Ali Khan), served as the family's place of residence, and was held as an altamgha , or rent-free grant.) But by the early 1790s this claim was disputed by the government—as were many other revenue-free grants and estates. The family's grant was eventually revoked because the deed entitling them to the grant was considered a forgery. Their stake in the south-

[37] Seir , vol. 3, pp. 181 , 182. By zamindar he meant, as he explained to Company officials, a "possessor or proprietor of land . . . who pays rent to the . . . ruler, and is equally applicable to every landholder whether possessing a greater or less number of villages or only a portion of a village." "Questions to [and answers by] Golam Hossein Khan . . . ," translated Feb. 29, 1788, Home Miscellaneous, H/Misc/381.

[38] Seir , vol. 2, pp. 204-5.

western Gaya parganas of Siris and Kutumba, which, according to Ghulam Husain, "had been leased out to our family from a great number of years,"^[39] also slipped out of their hands and devolved entirely into the possession of the area's long-standing zamindar, Narain Singh. A brief stint in 1774 as sazawal (land steward) for the latter's lands set him back financially because the zamindar's "bad conduct" prevented him from managing the estate profitably. Narain Singh, moreover, continued to enjoy his estate (zamindari) even though he repeatedly took up arms against the British (for example, by joining the Banaras rebellion of Raja Chait Singh in 1781) and was remiss and recalcitrant in meeting his revenue payments. Jailed by the authorities, he was restored to his "forfeited" zamindari upon his release in 1790. As for Ghulam Husain, he was left with only a small portion of the lands that he had formerly leased, worth Rs. 30,381, compensation for a debt owed him by Narain Singh.^[40] Small wonder that Ghulam Husain compared the English unfavorably with earlier rulers who granted rent-free lands to "Noblemen, whether Musulmen or Hindoos, and indeed upon any others indifferently, according to their stations and merits, with the hope of further preferment, in proportion to their abilities and exertions in the service."^[41]

Ghulam Husain's ModernTimes ends its history in 1782 but presaged later developments. It foresaw what has now become a familiar theme in South Asian historiography, a story often related as unfolding around the notion of "land-is-to-rule," the idea that ownership or holding of land enabled its owner or titleholder to control land and the people occupying and working on the land. Holding of land, in other words, increasingly defined an economic and political as well as a social and cultural relationship. And in its insistent observations on the "overgrowing power of the Zemindars," the Patna historian anticipated the long-term consequences of the Permanent Settlement of 1793

[39] Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 423-24, vol. 4, pp. 88-89; W. Money, Colltr., to BOR, Apr. 30, 1822, P.C. Records, From Colltr., Bihar, vol. 10, 1822-23; Lehmann, "Eighteenth Century Bihar," pp. 64-70, 92; GOBi, BiharDistrictGazetteers , Palamau by P. C. Roy Chaudhury (Patna: Secretariat Press, 1961), p. 497. Japla was transferred from Gaya to Palamau in 1871.

[40] The revenue assessment of Siris and Kutumba was Rs. 160,450. See A. Seton, Magte., Bihar, to Earl Cornwallis, GGIC, May 31, 1791, Bengal Rev. Jdcl. Consltns., June 3 to July 29, 1791, June 17, no. 1; GSR , pp. 14-15; J. Reginald Hand, Early EnglishAdministrationofBihar , 1781-1785 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1894), pp. 10- 14.

[41] Seir , vol. 3, p. 202.

that fixed the revenue demand of the state in perpetuity and defined the "legal and administrative framework within which agrarian relations were determined . . . until the zamindari abolition acts of the 1950s."^[42]

Legally, this settlement established ownership rights in land, proprietary rights that its framers mistakenly expected would provide the impetus to transform zamindars into "improving" English landlords. Politically and administratively, it led to a policy of "control and collaboration" that generated "a close and mutually beneficial relationship" in which the "new regime held the reins of power and authority . . . but also . . . serve[d] as protector of its allies."^[43]

As allies, landholders gained the "overgrowing power" that Ghulam Husain anticipated they would if left unchecked to exercise their "mischiefs."^[44] Not that the colonial state was weak. On the contrary, over the course of the nineteenth century, it monopolized coercive power through its military and police forces; it also disarmed its subjects, thereby sharply curtailing local "fighting . . . and killing." But its control was strongest in the cities and towns where its institutions and personnel were aggregated; it became more attenuated with increasing distance from its urban centers.

Endowed with political standing in their localities by virtue of their positions as local allies of the colonial state, landholders thus enhanced their roles as local controllers. They also profited under this new system of control and collaboration because their legal rights were developed and protected by the rule of law. In addition, they benefited from having their revenue payments set in perpetuity while their lands continued to increase in value because of the changing land market. Land gained in value and agricultural prices rose, in part the result of growing numbers of people occupying land that reached its limits in terms of cultivation in the late nineteenth century.^[45]

[42] Ratnalekha Ray, ChangeinBengalAgrarian Society , c1760-1850 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979) , p. 1; Walter C. Neale, "Land Is to Rule," in LandControlandSocialStructureinIndianHistory , ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 3-15 .

[43] See my TheLimitedRaj:AgrarianRelationsinColonialIndia , Saran District , 1793-1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 70-89.

[44] Seir , vol. 2, p. 394. See also my LimitedRaj , chaps. 3-5, on the system of collaboration existing between the colonial state and local landed magnates.

[45] J. F. Richards, James R. Hagen, and Edward S. Haynes, "Changing Land Use in Bihar, Punjab, and Haryana, 1850-1970," MAS19 (1985): 699-732; Stephen Henningham, AGreat EstateandItsLandlordsin ColonialIndia , Darbhanga , 1860-1942 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jacques Pouchepadass, PaysansdelaPlainedu Gange:LeDistrictdeChamparan 1860-1950 (Paris: Ecole Francaise D'Extreme-Orient, 1989).

The primary beneficiaries of these new arrangements were the so-called great zamindars and not the overwhelming majority of zamindars occupying a few acres or shares scattered across villages and of varying status and historical standing with whom the Permanent Settlement was concluded. Although exceptions—but significant exceptions they were—these few "principal Zemindars" were significant "hinges of all business in their own lands." Recognized as rajas and maharajas and treated as the state's most significant and influential local connections, these "great" zamindars possessed estates that extended over vast areas and accounted for revenue payments that represented a sizable portion of the local revenue. Their age-of-revolution story—familiar to Ghulam Husain from his own experiences—often involved an initial phase of resistance or even outright rebellion when faced with the revenue demands of the new regime and with its attempts to curb their growing local autonomy. Most eventually came to terms with the new government, which elected to collaborate with these "old landed proprietors" despite their initial opposition and, in some cases, even vigorous rebellion. The most powerful of these local magnates were Darbhanga in Darbhanga, Bettiah in Champaran, Hathwa in Saran, Dumraon in Shahabad, and Tikari in Gaya. Their stories, which can be pieced together from their estate histories and official records, tell of family upheavals of epic proportions but also speak of the riches and power they acquired over the course of colonial rule. A few numbers will suffice to illustrate the case. Darbhanga, the largest of the great zamindars, possessed an estate ranging more than twenty-four hundred square miles and an annual income of approximately 4 million rupees, a scale on a par with many a princely state. Bettiah's eighteen hundred square miles yielding a rental of almost z million rupees made it the second largest zamindari; Hathwa's property, although small, nevertheless encompassed 1,365 villages, was inhabited by more than 391,000 people, and produced an annual rental of almost a million rupees.^[46]

Notwithstanding the ups and downs in the fortunes of some families, zamindars overall enhanced their roles as both local controllers and political connections of the colonial state over the course of the nineteenth century. Their rising profile in the local configuration of government control paralleled the decline of the "aristocracy" of the region, whose

[46] Yang, LimitedRaj , passim, esp. p. 117; Pouchepadass, PaysansdeChamparan , pp. 265-92; Henningham, GreatEstateinDarbhanga , chaps. 1-3.

elite positions in Azimabad were undermined by the upheavals of the eighteenth century. The relatively stronger government presence in Patna, as well as in the district headquarters towns, also contributed to this diminution in power and influence of the urban-based elite.

But the emergence of the new landed "aristocracy" in the wake of the revolution did not completely eclipse the city's bankers and merchants, certainly not their economic prosperity and well-being. Patna continued to enjoy its reputation as a place of "enormous wealth" well into the nineteenth century. "Many of the great men of the city are exceedingly rich," states an early-nineteenth-century source, citing as proof a durbar (audience, court) held by Lord Amherst at which "one of them offered, and it is said gave, a lac of rupees to have his name inserted at the head of the list of native gentlemen who paid their respects to the governor-general."^[47]

Although many more "Lalahs and Babus" joined the roster of the new aristocracy, Muslims remained prominent among the ranks of the city's aristocratic families. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Guzri, or Nawab Bahadur, family stood out as perhaps the richest family in all of Patna. Like many of the "city's" wealthy, the Nawab Bahadur's fortunes were tied to banking and trade. The Guzri family also branched out into the land market, investing heavily in land through purchases and mortgages to become the largest zamindar among city residents. As bankers, they acted as the underwriters of many a great zamindari family, for example, the Bettiah raj.^[48] However, as was the case with most urban-based nouveaux riches, this Patna family was not counted among the "old landed proprietors" and therefore was not singled out by government to serve as its local connection, at least not in the areas where the family held land. Nor were such absentee landholders generally the salient men of the locality in which they had acquired rights in land. On the contrary, actual possession of the land itself often continued to be contested long after property titles had officially changed hands. As Pouchepadass notes, "[T]he man who purchased land at a public sale after its 'legitimate' owner had been forced to part with it was not unnaturally

[47] "Mofussil Stations. No. IV.—Patna," AsiaticJournal 10 (1833): 253.

[48] E.g., see Account Book (JamaKarch) , Guzri family, Feb. 23, 1864-Oct. 12, 1871, which indicates that loans totaling Rs. 409,000 were given to Bettiah. Account book is in the possession of Sarwar Ali, former Justice, Patna High Court, and descendant of the Guzri family.

viewed as an intruder and an usurper, unless he managed to compel recognition by force."^[49]

Like many other prominent Patna notables of the colonial era, the rise of the Nawab Bahadur family to the ranks of the local aristocracy is a postrevolution story. The Indian episode of these late-eighteenth-century immigrants begins with Persian ancestors who arrived in the northwest in the train of Nadir Shah's invasion (1730s) and subsequently settled in Awadh. Their Bihar chapter opens with Syed Abdullah, who established himself in Patna at the turn of the nineteenth century. Well-off when he first set foot in Bihar, his riches-to-richer story turns on his success at building up his fortune by engaging in money "transactions," in conducting "trades of different sorts," and by assuming the farms of government estates.

Acknowledged as the "principal banker" of the city by local authorities, he served as the spokesman for Patna's elites. When government sought to resume revenue-free lands, he represented the lakhirajdars (revenue- or rent-free holders) of Bihar—many of whom were said to be among "the most influential class of persons in the city," personally lobbying the governor-general in Calcutta and taking the lead in submitting petitions against resumption legislation. Although the lakhirajdars were unsuccessful in their efforts—as Ghulam Husain had been four decades earlier—to hold on to the titles that government believed many bankers and moneylenders had obtained from the original owners, this campaign rallied crowds of four to five thousand people at the Patna collector's office and generated all kinds of rumors about the religious motives underlying government intentions and actions.^[50]

By the time of Syed Abdullah's death, there was in Patna, in his grandson's words, "no one equal to him in wealth."^[51] His annual income was described by one source as nearly amounting to two hundred thousand rupees. His four sons, Mehdi Ali Khan (1793-1850), Mohammad Ali Khan (1797-1826), Kasim Ali Khan (1806-62), and Lutf

[49] "Land, Power, and Market: The Rise of the Land Market in Gangetic India," in RuralIndia , p. 84.

[50] One rumor that ignited concern was that Patna's mosques were about to be pulled down. It apparently gained currency because many lakhiraj grants were dedicated to the support of religious establishments, both mosques and temples. J. B. Elliott, Commr., Patna, to H. Mackenzie, Secy., Territorial Dept., July 6, 1829, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Aug. 4 to Sept. 15, 1829, Aug. 25; "Petitions of certain inhabitants of Bengal, Bihar . . . to Lord Bentinck," Bengal Rev. Consltns., Apr. 22-May 9, 1929, May 19, no. 3.

[51] Translation of letter of Wilayet Ali (grandson of Syed Abdullah), n.d., P.C. Double Lock Box no. 5, 190?.

Ali Khan (1812-90), continued to prosper, as did Mehdi Ali Khan's son, Wilayet Ali Khan (1818-99). In the early 1850s the family business was divided up (batwara) , each of the four branches receiving Rs. 1,840,500. In the wake of the division, separate kothis (banking houses) were established by Kasim Ali, Lutf Ali, and Wilayet Ali in partnership with Mohammad Bakur Khan (son of Mohammad Ali). And the family fortunes continued to soar: when Lutf Ali died in 1890, he left Rs. 3.2 million in cash and an annual zamindari income of five hundred thousand to be apportioned among his three sons and two daughters.^[52] Wilayet Ali also seems to have done well; his inherited properties in Bihar yielded an annual income of fifty-five thousand rupees in addition to the "profits from money transactions." In the 1860s he branched out into the grain business, in partnership with a former commissioner of Patna, William Tayler. According to Nawab Waris Ismail, a descendant of the Wilayet Ali branch, the Nawab Bahadur families had "golden times" in the 1880s and 1890s. With the main kothis in Patna and branches elsewhere, and with zamindari income bringing in almost a million a year, they did not suffer any reverses until the early twentieth century. In 1915, however, their banking business came to a halt, and in banking, as in other matters, internecine squabbles led the way to the family slipping into "deteriorating conditions."^[53]

The most prominent "Lalahs and Babus" were also involved in banking and trading. As in other north Indian cities, in Patna as well, Marwaris and Aggarwals, originally from Rajputana, were especially conspicuous in these activities. Some Marwari families dated back to the Mughal period, others were part of an eighteenth-century migration, and still others constituted part of the now-familiar migration down the Ganges in the nineteenth century. The attraction of Patna was, as a

[52] Lutf Ali was suspected of being a rebel in 1857; his father was suspected of being involved in the "Patna Conspiracy" of 1845, which attempted to unite landholders, urban elites, and the rank and file, including prisoners, against government over religious and sociocultural issues. See W. Dampier, Suptd., Police, to F. J. Halliday, Secy., GOB, no. 367, Mar. 16, 1846, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Apr. 1-15, 1846, Apr. 1, no. 42; Anand A. Yang, "Disciplining 'Natives': Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India," SouthAsia 10 (1987): 29-45.

[53] Interview with Nawab Waris Ismail (1909- ), descendant of Wilayet Ali, May 19, 1984. Information on this family is also based in part on the Diary of Waris Ismail. See also "Brief History of Syed Badshah Nawab Razvi . . . Gurzi, born 30 July 1858," enclosure to Patna Magte's no. 3326, July 15, 1905, P.C. Double Lock Box, no. 7, 1904-9; F. B. Bradley-Birt, TwelveMenof BengalintheNineteenthCentury (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri, 1927), chap. on "Nawab Bahadur Syed Walayet Ali Khan, C.I.E., 1818-1899."

present-day descendant of the banking Ramji Ram family put it, the "scope of the business."^[54]

The Rohatgi family affords another example of recent immigrants who established themselves in Patna business. In the nineteenth century their Dhawalpura Kothi, or the firm of Kallu Babu Lallu Babu, comprised one of the major banking house: their business included credit note (hundi) transactions and some moneylending. They were also involved in the "cloth printing business." By these means they accumulated enough wealth in the nineteenth century to challenge the Nawab Bahadur family, a competition, according to one account, to see which family could—literally—line more of the city streets with gold coins. The winners, the Babus, are said to have bested their rivals by producing a bullock cart filled with three hundred thousand rupees' worth of "Edward coins." Another version of the tale states that the competition was to see how far each of the families would get from the "city" to Bankipur by placing their gold coins alongside one another.^[55]

But if the histories of these prominent banking and trading families illustrate the rise of a new generation of aristocrats and the persistence and development of the city as a center of wholesale trade and banking, the chronology of their declining fortunes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also mirrors the shifts in the city's primacy as a central place. The collective fate of bankers and petty traders in the colonial period further underscores this slump. Their declining condition is an especially revealing index of regional trends because they were instrumental in underwriting the wholesale trade of the area.^[56]

At the outset of the nineteenth century the city supported 24 substantial bankers (kothiwals) with capital ranging from five thousand to five hundred thousand rupees, 168 moneylenders with capital of one thousand to one hundred thousand rupees, and 30 usurers with small amounts of money. In addition, 321 money changers (shroff), some with as much capital as ten thousand to fifty thousand rupees, and 50

[54] Interview with Krishna Chandra, Patna City, June 1984. See also below, chap. 5, on traders; and Thomas A. Timberg, TheMarwaris:FromTraderstoIndustrialists (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978), pp. 41-124. "In colloquial usage, outside of Rajasthan," as Timberg explains, "Marwaris used to refer to emigrant businessmen from the vicinity of [Marwar, an area in] Rajasthan" (p. 10). The term is often used loosely to refer to a number of groups from this region, including Aggarwals, Maheshwaris, and Oswals.

[55] Interview with C. K. and M.P. Rohatgi, descendant of Kallu and Lallu Babus, Patna City, June 16, 1984. See also below, pp. 236-37.

[56] B & O, ReportoftheBiharand OrissaProvincialBankingEnquiry Committee1929-30 (Patna: Govt. Printing, 1930), p. 186.

money changers with a side business in cotton cloth and cotton and wood also plied their trade in the city. Although the number of bankers totaled 827 by the 1870s, this estimation conceals the fact that the number of large banking houses (kothis) had fallen to only ten. The rest were mostly petty moneylenders, except for 43 persons described as principally dealing in the hundi trade. By the 1880s, the "few big mahajuns . . . who at one time, by the help of their large capital, ruled over the commercial destinies of the district" were said to be a thing "of the past."^[57] Fifty years later the systematic 1929–30 inquiry of banking in the region was hard-pressed to find any large banking houses still operating. According to its report, the few survivors "have . . . ceased to be shroffs . . . as they have lost their deposit business. They have been transformed into zamindars and money-lenders."^[58]

Data on arhatiyas— commission agents involved in purchasing and selling goods—tell a similar story. In the early nineteenth century when Patna's role as an emporium of trade was still secure, it counted 124 arathiyas , some with capitals of up to twenty-five thousand rupees. By the late nineteenth century, however, only 14 were left.^[59]

The changing fortunes of Patna bankers and traders as well as the rise of landholders were related to another major development perceived to be a characteristic of the "modern times" of the city and its hinterland: their changing manufacturing and commercial fortunes. This shift, furthermore, affected not only the "aristocracy"—many of whom were involved in the trade of "manufactured" goods or the products of artisanal industries (as the Rohatgi family were)—but also large numbers of ordinary men and women who formed the backbone of this sector of the economy.

Ghulam Husain anticipated this effect of colonial rule when he hinted that the growth of Company trade, backed by special privileges, was overwhelming indigenous competition. As recounted by Amiya Bagchi, this trend resulted in deindustrialization in the nineteenth century, a process of decline in the "industrial" or nonagricultural sector of the economy. His

[57] AGRPD 1883–84; Syud Ameer Hossein, "Mahajani Statistics," AGRPD 1876–77, Appendix C; F. Hamilton Ms., "The City and Suburbs of Patna," Mss. Eur. D. 87.

[58] ReportofBiharBankingCommittee , p. 186. A shroff is "able to attract public deposits and draw hundis which are readily accepted or discounted in the market . . . [T]he money-lender . . . lends only his own money."

[59] Hamilton Ms., "Patna"; Hossein, "Mahajani Statistics." Buchanan also mentions 125 dandidars (weighmen) and 200 dalals (brokers).

argument, based largely on data for Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur, Purnia, and Shahabad, discerns "a decline in the proportion of the working population engaged in secondary industry to total working population, or a decline in the proportion of the population dependent on secondary industry to total population."^[60] By his reckoning, the proportion of people whose livelihood depended on "industry" declined from 18.6 percent in the first decade of the nineteenth century to about 8.5 percent by the end of that century. Patna and Gaya, administered jointly at the outset of the century, added up to 19.5 percent, but only 11.1 and 9.1 percent individually later in that century when the two areas were counted as separate districts. Particularly hard hit was the hand-loom industry, which constituted the largest segment of this secondary industry. As Bagchi's figures show, the population involved in cotton weaving and spinning declined from 62.3 percent to 15.1 percent; Patna and Gaya tallied 58 percent in 1809-13 but only 12.4 and 22.4 percent for Patna and Gaya, respectively, in 1901 In other words, the proportion of the population involved in this artisanal industry dropped by almost four-fifths in the case of Patna over the course of the nineteenth century!^[61]

Although the question of deindustrialization remains a hotly contested subject in Indian history, there is growing agreement that—although the data is not reliable enough to allow precise quantification of changes and although not all handicraft industries suffered under colonial rule—the hand-loom industry faded in the face of foreign competition. Indeed, whatever the shortcomings are of accepting Buchanan's figures at face value, as Bagchi does to advance his argument, there is a considerable body of evidence supporting the claim that deindustrialization occurred, although later in the nineteenth century than earlier; that is, toward the latter half of the century.^[62]

[60] "Deindustrialization in Bihar," p. 499; Seir , II, pp. 468-69. Irfan Habib, "Studying a Colonial Economy—without Perceiving Colonialism," MAS 19 (1985): 358, contends that the Patna historian argued that Company trade and policies had harmful effects "on the crafts and internal trade of Bengal."

[61] Bagchi, "Deindustrialization in Bihar," pp. 509-14. An intriguing coincidence is the fact that cotton cultivation in the primary cotton-producing area of Patna, pargana Ghyaspur, dropped from two thousand maunds in the 1830s to about four hundred by the 1860s, or a decrease of four-fifths! The district never grew much cotton and had to import it from Mirzapur and other western markets in order to meet local demands. H. D. H. Fergusson, Commr., to Secy., BOR, no. 10, May 9, 1861, Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr.-June 1861 , June, no. 118.

[62] The attack on Bagchi has partly centered on his reliance on Buchanan's data. See, e.g., Marika Vicziany, "The Deindustrialization of India in the Nineteenth Century: A Methodological Critique of Amiya Kumar Bagchi," IESHR 16 (1979): 105-46.

Of the 11,000 shops identified in the city by a 1790 report, 153 belonged to Dhunias who prepared cotton for quilts and 50 to people involved in the stamping of cloth; in addition, there were 7 sellers of cotton, 124 sellers of cloth (bazzaz) , and 71 makers of carpets (kalin) . Twenty years later, when Buchanan conducted his "survey" and "enumerative" project in the area, he found abundant signs of a vibrant textile industry and as yet no evidence of cloth imported from his own country. His report indicates that Patna district had 175 weaver villages, and weaver quarters (muhallas) in virtually every higher-order market. Within a decade, however, "British cloths which pay no duty" were "selling in [the] Patna Bazaar."^[63]

Beginning in the 1830s the volume of foreign cloth dumped on India reached significant proportions, so much so that by the 1860s, Patna's inhabitants were said to have become accustomed to "British goods." By then, "the value of English goods disposed off in Patna district" was, in one estimation, "at least four times the value of cloth of native manufacture." Yet another blow to the handicraft industry was delivered by the mills of Kanpur and Bombay, whose products penetrated the local market by the 1870s, also the period in which cheap machine-made thread came into widespread usage.^[64]

Increasingly, the only "native manufacture" that survived the invasion of "foreign" products was coarse cloth, known locally as motia or gazi . Durable and affordable, it persisted as the cloth of choice of the "poorer classes." (It outlasted imported cloth by four or five months, and it was half as expensive.) Yet even the motia cloth bore the mark of the new market conditions as it was increasingly woven by combining indigenous thread with machine-made thread!^[65]

[63] Colltr., Govt. Customs, Patna, to Board of Commrs., Bihar and Benares, Bihar and Benares, Board of Commrs., Customs, 1819, Aug. 31, no. 1; G. F. Grand, Magte., Patna, to G.H. Barlow, Subsecy., Dec. 29, 1790, Bengal Rev. Jdcl. Consltns., Mar. 11-25, 1791, Mar. 18, no. 20; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 319, 156.

[64] Colltr. of Patna, cited in "Abstract of Returns to Circular Order No. 9 of July 1865," Bengal Rev. Procs., July-Dec. 1865, Dec., no. 125; AGRPD 1879-80; J. G. Cumming, ReviewoftheIndustrialPositionandProspects inBengalin1908 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1908), pp. 7-8.

[65] T. Inglis, Colltr., Patna, to Secy., no. 541R, June 18, 1897, Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr.-June 1898, Apr., nos. 68-69. The new thread led some weavers to develop new products: a fine muslin made in imitation of Dacca muslins and called Bihar jamdani was started up in the 1860s; turban cloth, a plain muslin generally used for turbans; and colored cotton fabrics, manufactured in the 1880s, that resembled the various jute and cotton cloths produced by the mills of Kanpur and other areas.

That imported products sharply curtailed local production is also evidenced by the declining condition of the weavers of Barh subdivision who, based in the market towns of Bakhtiyarpur, Fatwa, and Nawada, once specialized in the making of cotton towels, sheets, and tablecloths as well as coarse country cloth to sell at Danapur and to export to Kanpur. By 1875, machine-made cloth pieces added up to as much as Rs. 3 million of Patna's trade, making machine-made piece goods a more valuable commodity than any other food or nonfood import. "Death by Manchester," as one official report put it concisely.^[66]

The decline of the textile industry affected a large sector of the local population involved in different phases of cloth production: Dhunias (cotton carders) who specialized in the cleaning of cotton; spinners, often "women of small means and almost every class [who] used to spin thread out of indigenous cotton"; and weavers, mostly Muslim Jolahas and Hindu Tantwas, who wove the thread into cloth. Buchanan's figures for Patna—278 Dhunias, 23,400 cotton spinners, and 2,010 houses of cotton weavers who together had 2,692 looms—provide one indication of the numbers whose livelihoods were altered by Manchester and later by the development of Indian mills.^[67]

Cheap machine-made thread sharply curtailed the role of women in the making of thread out of indigenous cotton. Also hard hit were the weavers, a group much highlighted in the deindustrialization literature because they were generally men of small means whose subsistence depended largely on their earnings from this artisanal industry. Their plight was widely noticed in the 1860s when they were said to be abandoning their traditional occupation in droves. "If all the members of the Jolaha caste had to depend on the produce of their looms, they

[66] Deputy Colltr. Mullik, "Notes on the Cotton Fabrics . . . of Gaya," Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1898, nos. 37-38; E. W. Collin, on special duty, Jan. 4, 1890, Bengal Genl. Procs., Jan.-Aug. 1890, July, nos. 12-18 (hereafter Collin report); T. Sandys, Colltr., to G. Gough, Commr., July 19, 1848, P.C.'s records, Letters from Colltr. of Patna, vol. 61, 1848; "Abstract of Returns"; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 319, 156. See also Gyan Pandey, "Economic Dislocation in Nineteenth Century Eastern U.P.: Some Implications of the Decline of Artisanal Industry in Colonial India." Centre forStudiesinSocialSciences , Calcutta , OccasionalPaperNo . 37 ( 1981).

[67] These figures do not include another 126 chintz makers. Typically, after the cotton was cleaned it was spun into thread and then handed over to weavers, who made it into cloth on consignment or who purchased it outright and then sold the finished product in the market. Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 771-74; Inglis to Secy., no. 541R, Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1898, nos. 68-69. Grierson, BiharPeasantLife , pp. 62-76, provides a step-by-step description of how thread was spun and cloth was made locally.

would have disappeared long ago," noted one source. "At present some of them are virtually agriculturists, and ply their trade less for gain than to keep up old traditions. This class has also taken largely to service and trade. Only the poorest of them weave cloth for wages."^[68]

Many weavers moved east, migrating to Bengal in search of menial jobs. "Jolahas from south Gangetic Bihar" were especially conspicuous in the stream of seasonal migrants seeking "employment in the jute factories of Hooghly and Howrah, and as coolies and domestics in Calcutta."^[69]

Products of a number of other artisanal industries, ranging from carpets, brocades, embroidery, paper, pottery, brass work, toys, fireworks, lac ornaments, gold and silver wire and leaf, glassware, boots and shoes, and cabinets in Patna to linen, furniture, and cabinet ware in the nearby town of Danapur, were also the casualties of deindustrialization. Carpet-making in the city, for instance, which was once centered in the thanas (a subdistrict unit of administration) of Sultanganj and Alamganj, was in greatly reduced circumstances by the turn of the twentieth century. So was papermaking, especially in the town of Bihar, which was once the occupation of thirty families. By 1890 this number had been reduced to twenty-five, and the industry was said to be "fast dying out."^[70] A similar fate was shared by the area's "most important industry," opium, which increasingly counted for less and less acreage—from 26,314 acres in 1881 to 7,710 in 1911—and was finally abandoned in the early twentieth century.^[71]

Much the same narrative about prosperity and decline, even down to the chronological framework of relative prosperity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries followed by decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized the city's overall commercial condition. Its changing condition also reflects its growing subordination to Calcutta and to the larger national and international markets.

[68] "Report on the Manufactures and Mines of the Gaya District, compiled by Babu Ram Anugrah Narayan Singh, Deputy Colltr., Gaya . . . ," inDistrictCensusReports , 1891 , PatnaDivision (Calcutta: n.p., 1898), Gaya, appendix; R. B. Chapman, Secy., GOB, BOR to Jr. Secy., GOB, Nov. 28, 1864, Bengal Rev. Procs., Oct.-Dec. 1864, Dec., no. 17; Inglis to Secy., no. 541R, Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1898, nos. 68-69.

[69] "Report on Gaya"; Yang, "Peasants on the Move." In many areas, weavers who continued to produce cloth did so for their own use or for sale in local markets. See B. Ramapati Chatterjee, Deputy Colltr., "Cotton Fabrics in the District of Champaran . . . ," Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1898, nos. 43-44.

[70] Collin report; Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 765, 772.

[71] Opium was the most valuable agricultural or nonagricultural item exported from the district. PDG , 1924 , pp. 122-23; PSR , p. 25; Inglis to Secy., no. 541R, Bengal Rev. Procs., Apr. 1898, nos. 68-69.

Patna persisted as the central place of the region in the initial century of colonial rule, Rasikh's pronouncements regarding the absence of "commercial capital" and the advent of "poverty" notwithstanding. Writing in 1790, a group of thirty-three merchants, bankers, and dealers described the trade of the city as consisting of spices, copper, lead, tin, broadcloth, and cotton, and silk goods from the east, mainly from Calcutta and Murshidabad, and such goods as calicoes and cotton from the west. Three-fourths of the trade involved the east, the remaining one-fourth was directed at the North-Western Provinces.^[72] At its height, Patna was the "largest of the mercantile centres of Bengal," "an emporium of trade . . . for reconsignment and reshipment . . . [for] through traffic, which is merely sent to Patna on account of the facilities that the city affords for despatching the consignments to their final destination."^[73] In other words, it served as the principal entrepôt for the trade flowing between Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, a collection point for the products of its hinterland that were then redistributed locally and regionally, and an important center for the trade with Nepal to the north.

Buchanan's detailed figures from 1811-12 provide one estimate of the extraordinary level of its trading activity, even if his numbers are not precise tallies. According to his "conjecture," exports totaled Rs. 3,259,558, imports almost double that figure at Rs. 6,510,546. Food and nonfood crops constituted almost two-thirds of the value of the exports, with rice and wheat accounting for Rs. 198,100 and 183,200, respectively. Salt, estimated at Rs. 799,200, and sugar, at Rs. 219,100, weighed in as two other significant items. Other major export items were: cotton cloth (Rs. 200,000) and chintz (Rs. 121,500), and metals of one sort or another (copper, zinc, tin, lead, and iron), whose total was reckoned at Rs. 160,750, and shoes (Rs. 100,000). Food and nonfood crops accounted for an even larger share of the imports, constituting almost 82 percent of the overall total. Notable among these were rice (Rs. 521,300), wheat (Rs. 470,000), oilseeds (Rs. 487,900), salt (Rs. 1,778,250), sugar (Rs. 235,850), and betel nuts (Rs. 100,250). Other major import goods were items known as pasari (Rs. 163,000), a

[72] See "Petition of Joal Dass . . . and Other Merchants, Bankers, and Dealers . . . of Azimbad Gentoos and Musulmen . . . ," Bengal Rev. Consltns., Jan. 6 to 20, 1790, Jan. 6, no. 18; "Extract of Procs. of a Council of Rev., Mar. 23, 1773," Bengal Rev. Board of Commrs., Customs, April 14 to Dec. 15, 1773, Apr. 14.

[73] TradeofBengal1876-77 , p. 196.

designation applied to a range of spices and other goods, metals (Rs. 280,650), and cotton wool (Rs. 130,000).^[74]

Well into the late nineteenth century Patna remained one of the premier entrepôts of north India. Registered "internal trade" figures, which generally underestimated interdistrict trade, such as that between Gaya and Patna, in fact reveal that Patna had the largest trade of any district in Bengal. In 1876-77, registered exports were valued at Rs. 36,222,400, or 11.1 times the value of goods sent out in the 1810s; total imports were estimated at Rs. 44,651,000, or 6.8 times the 1810s value.^[75] This trend accords perfectly with the now well-established pattern of increasing trade in the late nineteenth century, particularly of certain kinds of medium- and low-value agricultural goods.^[76]

From nearby districts flowed grains of all sorts, appearing as both exports and imports because they were transferred in and out of the city. Rice came from Purnia, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, and Saran; high-quality Patna rice, "celebrated throughout Bengal for its fineness," was sent out to Murshidabad and Calcutta as well as to Banaras. Bhagalpur was a major supplier of Patna's wheat and barley stocks; other grains, such as kodo , marua , and kauni , were drawn particularly from Saran, Muzaffarpur, and Darbhanga. Oilseeds, mostly shipped in from north Bihar and recorded in Buchanan's register as "imports," were then ex-

[74] The export and import figures for rice (Rs. 198,100 vs. Rs. 521,300) are misleading because exports typically exceeded imports. Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 670, 776, table no. 44.

[75] An 1875-76 government study of imports and exports—calculated by weight rather than by monetary value—estimated the former exceeding the latter by a little over twice the amount (3,166,856 vs. 1,525,827 maunds). As was the case over half a century earlier, food and nonfood crops accounted for much of the trade: oilseeds topped the list of exports (1,146,852 maunds), followed by alimentary salt (105,329), wheat (73,900), and pulses and gram (73,900). European cotton manufactures—not a presence earlier in the century—were priced at Rs. 443,950 and represented another significant export item. Oilseeds (1,195,709 maunds) also stood high on the imports list; rice was a distant second (326,272), followed by alimentary salt (232,605), other saline substances (khari , sajji , reh) (204,762), pulses and gram (202,126), wheat (150,884), paddy (138,601), and other cereals (134,167). Other significant import items were European cotton manufactures valued at Rs. 2,855,374, and cotton, spices, and tobacco estimated at 38,271, 43,685, and 9,398 maunds, respectively. Note the appreciable drop in imports of cotton. M. Rattray, Suptd., Salt Excise, to Magte., Patna, no. 222, June 27, 1876, Bengal Statistical Consltns., Trade and Traffic, 1876-77, July 1876, colln. 7-123/2 (hereafter cited as Rattray report).

[76] Derbyshire, "Railways in India," pp. 528-29. Early-nineteenth-century trade statistics can be gleaned from information on customs and town duties collected in Patna (mostly on piece goods). E.g., see F. Balfour, Colltr., Govt. Customs, to Bd. of Commrs, Aug. 23, 1819, and Senior Commr.'s Minute, Aug. 31, 1819, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Oct. 8 to 15, 1819, Oct. 8, nos. 35 and 37.

ported to Calcutta. Sugar and salt appeared on both sides of the trading balance sheet because they were brought in from Bengal and the North-Western Provinces. Metals likewise went both ways: copper, zinc, tin, and lead were relayed from Calcutta to Patna and then north and west, whereas iron came from south Bihar and was sent east. Cotton cloth, a major item of trade, involved as many as twenty-two "native merchants" who maintained factories in and around the city for the "purchase of plain cotton cloth." In addition, coarse cotton was imported from nearby areas. Cotton wool entered the city largely from the west, from Mirzapur, which was also the source of the city's chintz, as was Lucknow, which was also where the city's shoes were sent. From Patna the chintz was moved out to Calcutta; the shoes were exported to Bengal. Spices and other goods (pasari) were brought in from nearby districts.^[77]

Late-nineteenth-century sources provide more precise identifications of the nodes that were tied into the city's trading networks and of the extent of their trade. Oilseeds, brought in mostly by river, were imported to Patna from throughout Bihar, the largest amounts coming from Revelganj (193,875 maunds), Bettiah (94,502 maunds), and Gaya (96,733 maunds). Lesser amounts trickled in from other markets in Saran, Champaran, and Gaya, as well as from Patna, Shahabad, and Darbhanga. The North-Western Provinces comprised the other major source: Nawabganj in Faizabad district supplied as much as 178,612 maunds, and four markets in Gorakhpur together tallied 103,677 maunds. Oilseeds increasingly constituted the most valuable article of trade, representing as much as four-fifths of the total exports of the city. Much of it—1,140,460 out of 1,146,852 maunds—was sent to Calcutta by rail. Its trade was controlled by a handful of merchants; two European agencies, Messrs. Ralli Brothers and N. I. Valetta and Company, alone accounting for more than half of the exports to Calcutta.^[78]

Food grains, another major item of trade, added up to more than a million and a half maunds of imports into Patna in 1876–77; and almost an equivalent amount was exported. Wheat and rice each accounted for more than a quarter of the total imports; wheat also represented more than a quarter of the total exports, rice only a fifth. Much of the imports went for local consumption; much of the exports, particularly wheat, pulses, gram, and rice, for the Calcutta market.

[77] Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 671–82.

[78] TradeofBengal , 1876–77 , pp. 198–99; Rattray report.

Rice was supplied primarily from within Bihar. Some of it came in from the North-Western Provinces; very little of it originated in the rice-producing districts of Eastern Bengal. Wheat was another import from up-country, the markets of Gorakhpur being a major source; a sizable amount came from Revelganj, Chapra, Arrah, Danapur, Fatwa, and Hilsa. As with so many other exports, its destination was Calcutta. Pulses and gram similarly drew on Bihar markets, much of the city's supply stemming from the district itself and, as in the case of wheat, these food grains too were sent east, to Calcutta and Dacca. Cotton piece goods flowed in almost entirely from Calcutta and went out as exports to supply markets within the region. From the railway station in Patna, carts carried away a large allotment for Gaya; another sizable amount was exported to Muzaffarpur and other north Bihar areas. A small portion of the salt came from as far away as Punjab, but the bulk of it, as much as 220,616 of the 232,605 maunds imported into Patna, originated in Calcutta. From Patna the salt was redistributed throughout the region, particularly to Gaya and Champaran; the largest amount, 48,500 out of 105,329 maunds, was sent on to Burhej in Gorakhpur. The role of the city as entrepôt can also be seen in its "through" trade of hides and skins, timber, bamboo, sugar, tobacco, and saltpeter.

Calcutta was the principal place of origin of Patna's imports: it accounted for 364,395 maunds, of which 220,616 was taken up by salt. Lalganj with 241,786 maunds weighed in second—more than half of this was firewood—and Revelganj with 231,671 maunds was third. Nawabganj came next (178,612), followed by Muzaffarpur (143,920), Bettiah (139,236), Chapra (131,814), Gaya (130,292), and Golagopalpur in Gorakhpur (125,093). In tenth place stood Hilsa and Attaserai (Islampur) with 122,937 maunds; Burhej occupied eleventh place with 115,838 maunds, and the town of Bihar was in twelfth place with 100,057 maunds. Other than Calcutta and three markets in the North-Western Provinces, eight of the twelve principal points of origin for Patna's imports lay within Patna Division. Calcutta was also the primary exporting partner of Patna, accounting for as much as 1,244,423 of the total 1,525,827 maunds counted as exports in 1875-76. Appreciably smaller amounts were sent to Burhej (48,500 maunds), Dacca (46,986), Bettiah (28,366), Gaya (18,738), Bhagalpur (17,363), Lalganj (12,970), Khagaria (12,637), and Chapra (10,361).^[79]

[79] Rattray report; TradeofBengal , 1876-77 , pp . 200 -4.

In the late nineteenth century, however, Patna's commanding role as regional entrepôt declined. What curtailed its salience—and consequently boosted the stock of other towns and localities in the region— was the loss of its enormous trading edge as a strategic location on the major river highways: this significant geographical advantage was eroded by the development of railways, beginning in the 1860s. Rail lines within the region terminated its role as the "forwarding station" for the neighboring districts, and the opening up of the Ajmere and Bombay line, which enabled goods from the North-Western Provinces to be sent directly to Bombay instead of via Patna, reduced its role as "a great central godown."^[80]

Railways diminished the centrality of Patna in two respects. First, the traffic, particularly that conveyed by country boats, which converged on Patna en route to its hinterland or to other areas, no longer needed this intermediate stop. The new railway lines in the north enabled small traders especially to remit their goods directly to Calcutta instead of sending them on to Patna. With freight charges lower for goods transferred directly between place of origin and Calcutta without stopovers, many traders opted for the better rates and bypassed Patna. As a result, as one administration report noted, "Behar districts no longer receive from Patna their supplies of articles produced or purchasable at other places and Patna does not import or export now much over what is necessary for local consumption, or what is the surplus produce of the district."^[81]

Trade statistics, more reliable for goods carried by railway than for those conveyed by boats, carts, and pack bullocks (for which figures were either not kept at all or kept only sporadically), document the shifts in transportation patterns. By the late 1870s exports sent out of the city by rail added up to 64 percent of the total (Rs. 23,287,000 of the total registered exports of Rs. 36,333,400); the rest was carried by rivers (31 percent) and roads (5 percent). Railways accounted for far less of the imports total, only 40 percent (or Rs. 18,052,100 of the total imports estimated at Rs. 44,651,000); whereas 56 and 4 percent flowed

[80] Patna's trade was also affected by the "district's own rail corridor, which had the effect of by-passing the city's river based facilities . . . land] the construction of the grand Chord Rail Line from Mughal Sarai (near Benares) through Gaya Town and on to Calcutta, completed in 1909." Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," chaps. 2, 7; AGRPD 1879-80, 1880-81, 1881-82.

[81] AGRPD, 1882-83; AGRPD, 1890-91; AGRPD, 1900-1 to 1904-5; PDG 1924, p. 127.

into the city by river and by road, respectively.^[82] By the early 1880s the city's merchants and traders were "complaining of want of business. Many of the larger godowns are lying vacant, and in consequence many business men are resorting to other places of trade."^[83]

By the turn of the twentieth century, except for some food grains little was transported by river. Even the market in boats virtually disappeared; the "wood and timber" trade also declined appreciably. To some extent, the fate of Patna was shared by the rest of Bihar, which also became, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "a 'by-passed' region of north India."^[84]

A similar story can be pieced together by examining the changing profile of the city in relation to its immediate hinterland. In an earlier era, as a 1790s police tax imposed on "houses of trade" (that is, on traders, merchants, and shopkeepers) reveals, the city dominated regional and local trade. Its assessment of Sicca (a type of rupee) Rs. 28,287 exceeded by far the total of Rs. 20,571 levied on the rest of the district, which then included much of what later became Patna and Gaya districts. Buchanan's account suggests a similar disparity when it reports that the city monopolized 70.8 percent of the trade in exports of the old district of Bihar and 91.1 percent of the imports.^[85] Contrast this picture with a profile from the postrailways era that reveals a dramatic drop in Patna's share and an appreciable increase in Gaya's portion of the trade of

[82] Figures for the trade in wheat, a commodity not produced in any appreciable quantity locally but brought into the city by river from districts to the west and north and then moved both east and west, is another index of the diminishing role of Patna in the "forwarding business." The decline is apparent in the drop in numbers from 1,329,577 to 269,609 maunds in the early 1880s. Likewise, the trade in piece goods fell, amounting to only 10 percent of what it used to be by 1881–82; in the five years leading up to this date it had dropped by as much as one-fourth. With direct lines of communication forged by the development of railways, districts in the north and south received their piece goods directly from Calcutta. AGRPD 1881–82; 1880–81; 1884–85; 1889–90.

[83] AGRPD, 1880–81; AGRPD 1879–80, 1882–83; PDG 1924 , pp. 129–31. See also below, chaps. 3 and 4, on the related rise of other towns and localities in the region. Items such as bamboo and timber continued to be shipped by water, which was cheaper and more convenient for handling bulky and unwieldy goods. The larger proportion of imports than exports transported by water reflects the fact that Patna continued as a collection point for its intermediate hinterland.

[84] Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," p. 300. See also "Report on the Census of the District of Patna," Census1891 , Patna , pp. 1–4, 14; C. J. Hamilton, "Note on an Economic Census of Patna Bazaar," in CensusofIndia , 1921, vol. 7, BiharandOrissa , part I, Report , by P. C. Tallents (Patna: Govt. Printing, 1923), pp. 95–96;PDG1924 , p. 127.

[85] Buchanan, BiharandPatna , table 44, pp. 776–78; "Statements of Names . . . ," Bengal BOR Procs., Police, Jan. 6 to May 19, 1797, nos. 9 and 10.

south Bihar. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Patna district only accounted for 63.5 percent of the trade of Patna, Gaya, and Shahabad, a percentage that continued to fall, dropping to 53.4 percent by 1905-10. And within Patna Division, the district only accounted for about a third by the close of the nineteenth century.^[86]

The changing relationship between the city of Patna and its hinterland can also be gauged in another way. When it was the primary commodity bulking center, the city imported goods that were either relayed to other localities or redistributed to the lesser intermediate and standard markets within its own locality. But as the center of marketing gravity shifted away, marketing functions and markets became more evenly distributed across the district. In part the change was ushered in by an intensification of commercial functions at the level of intermediate markets, in part it resulted from the extensive growth of periodic markets across the locality.

As the central place of both the locality and the region, the city stood well above all the other marketing nodes. To use Skinner's formulation, it was a "central market": "a strategic site in the transportation network. . . . Its facilities are designed, on the one hand, to receive imported items and distribute them within its dependent area and, on the other, to collect local products and export them to other central markets or higher-level urban centers."

By contrast, the next rung in the marketing hierarchy was the intermediate market, which replicated to a lesser degree the functions performed by the city by virtue of its "intermediate position in the vertical flow of goods and services both ways."^[87] This rung in the marketing hierarchy was filled by the qasba (town or large market village), of which there were nine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Barh, Bihar, Danapur, Fatwa, Hilsa, Islampur, Naubatpur, Phulwari Sharif, and Sherpur.^[88]

[86] "Quinquennial Administration Report of the Patna Division . . . , 1900-01 to 1904-05"; "Quinquennial Report . . . , 1905-6 to 1909-10," Bengal Gen. Procs., Apr. 1911, nos. 1-2. Precise statistical comparisons for the pre- and post-1880s periods are difficult to make because trade figures in the later period were kept by districts rather than by specific cities; the exception was Calcutta.

[87] Skinner, "Marketing in China," p. 7; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 54-58. Markets above the haat level are generally referred to in contemporary sources as bazaars, ganjs , qasbas , and mandis .

[88] Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 52-61; Skinner, "Marketing in China." My list of intermediate markets differs from that of Hagen—I include Danapur and not Rajgir (as does Hagen) because the latter was in decline whereas the former was emerging as an intermediate market at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hagen bases his list on places that were identified as qasbas .

A comparison of Patna and Bihar highlights the difference between these two levels. Once a small town subordinated to Bihar when it was a provincial capital, Patna had attracted a population ten times that of the latter at the turn of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, whereas it supported bankers, moneylenders, usurers, and money changers, along with merchants and wholesalers who dealt in virtually every kind of commodity, from cloth to grain to household goods, Bihar was a market specializing more in retail than in wholesale trade. An intermediate market, it was the gathering place of sixty dealers in grain who kept cattle, and forty money changers. Similarly, the intermediate markets of Barh and Fatwa were thronged largely by retailers; wholesale dealers were more the exception than the rule.^[89]

Standard markets, numbering twenty-five in all, occupied the level below intermediate markets. They were markets that "met all the normal trade needs of the peasant household: what the household produced but did not consume was normally sold there, and what it consumed but did not produce was normally bought there. The standard market provided for the exchange of goods produced within the market's dependent area, but more importantly it was the starting point for the upward flow of agricultural products and craft items into higher reaches of the marketing system, and also the termination of the downward flow of imported items destined for peasant consumption."^[90] In other words, standard markets were the most significant markets in localities that did not have easy access to intermediate markets or to the city of Patna. They were "centers of . . . both horizontal and vertical [trade]. It was at this level that most of the agricultural surplus from the countryside was marketed with agents (areths) who maintained permanent storage facilities. This economic function of wholesale and storage activities as part of the role of absorbing the bulk of the agricultural surplus distinguished the standard market place from the periodic haat [market]."^[91]

Standard markets, in contrast to the two highest levels of the marketing system, typically provided few if any wholesale services. Almost all

[89] Barh had nine wholesale dealers in grain and iron and forty money changers who also dealt in cotton cloth; Fatwa supported ten money changers and dealers in cloth, eleven dealers in cloth, and one arathiya who dealt in grain and salt.

[90] Skinner, "Marketing in China," p. 6.

[91] Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 58–59, 52–61. The twenty-five standard markets were: Maner, Danapur, Panhar, Tilhara, Mirzagunj, Baiketpur, Nur Sarai, Bahpura, So Sarai, Bhagwangunj, Pali, Patut, Bara Nawada, Lai, Maghra, Digha, Silao, Lakhna, Ekanger Sarai, Jogipur, Nawada, Punarak, Saksohara, Barah, and Dariapur.

transactions were in retail trade. The sizable standard market of Maner, which met daily, for instance, had four money changers who were also dealers in cotton cloth, but the rest of its roster consisted of retailers—two in cotton cloth, twenty-two in provisions, seven in betel leaf, one in sweetmeats, and ten in oil. In addition, the market was made up of two dyers, two coppersmiths, seven goldsmiths, four blacksmiths, two makers of glass ornaments, one maker of fireworks, two makers of soap, two butchers of large cattle, three butchers of small cattle, two silk string makers, and one liquor shop. The standard markets of Bara Nawada and Tilhara had much the same assortment of retailers.^[92]

Below the standard markets were sixty-seven periodic markets, known as haats in the vernacular. The lowest rung of the system, these markets comprised the overwhelming number of marketing settlements in any locality. Like their counterparts in other agrarian societies, they were "minor" markets in which transactions were predominantly horizontal, that is, locally produced agricultural and craft items exchanged hands within the locality. In some, a modest amount of vertical trade was transacted, as goods produced externally were brought in from higher-level markets or those produced locally were traded to larger markets. The haats had the least to offer, typically they featured a few retailers selling a handful of agricultural products or a few household commodities. The haat of Jethauli in the vicinity of Fatwa, for instance, had four retailers of provisions, three retailers of parched grain, one retailer of betel leaf, two oil makers, and one shop for retailing palm wine. One local resident described haats as meeting "two days in the week. . . in the village, or in some neighbouring one, at which articles of food of the commonest and coarsest kind, necessary for bare subsistence, can be had, and where the people from the surrounding localities come to buy and sell them."^[93]

It was at the level of periodic markets that the most dramatic change occurred. Their number more than tripled over the course of the nineteenth century and then almost doubled during the first half of the twentieth century—from 66 in 1811-12 to 209 in 1911, to 393 in 1951. This surge meant that markets became relatively accessible across the district. Few settlements lay outside a two-mile radius of this lowest order of marketplaces. Furthermore, haats began to assume

[92] Hamilton Ms., "Patna."

[93] Ghose, "Rural Behar," p. 221; Hamilton Ms., "Patna"; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 52-61; Skinner, "Marketing in China," p. 6.

some of the marketing and storage functions of the higher-order markets, especially the standard markets. The latter lost some of their salience as a consequence.^[94]

Far less conspicuous but equally significant was the change at the level of intermediate markets. Although their number remained relatively constant over the course of the colonial period—from nine in 1811 to ten a century later and eleven in 1951, they greatly expanded their range of marketing activities in the late nineteenth century. This growth further underscores the downward turn in the fortunes of Patna because it resulted from the extension of rail lines to intermediate towns, which thereafter received their supplies directly instead of via the declining entrepôt of Patna.

More important than the change in number of intermediate markets are the alterations in the roster of these markets because they once again show the changes wrought by the development of railways. Three of the nine qasbas identified in 1811, Islampur, Naubatpur, and Sherpur, were no longer intermediate markets a century later. In their place were four new markets, Mokamah, Khagaul, Masaurhi-Tarenga (Mausarah), and Paliganj. Two of these, Mokamah and Khagaul, had been so inconspicuous earlier in the century that Buchanan did not even notice them. By the late nineteenth century, however, they had emerged as a result of changes in transportation and in the role of Patna. Mokamah was described in the 1870s as registering "a considerable trade in country produce. Much of the Tirhut trade, which is borne down the river Baya, finds its way to this place; and it is also a railway station." The same writer referred to Khagaul as "another instance of a modern town which may be said to have been created by railway."^[95]

The town of Bihar, used as an example for the earlier period, serves once again as an apposite illustration of the changing relationship between Patna and intermediate markets. Throughout much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its story is one of decline. In the

[94] Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 308-10. The number of standard markets remained constant between 1811 and 1911: twenty-five. In 1951, however, there were thirty-four standard markets. See also below, chap. 5, regarding the development of local marketing systems over the colonial period.

[95] Hunter, AccountofPatna , pp. 83, 90; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," p. 312. Mokamah emerged once it became a changing station for the railway. See S. C. Bayley, Offg. Commr., to Secy., GOB, no. 437R, Mar. 22, 1873, Bengal Gen. Procs., Jurisdictions, 1873-75, May 73, no. 10.

early nineteenth century it was characterized as reduced to "a probable population of 20,000 inhabitants, and . . . now fast verging upon ruins; its massive stone fort is no longer tenable, its tombs and mosques are in a sad state of decay, and its whole appearance has the air of a city deserted by all its influential and rich members."^[96] By the late nineteenth century, however, its condition had improved because it had grown into an important node on the trading line connecting Patna, Gaya, Monghyr, and Hazaribagh and because it continued as a place of production for muslin, silk, and cotton cloth. Certainly as an intermediate market town its wholesale and retail facilities had expanded considerably since the beginning of the nineteenth century. An estimate of the 1870s indicates that as many as one-fourth of the 8,346 houses belonged to cloth merchants and grain dealers; of the cloth merchants twenty-eight families were singled out as being particularly prosperous. In addition, it supported a range of retail shops: sweetmeats, 40; spices, 18; cotton goods, 11; tobacco, 6; shoes, 16; gold and silver, 3; brass and iron, 5; sugar, 8; hides, 6; dal and other goods, 70; baskets, 14; costermongers (paikaris) , 33; and itinerant cloth dealers, 7.^[97]

Contrast this expansion with the decline in the role of Patna as a center and outlet for the products of artisanal industries, as well as a "platform for a commercial shop" and a site of "sellers" and buyers." In Rasikh's lifetime, as Buchanan's figures for 1810-11 reveal for the cloth and grain trade—two commodities that constituted a significant proportion of Patna's imports and exports—the city supported as many as 160 cloth dealers and 711 grain dealers. By 1920-21, however, the numbers had dropped to 97 and 131, respectively; the 131 can be further divided into 96 "grocers" and 35 "grain sellers."

A similar pattern can be traced for other commodities by considering 1810-11 as a baseline. As Buchanan's detailed and extensive list for that period shows, in the chauk (city center) area of the "city" alone, he encountered a daily crowd of approximately zoo "manufacturers, carpenters, taylors [sic] , weavers, coppersmiths, shoemakers and those who make tubes for smoking tobacco and garlands." Patna's

[96] NotesonBehar , p. 1; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 291, 310-12; PSR , p. 8.

[97] In addition, porcelain goods were sold in this market, although the number of shops was not specified. "Return of Trade in the Town of Behar," B. C. Bhuttacharjee, Deputy Magte., Behar Subdivision, Apr. 27, 1876, Bengal Statistical Procs., Trade and Traffic, 1876-1877, July 1876; Hunter, AccountofPatna , pp. 75-77.

ganjs (small regulated markets), mostly situated in the "city," abounded in other goods and services, too. Cloth of every variety could be purchased from 160 dealers in cloth or 5 Kashmiri merchants specializing in woolen clothes; grain was available from 100 grain dealers or from 55 grain dealers who combined their business with salt, iron, and metals (gullah and kiranamahajan) or 556 (presumably) retail grain dealers who also dabbled in selling pulses; salt was procurable from 40 retailers or 20 wholesalers, or from the 55 above-mentioned grain dealers who also sold salt. "Prepared butter" was the specialty of 9 retailers, and also of 4 wholesale and 31 retail dealers whose stocks included sugar as well. Among the shops carrying foodstuffs were 160 specializing in spices and drugs (pasaris) , 1,350 in general provisions (khichrifarosh) , 300 in vegetables, 330 in betel leaf, 225 in grain, 40 in seasonings and fruit, 50 in poultry, and 80 in fish. And among those selling household goods were 32 specializing in cotton wool, 32 in sackcloth, iron, and millstones, 12 in stoneware, 12 in platters made of leaves, 80 in earthen pots, 20 in turbans, 20 in wooden vessels, 18 in brass and bell-metal vessels, 55 petty and 6 large dealers in shoes, 21 in wooden combs, and 11 in wooden cups and boxes. And if this range and assortment of shops was not sufficient to meet the needs of a customer, Patna's markets offered still more variety, including 9 retailers of European goods, 5 dealers in iron and ironmongery, 7 retailers of hemp buds, 3 sellers of lime, 25 dealers in sugarcane extracts, 5 in soda and purging salts, 8 in tobacco leaves, 13 retailers of brass implements for smoking tobacco, 50 petty dealers in house furniture and other knickknacks, 2 horse dealers, 10 sellers of tin ornaments; 6 perfume retailers, 10 paper retailers, 4 sellers of musical instruments, 10 sellers of palmyra leaf fans, 5 coconut sellers, 6 parakeet hawkers, as well as others peddling everything from beads to old clothes to swords. Because of Patna's involvement in the wood and timber trade, the city had 200 retailers of bamboos, firewood, and so forth, and 32 dealers in sal timbers, beams, planks, and posts. And because of its role in the river trade it was also a place where boats could be purchased, from those of "superior description" to ordinary boats and canoes, and from ferry boats of considerable size to "small" boats.^[98]

Although an extraordinary range of wholesale and retail dealers and of petty shopkeepers and manufacturers remained an essential feature

[98] Hamilton Ms., "Patna."

of Patna, Patna's scale, especially in the "city," had diminished noticeably. The decline of the city as an entrepôt and as a manufacturing center meant that many transactions in the early twentieth century were handled through "petty shops . . . [that] are little more than the adjunct of the workshops of small artisans, mechanics, and manufacturers. The makers of certain classes of ornaments, of white caps, of country (biri) cigarettes, of hookahs, of tin boxes, of basket-ware, of sweetmeats, of perfumes, are petty manufacturers and workmen first and shopkeepers second. "99

No longer present in any significant numbers were the large wholesale dealers, so noticeable in the early nineteenth century. Thus, the 1920-21 economic census of the "Patna Bazaar" turned up mostly small-scale dealers or retailers, of cloth, groceries, ornaments, cigarettes, stationery, and fancy goods—their business conducted from tiny shop fronts attached to their residences.100

And what of the "garden" of Azimabad itself? How did its built environment stand up to the tremors of the eighteenth-century "revolution"? Did the city register the decline that Ghulam Husain chronicled for his "modern times"? And how did it fare in the aftermath of the "revolution," when deindustrialization and the age of railways signaled its growing incorporation into a larger colonial system and a world economy?

The "English" practice of "counting the inhabitants of every town and city" offers ample evidence that Patna's growth and expansion continued well beyond the "modern times" and until the late nine-

[99] Hamilton, "Census of Patna Bazaar," p. 96

[100] Ibid. At the head of the list were 848 retail shops, the largest number of these dealing in tobacco, betel, and aerated water (126); cloth (97); groceries (khichrifarosh , spices, sugar, salt, and grains) (96); stationery and fancy goods (80); fruits and vegetables (45); grain (35); boots and shoes (33); caps, generally combined with a business in the sale of "other fancy articles" (28); drugs (25); oil (23); meat (butchers) (19); oil and hardware (17); books and printing (16); brass ware (15); rope and basket ware (15); iron (ironmongers) (13); perfume (12); and earthenware (11). In addition there were 586 manufacturing and retail shops, including sweetmeats (81); tailors (60); goldsmiths (53); ornament makers (49); glass ornament (tikuli) makers (28); tinsmiths (22); brass ware makers (20), woodworkers (20); dyers (19); cotton thread makers (17); blacksmiths (17); shoemakers (17); watch repairers (15); repairers of tin or iron goods (14); cabinetmakers (12); and country cigarette (biri) makers (12). Another 9 counted among the ranks of wholesale traders and consisted of 3 tobacco godowns and dealers, 3 yarn dealers, 1 timber dealer, 1 lime and cement dealer, and 1 pepper dealer. "Patna Bazaar" in this report refers to the entire area along the main road between the Bankipur Maidan and the eastern extremity of the "city." Although a reasonable account of the "majority of the trading and petty manufacturing establishments of Patna," this report does not include the "petty traders and manufacturers located in the side streets" (p. 95).

teenth century. Thereafter population growth leveled off, and may even have declined, although not quite as appreciably as some scholars have claimed in identifying deurbanization as part of the process of deindustrialization.^[101]

Until the late nineteenth century Azimabad grew, expanding westward in the direction of Bankipur. This growth was largely confined to a narrow stretch of riverbank along the Ganges because the river constituted a natural boundary to the north; to the south the Punpun, with its tendency to flood, acted as another barrier. Only in the twentieth century, to accommodate increasing numbers of people, has the city extended in other directions, for instance, eastward. Patna thus became a city of "length without breadth."^[102]

Measurements of its linearity and elongation taken at different times are handy markers of its chronology of growth. Thus, Ralph Fitch in 1586 had found a "very long and great Towne" of Patna, measuring a mile and a half from the eastern to the western gate and three quarters of a mile from north to south, whereas Tavernier's appraisal less than a century later shows a settlement "not less than two coss [four miles] in length." By the latter's estimation Patna was the "largest town in Bengal" and "one of the largest towns in India." In the opening decade of the nineteenth century, it included an area extending from Jaffar Khan's gardens to Bankipur—almost nine miles—and a width averaging two miles, for a total area of almost twenty square miles. By the mid-twentieth century the "very long Towne" measured twelve miles from east to west; in breadth, however, it still hugged the course of the Ganges, in some areas extending no farther than a half mile from the river.^[103]

As the chronology of the elongation of Patna suggests, and as the longuedurée view confirms, the city and its population had been growing ever since the late sixteenth century. No doubt, the pace quickened in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning with the attempts by Prince Azim-us-Shah to elevate Azimabad to new heights and continuing under the British, who designated it as the locus of their

[101] Habib, "Studying a Colonial Economy," pp. 364-68, makes a case for the decline of cities and towns as part of the process of deindustrialization.

[102] H. Beveridge, "The City of Patna," CalcuttaReview 76, no. 152 (1883): 211; PDG1970 , p. v; Patna Improvement Trust, MasterPlan , Patna , vol. 1, TextandPhotographs (Patna: Patna Improvement Trust, n.d.).

[103] Buchanan, BiharandPatna , p. 61; Patna, MasterPlan , p. 17; Sarkar, "Patna in the Seventeenth Century," pp. 128-29.

power and authority in Bihar. In-migration from the west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries added to Patna's numbers.^[104] So did the influx of people from other settlements in the region, such as the town of Bihar in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Gaya, particularly after the headquarters of the old district of Patna and Gaya was shifted from Gaya to Patna. To hear the principal residents of Gaya tell of the effects in 1797, so many of their fellow inhabitants moved to Patna—in step with the relocation of the treasury and district offices there—that there were a "great many empty houses and . . . [a] constant fear of robbers and murderers."^[105]

Its growth can also be documented from internal evidence. Buchanan alluded to the rising pressure of numbers on the land when he observed that "the city is said to have greatly increased, and the value of the ground in it, within these 15 years, is said to have doubled, owing to the difficulty of procuring a spot for building a house."^[106] "That Patna is in a flourishing state is evident by the number of new dwellings which are always building," states one 1818 report. "In the City there is little room left for more houses; but good habitations are built on the sites of old or inferior ones, and in the suburbs, particularly to the westward, the number of houses is increasing."^[107]

In the twenty square miles he identified as Patna, Buchanan estimated a population of 312,000. By this reckoning, Patna was the largest city in India at that time. Compare this number with the enumerations returned by the decennial censuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: 170,654 in 1881, 165,192 in 1891, 134,785 in 1901, 136,153 in 1911, and 119,976 in 1921. Not until the 1961 census did Patna again top 300,000 inhabitants—with 364,667 to be exact.^[108]

[104] The petition of "200 Mahomedans," Patna, May 3, 1837, Bengal Rev. Consltns., June 13-27, 1837, June 27, no. 70, mentions ancestors who immigrated to Patna from Persia and Kabul.

[105] "Translation of a Memorial . . . of the Principal Bankers and Other Inhabitants of the City of Gya . . . " Bengal Rev. Consltns., May 5 to July 28, 1797, May 8, no. 25; Law, Colltr., Bihar, to John Shore, President and Members, BOR, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Oct. 25 to Dec. 28, 1787, Dec. 7.

[106] BiharandPatna , p. 63.

[107] Patna Court of Appeal to Bayley, Secy., Oct. 23, 1818, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Nov. 6 to Dec. 16, 1818, Dec. 4, no. 40.

[108] Patna, MasterPlan , p. 7. Buchanan's figure is based on an 1810 tally of 52,000 houses, each of which was estimated to have 6 inhabitants. See his BiharandPatna , p . 61; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," p. 61. K. M. Mohsin, "Murshidabad in the Eighteenth Century," in The CityinSouthAsia:Pre-Modern andModern , ed. Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison (London: Curzon Press, 1980), pp. 76-77, estimates a population of 200,000 for Murshidabad and Dacca.

In light of these later census tallies, Buchanan's figure may seem to be grossly exaggerated, but it is probably less inaccurate than it appears initially.^[109] Nor is the sizable population of the city in the early nineteenth century inconsistent with the demographic trends a century later.^[110] A substantial corrective is necessary, however, because the enormous drop registered by the censuses to a little over 170,000 in 1881 and the subsequent pattern of continuous decrease over the next few decades, with a bottoming out at a little less than 120,000 in 1921, grossly overstate the actual numerical decline. While not inaccurate in indicating the patternofdecline in this period, the figures do not take into account the entire city of Patna but only a limited area of nine square miles comprising the "city" and part of the suburbs. By contrast, early-nineteenth-century estimates by Buchanan and others cast their statistical net over an area of twenty square miles.^[111] There was, nevertheless, a general leveling off and decrease in population in the region, affecting Patna in particular because it was fading as a trading and commercial center. And within the "city," hardest hit were Khwaja Kalan,

[109] Earlier estimates include Manrique (in 1641)—200,000 people—and Thomas Twining (in 1790s)—approximately 300,000. Chaukidari (night watchmen or village police) returns of 1817 similarly put the figure at almost 300,000. At odds with these figures, however, is an 1818 estimate of 247,464. Although this tally was made at a time when cholera had struck twice in eighteen months, the figure nevertheless comes in much lower than most estimates in the early nineteenth century, when deaths from the epidemic were calculated at only four to five thousand. The Patna Improvement Committee accepted 300,000 as the right figure; a census in 1837, however, placed the number at 284,132. W. H. Tippet, Magte., City of Patna, to W. B. Bayley, Offg. Chief Secy., Oct. 11, 1817, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Nov. 14 to 25, 1817, Nov. 11, no. 36; Naqvi, UrbanCentresin India , p. 105; Wm. H. G. Twining, ed., Travels inIndiaaHundredYearsAgowithaVisittothe UnitedStates:BeingNotesand ReminiscencesbyThomasTwining (London: James R. Osgood, 1893), p. 135; Committee of Improvement to H. Shakespear, Secy., Govt., July 28, 1829, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Sept. 22, 1829, no. 8; Patna Court of Appeal to Bayley, Oct. 23, 1818, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Dec. 4, 1818, no. 40; H. E. L. Thuiller, Statisticsofthe DistrictofPatna (Calcutta: n.p., 1847), p. 1.

[110] In part the welter of seemingly conflicting data can be explained by the absence of accurate information-collecting agencies; in part the highs and lows can be regarded as reflecting actual fluctuations in the city's population. Based on the low estimate of 247,464 and Buchanan's high figure of 320,000, it would be safe to conclude that the actual population ranged between 250,000 to 300,000. The quantitative data point in this direction, especially the house count rendered for chaukidari purposes. Indeed, this was a census that people preferred to evade, since being counted meant paying a chaukidari tax. And the qualitative evidence attests to the steady westward expansion of Patna boundaries.

[111] GOI, CensusofIndia , 1891 , vol. 3, TheLowerProvincesofBengal , TheReport , by C.J. O'Donnell (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893), p. 113; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," p. 63. "City" in the British records increasingly came to refer to the older portion of Patna, which was to be distinguished from the newer area known as Bankipur.

Chauk Kalan, and Malsalami, localities whose prosperity was tied to the fortunes of trade. In short, the declining population was a symptom of Patna's fading economic health, a deterioration that would have been all the more pronounced had Patna not received a tremendous political boost in the twentieth century, when it became a provincial capital.^[112]

In the age of revolution the city was not only the site of political, economic, and social activity but it was also the place of residence for its notables, particularly its merchants and bankers. As its leading traders and bankers stated in the early nineteenth century, they maintained "puckah [solid, meaning brick] houses and godowns [there], and the purchasing and selling of goods all within the city of Patna. . . . All the bankers are residents within the City and near the bazaar of the great chouk [city center]."^[113]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the city's appearance in the initial colonial period was the extent to which its quotidian landscape was a legacy of both Ghulam Husain's "modern times" and the preceding eras. Let us begin with the spatial grid of Azimabad, an important template that had been deeply marked by the coming of Prince Azim-usShah, who is widely credited with having organized its muhallas , or quarters. When he relocated in the city, "many of the nobles of Delhi came out to live within its walls. The City was divided into a number of wards. All classes of people had separate quarters assigned to them. Dewan Mohalla was so named, because it was assigned to the clerks of the Government offices; the quarters assigned to the Lodis (Afghans) came to be known as Lodikatra Mohalla; those allotted to the Moghuls, as Moghulpara; and the princes and chiefs had their residence assigned to them in Mohalla Khowah Sekho, or, as it is otherwise called, Khowah Khoh. The poor and destitute were not forgotten; and several serais and alms-houses were built for their reception."^[114]

In establishing muhallas that organized people into elite quarters and set up ethnic and occupational groups in their own quarters, this Mughal

[112] CensusofIndia , 1921 , vol. 7, BiharandOrissa , Report , p. 86. Plague in the early twentieth century also took its toll on the city's residents.

[113] See "Translate [sic] of a Petition Presented by Sulloo Baboo, Sukhee Chund . . . Beoparees," June 24, 1828, P.C. Records, vol. 179, From the Bd. of Custom, Salt and Opium, Dec. 11, 1813 to Nov. 27, 1833.

[114] G. P. S., "Patna of the Mahomedans," p. 115. See also Jim Masselos, "Appropriating Urban Space: Social Constructs of Bombay in the Time of the Raj," paper presented at the Social Science Research Council Workshop on "Culture and Consciousness," Isle of Thorns, Sussex, July 1989, on the spatial makeup of the city as a series of templates.

prince followed a long-standing precedent. Such deeply rooted patterns explain why these residentially organized quarters gave rise to a sense of place and identity. In the sovereign Mughal city of Shahjahanabad, as a recent study shows, caste, craft, and elite muhallas existed with caste or craft quarters headed by chiefs of caste councils (panchayats): "Chiefs settled intramahallah quarrels, judged disputes over land and other property, and decided questions of ritual status. They negotiated taxes with city authorities, arranged security against both internal and external disturbances, and consulted with other chaudhuris on matters of common interest. Mahallahs were surrounded by high walls and contained houses, shops and stalls where food, clothing, and other supplies were sold, wells and tanks for water, and resthouses for travellers. People gathered in mosques and temples to hear political announcements, celebrate marriages, and exchange gossip."^[115]

Some localities were named after their pioneering or notable residents. Chaudhuritola commemorated the presence of its resident Chaudhuri family, also the leading family of the muhalla . According to its official history, the family first came to Bihar in the early eighteenth century as part of the Mughal army. Because of meritorious service, one member of the family, who took up residence in Patna, received the title of chaudhuri , or chief. In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries the family continued to prosper, its members branching out from landholding to moneylending, and becoming, in their own words, "leaders. . . . Reis of the old type."^[116] Throughout India muhallas were named after an area's "pre-dominant caste or occupational group . . . the founder's name or that of the original rural village on the site, or a market, a public building, or an old city gate. The population of a mohalla may be several thousands or tens of thousands."^[117]

Thus were muhallas a fundamental template of the city of Patna, constituting, as they did in other north Indian cities, a "basic unit of urban social organization and . . . associational activity."^[118] In this "city"

[115] Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad:TheSovereign CityinMughalIndia , 1639-1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 84.

[116] Pandit Rampratap Pandey, "A Short History of the Chaudhary Family, Patna City," (trans. from Hindi), in Ramgopal Singh Chowdhary, SelectWritingsandSpeechesof BabuRamgopalSinghChowdhary (Patna: Bishund Prasad Sinha, 1920), pp. i-xxiv, esp. x.

[117] John E. Brush, "The Morphology of Indian Cities," in India's UrbanFuture , ed. Roy Turner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 60.

[118] Sandria B. Freitag, "Introduction: The History and Political Economy of Banaras," in CultureandPowerin Banaras:Community , Performance , and Environment ,1800-1980 , ed. idem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 18-19.

dominated by trade and commerce, traders, merchants, and artisans particularly were organized along residential lines—by muhallas—as well as by occupation. When government imposed a new duty in 1790, not only were there protests from "merchants, bankers and dealers" representing Azimabad, but protests were also forthcoming from other groups organized along residential (muhalla) and occupational lines. For instance, the beoparis of Mehdiganj, who were kirana dealers, spoke up in unison. Others who raised their voices collectively were organized by their profession, such as confectioner and cloth seller. At the bidding of the latter all the cloth shops in the city were shut down and "cloth was not procurable even for the burial of the dead."^[119]

By the twentieth century some of these organizations had dissolved, in part because handicraft industries and local manufacturing had declined and in part because some of the artisanal activities were no longer monopolized by a single caste. Thus, there were caste panchayats (councils) among the tabaq beaters (makers of tabaq , a kind of washing vessel), the copper- and brass-smiths, the lace makers, the turners, and the comb makers, but not among makers of tikuli (glass ornaments), whose ranks included "many . . . wage-earning classes . . . scattered over the whole town . . . [and not] inhabiting a particular Mahalla."^[120]

The colonial government—as the Mughals before them—sought to capitalize on the existing organization of muhallas by penetrating urban society through them: muhallas were grouped into thanas (police circles) and thus integrated into a police system. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Patna was organized into sixteen thanas; later in the century the number was increased to seventeen. The sixteen thanas together comprised 222 muhallas . Chauk Kallan thana , for instance, extended over 29 muhallas; Mehdiganj, on the other end of the scale, extended over only 3.^[121]

[119] G. F. Grand, Judge and Magte., Patna, to T. Law, Colltr., Behar, Aug. 29, 1789, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Feb. 19 to Mar. 10, 1790, Feb. 19; "Petition of. . . Halways of the city," "Petition of . . . Beoparries Residing at Mehdee Gunge," "Petition of . . . Merchants, Bankers and Dealers . . . Gentoos and Musulmen" and "Translate of . . . Narrative of Facts Attested by 40 Banker Merchants . . . ," Bengal Rev. Consltns., Jan. 6-20, 1790, Jan. 6, no. 18.

[120] Moulvi Abul Hasan M. Taib, "Report on an Enquiry into the Position of the Smaller Traders and Artisans in Patna City," in Chanakya Society , 5thAnnualReport , pp. 30-49, esp. 32.

[121] T. C. Robertson, Acting Magte., Patna, to W. Blunt, Suptd., Police, Jan. 17, 1817, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., 1817, Feb. 14, no. 4; Hunter, AccountofPatna , p. 191. Thesixteen thanas in the early nineteenth century were: Bankipur, Pirbahore, Sultanganj, Alamganj, Colonelganj, Sadikpur, Diwan Mohulla, Mehdiganj, Mogulpurah, Khajekallan, Lodikatra, Chauk Kallan, Chauk Shikarpur, Dhalpurah, Malsalami, and Begumganj.

Muhallas also figured in the subsidiary police system of night watchmen (chaukidars) instituted in the early nineteenth century. The leading notables of each ward, generally "merchants," were singled out as muhalladars , local men of power and influence, charged with collecting information in their wards for purposes of levying the unpopular chaukidari tax and for collecting the tax. Such men were the urban counterparts of the major landholders that government recruited as its intermediaries in rural localities in the wake of the Permanent Settlement of 1793. They were vital links for the colonial state, as their consent and cooperation legitimized and enhanced the authority of the Raj. Their integration into the local structures of formal and informal administration also enabled the British to keep a rein on these powerful local controllers. Not surprisingly, the position of muhalladar became a coveted office. Thus, an influential Patna resident who had been stripped of this position for his "considerable" absence from the city actively and successfully campaigned "in the most object [sic] and submissive manner, to have it restored to him, declaring that by the deprivation he felt himself lowered in the estimation of the people in his neighbourhood."^[122]

In contrast to muhallas that extended over all of the city, ganjs , or small regulated markets, were found in specific areas, typically those areas that served as "emporium[s] for grain and other necessaries of life." Major ganjs handled the trade of the region; lesser ganjs served the needs of their localities or their neighborhoods. Some ganjs were coterminous with muhallas , others were part of muhallas . Their prominence in the economic life and the spatial organization of the city was acknowledged by the colonial authorities who often designated ganjs as the hubs of their police system of thanas .^[123]

Established and patronized by prominent local men who were distinguished members of the region's aristocracy, most of Patna's ganjs originated and were developed in the eighteenth century. And their per-

[122] Robertson to Police, Jan. 17, 1817, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Feb. 14, 1817, no. 4; Freitag, "History of Banaras," pp. 18-19.

[123] Robertson to Police, Jan. 17, 1817, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Feb. 14, 1817, no. 4; H. H. Wilson, AGlossaryof JudicialandRevenueTerms (1855; reprint, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), p. 165.

sistence well into the nineteenth century as the main business quarters of the city reinforces the trade profile sketched earlier.

Increasingly, the most important commercial ganj in the city was Russut or Marufganj, located at the eastern extremity of the "city," under the shadow of the eastern walls.^[124] Established in 1764 by Nawab Ikram-daula and patronized by the East India Company in the late eighteenth century, in its rise it eclipsed Nawabganj and Mandiganj, both of which dated back to the early eighteenth century. Marufganj and nearby ganjs received most of the boats bringing in goods in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Its residents characterized it as "the commercial mart of Patna city."^[125]

Marufganj's control of the valuable oilseed trade—almost two-thirds (or 728,237 maunds) of the city's total supply passed through it—reflects its primacy. Sugar, salt, and food grains were other major items available at this ganj . Mansurganj, an inland mart south of Marufganj, ranked second in volume, its trade centered mainly on oilseeds (104,968 maunds); it also imported salt (56,873 maunds), sugar (8,000 maunds), and food grains from Patna and neighboring southern districts. The riverside mart of Colonelganj, the most western of the big ganjs of Patna, was another important "regulated market," best known for its import of oilseeds (137,370 maunds) and for food grains from north Bihar and from Bengal. Other ganjs , smaller in size than Marufganj, Mansurganj, and Colonelganj, that played an active role in the trade of Patna were Sadikpur and Maharajganj. They spe-

[124] Other major ganjs were: Hindiganj (established in 1721); Begumganj (1724); Hajiganj (founded in 1752 by Nawab Haji); Floreyganj (founded in 1766 by Nawab Jaffar Ali Khan); Maharajganj (founded in 1772 by Maharaja Shitab Rai); and Shahganj (founded in 1730 by Nawab Fakhr-ad-daula). In addition, there were Murtuzaganj, Qazibagh, Kabutrah Khannah, Alabakspur, Masallapur, Hakimganj, Dandunmandi, Arafabad, Rasulpur, Khamepur, and Mandi Begumpur, all established in the early eighteenth century and all engaged in the sale of food grains. Beyond the limits of the "city" lay Colonelganj, another "great market for grain," established in 1763 by Nawab Ikramdaula. BOR to W. Money, Colltr., July 28, 1824, P.C. Records, From Colltr. of Bihar, vol. 11, 1824. See also Law, Colltr., Bihar, to Henry Revell, Colltr., Govt. Customs, Aug. 23, 1788, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Feb. 19 to Mar. 10, 1790, Feb. 19, no. 87

[125] "Memorial of the Inhabitants of Mohulla Maroofgunge . . . ," Bengal Public Works Procs., Jan.-Apr. 1876, Apr., no. 3; Petition of Sheikh Fuckur Oollah etc., with Grand to Law, Aug. 29, 1789, Bengal Rev. Consltns., Feb. 19 to Mar. 10, 1790, Feb. 24, no. 20; W. R. Jennings, Colltr., Govt. Customs, Patna, to H. M. Parker, Secy., Bd. of Customs, July 10, 1828, P.C. Records, Customs, vol. 179, Dec. 11 1813 to Nov. 27, 1833. The ward comprising Marufganj—it included Malsalami, Marufganj and Chalkiat bazaar—paid more than twice the amount of police taxes (Rs. 5,280 as opposed to Rs. 2135-4) than the second-most highly taxed ward. See Statement of Police Taxes, Bengal BOR Procs., Police, Jan. 15 to Dec. 13, 1796, Jan. 15.

cialized in oilseeds and cereals; Alabakspur, an inland mart, chiefly imported oilseeds, as was also the case with neighboring Arafabad; and Gulzarbagh dealt in oilseeds, unrefined sugar, shoes, and rattans.

In the heart of the "city" lay the Chauk, Mirchaiganj adjoining it, and east of the latter, the Qila (fort) that was known as "the cotton mart." These marts were the center of the cloth import trade—largely in the hands of Marwaris; other imports included various metals, iron, copper and brass, spices, silk, and "'miscellaneous English goods' . . . umbrellas, knives, scissors, walking sticks, crockeryware, glassware, hardware, &c." Whereas the big riverfront ganjs , particularly Marufganj, Gulzarbagh, and Colonelganj, received most of their goods from throughout the wider region, the inland markets of Mansurganj, the Chauk with Mirchaiganj, Maharajganj, Sadikpur, and Alabakspur, were supplied primarily from their immediate hinterland—Patna district itself and Gaya and Shahabad—and their supplies, principally oilseeds and food grains, were transported there by carts and pack bullocks.^[126]

The mosques were another conspicuous feature of the city. Well into the nineteenth century, British visitors to Patna considered it a Muslimdominated place because of its religious architecture. As one British observer noted on viewing Azimabad from the Ganges: "[T]hough it does not contain any single building of great celebrity or peculiar beauty, [it] is rich in the remains of Moosulman splendour. . . . [A]nd when the river is full and brimming to its banks, turret, spire, and dome . . . reflected in its broad mirror, the coupd'oeil is exceedingly imposing."^[127]

Moreover, the denizens of Patna continued to regard the city as an Islamicized place in the nineteenth century, an identity also associated with "other mughalizing urban centers in north India."^[128] It was an identity that had evolved in Patna while it was a regional Mughal headquarters town, an experience imprinted on the lifestyle of its people and the built environment of the city. There was, as well, a disproportionate number of Muslims among its inhabitants. Although Hindus constituted almost 88 percent of the population of the district in the late nineteenth century and Muslims a little more than 11 percent, in the city the latter numbered more than 12 percent, and in the "city" it-

[126] Rattray report; Robertson to Police, Jan. 17, 1817, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Feb. 14, 1817, no. 4; Tradeof Bengal , 1876-77 , p. 196. See also below, chap. 5, on Marwaris and other traders and merchants.

[127] "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 249.

[128] Freitag, "History of Banaras," p. 9.

self almost 24 percent. They were especially well represented in Pirbahor, a thana where large numbers of Muslims working for the British resided, and in Khwaja Kalan, "essentially the Muhammadan quarter where the chief mosque is."^[129]

The city's "imposing" remains, so evocative of its earlier prominence, must have further heightened the sense of loss felt by the aristocratic generation during the revolution. The remembered past of the historian and poets must have seemed all the more grand in contrast to the changes of their own times. Mosques, the major landmarks, were surely striking indeed for the British visitors, who viewed the city as little more than a "collection of mud huts, separated by narrow and often very dirty lanes [and without] any public buildings of interest or importance."^[130] In addition to mosques, the city's sacred geography for Muslim devotees was also notable as the site of four pirs (Muslim saints)Mansur, Maruf, Jafar, and Mahdi—and of the shrine of Shah Arzani.^[131]

Ritual occasions further dramatized the Muslim appearance of the "city" because they seemed to attract Muslims and Hindus equally, well into the nineteenth century. Contemporary accounts describe a local society in which Muslims coexisted harmoniously with Hindus, each group participating in the other's festivals. At the festival of Mohurrum, one of the biggest religious event of the year (as many as a hundred thousand were said to have attended in the late nineteenth century), "the whole population of Patna, Moslem, Christian, and Hindoo, assemble[d] to witness the procession."^[l32]

Patna was also the site of Hindu places of worship, as well as an intermediate stop on the way to Gaya for those pilgrims traveling on the Ganges or by the old Mughal highway. Only with the development of

[129] Muslims declined in numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in part because of the outmigration of weavers or Jolahas. See Census1891 , Patna Division , p. 4; Hunter, AccountofPatna , p. 65; Grierson, NotesonGaya , p. 118; "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 252.

[130] H. Beveridge, "The City of Patna," CalcuttaReview 76, no. 152 (1883): 215.

[131] PDG1924 , pp. 67; 177-89; Syed Hasan "The City of Patna—Etymology of Place-Names," in Patna throughtheAges , ed. Qeyamuddin Ahmad (New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1988), pp. 53-70. Other than the mosque of Sher Shah (dating from the 1540s) and of Allauddin Shah (1489), most of the major mosques were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[132] "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 252. See also Chunder, Travels ofaHindoo , vol. 1, p. 118; Syed Badrul Hasan, Yadgar-e-Rozgar (Patna: n.p., 1931); Ali Muhammad Shad, Naqsh-e-Paidar , vol. 2 (Patna: n.p., 1924). Recent scholarship attests to the higher degree of cooperation and collective celebration existing between Hindus and Muslims prior to the so-called communal conflicts of the late and early twentieth centuries. E.g., see Freitag, "History of Banaras," pp. 11-15.

railways and roads in the late nineteenth century and the resultant new routes did this pattern change. For Sikhs, Patna was important as the site of the birthplace of their tenth guru (Govind Singh), an event later commemorated by a temple called Har Mandir. And as ancient Patna had been the heartland of earlier religions, it was also graced by a number of Buddhist and Jain relics.^[133]

Beyond this "garden" of muhallas and ganjs and mosques and temples lay another Patna, a city in which the "English" presence was increasingly more visible and an area that was just beginning to develop in the age of revolution. A visitor to the city at the end of the nineteenth century would have found the map in Ghulam Husain's ModernTimes inadequate because the city had grown so. In part, the new configuration was an outgrowth of the policies of the "alien" regime. As the Patna historian's account indicates, the "English" deliberately set themselves apart from local society, openly exhibiting an "aversion . . . for the company of the natives, and such the disdain . . . that no love, and no coalition . . . can take root between conquerors and the conquered."^[134] Buchanan personally articulated this "disdain" in declaring that the Indian Patna was "a disgusting place. There is one street tolerably wide that runs from the eastern to the western gate. Every other passage is narrow. Paving, cleaning and lighting, considered so essential in every European town in such circumstances are totally out of [the] question. In the heats of spring the dust is beyond credibility, and in the rains every place is covered with mud. . . . In the rainy season there is in the town a considerable pond or lake, which, as it dries up, becomes exceedingly dirty, and in spring is offensive."^[135]

Such a perspective hardened into the official view. "European visitors," noted an early-nineteenth-century account, rarely ever entered the "city . . . except upon duty. When there is no particular object of celebrity to attract attention, Anglo-Indians, either from contempt or

[133] Chowdhari, RamblesinBihar , pp. 7, 14; PDG 1924 , pp. 61-65; 165-97; Hagen, "Indigenous Society in Patna," pp. 70-72. In addition to the temples associated with the presiding deities of Patna, Bari (Big) Patan devi, and the Chhoti (Small) Patan devi, there were also those of Satya Narayan, Gopinath, Govindbagh, the Shivala of Gauri Shanker, the Shivala of Jugeshwar Nath, Kali, Sitala, and the Thakurbari of Baba Bhisham Das.

[134] Seir , vol. 3, pp. 161-62. The original is in italics. See also Qeyamuddin Ahmad, "An Eighteenth-Century Indian Historian on Early British Administration," JournalofIndian History (1973): 893-907, for a discussion of the "causes" cited by Ghulam Husain for the shortcomings of "English" rule.

[135] Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 58-59.

apathy, rarely enter the native towns in their neighbourhood."^[136] Much the same tone is evident in George Graham's description of his journey through the bazaars of Patna in the late nineteenth century: "Anything but pleasant; the dust was choking, and the stench of oil and rancid ghee was overpowering. It being the cold weather too, a great number of wood fires were lighted, the wood being by preference damp, and emitting the most pungent smoke, hostile indeed to mosquitoes, but very trying to the eyes and sense of smell."^[137]

Nor did the British perception of Patna "city" as an impenetrable, even a hostile, place help to bridge the divide between Bankipur and the "city."^[138] Patna's negative reputation dated back to 1763, when Nawab Mir Qasim killed his English prisoners—an event remembered in British accounts as the Patna Massacre. According to one contemporary source, the very decision to settle in Bankipur and not in the "city" was prompted by this "treacherous attack." Periodically in the nineteenth century, the city was rife with rumors of the impending massacres of Europeans by hostile "natives." Were these perhaps the expressions of "subaltern consciousness" regarding the alien "English" that in the postrevolutionary era were uttered in the vocabulary of re-

[136] "Mofussil Stations—Patna," p. 255. For similar observations regarding other cities, see Veena Talwar Oldenburg, TheMakingofColonialLucknow , 1856-1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 18-19.

[137] [G. Graham] An Ex.-Civilian, Lifeinthe Mofussil;or , theCivilianin LowerBengal (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878), pp. 62-63. Complaints about "disgusting" Patna notwithstanding, colonial administrators did little to alleviate the conditions of the "native town." On the contrary, as the European translator of Ghulam Husain's history noted, a standard charge "against the English by the natives" was "that of so many English that have carried away such Princely fortunes from this country, not one of them has ever thought of shewing his gratitude to it, by sinking a well, digging a pond, planting a public grove, raising a caravensera, or building a bridge." Seir , vol. 3, p. 183, note 131 . For additional details on piecemeal and failed municipal projects in the city, see my "The City of Patna: The Central Place of Exchange," paper presented at the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Tucson, Arizona, Oct. 1987.

[138] A "good and permanent road" between Bankipur to the eastern extremity of the "city" did not exist as late as the 1820s, although a "committee for the improvement of the city of Patna" had been involved in road-building and other municipal projects since the second decade of the nineteenth century. By contrast, note the committee's successes in undertaking works of "public and military importance": the upkeep of a "high military road" from Bankipur to the cantonment town of Danapur and the construction of a well and a small tank near the parade grounds in Bankipur, both obviously better situated for people residing in that "suburb," especially for the military personnel using those grounds, than for the ordinary people of Patna. Committee to Shakespear, Bengal Cr. Jdcl. Consltns., Sept. 22, 1829, no. 8; W. M. Fleming, et al., to W. B. Bayley, Secy., Govt., Jdcl., Ibid., June 3 to 10, 1824, June 3, no. 20; G. Dowdeswell to H. Douglas, A. Welland, D. Campbell and W. Money, Jan. 15, 1814, Ibid., Jan. 1 to 22, 1814, Jan. 15, no. 12.

sistance rather than the poetic lament of "ruin" and "despair." William Tayler, the commissioner of Patna during the tumultuous period of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 considered the city to be "a very sink of disaffection and intrigue."^[139]

The British association of Patna with "disaffection and intrigue" was also related to the perception of it as a Muslim city. One early-nineteenth-century observer characterized it as a "stronghold of Mohammedanism, and the disciples of the prophet, who dwell within its walls, are described as being far more fanatic and intolerant than their brethren of Bengal."^[140] Local administrators kept a wary eye on the Wahabis because of their numerous conspiracies against the British in the nineteenth century.^[141]

The missionary experience reinforced this negative image. One missionary ranked Patna alongside Murshidabad as the two cities in the region with the most "hostile feeling to Europeans." For only in Patna were there instances-said to be rare in India-of missionaries encountering "virulent opposition, and even personal violence. . . chiefly from the Muhammadans." And as far as the police were concerned, there was not only the "somewhat turbulent population," with suspect political outlooks to contend with, but also "'badmashes' [miscreants]."^[142]

Furthermore, British attitudes toward "disgusting" Patna-or the "city" that was exclusively inhabited by Indians-were reinforced by the "scientific" discourse that emerged about cleanliness in "native" towns in the late nineteenth century. Sanitation became a paramount concern because British troops had suffered higher casualties from disease-related deaths than from combat during the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857-58. And since contemporary theory linked dirt and disease, and sanitary conditions of "native" towns with the occurrence of epidemics in the wider population, including even the "distant" European quarter, the latter-day improvement (municipal) committees once again focused

[139] W. Tayler, ThePatna Crisis (London: W. H. Allen, 1882), p. 21; "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 250. For a similar impression of Lucknow, see Oldenburg, ColonialLucknow , pp. 20-26. See also my "A Conversation of Rumors: The Language of Popular Mentalités in Late Nineteenth-Century India," Journalof SocialHistory zo (1987): 485-505.

[140] "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 252.

[141] Qeyamuddin Ahmad, The WahabiMovementinIndia (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966). One of the few occasions when the British attempted to reshape the "city" was when they tore down and confiscated the Sadiqpur properties of "convicted Wahabi traitors" and sought to build in their place a "good market."

[142] Patna Census, 1891, p. 1; Buyers, Recollections of India, p. 200.

their attention on the "disgusting" places. As a result, in Patna—as in Lucknow—municipal committees under the direction of local British administrators combined "genuine concern for the lack of adequate drainage and rubbish disposal, some good common sense about clean drinking water and more and better public toilets, some prejudice about 'native habits,' and a spirit of bold experimentation. . . to clean up the city."^[143] But, as in their previous close encounter with the "native" city, their efforts were consistently hampered by financial constraints. Lack of funding in Patna meant that no "large schemes" were introduced "which would completely remedy the insanitary conditions produced by many centuries of neglect."^[144]

These perceptions deepened the "aversion" between Azimabad, increasingly called the "city," and the Patna of the alien rulers that clustered around the area known as Bankipur. In other words, the new regime deliberately established its own private and public spaces at a far remove from those of its subjects. Only five miles separated the western wall of the "city" and the British-built Golghar (granary) in Bankipur, but in the colonial imagination the "city" grew increasingly remote. By the late nineteenth century not a single European resided in Azimabad, and similarly, well into that century, Bankipur remained a European enclave inhabited by "very few natives."^[145]

But the shift toward Bankipur was not an entirely novel development: expansion in that direction was well under way before the advent of colonial rule. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to Ghulam Husain, his fellow residents were constructing "numerous houses and ha[b]itations" beyond the confines of the city walls. This westward expansion was pioneered by wealthy residents building garden houses along the riverbank leading up to Bankipur. They were joined and increasingly supplanted by the new masters of the city, the British, who staked out many of the prime locations beyond the western gate of the

[143] Oldenburg, ColonialLucknow , p. 100. Patna was constituted as a municipality in 1864.

[144] PDG 1924, p. 79; E. Drummond, Chairman, Municipal Commrs., Patna, to Commr., Patna, no. 17, May 28, 1868, P.C. Basta no. 229, Important Bundles, Jdcl. Dept., Alphabet A, B and C, nos. 1–16. The municipal committees were, on the whole, an abysmal failure. Without the constant prodding of the British officials residing in distant Bankipur, the Patna committee's nonofficial members—mostly "city" inhabitantswere generally said to exhibit little interest in the affairs of the committee. Consequently, in Patna, as elsewhere in Bihar, the municipal committees were "said to prove a hindrance to business rather than a help in its disposal." AGRPD, 1874–75.

[145] Hunter, Accountof Patna , p. 74; Beveridge, "City of Patna," p. 216.

"city," particularly the "suburb" of Bankipur, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Patna experienced another phase of growth and development in the early twentieth century, when it became the capital of the newly constituted province of Bihar and Orissa.^[146]

To the British, Bankipur, the "European portion of the station," stood in stark contrast to the Muslim-dominated "city," that crowded, "disgusting" hive of commercial activity. "The narrow road of the native portion of the town here widens out into a spacious plain of a circular shape, which formed the race course.. . . Around this are situated the residences of the Europeans, the Church, and some of the Law Courts; and the open green space, with its fine trees, is very refreshing to the eye after the long, dusty, narrow bazaar."^[147]

This landscape had been shaped by "colonization," whereby a new zone was created and stamped with a distinctively colonial social geography. The initial British foray into Patna was linked to trading interests. Consider first their beginnings in Patna—beginnings completely ignored by the historian Ghulam Husain. They were confined at that time to a house in the western suburb of Alamganj, which had been assigned to their short—lived factory of 1620–21 by the Mughal governor. As yet a minor political player, the British were relegated to the outer reaches of the city. In the mid-seventeenth century, the first "permanent" English factory was set up, almost adjacent to the western wall of the old city—close to the city but yet still outside it. At this site, the building known today as the original Patna Factory was erected in the eighteenth century. It was the setting for many of the key political and military events that led up to British ascendancy in the region in the latter half of that century. Its location beyond the walls of the city may have been preferred by both sides, Indian rulers and English traders: it was contiguous yet outside. The vulnerable occupants were offered some protection because the factory was fortified and it possessed a safe passageway to an outer well from which water could be obtained. The factory occupants as yet represented only one of the several contestants for regional power.^[148]

But as the British gained in power, their presence was registered on the urbanscape of Patna. Even before 1757 the Company had acquired

[146] PDG1924 , pp. 165–97; PDG1970 , pp. 655–61; Seir , vol. 1, pp. 428, 447.

[147] "Mofussil Stations, Patna," p. 66.

[148] PDG1924 , pp. 173–83; Sarkar, "Patna in the Seventeenth Century," pp. 127, 149.

a piece of garden land along the Ganges in Bankipur: it came to be known as the Company Bagh (garden). Although the initial grant was for only a small area—just large enough to accommodate the house and compound of the Company's factory chief—by 1778 the Company Bagh had secured a new grant that enlarged the lands to 87 bighas (about 54 acres). And by the end of the eighteenth century the Bagh covered 130 bighas . Reclaimed in part from wasteland, the area became the hub of the emerging empire. Eyre Coote and Robert Clive had camped there in 1757 and 1758, respectively, in the course of their military campaigns; in 1763 the campground served as the headquarters of the military commander in chief. When the military was shifted to Monghyr in 1765, the staff quarters became the headquarters of the factory, which retained possession of it until the abolition of the Commercial Residency in 1829. (It then became the court of the district judge.)^[149]

The expansion of the Company Bagh and the stationing of the Third Brigade at Bankipur at a place later known as Barkerganj (after Sir Robert Barker, who commanded the brigade in the 1760s) not only chronicles the rise of the Company from a trading to a political power but also epitomizes the ever-expanding British presence in Bankipur. So does the fact that buildings formerly housing the commercial and military representatives of the Company came to house administrators responsible for carrying out the dictates of the rising colonial state and the construction of new edifices to house the offices of its growing bureaucracy. A changing of the guard reflecting the new realities of power and authority was also evident in the British acquisition of lands, particularly the takeover of much of Bankipur in the last decades of the eighteenth century, as the Company emerged as the supreme political power in the region. The process continued in the first half of the nineteenth century, as the Company completed its mastery over the subcontinent.

By the early nineteenth century, much of the property along the riverfront had already changed hands. The few "local" residents who remained on these lands were major allies of the Raj, prominent landholders who formed part of the local "aristocracy" and whose conspic-

[149] PDG1924 , pp. 176–77. G. F. Grand, The NarrativeoftheLifeofaGentlemanLongResidentinIndia (Calcutta: Calcutta Historical Society, 1910), p. 19, writes of being stationed at Bankipur in the 1760s; he was a judge and magistrate of Patna in the 1780s. Gopal, Patna , p. 3, asserts that the decision to set up the British hub in Bankipur was prompted by the desire to be close to the military cantonment of Danapur.

uous "palaces and mansions" highlight their "overgrowing power" in the colonial system. At one extremity of Bankipur, the westernmost "suburb" of Patna, lay the Golghar, a gola , or granary, ninety-six feet high, built in 1786 to store grain in case of famine. Nearby to the north and northwest, in part of the area formerly known as the big (bara) and small (choti) Nepali kothi , the engineer of Golghar built a house. East of Golghar, close to the river, in the area of the old cantonments of the Third Brigade, arose bungalows and houses that served either as the residences of government officials, such as those of the opium agents (later to become the residence of the civil surgeon), or as the offices of local administrators, such as the building adjacent to the civil surgeon's house, which became the collectorate. East of this was the Bankipur Club with its commanding view of the river. Beyond this lay the historic Company Bagh, containing the house of the district judge, the headquarters of the commercial resident that became the court of the district judge in 1829, an old house that became the quarters of the munsifs' (Indian civil judges') courts, and in Muradbagh, the former residence of the chief of the revenue council in the 1770s. Southeast of the residence of the Patna Revenue Council chief lay the tomb of Mirza Murad from which came the name Muradbagh (Murad garden). Next in size was the palatial house of the maharaja of Darbhanga, Bihar's largest landholder. The maharaja's neighbor, now housing Patna College, was the house of the opium agent of Bihar in the 1810s. Nearby lay Afzalpur, the site of the tomb and garden of Mir Afzal, and east of it, Golak Sadih's dargah , which explains the origin of the name of the muhalla of Golakpur. To the north, at the river, was Rani Ghat, a popular bathing area. Formerly, near the ghat was the house of Mir Ashraf, the late-eighteenth-century gomastha (agent) of the English factory; his neighbors were, in one house, the Tikari zamindar, and in another, the Bettiah zamindar. From there to the old English factory, the riverfront was carved up by the house of Nawab Baker Ali Khan, Colonelganj, and the garden of Shaista Khan. Adjoining this factory were the western walls of the "city."^[150]

Well into the late nineteenth century, local administrators toiled hard to keep Indians and ordinary Europeans at arm's length and away from the heart of Bankipur that had been "[b]efore the disturbances of

[150] Buchanan, BiharandPatna , pp. 40–71; PDG1924 , pp. 173–8; J. F. W. James, "The River Front of Patna at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century," JBORS 11 (1925): 85–90.

1857/58 the little plains in our station [that] was used almost exclusively for the Residents and was free from intrusion of soldiers or police or of public influence." In voicing his concern in 1863, the commissioner of Patna chafed at what he termed the "needless occupation and intrusion by buildings and departments," a presence that meant the stationing of "soldiers or police" drawn from ordinary men, both Indian and European.^[l51]

In addition to acquisitions through purchases from local landholders, land in Bankipur generally devolved into British hands in two ways. The first, occurring in such areas as that formerly occupied by the Provincial Battalion, were acquired by "government, partly from Nizamat lands [lands paying revenue to the Nazim, that is, to the former Mughal governor], for which a remission was granted, and partly from rent-free lands for which no compensation was ever made to the minhaedar [minhaidar , holder of land exempted from revenue payment] . . . [nor] any rent has ever been paid or demanded for the compounds which are taken out of rent free lands."^[152] Thus, the British "civil station" of Bankipur had been carved out of lands for which no grants could be located. In other words, these lands were rent-free and the property of government, or they were on estates that paid revenue to government and whose proprietors were paid a nominal rent for the use of the buildings on the grounds.

The British "occupation" of Bankipur followed the familiar pattern of colonial settlements emerging alongside existing "native" cities and towns. Rather than engaging in extensive urban removal, which would have been costly, colonial rulers followed the more expeditious policy of fashioning their own "suburbs" away from the heart of the old city. In the case of Patna this commenced with the initial British relocation to Bankipur and concluded with building of the new capital in the twentieth century in the new areas west of Bankipur, that is, even farther removed from the earlier settlement. That Bankipur and the "suburbs" that were created later officially appropriated the name of Patna, while the old town came to be known as Patna "city," is its own commentary on the realities of power and authority during the colonial period. In this sense, the colonial record of Patna stands in sharp contrast

[151] G. F. Cockburn, Commr., to Secy., GOB, no. 353, Oct. 20, 1863, P. C. Double Lock Volumes, vol. 1, Basta no. 3, 1863.

[152] R. N. Farquharson, Special Deputy Colltr., to E. C. Ravenshaw, Offg. Commr., Feb. 6, 1838, P.C., Letters from the Colltr. of Patna, vol. 48, 1838, no. 22.

to those of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, the great presidency cities. For these three cities formed the hubs of the empire. Their rise followed the pattern of early Western bases elsewhere in Asia, which were "either wholly nonurban or little developed.. . . Many of these early Western bases were entirely new; not only did they occupy previously unused sites but they represented a new kind of city exclusively centered on trade."^[153] In another sense all of Patna became increasingly marginalized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it became merely an inland port city serving the great metropolises represented by the presidency cities, also the primary colonial port cities.^[154]

As a result of the development of Bankipur, Patna became a city of two distinct zones in the nineteenth century: the "city" that Ghulam Husain knew so well and the Bankipur of the British. A third zone came later as the westernmost area was built up to accommodate the emergence of Patna as the provincial capital. The city in other words developed unevenly, as it underwent the transitions from Pataliputra to Patna to Azimabad to Patna. While the revolution of the eighteenth century and the new economic climate of the nineteenth century weakened the foundations of the "city," dependent as it was on political prominence and status as a regional central place, these changes had less impact on the rest of Patna because Bankipur and the western zone continued to benefit from Patna's role as the colonial administrative and political hub of the region. Furthermore, because the development of the three zones followed different economic and political calendars, setbacks in one area were mitigated by advances in another. Thus, the changing economic conditions that threatened the "city" and its prosperity as a center of retail and wholesale trade and banking—a situation that endangered the health of the entire city—were partly offset by the development of Bankipur as the civil station for the district and the region. Insurance against the economic slump was also provided by the emergence of the westernmost zone in the twentieth century.

By the mid-twentieth century the city of Patna consisted of three distinctive zones. At the eastern extremity lay the "city," an area still housing the wholesale trade, although no longer the flourishing economic and commercial center it had been in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The middle zone encompassing the area extend-

[153] Rhoads Murphey, TheOutsiders:TheWestern ExperienceinIndiaandChina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), p. 17; PDG 1924, p. 194.

[154] See the essays in Basu, ColonialPortCitiesinAsia .

ing from the western gate of the "city" to the Patna-Gaya road (now renamed Buddha marg), that is, essentially the Bankipur of British creation, constituted the "business and commercial core of the city" and the site of the "bulk of the institutional, cultural and district administration buildings" of Patna. In addition to housing most of the district administration offices, this middle area became the site of Patna University, which was established in 1917. Other than housing the monumental buildings typical of a state capital, as late as the 1960s the third and westernmost zone had few "community facilities such as schools, shopping centres, etc."^[155]

To sum up, because Patna remained an administrative and political hub, worsening economic conditions did not transform it into a "ruined city"; nor was its position as the central place of the region entirely eroded, notwithstanding such evocations in the plaintive prose and poetry penned by the aristocratic generation of the late eighteenth century. Consider the eyewitness account of Enugula Veeraswamy, a pilgrim from south India who visited Patna at the close of 1830. The next chapter retraces his journey across the region to the scene of melas, or fairs.

[155] The changed relationship between the three zones is evident from the fact that the eastern zone had only 35.5 percent of the population in the late twentieth century, whereas the central and western zones accounted for 43.8 and 20.6 percent, respectively. Although the central zone remained at the core of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its primacy was being undercut by the western zone, with its growing population. Between 1951 and 1961 the western zone increased its number by over 126 percent; the central zone, the "most overcrowded" grew only by 18.6 percent, and the eastern zone by 12.2 percent. Patna, MasterPlan , pp. 22–24, 17.