1. Kunwar Chheda Sinha, Kshatriya aur Kritram Kshatriya, published simultaneously in English as Kshatriyas and Would-Be Kshatriyas, translated by Kunwar Rupa Sinha (Agra: Rajput Anglo-Oriental Press, 1907), 1. Similarly oriented tracts included Pandit Kashinath, Varnavivek Chandrika [Moonlight of Varna Wisdom] (Bombay: Shri Venkateshwar Press, 1898); and Jvalaprasad Mishra, Jati Nirnay [Jati Rulings] (Bombay: Lakshmi Venkateshwar Press, 1901). Thirty years later, Chaudhari Dipnarayan Sinha of Chunar south of Banaras composed a one-hundred-page argument responding to the attacks and cultural slights contained in these works in his Kurmi Kshatriya Nirnaya (1937).

2. Sinha, Kshatriya aur Kritram Kshatriya, 1–13. Sinha, not surprisingly, cited the opinions and speculations of British civil servants and ethnographers in India.

3. Imtiaz Ahmad, “Caste Mobility Movements in North India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 7, no. 2 (1971): 168.

4. Gyan Pandey, “Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c. 1888–1917,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 74–75. Pandey cites Nirmal Sengupta, “Caste as an Agrarian Phenomenon in Twentieth Century Bihar,” in Arvind Das and V. Nilakant, eds., Agrarian Relations in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), 85–89. See also Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 202, who describes the formation of caste associations as “originally a response to the 1901 Census classifications.”

5. L. S. S. O’Malley, in GOI, Census of India, 1911, vol. 5: Bihar and Orissa, part 1 (page number not given), cited in Ahmad, “Caste Mobility Movements,” 169, n. 11. O’Malley served many years as a district officer in Bihar and became something of a local expert on Bihari culture. He subsequently authored many of the Bengal District Gazetteer Reports relating to Bihar which were published in the first decade of the twentieth century.

6. Thus Kumar, Artisans of Banaras, 202, describing Banaras: “the Census classification of castes greatly agitated the Kayasthas, Khattris, Kurmis, and Jats.”

7. Cf. Lucy Carroll, “Colonial Perceptions of Indian Society and the Emergence of Caste Associations,” Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (1978): 233–250. For a sprinkling of the correspondences received by E. A. Gait’s “ethnography” staff, see Census of India, 1901, vol. 6, part 1, 378–84. This was not a phenomenon restricted to the Gangetic north: the extensive correspondences and circulars regarding the changing dimensions of reform among Shanar (toddy-tappers) redefining themselves as Nadar kshatriya in South India are recounted in Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 133–36.

8. See Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, xv (on psychocultural survival), and 4–11.

9. Ahmad, “Caste Mobility Movements in North India,” 168.

10. I employ the term Goala in this section, inasmuch as this movement stood apart from the Goala/Gopa/Ahir articulation of Yadav-kshatriya identity.

11. John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, 272.

12. Anand A. Yang, “Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the Anti-Cow Killing Riot of 1893,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 4 (October 1980), esp. 590–96.

13. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, 273 (for the quote immediately following, 296).

14. See Peter G. Robb, “Officials and Non-officials as Leaders in Popular Agitations: Shahabad 1917 and Other Conspiracies,” in B. N. Pandey, ed., Leadership in South Asia (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977), esp. 198–203.

15. Pandey, “Rallying Round the Cow,” 88, 60–61, 104. The term “ahir” was common to eastern Uttar Pradesh. See also 89–90 for the “convergence of interest” between Goalas and dvij zamindars over the issue of cow protection.

16. The following descriptions emerge from Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, Police Proceedings (held in the Bihar State Archives, Patna), June 1893, nos. 53–62, “Riots in the Gaya District,” 5–7.

17. Pandey, “Rallying Round the Cow,” 106. Pandey cites Sandria Freitag, “Religious Rites and Riots: From Community Identity to Communalism in North India, 1870–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980). Freitag cites Oriental and India Office Collection, L/P & J/6/365, File 84 of 1894, Hoey’s “Note on the Cow-Protection Agitation in Gorakhpur District,” 2, 4.

18. GOI, Home Department, Public Proceedings (held in the National Archives of India, New Delhi), December 1893, no. 212, “Note on the Cow-protection agitation on [sic] the Gorakhpur District,” 2. (This is probably a slightly earlier version of Hoey’s note, held in the Oriental and India Office Collection, cited by Freitag and Pandey.)

19. Government of Bihar and Orissa, Political Department, Special Section, file no. 171 of 1925, “Subject: Serious riot between Babhans and Goalas at Monghyr. (2) Lakhochak riot.” See Hetukar Jha, “Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars in Bihar (1921–1925): An Analysis of Sanskritization and Contradiction between the Two Groups,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 14, no. 4 (1977): 550–54, for extended extracts from this file, comprising the following: “Reports on the Riot at Kiul by D.I.G., Bihar and Orissa”; “No. 1077, Dated 11th June, 1925, from J. D. Sifton, C.S. to Government of Bihar and Orissa, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department”; and “No. 108 Con. from S. A. Khan, Dist. Officer, Bhagalpur, to the Commissioner of Bhagalpur Division. 7 July, 1925, ‘Re: The Goala Movement, its Causes and Character.’” I refer hereafter to the entire report—whether reproduced by Jha or cited directly by me—as Political Special File no. 171 of 1921.

20. Government of Bihar and Orissa, Political Department, Special Section, file no. 79 of 1921, “Goala Movement in Patna City and Other Districts of Bihar.”

21. “No. 1077, Dated 11th June, 1925 from J. D. Sifton, C.S. to Government of Bihar and Orissa, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department,” cited in Jha, “Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars,” 553.

22. Cited in “Letter from Y. A. Godbole, Esq. I.C.S., D.O. of Purnea, to the Commissioner of the Bhagalpur Division, 15 July, 1925,” in Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, 105–6. Mukherji refers here to shraddh, or funerary purification, during family bereavement. According to Hindu law, shudras were obliged to undergo thirty days of ritual seclusion after a death in the family, whereas the twice-born only had to undergo seclusion for a period of thirteen days.

23. Ibid., 106. The name Swayambara Das indicates a Vaishnava monastic affiliation; the educational employment immediately brings to mind the experience of another, better-known Vaishnava, the Ramanandi Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad.

24. Ibid., 107. Barbers, known as hajjams, were required to shave the head of the male bereaved on the day of shraddh. Mukherji, incidentally, noted that “the movement still requires watching, especially in the Dhamdaha area.” Christopher V. Hill, “History in Motion: The Social Ecology of Purnia District, 1770–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1987), has pointed out that the severe conflict over land control in this region was underscored by extreme caste polarity.

25. “Letter from Y. A. Godbole, Esq.…15 July, 1925,” 106–7.

26. H. M. Elliot, Memoirs of the History, Folklore, and Distribution of the Races of the North Western Provinces of India, 1:156. See also Pandey, Construction of Communalism, 85.

27. Baijnath Prasad Yadav, Ahir-Jati ki Niyamavali, 37; 6, 11, 33–34; 30–31.

28. Saraswati, Kurmi Kshatriya Itihas, 147–55.

29. See the remarks of M. N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India, 46–50, and “The Changing Position of Indian Women,” Man, n.s., 12 (1977): 221–38; and, apropos to Srinivas, see Rama Joshi and Joanna Liddle, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste, and Class in India (London: Zed, 1986), 60.

30. See, for instance, Shivnath Prasad Yadav, “Akhil Bharat Yadav Mahasabha ka Itihas” [The History of the All-India Yadav Mahasabha], Yadavesh 1, no. 2 (1935–36): 19–20. K. K. Verma, Changing Role of Caste Associations, 22, notes that the women’s wing of the Kurmi movement—the “Kurmi kshatriya Mahila Parishad [council]”—was inaugurated in March 1927 on the occasion of the fifteenth session of the mahasabha in Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh by the wife of a prominent local zamindar.

31. Ray, Kahar Jati aur Varnavyavastha, 19. The sati as the ideal, sacrificial woman is a complex subject that cannot be dealt with adequately here. See the discussion of the sati ethic in present-day Rajasthan in Lindsey Harlan, Religion and Rajput Women: The Ethic of Protection in Contemporary Narratives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 112–82.

32. Vir Jaymal, 3d ed. (Banaras: G. Gupta, 1917); “Jaymala” translates literally as victory garland and is also the garland a bride drapes around the neck of her groom during the marriage ceremony. Vir Patni, 2d ed. (Banaras: Banarsi Prasad Varma, 1912). Kile ki Rani 2d ed. (Banaras: Durga Prasad Khatri, 1915). Notwithstanding Reynolds’s active participation in nineteenth-century revolutionary circles in Europe, his fiction has generally been regarded as low-quality sensational romance.

33. No. 108 Conf. from S. A. Khan, Esq., I.C.S., District Officer of Bhagalpur, to the Commissioner of the Bhagalpur Division, 7 July, 1925, “The Goala Movement, its Causes and Character,” Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, 94. (This extract is reproduced incorrectly in Jha, “Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars,” 554, where the word “begari” is replaced with the word “benign.” While there are many terms that can translate “begari,” benign is not one of them.)

34. “Extract from D.I.G.’s weekly report date the 5th August 1921,” 1; “Extract from the Confidential Diary of the Superintendent of Police, Patna, for week ending the 26th February 1921”; “Copy of Patna Special Report Case No. 7 of 1921” (Report no. 1, dated the 1st March, 1921; Report no. 2, dated the 17th March, 1921; Report no. 3, dated the 15th July, 1921), 3–7; all contained in Government of Bihar and Orissa, Political Deparment, Special Section, File No. 79 of 1921, “Goala Movement in Patna City and Other Districts of Bihar.” Shri Ballab Das was probably, by virtue of his title, a Vaishnava monk, and probably a Nimbarki or Radhaballabhi; vallabha, of which “ballab” is a corruption, means beloved and, in the Vaishnava context often refers to the phrase Radha-vallabha, or the beloved of Radha, i.e., Krishna. The association with Krishna here is appropriate given the Krishna-oriented identity of Yadavs. “Gope” or “Gopa” is a variation of Goala and “Jotiya” is the Bengali pronunciation of jati, which would indicate that the official in charge of preparing the report covering this meeting was Bengali. Bakr-Id is a Muslim festival, also known as Bari-Id, commemorating the readiness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmail.

35. Jha, “Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars,” 550. The Samastipur incident involved “Babhans who disliked the idea of the Goalas claiming to be their equal [and] assaulted a Goala girl and left her naked. She lodged a complaint before the S.D.O. at Samastipur who dismissed it without enquiry.” Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, cited by Jha, 551.

36. See, for instance “Reports on the Riot at Kiul by D.I.G., Bihar and Orissa,” reproduced in Jha, “Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars,” 552.

37. “Confidential,” no. 269 c, from J. A. Hubback, Esq. I.C.S., Commissioner of the Bhagalpur Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bihar and Orissa, Political Department, Dated Bhagalpur, 18th July, 1925, “Subject—The underlying causes of the Goala movement,” in Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, 92.

38. Gangaprasad, Kushvaha Kshatriya, urf Koiri, Kachhi, Murav, Kachhvaha, 2. The phrase “thus a shudra is born” appears in the text in Sanskrit as janmana jayte shudrah, and refers most likely to the myth of the primeval man, Purusha, whose head became the brahman, torso the kshatriya, loins the vaishya, and feet the shudra. Professor Tessa Bartholomeusz, now of the Department of Religious Studies at Florida State University, kindly aided in the translation.

39. Ray, Kahar Jati aur Varnavyavastha, 54.

40. No. 108 Conf., from S. A. Khan, Esq., I.C.S., D.O. of Bhagalpur, to the Commissioner of the Bhagalpur Division, dated 7th July 1925, in Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, 94.

41. Ibid. This leaflet and an extremely sketchy translation are provided in Political Special File no. 171 of 1925, 96–101, from which I take all my citations. A full translation can be found in Appendix 2. Sukirti Sahay, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and from Gaya District in Bihar, kindly aided in the sharpening of the revised translation.

42. In other words, “there are so many of you.” A popular proverb holds that while noble beasts such as the lion and the tiger produce only a few offspring, lowly animals like the monkey produce veritable hordes of children. In this sense Bahuran was taunting Yadavs with insinuations of profligate intemperance.

43. See the section entitled, “The Ancient Present: Aryavarta, Dignity, and Labor,” in chapter 3, above.

44. Suzanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 2d ed. (1967; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), viii.

45. This description of Sahajanand Saraswati’s life is based on portions of his autobiography, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, translated in a typescript draft of Walter Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism in Twentieth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 14–35. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to cite this work.

46. Saraswati, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, 160, 174, cited in Hauser, ibid., 20–21. Sahajanad Saraswati’s status as a dandi, or orthodox, Dasnami sanyasi is significant, given the marginal brahman status of the Bhumihar and Jujhautiya Brahman communities in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, inasmuch as dandis are said to initiate only pure brahmans. He stands therefore as a parallel to Dharnidharacharya, noted in the previous chapters, whose status as a Ramanuji could in and of itself be marshaled as evidence of the high status of the jati community that he was, ostensibly, leaving behind to become a monk.

47. To this end, Sahajanand composed “a massive 1200-page manual of Hindu ritual, under the title Karmakalap (Kashi: Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, 1926), a book which very quickly went into a second and subsequently into multiple editions.” Naturally, this book was used for the instruction of students at the ashram. See Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism, 23–24.

48. Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism, 17.

49. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Gita Hriday (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1948).

50. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, new edition (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1985), 173. Sahajanand describes Sitaram Das as a paramhansa, a term applicable to both Vaishnava and Shaiva sadhus, referring specifically to someone of particularly progressive views. See Ghurye, Indian Sadhus, 72. However, both the name “Sitaram” and the suffix “Das” suggest very strongly his Ramanandi identity.

51. Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism, 24.

52. Saraswati, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, 176. See also Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism, 27–28.

53. Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism, 28.

54. Saraswati, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, 172. On the other hand, the Swami was forced to contend throughout his political career with the constant criticism that he was nothing but a jati politician gone awry (182).

55. Walter Hauser, “The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929–1949: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1961), 77.

56. Ibid., 77–78.

57. The name “Triveni Sangh” is particularly appropriate: “Sangh” means confederation; “triveni” means “triple braid” and is usually employed to refer to the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati rivers at Prayag (Allahabad), the most auspicious of the four sites for the kumbh mela. The appellation “Triveni Sangh” is usually taken to refer—in its “three-braided” sense—to Kushvaha, Yadav, and Kurmi kshatriyas, the dominant components of the organization. To my mind, the term also refers to the sacred confluence near Prayag and suggests broader mobilizing solidarities, particularly with respect to Vaishnava ideology and the kumbh mela.

58. Verma, Changing Role of Caste Associations, 90; Kalyan Mukherjee and Rajendra Singh Yadav, Bhojpur: Naxalism in the Plains of Bihar (New Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 1980), 27. In this remarkable and politically commited account, Mukherjee (a journalist) and Yadav (a political activist) credit Sheopujan Prasad Singh, a Kurmi-kshatriya leader, with originating the name for the Triveni Sangh. My description of the emergence of the Triveni Sangh and its relations with Congress and the Kisan Sabha, unless otherwise noted, is based on this work, 27–32.

59. Mukherji and Yadav, Bhojpur, 28.

60. Ibid., 28, n. 31. The authors do not explain the nature of this humiliation.

61. Mukherji and Yadav, 29, credit Tapsi Mahto with the epithet, who had in fact employed a stronger term of abuse, sala, meaning “brother-in-law.” To refer to someone who is not a brother-in-law as “sala” constitutes a severe affront, inasmuch as it implies that the person doing the insulting has had sexual relations with the other’s sister.

62. Ibid., 30. Mukherjee and Yadav recorded this candid reminiscence of 1937 by Ramraj Singh during an interview on 2 December 1980, in Arrah, the headquarters of Shahabad District. A “lathi” is a long, heavy bamboo truncheon, often made more lethal with iron attachments.

63. This logic benefits from Walter Hauser’s analysis of political alliances and jati affiliations in Bihar prior to and following Independence, in an unpublished essay entitled “Dynamics of Social Ranking and Political Power among Emerging Caste Groups in Bihar,” presented at the “Caste and Politics in Bihar” panel at the nineteenth annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, March 20–22, 1967. I am grateful to Professor Hauser for allowing me to read and cite this essay.

64. Mukherjee and Yadav, Bhojpur, 32.

65. Karpoori Thakur belonged to the Hajjam jati, known as masseuses and barbers.

66. See Harry W. Blair, “Rising Kulaks and Backward Classes in Bihar: Social Change in the Late 1970s,” Economic and Political Weekly, January 12, 1980, 64–74. Karpoori Thakur, chief minister of Bihar from 1977 to 1979, relentlessly pursued a policy that would have reserved 20 percent of all state-level bureaucratic appointments for “backwards,” with heavy overrepresentation for Kurmi, Yadav, and Kushvaha kshatriyas. The backward classes movement is discussed in the following chapter; see the section entitled “Forward and Backward.”

67. See Mukherjee and Yadav, Bhojpur; Report from the Flaming Field of Bihar: A CPI (ML) Document (Calcutta: Prabodh Bhattacharya, 1986); and Christopher V. Hill, “Militant Agrarian Unrest in North India: Perspective and Ideology,” review of India Waits by Jan Myrdal and Report from the Flaming Field of Bihar, Peasant Studies 15, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 297–305.