PART THREE—
BANARAS IN WIDER ARENAS
Introduction to Part 3—
Banaras in Wider Arenas
Part 3 places Banaras in a variety of contexts that extend beyond its urban boundaries. Focusing on a particular subject, each of these four chapters traces the connections between the city itself and a larger world: of literary and political movements, of regional environment, of such developments as disease. The ultimate goal of this juxtaposition of essays is to illuminate a series of overlapping, broad sketches that suggest a world whose history cannot be summed up simply in the political narrative of elites.
In some respects these contextualizations of a city connect back to themes and central questions posed by the essays in Parts 1 and 2, including the ways in which public performances inform processes of identity formation and constructions of community, as well as the role played by patronage in these processes. The shift in those who fill patronage roles—from an aristocratic, courtly class to merchants and, beyond them in recent decades, to lower-class groups—has great relevance for the larger, imperial political world of which Banaras was a part: examples of this are provided in chapters 6 and 7. Indeed, perhaps the most important contribution to be made by this volume will be its ability to suggest how very localized expressions of such processes link up with larger historical movements; how scholars can look to the most basic building blocks, such as muhalla[ *] organization or the role of akhara s[*] , for explanations of popular support and interpretation of movements previously explicated only through the behavior and interests of elites.
To speak in terms of academic disciplines (and the methodologies used by each), we might say that scholarship on South Asia has reached a point where intellectual interaction can lead us to very fruitful and polished conclusions when history and anthropology, literature and
musicology have been brought together. The first essays in this part provide refinements that lead beyond existing literature in this relatively well mined interdisciplinary world of analysis, suggesting as well new ways to deal with familiar source materials and events. Several important historical themes emerge from this interdisciplinary approach, as the essays suggest the extent to which elite and lower-class values have overlapped—as well as pinpointing at what times, over which issues, and in what contexts they separate. This is not to argue for a social stasis, or an integrated, harmonious social structure. It is simply to insist that disharmony can be traced to specific historical causes at particular moments in time, about which scholars must be precise if they are to understand the significance and nuances involved.
This part turns as well, however, to analytical ground less well cultivated. It introduces discussions with few precedents, in which are suggested the potential for a similar combination of social history with the disciplines of economics, demography, and environmental studies.[1] Such an approach would move us in interesting ways beyond the historiographical precedents. From G. R. Trevelyan's "history with the politics left out," social history has become, in recent years, a much more dynamic investigation, particularly of social conflict, consciousness, and change. Now we propose to combine this line of inquiry with a closer scrutiny of the role of physical context and material processes. Such a social history, in David Arnold's words, would be "about human actors against (and within) a landscape only partly of their own making." Such a history "has enormous potential in helping to explain unspoken (or unrecorded) parameters of human existence and struggle, in suggesting another set of factors alongside (rather than instead of) the political, the cultural, the conventionally social." Writing such a history, as these beginning attempts suggest, is quite difficult, requiring us "to juxtapose the technical (a knowledge of how a particular disease operates, or a river system functions) with the more familiar cultural and social domain."[2]
Thus, in forging a new interdisciplinary approach to Indian social history, these essays are still quite preliminary, even in the conclusions they suggest for their particular topics. And, although we have tried to use their juxtaposition to delineate the implications when material and cultural analyses are combined, the investigations developed in these essays are still somewhat tentative. As a consequence, it is not possible, yet, to successfully integrate these approaches to present a single, coherent large-scale picture. Nevertheless, taken together, they begin to
[1] Thanks to Nita Kumar for suggesting that this point be made.
[2] I gratefully acknowledge Arnold's helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. The quotations come from a private communication dated April 28, 1987.
sketch the outline needed for a new Indian history—one that includes changes in material conditions and processes of production, as well as changed social and cultural environments. As Arnold suggests, this new approach may also allow us to refine, within the larger outlines, values and viewpoints particular to certain subgroups within the society whose history we are trying to recover.
To assay a new history, we shift both the subject focus and the level of analysis in this part. Arnold and Varady thus sketch the implications, for the social processes described above, of the economic and environmental developments that occurred during our period. Jim Hagan has suggested a paradigm for the Gangetic world which begins to connect the conclusions of these authors.[3] The Hagan paradigm considers three interrelated subjects: (1) expansion of arable; (2) population density; and (3) trade networks. A steady increase in these three items had characterized the nineteenth century. From about 1880 to 1890, however, the ratio of cultivation and fallow areas plateaued. In the 1920s cultivation was again extended. Similarly, population trends seem to follow a somewhat similar pattern; scholars should begin to explore the relationship between these trends. Hagan suggests that the development of trade systems also matched land use trends, with an elaboration and buildup of transport prompting nineteenth-century expansion, followed by a plateau from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s. Exploring the possible relationship between these three items, he speculates that trade networks must rise to a certain level before the expansion of arable land and population growth would take off again. Since fertility was always high, he noted, the critical issue in the change in population numbers depended on changes in mortality (an important contribution made by the Clark essay written for this panel). Although not enough is yet known to state definitively the relationship of these three variables—arable, population, and trade—to the social and political narrative outlined in the Introduction, the connections to the timing of the shifts traced in patronage and power relationships in nineteenth-century Banaras seem more obvious. Similarly, we could speculate profitably on the ability of the land-based Bhumihar dynasty, the merchant-bankers with rural connections, and the trader-mendicant Gosains to build their power bases in the district and the city, from these three variables.
[3] Hagan served as discussant when several of the volume's essays were presented during the Southeastern regional meeting of the AAS, in Raleigh, January 1986. Particularly important in this discussion was an excellent paper by Alice Clark tracking demographic changes in the region. Regrettably, for reasons of space this essay could not be included in the volume. Hagan's insights draw from a much larger project, based at Duke University, for which Hagan has been analyzing census and other environmental data.
The role played by an urban center in this process may, indeed, have been very important. It is likely, at least, that in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth century such developments led to an increased pace of incorporation, in which the ties between hinterland and urban centers were strengthened. Perhaps because of this, or the general ecological decline sketched by Varady, new actors have been pulled into the urban arenas: the studies in this volume document one such example, in the increased visibility of Ahirs (or Yadavs[*] ) in Banaras's urban culture (chapters 3 and 4). (This change in the role and fortunes of the Ahirs dates, probably, from World War II.)[4] It has also placed a greater demand on urban resources for supporting a wider net of people; it is likely that the increasingly tenuous connections between upper and lower classes, and the expanding role played by the lower classes as patrons of "their own" public activities, relate to this development.
Scholars of South Asia have become accustomed to looking for evidence of city-hinterland connections in cultural events and caste activities. Chapter 9 suggests other fruitful contexts in which such evidence can be sought. Tracing the movement of disease vectors, for example, also plots the movement of people—in pursuit of employment, on pilgrimage, seeking longer-term migration—and, by implication, of the ideas and values they espouse.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the juxtaposition of essays on ecological developments and disease and its treatment, with discussions of political, social, and literary movements underscores the significance of the colonial impact on this emerging popular history. As Arnold has noted, "to a degree unprecedented in pre-colonial times (though not altogether absent), the British put 'the environment' on the agenda: forests, irrigation, disease control, etc., became affairs of state and matters on which the British presumed an authority they largely denied to the people they ruled—the 'landscape' in a general sense, came to be managed as did the people."[5] In this respect the history of Banaras may provide a more sharply etched picture than would that of other north Indian urban centers. For Banaras experienced a more pronounced shift from community self-rule to increased interference by the imperial state.
As the Introduction and chapter 7 make clear, community self-rule had been protected in Banaras by the special set of circumstances established there in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not least of these circumstances was the intermediary role played by the Maharaja of Banaras and the Hindu merchant corporation of the city.
[4] See, for instance, U.P. State Archives General Department, File no. 173 of 1921, Keepwiths: Petition from Ahirs of Banaras Division.
[5] Private communication of April, 28, 1987.
Thus, when the British imperial state began to reach down into Banarsi society, as it had elsewhere, strong intermediaries existed to mitigate the impact on the constituent communities of the city. While it did not remain completely protected, nevertheless in this respect Banaras proved virtually unique among north Indian urban centers.
Efforts by the state to intrude took many forms. These ranged from substituting British values for Indian social mores by suppressing sati,[6] to enforcing health measures designed not only to implement Western notions of prevention but also to impose the state as final agent of a "healthy" society. The environmental degradation in the construction of the railroads provided one form of intrusion charted by Varady; the resulting expansion of communication networks along the rail lines provided another. Such intrusion could be intellectual as well as physical: imperial decisions about what constituted local "language" had as profound an impact as did efforts to woo certain groups away from the nationalist movement.[7] In turn, this led to an imposition of an alien world view based on "scientific" principles and Western assumptions about exercising control over the environment. The Indian response was complicated and included not just resistance (e.g., to forest laws) but also translations into the culture and consciousness of Maharajas (e.g., Banaras's support of various systems of medicine) and sweepers (e.g., in their new explanations for pollution).[8]
Although many of the results of such intrusion were unanticipated, there is no mistaking the basic intentions that united these various efforts by the imperial state. As Arnold has argued in chapter 9, the attack on what was perceived as dirty and disease-ridden in Indian society was also an attack on Hindu India. It is an attempt, as well, to substitute the authority of the imperial state for the more localized sources of moral authority located within the constituent communities of the city.[9]
In its turn, this assertion of the overriding authority of the British imperial state had important ramifications in a Banaras buffered by in-
[6] For a fascinating study of sati and, particularly, evidence of the way the British misrepresented an exercise that frequently provided an honorable way for aged widows to die, see Anand Yang 1987.
[7] Both the efforts in 1910 to create a princely state for the Maharaja of Banaras—explicitly defended by the Government of India as a way to retain the conservative support of "orthodox opinion" in Banaras—and the rather bald negotiations with Ahirs in the early 1920s (to trade increased opportunities in the military for the Ahirs in return for a promise by them to eschew all nationalist agitation) provide examples of this kind of intrusion. See the Introduction for more details on the creation of the princely state; see note 4 on file on Ahirs.
[8] For a fascinating discussion of the varieties of responses, particularly to Western science, see Jim Masselos 1987.
[9] See extended discussion of issues revolving around authority in Freitag 1985.
termediaries. These ramifications began to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas in other urban centers in the north the nationalists could lay claim to this single authority on the grounds that they merited it more than a foreign ruler could, such claims became harder to press in a city that, essentially, had enjoyed many of the aspects of self-rule by an indigenous corporation representing a congeries of constituent local communities. Thus nationalists in Banaras had to pose, instead, a new moral authority for that previously exercised by the local community: in this way, reformist influences—although espousing many characteristics marking them as distinctly Hindu in character—entered Banaras in the guise of nationalism.
In asserting their moral authority over local communities, the nationalists were forced to lay claim to the world of collective activities in public spaces. As they attempted to Sanskritize and sanitize these activities, they alienated increasing numbers of lower-class residents in the city, including, particularly, the Muslim weavers and Ahirs who have been studied here. Chapter 7 touches briefly on the results of this alienation in the 1930s; it can be traced as well in the divergence between elite and lower-class urban culture, sketched in most of the essays (and in N. Kumar 1984). The degree of alienation can be measured in the extent to which collective activities in public spaces are currently designed, funded, and attended primarily by the lower classes resident in Banaras.
Thus a critical issue in any discussion of Banaras in its various larger contexts is that of the role of the imperial state. But Part 3 is designed to suggest that no discussion of these contexts can be complete without a careful consideration of the interplay of local culture and imperial concerns: population changes depended not only on state decisions on how to deal with famine, but on local values dictating who ate scarce foods in any given family; changes in medical treatment of disease vectors reflected not only the embrace by the imperial government of the newest European medical theories, but also patronage patterns at the Maharaja's court and the "fashions" in personal medical practices among Banarsi elite. We hope that this part, particularly, will stimulate students of South Asia to ask new questions of the historical documents and to juxtapose different kinds of sources and insights. The result could be a distinctly Indian (as opposed to European-derived) social history of South Asia.
Six—
Forging a New Linguistic Identity:
The Hindi Movement in Banaras, 1868–1914
Christopher R. King
Introduction:
Indo-Persian and Hindu Culture
Queen Abode-of-Truth is speaking, testifying before the court of Maharaja Righteous-Rule on behalf of Queen Devanagari:
Here's where Nagari dwells, here her own dear country,
Here our queen was born, in sacred, holy Kashi.
(Datta 188?:8)
A little later Begam Urdu speaks on her own behalf before the Maharaja:
Persian is my mother, Urdu is my name.
Here my birth took place, and here I will remain.
(Datta 188?:10)
Each woman claims India as her birthplace, and each asserts her right to rule (see fig. 14). As this late-nineteenth-century Hindi drama develops, the reader soon realizes that the verdict will favor Queen Devanagari, and that the author, Pandit Gauri Datta of Meerut, has passed chiefly "moral" rather than technical judgments in presenting the dispute between the two personified languages and scripts.[1]
The entire action of the play, a short one-act work in the folk theatre tradition of svang[*] (see chapter 2 in this volume) takes place in a courtroom over which Maharaja Righteous-Rule presides. Babu Moral Law
[1] Datta's play, judging from internal evidence, seems to have been presented several times, and the audience may well have included visitors to local melas (religious fairs). Thus in April 1889, Datta's own newspaper, the Devanagari Gazette of Meerut, reported that four dramas, including at least one critical of Urdu, had been performed by Hindi advocates at a recent mela, and printed the first and last acts of this play (NWP&O SVN 1889:284).
Fig. 14
"Begam Urdu," in the garb of a courtesan, addresses "Queen Devanagari," attired
as a proper Hindu wife. Illustration for a svang[*] text printed in the periodical
Saraswati (1910). Courtesy of the Allahabad Public Library. Special thanks to
Sanjay Sharma for research assistance.
Singh argues for Queen Devanagari, and Mirza Cunning Ali Khan for Begam Urdu. Queen Devanagari complains that Begam Urdu has usurped her former rule over all works of wisdom and virtue, as well as letters, papers, account books, bonds, notes, and official documents. She testifies that she teaches righteousness and removes falsehood, and that under her rule people could make merry, become wealthy, carry on their business, and learn wisdom.[2] Bribery, continues the Queen, would weep at the very sound of her name, and fabrications and fraud would disappear should she rule again. Her witnesses all attest to her good name, sterling character, and indigenous origins. Indeed, as we
[2] Datta may be intentionally echoing the Hindu doctrine of the four ends of life.
saw above, her birth takes place in the hallowed location of Kashi—an older name for the largest of the several sacred zones of Banaras (Eck 1982:350). In short, Queen Devanagari embodies many of the moral and religious values of the Hindu merchant class described by Bayly, especially the core value of credit (sakh ) (Bayly 1983:375–93). "The behaviour and ideals of the merchant family firm were . . . directed to survival first and foremost, but survival here meant above all the continuity of family credit within the wider merchant community" (381). Queen Devanagari, through her righteousness, guarantees the continuing "credit" of business and government records, while Begam Urdu, through her corruptness, threatens the inextricably combined moral and economic well-being of society.
Begam Urdu defends herself by arguing that although her mother, Begam Persian, was foreign, her own birth took place in India, and therefore she has a right to stay. She describes her own work, however, in terms hardly calculated to make a good impression on her judge:
This is my work—passion I'll teach,
Tasks of your household we'll leave in the breach.
We'll be lovers and rakes, living for pleasure,
Consorting with prostitutes, squandering our treasure.
Give heed, you officials, batten on graft,
Deceiving and thieving till riches you've quaffed.
Lie to your betters and flatter each other.
Write down one thing and read out another.
(Datta 188?:10)
Her witnesses, too, bear names unlikely to mollify the judge: Begam Twenty-Nine Delights, Prince Passion-Addict Khan, Begam Wanton-Pleasure, and Emperor Ease-Lover. Urdu's witnesses all testify to the licentiousness and depravity of their mistress and the pleasures that follow in her train.
The climax of the play sees Queen Devanagari's lawyer making an impassioned plea for his client. By restoring the former monarch to her rightful place, the age of falsehood would become the age of truth, fraud would vanish, good deeds would multiply, people would feed Brahmins, hatred and strife would disappear, enemies would become friends, everyone would become clever, and every child would study Nagari in school. Begam Urdu's lawyer in his final summation points to the British recognition of Urdu and claims that should Nagari try to perform the work of courts and offices, everything would become topsy-turvy. In an inversion of the actual power structure of society at the time (typical of the svang[*] —see chapter 2) Maharaja Righteous-Rule brings the case to a close with his judgment, made in accordance with the sacred law of the Hindus: let Urdu be cast out and Nagari take her place (Datta 188?:13–14, 16).
Language and the Formation of Community Identity
Many studies of the Hindi movement have focused on the political aspects, especially at the national level, and have dealt primarily with the twentieth century (for example, Brass 1974; Das Gupta 1970; Gopal 1953; Harrison 1960; Kluyev 1981; Lutt 1970; S. Misra 1956; Narula 1955; Nayar 1969; Smith 1963; Tivari 1982; L. Varma 1964). The great majority of these have used chiefly English sources, and few of them have thoroughly surveyed the relevant sources for the nineteenth century. Almost no studies have attempted to trace the detailed history of the voluntary language associations that played such major roles in the development of Hindi. In this essay I examine not only the political but also the social and cultural aspects of the Hindi movement, particularly on the local and provincial levels, and deal chiefly with the nineteenth century. Moreover, I have made extensive use of both Hindi and English sources, including a thorough search of official records, such as education reports, publication statistics, and the like. Finally, I stress the importance of voluntary language associations, which both reflected and intensified the Hindi movement (see also King 1974).
The play described above well illustrates the social, cultural, and political matrix from which the Hindi movement arose, namely, the growing split between Indo-Persian and Hindu merchant culture characteristic of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century in north India. As Bayly (1983) has shown in his analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north India, these two "conflicting forms of urban solidarity" served as the foundations of the later-developing nationalism and religious communalism, which so dramatically affected events in the twentieth century. Urdu effectively symbolized the dominant Indo-Persian culture of north India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for it formed one of the major parts of this blend. The attack on Urdu and the strong support for Nagari (a term that encompassed both language and script) evident in the play became important elements in the process by which a self-conscious Hindu nationalism emerged in north India. Part of this process involved the separation from and rejection of earlier symbols of joint Hindu-Muslim culture, and part entailed the definition and affirmation of newer communal symbols. Moreover, this process also involved the complete disregard or rejection of various forms of written or oral popular culture, such as Hindustani, the regional dialects (e.g., Braj Bhasha and Bhojpuri), and variant scripts (e.g., Kaithi).[3]
[3] Braj Bhasha and Khari[*] Boli[*] are the major regional dialects in western U.P., Awadhi in central U.P., and Bhojpuri in eastern U.P. and western Bihar. The first three had major written as well as oral traditions during our period, the fourth only oral. Kaithi, Mahajani, and Muria are cursive variants of the Nagari script, associated with certain Hindu merchant castes and famous for their ambiguity.
This process of separation and differentiation between the Indo-Persian and Hindu merchant cultures led to a shift: the overlapping literary cultures came to function separately, following a new identification of "Hindu" with Hindi and of "Muslim" with Urdu. This shift came about through a wide variety of means, many of which lend themselves to some form or other of measurement. Among these are the development of voluntary organizations to promote languages and scripts; the standardization of languages through dictionaries, grammars, and other publications; newspaper campaigns for or against languages and scripts; systematic searches for, and publication of, old manuscripts; the introduction of large numbers of Sanskrit and Arabic and Persian words into Hindi and Urdu respectively; the publication of books and periodicals, especially elementary- and secondary-school texts; and the production of vernacular literature attacking the joint Hindu-Muslim cultural tradition, especially as it was expressed in Urdu. The "Hindu" and "Muslim" of this shift, however, do not include the Hindu and Muslim masses, but rather refer to a "vernacular elite," that is, Indians educated in the vernaculars and in competition for government service. Likewise, "Hindi" and "Urdu" refer not to the regional and local dialects of the bulk of the population, but rather to carefully cultivated literary dialects, strongly linked to the corresponding classical languages of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic.
During our period Banaras played the leading role in the process outlined above. Long famed in India as a center of Hindu learning and religious pilgrimage, by the early nineteenth century the city had also become a major center of Hindu literature (Grierson 1889:108–9). Bharatendu Harishchandra and Raja Shiv Prasad were only two of the most eminent literary figures of the second half of the century to live in Banaras. The peak of the city's influence on the gradual process of the emergence of modern Sanskritized Hindi as an important symbol of Hindu nationalism came with the founding of the Nagari[*] Pracharini[*] Sabha[*] (Society for the Promotion of Nagari) in 1893.
This organization, the majority of whose membership came from the eastern part of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O), remained the single most influential force for Hindi until the eve of World War I, when a gradual decline in membership, and an increasing concern for things literary and a decreasing concern for things political in the Sabha's leadership, allowed the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (Society for Hindi Literature) of Allahabad to become the premier Hindi institution. This shift from Banaras to Allahabad also roughly coincided with a shift in the scope of the controversy between Hindi and Urdu from the provincial (NWP&O) to the national level. Significantly, one of the ironies of the Hindi movement is that neither of these organizations promoted popular culture in the form of the re-
gional and local dialects that surrounded them, though both spoke for the welfare of the Hindu majority of the population in the "Hindi-speaking" areas of north India. Let us now focus on the process of linguistic and social change in the NWP&O and other parts of north India, and on some of the most important means through which this came about.
Old Identities:
The Terminus a QUO
In 1847 a noteworthy encounter took place between Dr. J. F. Ballantyne, principal of the English Department of Benares College, and several students of the Sanskrit College (also part of Benares College). After various unsuccessful attempts to "improve" the Hindi style of his students, Ballantyne lost his patience and directed them to write an essay on the question "Why do you despise the culture of the language you speak every day of your lives, of the only language which your mothers and sisters understand?" (NWP Educ Rpt 1846–1847:32). The ensuing dialogue produced several striking statements that clearly indicated that Sanskritized Hindi had not yet become a symbol of Hindu as opposed to Indo-Persian culture. Ironically, this situation existed among students of the very institution which the founders of the Nagari[*] Pracharini[*] Sabha[*] (NPS) would attend nearly half a century later. An apparently puzzled student spokesman told Ballantyne:
We do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects, all in our opinion equally entitled to the name, and there is here no standard as there is in Sanskrit. (NWP Educ Rpt 1846–1847:32)
The same student went on to say:
If the purity of Hindi is to consist in its exclusion of Mussulman words, we shall require to study Persian and Arabic in order to ascertain which of the words we are in the habit of issuing every day is Arabic or Persian, and which is Hindi. With our present knowledge we can tell that a word is Sanscrit, or not Sanscrit but if not Sanscrit, it may be English or Portuguese instead of Hindi for anything that we can tell. English words are becoming as completely naturalized in the villages as Arabic and Persian words, and that you call the Hindi will eventually merge in some future modification of the Oordoo, nor do we see any great cause of regret in this prospect. (NWP Educ Rpt 1846–1847:32)
If his students did not yet have a national goal for Hindi, then Dr. Ballantyne did. In reply to this perception of Hindi as a cluster of unselfconscious vernaculars rather than a refined literary language, he urged:
It was the duty of himself and his brother Pundits not to leave the task of formulating the national language in the hands of the villagers, but to endeavour to get rid of the unprofitable diversity of provincial dialects, by creating a standard literature in which one uniform system of grammar and orthography should be followed; the Pundits of Benares, if they valued the fame of their city, ought to strive to make the dialect of the holy city the standard of all India, by writing books which should attract the attention and form the taste of all their fellow countrymen. (NWP Educ Rpt 1846–1847:32)
Ballantyne's uncannily accurate vision of the future of Hindi struck no responsive chord in the thoughts or feelings of his students. The disappearance of Hindi into Urdu aroused no sense of alarm in these Hindi scholars of Sanskrit, nor did they see any necessary connection between being Hindu and speaking Hindi. Moreover, since the very term "Hindi" struck them as vague and ambiguous, no standard having emerged, we may tentatively conclude that these students would have included the regional and local dialects, the vehicles of popular culture, under this rubric. Ballantyne, on the other hand, clearly intended to separate Hindi from the confused mass of popular dialects, to reject any conceivable influence of villagers on "the national language," and to define and affirm Hindi in terms of a standardized and Sanskritized language created by a vernacular elite.
A decade before Ballantyne's encounter with his students, English and various local vernaculars had replaced Persian in British India. In north India, with one or two exceptions,[4] this meant that Urdu in modified form of the Persian script became the official vernacular. The original purpose of replacing Persian had been to make the official proceedings of courts and offices intelligible to the people at large; thus in 1830 the Court of Directors of the East India Company had intoned that "it is easier for the judge to acquire the language of the people than for the people to acquire the language of the judge" (Malaviya 1897:497), overlooking or ignoring the fact that the great bulk of the population had no acquaintance with either spoken or written Urdu.
Very soon, however, the excessive Persianization of the new court-language of north India made a mockery of the supposed reason for which the change had been made. As early as 1836, for example, the Sadar Board of Revenue of the North-Western Provinces (N.W.P.) had warned division Commissioners that the replacement of Persian by Urdu did not mean "the mere substitution of Hindee verbs and affixes, while the words and idiom remain exclusively Persian" (NWP Lt-Gov
[4] Among the exceptions were the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories in the mid-1830s—see King 1974:66–70, 149–54—and the Kumaun division of the NWP&O throughout our period.
Prgs SBRD 19 July to 2 August 1836:Range 221, Volume 77, Number 52). Yet nearly two decades later, exactly this had happened, for the then lieutenant-governor of the N.W.P. felt obliged to inveigh against the style of official Urdu, "little distinguished from Persian, excepting the use of Hindee verbs, particles, and inflections" (Malaviya 1897, Appendix:52). Official protests and notifications did little to change this state of affairs, however, and complaints about the excessive Persianization of court Urdu appeared regularly, well into the twentieth century. In general, British support for Urdu did much to assure the continued dominance of this symbol of Indo-Persian culture. In the province, the heartland of the Hindi movement, most gains for Hindi and the Nagari script in courts and offices came in the face of government neglect or opposition.
At this point, let us posit a spectrum of linguistic popular usage for north India during our period: the term "popular" should be understood in a relative rather than an absolute sense. At one end of this spectrum comes English and at the other, local dialects. In between we have, first, the classical languages Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian; then, Urdu followed by Hindi; next, Hindustani (in the sense of a language style less Persianized than Urdu, and less Sanskritized than Hindi); and finally, the regional dialects such as Bhojpuri and Awadhi. From this viewpoint Hindi ranks as more "popular" than English or Urdu, but less so than Bhojpuri. The bulk of the supporters of the Hindi movement in Banaras and elsewhere in the province came from the ranks of the vernacular elite, those educated in the more standardized vernaculars of Hindi and Urdu, not from the English-speaking elite on the one hand, nor from the regional- or local-dialect-speaking masses on the other.[5]
The potential for differentiation and separation between the two different sections of the vernacular elite existed long before the 1860s, when controversy between supporters of the more "popular" Hindi and the less "popular" Urdu first began. Bayly concludes that "some of the conditions which fractured the life of modern north India into Hindu and Muslim camps must be dated much earlier than is commonly supposed" (Bayly 1983:455). Similarly, as we shall see, considerable evidence indicates that the potential for linguistic controversy stretched back to the early nineteenth century and before. We must ask, then, what influences kindled underlying differences into open conflict in the 1860s. In general, the pace of economic and social development in the province quickened after the Rebellion of 1857 in a wide variety of ways (see Bayly 1983:427–40). Most important for our
[5] This picture may be too starkly drawn, however, since many Hindi speakers knew some English, and most or all of them undoubtedly knew regional or local dialects.
purposes, however, was the rapid post-Rebellion expansion of the three closely related areas of government service, education, and publication (all discussed below). Each of these institutionalized the most refractory difference between Hindi and Urdu—script—and each became an arena of competition in a mutually reinforcing and ever-expanding spiral.
Definition against External Rivals:
The Hindi-Urdu Controversy
The Hindi-Urdu controversy, as the long and heated exchange of opinions between opposing supporters of Hindi and Urdu came to be known, began in the 1860s and continued right up to Independence. Confined largely to U.P. in the nineteenth century, the controversy gradually assumed national proportions in the twentieth. On both the provincial and the national level, a major portion of the debate focused on the question of the proper language and script for government courts and offices. The center of the Hindi side of the controversy lay in the eastern districts of the province and especially in the cities of Banaras and Allahabad.
The themes announced early in the controversy appeared again and again with wearying consistency. The protagonists of Hindi argued: the bulk of the population used Hindi; the Urdu script had a foreign origin, and also made court documents illegible, encouraged forgery, and fostered the use of difficult Arabic and Persian words; the introduction of the Nagari script into government courts and offices would give considerable impetus to the spread of education by enhancing the prospects for public service; and experienced Hindi scribes could write just as fast as their Urdu counterparts. The supporters of Urdu maintained: even the inhabitants of remote villages spoke Urdu fluently; the Urdu language had originated in India even though its script may have come from outside; any script could lend itself to forgery; the numerous dialects of Hindi lacked standardization; and Hindi had an impoverished vocabulary, especially in scientific and technical terms. One of the most often repeated arguments for Hindi appeared in blunt numerical terms, where speakers were identified by religious community. An 1873 issue of the Kavi Vachan Sucha[*] , a Hindi newspaper of Banaras, argued that the government's duty lay in yielding to the demand of the general public for the introduction of Hindi. Although the Muslims might suffer from the change, they constituted only a minority of the population, and the interests of the few always had to yield to those of the many (NWP&O SVN 1873:528). Such arguments, of course, ignored the fact that the great bulk of the population used nonliterary regional and local dialects, and not the Sanskritized Hindi and Persianized Urdu of the vernacular elite.
Throughout the controversy the participants tended to identify language and religion. In 1868, Babu Shiv Prasad, a prominent advocate of the Nagari script, castigated British language policy, "which thrusts a Semitic element into the bosoms of Hindus and alienates them from their Aryan speech . . . and . . . which is now trying to turn all the Hindus into semi-Muhammadans and destroy our Hindu nationality" (Prasad 1868:5–6). Professor Raj Kumar Sarvadhikari, appearing before the Hunter Education Commission in 1882, remarked that in Awadh "Urdu is the dialect of the Muhammadan inhabitants and Hindi of the Hindus" (Educ Comm Rpt NWP&O:462). Conversely, in 1900, a correspondent of the Punjab Observer expressed fears that the recent decision of the provincial government to recognize the Nagari script would eventually lead to the abolition of Urdu, which would in turn cause Muslim boys to become Hindu in thought and expression (Khan 1900:79).
From the very beginning the different parties to the debate consistently confused the names for language and script. "Hindi," "Hindi character," "Nagari," and "Nagari character" seemed interchangeable, as did "Persian," "Persian character," and "Urdu." Sir George Grierson, author of the massive Linguistic Survey of India , remarked that "these fanatics have confused alphabet with language. They say because a thing is written in Deva-nagari [sic ] therefore it is Hindi, the language of the Hindus, and because a thing is written in the Persian character therefore it is Urdu, the language of the Musalmans" (Grierson 1903–1928, vol. 9, part 1, xiv, 49). Yet script was the critical issue. More than any other linguistic fact, the radically different nature of the two scripts rendered any solution to the Hindi-Urdu controversy intractable.[6] While the grammars of Hindi and Urdu, derived from the regional dialect of Khari[*] Boli[*] , were almost identical, and while the vocabularies of the two on the everyday level of discourse overlapped considerably, the two scripts focused and heightened the differences between the Hindu and the Indo-Persian cultures.
Like different channels to different cultural reservoirs, deliberately opened, they allowed the influence of Sanskrit, on the one hand, and of Arabic and Persian, on the other, to pour separately into Hindi and Urdu, bypassing the existing mixture of Indo-Persian culture. The results of this artificial irrigation, highly Sanskritized Hindi and highly Persianized Urdu, not only served to distinguish the rival Hindu and Indo-Muslim cultures from each other, but also sharply differentiated both from the surrounding ocean of popular culture.
[6] The Nagari script is syllabic, indicates all vowel sounds, has a chunky and square appearance, has a nearly continuous line across the top, and reads from left to right. The Urdu script (often referred to as the Persian script during our period, though it has several more letters) is alphabetic, does not indicate many vowel sounds, has a curved and flowing appearance, and reads from right to left.
Definition against Internal Rivals:
Hindustani, Braj, and Kaithi
The processes of separation and rejection, and of definition and affirmation, occurred not only between Hindi and Urdu, but also within the world of Hindi itself. Considerable controversy took place among Hindi supporters over the question of the proper style for literary works. Whatever the merits or demerits of the various styles current among Hindi authors, however, the reading public showed a definite preference for a simple style. The most popular author of the period, Devki Nandan Khatri (1861–1913), wrote in a clear and readable Hindi that made ample use of common Arabic and Persian words. His two best-known series of novels, Chandrakanta and Chandrakanta Santati , which he started writing in 1888, won him fame and fortune. Within ten years he had earned enough to found his own press in his native city of Banaras. For a few years Khatri became a member of the NPS, but found the atmosphere there uncongenial. From the viewpoint of the Sabha, although Khatri's works (published in the Nagari script) had won more readers than any other author (UP Admin Rpt 1914–1915:72), his style did not deserve to be considered literary Hindi, but rather only merited the designation "Hindustani," a vehicle fit merely for light and frothy creations and too close to Urdu to be respectable (R. C. Shukla 1968:476–77).
In the NPS the whole vexed question of the proper style for Hindi came to a head in a controversy between the Sabha and one of its own officers, Pandit Lakshmi Shankar Mishra, who served as president from 1894 until his resignation in 1902. Mishra possessed impeccable credentials: he held a high position in the provincial Educational Department, he had made efforts for the increased use of Hindi in government schools, and he had published in Hindi on the subject of science before most of his fellow scholars. The heart of the dispute appeared in a letter sent by Mishra to the provincial Text-Book Committee at the time of his resignation. After speaking of a "widening gulf" between Hindi and Urdu, Mishra went on to say:
As the Grammer of both Urdu and Hindi is identical, they should not be considered as separate languages, and hence for ordinary purposes, in such books as are not technical and which are intended for the common people, [an] attempt should be made to assimilate the two forms into one language, which may be called Hindustani, and may be written either in the Persian script or the Nagari character. (NPS Ann Rpt 1894:35–36, 40 41; UP Educ Progs May 1903:31–32)
Yet the raison d'être of the Sabha was the distinct and separate existence of Hindi vis-à-vis Urdu. Any attempt to combine them or to reduce or eliminate their differences undermined the whole purpose of the organization. Views such as those put forth by Pandit Mishra must
have been anathema to the other leaders of the Sabha,[7] and they could hardly tolerate the open expression of such opinions by their own chief officer. The leaders of the Sabha felt obliged both to differentiate their language and script from others and to reject any actual or potential rivals. In Sanskrit plays, characters of loftier social rank speak Sanskrit, while those of lower ranks speak lesser languages. Similarly, the Sabha gave great importance to preserving the Sanskritic purity of an important cultural symbol. In this way, the organization consciously chose to maintain linguistic contact with Hindu vernacular elites in other areas of India, rather than encourage popular culture and enlist the support of the masses of its own area (see Das 1957:251–52).
The Rejection of Braj Bhasha
In its first annual report the Sabha presented a picture of the rise and development of Hindi literature which showed a basic ambiguity (NPS Ann Rpt 1894:1–3). While claiming Braj Bhasha and other literary dialects as part of Hindi literature in the distant past, when speaking of the origins of Hindi prose in the nineteenth century, the Sabha clearly meant only Khari[*] Boli[*] Hindi.[8] The Sabha's use of the term "Hindi" expanded while moving toward the "glorious" past and contracted while moving toward the present.
Behind the Sabha's attitude lay the fact that Braj Bhasha remained the most important medium of "Hindi" poetry in large areas of north India until the 1920s. Ironically, several of the leading Braj poets lived in Banaras, some of whom joined the Sabha, and even Bharatendu Harishchandra, widely acclaimed as the father of modern Hindi, had written most of his poetry in Braj. Many members of the Sabha felt that this situation presented a great obstacle to the progress of Hindi; the language of prose and poetry ought to be the same. Instead, most prose appeared in Khari Boli Hindi and most poetry in Braj Bhasha or Awadhi. Even primary-level Hindi school books used Braj for their poetic selections, wrote Shyam Sundar Das (one of the founders of the NPS) in 1901, urging the use of Khari Boli poetry instead (Misra 1956:209). Nevertheless, Braj remained the language of poetry in Hindi school books for more than another decade (UP SVN 1913:1254).
Years earlier the opening salvo of a controversy between the advocates of Braj Bhasha and those of Khari Boli had appeared in a work entitled Khari Boli ka Padya (Khari Boli Prose) by Ayodhya Prasad
[7] Decades later Mahatma Gandhi, for a while a leading member of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, adopted exactly this approach in his unsuccessful attempt to bring an end to the Hindi-Urdu controversy, an approach ultimately rejected by the Sammelan.
[8] Khari Boli, the common grammatical basis of both Hindi and Urdu, is also a regional dialect of western U.P. (see n. 3).
Khatri, a resident of Bihar. Khatri published and distributed his book at his own expense to scores of well-known Hindi supporters. He hoped to persuade Urdu poets to use the Nagari script, and Hindi poets to use Khari[*] Boli[*] . He wished all concerned to meet on the common ground of Khari Boli written in the Nagari script (Misra 1956:158, 179). Although Khatri's efforts met with little success, they did serve to touch off a vigorous debate between two noted Hindi supporters in the pages of Hindustan , the province's only Hindi daily at the time.
Shridhar Pathak, the champion of Khari Boli, had earned a reputation in both of the rival literary dialects and had authored the first poem of any importance in modern Khari Boli Hindi in 1886, only a year before the publication of Khatri's book. Radha Charan Goswami, the defender of the opposing literary dialect, edited a Hindi newspaper in Brindaban in the heart of the Braj area (R. C. Shukla 1968:436, 559). He argued Khari Boli and Braj Bhasha were one language; no poetry worthy of the name had appeared in Khari Boli; Khari Boli did not allow the use of the best Hindi metrical forms; people over a wide area understood Braj; and poetry and prose could never use the same language. Most important, Goswami claimed that should poets accept Khari Boli, as Khatri had suggested, their efforts would only serve to spread Urdu. Pathak countered that Khari Boli and Braj were two languages; the future possibilities for Khari Boli poetry were great; Khari Boli did allow the use of a wide variety of metrical forms; many more people understood Khari Boli than Braj; and poetry and prose could and should use the same language. Although Pathak did not reply directly to Goswami's most important charge, unlike Khatri he neither spoke of Hindi and Urdu as the same nor excluded Braj Bhasha from the realm of Hindi poetry (Misra 1956:175–82).
Goswami had pinpointed an important issue, namely, Khari Boli poetry seemed suspect to many Hindi supporters because almost all of its recent creations were in Persianized Urdu. The real answer to Goswami's imputation appeared in the work of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, editor of Saraswati , the most influential periodical in the Hindi literary world in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dwivedi used Sanskrit words and metrical forms in his own Khari Boli poetry and encouraged the same approach in those who wrote for his journal (Misra 1956:211; R. C. Shukla 1968:583). After Dwivedi, no one could seriously oppose Khari Boli Hindi poetry on the grounds that this would further the spread of Urdu. Dwivedi had succeeded in Sanskritizing the new poetic medium.
More than twenty years later the conveners of the first Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in Banaras in 1910 called on Pathak and Goswami to come forward and reiterate their previous arguments. The situation had changed, for now the question had become not whether Khari Boli
should become a medium of Hindi poetry, but rather to what extent Braj Bhasha should remain one (Misra 1956:213–24). In the second session of the Sammelan a year later in Allahabad, one advocate of Khari[*] Boli[*] had harsh words for Braj. Badrinath Bhatt, later to become professor of Hindi at Lucknow University, told his listeners that in an age when India needed men, the cloying influence of Braj had turned Indians into eunuchs. During the fifth meeting of the Sammelan in 1914, the prominent Hindi poet Maithili Sharan Gupta, a protégé of Dwivedi, spoke even blunter words. He called the supporters of Braj Bhasha enemies of India's national language, Khari Boli Hindi (Misra 1956:225, 228–29).
Part of the process of defining "Hindi," then, involved affirming the earlier literary heritage of other regional dialects in the past, but rejecting literary creations in the same dialects in the present. Because they added lustre to Hindi's past, written traditions in these dialects at least merited attention. On the other hand, because they were presumably considered too vulgar and unrefined, oral traditions, such as the biraha[*] of the Ahirs of the Bhojpuri-speaking area, received no notice. Thus the records of the NPS (for at least the first twenty years) make no mention of Bhojpuri, although its speakers constitute the great majority in Banaras and environs. Nor do they mention the reputed creator of biraha , Bihari Lal Yadav (1857–1926) (see chapter 3).
Nagari Yes, Kaithi No
Script as well as language was subject to these internecine conflicts. The Kaithi script, one of several cursive forms of Nagari used by merchant castes, led a precarious existence in the official infrastructure of British India, though surviving and even thriving in more ordinary surroundings. With a few notable exceptions, British officialdom in the province opposed the use of Kaithi in courts, offices, and schools, even though this script had much greater popularity than Nagari, especially in the eastern districts. Officials in the neighboring province of Bihar, however, displayed very different attitudes. Believing Kaithi to be the most widespread script in the province, as evidenced by the flourishing condition of the indigenous schools teaching it, the government ordered the creation of a font of Kaithi type, and by 1881 had prescribed Kaithi for primary vernacular schools. Kaithi texts soon began to appear, and the schools and courts of Bihar continued to use the script until at least 1913 (see King 1974:162–64, 166–70).
These policies met with bitter criticism from Dr. Rajendralal Mitra, a distinguished Bengali educator, in his testimony before the Hunter Education Commission. He noted that Hindi textbooks for Bihar schools printed in Nagari had previously come from Banaras, and that for every textbook Bihar could produce, the U.P. could produce a hundred.
This flow of books had kept the people of Bihar linguistically united with their fellow Hindus to the west. The use of Kaithi, on the other hand, would eventually deprive Biharis not only of the literature created by their ancestors but also of that more recently created by their kinsmen in the U.P. (Educ Comm Rpt Bengal 1884:334). Mitra spoke of Kaithi as the NPS had written about Hindustani: Kaithi threatened the linguistic and religious identity of Bihari Hindus.
Agreeing with Mitra, the NPS also rejected Nagari's rival. In its ninth year the Sabha, at the suggestion of a member, considered the question of improving Kaithi's shortcomings. After some deliberation, the Sabha declared:
In the opinion of the Sabha there are no letters more excellent than the Nagari, and in its opinion it is useful and proper for the Aryan languages of India to be written only in their Nagari letters. For this reason the Sabha cannot aid in any way in promoting the progress of Kaithi letters, nor can it display any enthusiasm for this. (NPS Ann Rpt 1903:14–15)
Although the Sabha had earlier expressed the need for a shorthand system for Hindi, it apparently never considered the possibilities of Kaithi for this (NPS Ann Rpt 1895:10; NPS Ann Rpt 1899:20; NPS Ann Rpt 1900:21–22). Moreover, the Sabha made numerous and mostly unsuccessful attempts to establish Nagari court writers in every district of the province, largely because the organization ignored the fact that almost no writers knew Nagari, especially in the eastern districts, though many knew Kaithi, and the indigenous schools teaching this script were thriving.
Contemporary sources indicate that other Hindi supporters thought Kaithi to be as illegible and ambiguous as the Urdu script, no easier or more widely used than Nagari, and unsuitable as a medium of education. Certainly Kaithi lacked the auspicious association with Sanskrit possessed by Nagari; rejecting Kaithi meant indirectly affirming Hindi's close connection with Sanskrit. To Hindi supporters, rejecting Kaithi also meant separating Hindi and Nagari from a more popular but lower level of culture. Thus, a writer in a 1900 issue of the Hindi newspaper Bharat Jiwan of Banaras argued that those Hindu trading classes who used the Muria script (another cursive form of Nagari similar to Kaithi) could not hope to better their condition until they received their education through the Nagari script (NWP&O SVN 1900:183). Moreover, a strong association existed between Kaithi and rural life: government policy in Awadh allowed, and in Bihar encouraged, the widespread use of Kaithi by patwari s or village record keepers (Educ Comm Rpt Bengal 1884:46–47; NWP&O Educ Rpt 1886– 1887:77–78; Oudh Educ Rpt 1873–1874:150).
Definition through Print:
The Growth of Publications
In 1868 several provincial governments began to issue quarterly statements of books and periodicals published or printed in the territories under their jurisdictions. Although these statements had several short-comings, especially in their earlier years, they constitute by far the most complete and detailed source for the publishing history of India during our period. According to these records, by 1914 Banaras had become the major center for Hindu-heritage languages, well ahead of Allahabad in Hindi and in Sanskrit-Hindi publications, and far ahead of any other center in Sanskrit, while Lucknow led in Islamic-heritage-language publications. Moreover, while the number of Urdu publications had grown substantially in both relative and absolute terms between 1868 and 1914, the number of Hindi publications had grown even more rapidly, so that the latter outnumbered the former by nearly three to one (see table 6.1). Up to 1900 the ratio between Hindi and Urdu publications had remained roughly constant, about fourteen or fifteen books in Hindi for every ten in Urdu. By 1914, however, the ratio had changed dramatically to nearly twenty-seven to ten, almost double the previous ratio. It is not coincidence that this literary expansion
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accompanied an increasing articulation of the differences between Hindi and Urdu.
The British-sponsored development of the lower levels of education beginning at about mid-century played a crucial role in this expansion. The new educational system demanded hundreds of thousands of Hindi texts in the Nagari script and created thousands of career opportunities that depended on literacy in Hindi. The government's recognition of Hindi and Urdu as separate subjects in its schools as early as the 1850s, and the printing of textbooks in both the Nagari and the Urdu script, only heightened existing differences and helped to create opposing vernacular elites.
In the nearly five decades between 1868 and 1914 several other trends emerged. Publications in the classical Islamic-heritage languages of Arabic and Persian slowly diminished, with the most rapid decline occurring in the period 1900–1914. Arabic, comprising about 2–3 percent of total publications previously, dropped to 0.1 percent, while Persian publications went from about 10 percent to less than 1 percent. Hindu-heritage languages, on the other hand, after remaining on roughly equal terms with Islamic-heritage languages in the nineteenth century, showed the same striking increase as Hindi in the first years of the twentieth century, especially dual-language works in Sanskrit-Hindi, suggesting a trend toward the popularization of Sanskrit texts. (See also the discussion of the publishing history of the Awadhi Manas[*] in chapter 1.)
The geographical distribution of publication in various languages showed striking shifts during the same period. The proportion of Hindi works in the total output of the eastern part of the province remained practically constant (56–57 percent), as did the proportion of Urdu works (about 29 percent) in the west. After 1900, however, the proportion of Urdu works in the east fell to about half the former level, while that of Hindi works in the west rose to almost twice the previous level. In short, it was as if an increasing tide of Hindi works had pushed a diminishing flow of Urdu works back into the western part of the province. On the level of the vernacular elite, the differences between Hindi and Urdu had become greater. At the same time, the gap between Hindi and Urdu, on the one hand, and the regional dialects, on the other, had widened.
The Who of Hindi Supporters:
Patterns in Education and Employment
The Vernaculars and Education
In the mid-1840s the government of the N.W.P. conducted a survey of educational institutions, which presented a clear picture of the social
backgrounds of students and teachers in Persian, Hindi, Arabic, and Sanskrit schools in many districts. The distribution of students and teachers in the Persian and Hindi schools (the great majority of the total) of Agra district fairly represented the general situation in other districts. Muslims and Kayasths composed the great majority of teachers and students of Persian, and Brahmins, Baniyas, and Rajputs, of Hindi. Moreover, all but a handful of Muslims studied Persian, while most Hindus (with the notable exception of Kayasths) studied Hindi (NWP Educ Rpt 1844–1845:Appendix I).
Another aspect of language study patterns appears in statistics for government schools in 1859–60. In the western part of the province students learning Islamic-heritage languages were a slight majority, while in the central and eastern parts those learning Hindu-heritage languages were large majorities (NWP Educ Rpt 1859–1860:Appendix A, 2–62). Similar figures for Awadh in 1869 show a pattern very close to that of the western N.W.P., with slightly more than half the students learning Islamic-heritage languages, a little more than a third, Hindu-heritage languages, and the remainder, English (Oudh Educ Rpt 1868–1869:Appendix A). In both Awadh and the N.W.P. another pattern appeared in education statistics during this period: the higher the level of education, the greater the proportion of students taking Islamic-heritage languages and English, and the smaller the proportion taking Hindu-heritage languages (see King 1974:84–91).
When we put these patterns together, a picture emerges which correlates quite well with the distribution of Hindi and Urdu publications discussed above: Hindi in a subordinate position in government institutions, contrasted with Urdu well entrenched in the higher reaches of education and administration; Hindi supported by castes associated with Sanskrit learning and resistance to Muslim rule in the past, versus Urdu upheld by Muslims and those Hindu castes (chiefly Kayasths) with a vested interest in Indo-Persian culture; Hindi whose stronghold lay in the eastern part of the province where the Hindu merchant tradition was more powerful vis-à-vis Urdu, whose strength lay in Awadh and the western part of the province where the Indo-Persian service tradition was more dominant (Bayly 1983); and finally, Hindi and Urdu studied almost entirely by high-caste Hindus and Muslims.
The Vernaculars and Employment
In 1877 the provincial government first prescribed a successful performance in either the Middle Class Vernacular or the Middle Class Anglo-Vernacular Examination as a qualification for government service. By the mid-1880s the sizable increase in the numbers of candidates showed that the order had begun to take effect. Lists of those
passing the examinations were sent to each collector or Deputy Commissioner, and in many districts vacancies were filled from them. By the late 1880s these examinations had come to be the educational event of greatest interest to many hopefuls for government service. Their popularity began to wane toward the end of the century, however, as graduates with higher qualifications offered increasing competition. The statistics for these two examinations plainly show the dominance of certain castes, especially Kayasths, in the struggle for government service. They also show that the chief rivals of the Kayasths and Muslims were high-caste Hindus, namely, Brahmins, Rajputs, Khatris, and Baniyas (NWP&O Educ Rpt 1885–1886:Orders of Government, 6; NWP&O Educ Rpt 1886–1887:15–17, 19; King 1974:186–94).
The 1877 order had a significant effect on the numbers of candidates opting to study one or the other of the two vernaculars. In the twenty-year period between 1875 and 1895 the proportions of candidates taking Hindi and Urdu reversed themselves. In the mid-1870s Hindi candidates accounted for more than three-quarters of those taking the examinations; by 1887 Urdu candidates made up more than three-quarters of the total, and this ratio remained nearly the same for the rest of the century (Malaviya 1897:31). The reason for this shift was clear: as a result of the 1877 orders, the candidates chiefly valued the examinations as a means to government service, and naturally preferred to take them in the vernacular language that dominated in courts and offices.
Let us imagine a picture based on the preceding data. A pair of gates labeled Vernacular Middle and Anglo-Vernacular Middle Examinations stands before us. Through them pours a crowd of thousands, moving in the direction of more distant gates. A small portion of the crowd, mainly Muslims and Kayasths, succeeds in passing through one of these more distant gates, labeled Subordinate Judicial and Executive Services, but many others are turned aside. Among these, numbers of Brahmins, Rajputs, Khatris, and Baniyas, as well as a few Muslims, succeed in crossing the portals of a large gate labeled Educational Department. Others, among them many Muslims, manage to enter a smaller gate labeled Police Department. Some of the remaining crowd enter through other, smaller gates, but many fail to pass through any gate and straggle off into the surrounding countryside. Here live millions unacquainted with either Sanskritized Hindi or Persianized Urdu who come from the lower levels of Hindu and Muslim society—Ahirs, Chamars, Bhangis, and many others.
This fanciful portrait is meant to suggest that many non-Kayasth Hindus found that their best hope for government service lay in the newer Educational Department rather than in the older, more presti-
gious, and more remunerative Revenue or Judicial Departments. From the ranks of such Hindus came many leaders of the Hindi movement. The three founders of the NPS, for example, included a Brahmin, a Rajput, and a Khatri; all three made their careers in education—two in government service, and one in both government and private service. Our portrait also suggests that the great majority of the population, the repository of popular culture, did not share the concerns of the vernacular elite.
Yet another aspect of the relationship between education, language, and employment appeared in the results of an investigation ordered by the provincial lieutenant-governor in May 1900, a month after he had issued a resolution ostensibly granting equal status to the two vernacular languages and scripts. This investigation, which included the courts and offices of the Judicial and Revenue Departments from the highest to the lowest level in each district, aimed at determining the respective numbers of Hindu and Muslim clerks familiar with Hindi or Urdu or both (NWP&O Gen Admin Progs October 1900:111, 119, 122–24).
The results showed that most Hindus knew at least some Hindi, and even more knew at least some Urdu. On the other hand, fewer than half of the Muslims knew at least some Hindi, while all knew at least some Urdu. To put matters differently, almost all the Hindus knew Urdu well, and the majority knew Hindi well too. While almost all the Muslims knew Urdu well, only a small minority knew Hindi well. Contemporary observers suggested with good reason that the results were very likely skewed in favor of Hindi. Even so, the investigation clearly indicated that Muslims had a strong vested interest in Urdu, the dominant language of the courts and offices, while Hindus, though rivaling Muslims in Urdu, could easily turn to Hindi, where they far outstripped Muslims. In sum, Muslims stood to lose much more from any change than did Hindus. For the thousands of Hindus and Muslims educated in the vernaculars—that is, those who constituted the vernacular elite—language identity and economic well-being were bound together inseparably, a fact that intensified the rivalry between supporters of Hindi and Urdu.
The Role of Voluntary Organizations:
The Nagari Pracharini Sabha
If Pandit Gauri Datta had expressed himself visually, his play might have taken the form of the picture that appeared in the November 1902 issue of Saraswati (R. K. Das 1902:359: see figure 14). On the left stood a Muslim prostitute, decked out in all the finery of her profession. On the right, facing her rival, sat a Hindu matron, modestly
clothed in an ordinary sari. The caption "Hindi-Urdu" and the verses below made it clear that on the left stood Urdu personified and on the right sat Hindi. The author of the verses was Radha Krishna Das, a member of one of the great merchant families of Banaras, a relative of Bharatendu Harishchandra, and the first president of the Nagari[*] Pracharini[*] Sabha[*] of Banaras.
As the nexus of relationships embodied in the picture suggests, the Sabha both reflected and contributed to the process of change discussed above. Founded in 1893 by schoolboys of Queen's College in Banaras, the Sabha soon acquired influential patrons such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, played the leading role in mobilizing support for the resolution of May 1900, gave prizes for Nagari handwriting in schools, granted awards for Hindi literature, carried out extensive searches for old Hindi manuscripts and published the results, started two influential journals (the Nagari Pracharini Patrika and Saraswati ), attracted a membership of many hundreds, received donations of thousands of rupees, founded the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan of Allahabad, constructed a major headquarters building, published many important works (including grammars and dictionaries), and lobbied the provincial Text Book Committee and other government organizations for Nagari and Hindi (see King 1974:243–377, 455–79). Through all these activities, the Sabha played the leading role in affirming and defining Hindi during our period, a Hindi separate and distinct from Urdu, other literary dialects, Hindustani, and the popular culture of oral tradition.
The social and geographic origins of the early membership of the Sabha, not surprisingly, showed patterns that strongly correlated with the patterns of publication, education, and employment we have already examined. Brahmins, Khatris, Rajputs, and Baniyas[*] (mainly Agarwals) accounted for more than two thirds of the total membership of 84 in 1894. In the same year provincial residents composed 80 percent of the membership, and residents of Banaras 56 percent. The eastern portion of the province provided 68 percent of the membership, Awadh and the western portion only 6 percent each. The remainder of the membership came from Rajasthan, Punjab, the Central Provinces and Central India, Bihar, and Bengal (King 1974:251–68).
By 1914, the peak year before a prolonged decline in membership, the proportions had shifted. The province had dropped to 64 percent and Banaras to 16 percent of the total of 1,368 members, though the leadership remained firmly in the hands of the same Banaras castes. While the share of the eastern portion of the province fell to about 33 percent, that of the western part rose to 20 percent, and that of Awadh to 12 percent, mostly in the two or three years before 1914. Rajasthan, the Central Provinces and Central India, and Bihar made up 23 per-
cent. The Sabha remained an almost entirely north India and Hindu organization throughout our period: the first of a handful of south Indians joined in 1908, and only tiny numbers of Muslims ever became members (King 1974:445–51).
While much of the financial support for the Sabha came from membership donations and the sale of publications, especially school textbooks, a significant portion came from large donors, many of whom were princes. In the first thirty years the organization's twenty largest donors contributed close to Rs. 100,000, or approximately 30 percent of the total income. Twelve of these donors were princes, seven of whom became official patrons of the Sabha, namely, the Maharajas of Gwalior, Rewah, Baroda, Bikaner, Chatrapur, Alwar, and Banaras (King 1974:452–54, 456–59).
Whereas the Sabha's first decade brought significant successes in both political and literary endeavors, the second decade saw continuing progress in the latter but little or no advance in the former. From about 1914 on, the Sabha devoted most of its energies and funds to literary efforts and turned away from political activities. So politically conservative did the organization become that the government even allowed the Sabha to keep proscribed books. In the decades to come, not the Sabha but the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan played the preeminent political role on both the provincial and the national level in the promotion of Hindi and the Nagari script.[9] The Sabha remained content to embellish Hindi literature.
Conclusion:
New Identities—The Terminus Ad Quem
The picture in Saraswati provides a convenient departure point for summarizing, analyzing, and speculating about what we have learned of the Hindi movement. By the early twentieth century, as the distance between the two women suggests, the Indo-Persian and Hindu cultures had become separate clusters of symbols for many members of what we have called the vernacular elite. From the more extreme Hindu view-point, the two figures stood for virtue versus vice; from the more extreme Muslim viewpoint, for barbarism versus refinement (see Rahmat-Ullah 1900). As one scholar of north India has suggested, various symbols of communal identity gradually clustered around the master symbol of religion in a process designated as "multi-symbol congruence" (Brass 1974).
We need not restrict ourselves to models from Western sources to analyze the Hindi movement, however, for the process of linguistic
[9] The membership of the NPS and the HSS certainly partially overlapped in the early years of the latter, although how much I do not know. The leadership, however, soon became entirely separate and remained so for decades.
"purification" has a venerable social and cultural history in India. Just as certain standards for social behavior, especially for those castes wishing to elevate their position in the hierarchy, have been embodied in Brahmins for many centuries, so standards for language behavior have resided in Sanskrit, whose very name means "perfected." Thus we can explain much of the Hindi movement as a process of "Sanskritization" in which the excellence of a language was judged by the degree to which it incorporated the standards of Sanskrit. At the same time, we must not overlook the influence of English, which provided a not necessarily antithetical model of a modern language. The supporters of Hindi could choose or reject, and they did; roman letters proved unacceptable, while dictionaries of scientific terms were deemed acceptable.
Through the processes of separation and rejection Hindi supporters determined what Hindi was not and what Hindi should not be . Through the more positive processes of affirmation and definition they decided what Hindi was and what it should be . Hindi was certainly not Urdu (separation) nor should it be (rejection). On the other hand, Hindi had descended from Sanskrit (definition), something good for religious and cultural reasons (affirmation). These admittedly imprecise terms suggest the active approach of the vernacular elite to the creation of a new language style, what we might tentatively call the Sanskritization of Khari[*] Boli[*] (the common grammatical base of both Hindi and Urdu). From this viewpoint we can argue that the rejection of Hindustani, Kaithi, and popular oral traditions rested primarily on their relatively "impure" natures as compared to a shuddh (pure) Hindi. In the cases of Braj Bhasha and Awadhi, however, such an explanation does not suffice. Here more practical reasons seem to have prevailed: though both acted as bearers of a glorious literary tradition and parts of Hindi's past, neither possessed the necessary characteristics for a potential national language. Only Sanskritized Hindi, sharing the same grammatical base as the already widespread Urdu, had both the necessary purity and practicality.
While the vernacular elite played an active, not passive, role in the Sanskritization of Khari Boli, they forged Sanskritized Hindi within arenas—the educational system, the press, the publishing industry, voluntary associations, and the government itself—largely introduced through British rule. This external framework displayed fundamental ambiguities, however: thus, a close study of the period reveals that British officials authored language policies with massive contradictions (see, for example, King 1974:383–93) which exacerbated the very conflict they decried and left considerable room for the vernacular elite to maneuver.
By the eve of World War I, then, a class (the Hindi vernacular elite) had appeared in north India, especially in eastern U.P., whose commu-
nity identity centered on shuddh Hindi, Hinduism, and an urban alliance of service and merchant interests. The harmonious working relationship between two leading members of the Sabha, Radha Krishna Das, merchant, and Shyam Sundar Das, educator, beautifully illustrates this alliance. The intensity of the struggle with the Urdu vernacular elite in the province expanded to the national level in the twentieth century. The emphasis on the purity of Hindi widened the gap between Hindi and Urdu as well as between elite and popular culture. The final result came after Independence, when Hindi became one of the two official languages of India, and the only official language of the U.P., thus at last fulfilling the judgment of Maharaja Righteous-Rule in Pandit Gauri Datta's svang[*] . Truly, Queen Nagari, born in Sanskrit-rich Banaras, ruled again.
Seven—
State and Community:
Symbolic Popular Protest in Banaras's Public Arenas
Sandria B. Freitag
Despite its long-lived centrality of place in Indian perceptions, Banaras has not figured prominently in accounts of modern Indian history. This is primarily because it does not lend itself to the approach previously taken by most historians, which focused on the response of a Western-educated elite to the British Empire.
As the richness of subject matter discussed in this volume suggests, such a narrow focal point ignores much that provides texture and significance in the lives of Indians. It also leads to assumptions about popular values and collective motivations that are quite suspect: to the extent that collective protest figures at all in this style of history, it is seen either as popular sentiment manipulated by the elite or as a result of elite loss of control over mass action—the "insensate violence" of the "bazars and mohullas of Indian towns" (Robinson 1974:6). Yet, as the preceding chapters suggest, if the historian's focus shifts from the Western-educated elite (in any case a relatively unimportant identifier in Banaras, even for those who were) to collective activities that express group values and processes of community identity, a very different picture emerges. The historical dynamic captured by this focal point underscores the changing definitions of state and community and their interrelationship. In this view of modern Indian history, Banaras plays a key role.
This essay is meant to suggest the historical interpretations made possible through an analysis of collective activities. It is based on the premise that such actions are not "insensate" but quite rational; that they may be subjected to careful scrutiny to yield evidence about the values and motivating forces of the crowd; and that, moreover, crowd
behavior should be seen, not as peripheral to the dynamics of historical change, but at its very heart.[1]
Given the paucity of primary sources that accurately reflect the values and perceptions of participants in collective action, particularly for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,[2] those interested in the crowd must analyze its actions. Methodologically, this approach calls for a careful consideration of the full range of actions taken collectively: these possess the potential to speak to us through their shared symbolism, through the general ambiance of the public spaces they occupy, and through their methods of mobilization.[3] As a technique the approach owes much to what Victor Turner has called "comparative symbology," in which the analyst must investigate "the relationships between symbols and the concepts, feelings, values, notions, etc., associated with them by users, interpreters or exegetes." Particularly for the historian, changes over time in the use of these symbols are central to the analysis, for the symbolic actions express "social and cultural dynamic systems, shedding and gathering meaning over time and altering in form" (Turner 1979:12–13).
Collective actions in the public spaces of an urban north Indian environment tended to be of three types: public space performances, collective ceremony, and popular protest. These forms have been dis-
[1] The historiographical tradition to which these techniques relate is more developed for European history, particularly that of early modern France and England. See, for instance, the work on "the crowd" of George Rudé, Natalie Z. Davis, E. P. Thompson, et al. More recently, and for South Asia, much of the work of the self-styled "Subalternist school" has attempted a similar historiographical approach.
[2] From materials available for the later decades of the twentieth century, we know that the best sources would be the texts of publicly posted placards; folk songs (see lyrics in chap. 3); "popular painting," to use the Archer term (1977), such as illustrations utilized by itinerant storytellers, or even individual paintings depicting local scandals and activities. Unfortunately, although administrators cum amateur anthropologists assiduously collected folk songs and folk tales in the late nineteenth century for the rural areas, we cannot assume that these sources reflect the values or social organization of the urban world. The closest we can come to sources that connect, at least tangentially, to the popular perceptions and values of the city are newspapers, particularly the vernacular press—which, while written by a literate elite, did function to "report" happenings, including collective activities; and petitions submitted to the authorities—which, while written by an elite literate in English as well as in a vernacular language, attempted to "explain" collective action. As is noted below, these sources must be used as judiciously as any primary materials.
[3] Sources for such a methodology are somewhat problematic, since they depend not on polemical explanations for crowd behavior (which characterize most vernacular primary sources on a subject), but on accurate descriptions of crowd action. Perversely enough, administrative accounts of protest actions—if detailed enough, written soon after the fact, by someone relatively familiar with the locale—often prove the most valuable sources. The historian must, of course, treat them as any primary source, and take care to use them only for what they describe , rather than for what they attempt to explain .
cussed in the Introduction to Part 1. Although distinct in significant ways, they developed out of shared cultural assumptions and, taken together constitute a world that should be considered a coherent whole and analyzed on its own terms. This world may best be described as composed of "public arenas," or activities that represent public expressions of collective values and motivations (Freitag 1989). By analyzing the characteristics shared by the variety of types of collective actions we begin to see a consistent picture of symbolic behavioral expressions. In turn, this consistency of symbols highlights historical change when we compare a series of collective actions over time. In particular, the concept of "public arena" activity is intended to emphasize the "structure-in-process" or "process-ual" elements (to use Turner's terms) that are inherent in this world. That is, it is a world in which changes (in, for instance, the functions of particular groups and the relationships between them) affect, and become reflected in, structure that alters with each iteration. By studying the ritual symbols of this world in conjunction with other expressions of political power and cultural values, we discover what historical change is all about. Turner, too, urges that ritual symbols be studied
in relation to other "events," for symbols are essentially involved in social process . . . performances of ritual [are] distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups became adjusted to internal changes . . . and adapted to their external environment. . . . From this standpoint the ritual symbol becomes a factor in social action, a positive force in an activity field. (Turner 1979:13)[4]
Several of the chapters in this volume treat the first of these types of public-arena activities. In this chapter I examine in more detail the latter two types, suggesting their significance in constructing a history of north India. At the heart of this processual analysis of symbolic collective behavior are events of 1809–1811. During these two years a style and a symbolic rhetoric of protest emerged in Banaras which differed in important ways from the style that evolved in other U.P. urban centers. After examining the protests of those critical two years, we look, in turn, at collective protests and ceremonials in the 1890s and 1930s in order to chart changes over time. In particular, these changes suggest
[4] In this emphasis on "social process" this approach differs from that of Guha (1983) and others of the Subalternist school, who have also interpreted symbolic action. Such action expresses for them a fundamental oppostion of upper and lower class, of oppressor and oppressed (which can, therefore, generally be read backward or forward in time). While I think the evidence shows that, on some occasions, the symbolism did indeed express such opposition, that is not always the case (see chaps. 5 and 6 of Freitag, 1989). Instead, I would argue, the interpretation of symbolic action must be carefully contextualized.
for us the significance of public arenas in accommodating important historical change, expressing through structure-in-process forms the significant alterations in relationships among urban groups, as well as between the state and its constituent communities.
Shared Culture of Public Arenas
Early-nineteenth-century sources refer, albeit briefly, to an array of collectively observed ceremonial activities, most of which were identified by the administration as "religious." Certainly their subject matter was religious, as the observances frequently reenacted stories from sacred texts. Particularly at this time, however, such ceremonials constituted statements of shared civic identity, of "Banarsipan," as much as they did a specific religious identity. The Muslim petition submitted in 1809, for instance, referring to a disputed site, said that "for some years, the lower classes of Hindus and Muhammedans have annually celebrated the marriage of the Laut and have divided the offerings between them" (Board no. 9093:168).[5] Similarly, in referring to a site shared by a temple and a mosque, the Acting Magistrate noted that "the Muslims have frequently participated with the Hindus in the offerings presented to the idols" (Board no. 9093:262A). Even thirty years later, a British observer resident in the city commented that "on most occasions of festive and multitudinous assemblage, the distinctions of religion give way, and the scene bears more the character of a fair than of a religious meeting" (Prinsep 1831, quoted in Eck 1982:254). Indeed, the shared civic sense fostered by such public ceremonials is suggested by Acting Magistrate Bird when he noted in 1809 that "the religious ceremonies of the Muhammedans and Hindus are so inseparably blended" that any attempt to "disunite them" would constitute a "new arrangement" (see fig. 15).[6]
This same source provided a brief description of an observance of Bharat Milap[*] in 1809, which sketches the nature of these shared cultural activities. The story for the occasion is staged each year on a small field permanently set aside for the purpose in muhalla[*] Nati Imli. After reenacting the reunion of Rama[*] with his brother Bharat, the observance opens out to become a general celebration shared by thousands of people (see N. Kumar 1984:263). In 1809, although the seeds of conflict had been sown which would soon erupt in a virtually unprecedented riot between groups of Hindus and Muslims, the citywide ceremony was deemed sufficiently important that "it was amicably agreed upon to suppress and conceal their mutual differences during the cele-
[5] I have not been able to find a description of this "marriage" ceremony.
[6] IOL & R. Board's collections. F/4/365, no. 9093 for 1812-13:269A.
Fig. 15
Drawing of a tazia procession during the Muharram observance, 1831. James
Prinsep, Benares Illustrated (Calcutta, 1833).
Courtesy of Ames Library, University of Minnesota. (Compare with figure 13.)
bration . . . and refer them after the expiration of the holiday to the decision of the Court" (Board no. 9093:44).
Part of a preeminent occasion for collective play,[7] this festival occupied an important place in the inventory of Banaras's public-arena activities. Perhaps the most appropriate documentation of this is found in a vernacular newspaper almost a century later, when the Bharat Jiwan commented on "the Bharat Milap of Nati Imli which is famous in this and all nations. . . . None would object perhaps to calling it the foremost of Kashi's melas and festivals, because on that day all Kashivasis—women, aged, children, Hindus, Muslims and the English—feel a rush of Rambhakti [devotion to Ram[*] ] in their hearts . . . it would have to be an invalid or disabled person who does not go to see it" (Bharat Jiwan , 30 Oct. 1893, 8, quoted in N. Kumar 1984:264). Its eminence can be further attested to by the growth around it of a number of legends (see N. Kumar 1984).
While the occasion was doubtless particularly important to the artisans and other lower-class groups of the city (e.g., Ahirs carried in the swarup s, or actors, playing Ram, Laxman, and Sita[*] ), the newspaper went on to note by name the important local leaders who participated by observing the event.[8] Even today, one of the measures signifying the importance of the Bharat Milap[*] observance is participation by the Maharaja of Banaras, who enters first as "the king" who then "becomes front rank of the audience, completing the sense of the event as that of a total people, led by their king, witnessing and worshipping the momentary arrival of their God in their midst. . . . The Maharaja, in the words of informants, is the people and the kingdom, and his exchange with Rama is symbolic of that of the necessarily anonymous masses [who] throng to the spot" (N. Kumar 1984:266).
By the middle of the nineteenth century this functional role of the Maharaja as symbol of "the people and the kingdom" had become virtually unique in U.P. As the Rohillas, the Nawabi of Awadh, and other successor states gave way to the British Empire, those who performed the integrative function described here were either dispossessed or had their status reduced and trivialized to that of mere large landlords.[9] Nowhere else in U.P. did such a coalition (of merchants, Maharaja, and Gosains) succeed in protecting and extending the shared local culture. How did this unique situation evolve in Banaras? In the remainder of
[7] Bharat Milap provides a pivotal scene in the longer enactment of the Ramlila[*] .
[8] Kumar also refers to newspaper advertisements in the 1930s selling tickets for wealthier observers to secure places in nearby gardens and rooftops from which to view the field.
[9] Given the right circumstances, some of the taluqdars of Awadh doubtless possessed the potential to expand their control (as the Bhumihar family had) until they possessed kingly attributes (T. Metcalf 1979).
this chapter I will argue that the answer to that question can be found by focusing on public arena activity; this focus points up a series of renegotiations of the relationship between state and community which helped preserve a particular form of local culture even while it accommodated changes in the roles and connections between leaders and followers in Banaras.
The Maharaja's own public ceremonial, as it was elaborated over two centuries, typifies the processual elements of collective observance. As was noted in the Introduction, the Hindu merchant corporation of the city, and the Bhumihar dynasty based in Ramnagar, cosponsored this unique version of Ramlila[*] .[10] By virtue of its thirty-one-day length and its patronage by the dynasty, this Ramlila remains, to the present, "the most extensive, best performed, and draws the largest audience of any" Ramlila in the subcontinent (Schechner and Hess 1977). Its key attributes emphasize expression of the "relationship between government, Maharaja, and ordinary people." Schechner and Hess note that the day-to-day events of the performance follow the outlines of Tulsidas's epic poem, the Ramcharitmanas[*] , "but some events—notably those of great iconographic effect, the processions—are given higher focus: they are good theatre, and especially display the Ramlila's two leading performers, Rama and the Maharaja." This provides the widest possible appeal, incorporating all Banarsis even as it emphasizes the integrative role of the ruler.
Although the Maharaja does not figure in Tulsidas's narrative, or in the other, ubiquitous enactments of it staged throughout north India,[11] "each day's [Ramnagar-sponsored] performance begins only after the Maharaja arrives, either on elephant or horse-drawn carriage or in his 1927 Cadillac limousine." Since the performance ceases and resumes again around the Maharaja's daily sandhya puja , it is the Maharaja who imposes, twice a day, a "processional rhythm" on the performance. Indeed, the authors note that "The Maharaja and Rama are mirror images of each other, the twin heroes of the Ramnagar Ramlila. The Maharaja is as much a mythic figure as Rama." Throughout the Ramlila, his actions and attire reflect his mythic kingly role as "upholder of reli-
[10] While merchant roles have undoubtedly expanded in the twentieth century, Hess's recent description is worth noting: "Most spectators cross the river [from Banaras to Ramnagar] each day to attend the Lila; a fair number come from the Ramnagar side as well. . . . Though no survey was taken of audience members' caste, occupation, or education, we noticed that small-scale merchants were heavily represented. Almost no one we met in the crowd spoke English. People of different castes and classes appeared to mingle quite freely, though there may have been ways of maintaining separations of which we were unaware" (Hess 1987:3).
[11] For a discussion of the political implications of Ramlila performances throughout U.P., see Freitag 1989, chap. 7.
gion, repository of tradition and authority," patron of the arts and learning. At the same time, he has a second mythic role, that of representative of Shiva, the lord of ancient Kashi.
The Ramnagar dynasty quite deliberately pursued certain political ends (see chapter 1) through Ramlila[*] patronage. Important gains were made for Hindu culture in the process—especially noteworthy in the face of the political power of the (Muslim) Nawab of Awadh. But other, internally significant political ends were served as well by this elaboration of a popular observance—ends that reinforced the relations with the lower classes of Banaras, frequently Muslim, through the emphasis on the Maharaja as ruler of all. While Rama[*] "fulfills his destiny . . . as the bearer of Hindu culture" (Schechner and Hess 1977:54), Tulsidas's equal emphasis on devotion over orthodoxy, of shared brotherhood over community and caste divisions, enabled the dynasty to use this event for integrative purposes, even with Muslim weavers. Thus the observance documents the uniquely Banarsi emphasis on the role of local ruler, with whom all Banarsis could identify. We may speculate, too, that the physical locale of the Ramnagar observance—with its permanent constructions representing various places in the subcontinent located in a space at some remove from the neighborhoods where popular forms of competition were focussed—could function in integrative ways not available to other observances of Ramlila.
Early-Nineteenth-Century State and Community
This description of collective ceremonials suggests the structural outlines of the public arena as it existed at the end of the eighteenth century in Banaras. Against this background established by integrative ceremonial, however, the early nineteenth century witnessed two unprecedented occasions of collective protest—a riot in 1809 between groups of Banarsis over sacred space, and a protest in 1810 against an innovative tax imposed by the British on Indian dwellings. By examining these two occasions, we gain a sense both of the process or dynamic that underlay structure and of the turn-of-the-century historical changes that had to be accommodated by that structure.
Sources have always identified the 1809 protest as a religious riot, an accurate characterization in terms of the targets chosen, the symbolic actions of the crowd, and the fact that groups of "Hindus" were generally arrayed against groups of "Muslims." The event left residents much shaken and was perceived at the time and thereafter as extraordinary—for such religious unrest, particularly in terms of the scale of destruction, was unprecedented in Banaras. As a petition from the qadi and mufti (the law officers of the Nizamat Adawlut, who resided in Ba-
naras) put it, this was "a disturbance of a more alarming nature than has ever been witnessed in this country . . . for three days this city was filled with rapine, fire and murder" (Board no. 9093:220).
The site of the original dispute was a neutral area between the pillar known as the Lat[*] Bhairava and a neighboring Imambara[*] .[12] To underscore the neutrality of the area, weavers insisted in their 1809 petition that the idols set up on this ground were removed by the Brahmin in charge "when the Muslims met together for the purpose of prayer"; "if there happened to be any which could not be conveniently taken away, they were carefully concealed with grass" (Board no. 9093:169). While this version probably exaggerates the transitoriness of Hindu claims to the ground, it does explain the strong reaction of the weavers to the act of devotion that, in their perception, completely changed the nature of the area. For, into this shared space, came a worshipper of Hanuman who, in fulfillment of a vow, attempted to replace a sheltering mud structure around Hanuman's statue (perceived by Muslims as more "temporary" in nature) with one made of stone.
At first the weavers seemed content to appeal to the qadi, and agreed to continue participating with Hindus in the observance of Bharat Milap[*] . At the Friday prayers that followed conclusion of Bharat Milap (October 20, 1809), however, they violently removed the stone structure and damaged nearby sacred objects. Word spread, bringing indignant Rajputs to the site. Kotwal and Acting Magistrate both rushed to the scene; they left again when it seemed that order had been restored. Instead, however, the Rajput crowd "committed some slight injury" (in the words of the Acting Magistrate) to the Imambara. The weavers' reaction drew on both their training in sword-and-stick performances (gained at physical fitness gymnasiums, or akhara s[*] ) and on the symbolic actions they performed during Muharram: "collecting in considerable numbers armed with swords and clubs, [they] hoisted a standard and, exclaiming Imam Hossein and beating their breasts, marched towards the city" (Board no. 9093:45). Continuing their symbolic action, they marched to the temple of Vishveshvara (often transliterated Bisheshwar), which stood next to the mosque Aurangzeb had erected on the site of an older temple. Those left behind invoked religious symbols as well: after pulling down the pillar and breaking it into pieces, they then "slaughtered a [sacred] cow at the foot of the Laut and sprinkled [the broken column] with the blood of the animal" (Board no. 9093:47).
[12] The Lat, or "staff," of Bhairava ("popularly known as the police chief of sacred Kashi") is located at the northern end of Banaras. The pillar, removed from a Hindu temple complex when Aurangzeb destroyed it, was left intact, but had once been much taller (Eck 1982:196). An imambara[*] is a building used particularly to store the tazias, or floats, paraded during Muharram.
Reaction among Hindu groups in the city varied. The Raja disarmed his men voluntarily and removed them from the city during the violent period. The "brahmins and superior orders" gathered at the ghats and fasted. Rajputs and Gosains, slowly gathering force, invoked symbols appropriate to their own roles in seeking revenge. Late the next morning the Rajputs gathered together again and returned to the Imambara[*] . After destroying it completely and murdering the four or five members of the caretaker's family, they countered the blood symbolism of the slaughtered cow by killing a hog (in Muslim eyes an unclean animal) near the principal tomb. From the Imambara they moved on to destroy the Dargah of Fatima and then turned to the weavers' quarters: they could target domestic quarters and Muslim bodies, for they did not need good relations with the Muslim lower classes of the city. Another crowd, this one composed of Gosains, concentrated instead on Muslim sacred spaces rather than their domestic quarters; it began pulling down the Gyan[*] Vapi[*] (often transliterated Jnana Vapi) mosque next to the Vishveshvara Temple. "The whole of Benaras," the Acting Magistrate observed, "was in the most dreadful uproar and confusion. The temples were shut, and multitudes of armed Hindus were assembled in every quarter, directing their rage chiefly against the lives and properties of the Joolahers [Julahas[*] , i.e., weavers] and the Butchers"—indeed, "the whole quarter of the Joolahers was a scene of plunder and violence" (Board no. 9093:48–51). In contrast, the very lack of action by the Raja also proved significant from this vantage point. He remained aloof, withdrawn from the violence, an exemplar of the appropriate behavior by an integrative ruler. In the aftermath of the riot, he worked to restore peace, treating with the British administrators, on the one hand, and working with the leadership of various muhalla s[*] , on the other.[13]
Beyond the overt level of symbolism that classifies this conflict as "religious" lie further meanings. From this vantage point, the specific identification of the combatants, not as "Hindus" and "Muslims," but as Marathas, Rajputs, Gosains, and weavers, becomes significant. Thus, while not denying the religious characterization, we can find much additional meaning by placing these acts in the larger context of the political economy of Banaras at the turn of the century. To begin with, although the British East India Company had formally assumed control from the Raja in 1794, the frailties of the then-reigning Raja may have postponed a perception of finality regarding the transfer of power. By 1809, however, his successor had been agitating unsuccessfully for more than a decade to have the agreement put aside. He had also "lost
[13] For a more detailed analysis, see Freitag 1989 chap. 1.
face" in negotiations over changes in structures of rural management.[14] These indicators of loss of power by the Bhumihar dynasty could only have heartened both Marathas and Rajputs.[15] The latter, as landholders who resided in the city but were supported by their holdings located throughout the surrounding district, still occupied "an important position in the district" in the nineteenth century, but they had had "their former predominance" destroyed "by the rise of the Benaras Rajas."
Yet new claims to power and leadership by Marathas and Rajputs necessarily imperiled the relationships already established in the city—both the triumvirate of influence and control exercised by the dynasty, Gosains and merchant-bankers, and the interdependence of the weavers and merchants that was expressed culturally through the figure of the Raja. I would argue that the underlying symbolism of the rioters' actions may be taken to express these configurations as much as they expressed conflict between "Hindus" and "Muslims."
During 1809, then, we can discern a first phase in the process by which symbolic structures in the city adjusted to accommodate momentous political change. For this phase, conflicts among those who held power in Banaras—which affected as well the relationship between artisans and their merchant patrons—found expression through a religionfocused symbolic vocabulary. This indicates that the participants, leaders and followers alike, reacted against other Indians perceived as competitors, in the field most open to them—that in which public arena activities were staged.
In this respect what happened in Banaras differed little from the style of urban conflict developing throughout the nineteenth century in U.P. While becoming reified in other urban centers, however, this style of symbolic activities did not come to dominate the public arenas of Banaras. To understand why, we must examine with some care the aftermath of the 1809 riot, as well as the collective protest staged just fourteen months later against imposition of a house tax. For, as the agitation died down in the city, the attendant actions of the various participants—including the British East India Company—reflected changes occurring in Banaras's structures of urban self-rule. The evi-
[14] An 1810 document notes: "In the late Tahsildari arrangements . . . the Rajah has been expressively disappointed and chagrined and though he by no means presumes to arraign the orders of government he has fancied himself degraded in dignity and consequently by the little attention paid to his solicitations an opportunity is now afforded . . . of mitigating the Rajah's discontent." IOR. Bengal Revenue Proceedings P/55/vol. 37 (Progs for 11th January 1811).
[15] See Introduction to Part 1 for the role of Marathas in the city, particularly in the eighteenth century.
dence is clearest for the kotwal (police) and qadi (courts), but emerges as well for the neighborhoods and the relationship between community and state.
As was noted in the Introduction to Part 1, the functioning of the kotwal and qadi was essential to the well-being of an urban central place. The kotwal required the confidence of all communities resident in the city. In Banaras by the turn of the century, however, evidence strongly suggests that the preexisting relationship between kotwal (as representative of the state) and communities had been eroded. Perhaps the first indicators emerged in 1803 when the British administration instructed the kotwal to become involved in the administration of the phatakbandi tax. The measure, we are told by the Gazetteer , was "stoutly resisted" (Nevill 1909a:166). Significant further erosion of the kotwal's position is described in some detail in the documentation of the 1809 riots. The kotwal himself acknowledged this diminution in popular recognition of his authority by requesting that he be allowed to retire.
The shape of self-rule in Banaras was most profoundly altered, however, by administrative steps taken after the riot.[16] First, the administration began altering both the composition and the organization of the urban police force. Second and even more significant, the administration decided that certain persons would be "brought to trial not for the outrages each had committed against the other, but one common offence against the peace . . . as an offence against the State." These persons had been selected as appropriate to stand as symbolic representatives for their communities because, "from acts and circumstances which have come to light, [these were the people who] appear to have instigated and encouraged, purely upon religious principle, the disgraceful excesses which were committed, or who were themselves personally concerned in the commission of some overt act of violence and outrage" (Board no. 9093:272–77).[17]
These attempts by the British to alter the relationship of community and state are particularly significant. For evidence suggests that this kind of alteration was at the very heart of the collective protests of these years. The exasperated Acting Magistrate noted, for instance, that "the disturbance is found to have originated in the abuse of that privilege which the Natives have been permitted to enjoy, of assembling among themselves to deliberate on questions of common inter-
[16] For details, see Freitag 1989.
[17] Qadi and mufti, law officers of the court in which the trials would be conducted, were greatly alarmed at this innovation. Normally, they would have been expected to issue a fatwa[*] (decision interpreting the law) on the cases. But this put them, as residents of Banaras, in a particularly awkward position. "These disturbances have been so general that our interference must raise thousands of enemies against us, and as our families reside in the city, we may justly apprehend both their and our total destruction." As a result, the cases were tried without "the intervention of any natives."
est." Further, in condemning the Rajput leader, he notes that "it is clear from the whole tenor of his conduct that he considered this a dispute in which the public authority had no business to interfere. That as the injury had been offered to the Hindus at large it was for them alone to determine the measure of their revenge and unite in the common resolution of inflicting it" (Board no. 9093:261, 295). As the conflict that erupted the following year demonstrated, the ability and inclination of Banarsi communities to gather and decide collectively on courses of action remained strong—and it directly threatened British perceptions of their state authority.
Yet, in the face of these clear messages, the British increased their interference. Thus the administration introduced the changes described earlier in the policing system; passed a proclamation that provided for closer control over collective gatherings;[18] and in December 1810 attempted to introduce a new house-tax that would provide greater revenues for running the municipality, in the process bringing the revenues and administration of the neighborhood-based chaukidari[*] system under closer administrative control.
These intrusions by the imperial state created a new relationship between state and community, one unappealing to the residents of Banaras. Moreover, the style of interaction differed from that demanded by Banarsis. Acting Magistrate Bird willingly worked unceasingly behind the scenes, where he repeatedly relied on personal, face-to-face relationships with the leaders of each community; but they wanted more. They wanted him to act publicly, to place his own person physically in public arena spaces for symbolic purposes. To underscore his perception of the audacity of one protest,[19] for instance, Bird noted that
on the morning of the 24th the [leaders who became] prisoners assembled with the whole body of goshains and seating themselves upon the ghats remained there in spite of all remonstrance until the agitation occasioned by it, threatening a renewal of those horrors from which the city had recently been rescued, I was compelled to go in person to remove them; for this conduct they . . . collected not like the brahmins on the 23rd for religious principles, but for the purpose of obtained concessions. (Board no. 9093:304; emphasis added)
Renegotiating the Relationships
Reacting to the administrative innovations introduced in the wake of the 1809 riots, the House Tax Protest of 1810 provides a clear symbolic
[18] This control operated more in public awareness than in actuality, for the Magistrate was instructed to exercise broad tolerance in permitting collective gatherings.
[19] His perception was seconded in London, where the India Office copy has been underlined, with indignant marginal notes.
statement of the second phase in the early-nineteenth-century process during which residents of the city reiterated the distinct Banarsi-styled relationship between state and community. In 1809, the first phase, Indians had acted out symbolic protests against other Indians. In 1810, however, these antagonists turned instead against the British, concentrating on issues that intruded into their preexisting system of urban self-rule. In the first phase, moreover, Banarsis had faced symbolic challenges to the internal relationship established between the ruling group (referred to here as the "triumvirate" of Ramnagar dynasty, merchant-bankers and Gosains) and artisans within the city; the style of the second phase suggests that the participants had resisted these challenges. In 1810, then, it is the underlying continuity of structure and protest that, together, stand out as the principal components of public arena activity.
Pre-British structures of community organization provided critical lines of mobilization to protest the house tax:[20] while "all ranks and description of Banarsis joined in the protest" (Acting Magistrate Bird quoted in Dharampal 1971:6), the initial petitions were submitted by each neighborhood or muhalla[*] (Boards Collections no. 7407:94; Heitler 1972:241). Occupation as well as neighborhood provided organizational networks, as the administration recognized when it tried to negotiate with occupational chaudhuri s[*] (headmen).
Forms of protest followed time-honored merchant patterns, described as "sitting dharna." Once again taking oaths to shut down the bazaars and withdraw their services until "the outcry and distress" in the city induced the magistrate to accede, more than twenty thousand inhabitants "sat" in an open field in the city. Caste panchayats not only maintained order, they coerced those whose support was wavering for this "panch" form of protest.[21] Symbolically, the orderly withdrawal to the field demonstrated as well to the British the effectiveness of mechanisms of urban self-rule:
Vast multitudes came forth in a state of perfect organization: each caste trade and profession occupied a distinct spot of ground, and was regulated in all its acts by the orders of its own punchayat, who invariably punished all instances of misconduct or disobedience on the part of any
[20] Regulation XV of 1810 called for a levy for 5 percent on the "annual rent" of all dwellings and 10 percent on all shops. Sources for this protest are contained in IOR. F/4/323, Board's Collections no 7407; and Dharampal 1971 (which, unfortunately, does not contain the texts of any of the petitions). See also the excellent article by Heitler (1972). Where possible I have cited the latter sources, since they will be the most accessible for the readers.
[21] Contrary to the impression conveyed by Heitler's article, these tactics are never characterized in the petitions as hartals. Rather, the terms used are "panch" and "sitting dharna."
of its members. This state of things continued for more than a month; and whilst the authority of the British Government was, in a manner, suspended, the influence of the punchayat was sufficient to maintain the greatest order and tranquility.[22]
As was suggested in the Introduction to Part 2, such "combinations" became possible by working through urban linkages that overarched particular caste- and occupation-specific units. By the early nineteenth century such social integration proved capable of bringing to the field of protest representatives of most families in Banaras and its rural environs (see Dharampal 1971:13, 6). Money was raised through these same networks to support family members whose wage earners had withdrawn to the field: "The individuals of every class, contributed each in proportion to his means, to enable them to persevere, and considerable sums were thus raised."[23]
This was, then, a popular protest, supported by virtually all levels of society and ordered by a variety of mechanisms reflecting local community organization. Even when the government decided to exempt religious buildings and lower-class dwellings, the protest remained general. Moreover, beyond the organizational level, the rhetoric and symbolic action of the protest provides important evidence of the symbolic structures brought to bear during this conflict.
To begin with, as the petitions make clear, Banarsis viewed this new taxation as an intrusion into their customary charitable practices. The city was filled, they noted, with widows, Brahmins, and other poor who were housed in structures that could not be maintained if taxes had to be paid on them as well. Threats to this practice undermined basic tenets on which Banaras had been established: "In this holy city the rajas of ancient times from a principle of virtue and in the hopes of everlasting fame built houses and fixed salaries and settled perpetual donations for the subsistence and residence of brahmins, paupers and mendicants, there are hundreds of such houses appropriated to brahmins" (Boards Collections no. 7407:106–13).
Furthermore, both rhetoric and action deliberately posed their system of self-rule against state perceptions of appropriate behavior. In their final petition to government, the protestors insisted they had not
[22] J. D. Erskine, Acting Third Judge of the Court of Appeal and Circuit for the Division of Banaras, included in Selections of Papers from the Records of the East India House . . . , Vol. 2:89 (quoted in Heitler 1972:246).
[23] Letter from Collector W. O. Salmon, quoted in Dharampal 1971:15. Landlord connections can be inferred from the extensive holdings possessed by Banarsi bankers; see descriptions in Nevill 1909a:117 et seq. Connections in the opposite direction (i.e., from moneylenders located in the countryside who helped contribute to the trading activities centered in Banaras) are discussed in Bayly 1983:103–6. References to fundraising, Bird quoted in Dharampal 1971:13.
created a "disturbance," as the magistrate charged, but had registered a complaint in a legitimate manner. They noted that
the manner and custom in this country from time immemorial is this: that, whenever any act affecting every one generally is committed by the Government, the poor, the aged, the infirm, the women, all forsake their families and their homes, expose themselves to the inclemency of the seasons and to other kinds of inconveniences, and make known their affliction and distress. (Quoted in Heitler 1972:250)
It is significant, too, that their objections to the tax centered, not on the rate at which it was pitched, but on the very legitimacy of the form of demand. Their petition noted that
in the Shera and Shaster, together with the customs of Hindostan . . . houses are reckoned one of the principal necessaries of life, and are not accounted disposable property . . . in this country, in the times of Mohamedan and Hindoo princes, houses were never rendered liable to contributions for the service of the state. (Quoted in Heitler 1972:253)
They objected, as well, to the notion that representatives of government should go into their houses to determine the value to be assessed. Finally, they pointed out that already they were paying other taxes, such as stamp, transit, and town duties; in particular they referred to the phatakbundi .
The contrast between the new house-tax and the phatakbundi was an important one. The phatakbundi operation had been organized locally within each muhalla[*] ; the substantial sums, collected by the inhabitants themselves, then were used to pay chaukidar s—also chosen and supervised by the inhabitants. The new taxing arrangements would have represented a very substantial infringement on local self-rule. Thus the antagonists clearly perceived the conflict to be between British authority and Banarsi community control. In early January the government of the East India Company responded to Bird with the observation that Bird should announce the compromise of the phatakbundi in the way "best calculated to allay the disposition to riot and resistance to public authority, which appears so generally prevalent among the lower orders in the city of Banaras." Yet three weeks later, Bird despairingly noted that "the people still continue collected as they were," and only fatigue and disappointment were likely to break up the tent city. He was fully aware of the implications of the month-long protest: "I cannot but feel very forcibly, that such a state of things being permitted to continue in defiance of public authority, has already weakened, and weakens daily still more and more, those sentiments of respect, which it is so essential that the community should entertain for the government of the country" (Boards Collections no. 7407:121–24, 185–88).
The tactics with which Banarsi communities fought the state had been carefully designed to protect their legitimacy. The crowd's careful adherence to nonviolence tied Bird's hands, for he felt that only violence would justify use of the military. The tactics, as he noted, thus forced city life to a standstill, leaving the administration little choice but to rescind the tax. Beyond the petition cited above, we have other evidence that the crowd felt itself fully justified in its action. Another petition, with a "style and contents" characterized as "disrespectful" by the judges of the Provincial Court to which it was addressed, baldly declared the "deadly evil" that the tax represented. Indeed, the petitioners continued, "if our bad fortune be such, that you are induced to wish our leaving this for other countries, we trust that you will be pleased to order what we have expended in buildings to be paid to us out of your treasury" (Boards Collections no. 7407:203).
Demands for an appropriate state-community relationship moved beyond the actual issue of taxation, to the increasing reluctance of the new government to symbolically participate in public arenas. The protestors underscored this last grievance by their demand on January 23 that "they were willing to disperse, providing [the Acting Magistrate] came to them [in the field where they were residing] in person to request it" (Bird, 28.1.1811, quoted in Dharampal 1971:30; emphasis added). After his indignation in 1809, the magistrate flatly refused this time. Instead, he turned to the Raja of Banaras to represent the state in public. The Raja
proceeded with all the distinctions of his rank to the place where the people were collected, the mob soon listened to his exhortations, and returned to their homes, and the Rajah, selecting from among them, fifty of the persons principally concerned in the disturbance, brought them, to [the magistrate] to acknowledge their offences; while the Rajah himself interceded in their behalf and solicited [the magistrate] to endeavour to procure both for themselves and for the subject of their complaint, the indulgence of the Government. (Bird 28.1.1811, quoted in Dharampal 1971:32–33)
The role of the Raja in this process thus proved critical. While his power was doubtless bounded by the British government, his behavior matched public expectations for a traditional ruler. On the one hand, he could represent symbolically the culture shared by upper and lower classes, by Hindus and Muslims alike. On the other hand, he provided the only symbol of authority on which both the Banarsi and the British could agree—the only figure who could operate both in the reformulated system of self-rule emerging in Banaras and as an intermediary figure judged legitimate by British administrators. We might note that his symbolic usefulness continued even after he convinced the residents
to abandon their tent city. Once the crowds had dispersed and business and services resumed, the Raja returned to the magistrate. On this visit he again acted on behalf of Banarsi residents, bearing their petition addressed to the Governor General in Council.[24]
In this second phase in Banaras, then, we find that the rituals of protest had resulted in creating a structure in which urban residents— rallied by merchants, Gosains, and Brahmins, and brought together around the figure of the Raja—moved against the imperial government. That they joined together to focus their protest, not against each other but against government measures imposed from above, reflected a society more culturally integrated than that of any other urban center in U.P. Where, in other urban centers public arena activities became increasingly focused on conflicts among communities, in Banaras they focused instead on the relationship between state and community.
This is not to say that Banaras was wracked by collective protest in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. On the contrary: for a variety of reasons—relating to its relative economic stability (compared, for instance, with Kanpur) and its Bhojpuri cultural continuity with the surrounding countryside (see Pandey 1983)—very few collective confrontations occurred in Banaras. Those few, however, until the 1930s followed the pattern we saw established early in the nineteenth century. They centered on issues affecting the relationship between state and community. We turn now to an examination of examples of collective protest in Banaras in 1891 and 1931 to discern further shifts in the processual character of public arena activities.
The Changing Style of Banarsi Protest:
1891 and 1913
In the 1890s, while the rest of the province rioted over the issue of Cow Protection, the collective violence in Banaras was directed at statemandated technology. The administration began introducing a new water-supply scheme into many of the larger cities of U.P.; by 1890 the attendant tax increases to fund the scheme had been levied in Banaras. This municipal taxation, we should not be surprised to learn, was "generally viewed with disfavor by the poorer classes of traders and shopkeepers. The butchers have already [by March 17, 1890] struck
[24] Moreover, these representations by the Raja continued to be accompanied by expressions of ongoing public discontent; indeed, householders greeted the assessors with such "sullen silence" that the government could never actually collect the tax. While the administration delayed facing the inevitable, in part to save face and in part to await the decision of the India Office in London, eventually they acceded to public pressure. The tax was finally abandoned in 1811 (Nevill 1909a:166); not until 1860 did the British dare to institute a house tax in Banaras.
work, and other classes are expected to follow suit" (Raj-ul-Akhbar , 17 March 1890; Bharat Jiwan , 2 March 1890; both in SVN). This intrusion of tax-financed technology exacerbated the perceptions of hardship which had originated with a grain shortage. Particularly hard hit by the great rise in grain prices, Muslim weavers experienced "grave" reductions "in circumstances from the falling off in the demand for those rich fabrics for which Banaras was famous." They had also approached the Collector for financial assistance; as the Officiating Commissioner noted, they suffered more in such circumstances than did others in the city, for "they have no such resources as poor Hindus who are fed in thousands daily at the various chhatras maintained by opulent Hindus from charitable motives."[25]
While not directly related to the waterworks issue, an accompanying act of protest resulted in the city's collective self-denial of pleasure in the face of new taxation and grain scarcity. No observances were held that year of the "Water Carnival," or Burhwa Mangal, a festival in which decorated boats paraded along the river. A crowd predominantly composed of weavers ensured that this ostentatious occasion of play did not occur, by visiting the boatmen (mallah s) and warning them against participation.[26]
Actual construction shifted public focus to the waterworks themselves. As a symbol of encroachment, the technology being applied to water proved strikingly apposite.[27] Moreover, Banarsis watched closely the fate of a small temple contiguous to the construction site of the pumping station at Bhadauni, three miles outside of town. Early complaints noted that the engineer repeatedly entered the temple with his shoes on. Soon, however, it became apparent that construction endangered the temple itself. The Municipal Board rather cynically decided to simply permit construction to continue—thus leaving a hole all around the temple some ten feet in depth—so that the temple would "fall down of itself in the monsoon" (White Demi-official). As agitation mounted "the principal pandits and bankers of Banaras" resolved at a public meeting to send a protest memorial to the government and to seek the assistance of the Sujan Samaj of Banaras (Bharat Jiwan , 3 November and 1 December 1890, SVN), an organization of Western-
[25] Official Report from G. W. Wright, Officiating Commissioner of Banaras District, dated 28 April 1891. IOR. L/P & J/6/301, file 907 for 1891 (hereafter Wright report).
[26] Demi-official from Mr. James White, Magistrate of Banaras, to Woodburn, Chief Secy to the Govt NWP & O dated 16 April 1891. L/P & J/6/vol. 301 for 1891, file 907 (hereafter White Demi-official).
[27] See Nita Kumar's discussion of the symbolic and practical significance of water in Hindu life (1984, chap. 3); and chapter 8 in this volume on the ecological significance of water for the city.
educated pleaders and clerks opposed to any form of direct taxation (White Demi-official).
Collective activities thereafter combined traditional-styled protest actions and Western-styled argumentation. At February public meetings called by the Samaj, participants protested "against the alleged improper assessment of the house tax and [urged the administration] to consider the subject of electing a better class of men as members of the Municipal Board" (a denial of the legitimacy of those who participated in British-sponsored institutions). Crowds continued to gather each day at the construction site and temple. A similar-sized body "of about 4,000 men" marched on the Collector's house to complain "of hardships caused to them by the scarcity of grain and increase of municipal taxation" (White Demi-official; Raj-ul-Akhbar 13 April, 1891, SVN).
Violence finally erupted when the Municipal Board refused to take action to protect the temple. As bankers and shopkeepers closed their storefronts, from five to six thousand people assembled at the temple site. Increasingly agitated, the crowd raised the cry "Destroy the machinery!" and pitched boiler and pump into the river. It is significant that the protest particularly targeted symbols of imperially imported technology. Within two years of major protests that, in the rest of U.P., pitted Hindus against Muslims (i.e., the Cow Protection riots of 1893), Banarsi crowds, instead, tore up water-supply pipes, then rushed through the city to destroy streetlamps, the telegraph office, and the railway station.
Some of these collective activities continued styles used in earlier protests: businesses closed, crowds marched to petition administrators, others gathered at the scene where their values seemed most directly threatened. While the crowd acted in ways somewhat different from those of a century earlier, this symbolic behavior still conveyed concern over shared values represented in public spaces. Crowds concerned with the threatened temple, for instance, included Muslim weavers, lower-class Hindus, and the Brahmins and pandas attached to the temple (White demi-official). That is, within these changing but still culturally continuous modes and alliances of protest, the rioters continued to reflect the two characteristics that distinguished Banarsi protests from those in other U.P. urban centers: (1) the state, rather than a perceived community of "Others," remained the target; and (2) public arena activities still operated in broadly inclusive ways, expressing protest still shared to a significant extent by the mercantile elite of the city and the artisan masses. Comparing this Banarsi protest of 1891 with an ostensibly similar one in Kanpur in 1913, for instance, we can see the importance of these distinguishing characteristics (for full description of Kanpur 1913 riot, see Freitag 1989, chapter 7). Where, in Banaras, a
protest that had begun over a temple had been rerouted against the technology of the state, in Kanpur the protest (over the road routed through part of a mosque) evolved into a dramatic and influential statement on the "martyrdom" of Indian Islam. Where in Banaras the symbolic enactments of protest centered on destroying streetlamps and telegraph equipment, in Kanpur they included processions of mourning and the rebuilding of a section of the mosque.
While the Banarsi style of protest remained distinctive over the nineteenth century, however, it was changing as well. The "structure-in-process" elements of symbolic public actions trace these changes. Most important, in contrasts between the agitations of 1809–1811 and that of 1891, we can begin to discern, between the lines of eyewitness descriptions, an increasing gap between the actions of the crowd and those of the Banarsi elite. Unlike 1809, for instance, descriptions of the crowd in 1891 suggest that no upper-caste Hindus joined the lower-class crowds who gathered at the temple or marched on the Collector. While there may still have been hinge individuals or groups who connected protest meetings and these crowd actions, they are less visible by the end of the century (perhaps the most prominent was Raja Shiv Prasad).
The gap between lower-class and upper-class residents of the city widened even more in the early twentieth century. Other chapters in this volume suggest that the period directly preceding the 1930s may have proved critical in this process (see Introduction to Part 1). As Kumar has documented, perhaps the most dramatic example is the Nakkatayya festival (designed around the moment in the Ramlila[*] when Ram[*] cuts off the nose of a demoness). From a festival of reversal in which "antisocial" behavior was expected and condoned for those who marched in the army of the demoness, it first became sanitized, then suffered the withdrawal of elite patronage. Other festivals and events were affected as well, including Burhwa Mangal and even Muharram, which in Banaras had been observed not only by Sunnis and Shias but also by Hindus (N. Kumar 1984).
This process of separation did not begin within a religious frame of reference as it generally did in the rest of U.P. Instead, connected primarily to the growth of nationalism, it was played out in public arenas as a division between upper and lower classes. Yet a large proportion of the lower-class urban population in Banaras was Muslim: most of them weavers, they lived "a hand to mouth existence . . . without exception dependent on the good will of their Hindu employers."[28] The dramatic
[28] Copy of a letter No. 118/D.M. dated February 23, 1931, from the District Magistrate, Banaras, to the Commissioner, Banaras Division. IOL & R, L/P & J/7, vol. 75 for 1931, p. 573.
shift in public arena relations, the unprecedented separation of activities patronized by the elite from those participated in by the lower classes, thus had implications for relations between religious groups as well:
For a period extending beyond the memory of living man Benaras appears to have been free of instances of severe communal disorders although periodically small disturbances have occurred owing to the close proximity of Hindu and Mahomedan sacred places. In 1930, however, signs of increasing [tension] became apparent. In that year two movements came to the fore. On the one hand there was a very pronounced Hindu movement represented by the Congress volunteers and on the other hand there was a Mahomedan movement represented by the Tanzeem organization. A violent clash between the two communities was narrowly averted at the Ram Lila at the end of September.[29]
The ironic and sudden shift in Banaras to an apparently communal style of popular consciousness in 1931 could not be expressed in more symbolically significant terms than the 1931 riot there. The narrative is quickly told. The autumn of 1930 witnessed intense boycotting by Congress of educational establishments, which attracted a strong contingent of student supporters. These, in turn, concentrated on picketing schools, as well as cloth and liquor shops in Banaras. Agitation declined, however, after Congress was declared an illegal association in October, although intermittent pressure continued to be applied to cloth and liquor shopkeepers. In January activity resumed with enthusiasm when the Government of India released the All India Congress Committee. During the picketing in February, Congress volunteers beat a customer in the shop of Agha Muhammad Jan; he called the police in, and the volunteers were arrested. That night Agha Muhammad was severely injured on his way home. Before he died he named as his attacker a student from Banaras Hindu University, head of the Congress student volunteers. Two violent outbursts accompanied Agha Muhammad's funeral procession; one by a crowd awaiting the body near Victoria Park, another by those accompanying the body in procession. The latter had taken offense that Hindu merchants' shops remained open as they passed; their destruction of goods and shops symbolically mirrored the violence exerted by their opposites, the Congress volunteers who had picketed liquor shops. Three days later groups of Hindus retaliated during Friday prayer, choosing as their site of attack the Gyan[*] Vapi[*] mosque (which had attracted the attention of the Gosains in 1809).
Certainly on the face of it, this conflict looks much the same as ones
[29] See IOR. L/P & J/7 vol. 75 for 1931, which includes riot reports and U.P. Legislative Council Proceedings for February and December, 1931.
occurring in these years in Kanpur or Bareilly—involving a Hinduized Congress, alienated Muslims, and sacred spaces (see Freitag 1989, Part 3). What had happened in Banaras in the 1920s to change its own style of collective protest so that it matched, so much more closely, that of other urban centers? I would argue that two simultaneous and complementary processes had altered the relationship of state and community expressed in Banaras's public arenas. First, the question of who possessed the moral authority of the state had become clouded. While in other parts of U.P. the nationalists' claims to state power had led them to attempt to claim authority from the British colonial state, this proved more problematic in Banaras. There, the British had never succeeded in wresting moral authority from the Maharaja and his mercantile supporters. Thus the new nationalist claims challenged the previous integrative understanding achieved between the triumvirate and the lower-class residents of the city. Second, as essays in this volume and Kumar (1984) have documented, a separation of elite and popular culture had developed, which became reflected in public arena activities. The public culture of the lower classes that remained, after elite patronage had been withdrawn, revolved around identities that alternated between class and religion, depending on the particular historical context at the moment.
Not least important in this process was the impact of the depression on the interrelationship between Hindu merchants and lower-class artisans. While we have no detailed studies of this development, we do know, for instance, "that all the ills of the handloom industry . . . came to a head after the world economic crisis of 1929–30" (Fact-Finding Committee 1942:20). "The severe trade depression which has prevailed since 1929 has seriously reduced the average earning capacity of the handloom weaver . . . accentuated by the relative increase in the cost of yarn on account of the protective duty" (Tariff Board Report of 1932:70, quoted in Fact-Finding Committee 1942:20). This materially affected the relationship between weavers and the merchants who functioned as their supply sources and selling agents. To the extent that the relationship had previously included certain protections and benefits for the weavers, we may assume that this economic interdependency was imperiled by the inability of middlemen to protect weavers from economic distress; we certainly have indicators that there were shifts in this period in the shares of the market enjoyed by artisans of particular products (e.g., N. Kumar 1984:45). This social dislocation fortuitously coincided with the reintroduction of Congress nationalist agitations. As Nehru later observed, "The Civil Disobedience movement of 1930 happened to fit in[,] unbeknown to its own leaders at first, with the great world slump in industry and agriculture" (quoted in G. Pandey 1978:155).
Significantly, much of this nationalist agitation in Banaras was expressed in a very particular vocabulary, that of reformism. This development should not surprise us; from the eighteenth century the city had been dominated by a "code of piety and restraint," to use the description of Hindu-Jain merchant culture employed by Bayly (e.g., 1983:385). Banaras Hindu University served as a base for those interested in agitation in the city, hence the prominence accorded to student activists, and a recognition of the collective authority assigned to Hindu scholars in the city. Reflecting reformist values, then, nationalism in Banaras came to be expressed in efforts to curb consumption of alcohol, to remove excess from public festivals: that is, to Sanskritize expressions of Banarsi personal and collective culture. The extent to which elite patronage encouraged this development can be traced, for example, in essays in this volume on drama, the Hindi movement, and religious oratory. Arguments for sanitizing the festivals were sketched out in the pro-Congress Aj[*] :
The aim of Lilas is to educate the public through the teaching of . . . Rama and other pure characters. . . . It is essential for such important Lilas to be pure. Two Lilas are specially splendid here: Bharat Milap and Nakkatayya. . . . Such shameful scenes should be completely stopped. The organizers of Ramlila can stop them in one day. If educated young men would make groups and plead with the makers of floats, these corrupt scenes could be done away with.[30]
Although these values were supported by the elite of the city, they did not appeal to lower-class Muslim artisans, who, as we have noted earlier, made up almost one-fourth of the population. Their search for alternatives led them to public arena activities that focused either on lower-class interests and values (see N. Kumar 1984; chaps. 5 and 6), or on Islam. Fittingly, the form of Islam they supported also reflected reformist influence. Baba Khalil Das "for several months previous to these riots was organizing the Muslims of Banaras, mainly of the lower classes, to adhere more to Islam and to religious practices." In Benin Park and other Muslim quarters of the city, as well as in Victoria Park,[31] the Baba organized his listeners into "processions which paraded the town til late[,] night after night singing and preaching Islam." These followers carried symbols to testify that they belonged to the Tanzim movement, including green badges, distinctive uniforms, and flags. When challenged by the magistrate—who cited Hindu complaints that Tanzim was aimed against them—the Tanzim organizers
[30] 17 October 1920, p. 7; quoted in N. Kumar 1984:282.
[31] See reference to the group of mourners who attacked from Victoria Park, above.
published a list of "objectives" for the movement that emphasized social and religious reform. The government felt that it could not object.[32]
The economically and socially unsettled context, then, had dislocated the interrelationship of Banarsi communities. These changes were played out in political terms in the competition between Congress agitations and Tanzim, which in Banaras were as much expressions of conflicting class values as they were of conflicting religious identities. Collective violence extended the competition to riots occurring around the murder of Agha Muhammad Jan; these, too, came to be seen as communally motivated. Yet such communally oriented unrest is perceived even now as an aberration in the normal pattern—as is indicated in the oral history cited by residents, who date participation by Hindus in Muharram as being commonplace "'before 1930s,' 'before the Hindu-Muslim riots' " (N. Kumar 1984:316).
Thus the processual shifts in the relationships in Banaras could reflect class or religious differences, depending on the context. But the legacy of the eighteenth century remained. In an effort to nullify such shifts, symbolic acts were organized. Staged in public arenas, these attempted to heal the rift in shared culture. In two town meetings led the following week by Pandit Malaviya, Raja Moti Chand, and others, "resolutions were passed deploring the communal riots, expressing sympathy with the sufferers and deciding to raise funds for repair of temples, mosques, shops and houses that had been damaged and for compensation of the injured." On the following night, "a large number of Mahomedans congregated in the Town Hall grounds where pan, illaichi and garlands were distributed to them by Raja Sir Moti Chand (whose idea this was), Dr. Bhagwan Das and other Hindu gentlemen. This may be regarded as the formal end of an outbreak."[33]
Conclusion
In Banaras, then, state and public structures had been integrated symbolically through the person of the Maharaja and, as modern political forms emerged, the merchant elite allied with him. The Hinduized cultural style of the city had been shaped by the values and cultural patronage of merchants and other intermediary groups, who had maintained close ties through the hierarchically structured Banarsi society. Developments in the 1920s and 1930s strained these ties, however: among the most important of these developments were economic dislocation from the world depression, accompanied by an effort to ensure the moral authority of public arena activities through a Sanskritization
[32] U.P. Legislative Council Proceedings for December 15, 1931, pp. 146–50.
[33] L/P & J/7/75, pp. 580–81.
of popular culture. Alienated lower-class artisans instead developed their own collective activities, which ranged, depending on the context, from festivals staged by and for themselves to Islamic reformist activities such as Tanzim. The change should not be overstated: a shared culture of public arenas still exists in attenuated form today, in which activities featuring the Maharaja of Banaras continue to be seen as "significant" events shared by both elite and lower classes. Nevertheless, many public arena activities are created, organized, and sponsored from within the lower-class culture of the city—a measure of the changes in the processual nature of collective activities which has developed over the last century.
In this context, it is not insignificant that scholars have documented a significant expansion in recent years of a wide variety of collective activities staged publicly in Banarsi neighborhoods. As the welter of festivals around Ramlila[*] attests, the moral authority of the public arena is shared now among competing actors: the Maharaja, the state, and those interested in expressing lower-class community identity.
Eight—
Land Use and Environmental Change in the Gangetic Plain:
Nineteenth-Century Human Activity in the Banaras Region
Robert G. Varady
Kashi is not of this earth, they say, no part of the terrestrial globe, for that rests on the thousand headed serpent Ananta; whereas Benares is fixed on the point of Shiva's trident. While it is in the world and at the very center of the world, it is not attached to the earth. No earthquake is ever felt within its holy limits, and in consequence of its peculiar position it escaped destruction during a partial overwhelming of the world.[1]
According to Brahmin tradition, as illustrated above, Banaras transcends its earthly locale. But in a more temporal sense, this ancient city has been an integral part of its Gangetic environment.
Other chapters in this volume have placed Banaras within a social context and discussed its cultural identity. Preceding chapters have illustrated that the character of modern Banaras has been shaped by its unique institutions, its inhabitants, and their activities. But without an adequate resource base to sustain and nourish urban vitality, the city could not have prospered. Here I shall examine the nature of the relationship and dependence between Banaras and its physical surrounding. During the mid to late nineteenth century these surroundings were subjected to pressures that altered the landscape and affected the ecological balance. The following will identify major agents of change and describe and assess their effects.
Historiographical Perspective
Current historical writing on South Asia is richly diverse and broad in scope. But until recently the topics treated often lay within narrow confines. Historical study of environmental change usually remained outside the realm of traditional inquiry. A brief discussion of its antecedents, therefore, can serve as a contextual marker.
[1] The passage is a composite of observations by the early nineteenth-century chronicler, Walter Hamilton, and a modern scholar, Diana L. Eck (Hamilton 1820:306; Eck 1982:24).
Historians of South Asia, inheriting the legacy of colonial writers, tended to focus on political might and associated personalities. For some this interest led to studies of the roots of such power. In India with its vast arable terrain and agrarian society, influence required control over land tenure and revenue. Accordingly, during the 1960s numerous historians explored Indian agriculture and reconstructed the dynamics of administration, settlement, and rural economy. The resulting studies, while innovative, still converged on powerful individuals, elites, and institutions and the influence they wielded. Residents, rajas, zamindars, talukdars, jagirdar s, and moneylenders; prominent clans, Hindu temples and math s, Islamic orders, and British government filled the pages of these works.
More recently, beginning in the early 1970s, some scholars have turned their attention from land revenue to land use . This new approach has resulted in two noteworthy shifts of emphasis: (1) from affluent elites to peasants and workers, and (2) from wealth and productivity of land to alteration of land and the attendant consequences. These shifts have yielded new historical studies of forest administration; change in the vegetation; development of roads, railways, and irrigation; sanitation and public health; and urbanization. The topics can be categorized as ecological, since in each case a primary concern is the relationship of the environment to social, economic, and political affairs.
During the past dozen years scholars such as Bayly, Clark, Hagen, Haynes, Klein, Ludden, McAlpin, Oldenburg, Richards, Tucker, Whitcombe, and Yang have addressed various aspects of this relationship.[2] In the process, they have created an abundant and fascinating literature, which contributes significantly to our understanding of colonial India. A notable feature of this historical work is that it is rendered from exceptionally scanty resources. Ecology and environmental degradation interested early observers, chroniclers, or administrators only insofar as these processes affected productivity, revenue, and public health. Historians investigating environmental change and its impact, therefore, have needed to examine sources particularly closely and employ them creatively.
[2] C. A. Bayly (agriculture, ecology, trade, and politics); Alice W. Clark (demographics, mortality); James R. Hagen (land use, vegetation change); Edward S. Haynes (agriculture, vegetation change); Ira Klein (agriculture, population, public health); David Ludden (ecology, irrigation); Michelle Burge McAlpin (railroads, famine, vegetation change); Veena Talwar Oldenburg (urbanization, sanitation, public health); John F. Richards (cash cropping, vegetation change); Richard P. Tucker (forest administration, devegetation); Elizabeth Whitcombe (public works, irrigation, environmental change); Anand Y. Yang (peasant economy, migration). This list is certainly not exhaustive, but it illustrates the types of subjects being studied. Specific titles are cited in this chapter.
Banaras:
Characteristic Features
In nearly all ways the Banaras region has been a prototypical central-Gangetic-plain tract dominated by a large urban center. For centuries Banaras shared many of the characteristics of such relatively nearby locales as Patna, Ghazipur, Allahabad, Faizabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, and Mathura. In common with these towns, Banaras originated in ancient times, lay on a Gangetic river, exploited a fertile hinterland, developed into a commercial hub, grew to formidable size, and served as an administrative capital during Mughal and British times. And in withstanding the innumerable political changes that followed its establishment, Banaras shared with its neighboring communities a strong sense of survival. For all of northern India, as C. A. Bayly has observed, lay in a zone precariously exposed to variable and volatile climate (Bayly 1983:74).
To facilitate survival in the face of political and environmental uncertainty, Banaras relied on a strong sense of identity. Like Hindu Ayodhya (Faizabad), Prayaga (Allahabad), and Mathura, and Buddhist Pataliputra (Patna), Banaras remained a major center of religious pilgrimage. Accordingly, the city has been associated with Hindu religious sympathies throughout its existence (Calcutta Review 1864:256).
But at least two factors distinguished Banaras from its sister pilgrimage sites. First, Banaras was centrally situated astride the Ganges and at the hub of an ancient subcontinental road network, within reach of western, central, and eastern India. More important, Banaras was perceived as the center of the world, the place of creation, the holiest spot on earth, the ultimate destination for all Hindus (Eck 1982:5–6; Havell 1905). Endowed with such authoritative religious sanction, it easily surpassed other centers in importance. And benefiting from ecclesiastical supremacy, Banaras achieved secular prominence. From its alleged founding in the sixth century B.C ., the city grew to be one of northern India's largest by the early nineteenth century.[3] The Banaras region, moreover, was one of the most densely populated on the subcontinent, more than twice as dense as any European country.
It is Banaras's religious uniqueness, its resultant preeminence, and its magnetic appeal which set it apart from otherwise similar regions. These features have shaped the development of the city and its envi-
[3] Bishop Heber believed that Banaras was at that time larger than any European city (Heber 1828, 1:270). Hamilton grossly exaggerated the population at 582,000 (Hamilton 1820:306). J. Thornton suggested that the district's population was 200,000 (Shakespear 1848:5). The 1872 census enumerated 175,000 in the city (Plowden 1873). Whatever the precise figure, Banaras's population was one of north India's largest throughout the century.
rons. Dense population and continuous pilgrimage have spawned persistent environmental consequences.
Environment and Resource Base
Banaras is situated approximately halfway between Delhi and Calcutta, in the heart of Gangetic India. Since Mughal times the city has been within a district (zillah) of the same name. During the nineteenth century the district was the size of Rhode Island (2,600 square kilometers). The district came under British domination by 1781, administered first within the Bengal Presidency, then the North-Western Provinces, and finally, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
Physical Features
The Banaras region lies within the Middle Ganges Plain; more specifically, at the southwestern corner of the lower Ganges-Ghaghara doab (interfluve).[4] The terrain throughout this portion of the Ganges drainage basin is flat and slightly elevated (eighty meters). Banaras city is situated fifteen meters above the Ganges, on its northern bank. The river constitutes the southern border of the district, until just before the city. At that point the Ganges turns northward, bisecting the district before reaching Ghazipur. Within this portion of its course the Ganges has flowed stably for centuries, but seasonal flooding leaves small lakes (jhil s[*] ), used for irrigating crops. At the eastern extreme of the district the Ganges is joined by the Gomati and then the Karamnasa River.
Thus drained by these three rivers and a number of smaller streams, the district has possessed abundant surface-water resources. One consequence is the region's rich alluvial soils, deposited by the Ganges and its Himalayan tributaries. Textures vary from sandy to loamy to clayey, but virtually all the soils of the region have been fertile and nonsaline. Additionally, alluvial soils tend to be porous and are able to store groundwater. Aquifers exist, and the water table is generally high, permitting exploitation for drinking and irrigation. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century groundwater surveys did not exist for the region, and tube-well irrigation was infrequent.
In addition to possessing fertile soils, the area lies within a zone of adequate average rainfall. Nevill, writing in the 1909 district gazetteer, listed the mean annual precipitation for 1864 to 1906 as 1,000 millime-
[4] Much detailed information exists describing the geography and physical features of Banaras district in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This section is not comprehensive, but merely provides a sketch of salient characteristics. For further data, see Hamilton 1820:302–9; Hunter 1881, 1:532–34; Nevill 1909a:1–23; R. L. Singh 1971:183–251; R. N. Mishra 1977:1–22.
ters. But as Bayly has noted, variation was extreme, ranging from a minimum of 540 milimeters to a maximum of 1,620 (Nevill 1909a:22; Bayly 1983:74). There is little evidence to suggest that the region's climate has changed significantly over the past several centuries.[5] Impressed by the soils and water resources of the area, early Europeans traveling through the district and nineteenth-century administrators were uniformly sanguine about the region's agricultural potential.
It is likely that this agricultural potential was in fact intensely exploited. Already by 1820, according to the region's first gazetteer, nearly all arable land was being cropped. Tens of centuries of human occupation and agriculture had stripped most of the original vegetative cover (Hamilton 1820:306–8; R. L. Singh 1971:204–5). According to Nevill, by the turn of the century no forest remained, only jungles. In the remaining jungles, wildlife population and diversity has been reduced appreciably. Banaras, Nevill wrote, had become one of the province's poorest districts in regard to fauna. Once abounding in predators, deer, and antelope, the area retained only a rich bird population (Nevill 1909a:14, 17–18).
As for nonrenewable natural resources, the Banaras region has been poorly endowed. The alluvial plain is devoid of all rock but limestone (kankar ) and contains no minerals. Kankar , gravel, sand, and clay were the only useful products. These were employed in road building, construction, brick making, and the manufacture of lime. The nearest commercial stone quarries were in nearby Ghazipur, Chunar, and Mirzapur (Hamilton 1820:303; Purser 1859:563; Nevill 1909a:15–16).
Agriculture
As was indicated above, Banaras is situated in a zone that Bayly has termed agriculturally "stable."[6] During Akbar's time the region was known to be productive, and records indicated that urbanization induced substantial increases in cultivated area during the seventeenth century. In the 1820s Hamilton and Heber noted continued extension of cultivation, increased demand and high prices of cropland, and shortage of grazing land. By 1848 Shakespear reported in his statistical survey that 71 percent of the district's area (181,000 hectare) was culti-
[5] Climatologists and social scientists continue to debate whether climatic change or human activity has been primarily responsible for desertification and other forms of environmental degradation over the past century.
[6] There is ample documentation on agricultural conditions in the Banaras area, so this section simply summarizes important characteristics. As with all statistics on nineteenth-century India, figures must be treated skeptically, owing to faulty enumeration techniques and reporting. For additional figures, see Hamilton 1820:302–5; Shakespear 1848:154–62; Colvin 1872; Nevill 1909a:31–49; Administration Reports 1896–1900; Ganguli 1938: 1–110; Whitcombe 1972: A. Siddiqi 1973.
vated (Shakespear 1848: 154; Heber 1828:255; Bayly 1983:76; Sinha 1974). Although Hamilton's and Shakespear's figures can hardly be considered accurate, it is probable that cultivation did increase throughout the region during this period.
Given the high proportion of sown acreage, further extension was limited. A survey in 1878–1882 showed a mere 2.4 percent increase in sown area.[7] In the district gazetteer Nevill considered even this small gain illusory, attributing it to previous underreporting of terrains in the Ganges floodplain. The reported total remained essentially stable through the rest of the century, prompting speculation that the limits of cultivation had been attained. As late as 1931 cultivated area stood officially at 74.7 percent of total area (Nevill 1909a:31–32; Ganguli 1938:6).
From the beginning of British rule, then, agriculture seemingly occupied most of the arable terrain. Cultivation, as was shown, was being extended to its limits. Two additional developments may be noted; irrigated area was increasing, and more and more land was being double-cropped. Heber, on his approach to Banaras, observed that the country was "imperfectly" irrigated. Certainly he saw no canals, for there were none. The topography of this portion of the Gangetic plain has not been conducive to canal irrigation. First, the large rivers lay too far below their adjoining banks. And in some places outlying water-deficient areas were at higher elevations than the rivers. In the absence of canals, growers employed floodwater, jhil s[*] , tanks, and wells to irrigate their crops. The earliest semireliable estimates of irrigated area are from the late 1880s. From then to the end of the century, one-quarter to two-fifths of cultivated land (40,000 to 64,000 hectares) reportedly was irrigated, depending on annual rainfall—the less rain, the more irrigation (Nevill 1909a:42–43; Administration Report 1896–97:6).
In contrast to the early extension of cultivation and irrigation, double-cropping remained uncommon until the latter part of the century. Shakespear fails to mention this mode of farming. Nevill, without indicating the source for his estimates, lists the 1840 double-cropped area as a mere 2,700 hectares (1.7 percent of cultivated area). By 1886, according to his data, the acreage had risen twelvefold, to 34,000 hectares (21.3 percent of cultivated area). If subsequent figures are indicative of general trends, this area fluctuated widely each year. In the four growing years beginning in 1896–97, 31,000, 24,000, 37,000 and 35,000 hectares were reported to be double-cropped. Like irrigated areas,
[7] The actual acreage figures appeared to decrease (from 180 to 161,000 hectares), indicating earlier overestimation of cultivation. The amount of land cultivated reportedly increased from 71 to 72.7 percent of total (Nevill 1909a:31).
these areas varied in proportion to annual rainfall, and observers have noted a close correspondence between irrigation and double-cropping (Nevill 1909a:32–33; Administration Reports 1896–1900:6; Ganguli 1938:45). Since both practices were associated with improved yields, exaggerated reported increases may have served to illustrate progress under British rule.
The crops grown in Banaras were typical for the region. Fertile soil, good drainage, and adequate rainfall enabled rice cultivation. Rice remained the leading crop throughout the century, covering as much as two-fifths of the terrain sown in the autumn (kharif[*] ). Barley was the next most common superior grain, followed by inferior grains and pulses (jowar[*], bajra[*] , peas, gram , and arhar ). In addition to grains and pulses, major crops were sugarcane, which decreased in importance, opium, fodder, fruits, and vegetables (Nevill 1909a:34–41; Administration Reports 1896–1900:6).
Livestock, an important component of the agricultural system, were not generally bred locally, but were imported and purchased at fairs. Although pastureland was limited, the numbers were nevertheless great. Cattle were not enumerated until the end of the century; by then the census listed some quarter million bulls, bullocks, cows, buffalos, and calves. Another 100,000 sheep, goats, mules, donkeys, and horses made up the remaining livestock population. Changes in this population are difficult to estimate, but Nevill believed that the number of goats and sheep had declined, mostly because of extended cultivation (Nevill 1909a: 19–21; Administration Report 1896–1900:6).
Human Population
Human population size in the various districts greatly interested British administrators. Yet for most of the nineteenth century census figures remained quite unreliable, often suggesting puzzling or contradictory trends. Recently developed techniques have permitted historians to adjust these figures in order to estimate more accurately some characteristic features of population. Alice Clark employs some of these methods to analyze fertility and mortality trends in Banaras (Clark 1986).
Of interest here are the effects of population pressure on environmental resources. As was noted above, the population of Banaras city was one of northern India's largest throughout the nineteenth century. As a result, the district's population density was listed as the highest in the province. In 1872 it was estimated at more than 300 persons per square kilometer, a representative figure for most of the century. As in much of north India, the measured population of Banaras remained
stable, having attained a relative maximum by mid-century. In fact the low variation in this measure (300 to 350 per square kilometer) seems to mirror the stability of cultivated acreage, which was also reported to have achieved a relative maximum at that time (Shakespear 1848: 12–13, 154; Plowden 1873:xxv, 2–3; Hunter 1881:532; Nevill 1909a: 83–85).
It would be deceptive, however, to suppose that stability in population size and cultivated acreage precluded pressure on land. On the contrary, population increase may have been limited by poverty-induced high mortality, rather than by prosperity. Crowding, land scarcity, and low productivity likely exerted continuous pressure on available resources (Klein 1974:194–99).
Environmental Alterations
Physical environment is subject to continuous modification from natural causes, such as tectonic forces, temperature extremes, fire, wind and river erosion, vegetation processes, and animal action. No less than natural agents, human actions can result in widespread and irreversible environmental change. Many of these processes occur insidiously over prolonged periods. In such instances, the effects often are cumulative. Other human actions may be more sudden and concentrated, resulting in immediate and noticeable change.
Whether continuous or precipitous, these human actions frequently have degraded the affected environment. The nineteenth century, a time of British consolidation in Gangetic India, witnessed both types of phenomena. Traditional environmental alterations continued, while imported technologies introduced new, more threatening agents of change.[8]
Agents of Continuous Change
The Banaras region, like most of the Gangetic plain, has been continuously populated for some twenty-five hundred years. In the process local residents established an important urban center, maintained its streets and buildings, connected it to other communities, supplied its industrial needs, and fed its population. Throughout this time human occupation affected the surroundings in a variety of ways.
Land Use and Resource Depletion . Over the centuries while Banaras city grew, its inhabitants exploited the adjoining terrain and its resources.
[8] For similar analyses of environmental change in Africa, see, for example, Advisory Committee on the Sahel 1983; and Gritzner 1981.
They cultivated the land to near capacity; hunted wildlife; raised livestock; and extracted timber, fuel, stone, sand, clay, and groundwater. Those materials and supplies which were unavailable locally were imported and brought in by road or stream.[9]
As Banaras continued to grow and prosper, surrounding lands strained to supply the rising needs of the city and its visitors. By 1800 the region's resource base was becoming strained. The town itself was built on the site of the legendary Forest of Bliss. But by the nineteenth century, according to Diana Eck, townspeople retained only memories of the once luxuriant woods. One central neighborhood came to be known as the "Cut-Down Forest" (Eck 1982:29).
In the countryside, too, large tracts had been cleared for farming, leaving only isolated trees and planted groves. The extensive fields in place by 1800 blanketed what was once a natural habitat of dense forest. The original cover included stands of valuable trees, such as sal (Shorea robusta ) shisham (Dalbergia sissoo ), jaman (Eugenia jambolana ), mahua (Bassia latifolia ), ber (Ziziphus jujuba ), pipal (Ficus religiosa ), neem (Azadirachta indica ), pagun[*] (Bombax ceiba ), banyan (Ficus bengalensis ), tamarind (Tamarindus indica ), and babul (Acacia arabica ). Apart from isolated stands near villages, few of these trees remained in the nineteenth century. Grasses and shrubs, too were continuously grazed and harvested for manufacturing bricks (Troup 1921, 2:8; 3:4, 147, 231; Stebbing 1922–26: glossary; R. L. Singh 1971:204).
This large-scale devegetation of the countryside put an enormous strain on the soil resources. No longer compacted by broad root systems, topsoils were swept away by floods and blown off by winds. And depletion of leguminous trees and shrubs deprived the earth of the nitrogen-fixing action of roots, leaving soils deficient in bacterial content. The stresses of repeated cropping and traditional shallow tillage minimized soil rotation, accelerated nutrient depletion, and reduced fertility. Finally, with firewood growing scarcer owing to devegetation, manure was employed as fuel, reducing the input of fertilizer (Crooke 1897:322–34).
The familiar cycle of deforestation, reduction of biotic diversity, soil erosion, reduction of fertility, and decline in productivity certainly was manifest in the Banaras region. The responses to this process were equally common: extension of cultivation to terrains previously considered "wastelands" or "barren" lands; increased irrigation; or multiple cropping.
[9] For discussions of land-use changes elsewhere in colonial India, see Richards and McAlpin 1983:68–94; Tucker 1983:146–66; Richards, Hagen, and Haynes 1985: 699–732.
As was noted above, British observers asserted that Banarsi cultivators increasingly adopted irrigation and multiple cropping techniques. Reclamation of barren land also occurred but was severely limited by availability. Already by the end of the eighteenth century most such land had been plowed and sown. Although varying perceptions of what constitutes wasteland render that term ambiguous, figures confirm that little such terrain was available by the 1840s. It appears that the amount may have decreased somewhat between 1848 and 1872 (from 19 to 15 percent), but stabilized at the latter level through the rest of the century. There is some evidence, meanwhile, that farmers were simultaneously abandoning previously productive lands. In 1788 Jonathan Duncan had already noted the desertion of formerly productive fields. Nearly a hundred years later the provincial land-settlement report of 1872 estimated that 5 percent of cultivated land had been recently abandoned (Shakespear 1848: 169–70; Colvin 1872, Appendix:16; K. P. Mishra 1975:85).
In sum, despite an ostensibly stable population, pressure on farmland was demonstrably heightening. The measures taken to compensate for erosion and soil depletion aggravated the situation. Each of the three alternatives employed—reclamation, irrigation, and multiple cropping—was intensive, adding further stresses on finite resources.
Religious Activity and Environmental Pollution . The processes described above were principally rural and resulted from land use intensification. Their effects were to degrade a limited resource base. Such phenomena have been common to many societies and typical for much of agrarian north India.
Considerably less typical and far more controversial have been the alleged ecological consequences of religious activity in Banaras. As the principal focal point of Hindu pilgrimage and the leading center of Brahmin ritual observance, Banaras has drawn enormous numbers of visitors throughout the year and on special occasions. It is principally the Ganges that affords this distinction, and it is on its banks that most activity occurs.
Primarily as a result of the vast number of participants, the riparian environment has been affected. Crowding, sewage generation, and the influx of ill visitors have caused serious public health concern since the beginning of the colonial period. Other actions may have contributed in small ways to riverine pollution, but their effects have been consistently overstated. Throughout British rule, Hindu religious practices were termed responsible for the pollution of the river and the adjoining areas.
For centuries throngs of pilgrims have converged on Banaras. In addition to the daily arrival of Hindus seeking personal salvation, sea-
sonal fairs or eclipses drew occasional crowds of a hundred thousand or more. These congregants required food, drink, and other substantive needs, adding further pressure on overtaxed resources (Hamilton 1820:301; Nevill 1909a:66–67; 1909b:85; Oude and Rohilkund Railway 1875:1169; 1878:1057; K. P. Mishra 1975:67). Their contribution to local degradation has been notable, but environmental pollution due to their presence has been a lingering concern. This is particularly ironic given the religious function of Banaras: to purify and cleanse ritual pollution. Diana Eck notes the importance of running water in general, and of Ganges water in particular, in purification. But this notion, as she recognizes, is unrelated to microbial purity (Eck 1982:216–17).
To colonial observers, eager to introduce Western hygienic principles, Hindu practices appeared unclean. Perceiving a real threat to their own health and well-being, Europeans eagerly condemned certain ritual acts. With the advent of the germ theory, objections that had been merely moral were accorded scientific sanction. By the 1850s a burgeoning body of literature joined religious criticism with social outrage and fear (Calcutta Review 1848:404–36; 1851:156–230; 1864: 253–94).
Foreign observers repeatedly cited the infectious nature of practices they found deplorable. Of these, perhaps the most shocking to British sensibilities was the Hindu custom of cremating the deceased and casting the remains into the Ganges. In theory cremation itself was not objectionable. In practice, however, it was noted that scarcity of fuel often resulted in incomplete cremation.[10] The consequences of partial consumption aroused an outpouring of righteous anger among British residents and administrators. They were appalled by "scorched trunks" thrown into the Ganges to float toward the sea "in a state of horrible decomposition, poisoning the water of narrow streams, or sickening the eye, whilst tumbled in the torrents of the Ganges" (Calcutta Review 1848:416; 1851:222). Additional concern was aroused by other aspects of cremation: decomposing corpses awaiting cremation, and burial of incompletely burned bones and dead animals.
On several occasions colonial officials attempted to intervene, citing public health considerations. In one such action in 1868 the Banaras Municipal Board asserted its right to close burning ghats or cemeteries deemed problematic. Within days, after reassessing the effective threat posed by the ghats and gauging popular feeling, the Magistrate repealed the proclamation (Bharat Jiwan [23 September] in SVN for 1912:898).
[10] Perhaps the earliest Western notice of this phenomenon was by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676, 2:231).
Disposal of human and animal bodies in the Ganges was another source of English consternation. Although these acts occurred, it is unlikely that their volume could have appreciably affected the quality of the water. Modern residents of Banaras, including the present Maharaja, insist that the above allegations are inaccurate and overstated (N. Kumar communication, March 1986).
But if the burning ghats were unlikely sources of pollution, other long-term human actions measurably affected the quality of the Ganges and its banks. The dumping of waste, sewage, and industrial effluent into the river; the bathing of persons and cattle; the washing of clothes and vessels; and emissions of noxious smoke represented real hazards. In addition, poor drainage allowed accumulation of stagnant waters in ponds (Bharat Jiwan [1 May] in SVN for 1893:191; Gopalkrishnan 1985:3–4). As early as 1864 the Calcutta Review noted that the "water is of deadly influence, and the vapour from which fills the air with fever-breeding and cholera-breeding miasma." The journal called for immediate steps to improve drainage in the vicinity of the ghats (Calcutta Review 1864:293).
Sensitized by the press, authorities and local residents feared the percolation of toxins and pollutants into the groundwater. In response, in 1886 concerned citizens formed a local pollution-prevention society, the Kashi Ganga Prasadini Sabha. The Sabha's primary objective was to eliminate river contamination, undertake a drainage scheme, and purify drinking water. Nevill reported that the project was completed in 1892. But in February 1893 the Bharat Jiwan of Banaras complained that drains had yet to be constructed and that wastewater continued to flow through city streets. And K. S. Muthiah, writing in 1911, confirmed the failure to implement its scheme (Nevill 1909a:262–63; Administration Report 1896–97: 167; Bharat Jiwan [6 February] in SVN for 1893:69; Muthiah 1911:164).
Perhaps the greatest immediate threat to public health was posed by the streams of crowds from throughout India, whose mere presence acted as a universal disseminator of infection. Since Banaras has been a magnet for persons wishing to die in the holy city, many visitors have been aged and generally in poor health. Accordingly, the city has been subjected to epidemics of cholera, typhus, and plague, and to chronic outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. The mortality rate from disease remained one of the province's highest through most of the century (Shola-i-Tur in SVN for 1871:704; Administration Report 1896–97: 6–7; Klein 1974:210).
One supposed factor contributing to epidemics was cited in an 1848 issue of the Calcutta Review . According to the author, sick and infirm individuals, "anxious for their rewards in the next life," were being en-
couraged to set up residence in crowded, damp, unsanitary huts by the river. The article decried this practice, which it termed "ghat murders." Certain that the custom hastened death, the author warned against the "unsalutary" effects of the vicinity (Calcutta Review 1848:404–36).
While similar issues surfaced in other cities, the status of Banaras as the country's leading pilgrimage center heightened British sensitivity to the polluting aspects of religious activity. Sentiments shared by Europeans elsewhere in India found clear expression in Banaras. Certainly, fears of contamination and deadly disease were not baseless. But many observers were unable to distinguish between the real dangers to public health resulting from unsanitary practices and assumed threats posed by certain ritual acts. The resulting mix of missionary righteousness and scientific theory directed unexpected attention to the environment, but the attendant rhetoric often obscured the nature of the problem.
Modern Agents of Change
The processes described in the preceding section resulted from ongoing practices, not from any sudden changes. Ninteenth-century improvements in transportation facilitated travel and thus increased pilgrimage to Banaras. The greater traffic placed additional stress on local resources and accelerated riverfront pollution. The modern transportation network and other newly established public works also had a more direct impact on regional environment. Roads and railways were superimposed on the rural landscape. First their construction, then their operation and maintenance, resulted in pronounced and usually permanent modifications of the terrain (Varady 1981, 1985a, 1985b).
Public Works Construction . From the 1830s to the end of the century northern India underwent a period of intense public-works construction. Cognizant of the benefits of improved communications, the ruling East India Company initiated a vigorous program for road improvement. Even earlier, in the first years of British administration, Collector Jonathan Duncan had authorized road improvements near the city. The first major project was a complete renovation of the old imperial highway connecting Bengal to the Punjab. Renamed the Grand Trunk Road, this throughfare was graded, then metaled (paved) with crushed limestone. Other provincial roads to Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Allahabad, Mirzapur, and Sasaram soon received similar attention. During the decade 1840–1850 alone the British constructed some fifty thousand kilometers of roads throughout their Indian territories (Abbott 1846:56–74; Sanyal 1930:3).
Even before the provincial road network was completed, the government turned its attention to railways. By the mid-1840s entrepreneurs
and administrators had discussed the idea in England, and soon they took the first steps to actuate their decisions. By 1854 the first train of the East Indian Railway Company (EIR) left Howrah to initiate the line that would parallel the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi and the Punjab.
For the next eight years the tracks crept toward Banaras. Construction continued northward through Bengal up to the Ganges, and then via Bhagalpur and Patna along the southern bank to Mughal Sarai, across the river from Banaras. After the completion in 1862 of the 860-kilometer route from Calcutta, construction continued on to Mirzapur, eventually to join the branch descending from Kanpur (East Indian Railways 1853–63; Bengal Past and Present 1908:55–61; Varady 1981:51).
Building roads and railway lines was both labor intensive and resource intensive. In each case, after rights of ways were secured the surface needed preparation. Gangs of thousands of beldar s[*] (laborers) from the nearby countryside were hired. Housed in meager shacks, underfed, and overworked, these laborers commonly were ill. Epidemics among road and rail gangs were frequent and destructive. There are records of camps of ten thousand losing up to a third of the workers to cholera and other diseases. Worse, the contagion often spread to nearby towns (Varady 1981:188–89; United Provinces Public Health Dept. 1903).
The work teams were employed to clear jungles of vegetation, excavate tree roots, flatten roadbeds, lay gravel or limestone, dig drainage ditches, construct embankments and berms, and bridge streams and nalla s. Additionally, railways required placement of creosoted sleepers (ties) every seventy-five centimeters (Bingham 1858:3–21; Muir 1858: 277–79).
The quantities of materials required were prodigious. To complete eighty kilometers of railway tracks in Banaras district, the contractor executed 1.2 million cubic meters of earthwork and 6,000 cubic meters of brickwork; in addition, 210,000 cubic meters of ballast were used. Limestone, gravel, and sand were obtained from neighboring floodplains and carted to the sites. The effects of such large-scale removal have not been studied, but elsewhere quarrying of stream beds has seriously affected flow and drainage patterns (Purser 1859:563; Davis 1985:1–5).
In the case of rail lines, vast amounts of timber were used for sleepers. Based on figures used by Tucker for the Rajputana Railway, tracks in Banaras district alone would have required a hundred thousand sleepers. Although some hardwood sal remained available in the region, stands were too depleted to furnish the railways's needs. Instead, the wood was imported, either from England or from the upper
Gangetic tracts northeast of Delhi, forested with deodar (Cedrus deodara ). The demand on Himalayan timber resources was thus considerable, especially since sleepers needed replacement every five years (Tucker 1983:160–61; East Indian Railways 1856:505; 1859a:531).
Although timber was not available in Banaras, local firewood and charcoal supplies were employed to make burnt-clay ballast and to bake the bricks used for bridges, stations, and culverts. In any case, as a Calcutta correspondent wrote to the Times in 1862, "the want of India is daily becoming more and more a want of wood." In the Banaras region, as in the rest of northern India, the railways clearly were agents of deforestation (East Indian Railways 1859a:531; 1862:555).
Road and Railway Operation and Maintenance . Devegetation and resource depletion were two important results of road and rail construction. Once in place, the networks continued to affect the surrounding environment. First, roads and railways, by their very presence, interrupted natural landscape. In the interest of efficiency and directness, they both sought linearity. Rather than skirting streams, it was cheaper to cross them. In nearby Son district the EIR alone constructed 240 bridges and culverts in 1860. Primary and secondary roadways also crossed rivers and streams whenever they were encountered. These interruptions interfered with drainage and flow patterns. Runoff characteristics, already altered by devegetation, were further disturbed. Instead of being stored in soils, water was lost to agriculture. Puddles and ponds were formed alongside thoroughfares, providing breeding habitats for disease vectors. Similarly, culverts silted up with lost topsoil. After heavy monsoon rains rushing waters created gullies and arroyos, further hastening soil erosion (East Indian Railways 1859b:1189–90; Colvin Gazette [15 April] in SVN for 1890:251; Hindostan [15 August] in SVN for 1902:527; Varady 1985b:2–3: Whitcombe 1972:12).
Partly from weather extremes, and partly from the relentless action of hoofed, wheeled, or rail traffic, surfaces needed constant repair and maintenance. Like the original construction, this activity required extensive labor and supplies. Metaled roads were paved smooth with ten centimeters of pounded limestone. Before long the road rutted and became impassable, demanding full resurfacing. Railbeds were similarly affected by rain, flooding, and heavy wear. Patrolling work crews added ballast and replaced broken and rotten sleepers. Upkeep of the nineteenth-century transportation network placed a continual drain on stone, sand, and timber resources.
Locomotives, moreover, required fuel. For much of the century engines burned wood, procured wherever it was sold, preferably in the vicinity of the route. So serious was the problem of supply that in the early 1860s, the Calcutta Review reported, "a great cry arose that
the Railway must soon stop for want of fuel." Though perhaps exaggerated, the concern was valid, as Indian railway operation consumed enormous amounts of firewood (50,000 kilograms per kilometer per year, according to one estimate). In some areas roots were burned as fuel. And by the mid-1860s some railway firms were calling for private fuel-wood plantations to meet growing demand. Only the advent of cheap coal enabled the EIR and other lines to continue operating (Calcutta Review 1867:262–327).
Conclusion
During the nineteenth century the area surrounding Banaras was rich in renewable natural resources and remained one of northern India's relatively prosperous areas. In most ways it typified the Gangetic plain. The region's one outstanding feature, its appeal to pilgrims, magnified similar conditions manifest elsewhere. A look at human-induced environmental change in Banaras, therefore, offers some insight into the processes of resource degradation and environmental pollution throughout the Gangetic belt.
Like other urban centers, Banaras relied heavily on local production of food, fuel, and building materials. The perpetual requirements of the resident population, coupled with the need to provide for millions of visitors, strained the capacity of the countryside to respond to the demand. Colonial agricultural officers, seeking to modernize farming and increase yields, introduced techniques that intensified cultivation. Production rose, but by the end of the century fertility was being depleted, and available cropland was diminishing. In the process, vegetation was being cleared to permit sowing, and soil erosion accelerated, threatening to reverse recent gains in productivity.
Other modern innovations brought further degradation of the rural environment. Road and rail construction scarred the watersheds and altered drainage patterns. And once in place, the new transportation systems continued to exact a toll from the surrounding terrain. Maintenance materials and fuel wood were constantly required, and the action of traffic hastened erosion.
Nearer the city, the presence of festival-goers, pilgrims, and residents affected the riparian environment. The quality of the river and of groundwater deteriorated, and epidemic disease vectors found hospitable habitats. Environmental health became a widely discussed issue among Europeans. Fear of disease prompted concerted attacks on religious practices seen as morally and hygienically unacceptable.
In sum, the effects of human activity in the Banaras region underlined the city's dependence on local resources and ecological stability. The prosperity and physical well-being of Banarsis required abundant agricultural production, a steady supply of construction materials, and a relatively disease-free environment. As this chapter has suggested, these conditions generally deteriorated during the nineteenth century.
Nine—
The Ecology and Cosmology of Disease in the Banaras Region
David Arnold
The cities of northern India have begun to engage the attention of historians at several levels of enquiry and analysis—as centers of trade and political activity, for example, or as focal points for the cultural and religious life of the region. Some interest has been shown, too, in the nature of the colonial impact upon these cities and how British ideas and policies affected their physical form and social order. Anthony D. King in his study of "colonial urban development" in Old and New Delhi, J. B. Harrison in his "sanitary history" of Allahabad, and Veena Talwar Oldenburg in her account of the "making of colonial Lucknow" have pointed, inter alia, to the importance of Western ideas of health and sanitation in the transformation, or attempted transformation, of urban north India during the colonial period (King 1976, Harrison 1980, Oldenburg 1984). As Oldenburg in particular shows, the British determination that the city "must be clean" was a matter of more than simply sanitary significance: it revealed underlying colonial attitudes and preoccupations; it touched upon political cultural concerns that were central to colonial control in the urban setting.
There is much to be gained from such an approach, not least for the political insights it gives to a subject too often regarded as obscurely municipal and dry as dust and for the depth of the colonial divide it displays. In a modest way this essay attempts a similar line of enquiry for another north Indian city, Banaras. But there is a danger in concentrating on a single city or artificially divorcing it from its natural hinterland, and this would seem especially constrictive in discussing diseases and epidemics that commonly ignored municipal limits and city boundaries. The health of Banaras was, like that of other cities of the north Indian plain, closely bound up with the region as a whole and
with extensive networks of pilgrimage, trade, communications, and migration, as well as with its status as a major Indian city.
Like cities elsewhere in India, those of the upper and middle Gangetic plain were, no doubt, subjected to a greater degree of medical and sanitary intervention during the colonial period than was the countryside around them. One crude index of this was the far higher level of expenditure by municipalities than district boards on public health in the late colonial era. Upwards of 35 percent of municipal income in the United Provinces (U.P.) was spent in this way, compared with a bare 3 percent of the considerably smaller funds available to the district boards (ARDPH 1925:49; ARDPH 1947:8–9). The cities of the region also maintained political and cultural traditions that could be strongly resistant to Western medicine and sanitation. Anticipated hostility from the urban centers of the North-Western Provinces—from Lucknow and Kanpur especially—and from Delhi forced the moderation in 1898 of the government's proposed antiplague measures, even though similar ones had already been imposed upon the towns and cities of western India.[1] Clearly, then, there were respects in which cities stood apart from their hinterland, and the cities of the north were distinctive even in colonial eyes. What is important, however, is to set this distinctiveness against or alongside the aspects of disease and medicine which tied a city like Banaras to its wider environment.
Diseases, and especially the epidemic diseases on which the first half of this essay concentrates, thus help to locate Banaras within a series of interlocking temporal, spatial, and cultural relationships. To some extent, this might be called a Braudelian approach, in that it gives emphasis to the long-term trends, as well as identifying some of the shorterterm cycles and fluctuations to which Banaras and the region were exposed. There are some evident parallels here with C. A. Bayly's broad perspective on north Indian trade and politics in the "age of British expansion," though the nature of the sources available forces one to concentrate mainly on the years after 1870, rather than, as in Bayly's book, on the earlier period (Bayly 1983). But I share the reservations of those critics of the Braudelian longue durée who, like Jean Chesneaux, feel that such "massive history is in reality a passive history," resulting in a "depoliticized long run" (1978:98). Where Braudel sets out with only a "dialectic of space and time (geography and history" (1975:16), this essay sees a need to juxtapose the long-term trends and influences with more immediate consequences of human activity and will. If people are to be understood as active agents in the making
[1] Government of India, Home (Sanitary), May 1898, nos. 421–567, National Archives of India (NAI); Home, August 1898, nos. 777–813, NAI.
of their own history, and not merely as the inert recipients of whatever long-term changes might be forced upon them, it is necessary to consider the perceptions that they bring to their own situation. It is one of the arguments of this chapter that both the ecology and the cosmology of disease have a place in the social history of health in the Banaras region.
The Seasonality and Periodicity of Epidemic Disease
As a major urban center, Banaras under British rule shared many of the problems and consequences of overcrowded and insanitary conditions, contaminated water supplies, inadequate sewage disposal, and deficient public health services which were the lot of other colonial cities in India and indeed of cities throughout the world during the period. Although by the 1930s Banaras and similar Indian cities were better equipped with hospitals and dispensaries, piped water and sewers, vaccinators and sanitary inspectors than the rural populations around them, urban morbidity and mortality rates remained, nonetheless, disproportionately high. This was particularly so in the case of Banaras. In U.P. as a whole during the quarter-century 1901–1925, urban mortality averaged 45.08 per thousand inhabitants: for the province generally (the towns included) the rate was 37.44. The figure for Banaras district, 33.74, was slightly below the provincial average, but for its principal city the mortality rate was a startling 57.88, considerably above even the average urban level in U.P. (calculated from five-year averages in ARSC 1906, 1911, 1916; ARDPH 1921, 1926). Banaras was one of the most deadly cities in northern India. The explanation for this was not just that Banaras was a populous and insanitary city: it was also a consequence of its geographical, cultural, and epidemiological context.
Never a purely random occurrence, disease reflected the material conditions of human existence, the influences of climate, vegetation, and landscape, and the characteristics of social organization and cultural behavior. Each disease enjoyed its own distinctive, if to human eyes enigmatic, relationship to the human environment. In a region where the seasons were well marked and the advent or failure of the monsoon rains had such momentous consequences, the incidence of disease (especially epidemic disease) bore a striking correspondence with the annual and seasonal variations in rainfall, temperature, and humidity.
Seasonality was more evident in some diseases than in others. In Banaras district, as in much of eastern U.P., the period following the onset of the monsoon in mid to late June was generally the unhealthiest
time of the year, with mortality from "fevers" (a vague description but probably including a preponderance of deaths from malaria)[2] and dysentery particularly high. In general, the dry months from December through March and April were the healthier part of the year. But it was during the dry season that smallpox, a disease widely prevalent in eastern U.P.,[3] made its annual appearance. Smallpox flourished with the spring—so much so that further east in Bengal it was known as basanta rog , the "spring disease" (Wadley 1980:38). It reached its greatest intensity between March and June, fading rapidly with the arrival of the monsoon, though in and around Banaras, with its year-round pilgrim traffic, this seasonality was not as extreme as in most rural areas. Temperature and low humidity influenced the activity and contagiousness of the smallpox virus, but social and cultural factors had some effect too. In a display of physical mobility rarely associated with a predominantly peasant society, the early months of the year were a time for travel and festivity—the time for Holi, pilgrimages, and weddings. These elaborate and intersecting networks of human mobility created social conditions conducive to the spread of a disease dependent upon human contact for its survival and transmission. Commenting upon this aspect of smallpox seasonality, the provincial Sanitary Commissioner observed in 1886 that
those who travel much about the country, cannot but be struck with the continual movement going on amongst the population of the country at this time of year. When the rains set in, smallpox diminishes in severity, partly, no doubt, from the cessation of intercourse which follows the increased difficulties of communication, and perhaps partly owing to the influence of moisture upon smallpox contagion. (ARSC 1886:26)
Despite increasing medical intervention—the number of vaccinations in U.P. rose from under three-quarters of a million in the 1870s to two million in the 1940s, with about a third of the population of Banaras district so protected by 1939 (ARSC 1878:27; ARDPH 1939:55)—the seasonality of the disease remained unaffected. In 1871, 70 percent of smallpox deaths occurred between March and June; figures for 1940 show 50 percent of deaths during the second quarter of the year with a further 25 percent in the first quarter (ARSC 1871:9; ARDPH 1940:7). During the ten years 1925–1934, 54 percent of smallpox deaths in Banaras district fell in the months of April to June and 21 percent between January and March (table 9.1). Although the city of
[2] E.g., in 1925, when 765, 799 of 875, 594 "fever" deaths were attributed to malaria (ARDPH 1925:14).
[3] In 1940, 44 percent of smallpox deaths in U.P. occurred in the Banaras and Gorakhpur divisions (ARDPH 1940:7).
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Banaras held only a fifth of the district population at this time, it was responsible for nearly 44 percent of the total smallpox mortality. Even in years when smallpox became epidemic in the countryside, the city's share remained disproportionately high.
Smallpox had a distinctive place, too, in the human life-cycle. In a land where the disease was endemic as well as periodically epidemic, few Indians reached adulthood without either surviving an attack of the disease or receiving the protection conferred by inoculation (variolation) or cowpox vaccination. The buildup of a pool of unprotected infants was thus one of the determinants of smallpox epidemicity. Across U.P. as whole major epidemics erupted every three or four years, but within a single locality the incidence was more irregular. Banaras and its environs suffered severe epidemics in 1878, 1884, 1889, 1897, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1942–45 and 1951–52 (Joshi 1965:353). Fifty percent or more of the deaths from smallpox were among children under twelve years, indicating its importance as a childhood disease. Years of smallpox epidemics were likely to be years of high infant mortality. In the interwar period, 1918–1939, about 72 percent of recorded smallpox deaths in U.P. were among those under ten, 28 percent of them among infants under one year old. However, as vaccination (and by the 1930s revaccination) became common and the disease passed through a period of low incidence between 1898 and 1925, so a large percentage of the adult population was left unprotected by either natural or artificial means. The result was a recrudescence of the disease after 1925 and a higher rate of adult mortality. In 1932, for example, the proportion of fatalities in those over ten reached as high as 40 percent (ARDPH 1932:14). Smallpox was losing something of its customary status as a childhood disease.
Like cholera, a disease with which it shared certain characteristics in the Indian context, smallpox not only followed a seasonal cycle but also formed part of the multiple crises occasioned by war, drought, flood, and famine. A disease that thrived in a dry climate and possibly profited from the undernourishment and debility of its human hosts, smallpox became particularly widespread in famine years or in the season following the failure of a monsoon (Rogers 1926:6; ARSC 1878: 23a). The wanderings of the famine-struck in their search for food, work, and water, their congregation at relief centers and in towns like Banaras (where religious and princely charity, as in the famine year 1878, could confidently be expected),[4] further favored the spread of the disease. Although the Banaras division escaped relatively lightly
[4] Report on the Scarcity and Relief Operations in the North-Western Provinces 1880:76. Banaras was also the city of the goddess Annapurna, "She of Plenteous Food" (Eck 1983:161, 163–64).
from the famines of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, conditions of scarcity or famine in 1877–1879 and 1896–1897 contributed to the high smallpox mortality in those years. Conversely, the virtual absence of famine after 1908 was a factor in the marked decline in smallpox epidemics until the Bengal famine of 1943 helped fuel a later resurgence. The disruption caused by the two world wars and their political sequels was similarly registered in high levels of smallpox mortality, whereas the depression years, perhaps because they were a time of low grain prices with little administrative and social dislocation, were remarkably free from major epidemics.
Taking an even longer perspective, it is possible that smallpox and cholera, despite their certain antiquity in India, became especially prevalent as a result of the political disruption of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the accompanying invasions, large-scale troop movements, and economic disorganization (cf. Nicholas 1981: 33–34; Arnold 1986). If this was so—and the evidence is as yet too patchy to be more than suggestive—then the advent of colonial rule in northern India may have caused or coincided with a significant upturn in epidemic mortality similar to that attributed to colonial intervention in sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth century (Kjekshus 1977). The growth of international and internal trade, the establishment of new and more rapid forms of transportation, and the increased mobility of wage labor, as well as the part British economic policies may have played in accentuating the effects of famines in the late nineteenth century, may all have contributed to making the colonial period a time of abnormally high epidemic mortality, a trend only gradually and partially countered by increasing medical and sanitary intervention (Klein 1972, 1973; Whitcombe 1972; but cf. Stone 1984). Viewed in this broad perspective the colonial era in northern India might itself be regarded as constituting a single epidemiological cycle.
Spatial and Social Aspects of Epidemics
Smallpox maintained a relatively direct and straightforward relationship with its human hosts, one factor that aided its containment and eventual eradication in the 1970s. But other disease had a more complex relationship, closely linked to environmental and sanitary conditions or mediated through insect and animal vectors. Plague offers one example of this. The spread of plague across northern India in 1899–1901 has been identified with the distribution of the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis , thought to have originated in Egypt's Nile valley and to have been introduced into India through the expanding traffic between the two countries which followed the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Plague tended to be most intense in areas like eastern U.P.—Banaras
and Gorakhpur divisions were among the worst affected localities in rural India (Rogers 1928:45)—where X. cheopis had become naturalized: it was less prevalent in much of eastern and southern India where X. astia remained more common (Hirst 1953:348–71). Reaching eastern U.P. in 1901–2, plague at first caused heavy mortality in urban areas. There were two thousand plague deaths in Banaras city alone in the years 1901, 1903, 1905 and 1911. Thereafter, however, urban mortality from the disease fell, rising above a hundred deaths only in 1912, 1917–18 and 1947, while in the countryside it became firmly entrenched. This can be read as evidence of the greater effectiveness of antiplague measures in urban Banaras, but X. cheopis also found a securer ecological niche among the rodent population of the densely inhabited, grain-rich countryside. Like smallpox, plague had an annual as well as an epidemic cycle, though one more regionally variable. In U.P. as a whole, about 60 percent of plague deaths occurred between April and June: in eastern U.P. and Banaras, January to April was the main period (table 9.1). The reasons for this variation were linked to climatic factors and to the breeding cycles of the rats and their fleas (Rogers 1928:42–43, 58–60; Hirst 1953:260–80). The timing of the year's grain harvest had a bearing, too, providing food for rats as well as humans and, through the transportation of grain, contributing to the fleas' mobility. One factor behind the resurgence of plague in eastern U.P. between 1942 and 1947 (apart from the breakdown of control measures during wartime) may have been the massive grain movements caused by the 1943 famine in Bengal.
But plague also illustrates the importance of human vectors. The epidemic arrived in eastern U.P. in November 1899 with the return of three Muslim Julaha[*] weavers whose employment in the cotton mills of Bombay had ceased with the closure of the factories in that plague-stricken city. From the weavers' homes in the small town of Mau-Aima in Allahabad district, plague spread to Banaras and from there to other towns and villages in the area. Plague had also established itself in rural Bihar and was encroaching on Banaras and Gorakhpur divisions from the east. Market towns were among the first to be affected, with grain traders and handlers among the earliest victims. Subsequently, as plague moved into the villages a disproportionate number of deaths occurred among women, whose housebound lives made them more vulnerable than adult males to a disease borne by domestic rats' fleas (ARSC 1900:6a;ARSC 1901:16; Blunt 1912:43–44).
Migration from eastern U.P. to Bombay, Calcutta, Assam, and Bihar,[5] and the counter flow of pilgrims, traders, and professional men
[5] "It is said . . . that there is not a single family in the Benares division which has not at least one member in the provinces of Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa" (Blunt 1912:49).
from Bengal were also human factors of great epidemiological consequence. The advent and progress of the plague epidemic was but one illustration of this. The severe epidemic of dengue ("breakbone") fever that struck eastern U.P. in the early months of 1872 was traced to importation from Calcutta where it was already rampant. The first recorded cases, were among passengers on a Ganges River steamer which arrived at Mirzapur on March 14, 1872; they infected coolies unloading the vessel and the disease spread rapidly. The first case in Banaras was reported on April 27, 1872—a Bengali who had come by rail from Calcutta two days earlier. From these two points of entry, dengue fever raced through the eastern districts, advancing mainly along the lines of rail and river traffic. An estimated 75 percent of the inhabitants of Banaras city were affected, though only two deaths resulted (ARSC 1872:15–16). By contrast, the influenza epidemic of 1918 reached Banaras from the west, causing rather less mortality than at Agra or Allahabad, but still raising the city's death rate to the highest annual figure (81.31 per thousand) on record (ARSC 1918:18a). Another disease, the protozoan infection known as kala-azar, spread by sand fleas, was becoming increasingly common in the Banaras area in the 1930s and 1940s, partly as a result of inroads from Bihar, but also through the return of migrant laborers from Assam where the disease was endemic (Joshi 1965:348). Cholera epidemics, too, were often attributed to seasonal labor movements between Nepal and the adjacent districts of eastern U.P. This was one explanation of the perennially high levels of mortality from cholera along U.P.'s northeastern border (ARDPH1926:41; Banerjea 1951: 25).
Cholera offers striking evidence of the close connection between human mobility and epidemic disease. Unlike smallpox, cholera has no uniform season. In Bengal it was most widespread between October and January and again in March and April. In Bihar, Orissa, and eastern U.P. the main season fell between April and August; in Punjab it was June to August (Pollitzer 1959:55). The disease thus appeared to move westward each year along what Bryden (1869) described as the "northern epidemic highway." Banaras lay in the path of the advancing epidemics; the first cases appeared early in the year, and mortality rose steadily between April and June, before waning in September and October. Although temperature and relative humidity were important factors (Rastogi, Prasad, and Bhatnagar 1967:844–50), the curious character of cholera epidemicity also bore some relation to human mobility and especially to Hindu pilgrimage routes and seasons.
Banaras stood at a critical juncture between the pilgrimage places of eastern India—Puri, Baidyanath, and Gaya especially—and the sacred sites of the upper Ganges valley and was one of the key centers in the all-India network of temples, shrines, and religious festivals. Few pil-
grims from the east or northwest failed to pass through Banaras, to visit its temples and bathe from its celebrated ghats. One party of pilgrims from Naini Tal journeyed in 1899 to Allahabad, Banaras, Gaya, Baidyanath, Calcutta, and Puri before some of their number fell victim to cholera (ARSC 1889:21). Bimla Devi, who died from the disease at Hardwar in March 1927, came from Burdwan in Bengal, visiting Gaya, Banaras, Ayodhya, and Nimsar en route to the Hardwar mela (ARDPH 1927:27A). The direction and duration of the pilgrims' journey was contingent upon many factors, including their means and devotional objectives. But the pilgrimages bore the imprint, too, of the agricultural cycle: the dry months were the period when agricultural work was slackest and thus pilgrimage most opportune. The timing of the major fairs and festivals (itself perhaps showing the influence of the agrarian calendar) was a further factor. Many pilgrims from Bengal and Bihar passed through Banaras at the start of the year to reach Allahabad in time for the Magh Mela in January–February and to arrive at Hardwar for the main bathing festival in March or early April. Many continued from there to Badrinath and Kedarnath, returning home for the monsoon and the resumption of agricultural activity (Bhardwaj 1973:219). There was a second period of festivals later in the year, during the month of Karttike (October–November), with meals at Garmuktesar near Meerut and, closer to Banaras, at Ballia, where the Dadri fair drew many hundreds of thousands of worshippers (ARSC 1901:16). But these later festivals attracted local rather than long-distance pilgrims.
From the 1860s the colonial authorities began to collect evidence linking cholera epidemics in northern India to the timing and direction of the main pilgrim flows. Banaras appeared doubly affected. Although it did not have such popular bathing festivals as those at Allahabad and Hardwar, its smaller fairs still acted as major epidemic foci, with infected pilgrims returning, as in 1924 following the lunar-eclipse fair, to such places as Deoria, Gorakhpur, and Azamgarh (ARDPH 1924:29; see also ARDPH 1927:46). Banaras was subject, too, to wider patterns of pilgrim mobility and disease dissemination. Cholera was unwittingly brought by pilgrims from Bengal to Banaras and to other religious centers in eastern U.P., such as Allahabad, and from there spread by dispersing pilgrims throughout the region. (See fig. 16 for one illustration of this.) Railroad junction as well as pilgrim town, Banaras could also be hit by cholera epidemics emanating from more distant sites, such as Puri and Hardwar. The Kumbh Melas, held at Allahabad and Hardwar at twelve-year intervals, and the intervening Ardh Kumbh Melas, by bringing together as many as a million pilgrims at a single time and place, created conditions peculiarly conducive to cholera outbreaks. The Kumbh Melas at Hardwar in 1867 and 1891 and those at Allaha-
Fig. 16
Cholera deaths among pilgrims dispersing from Allahabad Kumbh Mela February 1894.
Numbers after town names indicate fatalities; the date is of the first reported cholera death.
Source: Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh, 1894:30.
bad in 1894 and 1906 were seen as clear examples of the epidemic hazards of these periodic mass gatherings (Pollitzer 1959:882–85; Banerjea 1951; 28–31). As figure 17 indicates, cholera mortality in Banaras district reflected the incidence of these fairs, though it should be borne in mind that in some cases the correlation was fortuitous and the melas were not directly responsible.
As Banaras came to be recognized as a major turnpike along the "northern epidemic highway" special measures were introduced to prevent pilgrims from introducing cholera into eastern U.P. From 1927, health officials were posted at Mughal Serai (as well as at Ballia and Gorakhpur) to intercept and detain pilgrims suspected of suffering from cholera and other serious diseases. In this way fifty-seven cholera cases were detected in 1929 and sixty-one in 1930, the year of the Allahabad Kumbh Mela (ARDPH 1929:12; ARDPH 1930:21A).
Examples could be multiplied, but I hope that enough evidence has been given to suggest some of the ways in which the city of Banaras was subject to wider patterns of human mobility and mortality, or seasonal and cyclical change, and of epidemiological incidence and variation. In these respects one is struck not by the uniqueness of Banaras or by the significance of a rural-urban divide, but by the extent to which the city reflected or accentuated the characteristics of the regional society and the environment as a whole.
Fig. 17
Cholera mortality in Banaras district, 1875–1945. Source: Annual Reports of the Sanitary Commissioner and Director of Public
Health, 1875–1945.
Disease, Death, and Curing
Banaras had, however, a special place in Indian and even British thinking about disease, death, and curing. In the traditions of Ayurveda, Banaras enjoyed particular eminence. It was reputedly there that Dhanvantari, "physician of the gods" and "father of Indian medical science" (Stutley and Stutley 1977:75; Sukul 1974:93–94), imparted his knowledge and skills to Sushruta, the author or compiler of the Sushruta Samhitta . Other works of classical Ayurveda, such as Chikitsa Kaumudi and Chikitsa Darshan , were also said to have been written at Banaras during the reigns of the early kings of Kashi. From an early date, probably even before the time of Buddha, Banaras was renowned for its physicians (Joshi 1965:344). With the rise of Muslim power in northern India from the twelfth century, Banaras also became a center for the Unani system of medicine, itself evolving through interaction with Ayurveda. Fashions in medicine, at least among the elite, tended to reflect changes in political supremacy, and the advent of British rule in the late eighteenth century was soon followed by the introduction of Western, allopathic medicine. At first the British showed some tolerance, even respect, for the indigenous medical systems, but as British power grew in confidence and strength attitudes became more openly disdainful. In the Anglicization of the 1830s the East India Company withdrew its former patronage for indigenous learning, including Ayurveda (B. Gupta 1976:370); but the Rajas of Banaras, like the Kings of Delhi and the Nawabs of Awadh until the mid-1850s (Sharar 1975:97–98), remained important patrons, enabling Indian medicine to survive into the late nineteenth century, when it began to be taken up again by the middle classes. As guardians and patrons of Vedic scholarship, the Rajas of Banaras extended their support to Ayurveda as well. Though in a manner indicative of the pluralistic nature of elite culture in Banaras (Saraswati 1975:31, 52), they also employed, indeed seemed to show a preference for, Unani practitioners. The district gazetteer lists among those who served the Rajas the vaidya Trimbak Shastri and the hakims Muhammad Hadi (born 1825), Muhammad Jaffar (born 1854), and Mazhar-ul-Hasan (born 1867), each of whom served in turn as court physician (tabib-i-khas ) (Joshi 1965:34–35). With the establishment of the Banaras Hindu University in 1916 (with its own Medical College and Institute of Medical Sciences) and with the accession of the Congress to ministerial power in U.P. in 1937 and again in 1946, there was a revival of Ayurveda, yet Western medical education and practice remained in the ascendant (Joshi 1965:360; Sukul 1974:102, 115).
But Ayurveda and Unani by no means exhausted the medical specialists of whom Banaras could boast. Hindu and Muslim astrologers, for example, were consulted about the cause of physical and mental ail-
ments and recommended various charms and observances to free their clients of their afflictions (Pugh 1981). Clearly, popular ideas about disease and curing were intimately bound up with wider beliefs about malevolent and benevolent forces affecting human fortunes, health, and happiness. Banaras and eastern U.P. also produced specialists of a more evidently practical kind, such as Jarrahs, or barbers, who performed minor surgical operations (Joshi 1965:345). The region was also one where smallpox inoculation had long been practiced: indeed, the Brahmins of Banaras seem to have been celebrated practitioners of the art (Holwell 1767:8). One early-nineteenth-century report (interestingly, by a Muslim, Nawab Mirza Mehadi Ali Khan) tells of a Brahmin at Banaras who performed a kind of pre-Jennerian cowpox inoculation in the name of Sitala, the smallpox deity; but this cannot have been common (Asiatic Annual Register 1804:98–99). In eastern U.P. generally, inoculators were commonly men of the Mali, or gardener, caste who traveled about the countryside plying their trade during the smallpox season and then returned to their agricultural pursuits as the disease waned—another example of the connection between the agrarian and the disease cycle. Despite British attempts to suppress inoculation in favor of Western vaccination, the practice continued in and around Banaras until at least the 1880s and probably, more discretely, for some time thereafter.6
In Banaras, however, curing or preventing disease was not the province of medical specialists alone. The city itself, with its temples, shrines, ghats, and wells, was widely believed to possess a special capacity to cure, protect, and assuage suffering. To some extent this was the mark of the eminence of Kashi as one of the most sacred places of Hindu India. The abode of Shiva as Vishvanatha, the point where the Ganges flowed north toward the Himalayas, Kashi was an exceptionally auspicious place to die or to be cremated. "Death, which elsewhere is feared, is there welcomed as a long-expected guest. Death, which elsewhere is polluting, is there holy and auspicious" (Eck 1978:191). One path of "curing" offered by Banaras was thus escape from physical and earthly suffering through the certain salvation (moksha) that death in the city conferred. Since disease and suffering were associated with sin and divine displeasure, spiritual and ritual solutions were as commonly sought as any medical therapy. The waters of the Ganges, which could cleanse the soul of all sin, could also by association free the body of its physical afflictions. Pilgrims bathed in the Ganges and took the water home with them from a belief in its curative and protective properties,
[6] For Brahman inoculators at Banaras in the early nineteenth century, see correspondence in the Board's Collections, F/4/186, no. 3906, India Office Records, London (IOR); and for further discussion of inoculation, see ARSC 1878:30, 24A; ARSC 1885:47; Greenough 1980; Nicholas 1981:27–29.
as well as for its ritual uses. The sick traveled to Banaras in the hope of being cured or at least of dying in the holy city. Others visited it in fulfillment of vows made during illness. Like Allahabad, Baidyanath, and a number of other sacred places in northern India, Banaras was a site where lepers congregated, whether in the hope of finding charity or from a belief that the holiness of the place would rid them of their disease. It was also to Kashi that thousands fled from eastern India and the Deccan to escape the plague in 1900–1, believing that the dreaded disease could never enter so sacred a place (Nevill 1909a:27). The religious reasons that made Banaras such a magnet for the sick and dying also help to explain why the mortality rate in the city was so perennially high.
In addition to its all-India prominence as a center for pilgrimage and worship, Banaras was also a "microcosm of Indian life, customs and popular beliefs" (Havell 1905:80). As such it attracted to itself ideas about disease and curing which belonged to a wider Hindu or Indian cosmology of belief and explanation. The "disease godlings" (Crooke 1926:114f.) of the folk tradition here commingled with the Sanskritic deities and Ayurveda of the literati and the elite (the so-called Great Tradition) in ways that defied neat division and compartmentalization. The worship of Sitala could be taken as one illustration of this. The Brahmin inoculators of Banaras invoked the goddess for the success of their operations; and the city seems to have long been important as a center for her worship (Wadley 1980:51–53; Nicholas 1981:30–31). As one of the shakti (female) forms of Shiva, Sitala was perhaps thought deserving of special representation in Shiva's city, and shrines to the goddess were often to be found in close association with Shaivite temples in Banaras (Havell 1905:113). But Sitala also remained part of the folk tradition from which she had originated (Eck 1983:171–72), and her popularity as an object of worship in the city may have reflected the prevalence of smallpox in the region and the reverence with which the goddess was widely regarded.[7]
Other forms of popular disease propitiation and curing were to be found in Banaras. Vidyarthi in his recent study of the "sacred complex" of Kashi (1979:39, 54) lists thirteen deities with special attributes, including healing and protective powers. Apart from Sitala, these include Khokhi Devi for coughs and colds, Jwarharneshwar Mahadeo for
[7] But again the exceptionality of Banaras should not be overdrawn. The worship of Sitala was widely observed in northern India in the spring months, and festivals and pilgrimages to Sitala shrines occurred in a number of different places. See Jackson and Fisher 1883:104; ARSC 1881:25; North Indian Notes and Queries 1891, I (1):5; 1895, IV (12):202.
fevers, and Kal-Bhairava for warding off ghosts and malevolent spirits. Eck (1983:194) also identifies Bhairava as a popular protector against illness and misfortune. Other sources list tanks, wells, and shrines with similar properties. The Amrit Kupa (or "well of immortality") was said to be associated with the cure of skin diseases, including leprosy. It was also called after Dhanvantari, who was said to have thrown his medical bag into the waters, giving them their curative powers—an interesting link between Ayurveda and popular belief (Joshi 1965:345; Sherring 1868:219; cf. Eck's description of the Kala Kupa, "the well of time," 1983:262–63). At the Nag Kupa, or "serpent's well," an annual festival was held at the time of the Naga Panchami in Shravana (July–August) partly in order to obtain protection from snakebite (Fisher and Hewett 1884:139; Eck 1983:264).
Some of these protective or curative rites had their place in the annual cycle of the seasons, when a particular disease, like smallpox (Wadley 1980:37–38, 42–43), or when snakebite (Eck 1983:264), was most feared. But the annual cycle was interrupted or punctuated by the greater calamities of major epidemics when special measures were employed. On such occasions in eastern U.P., "scapegoats" were used to drive out epidemic disease, or offerings dedicated to a disease deity were passed on from village to village in the hope that the pestilence would move away with them. Sometimes as much noise and clamor as possible was made in a bid to scare off the demon of disease (North Indian Notes and Queries 1891, I (6): 111, 119; I (8): 127; Crooke 1968, chap. 3). Disease-driving rituals at times occasioned local clashes, for the inhabitants of contiguous neighborhoods did not always take kindly to the disease deity or demon being driven into their territory. On the night of March 10, 1901, as the plague epidemic closed in on Banaras, gangs of "rowdies" gathered in Dashashvamedha and Sigra in the south of the city to repulse the "scapegoat" of the disease driven out from Chaitganj (Bharat Jiwan [11 March] in SVN for 1901).
Such rituals gave emphasis to the continuing gulf between popular Indian beliefs concerning disease and the ideas held by the colonial administration. The depth of that divide, and its political as well as cultural connotations, was further exemplified by the rumor widespread in Banaras and other towns of northern India at the time that the British were deliberately spreading the plague through the poisoning of the municipal water supplies in order to rid themselves of a troublesome populace or to break down caste and religion (Kalidas [2 June] in SVN for 1900). But it is also indicative of the variety of responses provoked by epidemic disease that other Hindus and Muslims offered up prayers for protection in the city's temples and mosques and that the editor of the Banaras newspaper Bharat Jiwan turned to the Ayurveda
to find sanction for the British policy of evacuating infected towns and villages (Bharat Jiwan [11 March] in SVN for 1901).
A Colonial Cosmology of Disease
Disease and medicine were also powerful and enduring influences in British attitudes toward Banaras, though the nature of their influence varied over the long period of British involvement with the city and, to some extent, with the professional outlook of the individuals concerned. There was a disposition among European observers, medical men and missionaries especially, to denigrate Banaras as a Hindu sacred place by pointing to the contrast between its alleged sanctity and purity and its actual squalor and want of sanitation. Typical of this attitude was the following diatribe from the Reverend M. A. Sherring in the 1860s:
Threaded with narrow streets, above which rise the many storied edifices for which the city is famous, it is, without doubt, a problem of considerable difficulty, how to preserve the health of its teeming population. But, when we reflect on the foul wells and tanks in some parts of the city, whose water is of deadly influence, and the vapour from which fills the air with fever-fraught and cholera-breeding miasma; when we consider the loathsome and disgusting state of the popular temples, owing to the rapid decomposition of the offerings, from the intense heat of the sun; when we call to mind the filthy condition of nearly all the by-streets, due to stagnant cesspools, accumulated refuse, and dead bodies of animals; and, when, in addition, we remember how utterly regardless of these matters, and incompetent to correct them, is the police force scattered over the city, the difficulty becomes overwhelming. (Sherring 1868: 181–82)
One can see in this description the almost total reversal of the Hindu understanding of Banaras. Even its sacred and curative waters have become "foul wells and tanks" whose effects are described as "deadly" rather than life-giving or life-preserving. The Ganges at Banaras was subjected to a similar sanitary critique (cf. Eck 1983:216–17). It was also characteristic of Sherring's late-nineteenth-century British standpoint that he believed that the solution to the city's insanitary and insalubrious state lay in the creation of an efficient and purposeful municipal corporation. Under such a body, he claimed, "we should soon see a thorough transformation of the city," and the execution of "radical changes, so imperatively demanded in this region of palaces and filth, in this hot-bed of periodical disease" (Sherring 1868:183).
The British attack upon the insanitary, disease-ridden nature of Hindu pilgrimage centers and sacred places like Banaras was in part an
assault on Hinduism itself and an expression of the disgust, loathing, and incomprehension many nineteenth-century Europeans felt for Hindu India (Arnold 1986). Representing their own ideas and methods as rational and scientific, they characterized the whole of Indian medicine, religion, and popular belief as superstitious and irrational. Medicine and sanitation were among the means by which they sought to demonstrate and to implement their belief in the innate superiority of Western civilization. Through medicine and sanitation the West constituted itself the rival and the antithesis of Indian modes of thought and action.
But, for all the strength of their convictions, the British were forced to recognize the force of Indian cultural and social resistance to Western innovation and intervention. They could not simply ignore the importance of Banaras as a Hindu place of pilgrimage and worship. And, as an alien regime, in a vast and populous land, they were alert to the political risks in attempting too forcefully to impose their own ideas upon a wary population. At first, however, because Banaras was one of the earliest and largest Indian cities to pass under British control, and because it was such an important center for the Hindu religion, the British were keen to make the city a showpiece of their benevolence and enlightenment. Among the first institutions established at Banaras were those twin temples to the healing arts—a hospital (originating with subscriptions collected by Jonathan Duncan, the Resident, in 1787) and a lunatic asylum (1809). By 1814 the "native hospital" was one of three in the Bengal Presidency, but the other two, at Calcutta and Murshidabad, appear to have been more successful propagandists for the virtues of Western medicine. W. W. Bird, one of the governors of the Banaras hospital, observed stoically that the "rise and progress of every benevolent purpose has been a perpetual struggle against opposition and difficulty, but enlightened zeal and perseverance have always prevailed, and doubtless will in the present instance."[8]
Vaccination was another of the boons conferred by Western science and benevolence which it was at first hoped Hindus would embrace with alacrity and gratitude. In practice, in and around Banaras, inoculation continued to be more popular while vaccination was viewed with great suspicion. One of the rumors that circulated about it in eastern U.P. was that it was an attempt by the British to find a child with white blood (or milk) in its veins, the Mahdi or the Kalki, who would otherwise drive the British out of India (North Indian Notes and Queries 1891, I (2):32; I (8):120; Hopkins 1983:147). But the British continued to
[8] Bird to Secretary, Government of Bengal, 17 October 1814, Board's Collections, F/ 4/513, no. 12337, IOR.
think of the benefits of medicine as helping to complement or balance out the more openly coercive aspects of their rule. It was, significantly, at the opening of the Victoria Hospital at Banaras in December 1889 that the lieutenant-governor, Sir Auckland Colvin, possibly with the Mutiny more in mind than medicine, observed that "our empire in India to be secure must rest not on physical force only, but on the goodwill of the people" (Hindustan [28 December] in SVN for 1889). But to many of "the people" Western medicine, through such practices as vaccination, appeared to be just another aspect of colonial coercion (Arnold 1985, 1987).
But from self-interest and from the strength of the resistance encountered, the British were obliged to make frequent concessions to Indian sentiment, placing political pragmatism before medical idealism, and thus tending to confirm their own view of Indian ingratitude, ignorance, and immutable conservatism. When Duncan in 1790 tried to improve upon the primitive state of sanitation in Banaras a "vast multitude of persons" gathered on the outskirts of the city and forced the shopkeepers and traders to observe a hartal (a closure of shops and workplaces as a protest). A petition presented to Duncan complained that his measures were "a novelty" that made the people "apprehensive and disturbed them." He explained that there had been no sinister motive behind his action and that the changes had been intended to benefit the citizens of Banaras. With this reassurance, the people dispersed, "shouting their thanks and rejoicing, to their homes." But Duncan concluded from this and similar experiences that "all innovations, even for evident advantages, should be cautiously attempted, as far as they may affect the various classes and sects who inhabit the local centre of the Hindu faith" (Oldham 1876:208).
The British in Banaras (and to varying degrees elsewhere in colonial India) accordingly pursued a cautious policy, pressing what were seen to be the benefits of Western medicine when they could, but otherwise acknowledging political, cultural, and financial restraints. Early in the nineteenth century they elicited from the pandits of Banaras a statement that vaccination was not in contravention of the shastras (Report of the Smallpox Commissioners 1850:29). By the late 1870s smallpox inoculation had been formally outlawed within the municipalities of Banaras, Ghazipur, and Ballia, and in 1881 vaccination was made compulsory in the municipality of Banaras, followed two years later by the cantonment (colonial Banaras, it should be remembered, was also a military station). But as late as the 1920s the government refrained from making vaccination obligatory throughout Banaras district, fearing the strength of the opposition from the higher castes in the countryside
(ARSC 1879:31A; ARSC 1889:47; ARDPH 1925:44; Nevill, 1909a:26). Similarly, in 1900–1 the Collector of Banaras was at pains to impress the city's inhabitants that the government would not be enforcing the more extreme antiplague provisions, such as compulsory segregation and hospitalization of suspected cases (Indian Appeal , 8 February 1901; Bharat Jiwan [18 February] in SVN for 1901).
In a fashion that echoed the policies of the "Oudh School" of colonial administration, medical and civilian officers in eastern U.P. in the second half of the nineteenth century also sought to overcome or bypass popular resistance to Western medical measures by looking to local elites as intermediaries and leaders. In discussing the prospects for vaccination in the area, J. MacGregor, the regional Superintendent of Vaccination, remarked in 1878 that "an alteration in social customs to be successful in India, as in other countries, must take firm root in the upper strata before it penetrates downwards to the masses." It had been found from experience, he continued, "that when a zamindar's child is vaccinated, the ryot s [peasants] submit their children with only the slender amount of pressure required to remove the vis inertia of apathy." When, however, the landholder was "an absentee or malcontent," the vaccinator "was obliged to find his recruits among those outcasts who live in the slums, or in the outskirts, of the village," a course of action likely to further prejudice the higher castes against vaccination (ARSC 1878:20A). Vaccination officers accordingly sought the assistance of Indian government servants, newspaper editors, municipal councillors, zamindars, and the Raja of Banaras to try to persuade townsfolk and villagers to accept vaccination (ARSC 1877:41; ARSC 1878:20A, 24A).
By the 1880s Western medical and sanitary ideas were gaining at least partial acceptance among many of these traditional and more recent elites (though not, it should be stressed, necessarily to the exclusion of indigenous beliefs and therapies). It was, for example, on the initiative of the Raja of Banaras and his diwan (chief minister) that the Kashi Ganga Prashadini Sabha was formed in 1886 to redirect the sewage of Banaras, keeping the bathing ghats free from pollution. Veneration for the Ganges, the traditional leadership of the Raja, and Western (rather than Hindu) notions of cleanliness and pollution were in this cojoined (Bharat Jiwan [22 November] in SVN for 1886; Nevill 1909a:262). It is striking, too, how many newspaper editors in Banaras and neighboring towns associated themselves with the government's often unpopular vaccination and antiplague policies and were critical of what they, too, saw as the prejudices of the "ignorant masses" (e.g., Hindustan [24 March] in SVN for 1901). Despite the earlier antipathy
and divergence between Western and Indian medical belief and practice, by the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century there were signs of a growing accommodation and compatibility between the two.
Conclusion
For the social historian of modern India the study of disease opens up several inviting lines of enquiry. By looking at the incidence of disease, especially epidemics, one can gain insights into the material conditions and social organization of the population as a whole and of the subordinate classes in particular, for whom there is often otherwise a paucity of information. Disease morbidity and mortality can tell us a great deal about the temporal rhythms and spatial dimensions of rural life, and about the periodic crises brought about by drought and famine, war and political disruption. There is, too, a subjective domain to be considered—the cultural precepts that shaped the understanding of different social groups in their approaches and responses to particular diseases and afflictions. These reactions and perceptions in their turn may be revealing of wider social and political identities and divisions. For the colonial period especially, disease and medicine are richly informative about the nature and depth of the division between the British and their Indian subjects and about the growing penetration of state power, as well as about the practical and political limits to colonial intervention. These lines of enquiry may well lead in different directions, but ideally it ought to be possible to combine an awareness of the material aspects of disease causation and incidence with its social, cultural, and political dimensions.
For the purposes of this essay, Banaras—the city and its wider hinterland—has been the focus of attention. Banaras certainly possessed some features, not least its importance as a sacred place of all-India stature, that made it distinctive. But Banaras was also subject to and representative of wider patterns and influences. It shared many of its characteristics with other north India cities; it was bound in with the larger region through trade, transport, labor migration, pilgrimage, and numerous other factors of medical epidemiological significance.
A study of disease and medicine in Banaras also illustrates the pluralistic nature of its society and culture—folk and elite, Hindu, Muslim, and Western. At times the divisions appear so sharp as to be almost unbridgeable: such was the case most strikingly with certain aspects of British medical ideas and practice during the nineteenth century. But at other times and in other contexts, although the divisions remained important, there were significant linkages established. The Hindu Rajas
of Banaras could be patrons of Ayurveda, have Unani hakims for their court physicians, and fund Western-styled hospitals and dispensaries. Muslim astrologers could follow beliefs and prescribe cures not vastly dissimilar from their Hindu counterparts (Pugh 1981). Muslims might participate in the propitiation of Sitala and receive inoculation from Hindu practitioners of the art (Vidyarthi 1979:58), while Hindus might pray at Muslim tombs for health, wealth, and progeny (Sukul 1974:159). Even Western ideas and therapies, so often viewed with deep suspicion, could gradually find their way into elite culture and into the medical treatment of the poorer townsfolk and peasantry. Banaras provides some striking examples of this complex process of borrowing and intertwining, but it is doubtful whether in this regard the city can be said to be exceptional.