Political Peasants

Mahatma Gandhi’s great achievement was to revitalize the Indian National Congress in the late teens and twenties of this century by drawing in the support of what historians and political scientists—with some important, and relatively recent, exceptions—have called “the masses.” Thus Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph write that Gandhi transformed “the Indian National Congress from a body narrowly concerned with the interests of an anglicized elite to a socially concerned mass organization” by using “traditional symbols and language to convey new meanings and to reconstitute social action.”^[44] It cannot be denied that the rich cultural idiom that Gandhi drew upon throughout his political career proved profoundly effective in providing the Congress with a much broader base. Nevertheless, the “masses” that became involved in the Congress were far from undifferentiated. The aim of this section is to review the class dimensions of Indian nationalism and the caste dimensions of peasant radicalism, and to discern how both intersected with the sociocultural agenda of kshatriya reform.

Perhaps the best evidence of this fact in the Gangetic core is the growth in the 1920s and 1930s of the Kisan Sabha, which came to articulate a distinct peasant interest in contrast to the agrarian policies advanced by the Congress. An understanding of the political events of this period hinges to a great extent on the ideas and work of one remarkable man, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. Born Navrang Ray in 1889, a Jujhautia brahman of Ghazipur District, Sahajanand Saraswati took the vows of sanyas at the age of eighteen (1907) and became a Dasnami sanyasi.^[45] Sahajanand became involved in social reform activity when, in 1914 at the age of twenty-five, he was asked to address the annual conference of the Bhumihar Brahman Mahasabha held at Ballia in eastern Uttar Pradesh. After some determined reflection on his role as a sanyasi involved in social action, Sahajanand decided to devote himself fully to the cause of defining and maintaining a Bhumihar brahman identity for “Babhans.” In response to the denigrations of Bhumihars by Maithil brahmans and others, Sahajanand cited a broad range of Sanskrit and orientalist authorities to argue that “the acceptance of charity and the discharge of priestly duties are not inevitably necessary for the brahmans.” Rather, “even for the brahman, agriculture is preferable to the priesthood, and only in the absence of agriculture does the brahman have the right to perform the functions of the priest.”^[46] However, being brahman required a knowledge of Sanskrit and priestly ritual (karmakand), two assets in short supply among the Bhumihar community. Therefore, the founding of the Sitaram Ashram [sanctuary] to train students at Bihta, about sixteen miles west of Patna on the East India Railway line, signified the culminating achievement in Sahajanand’s efforts to build a Bhumihar brahman identity.^[47]

Sahajanand’s role in the political history of Gangetic north India was, to a large extent, a reflection of his unsurpassed ability to bridge differences in sociocultural, religious, and economic background. And he was able to overcome those barriers in exciting ways, creating new patterns of social and political organization. For instance, even though Sahajanand was a Dasnami sanyasi, it is clear from his own work that he was heavily influenced by the Vaishnava discourse of reform. And it was precisely the social imperative of that Vaishnava discourse that pushed him increasingly toward political radicalism. According to the historian Walter Hauser, Sahajanand’s reading of the Bhagavat Purana, a text central to Vaishnava bhakti, “made it explicit that to serve the people was like service and devotion to God.”^[48] Sahajanand also wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, published as Gita Hriday (The Heart of the Gita), which still stands as a remarkable personal testimony of socialist idealism founded on core Vaishnava tenets of correct social action.^[49]

Sahajanand was influenced by Vaishnava belief in more mundane ways as well. The land and buildings that formed the original nucleus of the Sitaram Ashram Sahajanand received from a Bhumihar Ramanandi named Sitaram Das, whose wish in old age was to “create a brahmacharya [student] ashram where Bhumihar brahman boys can come to study the Vedas, Shastras, and other sacred texts.”^[50] However, the Swami’s principled dedication to the common man and his keen commitment to social and economic justice no matter what the cost thrust him increasingly into a position contrary to that of the Bhumihar Brahman Mahasabha’s image as an organization designed to represent the “aristocratic, powerful, landowning elite.”^[51] This emerges nowhere more clearly than in Sahajanand’s own remarks describing the formative events of 1927:

The countless Bhumihar brahman benefactors, who in fact kept the ashram from closing with their total yearly subscriptions of thousands of rupees, nevertheless eventually became the sworn enemies of the ashram. Indeed, many of them lived near the ashram itself. This [their hatred] was due to the fact that I sided with the anguished Goalas and other kisans [peasants] who came to me, and raised a storm against their oppressive zamindars. If anyone goes to that area today to see for themselves the downtrodden people there, regardless of their jati or religion, he will be in total agreement with me and, therefore, the ashram. Indeed, there the question of jati does not arise.^[52]

From this point on, Sahajanand would only perceive agrarian conflict as that between landlords and peasants: “Caste and class had merged into a single category of social and economic exploitation. The Sitaram Ashram had become in his words a ‘symbol of revolution.’”^[53] It will be remembered that the term “Sitaram” possessed symbolic power in nearby Awadh during the Baba Ramchandra–led peasant struggle of 1919–1921. The name of the ashram alone may well have played a significant role in convincing many local cultivators of western Patna District that, in fact, the Swami would lend a sympathetic ear to their complaints. That the buildings and land for the ashram had been donated by a Ramanandi sadhu could only have furthered this perception. To complete the image, the Swami had by this time already developed a begrudged reputation among his landlord critics of being “nothing if . . . not progressive.”^[54]

While it is exceedingly difficult to arrive at any clear sense of the socioeconomic composition of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, it is likely—especially given the willingness of local Yadav tenants to seek the aid of the Swami in the transformative year of 1927—that peasants on the tenancy/proprietorship margin became involved in one way or another through the late 1920s and 1930s. This impression is reinforced by Hauser’s own earlier reading of the caste dimensions of the leadership of the Kisan Sabha, which included a dominant group of Bhumihars in addition to Rajputs and Kayasths, “with occasional Muslims and lower caste cultivating peasants, primarily Kurmis and Koeris.”^[55] Emphasizing the anti-landlord, pro-tenant stance of the organization, Hauser points out that “While most Kisan Sabha leaders were Bhumihars, so were most of the major zamindars, including the ones who came under sharpest attack by the Kisan Sabha. On the other hand, while there are some Bhumihar tenants in Bihar it is estimated that upwards of 90 per cent are not, and of course many of the best peasant cultivators in the province are Kurmis and Koeris.”^[56]

Nevertheless, while the Kisan Sabha may have satisfied temporarily the political aspirations of many marginally elite cultivators, the rise of the Triveni Sangh organization confirms that many Kurmi, Kushvaha, and Yadav kshatriyas felt a growing need for distinct political representation.^[57] Though the precise chronology of the emergence of the Triveni Sangh is as yet unclear—one scholar placing its organizational origins in the mid-1920s, other observers dating the formal naming of the organization to 1934—early signs of political cohesion between Yadavs, Kurmis, and Kushvahas can be seen as early as 1930.^[58] In that year a district-level meeting of Kushvahas and Yadavs was held in the village of Garve in central Shahabad District in southwest Bihar and was presided over by Sheopujan Prasad Singh, a Kurmi-kshatriya leader. Individual Kushvahas (Tapsi Ram of Begampur, Raghu Vir Singh of Dumraon) and Yadavs (Sheopujan Singh of Jitaura, Nandkishore Singh of Tenuni) cooperated in contesting the local district board elections in that and the following year, but fared badly. The Triveni Sangh was formally constituted in 1934 at another Shahabad District conference. A third district conference was held in 1936, when membership was estimated at approximately one million based on the number of Kushvahas, Yadavs, and Kurmis who had paid the four-anna (one-quarter of a rupee) fee to join the organization.^[59]

The movement expanded to the provincial level—partly in an effort to court Congress support in the upcoming elections of 1937—under the leadership of Guru Sahay Lal (who would later become a “backward caste” leader and who, according to one account, had suffered severe personal humiliation by the high-caste elite) and Dasu Singh (a Kurmi).^[60] Meanwhile, after 1935 the Congress was busy forming the Backward Classes Federation to counter what they viewed as the dangerous class features of the Triveni Sangh and Kisan Sabha movements. This federation groomed future “backward” leaders by co-opting men like Birchand Patel (a Kurmi), Sheonandan Mandal, and later Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav. Having thus guaranteed its “backward class” “vote bank,” the Congress subsequently refused to grant Triveni Sangh candidates tickets to contest the upcoming elections. Furious at what they could only perceive as the underhanded trickery of local Congress party bosses, the Triveni Sangh leaders pledged electoral war against the “cursed Congressites.”^[61] Following a hotly contested election in which two Triveni Sanghis emerged victorious in Shahabad District (Tapsi Mahto from Arrah constituency and Nandkishore Singh from Piro constituency), the war that had been waged with the ballot reverted to more violent means as high-status landlords reigned vengeful terror on whole Kurmi, Kushvaha, and Yadav villages. Conversely, in areas where the Triveni Sangh had not won, supporters consoled themselves with the ominous solace, “we lost by the vote, but we hadn’t lost our lathis.”^[62]

The rift between Congress and the Triveni Sangh, while sizable, was not insurmountable, as the latter merged with the Congress-sponsored Backward Classes Federation in 1948. While this certainly signified the end of the Triveni Sangh as a distinct political entity, it should not be viewed as the decline of Kushvaha-Kurmi-Yadav political power. Triveni Sangh leaders were being given posts in the Bihar Congress as early as 1940, and Kurmis, Kushvahas, and Yadavs contested seats in the 1946 election on Congress tickets. Thus, what Triveni Sanghis lost in terms of the symbolic power inherent in their kshatriya identities they gained in terms of direct access to political power. And while Congress gained access to a formidable rural vote bank, the social and economic tensions they were able to contain during the heady days of the new republic would eventually rise to the surface to define the quality of Indian politics in the post-1947 era.^[63]

Conversely, the failure to produce any sort of union between the Kisan Sabha and the Triveni Sangh in the 1930s, despite common economic interests, can only be explained by the historical antagonisms that existed between powerful Bhumihar landlords on the one hand and marginal Yadav, Kurmi, and Kushvaha peasants on the other. This basic enmity surfaces in a politically and socially charged description of the tenuous relationship between the Sangh and the Sabha:

The bridge between the Bhumihar messiah, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, and [the] ideologues of the Triveni Sangh was never built. Despite the fact that members of the Sangh flocked to listen to the Swami’s message of common struggle, the Bhumihar label stuck. When Kesari “Master” [a Triveni Sangh leader] visited the Swami’s ashram at Bihta in Patna district, night had fallen. Looking around he saw that those who surrounded the Swami were all upper-caste Bhumihars. Horrified, the backward-caste leader crept away under the cover of darkness.^[64]

This episode is recounted in a language and tone familiar to observers of late twentieth-century Bihar politics, but adjectives like “backward-caste” would have had little meaning in the 1920s and 1930s, when Sahajanand was making his overtures to the broad base of tenant-cultivators and the tenant-cultivators themselves—the new peasant kshatriyas—were joining to explore new modes of political expression. Master Keshari, the hardened Triveni Sangh orator, shrank from the overpowering Bhumihar presence in Sahajanand’s Sitaram Ashram not because they were “upper-caste Bhumihars” and he was a “backward-caste leader,” but because the memory of staunch Bhumihar opposition to peasant-kshatriya reform was too fresh in the minds of all Kurmis, Kushvahas, and Yadavs. Only in the 1940s and especially after Independence did such politically inspired labels as “backward” and “forward” become superimposed on the older and, by then, antiquated conflicts over varna.