Rethinking the Local in Indian History: Perspectives from Southern Bengal 2021007731, 2021007732, 9780367514136, 9781032055336, 9781003094395

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RETHINKING THE LOCAL IN INDIAN HISTORY

This volume looks at the concept of the ‘local’ in Indian history. Through a case study of Bengal, it studies how worldwide currents—be it colonial governance, pedagogic practices or intellectual rhythms—simultaneously inform and interact with particular local idioms to produce variegated histories of a region. It examines the processes through which the idea of the ‘local’ gets constituted in different spatial entities such as the frontier province of the Jangal Mahal, the Sundarbans, the dry terrain of BirbhumBankura-Purulia and the urban spaces of Calcutta and other small towns. The volume further discusses the various administrative as well as amateur representations of these settings to chart out the ways through which certain spaces get associated with a particular image or history. The chapters in the volume explore a variety of themes—textual representations of the region, epistemic practices and educational policies, as well as administrative manoeuvres and governmental practices which helped the state in mapping its people. An important contribution in the study of Indian history, this interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, history, sociology and social anthropology and South Asian studies. Kaustubh Mani Sengupta teaches History at Bankura University, India. He obtained his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was a post-doctoral fellow for two years at the Transnational Research Group on ‘Poverty and Education in India’ funded by Max Weber Stiftung, Germany. His research focuses on the urban history of South Asia, the early colonial state in India and the history of infrastructure and space. Tista Das teaches History at Bankura University, India. She obtained her PhD from the Department of History, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. She has been a Junior Research Fellow at the Peace Studies Group, Department of History, University of Calcutta. Her research interests include histories of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, migration, resettlement and ways and means of reading violence.

RETHINKING THE LOCAL IN INDIAN HISTORY Perspectives from Southern Bengal

Edited by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sengupta, Kaustubh Mani, editor. | Das, Tista, 1979- editor. Title: Rethinking the local in Indian history / edited by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das. Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifers: LCCN 2021007731 (print) | LCCN 2021007732 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367514136 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032055336 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003094395 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education–India–Bengal–History. | Regionalism–India. | Bengal (India)–History, Local. | Bengal (India)–Politics and government. Classifcation: LCC DS485.B46 R63 2022 (print) | LCC DS485.B46 (ebook) | DDC 954/.14035072–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007731 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007732 ISBN: 978-0-367-51413-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05533-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09439-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

vii viii ix

List of fgures Contributors Acknowledgement Introduction

1

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

PART I

Textual representations, public discourses

17

1

19

Dynastic time: A chronology for memories in Bishnupur PAULAMI GUHA BISWAS

2

Tidal histories: Envisioning the Sundarbans, 1860s–1920s

44

AVIROOP SENGUPTA

3

Representations of Manbhum and Purulia in Orientalist texts and the task of salvaging the past of the region

71

KALYAN CHATTERJEE

PART II

Pedagogic practices, local articulations 4

The small voices of history: Subaltern technologists of colonial Bengal

87 89

SUVOBRATA SARKAR

5

The Advent of Primary Education in Bengal AKASH BHATTACHARYA

v

106

CONTENTS

6

Education and training for coal miners: ‘Ignorance’ and ‘knowledge’ in the collieries of Raniganj and Jharia, 1901–1930

128

SANDIP CHATTERJEE

PART III

Administrative imperatives, governmental manoeuvres 7

Military interventions and surveys in southwest Bengal, c. 1765: Midnapore ‘frontier’ and the wider Jangal Mahal

149 151

UJJAYAN BHATTACHARYA

8

Rethinking detection in Bengal: Police work in the districts and the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

171

UPONITA MUKHERJEE

9

Infux and effux: A case study of Nadia, 1947–1971

196

SUBHASRI GHOSH

225

Index

vi

FIGURES

1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

Cover of a local pamphlet on the temples of Bishnupur, Bankura district, West Bengal. All images in this chapter were taken by the author during her trip to Bishnupur in September 2017 Cover of a local book on the legends, tales and history of Bishnupur The Dalmadal Cannon, Bishnupur Signboard describing the popular history of the Dalmadal Cannon Terracotta relief on the pillar of the Madanmohan Temple, Bishnupur Signboard of the Madanmohan Temple, Bishnupur The Lalbandh, Bishnupur Rashmancha, Bishnupur

vii

21 22 23 24 31 32 35 38

CONTRIBUTORS

Akash Bhattacharya is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. Ujjayan Bhattacharya is a Professor in the Department of History, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. Paulami Guha Biswas is a Visiting Faculty Member at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. Kalyan Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Government General Degree College, Manbazar II, Purulia, India. Sandip Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Banwarilal Bhalotia College, Asansol, India. Subhasri Ghosh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Asutosh College, Kolkata, India. Uponita Mukherjee is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University, USA. Suvobrata Sarkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India. Aviroop Sengupta is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University, USA.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Regional or Local History has become an important component of History curriculum at various universities of West Bengal in the last few years. At Bankura University, we were keen to make it a part of our course from the beginning. Over the years, we have had lively discussions about the ways of approaching the history of a region, the various kinds of sources we need to consult, and methods to follow while teaching the subject. The present book is an outcome of this collective thinking. We sincerely thank our colleagues in the department—Sankar Kumar Das, Sankar Kumar Biswas, Subhas Biswas, and Yarunnisha Khatun—for their constant support and encouragement. Our students, many of them with a keen interest in local and regional histories, have opened up new avenues of thought through their questions and comments in the classes and we thank them wholeheartedly. We would also like to thank all the contributors who agreed to be a part of the volume. They happily shared their thoughts on the volume, and helped us think through the various ways in which we can conceptualise the topic. Upal Chakrabarti kindly introduced us to Aakash Chakrabarty at Routledge, and it was a wonderful experience to work with him and his team on this volume. We hope that the volume will be an interesting read for researchers and students who want to venture into regional and local history. Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das

ix

INTRODUCTION Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Tista Das

The chapters in this book speak variously about the concept of the ‘local’ in modern Indian history. Individual contributors have used the concept in different ways, invoking notions of the ‘regional,’ ‘indigenous’ or the ‘vernacular.’ While these terms often do not convey similar meanings, and stand for distinct entities or ideas, in this volume we frame the category ‘local’ and its variants in the sense of a contrasting place-holder to the ostensibly universal or the general. But, as the chapters show in their different ways, this framing does not necessarily mean that the local is a separate, hermetically sealed box; rather, they focus exactly on the ways through which larger or universal currents infect the production and practices of the local.1 In our book, broadly speaking, we look at the category from two vantage points—as a spatial unit and as institutional or individual practices. The chapters look at the constitution of the category of the ‘local’ and how various actors, events, networks and technologies create a particular vision or version of a place or practice which gets designated as something dissimilar from the mainstream, the centre or the global. We have chapters dealing with various spatial entities—the frontier province of the Jangal Mahal, the Sundarbans, the dry terrain of Birbhum-Bankura-Purulia, the region along an international border (after 1947) and the urban nooks and corners of Calcutta. The chapters study various administrative as well as amateur representations of these settings to chart out the ways through which certain spaces get associated with a particular image or history. ‘Local history,’ as a genre, has attracted scholars for a long time now. Colonial administrators produced volumes of census reports, statistical accounts, gazetteers, surveys and settlement reports that collected and represented the past of the regions. Similarly, in the case of Bengal, from the late nineteenth century, histories of regions started to get published,2 but often these histories tended to be a celebratory account of great men and institutions of that particular region or were presented as a micro-version of a larger narrative of the country.3 As a result, the specifcity of the ‘local’ was lost. Also, these histories generally started with the assumption that the

1

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place is already, always lying outside the mainstream—be it the metropolitan centre or a universal discourse. On the other hand, local ‘histories’ frequently employed different narrative strategies and articulated divine/ mythic worldviews that constituted the ‘public life of history’ as opposed to ‘academic history.’4 A set of chapters in this book addresses these issues and analyses textual representations and public discourses around them to understand the production of certain spatial entities during the colonial period. Similarly, due to administrative necessities and political imperatives, distinct spatial units were carved out by colonial rulers. In the process of governing them, contingencies and specifcities moulded practices, producing novel ways of administration. In terms of governance, then, these instances provide us with another lens through which to study the notion of the ‘local,’ where the contours of the place, the people inhabiting it, their culture or custom forced the authorities to take into account the particularities of the unit. These governmental practices, in turn, helped in producing durable images of those spaces. These concerns are raised and discussed in another set of chapters, revolving around issues of military surveys, policing crime and the movement of population after partition. We also believe that the idea of the ‘local’ can be productively read in conjunction with the idea of the ‘vernacular,’ in the sense of translated variations of seemingly universal categories of capitalism, modernity or scientifc rationality.5 A group of the chapters focus on various social and technological practices which were infuenced by their settings, dealing with ‘local’ technologists, educational institutions and scientifc practices. In science and technology studies, we have now a vibrant scholarship that speaks of the ways in which local actors, in various subjugated positions, negotiated with hegemonic discourses by rethinking and reworking them to envision novel methods.6 In this set of chapters, the volume looks at the ways through which the category of the ‘local’ attains its meaning and gets attached to individual and institutional practices. Through these diverse issues (we must note that there are varied registers through which one can discuss the theme—like culture, identity or political articulations—all of which in some sense pioneered the idea of local/regional formations), the book wishes to bring the focus back onto the ‘small histories’ in an era of global networks and connections. But we hope that the new turn in history-writing towards larger connections will inform our ‘return’ to the local and help us rethink the dense confgurations of particular sites as constitutive of wider themes and issues. Let us now briefy look at the different ways in which the category of the local has been deployed in the writing of Indian history. As the chapter synopses in the last section of this introduction will show, these concerns—in some way or the other—have informed the chapters of the book.

2

INTRODUCTION

The spatial scale of the local For some time now, historians have drawn attention to the fact that space is not static, devoid of any meaning, serving as a mere backdrop to the unfolding of events. Borrowing from critical geography, historians have tried to merge the concepts of changes in time and space to offer a rich description of the past.7 Space, in this scheme of things, becomes dynamic, is produced and acts as a ‘constitutive dimension of social relations.’8 Spatial analysis sheds light on social relationships and structures of power. Henri Lefebvre has argued, ‘Abstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its “lens.”’9 Lefebvre tries to reconcile what he understood as the two competing conceptions of space. First, there is the mental or ideological space, and second, the natural space, where we actually exist. For him, the social space is connected but is distinct from either the mental or the physical space. Social space is produced and reproduced according to the forces of production and within the relations of production. But this does not mean that there is a direct causal relation between the growth of the forces of production and a particular space or a particular time, because ‘[m]ediations, and mediators, have to be taken into consideration: the action of groups, factors within knowledge, within ideology, or within the domain of representations.’10 The objects—both natural and social—present in the social space are not merely things, but also relations. Things hide social relationships: ‘The successful unmasking of things in order to reveal (social) relationships—such was Marx’s great achievement, and … it remains the most durable accomplishment of Marxist thought.’11 Lefebvre’s thesis on social space, as one commentator notes, effectively represents a ‘spatialized rendition of Marx’s conception of fetishism.’12 In the production of space, Lefebvre sees collusion between the state, its institutions, the connections inherent to property relationships and the forces of production. This brings forth ‘the polyvalence of social space.’13 In a famous imagery of the social space, Lefebvre views it ‘with a structure far more reminiscent of faky mille-feuille pastry than of the homogeneous and isotropic space of classical (Euclidean/Cartesian) mathematics.’14 The idea of the local as social space—produced in both conceptual and material terms—is the focus of a set of chapters in this book. Through issues pertaining to textual representation and administrative practices, the chapters unravel the ways in which certain regions got constituted. The local is not simply points in the Cartesian grid. The idea corresponds to a mental map, a cartography of individual and collective memory. It involves order and hierarchy. Apart from physical geography, there is also the politics of regionalisation. This process would involve the unfolding of universal economic systems like capitalism. Capitalism creates a terrain for its smooth functioning, something that Prasenjit Duara has termed as the process of

3

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

‘spatial production.’15 Capitalism and the global system of exchange produce regions according to a corresponding hegemonic mode, where a hierarchy of places is created. Similarly, the nation-state is imagined as a homogeneous space that would, in turn, reproduce regional formations, all in turn promulgated as a microcosm of the larger unit.16 A state works to produce a unifed space, Lefebvre asserts.17 In fact, sovereignty implies a space. The state would promote a practice of unifcation, impose a hegemonic ideal, which would subordinate various kinds of social practices and customs. In the case of modern India, colonialism has been the chief mediator in the process of the production of spaces. Capitalism and the associated class formation have also been mediated through the prism of colonialism and imperialism. The complex relationship between the British Empire and the colony unfolding against the backdrop of free trade imperialism created its own spheres of operation. Regions became suppliers of raw materials for industries, trading posts sprang up catering to the exchange of production in favour of the imperial economy, and catchment areas were demarcated for the supply of labour for the industries and plantations as well as of soldiers to fght in the imperial army. The railways paved the way for the free circulation of raw materials and people. The colonial regime created a rigorous centralised administrative structure after the violent events of 1857. This structure was largely based on an effcient bureaucracy, an army and a knowledge system that delineated the idea of India in different ways. Christian missionaries, colonial administrators and Orientalist scholars produced the various strands of knowledge about India and its people. Mapping, measuring and classifying became the practice through with the production of this epistemic structure found its shape. Colonial cartographic practice became an important tool in the penetration of a uniform, authoritarian rule.18 As spaces were thus produced, the notions of the core, the periphery and the frontier got constituted. The idea of the ‘interior’ gained prominence. East India Company offcials, and later, imperial bureaucrats would tour the various regions of the subcontinent—the seemingly impenetrable dark spaces of the heartland—to know about its people and topography, their custom and culture.19 These journeys helped in creating the idea of the centre and periphery or modern cities and primitive hinterland, civilised colonial centres as opposed to barbaric tribal forest regions.20 The chapters in this volume build on these insights to offer critical readings of the diverse ways through which the state and the population interacted to produce meanings—often contrasting or contradictory—associated with places and practices.

Politics, memory and indigenous practices Before spatial analysis became infuential, studying provincial political activities was one of the important arenas of enquiring into the events at a 4

INTRODUCTION

local level in colonial India’s historiography. The 1970s was a crucial decade in this regard. A host of historians, situated or studying at Cambridge, began working on the origins of pluralist politics in modern India.21 They questioned the notion of the lofty ideal of nationalism as being the moving force behind the articulation of dissent at the all-India level. Nationalism or anti-colonial sentiments were analysed as the coming together of dissent at various levels. Gauging local ambitions and local needs was important to understand the actual practices of nationalism. In the introductory chapter of Locality, Province and Nation, Anil Seal set out the argument: ‘It is no longer credible to write about a movement grounded in common aims, led by men with similar backgrounds, and recruited from widening groups with compatible interests.’22 Indian politics was studied as an interconnected system. The Cambridge historians took forward the theory of competition and collaboration working towards the penetration of imperial rule.23 They pointed out that local discontent—whose source could be a kind of mundane factionalism—was born out of local issues, got crystallised into anti-colonial sentiments and found expression in all-India protests. The Cambridge historians embarked on a study of Indian nationalism at two levels—frst, a study of local discontent, factions and organisations, and second, a study of the linkages between the various levels of politics. Personal interests found their way into a study of national sentiments. Nationalism, or what came to be constituted as such, was divested of an ideological rhetoric.24 Among these works, however, the idea of the region differed. Sometimes, it corresponded to British provinces while at some others it corresponded with other markers like language. Thus, regional solidarities became new felds of enquiry. Interestingly, it was also a way of coming back to and taking recourse in the colonial notion of the Indian nation being a conglomerate of many little nations. The idea of the locality or the region, in these analyses, remained a part of—a spatial unit of—the larger whole of the nation that ultimately robbed the distinct units of some of their unique identities and aspirations. In their critique of historiography of Indian nationalism, the Subaltern Studies collective pointed out that even though the Cambridge historians looked at the local level to study the political dynamics, their focus was solely on elite factionalism and power politics, which in the end failed to provide any agency to the poor, ordinary folks. Ranajit Guha and his colleagues argued that these studies, along with those of the Marxist historians, remained imprisoned within universal frameworks of nationalism, capitalism or class conficts.25 Instead, they insisted that historians need to study the struggles of the peasants and working-class population on their terms, appreciating their ways of life and understanding their religious and cultural world. The subaltern population had their own notion of territoriality—distinct from administrative divisions or units—as explained by Guha in his analysis of peasant insurgencies in colonial India. These were often local in character, delimited by ethnic, caste or village ties. And, in this bounded 5

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

version, ‘foreigners’ became the targets—be it the moneylenders or the alien rulers. Guha views the territoriality of peasant insurgency as an intersection of ethnic space and physical space. And, in nineteenth-century India, it helped the spread of insurgency.26 But this did not mean that territoriality did not impede the spread of insurgency at any point. Often it did, and as many revolutionaries fnd, it is not always conducive to build up a common movement across a fragmented terrain. However, as Ranabir Samaddar has shown in his study of the region of Jangal Mahals, the territoriality of a movement of a particular community based in one region often overlaps with other adjacent areas and uprisings. To analyse this phenomenon, Samaddar weaves together a disparate array of texts (including oral narratives) to understand the way people remember such actions. To study the remembrance of a series of movements as part of a single narrative, Samaddar brings in a cultural argument where he says cultural silence often sits together with cultural literacy, which conceives of the past in a certain way.27 Though very different in their outlook, from these studies, we can glean certain common elements regarding the notion of the local. As they show in their divergent ways, political claims are often hinged on spatial practices, cultural idioms and memorialisation of past events. The local here gets its meaning from distinct identities, linguistic or ethnic claims. A region often implies a set of commonalities that bind the people living within a geographical place. For example, in the case of eastern India, unique identities are expressed through the notion of desh (homeland). There are ties, most commonly familial, that bind one to this place. Implicit in this notion of desh is the certainty that one necessarily carries within oneself this identity, through acceptance or longing and also through rejection. In Bengali historiography, this notion comes out most powerfully in analyses of the Hindu refugee experience after the Partition of British India in 1947. Through a process of memorialisation, a comforting sense of past home—the desh or villages in East Pakistan—was remembered and written about by the refugees, and contrasted against the present harsh lives as refugees in a new country.28 Emotion plays a crucial role in refecting upon particular places. It imbues them with meanings, affections and a sense of familiarity. In larger, alien territory, emotional attachment to smaller areas—be it a nook or corner in a house, a particular neighbourhood of the city—creates comforting spatial entities and shapes identities of people residing there. These places provide them with security and stability.29 Similarly, myths and memories often conjure the pasts of a locality, and narratives are woven around them in folklore, travel accounts and local histories. Historians—aided by anthropological and sociological insights—work with these narratives to unearth a complex picture of the ways in which people lived, experienced and made sense of their surroundings. In the process, a rich texture of the local comes to the fore. The theories about nomenclature become a part of this narrative, which, almost always, begins with the story behind the origin of the name of a place. In stories about mythical origins, 6

INTRODUCTION

the landscape and physical geography become important. The narratives woven around a particular place become layered, with the history of political developments piling up in due course. The place becomes the meeting point of mythical and temporal locations. The history of the place is traced from ‘time immemorial’ to the present. These issues of politics and memory (as well as politics of memory) come up in different ways in some of the chapters of the book, and give us a sense of the practices through which the local was conceived of and analysed across a spectrum of historical writings.

The global, the local and the vernacular In this age of global networks and connections, it was but inevitable that historians would look beyond national frames and study trans-continental journeys—be it of people, community or commodity—to understand the shared past of the globe. The rise of global history can be attributed to the urge to move away from both Eurocentrism on one hand, and bounded national territory on the other. As one of the foremost practitioners of the feld, Sebastian Conrad mentions, ‘Global history is both an object of study and a particular way of looking at history: it is both a process and a perspective, subject matter and methodology.’30 Conrad contends that the importance of treating it as a perspective lies in the fact that historians do not necessarily need to cover the entire globe in their research, but rather the subject of research should inform the choice of perspective. The ubiquity of global history in recent times, however, looms large on other histories. As intellectual historian David Armitage once remarked in an interview, ‘if you are not doing an explicitly transnational, international or global project, you now have to explain why you are not.’31 But in this allure of the global, historians often run the risk of losing sight of experiences and articulations in concrete, individual sites. John-Paul A Ghobrial, in a recent forum on the challenges of twining microhistory and global history, notes that ‘In a feld that has foregrounded connections, circulation and integration, there is an acute worry on the part of some scholars about the methodological downgrading of place-based knowledge and expertise in the writing of global history.’32 Jeremy Adelman also signals a note of caution when he says that Global history faces two seemingly opposite challenges for an inter-dependent, over-heating planet. If we are going to muster meaningful narratives about the togetherness of strangers near and far, we are going to have to be more global and get more serious about engaging other languages and other ways of telling history. Historians and their reader-citizens are also going to have to resignify the place of local attachments and meanings.33 7

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

In these reappraisals of the feld, we fnd convictions of rethinking the spatial scales and universal notions with which we work. The local still holds relevance in depicting the varied histories of our past as well as informs the more universal categories and processes that form a part of global histories. The latter, as Ghobrial mentions, often ‘prioritizes fows and movements on global scale, while ignoring the diversity of processes and contexts that feed into, and are impacted by, those global processes as they developed in specifc sites.’34 The chapters in this book look at particular spaces and study specifc issues to bring out the history of these diverse processes and how they unravelled to mould the situation. But this does not hark back to a diffusionist history. Rather, the idea here is to interrogate how worldwide currents—be it colonial governance, pedagogic practices or intellectual rhythms—simultaneously informed and interacted with particular local idioms to produce variegated histories of the region. Neeladri Bhattacharya has recently demonstrated in his masterful account of the colonial agrarian in the context of Punjab that The global can exist historically only through the many locals … There is no understanding of the abstract universal in its historical forms without looking carefully at its concrete articulations … Only the local can imbue the abstract universal with density and thickness, fashion its distinctive forms.35 And in this reworking of the abstract universal, new meanings and methods are employed by local practitioners, which is often termed as vernacularisation. As Projit Bihari Mukharji has outlined, ‘vernacularization … is not a mere linguistic process of translation … It is instead a creative and agential process of refguration whereby an idea or practice is relocalized in a new historical context by subordinated agents.’36 The concept of the vernacular, then, helps us situate practices, not as deviations from the ideal or the original, but rather, as an ingenious refashioning of seemingly universal propositions.37 Celebrated practitioner of microhistory, Giovanni Levi also urges historians to look at the specifcity of local contexts to assess more general questions about historical processes.38 Conrad too mentions, It is often more a matter of writing a history of demarcated (i.e., non-“global”) spaces, but with an awareness of global connections and structural conditions … Global history, then, is not a synonym for macro-history. The most interesting questions often arise at the juncture where global processes interact with their local manifestations.39 Local history shows us how local particularities can put questions to totalising frameworks. For him, the global and the local do not necessarily 8

INTRODUCTION

stand in opposition to each other.40 Spatial scales are not given; they get constituted by social actors and practices, and it is precisely due to larger units of analyses that the focus needs to be on the small: ‘The “local” … has emerged as a category of identifcation, and of analysis, in response to processes of nation-building and of globalization.’41

Chapters in the volume The book is divided into three thematic sections. The frst section on textual representations and imaginings of regions has three chapters. Paulami Guha Biswas studies local legends of the Malla dynasty of Bishnupur (in the present-day district of Bankura) and elaborates the idea of ‘dynastic time,’ a special variant of time that contains, in its womb, cycles of the rise and fall of dynasties. She explores such a notion of time which combines the secular with the divine and the historical with the mythical. Her sources range from pamphlets, leafets, bazaar histories and tour guides to local myths, legends and popular histories. Narrating the legend of Madanmohan, the patron god of Bishnupur, who assumed human form and fred the famous Dalmadal Cannon to oust the bargis (Maratha invaders), she argues that divine myths have deep cultural roots that infuenced the production of local histories. She looks at how myths and legends mark the advent or fall of dynasties. Guha Biswas places local legends in broader historical contexts and compares them with the legends of other regions of India. In the next chapter, Aviroop Sengupta outlines three distinct ways through which the Sundarbans forests in the southern Bengal delta were envisioned in the metropolitan imagination between the 1860s and the 1920s. A wide array of texts, ranging from travelogues and adventure fction to statistical gazetteers and hydrographic manuals, portrayed the Sundarbans as a vast, dangerous, watery, tidal, wild terrain. However, depending on consciously chosen modes of travel and vantage points, they seemed to offer distinct and contradictory experiences. Whether the current desolate wilderness was of recent vintage, the site being home to fourishing civilisations in the deep past, or whether the eternal wilderness had only started to become tamed, controlled and cultivated from the advent of British rule in the region became a matter of debate. Again, administrators and wealthy private investors came together as well as clashed in depicting the Sundarbans as a ‘wasteland’ whose development required visionary plans of action. Sengupta shows how these three ‘visions’ of the Sundarbans—of a polarising present, a deeply contested past and a malleable future—were crucially dependent and entangled with each other. In the third chapter of this section, Kalyan Chatterjee critically examines the potential of the Orientalist texts on Manbhum and Purulia as prospective 9

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

sources of knowledge for reconstructing the past of this region. Chatterjee offers a close reading of passages from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works of WW Hunter, H Coupland, JD Beglar, Valentine Ball, Walter Hamilton and Edward Tuite Dalton. He highlights how a conventional reading of Orientalist texts can restrict one, while an awareness of the dualities and contradictions inherent within these texts can assist one in understanding the past. The point that he tries to make, therefore, is that it is possible for historians to glean information from the Orientalist texts if and when necessary, provided that the endeavour employs a reading that also exploits the fssures in the postcolonial canon of reading practices. The second section of the book focuses on the different kinds of epistemic practices and formulations of educational policies which delineated the borders of a region and of its people. Suvobrata Sarkar moves away from what he calls a mainstream history of the advancement of science and technology in India which primarily celebrates the achievements of illustrious Indian scientists, technocrats, doctors and institutions. He attempts a close reading of the vernacular publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His study reveals that ‘modern’ scientifc knowledge and its technological applications were also appropriated by a section of Indians lacking formal academic training in the engineering sciences. Their narratives illustrate that not only the colonial British rulers but the Indian elites as well were accountable for ignoring their achievements altogether. Scholars and artisans lived in exclusive social and cognitive worlds and thus circulation of knowledge between them remained impossible. The institutional training in engineering in India did not help the artisans, blacksmiths, etc. as it did their counterparts in Western Europe. In fact, engineering education created a gulf of difference between the self-taught, subaltern technologists and the ‘babu’ engineers. It is the work of the former that Sarkar attempts to reinstate in academic discussions through his contribution to this volume. Akash Bhattacharya’s chapter is on pathshala reforms in Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century. The 1854 Wood’s Dispatch, while outlining the institutional framework within which the mass education system should function, made a clear distinction between the ‘school’ and indigenous institutions of elementary instruction such as pathshalas and maktabs. It mandated the setting up of schools in order to create an institutional basis for mass education while allowing for the continuous ‘improvement’ of indigenous institutions. In Bengal, the policy was debated between offcials. Despite the sharp opinion in favour of improving pathshalas to prepare a base for mass education, in 1854 the pro-school group won the day. However, by the end of the decade, there was a shift in policy in Bengal. While the grants-in-aid system continued, improvement of pathshalas was attempted on an urgent basis through two schemes: JP Grant’s Scheme and Bhudev’s Scheme. Bhattacharya unpacks these two schemes and pays attention to two key aspects of this process: frst, how an education policy that 10

INTRODUCTION

was strongly indexed by globality, had to be moulded in accordance with local pressures, specifcities and histories; second, how the moulding took place, i.e. how the guru training schools were set up in a way that preserved parts of the traditional curriculum and pedagogy. Focusing on the issue of education, albeit in a very different context, Sandip Chatterjee, in his chapter, seeks to juxtapose the issue of educating the children of miners with that of training provided to adult miners in the collieries of Raniganj and Jharia in the frst three decades of the twentieth century. He argues that the schools, other than being sites for imparting education, also became sites for ensuring the safety of the miners’ children. The coal mine management and the colonial government were considering schools as an alternative childcare arrangement—a place to leave the children while their elders went to work. The other option was to leave them in the care of their elder siblings. This requirement of the children ‘old enough’ to stay at home and look after their younger siblings hampered their own education. Sending the children to schools became a better alternative. Schooling, argues Chatterjee, was more about keeping miners’ children in a safe refuge while their mothers were busy working than about fostering their intellectual development. The last section of the book is on the administrative manoeuvres and governmental practices which helped the state in mapping its people on the one hand and also contributed to the forging of identities of the subject population on the other. Ujjayan Bhattacharya’s chapter focuses on the construction of the idea of ‘sovereignty’ in the British imperium, particularly the notion of ‘frontier’—an important ingredient in the defnition of territorial power. The acquisition of territory in Jangal Mahals did not make the British power sovereign in the region immediately. Till the end of the eighteenth century, it was military power that supported and sustained the claim to rule those regions, collect revenues and supervise the administration. Much of the territory where military operations were carried out was under the control of tribal kings and princes who, though recognised by external political powers like the Mughals or the Nizamat of Bengal, had always ruled their territories autonomously. Those were the internal boundaries or the frontiers of the Mughal Empire which continued to exist in a semisubdued state in the south Chhotanagpur region during the transition in the eighteenth century. The Jangal Mahals, within the larger sphere of southwest Bengal and the adjoining regions of densely forested Chhotanagpur, was a ‘zone of anomaly.’ Thus, colonialism could gain a permanent foothold only by the middle of the nineteenth century, when the relationship between the metropolis and the colony was set up on a defnite basis. The next chapter in the section is by Uponita Mukherjee. Drawing historiographical attention to a branch of police work which is so often neglected in South Asian police histories where police ‘prevention’ of gang robberies, riots and various forms of public disorder dominate, she tells the story of 11

KAUSTUBH MANI SENGUPTA AND TISTA DAS

criminal ‘detection’ as it emerged and developed in British Bengal across the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mukherjee aims to correct the misconception that detection was the exclusive purview of offcers of the detective department based in the city. The administrative reforms which introduced the New Police System in Bengal in the early 1860s instituted ‘detective policing’ as a mandatory and essential part of regular police work for offcers in urban centres and provinces alike. Indeed, even before the detective department was instituted in the city, experiments with organising a select group of offcers for specialised detective work had already started in the Lower Provinces of Bengal around 1863. Mukherjee interrogates precisely this twinning of the city and the fgure of the police detective in popular, offcial and academic discourses. She zooms in and out of the city and its surrounding provinces (particularly the Lower Provinces of Bengal), to compare and contrast the ways in which practices of detecting crime developed differently across these spaces. She analyses detective work as the function of the varying local conditions in which police offcers ‘detected’ crime in Bengal. The last chapter of the volume, by Subhasri Ghosh, looks at the demographic nuances of infux and effux affecting the Nadia district of West Bengal from the times of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 till the Bangladesh crisis of 1971. Since the movement of people from East Pakistan to West Bengal has by and large been studied as unidirectional, Ghosh fnds a dearth of studies on the impact of a two-way fow of migration. She telescopes down to an individual border district like Nadia to identify signifcant exceptions to this general trend. Culling information from census reports of pre-independent and independent India, Ghosh examines, at a micro-level, how cross-border migration and subsequent relocation of populations had a telling impact on the religious and demographic contours. Taking a decadal view of the situation, this study analyses how, till the Bangladesh War of 1971, when the district was once again lashed by a huge tidal wave of migration from across the border, the fow of population remained a constant phenomenon infuencing the settlement patterns.

Notes 1 In a powerful reworking of the notion of the local, Upal Chakrabarti has argued that reducing the analytical power of the category within a set of binaries—outside/inside, metropolitan/colonial, liberal theory/indigenous practice, representation/reality—belies the complexities involved in the ways through which the ‘local’ was debated and discussed in policies regarding colonial agrarian governance, and was assembled through an interwoven network of discursive practices. He views the category as an apparatus or a network. Chakrabarti wants to unpack the spatial determinism involved in any analysis of the local, and bring it ‘out of a geographical stranglehold.’ He mentions, In imagining the ‘local’ as an apparatus/network, I look at it as a transformative force which sets in motion a continuous process of territori-

12

INTRODUCTION

2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13

alisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of practices and categories of knowledge and governance. The ‘local,’ in this way, gets de-linked from physical geography, and gets inscribed within analytical geography as a spatialising logic, which brings together sets of meanings as nodes, but only to burst open, disperse, and recreate new ones again and again. Upal Chakrabarti, ‘The Work of the ‘Local’,’ in Maitreyee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur (eds.), Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2018, pp. 59–77, quote from p. 70. Also, Upal Chakrabarti, ‘Agrarian Localities: Political economy as local power in early nineteenth-century British India,’ Modern Asian Studies, 2015, doi:10.1017/ S0026749X15000128. Though extremely persuasive and thought-provoking, the chapters in this volume do not share this vision of dispersed geography. While we need to be careful of geographical determinism and look at the ways in which wider currents of thoughts produce abstract categories, nevertheless, we believe that studying the constitution of the local as a spatial entity—keeping in mind the perils of binaries and the politics of scale—can provide us with nuanced understandings of the historical processes of particular geographical units. For a detailled discussion on regional history, especially that of Bengal, and a list of essential titles, see Yagneswar Chowdhury, Ancholik Itihas Chorcha O Granthapanji, Nabadwip: Nabadwip Puratattva Parishad, 2008. See the chapter by Paulami Guha Biswas in this volume for a discussion of ‘local history’ as a category. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015. Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Orient Blackswan, 2010; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004; Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, London, New York, Delhi: Anthem Press, 2011. For a general account of the spatial turn in social sciences, see Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London, New York: Verso, 1989. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 18. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 287. He further states, ‘to look upon abstract space as homogeneous is to embrace a representation that takes the effect for the cause, and the goal for the reason why that goal is pursued.’ Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 81. Andrew Merrifeld, ‘Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 18, No. 4 1993, p. 520; Andrzej Zieleniec, Space and Social Theory Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage, 2007, p. 69. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 85. He elaborates: Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it [social space] is also a means of production; networks of exchange and fows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it. Thus this means of

13

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production, produced as such, cannot be separated either from the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or from the social division of labour which shapes it, or from the state and the superstructures of society. 14 Ibid., p. 86. 15 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a region for our times,’ Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 69, No. 4, 2010, pp. 963–83. 16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1983. 17 Lefebvre, Production of Space. 18 See Manu Goswami, Producing India. 19 On tours, travel and colonial spatial imaginary, see Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, London, New York: Anthem Press, 2012; David Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006; Mary Louise-Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992. 20 Prathama Banerjee, Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; Ajay Skaria, ‘Being Jangli: The Politics of Wildness,’ Studies in History, Vol. 14, no. 2, 1998, pp. 193–215; Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness: Tribe, Caste and Gender in Western India,’ Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, pp. 726–45. 21 See, for an understanding of the analysis of Indian nationalism as an effect of competition and collaboration between the coloniser and the colonised at various spatial levels, Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1968; Christopher John Baker, The Politics of South India, 1920–1937, Cambridge, 1976; Judith M Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928–34, Cambridge, 1977; Judith M Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922, Cambridge, 1972; John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal (eds.), Locality, Province, and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870 to 1940, Cambridge, 1973; Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress, 1880 to 1915, Cambridge, 1973; Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923, Cambridge, 1974; DA Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920, Cambridge, 1976; CA Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920, Oxford, 1975. 22 Gallagher, Johnson, and Seal (eds.), Locality, Province and Nation, p. 2. 23 Gallagher and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., 6 (1953), pp. 1–15. 24 For an early critique of this view, see Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics,’ The Historical Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1979, pp. 747–63. 25 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,’ in R Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982. Also, in an assessment of the collective, Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, ‘Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge).’ Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity. 26 Guha mentions,

14

INTRODUCTION

The reason … lay in a decalage, that is, in the fact that the two kinds of space [ethnic and physical] did not quite coincide even when they converged. There were territorial units which were home to more than one ethnic group and there were ethnic regions which extended over more than one territorial unit. A peasant uprising tended, in either case, to fll in the gap by its own content and simulate a coincidence between community and habitat. An overlap of these two elements supplemented by the appropriation of one or the other by the act of rebellion was what constituted the latter’s domain. R Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 330.

27 Ranabir Samaddar, Memory, Identity, Power: Politics in the Jungle Mahals (West Bengal) 1890–1950, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998. 28 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages—Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 31, Issue No. 32, 10 Aug, 1996. 29 Razak Khan, ‘Local Pasts: Space, Emotions and Identities in Vernacular Histories of Princely Rampur,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 58, 2015, pp. 693–731; Geert De Neve and Henrike Donner, The Meaning of the Local. Politics of Place in Urban India, London and New York: Routledge, 2006; Kaustubh Mani Sengupta, ‘Community and Neighbourhood in a Colonial City: Calcutta’s Para,’ South Asia Research, Vol. 38, no 1, 2018, pp. 40–56. 30 Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 11. 31 Martine van Ittersum and Jaap Jacobs, ‘Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage,’ Itinerario, Volume 36, Issue 02, August 2012, pp. 7–28, quote p. 16. 32 John-Paul A Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World Like a Microhistorian,’ Past and Present, Supplement 14, 2019, p. 6. He describes microhistory in these words: microstoria was associated with a specifc practice, or mode, of working with primary sources. Microhistorians reduced the focus of their analyses, reading their sources as if through a microscope, and thereby prioritizing small details, or clues, which they used to unravel the teleology and triumphalism of grand narratives. In doing so, microhistory challenged the large-scale paradigms that had come to infuence the study of the past. p. 13. See also, Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi and Anne C Tedeschi, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1993, pp. 10–35.

33 Jeremy Adelman, ‘What is Global History Now?,’ aeon, 2 March 2017, https ://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment, last accessed: 19 April 2020. 34 Ghobrial, ‘Seeing the World Like a Micohistorian,’ p. 8. 35 Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018, p. 12. 36 Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Vernacularizing Political Medicine: Locating the Medical betwixt the Literal and the Literary in Two Texts on the Burdwan Fever, Bengal c. 1870s,’ in Rohan Deb Roy and Guy NA Attewell, Locating the Medical:

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37

38 39 40

41

Explorations in South Asian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 235–63, quote from p. 236. Akash Bhattacharya’s chapter in this volume employs both the meanings of the term vernacular—as in local language as well as a translation of ideas—to chart the history of the tensions and negotiations that accompanied the introduction of modern education system in colonial Bengal. Giovanni Levi, ‘Frail Frontiers?,’ Past and Present, Supplement 14, 2019, pp. 37–49. Conrad, What is Global History? p. 12. Ibid., p. 129. He mentions that there are ‘studies that analyze one concrete subject in its spatial and social specifcity, and at the same time position it in global contexts. The most fascinating questions are often those that arise at the intersection between global processes and their local manifestations.’ Ibid., p. 137.

16

Part I TEXTUAL REPRESENTATIONS, PUBLIC DISCOURSES

1 DYNASTIC TIME A chronology for memories in Bishnupur Paulami Guha Biswas

The canonisation of cannons In 1901, Babu Nilmoni Singh Deo, the Raja of the Malla dynasty of Bishnupur,1 a feudatory state in the Bankura district of western Bengal (geographically it is called the Rarh region), was told by the Bengal Government to return the cannons in his possession for the renewal of his license.2 The Indian Arms Act of 1878 made license mandatory for the possession of frearms by Indians. The resonance of the 1857 Revolt was still fresh in the memories of the colonial state. However, in 1896, the Babu was granted a license to retain four out of the eight cannons in his possession and was requested to return the rest.3 Out of the four, one burst, one turned useless and the other two were slightly broken, hence not ft for use. After the death of his father, Babu Ram Krishna Singh Deo, Babu Nilmoni expressed his wish to continue with the tradition of fring during the Durga Puja festivities and retained the other four cannons which were in good condition. The Raja of Bishnupur possessed four cannons in 1901. But as he refused to renew his license, the Government of India allowed Raja Sourindra Mohan Tagore of Calcutta to get hold of two out of the four cannons of Bishnupur. It was a sort of punishment for the Bishnupur Raja. Accordingly, the Bishnupur Raja’s persistent denial to return the cannons led to the cancellation of his license. An offcer of the Government of Bengal expressed his annoyance thus—‘I suppose the Babu is piquant at losing two of his four cannons, and that a false sense of pride accounts for his acting in this foolish way. It could be a pity to hurt his feelings more than can be helpful.’4 He further added that if the Commissioner or the District Collector personally met the Babu, he might ‘change his mind and give up the license without feeling any loss of dignity.’ What led the Raja to act in such a ‘foolish way’? What was this ‘false sense of pride’ that caused the loss of his license? Why was the ‘loss of dignity’ more humiliating for him than the loss of license? Where did this ‘sense of pride’ and dignity come from? What was the cultural signifcance

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of cannons in Bishnupur? Were they as anonymous as they appear in the British archival records? Were they just a bundle of ‘frearms’ subject to prohibition under the 1878 Act? Or did they have a sacral role to play in the myths and memories of Bishnupur? How much were they instrumental in reviving the memories of a ‘glorious past’? What was their place in the history of Bishnupur? Bishnupur, now known as the historical temple town of Bankura district, West Bengal, is famous for its beautiful terracotta temples built by generations of the Malla rulers. The fne terracotta and mortar sculpture on the temples, the Rash Mancha (a huge structure with a pointed tower and small towered cubicles where rash was celebrated during holi, see Figure 1.8), a number of huge tanks, the stone chariot and the local craft of Dashabatar tash (cards on which the pictures of the ten avatars are painted; it is said that the Mughal Emperors used to play in their court with the Bishnupur cards) gave Bishnupur a unique identity in the map of historical and archaeological sites of India. The extensive practice of Vaishnavism by the Malla rulers connected Bishnupur to Vrindavan and other Vaishnava centres of north India. The diverse religious traditions, the fourishing music gharana, the local craft of Baluchari sari and thriving trade and transport gave Bishnupur more of a cosmopolitan character and established it as one of the most famous regional kingdoms during the Mughal era.5 Cannons, for the people of Bishnupur, were symbols of power, authority and religious supremacy. Each canon had its specifc name and a story around it. The Dalmadal, the Gorak, the Jhuljhara, the Charakbijli, the Baghmua and many more enriched the cannon family.6 Local inhabitants believe that centuries back the Bishnupur Raj possessed around 1,200 cannons. During the reign of Raja Gopal Singhadeb I (1712–1748), the number of cannons was as high as 2,200. The local artisans belonging to the Mridha community, who are said to have learned the art from Turk Muslim experts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, continued to be the architects of cannons till the last one was made.7 The massive cannon known as the Dalmadal (that is displayed in Bishnupur and maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India) was probably manufactured during the reign of Raghunath Singha I, the son of Bir Hambir, in the seventeenth century (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4).8 From the Persian engravings on the cannon, it seems that an amount of 1 lakh 25,000 rupees was spent on its making. According to local legends, the name Dalmadal derived from Dalmardan, meaning the destruction of enemies. Another myth tells us that two cannons named Dal and Madal were joined together in order to create the giant one. But Priyabrata Dasgupta holds a different opinion. He thinks that Raja Raghunath Singha wished to pay respects to his father’s army general Dalamardan Malla.   What was the role of this cannon in the ‘history’ of Bishnupur? Fakir Narayan Karmakar, in his Timeless Tales of Bishnupur (Bishnupurer Amar Kahini),9 details the mythical story. The Malla state was attacked in 20

DYNASTIC TIME

Figure 1.1 Cover of a local pamphlet on the temples of Bishnupur, Bankura district, West Bengal. All images in this chapter were taken by the author during her trip to Bishnupur in September 2017.

1742 by the Maratha plunderer (locally known as bargis) Bhaskar Pandit and his troops. Raja Gopal Singha, a devout Vaishnava, left arms and ordered all his subjects to chant the name of Madanmohan, the patron god of Bishnupur. The air of Bishnupur echoed with the name of the god and the water was resonating with the holy chants. Amidst the tunes of the divine hymns, everybody was overwhelmed for a while by a deafening sound, the uproar of a cannon all of a sudden! What was its origin? Who fred the cannon? Karmakar carries on with the local story that a poor farmer ran towards the royal palace and told the Raja that he saw a young boy on a white horse. The boy was radiating a blue halo and was heavily sweating. Listening to this, the Raja and his courtiers ran to the Madanmohan temple and witnessed with surprise that the idol was 21

PAULAMI GUHA BISWAS

Figure 1.2 Cover of a local book on the legends, tales and history of Bishnupur.

sweating! What could one say after this? The news spread like fre that the young boy was Madanmohan himself. He lifted the Dalmadal cannon and fred it to save his devotees from the bargi attack! According to another legend, the god appeared in the dream of Bhaskar Pandit and instructed him to leave Bishnupur.   The mythical story described above fnds a space in all ‘local histories’ of Bishnupur. Now, how do we defne the genre of ‘local history’? What are its characteristics? Do local histories have a synchronic relationship with ‘national histories’? Or is it diachronic? Like the one mentioned, do all ‘local histories’ blur the borders between history, legend, myths and memories? Are local histories subject to fallacies of antiquarianism, as they are often blamed for, or do they serve to strengthen the discourse of metanarratives? Have local histories adopted the rules of modern history writing? What is the role of local histories in the construction of modern historiography in 22

DYNASTIC TIME

Figure 1.3 The Dalmadal Cannon, Bishnupur.

India? In the next section, I have summarised the history of ‘local histories’ in an international context and have placed the local histories of Bishnupur in a wider perspective.

Do memories have origins? This research began under a project on ‘public history.’ The aim of the project was to trace historical writings that circulate at the margins of academic institutions. The focus was on tourist manuals, pamphlets, bazaar histories and the narrations of trained and untrained tour guides in various historical monuments. Based on the assumption that these narratives would often be drastically different from historical research produced at universities and formal academic circles, the project required the collection of pamphlets and leafets and the recording of the narration of the tour guides. These pamphlets are often full of local myths, colourful love stories and shaded local memories that never secure any space in recognised academic histories (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Following the references given in the pamphlets and getting some information from the authors of these local histories, I began to trace back the origins of these memories. And that opened a Pandora’s box! 23

PAULAMI GUHA BISWAS

Figure 1.4 Signboard describing the popular history of the Dalmadal Cannon.

There is an obvious lack of formal academic work on Bishnupur. Kumkum Chatterjee in her article has mainly traced the roots of Vaishnavism there. She placed the history of Vaishnavism in Bishnupur in a broader context and noticed a confuence of Mughal culture and Vaishnava devotional traditions. She termed it the cosmopolitan culture of Bishnupur.10 But my concern was to unravel the local myths and memories. The history one gets in the pamphlets of Bishnupur is a history of a dynasty, the Malla dynasty that operated in and around Bishnupur for a thousand years. With its faded importance since the middle of the eighteenth century, Bishnupur collapsed into the category of the ‘local.’ The history of the Malla dynasty is now the ‘local’ history of Bishnupur. The pamphlets are talking about a ‘glorious past.’ This past is probably located in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Malla Rajas were sharing a cordial relationship with the Mughal Emperors of Delhi and were often favoured by them. The pamphlets are mainly quoting from books written in the last three or four decades. Books by Fakir Narayan Karmakar and Manoranjan Chandra are the ones most frequently referred to.11 I collected those books and got references to older texts from them, written either by Bengali authors or British administrators, district magistrates, etc. Gangagobinda Roy’s book preceded Karmakar’s 24

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and told the same stories, sometimes with small variations.12 Sequentially as I moved backwards, I reached LSS O’Malley’s district gazetteers and fnally the monographs by JZ Holwell written between 1765 and 1771 (Interesting Historical Events)13 and WW Hunter’s Diary of 1876 where he collected the narration of a Brahmin pandit of Bishnupur about the history of the place.14 Surprisingly, I found that the narrative of the pandit and that given by my tour guide were not much different. Almost the same legends about the Rajas, Ranis, gods and miracles by gods were circulating in Bishnupur for centuries. But how much of this history has been noticed by the so-called formal academia? Histories of small places, lesser spaces, such as a particular dynasty ruling in a certain region, were common in India since ancient times. Genealogies of families and achievements of tribal chiefs or religious preachers are preserved with great care and serve as important sources for research. But the genre of ‘local history,’ featuring the characteristics of modern historical methods, began to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century. Works were produced both in the vernacular and in English. In Bengal, there was an upsurge in recording the local legends of dynasties, chronicles of heroism, mythical stories of miracles, romances between kings and queens and anecdotes involving common people.15 But surprisingly, this genre has received only marginal attention from historians to date. Ranajit Guha questioned the authenticity of the early nineteenth-century histories as they drew ‘indiscriminately on myths and unverifed local legends and folklore.’16 The early colonial histories produced by British administrators, in his opinion, ‘had the material and colonial interests of the emerging colonial state.’17 He certifed Ramram Basu’s Raja Pratapaditya Charitra (published in 1801) as the frst historical work in Bengali that had a secular character, ‘In our culture the demolition of the absolute past of the Purana began with historicization rather than with novelization.’18 Guha identifed some features of the newly invented ‘world-history’ of the early nineteenth century and showed that Basu’s work, though did not fully ft that genre, was the frst instance of historical work in vernacular that could be placed at the margins of ‘world-history.’19 The point he missed is that a world of ‘local histories’ began to unfold in the mid-nineteenth century that combined Puranic legends with the new idea of chronology that arrived along with the Western methods of historiography. Both Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee noticed a gradual shift towards nationalist history in late nineteenth-century Bengal.20 The teleology of the nation, parallel to the ongoing nationalist struggle, structured the nature of history writing. Chatterjee’s detailed account of Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay’s Bharatbarsher Itihash (History of India, published in 1858) explains how the category of ‘nation’ overshadowed all other units of identity. He traced a shift from the ‘history of kings’ to the ‘history of this country,’: ‘Never again will Rajabali [chronicle of kings] be written; from now on, everything will be the “history of the des.”’21 25

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While tracing the revolutionary transformation of Indian historiography since the middle of the nineteenth century, Guha and Chatterjee overlooked the good number of tracts, records, registers and annals that, rather than contributing to a linear story of the nation, preferred to chronicle local memories and glorify the past of smaller spaces and minor places. Though historians have often drawn heavily from these works,22 none have tried to theorise this literature that was mostly produced from local presses. Shifting a little from Chatterjee’s argument, Kumkum Chatterjee divided the historywriting traditions in colonial India into two paradigms: the early colonial Persian tradition and the later nationalistic tradition.23 But even she did not engage with the vast plethora of local histories. A question frequently asked by local historians is whether these histories contribute to the grand narratives of the nation or whether they present an alternative account of the local. Folklore and literary studies in recent years have examined the relationship between metanarratives and local stories.24 Ramananda Chatterjee, the prominent nationalist leader of the Bankura district, praised Abhay Pada Mullick’s account of the Bishnupur Raj (published in English in 1921) as a substantial contribution to the history-writing tradition in Bengal. The ‘glorifying’ past of the local, as most of these local histories aimed to show, in a way contributed to the narratives of the nation. Attributing a ‘golden’ past to each local space could have helped to imagine a nation, built up with treasured fragments. But what were the features of these histories? Did they follow the rules observed by Ranajit Guha in the context of Ramram Basu’s Pratapaditya that ‘Henceforth, there would be no going back to Purana’? Did they really depart from the ways old legends and myths were told? The answer is in the negative. We can see that the local histories emerged as a genre that gave legitimacy to the stories of the divine, the miracles and magic. As the title of this article suggests, they attributed calendar dates to all such memories, a trend Guha too observed in Basu’s history. But that was to legitimise, rather than to depart from, these age-long stories. The debates on history writing in Bengal in the early decades of the twentieth century in fact did not recognise a dividing line between myth and truth.25 Kumkum Chatterjee has shown in the context of the kulagrantha (clan genealogies) debate that Dinesh Chandra Sen and Nagendranath Basu expressed their preferences for spontaneous, free-form memory as a mode of retrieving the past over professional history. Their compulsion was to defne a form of history of our own. Like the popular and well-circulated national histories, they too borrowed Western historiographical methods, applied chronology to memories and myths and made claims of authenticity.26 Following the exhaustive list of local histories in Bengal, we can see that the frst instance of such ‘history’ can be traced to the 1860s.27 By the time of independence (1947) the genre was quite widespread and popular. Local histories of Bogura, Bikrampur, 26

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Maymansingh, Midnapore, Pabna, Barisal, Burdwan, etc. began to appear along with books on the history of Bengal and India. Though their circulation was limited, they pose a serious challenge to the theory that the historywriting tradition in Bengal was a parallel development to nation-building. How much they contributed to the development of the tradition of nationalist history is a question still to be answered. Here I want to provide some details of the evolution of the genre of local history and the questions that were raised in Western academia. If Ramram Basu ftted within the ‘limit of world-history,’ how do we place the local histories of Bishnupur in the context of ‘local histories’ in general?

Local history at the limit of secular history Though rich instances of local histories have been available since ancient times, the particular form began to be theorised in the 1920s and 30s, between the two World Wars. That was the era of the production of new local histories and discoveries of the old ones. Though WG Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape was published a little later (1955), it was directly infuenced by the great upsurge of county histories, local archaeological societies, parish chronicles and manorial histories that multiplied in the interwar period, though it was ‘not until after the Second World War that new life was breathed into the world of local history.’28 Scholars identifed this new wave of local history as different from the previous trends which were generally downgraded as antiquarianism. Hoskins warns his readers in his introduction that his book ‘touches upon a wide variety of subjects—such as the industrial revolution, the building of country houses, the growth of towns, the construction of the railways—but it does not attempt to give a connected history of these things.’29 His work is the very account of the English landscape, its history and evolution. F Jacoby, in his extensive research on ancient Greek local histories, revolutionised the way Greek historiography was looked at.30 Moving beyond Herodotus and Thucydides, he unearthed a number of contemporary local histories of Athens that left deep impacts on the two aforesaid masters. Names like Hellanicus and Cleidemus were now pronounced with that of Herodotus. Later his study came to be known as Atthis or Atthidography (local histories of Athens). Following his footsteps, historians unearthed instances from Christian and pagan historiography which infuenced and even brought changes to the classical history-writing traditions in Greece.31 These histories chronicled the local myths and memories with great care. Even Herodotus was accused of forgery of Egyptian historians.32 As many of these works were in the local vernacular languages, the forged connections between history writing and classical Greek language also got dismantled. The discoveries of fractions, fragments and micro-studies challenged 27

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the established notions about Greek history and largely contributed to the understanding of the emerging genre of ‘local history.’ The dimensions of space and language addressed accordingly by Hoskins and Jacoby resonate too in the local histories of India and Bengal. But the strictly secular approach of the European historians towards local history is something that has to be modifed when we examine the Indian instances. Here, often the divine appeared as central. I tried to understand how a structure evolved through these histories, memories, myths; all interwoven into a singular discourse mostly circulated as the ‘Timeless Tales of Bishnupur.’33 But this does not mean that the recording of myths went uncontested. The historians of Bishnupur too were torn between dilemmas—‘whether to illuminate or eliminate historical myths,’ a question addressed widely by the ‘patriarchs of Western historiography.’34 But in spite of the challenges, it is the ‘mythistory’ that triumphed, a history that ‘treats manipulative and oppressive “lies” as “truths,”’35 a history that spread faster with the beginnings of the local printing technologies. Ranajit Guha observed about historical time, To introduce clockwork into the mythic time of the Kalpas is to dissolve its cyclicity into linear, natural time, just as to introduce the authorial present in a discourse is to free it from thraldom to Puranic time and transpose it to historical time.36 While supporting his basic premise, I slightly shift from his stand and use a different phrase, ‘dynastic time,’ to defne the nature of local histories. The histories of dynasties have been written so far as cycles of rise and fall.37 Jeroen Duindam, in his majestic work on the nature of dynastic histories worldwide, preferred a shift from the existing structure and considered ‘power’ as the pivotal theme: ‘Can the tensions inherent in the dynastic setup be understood as structural causes of an alternating cycle of ascent and decline?’38 Though in recent years this mode has been challenged by scholars who questioned the idea of ‘fall,’ the local histories still envision dynasties as units for writing history. LSS O’Malley, the author of the Bengal district gazetteers, wrote in 1908 that ‘The history of Bankura, so far as it is known, prior to the period of British rule, is identical with the history of the rise and fall of the Rajas of Bishnupur.’39 The present chapter argues that in the histories of Bishnupur, dynastic time was fraught with divine time. These texts have directly connected the rise and fall of the Malla dynasty to the legends of the patron god Madanmohan, whose arrival and departure from Bishnupur defned the fate of the dynasty. Along with the analysis of some legendary stories, the chapter elaborates this idea of ‘dynastic time,’ over which all the age-old memories were engraved with calendrical dates. 28

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The dynastic cycles From the age of the pandit, whose narrative WW Hunter documented in the 1870s, to the present age down the line, there are some special memories in Bishnupur that mattered. Jacques le Goff has traced the route from oral memories to written ones and showed how the claims of authenticity get stronger when the myths are documented.40 Hunter wrote in his diary—‘the local researches’ were ‘made by my assistants in India, district by district, under the printed instructions which I sent them.’41 The stories had orally circulated since time immemorial. It is often diffcult to trace written documents in support of the events recounted. Asit Das, the tour guide who took me around the place, narrated the same stories as detailed in the local histories. Let me begin with the legend about the origin of the Malla dynasty. Long back, towards the end of the seventh century AD, the dethroned king of Jaynagar, a tiny kingdom near Vrindavan in North India, was travelling with his family to Puri, the famous Vaishnava pilgrimage of coastal Orissa.42 His pregnant wife collapsed into labour pain at a village called Laugram near Kotulpur in western Bengal. After giving birth to a beautiful son, she succumbed to death. Her bereaved husband, overwhelmed with grief, left the child in the jungle and kept a sword named Jayshankar beside him with his name engraved on it. The child was rescued by a young widow who handed him over to the Brahmin Manohar Panchanan. The Brahmin read the engravings on the sword and came to know about the boy’s royal origin. From a number of miraculous incidents in the boy’s childhood, his foster father became sure about his superhuman qualities. One day the boy took out his cattle for grazing. Being tired, he slept in the feld. His father came there looking for him and was surprised to see that a snake was guarding him like an umbrella! The boy, who was called Raghunath, grew up with all these regal signs displayed around him. One day he defeated the most dangerous enemy of the king. The king, satisfed by his bravery and loyalty, offered him the throne of Pradyumnapur. The boy was titled Malla (brave man). Thus began the Malla dynasty with Raghunath, or Adi Malla, as its frst ruler. The capital was later shifted to the place where present-day Bishnupur is located. The origin and caste of the Mallas are controversial issues. Scholars tried to unravel the mysteries of their origin through the analysis of the above legend. Lokenath Ghose in his treatise on the Indian Chiefs, Rajas and Zamindars, has supported this story: ‘Adi Malla, a descendant of one of the Rajput Kings of Jai-Nagar, near Brindaban, was the founder of the Bishnupur Raj family.’43 In JZ Holwell’s account, we get similar references: To the West of Burdwan, something Northerly lie the lands belonging to the family of Rajah Gopaul Sing, of the Raazpoot Bramin tribe; they possess an extent of sixteen days travel, this district 29

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produces an annual revenue of between thirty and forty lac; but from the happiness of his situation, he is perhaps the most independent Rajah of Indostan, having it always in his power to overfow his country, and drown any enemy that comes against him.44 But another group of scholars questioned the validity of this story. Romesh Chunder Dutt was one amongst them: is there anything to fx the date or the authenticity of the story, or to show that it was not fabricated when the Rajas of Bishnupur were powerful in western Bengal and had assumed Hindu civilization, and were anxious, therefore, to make out a respectable royal descent for themselves.45 It was common among semi-aboriginal tribes of India to connect themselves to Aryan ancestors. Lokenath Ghose shows that the Burdwan Raj claimed their origin from the Kapur Kshatriyas of Punjab,46 the Midnapore Raj had mythical origins47 and the Nadia Rajas descended from Bhatta Narayan, head of the fve Brahmans brought from Kanauj by Adisur.48 The Malla Rajas were commonly known as Bagdi Rajas in Bengal. Current scholars like Sandhya Das and Ashok Ghosh too believe that the Rajas descended from the Bagdi caste, though the reverse view is equally powerful.49 The story above narrates the rise of the Malla kingdom, the beginning of the dynastic time. Some of the stories of Raghunath’s early life were identical to those of Lord Krishna’s childhood. Bishnupur would emerge as a main centre of Vaishnavism from the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is noticeable how the life of Vishnu had been merged with the lives of the kings. Dynastic histories revolved around divine myths. Kings appeared as superhumans with exceptional capabilities and with a halo of divinity around their heads. The myth about kingship and combining the divine with it was a common practice around the world. But as much as mainstream academic histories questioned, challenged and demolished such claims, popular histories continued to uphold them with profound faith. All the local histories of Bishnupur narrate the legendary story with deep devotion. Though this is the legend about the origin of the Malla dynasty, the period of its glory began only in the last decade of the sixteenth century during the reign of Raja Bir Hambir (1565–1620), a contemporary of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Raja Bir Hambir had several achievements including the expansion of his dynasty, building a number of temples, tanks, roads and buildings for the convenience of his subjects, inviting wise and learned men to his court and developing a diplomatic relation with the Mughals in Delhi. But surprisingly, the local histories of Bishnupur, along with short accounts of his successes, narrated a certain incident of his reign with great detail. According to legends, Bir Hambir brought the idol of the god Madanmohan 30

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to Bishnupur and established him in the famous terracotta temple dedicated to his name. Local historians tend to connect this incident with the beginning of the splendour and glory of the Malla dynasty. It is said that the Raja actually stole the idol from the house of a poor Brahmin. The image served as the most auspicious object during his rule. There are different versions of the story of the arrival of Madanmohan in Bishnupur.50 This apparently trivial occurrence preoccupied historians for quite some time. Fakir Mohan Karmakar emotionally narrated the events related to both the entry and exit of the divine idol.51 I summarise the legend below.  Once Raja Bir Hambir went out for hunting and took shelter in a poor Brahmin’s hut deep inside the forests of Brishbhanupur. He discovered the beautiful idol in the Brahmin’s home and demanded it in exchange for another idol. But the Brahmin treated the idol as his own son. He used to feed the idol before feeding himself. When he refused to hand it over to the king, the Raja stole it and brought it secretly to Bishnupur. He established the idol in the Madanmohan temple (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6). The Brahmin, bereaved and broken by the departure of his son-like god, arrived in Bishnupur after days of long walks. He asked everybody about the idol but the people of Bishnupur were instructed to keep quiet. One day when the Brahmin, hopeless and exhausted, was seen weeping sitting on the

Figure 1.5 Terracotta relief on the pillar of the Madanmohan Temple, Bishnupur.

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Figure 1.6 Signboard of the Madanmohan Temple, Bishnupur.

riverbank, a kind lady came to him and told him the truth. Hurriedly, the Brahmin visited the king and haughtily demanded his idol back. The king frst denied and then tried to coax him and allure him with assurances of lots of wealth. But the Brahmin was inconsolable. Then the king confessed that he stole the idol and allowed him to visit his Madanmohan inside the temple. When he met his son-like god and was eager to take him away, the god himself refused to come with him. The angry and disappointed Brahmin cursed the people of Bishnupur that one day they all would have to go through the pain he underwent for the loss of his dear god. The day in fact arrived, but we have to wait till the middle of the eighteenth century. Abhay Pada Mullick questioned the authenticity of this story. He has shown that the Bengali text Madan Mohan Bandana, a later-day composition, popularised the story. The text makes no mention of Brishbhanupur. Rathindra Mohan Chaudhuri thinks that the idol was brought from Birsimha.52 Gangagobinda Roy wrote in his Mallabhum Kahini that though the Madan Mohan Bandana portrayed Bir Hambir as a thief, the text Bhakti Ratnakar is silent about Madanmohan and talks about a Kalachand idol.53 Evidence proved that the story of the transfer of the idol was nothing but a myth.54 I argue here that the local histories directly connected the arrival of 32

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the divinity to the rise of the Malla dynasty to power and pomp. Dynastic time thus got entangled with divine time. The local histories stressed this incident in order to contribute to the idea of dynastic time that contained mythical memories within its fold.

The age of satis Now it is time to take a break from the stream of stories and delve into some theories on memory and history. Though often memory and history are looked at as conficting ideas, in scholarly practice too, memory was studied within the fold of history till recent times. Only in the 1980s there were attempts to separate the genres. In the beginning, the bulk of publications on memory studies were on the Jewish Holocaust. Memory studies emerged as a convenient ground where history and anthropology could merge. With the parallel rise of oral history, memory studies expanded their scope, though the central themes were mostly traumas, horror, sufferings and death. In Pierre Nora’s words, a ‘consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn.’55 Historians often placed memory and history in a temporal sequence, the latter following the former and the latter demolishing the former in order to establish its own authority. However, there are more nuanced works that addressed the complex relationships between the two. Jacques le Goff’s study of memory and writing culture paved the way to understand how memories often qualify as histories when they are documented.56 Memory studies with the course of time expanded their fold and explored mythical tales, ancestral pasts, heroic ballads and divine memories nurtured by communities and ethnic groups. In spite of the ‘conquest and eradication of memory by history,’57 memory studies are getting mounting importance within the discipline of history. Studies on spatial aspects, linguistics,58 cultural and labour history are putting increasing importance on oral and written memories. In India, memory studies often serve as supplements to the offcial archives.59 Pierre Nora’s voluminous work on the role of the French state in governing people’s memories stresses the political construction of the past. Maurice Halbwachs, on the other hand, elaborated how memories are socially constructed.60 He denied any existence of individual memory and preferred the term ‘recollection’ to ‘memory.’ Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam demolished Halbwachs’ thesis and advocated that ‘collective memory’ is a myth: ‘“Collective memory” is but a misleading new name for the old familiar “myth” which can be identifed, in its turn, with “collective” or “social” stereotypes.’61 But in Bishnupur the memories were collective. The tour guides, the local historians, the schoolmasters, the chapbook sellers, the rickshaw pullers, all were part of an age-old process of assembling these memories. They recounted the histories of the places around them in a more or less similar 33

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manner. The Lalbandh (The Lal Tank), the Sati Kund (The Spot Where Sati Happened), the Bhojan Tila (The Maund for Feast) and the Nutan Mahal (The New Apartment) are some of the place names in Bishnupur that contain local memories. What do they signify? Which story do they narrate? Does it matter if no noteworthy written record exists of the event? Memory is preserved in the very names of the places. Keith Basso, an anthropologist doing research among the Western Apache in Arizona, encountered place names such as ‘Men Stand Above Here and There,’ ‘Trail Extends Into A Grove of Sticklike Trees,’ ‘Whiteness Spreads out Descending to Water,’ and many more.62 He took the challenge to explore their origins. The following story will help us to unravel the mysteries of the place names in Bishnupur.  When the Malla king Raghunath Singha II (1702–1712) ascended the throne of Bishnupur, North India was passing through an enduring political crisis.63 Bengal was torn apart by the revolts of Sobha Singh of Midnapore and the Pathan leader Rahim Khan of Orissa. Raghunath defeated Sobha Singh in a ferce battle and brought his daughter Chandraprabha as a token of his victory. He married the girl but fell for a courtesan called Lalbai very shortly. The courtesan, a Muslim by faith, ended up at Raghunath’s court navigating through diverse destinies. Raghunath built a new apartment called the Nutan Mahal for her. Within a short while, Lalbai completely diverted the king from his courtly activities. Raghunath, absorbed in her beauty and talent, distanced himself from Chandraprabha. The court nobles secretly conspired to enthrone his younger brother Gopal Singha as Chandraprabha was childless. Lalbai got to know about the ongoing conspiracy and exiled Gopal Singha away from the capital. The Muslim courtesan made Raghunath dine with her from the same pots, which was considered an irreparable sin in Hinduism. She bore him a son and on the occasion of his rice ceremony, she planned to feed the people of Bishnupur and thus to contaminate their religious purity. A platform was raised for the feast which is still known as the Bhojan Tila. Fear of conversion numbed the air of Bishnupur. Losing all her calm at this moment, the queen Chandraprabha consulted the prudent men of the kingdom and decided to kill the king. Once when the king came to meet her after a long while, she targeted him with arrows. Stunned by the unprecedented attack, Raghunath jumped from the window, fell on the woods, was fatally hurt by the horns of the deer and died. When his funeral pyre was set up, Chandrapabha rejected the pleas of people, boldly walked into the fre, burnt herself along with her husband’s body and became immortal in local memories as the Patighatini Sati, a devoted wife who killed her husband, but still died with him. The spot is still known as the Sati Kund. At the same time, in the other part of the capital, Lalbai, with her infant son, was drowned in the big tank called Lalbandh by a violent mob (see Figure 1.7). Sati legends were common in pre-colonial India. The story of Padmini’s self-immolation in Chitore in order to resist the intrusion of Alauddin Khalji,64 the sati legends of Gwalior to guard their honour against Islamic 34

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Figure 1.7 The Lalbandh, Bishnupur.

invasions65 and the legend of Bishnupur had a common point. In all these cases the satis resisted contaminations from Islam. The valour and bravery of the ladies are symbolic of devout Hinduism, a necessary tool to assert identity in the face of dominant Muslim authorities. The sati legends date back to the Sultanate and Mughal rules, the age of expansion and consolidation of the empires. Here the history of Bishnupur comes on the same platform with the histories of other regions of India. So we can argue that local histories contributed to the building up of a national history. Fragments invested in the metanarrative in which the glories of Hinduism loomed large. Local histories of Rajasthan, Gwalior, Orchha, Vijaynagar, Maharashtra, Punjab and many other regional kingdoms magnifed the achievements of their rulers and chronicled how they posed challenges to the Muslim Emperors. The Bishnupur Rajas bravely fought the Mughal forces several times. According to one legend, king Raghunath I (1626–1656) once got an invitation from Shah Shuja, the second son of Shahjahan and the then-Governor of Bengal. Raghunath reached the court. Failing to fnd out a proper seat to rest, he unearthed a massive pillar of the palace, sat on a part of it and held another part on his lap. Shah Shuja, deeply impressed by this unusual display of physical strength, exempted Bishnupur from all demands of 35

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revenue. The sati legend and the legend of the king’s valour are some examples of how the local kingdoms responded to the powerful Mughals. It was the high noon of the Mughal imperial rule. The local dynasties, especially the Hindu ones, struggled to make themselves visible and prominent. The legends explain their modes of resistance and negotiations. In the words of WW Hunter, ‘Bishnupur appears sometimes as the enemy, sometimes as the ally, and sometimes as the tributary of the Musalman Nawab.’66 Though the sati legend infuenced a number of literary works in Bengali,67 historians often doubt the very existence of Lalbai, the infamous courtesan demonised in the legend. Manoranjan Chandra drew our attention to the fact that the tank Lalbandh was built by Raja Birsingha (1656–1682) much before the sati incident happened. He named it after the god Laljiu and not Lalbai.68 Our focus here is not to judge the truth claims of the legend but to check how the idea of dynastic time played through it. The sati legends of the medieval period followed almost the same pattern across the country. The local Hindu dynasties nurtured the legends to display their devout religiosity in the age of Muslim rule. Later the local historians applied calendar dates to the events and neatly placed them on the timelines of the dynasties. Somewhere between the glorious ‘rise’ and the fatal ‘fall,’ the dynastic cycle rolled through the moments of exception, of celebration, of magnifcence. The legend of the Patighatini Sati marked one such exceptional moment.

The divine cycles The downfall of dynasties is one of the most common subjects of historical research. While the origins of dynasties are often embedded in myths and mysteries, the end is more visible and researchable. Some of the stalwart works of international scholarship deal with the downfall of empires. Beginning from Edward Gibbon’s history of the downfall of the Roman Empire, through Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, to the Indian masterpiece on the fall of the Mughals by Jadunath Sarkar, everywhere historians stressed a range of political, social and economic factors.69 The famous debate on the collapse of the Mughal Empire, often explained in terms of Irfan Habib’s theory of the agrarian crisis and Satish Chandra’s scrutiny of factions in the Mughal court, encouraged generations of Indian historians to throw new light on the idea of decline and fall. Now, where do we place the local histories in this historiographical context? In Bishnupur the decline of the Malla dynasty coincided with the departure of the patron god Madanmohan. The idol that was once stolen by Raja Bir Hambir now went to the hands of the Calcutta merchant Gokul Mitra. Disaster befell Bishnupur. The divine cycle merged with the dynastic cycle. Following is the summary of the story.  In the middle of the eighteenth century, the fate of the Malla dynasty was at stake.70 The Bishnupur estate fell into heavy debt under the British

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East India Company. Raja Chaitanya Singha (1748–1801) mortgaged the Madanmohan idol to the Calcutta merchant Gokul Mitra. He took it to Calcutta and established it in the temple of his own house in Bagbazar. The idol served as a symbol of wealth, prosperity and good fortune. The departure of the idol caused enormous grief and pain among the people of Bishnupur.71 The walls of the Madanmohan temple echoed laments. The king wept, the queen wept, the people wept along with them. The priests wept until they lost sense. The elephants cried in the stable, the horses refused to drink water, the ladies continued lamenting. There were no more celebrations of rash or holi. No more pilgrims dropped at Bishnupur. Such was the place of Madanmohan in people’s hearts! Later, the Raja paid back his debt and requested Gokul Mitra to return the god. But Mitra refused. The arrival of Madanmohan brought him good luck. His daughter Lakshmipriya got so fond of the idol that she too refused to leave it. This is the brief story of the departure of Madanmohan from Bishnupur and of the concurrent fall of the dynasty. The idol is still gracing the temple at Bagbazar, Calcutta. The place is known as Madanmohantala. And there the dynastic cycle came to a circle. The Malla house was dismantled and Bishnupur came under the Collector of Burdwan in June 1793.72 A letter from the Collector refected the dilapidated and decayed state of Bishnupur: the temples deserted and in ruins, the zemindary diminished by one half, with the principal part of the remainder under attachment for sale and [the Rajas] themselves after being driven to the necessity of pawning their household goods still subject to a demand of arrears arising from the circumstances recited, an enforcement of which demands must reduce them to beggary and terminate their existence as Rajahs and landholders together with their zemindary or estate which had until lately been maintained in affuence through a period of nearly eleven hundred years.73 As we have already seen, in the imaginations of the local historians, it was the departure of the divine that marked the end of the Malla rule. While formal academic historians searched for politico-economic reasons for downfalls of dynasties, the local historians, chapbooks, pamphlets and religious literature envisioned coincidence as the cause. An incident appearing at the margins or footnotes of academic writing gained central focus here. Madanmohan left Bishnupur withdrawing all his blessings from the people there. The curse uttered by the poor Brahmin (from whom Bir Hambir stole the idol) came true. The connection between the arrival and departure of the idol and the rise and fall of the dynasty is not a recent invention. The Brahmin pandit interviewed by WW Hunter opined, ‘After the idol Madan

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Mohan (a remnant of aboriginal worship) was removed from Bishnupur, the city began to fall into decay.’74

Conclusion: dynastic time Johan Huizinga, the great chronicler of downfall, wrote in his Waning of the Middle Ages, ‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls. Whether we read a chronicle, a poem, a sermon, a legal document even, the same impression of immense sadness is produced by them all.’75 Taking a cue from Hayden White’s theory of emplotment,76 we can conclude how the local history of Bishnupur is plotted, structured and chronologised. The rise of the dynasty is narrated with valour and the fall with melancholy. All the myths and memories are dated and synchronised with the wider history of India. The presence of the divine is overwhelming. The god is presented as a human fgure with all its consciousness. It did not appear as a toy idol in human hands. It had active participation in the affairs of the state. The anthropomorphic divine controlled time and decided the fate of the dynasty. And it is here that the local historians stand out from formal academia.

Figure 1.8 Rashmancha, Bishnupur.

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Everybody wrote about the rise and fall but only in the local pamphlets do we encounter the giant image of the divine that often overshadowed the human heroes.

Acknowledgements This research was a part of the project on public history titled ‘Metamorphoses of the Political,’ funded by the Max Weber Stiftung, Germany and New Delhi, India, and conducted between August 2017 and March 2018. I am grateful to Mr Asit Kumar Das, tour guide, Bishnupur, for narrating the detailed history of the Malla dynasty and for giving me local contacts, and to Mr Prasanta Hembram, rickshaw-puller, Bishnupur, for taking me around the place and telling me the fabulous tales of his magnifcent temple town.

Notes 1 Bishnupur is known as the temple town of Bankura district, West Bengal. It’s famous for the magnifcent terracotta temples built by generations of Malla kings. The Malla dynasty ruled Bishnupur for more than a thousand years. The origin of the dynasty is traced back to the seventh century. The Malla rulers waged ferce battles against the Mughals and other neighbouring kingdoms. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the kings gradually lost their political authority. Bishnupur became a feudatory state under the regime of the British East India Company in 1793. 2 Home Department: Public Branch (henceforth HP), Part B, April 1901, Nos. 68–69, The National Archives of India, New Delhi (henceforth NAI). 3 HP, Part B, September 1896, Nos. 227–229. 4 Ibid. 5 Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Cultural Flows and Cosmopolitanism in Mughal India: The Bishnupur Kingdom,’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 46, Issue 2, 2009, pp. 147–82. 6 Manoranjan Chandra, Mallabhum Bishnupur, Kolkata: Mitra o Ghosh, 2002, p. 83. 7 Prabhat Kumar Saha, ‘Bishnupurer Nagarayan: Ekti Pralambita Prakriya,’ in Jaladhar Haldar (ed.), Pratna Parikrama: Mallabhum (5), Bishnupur: Pratnatattva o Sangrahalaya Adhikar, 2011, p. 98. 8 Priyabrata Dasgupta, ‘Mallarajdhani Bishnupur totha Mallarajyer Agneyastra,’ in Jaladhar Haldar (ed.), Pratna Parikrama: Mallabhum (2), Bishnupur: Mallabhum Kirtishala, 2006, pp. 105–8. 9 Fakir Narayan Karmakar, Patighatini Sati, Bishnupur: Sulabh Press, 1950, B.S. 1357; Bishnupurer Amar Kahini, Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 1979. 10 Chatterjee, ‘Cultural Flows and Cosmopolitanism in Mughal India.’ 11 Chandra, Mallabhum Bishnupur; Karmakar, Patighatini Sati; Karmakar, Bishnupurer Amar Kahini. 12 Gangagobinda Roy, Mallabhum Kahini, Calcutta: Mitra Press, 1955. 13 JZ Holwell (1765–1771): Interesting Historical Events Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, Vol. 1, London: Printed for T Becket and PA De Hondt, p. 197. 14 WW Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. 4, London: Trübner & Co, 1876.

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15 For a detailed list of Bengal local histories since the middle of the nineteenth century, see Kanta Chatterjee, ‘Evolution of Local and Regional Histories of Bengal, 1850–1950,’ Unpublished Thesis, Department of History, Jadavpur University, 2008, Chapter IV: ‘Regional and Local Histories—Sources and Information.’ Some of the stalwart works on Bengal local histories are the following. Yajneshwar Chaudhuri, Anchalik Itijash Charcha o Granthapanji, Pustak Bipani, Kolkata, 2008. Tarapada Santra, Howrah Jelar Purakirti, Purta (Puratattva) Bibhag: Paschimbanga Sarkar, Kolkata, 1976. The thesis of Somshankar Ray is an important contribution to the understandings of the genre of ‘local history’ in Bengal. Somshankar Ray, ‘The Local History of Bengal, c. 1850–1950—A Study in Historiography,’ Unpublished Thesis, Department of History, University of Calcutta, 2015. 16 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 181. 17 Ibid, p. 161. 18 Ibid, p. 182. 19 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 20 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, 1993, Chapters 4 and 5. 21 Ibid., p. 95. 22 The essays of the Subaltern Studies Collective drew heavily from the local accounts but no structured theoretical discussion came up on the genre. 23 Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India,’ Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, 1998, pp. 913–48. 24 Sabra J Webber and Patrick B Mullen, ‘Moving Stories, Local History, and the Narrative Turn,’ Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2011, pp. 213–47. 25 Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘The King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late Colonial India,’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 5, 2005, pp. 1454–75. 26 Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments, p. 78. Chatterjee noticed the entry of dates even in the itihasa-purana traditions. In Mrityunjay Vidyalankar’s Rajabali (1808) the dynasties fowed smoothly from the kings of Mahabharata and ended with the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II. 27 Kanta Chatterjee added a long list of local histories in Bengal in Ch. 4 of her thesis. The National Library, Calcutta, preserves exhaustive catalogues of old Bengali books published before 1947. 28 CP Lewis, ‘The Great Awakening of English Local History, 1918–1939,’ in Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord and Nigel Tringham (eds.), New Directions in Local History since Hoskins, Hatfeld: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011, pp. 29–53. 29 WG Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1955, p. 14. 30 Katherine Clarke, Making Time for the Past: Local History and the Polis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 31 Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1947. 32 Nino Luraghi, ‘Local Knowledge in Herodotus’ Histories,’ in Nino Luraghi (ed.), The Historians’ Craft in the Age of Herodotus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 138–60. 33 Karmakar, Patighatini Sati; Karmakar, Bishnupurer Amar Kahini.

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34 Joseph Mali, ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Myth, History and Mythistory,’ History and Memory, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1991, pp. 86–118. 35 Ibid, p. 88. 36 Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 183. 37 Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 15. Dynasties dismantle as political systems but their infuence remains in the following regimes. In India, many of the regional dynasties took direct part in the nationalist movement. Democratic forms of governments owe a lot to dynastic cultures. See Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra and Cathleen Sarti (eds.), Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation,’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. In Britain, historians are looking for what was left of royal power after the crown had been compelled to give up most of its historical rulership and leadership functions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See David Cannadine, Making History Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. For an idea of cultural exchanges between empires, look at Linda Colley, ‘What is Imperial History Now?,’ in David Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 132–47. Much before this new wave of studies came up, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger argued that the European monarchies tried to maintain their relevance in the age of democracy through the ‘invention of traditions,’ by the continuation of certain regal rituals and regulations. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983. See the article by David Cannadine in this volume, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition,” c. 1820–1977,’ pp. 101–64. 38 Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, p. 15. 39 LSS O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers: Bankura, Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1908, p. 19 [emphasis mine]. 40 Jacques le Goff, History and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 41 Quoted from Hunter’s diary of 1876, appearing in Francis Henry Skrine, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter, Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1901, p. 273. 42 The legend is summarised from Anilbaran Kar, Galpa Kathay Bishnupur, Arindam Niloy, Bishnupur, 1998, 2009, and Kanai Lal Ghosh (ed.), Mandir Nagari Bishnupur, Minerva Offset, Bishnupur, 2017. 43 Lokenath Ghose, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars, &c., Part II: ‘The Native Aristocracy and Gentry,’ JN Ghose & Co., Calcutta, 1881, p. 1. 44 Holwell, Interesting Historical Events Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, Vol. 1, London: Printed for T Becket and PA De Hondt, p. 197. 45 Romesh Chunder Dutt, ‘The Aboriginal Elements in the Population of Bengal,’ in The Calcutta Review, 1882. Also quoted in Amiya Kumar Banerji, West Bengal District Gazetteers: Bankura, State Editor, 1968, p. 90. 46 Ghose, Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars, &c., Part II: ‘The Native Aristocracy and Gentry,’ Calcutta: JN Ghose & Co, 1881, p. 5. 47 Ibid, p. 326. 48 Ibid, p. 358. 49 Ashok Ghosh, ‘“Bishnupurer Malla Rajara ki Rajput?”: E Prosonge Kichhu Kotha,’ in Achintya Mandal and Mrinal Kanti Dhnak, Bishnupur-Bankura: Oitijhyer Dhara, Bishnupur: Bishnupur Ramananda College (Itihash Bibhag), 2015, pp. 140–44.

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50 Samir Kumar Kar, ‘Mallabhum Rajdhani Bishnupurer Rashgarbo: Sekal o Ekal,’ in Jaladhar Haldar (ed.), Pratna Parikrama: Mallabhum (6), Bishnupur: Mallabhum Kirtishala, 2012, pp. 143–44. 51 Karmakar, Patighatini Sati; Bishnupurer Amar Kahini. 52 Rathindra Mohan Chaudhuri,‘Parampara Pranito Bishnupur,’ in Jaladhar Haldar (ed.), Pratna Parikrama: Mallabhum (6), Bishnupur: Mallabhum Kirtishala, 2012, pp. 99–104. 53 Gangagobinda Roy, Mallabhum Kahini, Calcutta: Mitra Press, 1955. 54 Gourpada Sen, ‘Bir Hambir: Ekti Bisleshan,’ in Jaladhar Haldar (ed.), Pratna Parikrama: Mallabhum (5), Bishnupur: Pratnatattva o Sangrahalaya Adhikar, 2011, pp. 107–15. 55 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,’ Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 1989, pp. 7–24. 56 le Goff, History and Memory. 57 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,’ p. 8. 58 Gerard de Puymege, ‘Chauvin and Chauvinism: In Search of a Myth,’ History and Memory, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring-Summer 1994, pp. 35–72. This article is a delightful story of the author’s thrilling investigations to trace the origins of the term ‘chauvinism.’ The author struggles to discover a link between the historic character Nicholas Chauvin, who was presumably a young recruit and a soldierlabourer in the Napoleonic army, and the idea of chauvinism, an expression of extreme and biased patriotism. 59 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 60 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 61 Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Collective Memory—What Is It?,’ History and Memory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1996, pp. 30–50. 62 Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Place: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. 63 Anilbaran Kar, Galpa Kathay Bishnupur, Bishnupur: Arindam Niloy, 1998; Kanai Lal Ghosh (ed.), Mandir Nagari Bishnupur, Bishnupur: Minerva Offset, 2017. 64 For a detailed analysis of the evolution of the story of Padmini and the sati legend, see Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in Indian History c. 1500–1900, Permanent Black (New Delhi) and University of Washington Press, 2007. 65 According to legends, a large number of ladies immolated themselves in fre during the Muslim invasions in Gwalior (in today’s Madhya Pradesh) in the seventeenth century. The Sati Kund is still carrying the memories of the horrifying incident. 66 Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. 4, pp. 236. 67 Karmakar, Patighatini Sati. Ramapada Chaudhuri, Lalbai, reprinted by Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2015. The former is a play on the event and the latter is a popular historical novel in Bengali. 68 Chandra, Mallabhum Bishnupur, p. 52. 69 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 volumes, London: Strahan & Cadell, 1776–1789; Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Penguin Books, 1987 (originally published in Dutch in 1919 and English translation in 1924); Jadunath Sarkar, The Fall of the Mughal

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70 71

72 73 74 75 76

Empire, four volumes, Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2007 (originally published between 1932 and 1938). Kar, Galpa Kathay Bishnupur. Ghosh, Mandir Nagari Bishnupur. A number of verses, proses, plays and histories, all published in the twentieth century, gave a melodramatic description of the gloom that enveloped the town following the departure of Madanmohan. One such verse is by Nibaran De, Madanmohaner Adi Mahatmya, Bishnupur. ND Karmakar in Bishnupurer Amar Kahini narrated the event with deep emotion. Also see Aditya Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Bishnupurer Bishnutattva, Minerva Offset, Bishnupur, BS 1415 (2008). Local proverbs refect the incident as this, ‘Has someone lost something? Madanmohan has run away.’ The loss of Madanmohan turned out to be a metaphor for losing valuable things. For proverbs in Bishnupur, see Namita Mandal, Bankurakendrik Mallabhumer Upobhasha, Bankura Loksanskriti Akademi, 1964, p. 216. Amiya Kumar Banerji, West Bengal District Gazetteers: Bankura, Kolkata: State Editor, 1968, pp. 117. Letter from the Collector of Burdwan to the President and Members of the Board of Revenue at Fort William, Calcutta, 12 February 1794. Quoted in Banerji, Gazetteers: Bankura, p. 120. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. 4, p. 236. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 30. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973.

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2 TIDAL HISTORIES Envisioning the Sundarbans, 1860s–1920s Aviroop Sengupta

The familiarity of a strange forest Sometime in the 1660s, the French physician-traveller Francois Bernier, accompanied by a crew of Portuguese pilots and Indian boatmen, sailed for nine days up the southern Bengal delta. ‘The striking and peculiar beauty’ of this country, Bernier would later write, had made a particularly vivid impression on him.1 As the Ganges fowed down on its fnal journey towards the Bay of Bengal, it split into an ‘endless number of channels, cut, in bygone ages, from that river with immense labour.’2 Innumerable islands had emerged amidst these channels, variable in size, ‘extremely fertile’ and ‘covered with verdure.’3 These were further crisscrossed by thousands of creeks, ‘stretching beyond the sight, and resembling long walks arched with trees.’4 The islands closer to the sea-face were densely forested, having been abandoned by former inhabitants after a series of ravages by ‘Arracanese’ pirates: At present they are a dreary waste, wherein no living creature is seen except antelopes, hogs, and wild fowls, that attract tigers … In traversing the Ganges in small rowing boats … it is in many places dangerous to land, … and it constantly happens that some person or another falls prey to tigers.5 The threat of tigers aside, journeying through this wild network of islands and channels presented other ‘extraordinary accidents or adventures’ to Bernier and his crew.6 Both sailing and stopping required constant vigilance, for the boat could at any point be drifted off-course by treacherous tidal waters. At one point they lost their way hopelessly amidst the creeks, and Bernier did not know how they ‘would have recovered their right course’ if they had not luckily come across some lonely Portuguese salt-makers.7 Meanwhile, a series of strange and rare ‘phenomen[a] of nature’ caused both wonder and alarm on a daily basis: lunar rainbows at night, unexplained

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bush lights and ephemeral freballs, surface waters littered with hundreds of seemingly stupefed fsh.8 The weather itself was wildly unpredictable, with still and suffocating heat on one night followed by violent life-threatening storms on another. When, after nine days, their boat fnally sailed out of the forests, Bernier and his crew—exhausted, wet and hungry—welcomed with delight the stark change in scenery, consisting of vast green agricultural felds and packed riverside villages. Two hundred and twenty-fve years later, in 1891, Archibald Constable of the Asiatic Society of Bengal edited and published a new, revised translation of Bernier’s travelogues of the Mughal Empire. Identifying the swampy southern Bengal tracts through which the Frenchman had sailed as the modern-day Sundarbans, Constable issued several corrective annotations to the text. ‘Canaux’ in the French original—canals—was now translated as ‘channels’ because Bernier was thought to have misinterpreted the presence of a few artifcial embankments here and there, and wrongly concluded that the ‘rivers themselves were canals, the work of human agency in times past.’9 While changes in the course of rivers could and did wipe away all material traces of past places, Constable hastened to remind his readers that Bernier’s suggestive allusions to erstwhile occupants of the ‘dreary wastes’ needed some clarifcation: while scattered and possibly ancient ‘remains of houses … have been found in isolated parts of this tract,’ real, successful efforts at reclaiming, cultivating and populating the land—and even these were confned to the northern parts of the Delta, far away from the sea-face—had actually begun long after the Frenchman’s visit, following the British takeover of Bengal.10 And Bernier’s belief that he was passing through the ruins of once-inhabited territory had led to zoological gaffes as much as archaeological ones: the volaille devenus sauvages in the original text, the editor argued, referred to wild jungle fowl, and certainly not ‘domestic poultry that escaped and became wild.’11 As for the Frenchman’s overall account of the forests, however, Constable had only one comment: ‘All those who are familiar with the nature of the Sundarbans tracts will be able to testify to the vividness of the traveler’s description of his journey.’12 This chapter will explore and historicise some of the elements that constituted this alleged sense of ‘familiarity’ with the nature of the Sundarbans. What experiences, perceptions or facts about the forests could someone like Constable expect his informed late nineteenth-century readers to be aware of when called upon to ‘testify’ the plausibility of a travelogue more than two centuries old? Had such fragments of knowledge come together to produce a shared, familiar consensus on the nature of the Sundarbans? When posed about the contemporary Sundarbans in modern West Bengal, the works of the anthropologist Annu Jalais offer us a specifc set of answers to the last question. Jalais has demonstrated that the discourses and practices of globally ambitious environmentalism—implemented in the southern Bengal delta through conservationist projects such as the Indian state’s 45

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Project Tiger—have popularised an image of the Sundarbans, at least among urban audiences, as a basically desolated, wild space of nature.13 In effect, Jalais argues, such an image manages to decentre and occasionally erase from metropolitan awareness and governmental priority the lives of the million-strong population in the Sundarbans—lives lived amidst abject poverty, political crises and natural hazards. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on the environmental threats to the delta from the pressures of pollution, deforestation, species endangerment and global warming. These threats are of course real, but in transforming the Sundarbans into a world heritage site, metropolitan nature-enthusiasts, private NGOs and the state seemingly collude in creating a consensus where, to use Jalais’s evocative phrase, ‘the tigers become citizens,’ and the people, ‘tiger-food.’14 However, as I argue in this chapter, if we push the question of an overwhelming image or consensus about the nature of the Sundarbans back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these answers do not remain quite as stable. How were the Sundarbans traversed, experienced, studied, thought of, administered and represented in the colonial era? The chapter deals with some of these fundamental issues to locate the ways through which the region was produced.

Envisioning the Sundarbans By the 1890s, when the new edition of Bernier’s travelogues was published, the Sundarbans had been a site of colonial administration and planning for almost 120 years. Spread between the estuaries of the Hoogly in the west and the Meghna in the east, and limited by the Bay of Bengal in the south and a highly contingent border 60 to 80 miles up north, the forests of southern deltaic Bengal were distributed across three districts: the 24 Parganas, Khulna (partitioned out from the district of Jessore in 1882) and Backergunge. Exceeding in size, as one commentator noted, ‘the principality of Wales,’ the Sundarbans appeared as a vast, low-lying, fat alluvial plain, covered—where not cleared—with impenetrable jungle and checkered throughout by tidal rivers, islands and creeks.15 In contrast to contemporary images about luxuriant and endangered forests, the historian Paul Greenough suggests that the ‘antecedent view’ of the nineteenth-century Sundarbans was overwhelmingly that of a depressing, desolated and dangerous ‘drowned land.’ Moreover, one ‘Victorian text’—WW Hunter’s 1875 essay on the Sundarbans in the frst volume of his Statistical Account of Bengal—was supposedly single-handedly responsible for the creation and circulation of this negative image.16 Greenough’s argument runs something like this: motivated in part by British efforts to categorise Indian forests throughout the subcontinent as ‘wastelands’ in need of development, and more strongly by a personal desire to showcase for readers his scholarly and literary talents, Hunter (1840–1900) deployed 46

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a series of Romantic tropes and quasi-scientifc motifs to textually render the Sundarbans as an anomalous, dreary and surreal landscape. The key claim here is that this image of the deltaic forests was created rhetorically, entirely as the ‘fantasy’ of a single individual.17 Hunter invoked contrasts with Victorian expectations of picturesque nature to present ‘enigmatic vistas’ of a monotonous, dark, marshy forest, only occasionally interrupted by pockets of bright green paddy cultivation.18 He appealed to allegedly inconsequential scientifc curiosities—the geological, climatic and hydrographic history of the Bengal delta—to titillate readers of an otherwise dull administrative gazetteer with the prospect of mysterious ‘colossal forces’ playing eternal havoc on the landscape.19 And he resorted to colonial-era stereotypes, to paint the few residents of the region as engaged in lifestyles and occupations nearly as anomalous as the surrounding forests and its fora and fauna, even as he dismissed their population as insignifcant.20 As this chapter will demonstrate, this is a reductive reading of the long and complex cultural confguration of the Sundarbans. To begin with, most of the themes that shored up these images of the forests, supposedly inaugurated by Hunter, had in fact been in circulation both before and after the publication of the Statistical Account of Bengal. Other texts had played equally infuential roles in compiling them together to make the Sundarbans available for ready popular consumption. More importantly, however, such a singular and dominant consensus on the nature and status of the colonial Sundarbans had never fully emerged, even if we grant Greenough his caveat that his analysis is restricted only to representations of the forests in English texts. Instead, I argue, structural convergences and tensions between at least three entangled modes of envisioning the forests had resulted in sustained metropolitan debates about the past, the present and the future of the Sundarbans.21 Archibald Constable’s annotations to Bernier’s text already offer us some headway into the chief axis of these debates. Controversies over the question of the historicity of the southern Bengal delta had originally been spawned at the Calcutta forums of the Asiatic Society in the late 1860s, before spilling over into public discussion: were the Sundarbans always a desolate wilderness, that only now was being gradually cultivated and occupied, or were the forests of comparatively recent vintage, the ruined aftermath to a once-thriving but now forgotten civilisation? Texts authored by a number of precolonial European travellers and commentators—Francois Bernier himself, Ralph Fitch, Caesar Frederick, Pierre Du Jarric, Nicolas Pimenta and others—were triumphantly re-read and reproduced to furnish evidence supporting both sides of the debate. Constable’s sympathies lay clearly with the position held by the Asiatic Society’s British historians: that the alleged fourishing historical past of the Sundarbans was entirely a fgment of the imagination. Participants later began identifying the rival sides as mutually opposed British and Bengali positions, and today, scholarly accounts on the Sundarbans continue to reproduce the controversy about precolonial 47

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settlements as just a quarrel between Englishmen and nationalist Bengalis, a curious but mostly irrelevant backdrop to the more important story of landreclamation initiatives in the southern Bengal delta.22 As I will show in this chapter, such neat polarisation was in fact violated by contradictions and contingencies in the natural and political history of the Sundarbans, and the question of historicity was often fundamental in administrative schemes and plans for the region. This is because the problem of the precolonial and early colonial past was connected intimately with two other modes of envisioning the Sundarbans, discernible as shadows in Constable’s commentary. The frst engaged seriously with the lie of the land itself, theorising a set of relations between the Sundarbans’ ecological history, patterns of agricultural reclamation and settlement in the past and the present, and visionary plans for reshaping the future of the region. Against Paul Greenough’s claim that WW Hunter included paragraphs on strange natural forces at work in the Sundarbans simply as a rhetorical strategy designed to appeal to Victorian readers, I show here that geo-hydrological details about deltaic and riverine action vitally shaped both historical and administrative visions of the region. The second tied competing practices of travel and vantage points with an idealised fgure, uniquely suited to search for the historical from the geographical, and made a range of distinct experiences of the Sundarbans terrain—as beautiful, thrilling, dreary, tiresome, scary, strange or uncanny— central to notions of identity, history and governing for the southern Bengal delta. Using textual sources published between the 1860s and the 1920s, this chapter will show how the debates on the historicity of the Sundarbans were mutually confgured by these parallel discourses, rendering the forests ‘strange’ yet ‘familiar’ in structurally specifc ways. Before we delve deeper into the problem of the past, let us map out some of their contours. By the 1850s, thousands of passengers were sailing through some of the rivers in the Sundarbans, and for many Europeans arriving by ship to Calcutta, their frst views of India were framed by the mangrove forests lining the banks. There seem to be no dedicated travelogues available from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although some Christian missionary memoirs contain scattered interpretations of sights and experiences in the Sundarbans as signifying the heathen nature of the landscape. The bishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826) for instance, recalled encounters with strange lights at ‘Saugor Island’: I never saw such magnifcent sheet lighting in my life as played over it all night. When coupled with the unhealthy and dangerous character of the place, and the superstitions connected with it as the favorite abode of Kali, it was impossible to watch the broad, red ominous light, which fickered without more intermission than just 48

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served to heighten its contrast with darkness, and not to think of Southey’s Padalon.23 For Alexander Duff (1806–1878), the dismal mud banks, thick forests and impenetrable thickets together constituted a ‘receptacle for ages of all manner of destructive creatures, and still more destructive exhalations which load the atmosphere with pestilence and death.’ Here in the Sundarbans, he wrote ‘silence reigned deep, awful and unbroken as that of the sepulcher.’24 While the presence of dangerous predators—tigers, crocodiles, pythons, bull-sharks—continued to be important markers in accounts of the Sundarbans, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, descriptions of geological and hydrographic oddities began to increasingly take the place of stories of strange scenes or eerie encounters in making a case for the ‘anomalous’ nature of the forests. In 1891, around the same time that the revised Bernier translations became available, John Rudd Rainey, a plantation owner in the Khulna Sundarbans, penned an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society attacking those historians who were sceptical about ancient settlements in the region.25 He began, however, by presenting and summarising a list of ‘natural anomalies’ in the Sundarbans. The main channels were characterised by treacherous double currents, with surface waters down to a certain depth fowing southwards, while below that line tidal waters fowed sneakily up northwards. The lands surrounding these rivers granted observers unprecedented opportunities to witness ‘deltaic action … in active progress,’ streams depositing silt on their own beds and changing course constantly, leading also to an exceedingly rare ‘centripetal system of drainage’ where water often fowed back towards a centrally depressed point and turned the whole area marshy, unhealthy and insalubrious.26 Most writers made it a point to note that surveys and digging during clearance operations around the southern delta had revealed that at some yet undetermined point back in time, ‘a great subsidence ha[d] operated over the whole extent of the Sundarbans,’ with stumps of entire forests of dead Sundri trees found at depths of 18 to 30 feet, in places ranging from Jessore all the way to Calcutta.27 Along with all this, unpredictable weather and ferce storms presented occasional thrills and annual hazards for travellers and settlers in the Sundarbans. James Westland, Magistrate of Jessore, had warned readers in 1871 about the effects of such cyclones in the delta: ‘when the cyclone wave pours up the great streams of the Pasar and the Haringhata [rivers], and from them spreads all over the country, the inundation works cruel havoc among the low-lying isolated villages.’28 In the 1860s, depth-sounding experiments conducted right off the mouth of the Raimangal and Malancha rivers in the eastern Sundarbans revealed a previously undiscovered submarine canyon, a literal hole in the foor of the Bay of Bengal which came to be known as the ‘Swatch of No Ground.’ Range readings recorded a sharp drop in depth from 7 or 8 fathoms to 49

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nearly 300 fathoms: a seemingly bottomless pit.29 The frst offcial report seems to have been published by James Ferguson of the Geological Survey of India in 1863 in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, which suggested that so ‘sharply defned a depression’ in ‘so muddy a sea’ could only have been created and sustained without silting up because of continuous tidal and fuviatile action.30 ‘Two circular tides,’ Ferguson theorised, meeting ‘somewhere at the Centre of the Bay’ scooped out a depression in the foor of the sea, and because the presence of the delta itself would have weakened the impact of such an explosive meeting, the Swatch of No Ground was thought to predate the Sundarbans themselves, which were only created later through the action of silting.31 The pairing of great depth with titanic forces gripped the attention of a lot of individuals, and, as we will see, the Swatch became a foundational force in theories about the tidal nature and history of the Sundarbans. Meanwhile, every monsoon brought reports of heavy thunderous sounds heard all over the Sundarbans, akin to cannon booms or loud explosions, heard at unpredictable intervals, usually ‘after a heavy fall of rain, or cessation of a squall, generally whilst the tide [was] rising.’32 Seeming to emerge from the south and south-east Backergunje Sundarbans, in the direction of Barisal, these mysterious sounds became known as the ‘Barisal Guns,’ and their origins and explanation were subject to speculation at the Asiatic Society for almost 30 years, often by the same actors quarrelling over the historicity of the delta.33 Rival theories included ‘the operation of the sea and rivers in the formation of islands,’ ‘breakers on the sea-coast,’ subterranean ‘earth-quake movements,’ ‘the falling of river-banks,’ ‘freworks’ or indeed, a literal rumble from the deep, caused by immense volumes of riverine water directly fowing into the depths of the Swatch of No Ground during the monsoons.34 Whatever the explanation, the Barisal Guns added an acoustic signature to the otherwise silent, dark spaces of the strange Sundarbans. These geo-hydrographic oddities, combined with rumours of supernatural entities, liminal religiosities, fearsome predators and a mobile, shifting, rising, falling, encroaching space to mark out the Sundarbans as a forest unlike any other in colonial India.35

The eternal Sundarbans? Following the political upheaval of 1757, the Sundarbans, along with the 24 Parganas, fell under the East India Company’s domains. Recognising the immense tidal fertility of the region as well as the safe refuge it offered to pirates, the British had from the very beginning commenced mapping and surveying projects and initiated a series of settlement and cultivation experiments in the Sundarbans in order to continually push back the forests. Planners and administrators from the late eighteenth century onwards, such as Tilman Henckel, proselytised about the necessity of creating future rice reserves against famines, and the potential windfall in revenue if these 50

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‘wastelands’ could be successfully rendered productive.36 Unlike the rest of Bengal, the Sundarbans were excluded from the revenue arrangements of the Permanent Settlement and zamindar intermediaries never introduced; instead, delineated tracts of land were to be leased out as ‘lots,’ and settlers incentivised to move to the region, hold direct land grants and clear and cultivate them rent-free for a few years, following which their tracts would be assessed for direct payments to the government. In 1816, an offcial post called the Sundarbans Commissioner had been created to oversee these deforestation initiatives, with the duties, powers and authority of a collector of land revenue.37 Regulation XXIII of 1817 declared with confdence the ‘inherent title of Government’ to shares of produce in every bigha not explicitly recognised to be owned by older proprietors, ‘within that part of the country which is ordinarily denominated the Sundarbans.’38 In 1833, Sundarbans Commissioner William Dampier and a surveyor named Lt Alexander Hodges produced, after a two-year-long arduous and often frustrating cartographic mission, what was intended to be the formal and fnal demarcation between cultivated abaad and forested baada in the Sundarbans, a boundary known as the Dampier-Hodges line. Hodges’s map included a total of 51,49,820 bighas as cultivated area, with the forests east of the Pasar river declared to be terra incognita, and the areas between the Pasar and the Hugli left out of land-distribution plans, as company offcials believed that there were no immediate chances of reclamation in that region.39 In the 1870s and the 1880s, a series of offcial publications by civil servants James Westland (1842–1903), Henry Beveridge (1837–1929), WW Hunter (1840–1900) and Frederick Eden Pargiter (1852–1927) celebrated the frst century of British colonial schemes in the Sundarbans.40 Westland and Beveridge, former magistrate-collectors of Jessore and Backergunge respectively, penned reports compiling notes collected on ‘subjects of local interest’ and the ‘foating, unwritten history’ of their districts. Hunter was inaugurating a series of systematic gazetteers, with the aim of collating accurate statistical data. Pargiter focused exclusively on policy implementations in the Sundarbans, tracing an exhaustive revenue and administrative history, year by year, document by document. Such differences in objectives notwithstanding, all three framed the Sundarbans as a dreary, formerly unpopulated stage where, for the good of ‘Company and country,’ a modern, enlightened regime sought to continuously tame, push back and improve on nature.41 Once boundaries had been drawn, and deforestation and cultivation policies set in action by the frst few decades of the nineteenth century, Westland and Hunter gushed, ‘the subsequent history of Sundarbans reclamation was one of steady progress.’42 Reclamation operations in the Sundarbans—along with other shortlived development initiatives such as an aborted attempt to build a port at Canning—had, however, often proved to be of very limited success. While a relatively small portion in the north had been divided up into ‘lots,’ 51

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cleared and distributed among ryots, successive administrations had gotten caught up in legal quagmires with neighbouring zamindars and other claimants regarding the ownership of land, the creation of borders and the fxing of revenues. In the absence of well-defned boundaries to their estates, zamindars began laying claim over any adjacent lands newly brought into cultivation, and sometimes arbitrarily announced extensions of supposedly hereditary territorial rights across forest lines, ‘as far as to the sea.’43 The government tried to deal with this problem by enforcing the DampierHodges line, and by making paper evidence (in the form of documents granted to individuals in the period following the East India Company’s acquisition of diwani) compulsory for claiming hereditary property in the Sundarbans.44 The wasteland grant rules were modifed several times, and large and small grants to capitalists introduced and abandoned. The forests themselves proved diffcult to tame, however, and reclamation initiatives were continuously frustrated. While occasionally groups of cultivators would join together to form a more permanent settlement, most ‘villages’ deeper south in the Sundarbans were ‘outposts of civilization’ in name only, waving felds of paddy amidst forested islands, a collection of a few homesteads unmanned for large parts of the year.45 The construction and fortifcation of embankments were vital in keeping the waters of high tides out so that the marshy lands behind them could be reaped, and Westland noted that new embankments were having a visible effect on tidal action, making rising waters noticeable where they could not be discerned before. As with the forest, here too the illusion of security could be taken away at a moment’s notice, and a burst embankment could permanently damage years of hard work. Cyclone waves were an annual hazard and placed a strict practical limit to the theoretical extent of cultivation: ‘for the nearer one gets to the sea, the greater the danger; and the more the forest is cleared away, the smaller the barrier placed between the cultivator and the devouring wave.’46 By the late 1870s, large tracts of the 24 Parganas and Jessore (later Khulna) Sundarbans were cordoned off as reserved forests, clearing and cultivation operations in these areas permanently halted in favour of more economically viable timber hoarding. Lieutenant-Governor Richard Temple, after a series of tours through the area, had decided that these tracts ought to be preserved for the supply of wood, timber and fuel. ‘Reclamation,’ he wrote, ‘is not wanted there. In some places the substitution of rice-felds for jungle may be desirable. But in this particular case the ground already bears produce, which is more valuable to Bengal than rice.’47 Reserved areas and cultivated areas now were split off under different administrations. Reclamation initiatives were revised and continued in the Backergunje Sundarbans, however, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the forest there had been pushed back nearly to the seaboard. Looking back in 1920, FD Ascoli, Secretary of the Bengal Board of Revenue, 52

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argued that the frst hundred years of British attempts at reclaiming the Sundarbans had resulted mostly in complex failures because they had mistakenly sought to impose abstract grand schemes without accounting for the lie of the land itself. Postponing the judgement of his predecessors, Ascoli declared that it was only from the 1870s onwards, when ‘agricultural and revenue experiments’ began to be ‘tempered by a recognition of physical and hydrographical problems’ that the (modern) history of the Sundarbans could be narrated as a history of ‘development.’48 As we have seen, administrative texts on the Sundarbans, while differing in content, shared common formal assumptions about the state’s role in benefcially altering the landscape of deltaic south Bengal in the recent past. By the 1870s, nearly all civil servants involved in the administration of the Sundarbans seem to have decided to tackle the question of the deeper, precolonial history of the delta, revolving around one problem in particular: were the Sundarbans inhabited in ‘ancient’ times? ‘It is a question of some importance,’ James Westland wrote, to fnd out ‘how long these reclamations have been going on, and whether there were any before the occupation of the country by the English.’49 Brick ghats and isolated tanks were regularly being unearthed deep in the forests during clearance operations, and even before full-scale reclamation schemes had been adopted, the line on the map separating cultivated abaad from forested baada descended further south in some areas than in others.50 Did this constitute evidence for a forgotten civilisation in the Sundarbans? The administrator-historians expressed their doubts, suggesting that while pockets of cultivation had probably been attempted in the past, south deltaic Bengal had always remained ‘essentially’ wild and wasted—until, that is, the English stepped up and began systematically pushing the civilising agrarian frontier right into its savage depths. This vision of the Sundarbans’ past was in direct confict with an emergent, alternative version, especially around the interpretation of specifc documents and of traces of earlier settlements hidden away amidst the landscape. Westland and Hunter invoked this debate by referring vaguely to ‘a recent question,’ some ‘commonly believed stories’ or general ‘rumors in circulation,’ but Beveridge was more upfront in accusing bhadralok classes as the driving force behind these alternative histories: The Bengali mind as being prone to the marvelous and to the exaltation of the past at the expense of the present, has … maintained the view that there were formerly large cities in the Sundarbans. Some Bengalis also have suggested that the present desolate condition of the Sundarbans is due to the subsidence of the last, and that this may have been contemporaneous with the formation of the submarine hollow known as the Swatch of no Ground.51 53

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It is not clear exactly when the idea of a past golden age of thriving cities in the Sundarbans started becoming popular among quarters of the bhadralok class, but interestingly, this proposition seems to have been explicitly articulated for the frst time by an Englishman at the Asiatic Society. In 1868, Henry James Rainey, brother of John Rudd Rainey, sent in a research paper for discussion to the Asiatic Society in order to ‘ventilate the subject’ of the precolonial Sundarbans.52 Entitling his paper ‘What was the Sundarbans originally, and when, and wherefore did it assume its existing state of utter desolation?’ Rainey cautioned that this ‘interrogative form’ was meant to look for rather than to propose a defnite solution to the problem, adding that such a solution ‘would be of practical value also as affecting the extent and character of the various works for reclamation and improvement of the Sundarban.’53 Throwing caution to the wind almost immediately, he went on to argue that that scattered ruins of temples, mosques and other buildings indicated that the Sundarbans were originally not only populated but ‘more advanced in civilization than any country lying immediately to the northward of it.’54 The key fgure, Rainey suggested, was the sixteenthcentury king Pratapaditya, who had founded a magnifcent city in what was now the Sundarbans, and who had made great exertions in civilising large parts of the forested tracts. The defeat of Pratapaditya at the hand of the Mughals, coupled with ‘Mug’ and Portuguese piracy and the effects of cyclones and storm surges, had eventually caused the near-complete desertion of these once-thriving Sundarbans by the beginning of the eighteenth century; indeed, the name itself was of recent origin. Their latter-day hostility to this idea notwithstanding, Rainey’s paper was initially received with enthusiasm by his Asiatic Society audience. The Reverend James Long (1814–1887) recalled having seen in Paris in 1848 an old Portuguese map of Bengal, which supposedly marked off the Sundarbans as a ‘cultivated land with 5 cities,’ narrated his personal acquaintance with old ruins in the vicinity of the forests and proposed that the Asiatic Society petition the government to ‘send an exploring expedition’ to the area.55 The Germanborn Orientalist Heinrich Blochmann (1838–1878), who would later lead the attack against the story of large precolonial settlements, agreed with Rainey that there was ample evidence to show that Arracan and Portuguese incursions had ravaged the country. Rainey had found his biggest taker, however, in Pratapchandra Ghosh (1845–1921), the Assistant Secretary to the Asiatic Society, who had been for some time researching and writing a Bengali historical romance centred around Pratapaditya. The frst volume of this work would be published the next year, in 1869.56 Drawing on his research notes, Ghosh argued that while Rainey had probably reached his conclusions from Mughal sources as well as Ram Ram Bosu’s book on Pratapaditya, published earlier in the century, the case for a civilised Sundarbans past was far more strengthened by consulting the ‘authentic history’ recorded in the works of precolonial 54

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foreign travellers and copper-plate inscriptions found all over the delta, which proved that until at least the ffteenth century, ‘the jungles of the Sundarban did not exist.’57 Ghosh’s own travels in the Sundarbans in search of the signs of Pratapaditya’s reign had convinced him that brick ruins in lot numbers 116, 211, 165 and 146 were the ‘remains of fne cities’ spotted by Francois Bernier himself.58 The causes of their decline, he added, could be found as much from recent theories of immense deltaic action in the area, proposed by JM Ferguson and Charles Lyell, as from piracy and storm surges.59 Over the next two decades, Ghosh’s novel on Pratapaditya, set in a lost land of thriving cities now reduced to ruins and predator-infested jungles, would set the theory of the Sundarbans as a recent phenomenon in motion.60 By the turn of the century, the theory had travelled internationally. The Italian novelist Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), who never set foot on the subcontinent, published I Misteri della Jungla Nera (The Mystery of the Black Jungle) in 1895, creating a far more incredible milieu of ancient ‘pagodas,’ Kali-worshipping thugees, decrepit tunnels under rivers and lost treasure in the Sundarbans—the ‘strangest, most desolate, most frightening sight in the world’—than arguably anything that Beveridge’s Bengali fabulists had conceived of.61 While Henry Beveridge did not mention him by name, it seems clear that the brunt of his 1876 attack in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal was aimed at what he believed to be Pratap Chandra Ghosh’s fantasy-prone misreading, or deliberate misinterpretation, of hydrographic and historic evidence. Elaborating on the list of precolonial travelogues collected by Ghosh, Beveridge set out to demonstrate how minds unencumbered with a fascination for the marvellous ought to scientifcally read, reason and infer from sources. Let us take a few examples. Evidence of salt-manufacturing in the eastern Sundarbans in ‘old times’ actually ‘militate[d] against the view of extensive cultivation’ because, as the administration’s present-day experiences in the forests showed, the making of salt required enormous supplies of wood fuel, and ergo, the presence of large tracts of forest.62 A few fortifcations here and there—as mentioned in works by travellers like Caesar Frederick and Ralph Fitch—marked signs of ‘insecurity, rather than prosperity’—precautions taken by frontier kingdoms against pirate-infested jungles. Ralph Fitch’s descriptions of fair houses, high buildings and large streets in a deltaic city called Bakola was automatically suspect because oriental cities did not have wide spaces; in any case, Bakola could be identifed in a section of Bakarganj which had never been part of the Sundarbans, and even if it were, Fitch’s descriptions of ‘naked people, with a little cloth about their waist’ did not suggest ‘the existence of much civilization or refnement.’63 Some sources were automatically suspect when they missed out on key details: Ralph Fitch’s omission of any mention of a massive cyclone recorded a year before his visit made him, at best, a highly unobservant author.64 55

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Also, Beveridge contended that any references to royal cities and kindly kings had to be located outside the space of the jungle itself, and even such kindness was illusory: missionaries were regularly betrayed and killed by wicked Hindu rulers. And if the famous Pratapaditya’s capital (Dhumghat) could be decisively identifed beyond the ‘wastes,’ then, Beveridge wrote, nothing was greater evidence of the ‘jungly nature of the surrounding country’ than the fact that his father, Vikramaditya, had chosen formerly forested Jessore as a safe retreat when attacked by Muslim invaders.65 To sum up, Beveridge argued, It seems to me that the Sundarbans have never been in a more fourishing condition than they are in at present. I believe that large parts of Bakirganj and Jessore were at one time cultivated, that they relapsed into jungle, and that they have soon been cleared again, and I have also no doubt that the courts of the King of Bakla and of Ciandecan imparted some degree of splendor to the surrounding country. But I do not believe that the gloomy Sundarbans on the surface of Jessore and Bakargunje were ever well peopled or the sites of cities.66 While less dismissive than Beveridge, most administrators and historians shared this view. WW Hunter had asked Heinrich Blochmann to compile ‘Geographical and Historical Notes’ on the Presidency Divisions of Lower Bengal for his Statistical Account, and the orientalist scholar countered Pratap Chandra Ghosh’s ‘Bengali romance’ point-by-point to conclude that The ruins discovered up to the present time are very far between, and are neither extensive enough nor suffciently antique to warrant … [the] conclusion that … the Sundarbans were in former times covered with thriving villages and towns, and that its desolate state in modern times is due to a combination of causes.67 Deltaic changes and the ‘natural agencies’ of cyclones and storm surges had always been at work, and an objective, etymological study of old maps and place names—in particular the map that James Long had seen at Paris, since procured by the Asiatic Society from French curators—confrmed what careful historians already knew from Mughal-era documents like Todar Mal’s rent-rolls and descriptions of dangerous jungles overrun with predators: the northern boundaries of the Sundarbans had remained stable since at least the sixteenth century, and ‘at no time extensive settlements could have been formed.’68 James Westland, dwelling on the ‘antiquities’ unearthed during reclamation operations in the Khulna Sundarbans, argued that since there was 56

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‘nothing wonderful’ in people constructing masonry ghats adjoining housing, he didn’t hesitate to concede that some people may have once attempted to permanently settle these regions, and that the evidence testifed to their ‘unfulflled intentions.’69 But the fact that no one knew anything much about more signifcant ruins or about local traditions in more populated areas was itself crucial. WW Hunter concurred, and argued that while he had no doubt that ‘settlers did occasionally appear in the Sundarbans in olden times … there is nothing to show that there was ever a general population in the Sundarbans lower than the present limits of cultivation.’70

Settling the Past It is interesting to note that early British reclamation plans for the Sundarbans had, in fact, leaned quite heavily on the notion of formerly fourishing Sundarbans settlements as a proof of concept. An 1858 article in the Calcutta Review, enthusiastically promoting the commercial importance of the ‘Soonderbuns’ and Lord Dalhousie’s call to quickly and completely destroy that ‘pestilent jungle’ to ‘remove the stigma … [of] the existence of such a nuisance almost within sight of the capital of the empire,’ reproduced extracts from a letter written in 1783 by Tilman Henckel, the frst Magistrate of Jessore, to Governor-General Warren Hastings: That it is practicable to populate these wild and extensive forests, and not a mere speculative idea, we have only to recur to the times of the Mogul government, and we shall fnd, that prior to the invasion of the Mugs in the Bengal year 1128, these lands were in the fnest state of cultivation, and the villages in general well populated. The number of mosques and other places of worship still remaining, fully demonstrate its former splendor and magnifcence.71 Frederick Eden Pargiter acknowledged that Henckel’s vision of the feasibility of settling the Sundarbans derived chiefy from his belief in ‘the former prosperous cultivation of the Sundarbans during the Mughal Empire,’ and in 1869, the Reverend James Long, in any case more friendly to the idea than most of his compatriots, cited even older letters, from Robert Clive to the East India Company’s Court of Directors, as further evidence.72 Increasingly, however, British offcials were categorically denying stories about extensive cultivation in the south Bengal delta in the precolonial ages. What caused the fundamental change in idiom between these early uses of a precolonial Sundarbans history and latter-day evocations of an eternally wild Sundarbans? We get one vital clue from the histories of revenue-extraction mechanisms in the area between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. Since the very initiation of land-reclamation schemes, the state had gotten embroiled in bitter legal fghts with zamindars over the delineation of 57

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boundaries and claims of long-held hereditary property in the Sundarbans. Pargiter’s minutely documented history is rife with instances of neighbouring zamindars contesting the rights of new lot holders and their ryots to clear jungles, disputing with surveyors about the accuracy of maps and the status of individual boundaries between baada and abaad territories and challenging revenue assessments with ‘notorious’ claims and forged documents about lands ‘long held under cultivation’ since precolonial times.73 What had been used to initially justify colonial ambitions of reclaiming the Sundarbans—a history of ownership and cultivation of lands which had subsequently been abandoned and reforested—now seemed to be threatening the smooth operation of clearance and settlement measures with protracted lawsuits and expensive re-surveys. In response to these headaches, the administration devised a two-pronged strategy. The state’s ownership and authority over Sundarbans territory was to be spatially enacted and reinforced through new surveys, erections of fnal boundaries and the production of defnitive maps. And claims of private and pre-existing ownership of tracts would be granted only upon the receipt of ‘authentic’ and acceptable historical documents, like sanads executed after the East India Company’s acquisition of the Diwani in Bengal.74 All other paperwork, such as chittas or dowls in the case of the 24 Parganas Sundarbans, even when issued as late as the 1790s, was declared to be ‘vitiated by … fraud and other malpractices’ and ‘generally forged.’75 Without reducing the historicist debates on the Sundarbans to this economic motive alone, we can still see how the production and propagation of an image of the Sundarbans as an eternally wild forest, with no signifcant precolonial past, served to strengthen the state’s monopoly over the region against competing claims. However, while the administration’s self-assigned role as the sole arbitrator and institutional catalyst of development in the Bengal delta was rarely challenged in this period, tidal nature and human history could still be invoked to push back against specifc policies upholding this offcial vision of the Sundarbans. The case of the English Rainey brothers of Khulna provides us with an interesting example. Between the 1860s and the 1890s, both Henry James Rainey and John Rudd Rainey penned numerous defences of the theory of a well-cultivated, populated precolonial past in the Sundarbans, and attacked sceptical historians of an ‘always-desolated’ Sundarbans, especially those who asked that ‘if the Sundarban was once a fourishing colony, why is it not so now’ with a ‘half-suppressed triumphant smile, as if the question could not be satisfactorily answered.’76 The Rainey brothers had inherited a considerable fortune from their father, William Sneyd Rainey, the frst European to settle, cultivate and reclaim large tracts of the forest in the Khulna Sundarbans as indigo and other plantations.77 Both had also made a name for themselves as hunters and as amateur experts on the history, zoology, botany and geology of the Bengal delta, publishing and corresponding heavily across 58

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learned forums throughout the empire. By the early 1860s, the brothers were increasingly alarmed by policy discussions proposing to mark off the Khulna Sundarbans as reserved forests, where no settlement and cultivation activities were allowed. When eventually implemented, reserving the Sundarbans in Khulna effectively prevented the Raineys from expanding their ageing estates in any direction, the profts from which were slowly drying up. Over the next 30 years, they sought to sway public opinion against this new government policy through critiques of the offcial views on tidal action, precolonial settlements and modern development in the Sundarbans. John Rudd attacked the transfer of forest administration from the Sundarbans Commissioner to the Forest Department as an ‘altogether retrograde policy.’78 Henry James, the more prolifc author of the pair, offered his ‘very decided opinions’ in the Calcutta Review with long, hostile reviews of the government’s famine relief plans and of offcial publications like Westland’s Report.79 In the alternate histories forwarded by the Raineys, the government were the indisputable aggressors in all early litigations with zamindars, rightful owners of long-cultivated land in the delta; Pratap Chandra Ghosh’s ‘able historical romance’ had been unfairly maligned by those ignorant of the real history of the forests; the complete clearance and settlement of the Sundarbans right up to the edge of the sea, minus the bureaucratic quagmire of land grant rules, was the only way to correct the state’s previous blunders in dealing with devastating famines in the province; and the effects of tidal and riverine action had been thoroughly misunderstood, meaning that the forests themselves, an aberrance only a couple of hundred years old, were taken to be eternal.80 The immense tidal forces unleashed by the Swatch of No Ground, audible perhaps in the roar of the ‘Barisal Guns,’ did not depopulate the Sundarbans through dramatic storm surges and rising waters. Despite the ‘imagination’ of recent writers, ‘sudden upheavals and sinking’ and immense ‘storm-waves’ served only to frighten those cultivators who were once again working to reclaim the forests.81 Instead, the Raineys argued, the chief cause was to be found in the more gradual, mundane silting action of rivers, which had changed courses, dried up and turned saline.82 The ‘proverbial indolence’ of the ‘Bengallee ryots,’ which rendered them unft to contend against any diffculties, made them abandon the fourishing lands, and the forest took over.83 Professed belief in the glories of a past civilisation did not necessarily translate into sympathy for those who had populated it. As we have seen, the brothers failed to force the government to come to ‘reason,’ and did not turn their fortunes around. After their deaths, their estates were taken up by the Khulna Magistrate on behalf of the government. And indeed, they may have underestimated the ability of state offcials to manoeuvre their version of the tidal history of the delta to suit government policy. As WW Hunter probably realised, stressing too much on the natural hazards of the delta as an overwhelming factor ruling out its 59

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settlement in the past could also jeopardise plans and prospects of reclaiming it in the present. He thus appended the following corrective note from the Commissioner in the Sundarbans as a caveat to Heinrich Blochmann’s dismissal of Pratap Chandra Ghosh’s history: For the last half century at least, there have not been any important changes in the course of the Sundarbans rivers. … Besides, whatever changes may have taken place in the course of the Sundarban rivers, it is certain that such dangers have been gradual, and not of a nature to prohibit permanent settlement. With regard to cyclones, also, I do not think that their action constitutes an important preventive of Sundarban colonization; for the effects of any cyclone, however disastrous at the time, are recovered from in the space of a very few years.84

Rise and fall When Satishchandra Mitra (1872–1931) published the frst volume of Jasohar-Khulnar Itihas (The History of Jessore and Khulna) in 1914, he made it a point, unlike most of his predecessors, to be explicit about the methodological principles and modes of travel required to tackle the specifc problem of the past in the Sundarbans.85 A teacher at the Doulatpur Hindu Academy in Khulna, Mitra had been mentored by the historian Jadunath Sarkar while studying at the Metropolitan College in Calcutta. With encouragement and funding from the nationalist chemist Prafulla Chandra Roy, he had given up early attempts at poetry and philosophical speculation and spent nearly 20 years compiling the sources and materials required to produce a grand history of Jessore-Khulna, spanning two millennia, with Pratapaditya at its very centre. In doing this, Mitra claimed allegiances across divides between British and Bengali historiographies, and underscored his debts to both Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s calls for producing general histories of Bengal and Henry Beveridge’s position that the ‘proper person to write the history of a district is one who is a native of it, who has lived all his life in it and who has an abundance of leisure to collect information.’86 Nevertheless, he made it clear that among two mutually incompatible arguments about the plausibility of precolonial habitations in the Sundarbans, his sympathies lay entirely with the ‘indigenous’ position against the ‘foreign’ one.87 As we have seen, there was no un-fractured or uniform ‘foreign’ view on the historicity of the Sundarbans, and Mitra’s own history resonated structurally and strategically with the Rainey version of the delta’s past. Meanwhile, the Bengali satirist Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay (1847– 1919), who had met WW Hunter in 1870 and worked as a research assistant on the Statistical Account of Bengal project, was now writing his famous Damaru-charit stories, sly parodies about a fantastic, magical Sundarbans 60

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where any number of tall tales could be set. The sixth story in the series narrated a history scam. Damarudhar, the greedy land-speculator protagonist, infates the price of a fallow piece of land in the Bagerhat Sundarbans in Khulna by forging some ‘ancient’ Bengali inscriptions on a copper plate and hiding it amidst forested ruins on the plot. The buyer is hoodwinked by appealing to the spectre of a rich and old golden age in the region, and Damaru lets him believe that the copper plate indicates the presence of hidden treasure on the plot from those times.88 These discrepancies notwithstanding, a bhadralok history-writing agenda had indeed been set in motion since the late nineteenth century, aiming to counter colonial constructions of the effeminate Bengali—cowardly, treacherous, unreliable—by producing grand visions of past golden ages. As a large body of scholarly work has demonstrated, the nation as an identity was being imagined into being through ‘objective’ practices of writing the past. Satishchandra Mitra certainly placed his project along these lines, reading into his hero, Pratapaditya, a sign of Bengal’s erstwhile glory and the Bengali’s lost martial valour. But he was careful to distinguish his approach from those of ‘novelists writing from behind the closed doors of three-storied mansion[s] in Calcutta’ or of ‘historians who had produced massive tomes on Pratapaditya without once stepping a foot on his playground.’89 The key to history writing was evidence, and the key to evidence was the act of witnessing, the ‘testimony of the eye.’90 Accordingly, Mitra set out the parameters for properly envisioning the Sundarbans, a natural historical site now infested with tigers where once, he wrote, ‘tiger-like Bengalis’ used to roam.91 While Frederick Eden Pargiter and Henry Beveridge had declared that the Sundarbans ‘possesses no beauty’—an unending stretch of low forests and dull expanses that presented essentially the same view to late nineteenthcentury travellers as it had to precolonial ones—Mitra disagreed. Describing a vantage point where three rivers intersected, he asked his readers to imagine the scene: If one is lucky enough to reach such a place, its beauty may be felt, but not described in words. If one looks around from the center of the confuence, in one direction the ocean appears to be churning till the very limits of the horizon; in another, the leaves of keora trees on freshly formed mud-banks seem to have been freshly painted green by someone; elsewhere, the rising waters have perhaps breached the embankments, exposing the primeval roots of a thousand trees to the air; perhaps right next to it, meandering canals are entering the emerald forest, glittering like silver threads. Anyone who has witnessed these scenes with his eyes and his heart will never be able to coldly and harshly pronounce that the Sundarbans have no beauty.92 61

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These visions of exquisiteness were revealed only to those who knew how to truly penetrate the forests, urged Mitra. Both the quest for beauty and historicity in the Sundarbans were dependent on modes of travel, choice of routes and points of view. Just as modern-day Englishmen grew despondent with the lack of picturesque scenes when passing through the main river channels in steamers, unaware of the beauty that lay hidden just beyond their line of sight, older missionaries, travelling through unused routes, had failed to witness the bustling cities of the inhabited Sundarbans.93 Dissatisfed with the accounts of the Sundarbans published in offcial gazetteers, Satishchandra Mitra, armed with notebooks, pencils, cameras, maps, compasses, watches, surveyor’s tapes, whistles, machetes and walking sticks, had set out to investigate for himself the rumours of antiquities in the jungles.94 After all, those who did have access to the depths of the forests on an everyday basis—the ‘illiterate woodcutters’ and ‘uncivilized workers’ settling the Sundarbans under government schemes—could not be trusted.95 Mitra was singularly dismissive of the lived world of the present-day settlers, a land of ‘superstition,’ ruled by folk-deities, peopled by those who had never learnt to truly see with their eyes, a wretched lot who fed in fear at the sight of the interrogative historian, mistaking him for a detective or a revenue-offcial, who tested his patience with irrelevant and unreal stories, from which the historical truth had to be dug out with extreme care.96 While Mitra recorded a glossary of the ‘wild’ dialects spoken by these inhabitants, this was meant only for future use by other prospective historians, who, inspired by the ‘new thirst for the archaeology’ in Bengal, might one day venture upon these lands.97 Recovering the past splendour of the historically insignifcant present was dependent, therefore, either on the testimony of one’s own eyes or at least on the testimony of educated and trustworthy bhadralok.98 Mitra waxed eloquent about his travel companion: the Raybahadur, Nalinikanta Raychoudhuri, brother of Prafulla Chandra Roy, generous and courageous of spirit, as ‘loyal to the government as to his countrymen,’ the ‘foremost expert’ in the province on the geography, history, archaeology, dialects, hunting and forest laws of the Sundarbans.99 Accompanied by Raychoudhuri and a staff of about eight or nine, and suffering ‘great risk’ and ‘considerable hardship,’ Mitra set sail on a series of expeditions, using a larger boat to travel through the main rivers and a small dinghee to enter the narrow creeks among the islands.100 The missions were exclusively archaeological in focus, and Mitra photographed, described and historicised a vast number of discoveries, distributed west to east across reclaimed lots and unclaimed wilderness in the Sundarbans. To take a few examples: a Shiva temple at Lot 101 in Bankra; the foundations of ruined houses and pottery shards amidst the jungles of Lot 169; the remnants of what he claimed was Pratapaditya’s naval command in Lot 173; a gigantic earthen ‘dock’ on the Kholpetua river; a mansion near the estuary of the Shibsa, which locals thought to be a blacksmith’s residence and Mitra interpreted as the house of a powerful family; 62

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the ruins of what he was sure was Pratapaditya’s Shibsa Fort at Lot 233, and a comparatively well-preserved structure nearby, which, he took some pains to explain, was actually a Hindu Kali temple, despite looking ‘Islamic’ in origin.101 Careful observations of these sites, Mitra assured his readers, could sustain no doubts about his general conclusion: the ‘Sundarbans were undoubtedly once the playing feld for an ambitious, courageous [Bengali] civilization.’102 Its cities were flled with people and its felds were teeming with crops.103 If the search for archaeological evidence often presented scenes of stunning natural beauty to the bhadralok explorer, it could also prod the imagination to open up unseen historical vistas from ancient times. Armed with ‘direct evidence’ from his explorations, Mitra sought to further address and challenge the textual interpretations of Heinrich Blochmann and Henry Beveridge. His tone was critical but deferential, offering polite rejoinders or alternate interpretations. Beveridge would later happily sponsor his membership in the Royal Asiatic Society.104 Blochmann had arrived at the theory of a long-steady northern frontier in the Sundarbans by citing Todar Mal’s revenue lists. But, Mitra claimed, this interpretation was suspect. Pratapaditya’s reign, beginning much after Todar Mal produced his list, had actually initiated a southward movement of settlements, and moreover, steady revenue amounts were no indicator of steady territorial limits. Revenue amounts were often fxed through previous agreements and would therefore not refect changes even if new lands were conquered.105 If the eastern Sundarbans were uninhabited, as Beveridge claimed, how were the saltworks run? The presence of jungle here and there did in no way negate the possibility of settlements. Could an uncivilised race have maintained an international maritime trade in salt and other commodities, as Cesare Frederici and other commentators had mentioned? The omission of a single cyclone did not logically render Ralph Fitch’s memoirs totally unreliable. Beveridge could be selective with the evidence as well, zeroing in on Fitch’s descriptions of the minimal clothing worn by residents to issue a snide comment on the state of civilisation in precolonial deltaic Bengal. But, Mitra argued, sartorial choices were fundamentally determined by climate, and Indians would be as surprised at the dresses worn by Laplanders as these early Europeans had been by those of the Sundarbans residents. Sanskrit texts indicated that contra Beveridge, Bakola was indeed highly civilised and located right amidst the eastern Sundarbans. Most importantly, the presence of primitive, uncivilised people in some areas did not rule out the existence of civilised settlements elsewhere in the Sundarbans.106 Throughout his narrative, Mitra posited the unique play of time over space in the Sundarbans as the fnal determinant of its tidal history. This was not just a passing allegory. The utthan and patan—‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of the Sundarbans—became a dominant motif for both natural and political history across the pages of Jasohar-Khulnar Itihas. The Sundarbans themselves 63

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might be eternal, as English offcials claimed, but its territories and borders were never static, and steady silting action by the rivers in the delta was slowly pushing it southwards.107 This normal, everyday rate of rise and fall in the Sundarbans was subject to periodic interruption by storm surges, cyclones, earthquakes and epoch-making subsidences. The mysterious Swatch of No Ground, located just offshore, kept pulling all the rivers towards its seemingly bottomless depths, washing away soil till the loss of balance in weight caused the entire landmass to collapse catastrophically upon itself.108 Mitra understood the civilisational chronology of the Sundarbans as existing in complete sync with this overarching ecological imperative: The Sundarbans have risen and fallen many times. It fell at the end of the Buddhist era and rose again with the rise of the Hindu kingdoms. The fall of the Hindus would lead to rise during the time of the Pathans. It fell again towards the middle of Mughal rule and has not risen since. The foreign merchants who had visited this country for trade had not seen the Sundarbans in its present impassable, predatory, wild state. There are no signs left today of what they got to see. No place has had such a remarkable decline as the Sundarbans.109 Man-made plans to settle and cultivate the Sundarbans, Mitra argued, were thus almost impossible to execute and predict without paying heed to the natural, longue-duree rhythm of its rise and fall. No one could force its lands to rise till they did so of their own natural accord. Gradually, they became fertile and arable, and as settlements were set up, the ‘memories of the Sundarbans’ got erased, its former history surviving only in traces of sunken forests and archaeological fragments.110 This process could be understood and analysed, but it was futile to attempt to change or intervene in its trans-historical play: ‘the rise and fall of the Sundarbans, and its everchanging boundaries are not subservient to human desires.’111 To Satishchandra Mitra, the end of Pratapaditya’s reign signalled the beginning of the latest long period of subsidence and decline in the Sundarbans. As the land started sinking, residents of his once-prosperous cities began moving out, the jungle took over, and the Sundarbans once again became depopulated.112 Living through this period of fall, Mitra proclaimed to his readers his prophetic vision for the future. When, for some reason, the Swatch of No Ground fnally silts up, the terrain of the Sundarbans will once again begin moving southward; people from the north will migrate down south, rapidly narrowing the forested Sundarbans. A day of great glory will then return to this southern Bengal delta. Perhaps prosperous cities and trading centers will once again be established.113 64

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Conclusion The debates on the historicity of the Sundarbans delta offer us an opportunity to closely examine what Prathama Banerjee has termed the ‘self-aware transition to spatialized time’ in colonial Bengal.114 As we have seen, any discussion on the ‘nature’ of the Sundarbans had to theorise a set of spatial and temporal relations between the present, the past and the future. For colonial offcials, settling the Sundarbans could not proceed without simultaneously settling the problem of whether the Sundarbans had been inhabited in precolonial times. If initially they claimed continuity with earlier modes of governance and revenue extraction, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the state’s monopoly over the forests in the present and the future depended crucially on the idea of the precolonial Sundarbans as an eternally wasted space of nature. To put it a little differently, in order to repopulate the present and the future, colonial administrators had to depopulate the past. For Satishchandra Mitra, the theory of the ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of the Sundarbans was predicated on the complete synchronisation between natural and political histories. If the glorious pasts of the Sundarbans were wiped away by the inevitable, rhythmic actions of time and tide, the forest offered a blank space in which to project any number of historical fantasies. Pratapaditya’s kingdoms could be imaginatively stretched to the edge of the sea, and scattered ruins interpreted as signs of a lost, great, martial Bengali polity. Tidal inevitability also granted glimpses of a resurgent, rising future, when the jungles would recede and civilisation would reappear. That left the matter of the present: the Sundarbans became a thrilling space replete with evidence of a lost golden age, marred only by the presence of those who had no assured place or use in bhadralok imaginaries of national civilisational values or pristine wilderness. In order to repopulate the past and the future, Mitra thus had to effectively depopulate the present. It is not surprising, therefore, that colonial offcials like James Westland and WW Hunter often portrayed sympathetic, if patronising, pictures of the lives led by settlers at the frontlines of the state’s project to change the nature of the Sundarbans. For Satishchandra Mitra, however, the ‘uncivilized lower-classes’ in the Sundarbans were nothing but an embarrassment or a hindrance to the work of historians looking for evidence from a period of past elevation, and they rapidly disappeared from his view. I have tried to show in this chapter why these differences cannot or should not be understood in terms of a clash between colonisers and colonised middle classes alone. Envisioning the Sundarbans involved a complex interplay between economic and political motives, geological and hydrological theories, practices of travelling, notions of historical change and an engagement with the littoral web of land and water itself. While, as the case of the Rainey brothers shows, it was entirely possible to shuffe around some of these elements to challenge offcial policies and historiographies 65

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for the southern Bengal delta, their mutual and structural dependence was almost impossible to break. Reducing the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury confgurations of the Sundarbans to the deployment of personal fantasies or one-dimensional revenue-extraction schemes erases these rich histories.

Notes 1 Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire: A.D. 1656–1668, ed. Archibald Constable, trans. Irving Brock (London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1891), p. 442. Francois Bernier (1620–1688) had spent 12 years in India during the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurungzeb, and published this famous memoir about his travels throughout the empire. 2 Ibid., p. 442. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., pp. 442–3. 6 Ibid., p. 443. 7 Ibid., p. 444. 8 Ibid., pp. 443–6. 9 Ibid., p. 442. 10 Ibid., pp. 442–3. 11 Ibid., p. 442. 12 Ibid., p. 446. 13 Annu Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens,” Refugees “Tiger-Food,”’ Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 17 (2005): pp. 1757–62; Annu Jalais, ‘The Sundarbans,’ Conservation and Society 5, no. 3 (2007): pp. 335–42; Annu Jalais, ‘Unmasking the Cosmopolitan Tiger,’ Nature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2008): pp. 25–40; Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010). For an analysis of (mostly) contemporary literary representations of the Sundarbans, which reaches similar conclusions, see Luca Raimondi, ‘Black Jungle, Beautiful Forest: A Postcolonial, Green Geocriticism of the Indian Sundarbans,’ in Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies, ed. Robert T Tally Jr and Christine M. Battista (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 14 Annu Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens,” Refugees “Tiger-Food.”’ 15 John Rudd Rainey,‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins,’ Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 13, no. 5 (May 1891), p. 273. 16 Paul Greenough, ‘Hunter’s Drowned Land: An Environmental Fantasy of the Victorian Sundarbans,’ in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and South East Asia, ed. Richard Grove, Satpal Sangwan, and Vineeta Damodaran (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 238; WW Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, vol. I (London: Trubner and Co, 1875). 17 Greenough frames this thesis as a ‘contribution to the study of orientalism and to the intellectual history of the environment in India.’ Greenough, ‘Hunter’s Drowned Land.’

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18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33

34

Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 256. There is a vast body of historiographical discussion on vision and envisioning. I am here drawing specifcally from Candace Slater’s work on the interactions between multiple representations of the Amazons, cast by a diverse set of actors and institutions, which have helped to historically create rival narratives of the region, ranging from ‘terrestrial paradise’ to ‘earthly hell.’ Slater demonstrates how the recurrence of certain themes from the seventeenth century onwards— land versus water, authentic wilderness versus inauthentic polluted Amazonian cities, primitive inhabitants at one with nature versus unnatural and out of place immigrants—have circulated distinct Amazons at different scales, and informed environmental and administrative policies. Unlike Slater, however, this essay is not interested in setting up contrasts between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ perspectives. Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan and Social Science Press, 2010), pp. 16–23. Heber was referencing present-day Sagar Island, on the western edge of the Sundarbans, which continues to be an important annual Hindu pilgrimage site. Heber’s ship anchored here in 1823 on his way to Calcutta. See Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India, From Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–1825 (With Notes Upon Ceylon), vol. I (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 181. Quoted in David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2005), pp. 72–73. Rainey, ‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins.’ Rainey, 275–6. See, for instance, Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, I: 290–1. James Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore: Its Antiquity, Its History and Its Commerce (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1871), p. 234. Cyclones in the southern Bengal delta in 1869 and especially in 1876 caused enormous damage to life and property in the Sundarbans. As we will see, Bengali commentators such as Satish Chandra Mitra would later translate this quite literally as atalsparsha: the ‘unfathomed,’ the ‘bottomless.’ James Ferguson, ‘On Recent Changes in the Delta of the Ganges,’ Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 19 (1863), p. 352. Ibid., pp. 352–3. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Edited by the Honourary Secretaries, January to December 1870 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1870), p. 244. Emphasis in original. This particular report was made by Henry James Rainey, ‘Zamindar of Khulna,’ and brother of John Rudd Rainey, who we have already met. The Rainey brothers (and their late father H Rainey Senior, an early benefciary of large land grants in the Jessore Sundarbans, were especially active in late nineteenth-century discussions on the nature, history and politics of the Sundarbans. Participants within and outside the forums of the Asiatic Society included James Westland, the Rainey brothers, Rajendralal Mitra, Henry Beveridge, WT Blanford, Gour Dys Basack, HH Godwin-Austen, WW Hunter and TD la Touche. See, for instance, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Edited by the Honourary Secretaries,January to December 1870,244–51; HH Godwin-Austen,

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35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

‘The Barisal Guns and Similar Sounds,’ Nature 53, no. 1368 (January 1896): 247–8; TD La Touche, ‘The Barisal Guns and Similar Sounds,’ Nature 53, no. 1368 (n.d.): 248; Satishchandra Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda (Calcutta: Chuckervarty Chatterjee and Co, 1914), 54. The syncretic religious practices and folklores of the Sundarbans are beyond the scope of this essay. For a historical discussion, see Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals. Frederick Eden Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans From 1765 to 1870, ed.Ananda Bhattacharyya (London and New York: Routledge—Manohar, 2020 [1885]), p. 85. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., pp. 111–12. Ibid., pp. 142–6. Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore; Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans; H Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj: Its History and Statistics (London: Trubner and Co, 1876); Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans from 1765 to 1870. Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans from 1765 to 1870, p. 5. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, I: 331. Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans From 1765 to 1870, p. 91. Ibid., p. 114. Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore, pp. 229–30. Ibid., p. 234; this turned out to be a prophetic warning. Five years after Westland’s Report was published, on 31 October 1876, the Great Backergunge Cyclone made landfall and a 40-foot high storm wave caused the immediate deaths of more than 200,000 people, followed by devastating epidemics and famines. For a searing indictment of governmental policy and societal divisions that make it impossible to read this as just a ‘natural’ disaster, see Benjamin Kingsbury, An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). FD Ascoli, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans from 1870 to 1920 (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1921), p. 15. Ibid., p. i; For a more detailed history of the colonial land-reclamation and forest reservation policies in the area, see Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals; Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, ‘Bengal’s Southern Frontier, 1757–1948,’ Studies in History 28, no. 1 (2012), pp. 69–97. Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore, p. 232. Ibid., pp. 231–2. H Beveridge, ‘Were the Sundarbans Inhabited in Ancient Times?’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XLV, no. 1 (1876), p. 71. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Edited by the General Secretary, January to December 1868 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1868), p. 264. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 265–6. Pratap Chandra Ghosh, Bangadhip-Parajay (Bangesh Bijay), vol. I (Calcutta, 1869). Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Edited by the General Secretary, January to December 1868, pp. 269–72. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 272.

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60 ‘Introduction to the First Edition,’ Ghosh, Bangadhip-Parajay (Bangesh Bijay); for a brief discussion on the importance of the fgure of Pratapaditya to early Bengali nationalist history writing, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 137–40. 61 Emilio Salgari, The Mystery of the Black Jungle, trans. Nico Lorenzutti (London, Canada: ROH Press, 2013), p. 1. 62 Beveridge, ‘Were the Sundarbans Inhabited in Ancient Times?’ p. 71. 63 Ibid., p. 72. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 76. 66 Ibid., p. 76. 67 Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, I, p. 381. 68 Ibid., pp. 383–9. 69 Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore, p. 232. 70 Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, I, p. 321. 71 ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance,’ Calcutta Review 31, no. 62 (1858), pp. 391–7. 72 Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans From 1765 to 1870, p. 85; James Long, ed., Selections from Unpublished Records of Government for the Years 1748 to 1767 Inclusive, Relating Mainly to the Social Condition of Bengal, vol. I (Calcutta: Offce of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1869), p. 155. Clive’s letter, dated December 31, 1758, concerning the Sundarbans districts, informed the Court of Directors that he had been informed on ‘good authority’ that ‘the revenue it formerly yielded … amounted to 40 lack of rupees, but the greatest part of this jungle is now uncultivated, uninhabited and overgrown.’ 73 See, for example, Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans From 1765 to 1870, p. 102. 74 Ibid., p. 114. 75 Ibid., pp. 132–3. 76 Rainey, ‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins,’ p. 280. 77 Rainey senior was a notorious indigo enforcer, and Satishchandra Mitra collected popular stories of his protracted conficts with other zamindars and his oppression of peasants in Khulna. See, for example, Satishchandra Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Dwitiya Khanda (Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyay and Sons, 1922), p. 740. 78 Rainey, ‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins,’ p. 279. 79 ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance.’ The author of this piece is not named. It is very likely that Henry James wrote it, however, given the publication and explicit stylistic and thematic continuities with his later essays. H James Rainey, ‘Famines in Bengal, and the Reclamation of the Sundarban as a Means of Mitigating Them,’ Calcutta Review, October 1874: 341; H James Rainey, ‘Jessore,’ Calcutta Review, July 1876; H James Rainey, ‘Jessore—Part II,’ Calcutta Review, April 1877; H James Rainey, ‘Jessore—Part III,’ Calcutta Review, October 1877; H James Rainey, ‘Jessore—Conclusion,’ Calcutta Review, April 1878. 80 Rainey, ‘Jessore—Part II,’ 356–7; Rainey, ‘Jessore,’ 14; Rainey, ‘Famines in Bengal, and the Reclamation of the Sundarban as a Means of Mitigating Them’; ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance’; Rainey, ‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins.’ 81 ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance,’ 389–90.

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82 ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance,’ 386–90; Rainey, ‘The Sundarban: Its Physical Features and Ruins,’ 280. 83 ‘The Soonderbuns—Their Commercial Importance,’ 387. 84 Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal: Districts of the 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, I: 349. 85 Satishchandra Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda (Calcutta: Chuckervarty Chatterjee and Co, 1914); Satishchandra Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Dwitiya Khanda (Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyay and Sons, 1922). 86 ‘Introduction,’ Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda. 87 Ibid., pp. 63–4. 88 Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay, Troilokyonath Rachanasangraha, ed. Anisuzzaman (Dhaka: Sahitya Prakash, 2001), pp. 866–7. 89 ‘Introduction,’ Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., p. 94; Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Dwitiya Khanda, p. 337. 92 Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda, pp. 45–6. 93 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 94 Ibid., pp. 106–8. 95 Ibid., p. 64, p. 68. 96 Ibid., p. 64, p. 68, ‘Introduction.’ 97 Ibid., p. 113. 98 Ibid., p. 68. 99 Ibid., pp. 106–8. 100 Ibid., p. 107, ‘Introduction.’ 101 Ibid., pp. 69–79. 102 Ibid., p. 66. 103 Ibid., p. 82. 104 Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Dwitiya Khanda, pp. 925–6. 105 Mitra, Jasohar-Khulnar Itihash, Pratham Khanda, p. 61. 106 Ibid., pp. 63–7. 107 Ibid., p. 43. 108 Ibid., p. 53. 109 Ibid., pp. 82–3. 110 Ibid., pp. 48–9. 111 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 112 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 113 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 114 Prathama Banerjee, Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 65.

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3 REPRESENTATIONS OF MANBHUM AND PURULIA IN ORIENTALIST TEXTS AND THE TASK OF SALVAGING THE PAST OF THE REGION

Kalyan Chatterjee

Introduction A proper study of the Orientalist texts that form the basis of the local history of a once-colonised region like Purulia is only possible when we take into account what Lisa Lowe calls the ‘Difference, ambivalence, and heterogeneity’ that are ‘fundamental attributes of Orientalist representations.’1 This paper seeks to show how conventional reading practices based chiefy on the tradition of reading an Orientalist text against the grain can throw the reader overboard due to the texts’ resistance against any attempt at strait-jacketing them as racist and imperialist to the core. The objective of the chapter is to critically examine the potential of the Orientalist texts on Manbhum and Purulia as potential sources of knowledge for reconstructing the past of this region, which has very few authentic historical accounts on it. The texts that have been referred to above as ‘Orientalist texts’ for critical reading include WW Hunter’s Statistical Accounts of Bengal (1877), H Coupland’s Bengal District Gazetteers: Manbhum (1911), JD Beglar’s Report of a Tour through the Bengal Provinces Vol-VIII(1872-73), Valentine Ball’s ‘Avifauna of Chhotonagpur,’ Jungle Life in India or the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (1880) and The Diamonds, Coal and Gold in India (1881), Walter Hamilton’s The East-India Gazetteer Vol-II (1828) and Edward Tuite Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872). In order to glean information from these texts to form an idea of the past of the lately formed district of Purulia2 and its adjacent territories that were once under the district administration of Manbhum, any contemporary reader would perforce be confronted by the postcolonial reading practices 71

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established by Edward Said with his Orientalism (1978) and since then honed/modifed by several (including Said himself). These critics of orientalism showed, among other things, the way to read Orientalist texts against the grain and with adequate caution. Due to this strongly formed canon of Orientalist texts, the reading practices approaching texts such as those mentioned above often render them either too untrustworthy to be of any use or nearly irrelevant to the present realities. No wonder these texts recede to an obscure margin of academic studies and are wilfully, complacently forgotten. The obscurity of these texts—among several other things—lead us to overlook patterns in events and phenomena that keep repeating within the known history of a place irrespective of the changes in governance and other markers that tend to compartmentalise time (sometimes schematically) to describe a place. The chapter, however, in no way, pleads in favour of lowering the guard justly put up against imperial designs borne in these texts. It would rather emphasise their racist and imperialist patterns to remind one, on occasions, about the primary cause behind the common apathy towards them on the part of contemporary readership. But while so doing the chapter will read passages that still remain relevant notwithstanding the changes in policies on governance that came with independence from colonial occupation. The paper will also put under the scanner passages that read as innocuous from the postcolonial perspective and incite us to re-think the role of the individual consciousness in forming the Orientalist canon, as the operation of the individual canon may at times have ruptured the linearity of the Orientalist narratives, thereby creating blocks that carry the potential to topple any reading strategy that refuses to see the already mentioned ‘ambivalence, and heterogeneity’ hidden within Orientalist narratives. The paper will comment upon the standard reading practices devised by Said and others and employed by readers of Orientalist texts on most occasions, while simultaneously trying to offer a close reading of passages that represent the problems already mentioned.

Orientalist representations and the individual consciousness In Orientalism, Said has analysed the role an individual consciousness might play in terms of her/his ‘contributions to the library of Orientalism and to its consolidation.’3 It is especially important for this paper to elaborate upon that, as it builds upon the assumption that individual consciousness often stands aside from the imperial road of canon-formation and creates gaps in the Orientalist discourses, thereby leaving textual materials for future use in favour of the orient, and it becomes possible because such materials, being products of individual perception, are not expressly related to the imperial schemes. Said makes his observation in this regard chiefy to address the cases of persons who place themselves into a position Said treats as ‘residence in the Orient.’ Therefore, it becomes a case that inevitably 72

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‘involves personal testimony to a certain extent.’4 According to Said, the resident Orientalist’s testimonies can pass onto the Orientalist discourses through an already established method of code-switching, which converts ‘a purely personal document into the enabling codes of Orientalist science.’5 He further elaborates his point by pointing out the exactitude of the process: In other words, within a text there has to take place a metamorphosis from personal to offcial statement; the record of Oriental residence and experience by a European must shed, or at least minimize, its purely autobiographical and indulgent descriptions in favor of descriptions on which Orientalism in general and later Orientalists in particular can draw, build, and base further scientifc observation and description.6 Said propounds these views keeping in mind, principally, those who came into ‘actual existential contact with the Orient’ not as colonial offcials but as explorers and scholastic investigators like Anquetil, Jones and Napoleon.7 But even then, Said sets a comparatively rigid path for their subjective experience in order to make a successful entry into the Orientalist knowledge system, as refected by his choice of imperative sentence structures using phrases like ‘has to’ and ‘must shed.’ The effort at compartmentalising subjective experiences into ones that can either suit the imperial scheme of things or not appears to be a touch restrictive though, as often the individual consciousness capable of negotiating a personal experience processes the experience with some degree of ambivalence. As a result, even the write-up of a colonial offcial fuses into his expressions about a geographical place subjective elements (like reactions to the centre-margin politics inside the very colonial framework) that create a fssure within the apparently fat and linear Orientalist narrative. We can read Valentine Ball’s exasperation at having to deal with his peers who schematically remain aloof about marginal places like the Chhotonagpur, where Ball is principally based: The Chutia, or as it is more commonly called the Chota Nagpur Division, notwithstanding its size and its proximity to Calcutta, is singularly little known out of the circle composed of the resident offcials and those whose business it is to pay it visits during their annual tours of inspection. Hajaribagh as a military station forms the sole exception to the rule that the principal towns, including Ranchi the capital, as they lead nowhere, are seldom visited by outsiders. I might quote the remarks of many who, on hearing the name of this portion of the country, have shown that their ideas of its position were of the most lazy character. In short it would seem that nothing less than a war or a famine would teach some people the geography of the country they live.8 73

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Valentine Ball, who was an Irish geologist working in India for nearly 20 years, contributed heavily as a naturalist. His cataloguing of the avifauna of Chhota Nagpur and his regular contributions to Allan Octavian Hume’s Stray Feathers are no less serious contributions than what his job as a geologist incited him to write. The Diamonds, Coal and Gold in India (1881) on one hand and Jungle Life in India or the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (1881) on the other demonstrate the two strains in Ball’s writing career. Ball’s long occupation as a GSI offcial with the Chhota Nagpur division—consisting of four British districts Hazaribagh, Lohardaga, Manbhum and Singbhum—brought him into close proximity with the people, the fora and the fauna of Manbhum and that proximity eventually created, as we can see in his remark, a sort of association with the region that went beyond what the dissociated offcialdom expected from an Orientalist. Here we can see that Ball is clearly distancing himself from the other offcials in the payroll of the empire who merely ‘pay it visits during their annual tours of inspection,’ and, unlike Ball, do not reside in the region. Ball’s residential status allows him a perspective on the powercentre at British Calcutta quite similar to a native of Manbhum of that time or, for that matter, even a resident of present-day Purulia. Calcutta (the capital of British India then and the capital of West Bengal at present, albeit with a changed name) can afford a degree of ignorance about its margins (both geographical and metaphorical) like Chota Nagpur or Manbhum that is only a privilege that power allows the centre to exercise over its margin. A native of Purulia would naturally be dismayed, in a somewhat similar manner, to be marked as someone coming from a place that is obscure and unfamiliar to the power-centre which otherwise poses to be the natural repository of knowledge. Setting the present-day parallel aside for now, we may probe what makes Said so rigid in his observation that ‘a European must shed, or at least minimize, its purely autobiographical and indulgent descriptions,’9 thereby discounting scopes of all such textual references and tropes that bear similar ‘autobiographical and indulgent’ traces. Here is Hunter for instance: During the hot weather, the dry red soil and the scarcity of trees give to this part of the country a scorched and dreary appearance; but in the rains, the fresh green of the young rice, and the varying foliage of the low jungle, form contrasts of colouring with the soil, and the scenery assumes that ‘park-like aspect’ which was frst remarked by Dr. Hooker. In the western and southern portions of the District, the country is more broken and the scenery far more picturesque. Here the Baghmundi range, striking out from the plateau of Chutia Nagpur, and farther to the south, the Dalma range, dividing Manbhum from Singbhum, stand up as commanding features in the landscape.10 74

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Therefore, siding with Said would imply that Hunter’s appreciation of the natural beauty of Manbhum, being part of the colonial gazetteers, produced expressly with the objective of facilitating the imperial occupation of the colonised state, has to be overlooked for having contributed to the Orientalist library, notwithstanding its genuine, sincere and subdued euphoria of attachment with the place. Written nearly four decades after this, and drawn heavily from Hunter, Coupland’s Gazetteers (1911) write in the similar vein: In the early hot weather the jungle-covered areas, whether on the hills or in the plain, present for a time brilliant spectacle, the blossom of the palas (Butea frondosa) contrasting in striking fashion with the fresh green of the new leaves.11 Though a tad composed in tone, the note of elation at the beauty of the place is still very clear, thereby forming a pattern of unrestrained appreciation of the place for its sheer beauty and not strangeness. Now, continuing with the cue left a while ago, we may look for reasons why Said is reluctant in granting any room for infltration into the Orientalist knowledge system, subjective elements that carry a potential for fracturing the linearity of the Orientalist discourses. Said ascribes this impossibility of any disruption whatsoever in the Orientalist canon-formation through occasional eruptions of the individual consciousness after the white man’s burden. Being a white man, according to Said, ‘meant specifc judgements, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend.’12 Being a white man, thus, becomes ‘an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world.’13 And within this agency called the white man, ‘although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White man ruled.’14 Said is extremely averse to allowing any leniency to the white man, because ‘Behind the White Man’s mask of amiable leadership there is always the express willingness to use force, to kill and be killed,’ or, in other words, a propensity for violence.15 Said has further consolidated his stance against the role of such solitary, individual consciousness pitting against the ‘organized collective passion’16 in his later work The World, The Text, and the Critic (1883). Said, here, develops his argument in opposition to Julien Benda’s endorsement of the role of an intellectual’s defant consciousness. Said understands the weight of Benda’s argument because even ‘Arnold speaks of “aliens” in Culture and Anarchy [as] “persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit.”’17 But Said dismisses both Benda and Arnold’s argument about the exceptional individual consciousness with a counter-argument. Said cuts off the potential of this individual agency against the larger system she/he is pitted against due to the formative infuence that the larger 75

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structure might have had over the individual, thereby making the individual not only a product of the structure she/he is trying to resist but also an actor or participator within that: On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it fnds itself. On the other hand, precisely because of this awareness–a worldly self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culture– that the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it.18 It must be mentioned here, however, that Said does acknowledge the existence of the individuals within his framework of study in his later essay, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ (1985), holding that because the social world includes the person or subject doing the studying as well as the object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them both in any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the Orientalists, and on the other, the Orientals.19 But, even within this acknowledgement, Said heavily invests upon strengthening the irreconcilability of the two entities—the Orientalist and the Oriental. Coming back to Said’s earlier proposition that the individual, being a historical and social actor, withdraws or fails to imprint upon his Orientalist text his individual assertion, we may note that the individual consciousness may eventually be imposed upon by what Said calls ‘the collective whole, context or situation,’ and there is hardly any way we can contradict the fact that the individual is forced to withdraw from the impulse his consciousness initially generates. But, the point that can be inferred from a reading of passages like the one from Hunter is that even if the individual backs off from allowing his individuality a free play against his white man’s burden, the process of such withdrawal on such occasions is often more cerebral and, as a result, clearly distinguishable. The euphoric expression denoting attachment and association with the place that was pointed out in Hunter’s writing would probably melt into his bureaucratic exposition of the colonised place in a more serious, formal and offcial tone, but not before leaving some residual traces of elements that may well stay put oppositionally within the Orientalist narrative. A close reading may salvage from it ingredients of a postcolonial-era revision of history from narratives that have almost been written off as racist, imperial and of hardly any use in the postcolonial context. We should read another passage from Valentine Ball’s writings; this time from his Jungle Life in India or the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (1881), which, just as its title suggests with the word ‘Journal,’ is 76

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professedly more personal in tone, language and approach. In this passage I am about to quote, Ball is deeply moved by the horrors of spectacles created by the notorious Orissa Famine. His spirit is stirred to a great turmoil. But immediately commences the process of hushing that voice up by his anxiety as a government offcial: While we were still encamped at Searsole, we were daily surrounded by sights of the most harrowing description, in connection with the assemblage there of hundreds of homeless waifs, the last victims of the great famine of 1886, better known as the Orissa famine. Large numbers of those who arrived there had deferred leaving their homes till too late, and were too far gone to be saved by any attention they were likely to receive, either at the relief-houses established by the Government, or at the one belonging to the wealthy native colliery proprietors at Searsole. They came in only to drop and expire, and increase the number of skeletons which, in a feld close by, constituted a Golgotha. Deeply imprinted on my memory is the recollection of the ravenous, parchment-like faces of some of those who were daily assembled to receive their dole of boiled rice and kunji water. The number of inexpressibly miserable, silent, seldom begging, candidates for aid, and their often scarcely human physiognomies tended, I afterwards thought, to render us callous, and I fear we did not do all that we might have done to ameliorate the distress.20 The turmoil in Ball’s empathetic mind is visible even in an ordinary reading, although it can more accurately be textually interpreted if we simply focus on the images and archetypes he is using to describe the scene. We can begin with Ball’s use of Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifxion, a place signifcantly strong as a metaphor for suffering, injustice, atrocities inficted by tyranny and death apathetically overlooked by citizen and ruler alike. To begin with our understanding of the metaphor we can read its entry in Encyclopedia Britannica: Golgotha, (Aramaic: ‘Skull,’) also called Calvary, (from Latin calva: ‘bald head,’ or ‘skull’), skull-shaped hill in Jerusalem, the site of Jesus’ Crucifxion. It is referred to in all four Gospels. The hill of execution was outside the city walls of Jerusalem, apparently near a road and not far from the sepulchre where Jesus was buried. Its exact location is uncertain, but most scholars prefer either the spot now covered by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or a hillock called Gordon’s Calvary just north of the Damascus Gate.21 Collins English Dictionary gives one of its meaning as ‘a place of agony or sacrifce.’22 The archetype of Golgotha thus unmistakably invokes the sense of 77

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human apathy to the suffering of the others. The deep remorse in Ball’s record accentuates the metaphor of Golgotha, as the killing feld of Manbhum, scattered with the carcasses of the miserable famine-victims, who unsuccessfully tried to survive by feeing from their home. It conjures up an image that has the obvious Christian connotation of injustice and suffering. The quoted description is suffcient for any reader of history to infer a picture of the past containing the records of atrocities and suffering the famine-stricken souls underwent. It would obviously be one among many famines to wreak havoc among the colonised population of India under British occupation. The image of the procession of the cadaverous human fgures in Ball’s account, however, features no clearly seen imperial design and could have easily been hushed up at the time of the conversion of the journal into a book to be published for mostly British readers. To relate this analysis with the point I made earlier on how an individual’s compulsion on becoming Said’s ‘historical and social actor’ intrudes (not before leaving a residue useful for future postcolonial historiography) we should now read the following part from Ball’s account, where he puts the whole responsibility/blame on native agencies of the colonial administration and on a few occasions on minor lapses or an explainable incapacity of the British administration. Ball sharply recovers from his tilt towards a pro-native-sympathiser perspective thinking in contradiction with the imperial scheme. He renews his vows as a cog in the imperial machinery. The rest I am going to quote will be familiar rhetoric hence. It would be the kind of rhetoric that desists a postcolonial reader from taking any part of the account seriously in favour of usage as a historical description: This was, perhaps, partly due to the local civil offcer deprecating indiscriminate charity; there being, he asserted, ample provision at the relief-houses. But for suitable medical treatment and regimen for the vast number of cases requiring them, there was certainly a defciency in the arrangements. I write, not in condemnation of the offcials, nor of the Government, knowing full well that no possible agency can be applied with effciency to these wide tracts of India, when stricken by a real famine. The physical diffculties; the corruption, laziness, and the diffculties arising from caste and various social customs, must always tend to interfere with the accomplishment of the designs of those whose business it may be to organize the relief.23

The descriptive, the commentative and the explanatory modes of representations As said earlier, the strong canon of postcolonialist reading practices has placed several blockades in the path of a reader of history to glean information from sources that are part of the library of Orientalism. The way we have 78

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tried above to compartmentalise Ball’s two contradictory narratives—one apparently an impulsive burst of empathy and the other a cautious, cerebral cover-up of his own reaction—would be frowned upon by critics like Ronald Inden. Inden argues that the accounts within Indological discourses have been constituted in a manner that has three aspects: ‘the “descriptive,” the “commentative” and the “explanatory.”’24 Inden expounds upon his thesis by frst explaining the essential characteristics of the frst two modes, namely the ‘descriptive’ and the ‘commentative.’ The frst, according to him, gives an impression of a near-objective observation on things that are Indian, such as people, places and practices. The second, the ‘commentative’ part, imparts in that apparent objective account a superfcial frame or some kind of patterning, but refrains from delving deep into the patterns, as that part is reserved for the last mode, the ‘explanatory.’ Inden describes the frst two modes in the following terms: The descriptive aspect of an Indological accounts is that which presents the thoughts and acts of Indians to the reader. The commentative aspect of an account is its frame, often isolable in distinct passages. It represents those same thoughts and actions by characterizing them, by indicating their general nature or essence.25 Inden goes on to elaborate upon his idea of the ‘explanatory’ later. But before that, he draws a parallel between these three modes of narrative and the Freudian hypothesis on how dream-texts unfold from a subject when the subject narrates his vision. The role of the agency (the dreamer in this case) is seen by Freud to be crucial in constructing what reaches the world outside his individual consciousness as a representation of the space (her/his subconscious) only (s)he has access to. Inden especially harps on what Freud labels as the ‘secondary revision’ (something the delineation of any dreamtext is subjected to by the dreamer), a process that distorts the dream-text in order—as if, paradoxically—to provide ‘the confused dream text with an orderly façade.’26 Having held that ‘[m]any Indological texts do not go beyond the commentative,’ Inden observes that ‘[m]any others, however, go on to include “explanations” or “interpretations” which closely resemble Freud’s secondary revisions.’27 By drawing the parallel with Freud’s dream analysis, Inden automatically earns the right to dismiss the ‘explanatory’ part of the Indological discourses as an imposed structure constructed with the defnite purpose of showing an order that is needed to forward the Orientalist cause of establishing several hierarchies in favour of the West. Inden brands these tendencies as ‘reductionist’: Nearly all of these secondary revisions tend to be monistic, to concentrate on one sort of ‘cause’ or ‘factor’ to the exclusion of others. Which is to say that they are also almost invariably reductionist.28 79

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That ‘the commentative aspect of an account is its frame, often isolable in distinct passages,’ as held by Inden, is fairly correct. We can read several passages from colonial writings to see the distinctness of the frst two modes of Inden. The East India Gazetteer (1828) of Hamilton can be illustrative in this context. I choose the passages due to their direct geographical relation to Manbhum. The frst one is Raghunathpur, spelt in Hamilton as ‘Rogonautpoor (Raghu natha pura)’: ROGONAUTPOOR (Raghu natha pura).—a town in the province of Bengal, district of the Jungle Mahals, 130 miles N.W. from Calcutta; lat. 23°32’ N.,lon. 86°44’ E. This place is remarkable for a very picturesque group of black, conical, granite rocks, the haunt of bears and leopards, and separated from the town during the rains by an extensive sheet of water—(Fullerton, &c.).29 In the above passage, there are clearly contents of two distinct natures. The geographical, geological, zoological and botanical details of the place are on the one hand forming the ‘descriptive’ part of the narrative, whereas on the other there is a subtle intrusion of the ‘commentative’ part comprising the phrase ‘a very picturesque,’ which explicitly is a not-so-objective observation and can go well as a subjective perception of the colonial offcial (Fullerton, in this case). The explanatory part is absent, as already said by Inden. The next passage is also from The East India Gazetteer of Hamilton. It is an entry on the Jungle Mahals: JUNGLE MAHALS.—A district of modern creation in the province of Bengal, which consists of dissections from the contiguous jurisdictions of Burdwan, Midnapoor, Ramghur, & c.; but its limits are as yet so ill defned that it is not possible to specify its dimensions. The head-quarters of the public functionaries are at Bancoorah, near Chatna; lat. 23° 20’ N., lon. 87°10’ E. The name of this district implies a waste territory and backward stage of civilization.30 Here also the geographical details form the ‘descriptive’ part, and the linguistically erroneous interpretation of the name Jungle Mahals form the commentative part. Neither the word ‘jungle’ nor the word ‘Mahals’ bear any connotations of a wasteland. Mahals especially undercuts Hamilton’s presumption, as the Bengali word Mahal means abode, and that too has the implications of being a little grander than an ordinary house. Jungle Mahals, therefore, implies a grand abode created out of vegetation instead of the regular brick and mortar and is expected to be inhabited, rather than lying waste, as the British offcial speciously presumes. The later part of Hamilton’s entry on the same place gives us a glimpse of the ‘explanatory’ mode. Here, the narrative lays bare its extreme prejudice about a place it 80

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does not want to understand fully or properly, thereby creating the unpleasant Other. In this account, the Jungle Mahals’ lesser number of incidents (to date) of insurrections indicates that the place is ‘tolerable’ by the standard of India: yet it appears, from the report of the circuit judge in 1815, that no instances of gang robbery or arson had occurred during the previous six months, and in India, when a country furnishes few materials for history, it may be presumed to be going on tolerably well.31 That ‘gang robbery,’ coupled with ‘arson,’ is often a euphemism for insurrections against local lords or the British administration is a given. Dalton’s accounts on the Bhumij whom he calls ‘Chuars’ following the dictum of the local ruling classes substantiates it further. However, Hamilton’s projection of India as a place that frequently provides irritants to the administration with nuisance shows how the Orientalist narrator tries to explain mutinies and uprisings all through the occupied territories as nothing but criminal inclinations of the native population. Dalton in his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872) applies the same method to describe the uprisings of the desperate, pushed-to-the-wall, indigenous population of Manbhum. Dalton grumblingly admits the inability of the British administration to contain them on most occasions. He also adds to it the account of a resultant retreat of the government and re-formulation of administrative policies which implied a loss of face for the mighty Empire. Here is Dalton’s account on the settlement of issues related to the king of Panchet (spelt ‘Pachet’ previously), whom the British attempted to evict forcefully and then had to back off due to the insurrection: Thus in the year A.D. 1798, when the Pachet estate was sold for arrears of revenue they rose and violently disturbed the peace of the country till the sale was cancelled. After hostilities had continued for some time, in reply to a very pacifc message sent to them by the offcer commanding the force, they asked if the Government were going to sell any more estates? I do not think that the settlement of any of the Bhumij Jungle Mahals was effected without a fght.32 Dalton gives two similar accounts in the same breath to make his point on the Bhumij of Manbhum, one on the Raja of Dhalbhum and the other the famous Ganga Narain revolt of Barabhum. The sharp retort from the local resistance, in the above case of Panchet, asking the government of its intention about future interferences before getting drawn into peace terms shows but the strong sense of purpose of the indigenous population who rose against the might of the Empire and against numerous odds. Dalton, however, is so upset at the belligerence of the native population that he 81

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refuses to see the causality in such insurrections, and his ‘explanatory’ account exposes the colonial offcial, who is rubbed the wrong way too often. He formulates his ideas about the Bhumij of Manbhum with an optimum degree of political and racial prejudice: The Bhumij of the Jungle Mahals were once, under the nick-name ‘Chuar,’ the terror of the surrounding districts, and their various outbreaks were called ‘Chuaris.’ On several occasions since they came under the British rule, they have shown how readily a Chuari may be improvised on very slight provocation. I do not know that on any occasion they rose like the Mundaris simply to redress their own wrongs. It was sometimes in support of a turbulent chief ambitious of obtaining power to which according to the courts of law he was not entitled, and it was sometimes to oppose the Government in a policy that they did not approve, though they may have had very little personal interest in the matter.33 If the above-quoted part is seen as the ‘explanatory’ account of the indigenous population of Manbhum, we can easily see how easily distinguishable the three modes Inden talks about can be. The explanatory part is, as a matter of fact, such a fimsy construct that any reader of history should be able to see through it with ease. Written almost around the same time, Beglar’s Report of a Tour through Bengal Provinces (1872–1873), however, describes Pachet focusing principally on the ruins of the temples, fort and the legends related to the monarchic dynasty of Pachet. Beglar goes on to give minute details on the remaining physical structures of the forts and temples of the Pachet monarchic dynasty. ‘About 10 miles to the south-west of Barakar,’ writes Beglar, ‘stands the high solitary hill of Pachet.’34 Unlike Hunter or Ball, Beglar describes the place without employing any appellative such as we saw in the cases of the earlier two. Beglar goes on to describe the boundaries of the place without much interference from any form of personal bias. He counters the popular explanation behind the contraction in the name Pachet from Panchakot. Beglar explains that the name Panchakot came due to its king’s sway over fve kingdoms, and adds that ‘the word clearly means fve forts, and I consider the name to have reference rather to the number of walls that defend the citadel—“kot.”’35 If the descriptive part in Beglar’s account comprises the act of locating the boundaries of the place, the ‘commentative’ part must consist of his surmise about the origin and meaning of the name of the place. The ‘explanatory’ part of the account, as commented upon by Inden, of course, is absent. As a result, the majority of Beglar’s accounts on Manbhum is free from racial prejudices and stands counter to the claims and dictums of the canon of postcolonial reading practices. Our reading of the passages, therefore, directs us to the problem related to the reading of Orientalist texts with a singularly linear strategy, which aims at discounting even the least possibility 82

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of fnding any trace of knowledge due to the nexus between knowledge and power. The power, here, obviously refers to the one aligned with imperialism. However, by discounting the possibility of fnding any knowledge that is re-usable in the context of the present realities of the once-colonised populations in Orientalist writings the entire endeavour of the postcolonial practices turns into a negative act, unsuccessful when it comes to addressing Said’s principal concern of progressing towards creating a knowledge system that is non-coercive in nature. It is against this context that Behdad introduces his revisionary mode of postcolonial methods that he calls ‘postcolonial belatedness.’36 Behdad holds that this belatedness ‘can be an oppositional praxis’ only if it ‘makes use of its historical consciousness to critique the cultural conditions that continue to produce unequal relations of power today,’ and ‘[w]ithout such historical consciousness the postcolonial reading of the colonial encounter is at best an informative ethnographic representation of colonial violence, and, at worst, a displaced interpretation of archival material.’37 Behdad also criticises Said, because his ‘monolithic notion of Orientalism as a purely reductive and biased discourse of power leaves no room for the possibility of differences among the various modes of Orientalist representation and in the feld of its power relations.’38 Crucially related to this context of reconstructing the history of the regions (Manbhum and Purulia) from even Orientalist writings (whenever possible) is the recognition of how the postcolonial canon of reading Orientalist texts fails to ‘account for the complexities of its micropractices; that is, the specifc but crucial points of its dispersed network of representations that include strategic irregularities, historical discontinuities, and discursive heterogeneity.’39 As with Said, so with Inden, the three-pronged model of reading Orientalist texts seems to be reductive and restrictive in nature. Although in most of the passages from the Orientalist writings we read and discussed, the points Inden made on Indological discourses being ‘descriptive,’ ‘commentative’ and ‘explanatory’ are validated, a closer look at those passages will also direct our attention to one weakness in Inden’s postulation, and that is that notwithstanding the parallels drawn by Inden with Freud’s psychoanalytical approach, Inden’s three modes are too clear, too obvious and unambiguously compartmentalised (as we saw) to sustain the metaphorical similarities with the Freudian dream analysis. The passages belie Inden’s presentation of structures of the Orientalist writings as dreamlike, which were supposed to have subtler subtexts of prejudices and political alignment with power in that case. Therefore, the problem with viewing the Orientalist writer’s endeavour as texts with such clarity and compartmentalised contents is that it will inevitably undermine the amorphous nature of the individual consciousness (of the writer) that churns out its material in the textual narrative in a far more complicated manner than the approach of Inden can accommodate. Thereby the Orientalist writer often creates a nebulous text that simultaneously works as an ally and also forms a resistance 83

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against the imperial power and destabilises her/his role as the ‘historical and social actor’ subtly and, sometimes, covertly. The history of the place in such colonial writings is, hence, contained in broken phrases, euphoric outbursts, inadvertent usage of words and slippages that have to be uncovered through close reading and deconstruction, if needed.

The exoticist, the magisterial and the curatorial approaches of Orientalist representations We can argue against the idea of employing the rejectionist mode to the Orientalist writings on Manbhum and Purulia from another standpoint by questioning the stereotype of power–knowledge nexus, as described by Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian (2005). Under the title ‘Western Approaches to India: Three Categories,’ Sen investigates the motivations of knowledge and relates it to, as the chapter title suggests, the Westerners’ intent to acquire knowledge about India. Sen begins his argument by presenting us with the idea of three distinct categories that can be traced within the outsiders’ attempts (mostly textual) at understanding India and consequently ‘interpret the country’s traditions.’40 Sen calls these three categories ‘exoticist approaches, magisterial approaches and curatorial approaches.’ According to him, the exoticist approaches concentrate on ‘the wondrous aspects of India,’41 whereas the ‘magisterial category strongly relates to the exercise of imperial power and sees India as a subject territory from the point of view of its British governors.’42 The third, or the curatorial category, according to Sen, ‘is the most catholic of the three and includes various attempts at noting, classifying and exhibiting diverse aspects of Indian culture,’ focusing on the difference and the extraordinariness, and ignoring the ‘exhibit value’ of India.43 In ignoring ‘the exhibit value’ the curatorial approaches create their distance from the exoticist approaches. In order to substantiate the comparatively benign interest in India refected in the curatorial approaches, Sen examines ‘the status of intellectual curiosity as a motivation for knowledge.’44 Negating the stereotypical notion of ‘knowledge’ as the unwavering ally of ‘power,’ Sen argues that although knowledge inevitably ‘gives power to its possessor in one form or another, this may not be the most remarkable aspect of that knowledge, nor the primary reason for which this knowledge is sought.’45 Sen directs our attention to the fact that ‘the process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some grosser kind.’46 By substantiating this view with early Arabic and early European instances of Orientalist scholarship like that of Alberuni and the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, Sen, thus, allows far more scope for even British Orientalist writings to be driven by a ‘systematic curiosity,’ which is not ‘hopelessly bound by some overarching motivational constraint,’ for instance, serving the empire’s cause in our case.47 84

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The point, therefore, this chapter seeks to make is that a history of Manbhum (or Manbhum’s lesser-known places, for that matter) and Purulia can glean information from even the Orientalist writings of the colonial period, if and when necessary, provided the endeavour employs a reading that exploits the fssures in the postcolonial canon of reading practices and remains aware of the postcolonial canon at the same time. It becomes especially urgent because notwithstanding its independence from colonial power, the region remains at the fringes of the geographical territory; still less known and little understood to the centre. Its relative obscurity emphasises the still existing unequal power relations harking back to the region’s colonial past. And there lies the relevance of reading the colonial writings on Manbhum and Purulia.

Notes 1 Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham & London: Duke UP, 1994, p. 13. 2 Due to frequent incidents of revolts the ‘district of the Jungle Mahals was broken up’ in 1833 (Coupland 65). The newly constituted district called Manbhum had its headquarters at Manbazar. Manbazar remained its headquarters till it was shifted to the town of Purulia in 1838. Purulia remained the headquarters of Manbhum till it fought its way out of the state of Bihar to be a part of West Bengal on basis of its vernacular and there came a new district carrying the name of its headquarters in 1956. 3 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New Delhi: Penguin, 2001, p. 157. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid, p. 156. 8 Valentine Ball, ‘On the avifauna of Chuti (Chota) Nagpur Division, Sw. Frontier of Bengal,’ Stray Feathers 2: 355–440 (1874), p. 356, South Asia Archive. Accessed on 6 May 2014. 9 Said, Orientalism, p. 157. 10 WW Hunter, Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol XVII. London: Trubner & Co., 1877, p. 255. 11 H Coupland, Bengal District Gazetteers: Manbhum. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1911, pp. 3–4. 12 Said, Orientalism, p. 227. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 226. 16 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1983, p. 15. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Edward W Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered,’ Cultural Critique. No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 89–107. 20 Valentine Ball, Jungle Life in India or the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist, London: Thos. De La Rue & Co., 1880, p. 78.

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Encyclopedia Brittanica, Accessed on 20 January 2018. Collins English Dictionary. Accessed on 20 January 2018. Ball, Jungle Life in India, p. 78. Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India,’ Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 20. No. 3, 1986, pp. 401–446. Ibid., p. 411. Ibid., p. 414. Ibid., p. 414. Ibid., p. 415. Walter Hamilton, East India Gazetteer Vol. II. London: Parbury, Allen, And Co., 1828, p. 467. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid. Edward Tuite Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. Calcutta: Offce of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1872, p. 174. Ibid. JD Beglar, Report of a Tour through the Bengal Provinces. Varanasi: Indological Book House, 1966, p. 178. Ibid. Behdad, Belated Travelers, p. 9. Ibid. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. 141. Ibid. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid. Ibid.

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Part II PEDAGOGIC PRACTICES, LOCAL ARTICULATIONS

4 THE SMALL VOICES OF HISTORY Subaltern technologists of colonial Bengal Suvobrata Sarkar

There are many categories of waterproof—Chemical Proofng, Tarpaulin or Canvas Proofng, Paper Proofng and Oil-cloth or Rubber-cloth. Tarpaulin was also previously manufactured in our country. But in the feld of chemical proofng we are the pioneer. One can understand the feasibility of paper proofing if we look to the examples of Europe and America. Many products are vulnerable to air or water. To keep these products fresh for a long time, the only remedy is paper proofng. The same is true for imported biscuits. We are successful at producing excellent quality proofed paper at our factory. Our products are cheaper than the imported foreign paper. But, unfortunately, people are not aware about its utility in our country. We manufacture the following products at our proofing section—raincoats, motor-hoods, holdalls, and curtains. Surendra Mohan Basu, the founder of the Bengal Waterproof Works, popularly known as Duckback, in an interview (1927)1

Despite Bengal’s traditional aversion to business, by the 1880s several Bengali-owned small and medium-sized frms were established. Most of these frms specialised in relatively technologically intensive production lines that demanded constant upgrading, modernisation and diversifcation; in short, there was a requirement for an emphasis on research. The ‘master craftsmen’ often became entrepreneurs themselves and had complete command over the production process. Unlike the Indian big industrialists, they had knowledge of the process of production and engagement in original research, and thus, were not dependent on foreign experts. Compared to large-scale industry, Tirthankar Roy identifes, these were units of smaller scale and, when compared with traditional small-scale industry, were usually of recent vintage and used machinery to a greater extent.2 Our protagonist, Surendra Mohan Basu, formulated a new process known as the ‘Duckback

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process’ for the manufacture of waterproofs. Duckback (originally the Bengal Waterproof Works) was very famous even during our school days (the 1990s). Among the frst to start chemical production in Bengal was Prafulla Chandra Ray, a doctorate in chemistry from Edinburgh, who later taught the subject at the Presidency College of Calcutta. Dr Ray can produce ripples in the minds of modern researchers even today.3 But Surendra Mohan and his Duckback have been unable to fascinate academia, especially scholars interested in science, technology and society studies (STS). Why do individuals like Surendra Mohan and others, with almost parallel calibre to PC Ray, not get the same attention? I will focus on these characters in this chapter to look at the production of new, small-scale industries dependent on local technologists in colonial Bengal. The title of the chapter has been borrowed from Ranajit Guha’s The Small Voice of History.4 The institutionalisation of the discipline of history, according to Guha, was basically augmenting the hegemony of the state and elite Indian actors—the benefciaries of English education. The others, although the majority, remained hidden and forgotten. A true historian should try to listen and converse with ‘the myriad voices’ of our society. These are the small voices of history, but as emphasised by Guha, their voices are lost in the celebrations of the elites. Guha appeals to the fraternity for an extra effort to hear these unsung voices and to identify these unnoticed characters: ‘For they have many stories to tell.’5 During the last two decades, works on the social construction of technology have virtually revolutionised our understanding of the technology–history relationship.6 This is fundamentally a sociological approach to technology that analyses artefacts in the context of society. It focuses on social groups that play a role in the development of technology. A social history of technology, to quote Cowan, ‘assumes a mutual relationship between society and technology; it also assumes that changes in one can, and have, induced changes in the other.’7 Recent scholarship on technology in South Asia has witnessed a dichotomy between big technology, such as the railways and the hydroelectric dam, and small ‘everyday’ technology, such as sewing machines and bicycles.8 But limiting both kinds of technologies in rigidly separated domains as watertight compartments is not correct. A recent study demonstrates that it is possible to write a history of technology in South Asia that does not discriminate between ‘big’ and ‘small’ technologies, and in which the voices of colonial apparatuses are analysed alongside the ordinary Indians—peasantry, artisans, etc.9 Reading the vernacular publications (memoirs, journals, periodicals, tracts) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we can get innumerable chronicles of ‘self-made engineers’ who excelled in the feld of technology. Traditionally the intellectual section of society often looked down upon technology as an inferior form of activity. The scholastic class and artisans lived in exclusive social and cognitive worlds and thus circulation of 90

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knowledge between them was often not possible. The Indian social structure, identifed by Indian luminaries, was responsible for the cleavage between mental and manual work and the resultant stagnation.10 In Western Europe, artisans enjoyed a higher status and when engineering education was introduced, they were the benefciaries. It helped them to become modern engineers. The outcome was such stalwarts as James Watt. In India, on the contrary, the ‘class’ and the ‘mass’ lived in two air-tight compartments— thus the probability of exchange of ideas was almost nil. This social dimension also cast its shadow on recounting the history of technologists. Forget about the semi-literate or illiterate artisans; several trained and untrained (without institutional training) Indian elites excelled in the feld of technology but remained absent in the academic discussion on technology.

Subaltern technologists? Subaltern Studies, appearing in the last two decades of the twentieth century, has introduced an almost new genre of history writing on modern India. The frst volume of the series, edited by Ranajit Guha, was published with a provocative opening statement: ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.’11 Neither of these two views can explain Indian nationalism because neither acknowledges the contribution made by people on their own, that is, independently of the elite, to the making of that nationalism. Subaltern Studies is a collection of monographs on diverse, unconnected topics. Subaltern, a term taken from Antonio Gramsci, means ‘of inferior rank,’ whether in relation to class, caste, gender, etc. The collection brings to light the lower sections of the Indian people hitherto neglected by historiography. Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, two scholars recently looked at the way that it is marginalised by the state and medical establishments while at the same time being very important in the everyday lives of the poor. They analyse a world of ‘subaltern therapeutics’ that both interacts with and resists state-sanctioned and elite forms of medical practice.12 The subject of a subaltern history of medicine, they argue, seeks to represent whatever is marginalised within that particular academic feld of knowledge. It might be possible then to better forge a link between scientifc ideas and their technological translation. In this context, it is perhaps appropriate that we begin here with a discussion of non-Western traditions of technology and the choices before them during our period of discussion. In many of these societies, science traditionally enjoyed a higher status than most forms of technology. The intellectual sections in these societies often looked down upon technology as an inferior form of activity. Traditional Indian society was also not an exception—where scholar-gentry and artisans lived in exclusive social and cognitive worlds and where problems of 91

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application were not shared between such groups, but only within them.13 In traditional society, science as a part of philosophy coincided more with the erudite—the Brahmins. Technology, despite its place in the cosmology, was confned to the manipulators of things—the artisans. Theologically also; even today, the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati, enjoys a higher status than the god of technology, Viswakarma. The historiography of science and technology in South Asia is always top-heavy—the accounts of the European scientists and doctors (bureaucrats) on the one hand, and of the few renowned Indian scientists and technocrats on the other.14 Even we have very limited studies on the engineering profession and subsequent industrialisation in the colonial Indian context.15 Of course, the scientists and engineers, products of institutional education, are important for understanding the Indian appropriation of Western technoscientifc knowledge. But there also existed substantial indigenous efforts, without any intellectual limelight, in the feld of technology. During the Swadeshi era, there were serious discussions and debates among the erudite regarding the role and place of Indian artisans in modern technical education.16 However, gradually, ‘academic engineering’ grabbed all the limelight. The achievements of the modern Viswakarmas devoid of formal technological training, whom we hesitantly name ‘subaltern technologists,’ deserve mention.17 ‘Hesitantly’ because Ranajit Guha, in his seminal work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, emphasises that subaltern politics was shaped by the distinct structure of subaltern consciousness.18 However, our protagonists were not concerned with creating any collective identity or consciousness; neither had they had any interlocutor, or any spokesperson (or historian!).19 A major argument that has been developed in the more recent phase of writings in and around ‘subaltern studies’ is that of alternative modernities.20 Scholars have explored various aspects of this process of the ‘translation’ of modern knowledge, technologies and institutions.21 What happened when the products of Western modernity (science) were domesticated in South Asia? Technology’s storytellers narrate the Indian response to Western science, and, as a spinoff, elite Indian actors come into play.22 Here, on the contrary, let us consider six fascinating stories of ‘subaltern technologists,’ in Guha’s style, as the small voices from history.

Pioneering engineers: Goluk Chunder and Shiv Chunder Nundy This ‘House of Unknown Fame’ is long and the luminaries can be found in the early nineteenth century itself. Amitabha Ghosh has identifed Goluk Chunder, a Bengali blacksmith of Titagar, as the ‘frst Indian engineer.’23 Goluk Chunder built a steam engine in 1828. In Serampore, the frst selfcontained industrial complex of Bengal, paper manufacture received a real breakthrough in 1820 with the introduction of steam power.24 Many 92

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contemporary Europeans tried hard to make a prototype of the imported engine. But it was Goluk Chunder who was ultimately successful in making it. The steam engine made by him was put on display during the Annual Exhibition of the Agri-Horticultural Society at the Town Hall of Calcutta in January 1828. The Calcutta Gazette reported on 17 January: A Curious model of a Steam Engine, made by Goluk Chunder, Blacksmith of Tittaghur, near Barrackpur, without any assistance from European artists, was likewise exhibited; and although not coming within the immediate sphere of the society’s exertions was considered so striking an instance of native ingenuity and imitative skill as to deserve encouragement. A donation of ffty rupees was, therefore, presented to the ingenious Blacksmith.25 Was there any practical utility of the steam engine made by Goluk Chunder? George Smith, the biographer of William Carey, mentioned it: ‘the steam engine was useful for irrigation of lands made upon the model of a large steam engine belonging to the missionaries at Serampore.’26 But unfortunately, nothing more about the frst Indian engineer is known. Thus, the steam engine, in those days an imported technological innovation from Britain, produced ripples in the minds of the local people. And in the early nineteenth century itself, one Goluk Chunder, without any knowledge of modern mechanics, was able to make a prototype of a steam engine successfully. Electricity, another technological innovation, was soon adapted. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, to cope with the everincreasing need to speed up communication, the new science of electricity found the frst practical and large-scale application in the use of the telegraph. It was with the introduction of the electric telegraph system that the profession of electrical engineering came into existence.27 The frst Indian electrical engineer, Shiv Chunder Nundy, came from the feld of the electric telegraph. Shiv Chunder, at the age of 22, joined the Refnery Department of the Calcutta Mint in 1846. His rise in the professional career shows that he was entirely a self-made man. His technical aptitude came to the notice of WB O’Shaughnessy, the chemical examiner of the Mint, and Nundy was selected as his ‘personal assistant.’ Together they carried out several experiments in O’Shaughnessy’s laboratory.28 In 1851, when the East India Company authorised the construction of the frst telegraph line in India and selected O’Shaughnessy to lead the task, he immediately placed Nundy ‘in charge’ of the assignment. Thus, the mint-man became a telegraph-man, a transformation which would last the rest of his life. In the very next year, work for the 21-mile-long frst section was completed and Nundy was closely associated with the project. It was Shiv Chunder who sent the inaugural message from Diamond Harbour, received in Calcutta by Lord Dalhousie 93

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and O’Shaughnessy.29 Immediately afterwards, Nundy was appointed as ‘Inspector-in-charge’ of the line. He was asked to instruct and train other signallers. The government also gave him the additional charge of the Post Offce at Diamond Harbour. Subsequently, he constructed about 900 miles of lines, from east Barrackpur to Allahabad, from Benares to Mirzapur, from Mirzapur to Seonee and from Calcutta to Dacca.30 Such responsibilities are enough to secure Nundy the distinction of a proper engineer. During the turmoil of 1857, Shiv Chunder was incharge of the headquarters at Calcutta and in order to secure the communication between Calcutta and Bombay, he laid down a portion of the alternative line from Mirzapur to Seoni via Jubbulpur.31 Nundy became an Assistant Superintendent of the Indian Telegraph Department (1866) and retired on a special pension in 1884, in which year he was made an Honorary Magistrate. He was awarded the title ‘Rai Bahadur’ in the preceding year.32

Kalidas Moitra, the frst Bengali writer on technological themes Many Indians made some signifcant attempts to diffuse and disseminate knowledge about technology in the public sphere in the Indian languages. Electric telegraph and railways perhaps frst captured the imagination of Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century. Kalidas Moitra of Serampore frst wrote two separate treatises on these technological innovations in Bengali as early as 1855.33 Apart from original works on the telegraph and railways, he also published on the principles of anatomy and physiology.34 Moitra, in his book on telegraphy, claimed that though several authors wrote on electricity and chemistry in Tattvobodhini Patrika, Bibidhartha Sangraha and Satyapradip Patrika, his monograph was the frst attempt in Bengali to cover the entire subject of electricity. He provided guidelines for experiments like principles of magnetism and chemical reactions using household items. He named telegraph stations as addas or ‘chatting spaces,’ and described O’Shaughnessy’s single needle signalling instrument at length, probably in the hopes of Indian replication.35 Moitra provided a preliminary outline of systems of signalling in Bengali, along with the English. He also gave here elaborate discussion on the Puranic or classical Indian time and Western time. Arguing for the superiority of the Western division of the day into 24 hours, he provided a guide to both Western and Indian time calculation as well as homogenising time calculation.36 Although an ardent follower of Western technology, one can discern notes of revivalist tenor in some of Moitra’s writings. For example, in his Baspiya Kal O Bhartiya Railway, he attempted to prove that ancient Indians used steam power.37 He constructed his argument based on many nineteenth-century Indian nationalists that ancient Indian culture was the amalgamation of both spiritual knowledge and scientifc truths. At the same time, Moitra was aware of the exploitative nature of colonialism and argued 94

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that the Company’s strategic need to transport troops rapidly was behind the growth of railways in India.38 He admitted honestly that he borrowed various technicalities of the steam engine from several English works. For Moitra, machines were equal to modernity, and the telegraph and railways were the best examples of that. He urged his countrymen to learn a European concept that time was money. Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury perhaps rightly remarks that Kalidas Moitra was a curious combination of ‘early nationalist egotism and conservative radicalism.’39

Sitanath Ghosh, the self-made inventor Sitanath Ghosh of Jessore manufactured an air pump and power loom exhibited in Hindu Mela40 in the 1870s. The young Sitanath entered Calcutta Medical College due to his aptitude in scientifc pursuits but was unable to complete his study due to ill health. He privately studied electricity and later joined as the editor of the Hindu Patrika from Calcutta in which he published many scientifc papers.41 The ffth session of the Mela (1871) was signifcant from the point of view of technological innovation. Here Sitanath for the frst time demonstrated his cotton spindle, by which yarn was produced and twisted mechanically in three places without manual effort at each turn, though the thread lacked uniform thinness. He also showed his loom, but it was not a fnished manufacture at that stage.42 Sitanath delivered lectures on various issues of science and technology even before he demonstrated his inventions. In fact, he made his frst appearance on the platform of the National Society, which was created from the fourth session of the Mela in 1870, in conjunction with the Mela.43 The frst lecture given by Sitanath was on machinery—about his new air pump and power loom. The latter could produce the work of four persons by the simple operations of one operator. On the same platform, he gave his speech on electricity.44 Impressed with his lectures on ‘Electricity and Magnetism’ at the National Society, Debendranath Thakur offered Sitanath the editorship of the prestigious journal, Tattvobodhini Patrika in 1872. In subsequent years he regularly contributed pieces on electricity in that journal.45 In the tenth session of the Hindu Mela (1876), Sitanath demonstrated his cotton-weaving machine and a loom which could be run by draught animals, steam or manual labour. The frst was an improvement on Charka and produced triple the amount of yarn done by the latter. The loom can produce in a single effort over 20 yards of cloth.46 The cloth was not yet of fne quality but in future would compete with Manchester products.47 The weaving machine made him famous. Many wealthy persons, including the Rani of Betia, offered huge amounts of money to buy his weaving machine. But Sitanath was determined not to sell it. He also invented a wheat-pounding machine, a mechanical plough which could be drawn with the help of one bullock and a mechanised boat. His other inventions were 95

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writing and press ink. He gave the formula to his friend Amrita Lal Roy who later became well known using the formula as AL Roy’s ink. Another invention, the scientifc amulet, was given to one Brajamohan Kar for marketing and he also made a good business out of it.48 Inspired by the concept of the Hindu Mela, Sitanath organised an annual agricultural and educational fair in his native village, Roygram, Jessore. There he demonstrated his technological skills in the form of telegraph lines set up from the riverfront to the fair site to welcome the dignitaries.49 Sitanath’s greatest scientifc achievement, in his opinion, was the Magnetic Healer, which he described in his book Medical Magnetism. Here he even depicted himself as the founder of Electropathy or the Magnetic System of Treatment in India. He derived the principle from the daily prayer (Anhik Mantra) of the Hindus and from the Vishnu Purana. The trident over temples was based on the theory of magnetism to prevent their collapse from lightning strikes. ‘It has been found,’ wrote Sitanath, ‘that…the human body is a magnetisable object though far inferior to iron and steel.’ In 1880, he opened his chamber at the Mechhua Bazar Street, Calcutta and started treatment of patients by electricity and magnetism. He claimed that ‘every description of indisposition known is partially or entirely removed as it is light or serious.’50 As we know that technology was a technique informed by scientifc knowledge, Sitanath was a technologist in its true sense—for he did not rest satisfed with the theoretical principles of electricity alone; he applied that knowledge to invent his apparatus the Magnetic Healer.

Jogesh Chandra Ray: a rare genius Jogesh Chandra Ray was a lecturer of science at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. He always stressed the practical demonstration of theoretical knowledge while teaching and tried to keep the college laboratory up to date for the beneft of students. For better instruction in physical sciences, he even manufactured various instruments.51 Jogesh Chandra was a prolifc writer and contributed to the leading journals of Calcutta—both English and Bengali. He also realised that one of the major problems in teaching science in the Indian colleges and schools was the absence of good quality books in the vernacular languages. So, he concentrated on writing Bengali books on science subjects for students.52 Jogesh Chandra was a person with multiple talents. From scientifc subjects to literature, his canvas was vast. He was elected a fellow at the Royal Microscopical Society (1901) and the Royal Astronomical Society (1902).53 Here we will discuss Jogesh Chandra’s accomplishment in the feld of technology. He always tried to apply his scientifc aptitude for the betterment of society. His inquisitiveness dragged him towards different branches of knowledge—the frst perhaps was fabric printing. From a casual reading of the Journal of Indian Arts, Jogesh Chandra grew an interest in the subject 96

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and devoted almost two years to experimenting with colours.54 His other trial was pencil making. During the Swadeshi era many enterprising Indians worked out schemes for industrial ventures—some saw the light of day and others sank without moving a single stone. One of the reasons for failure was the lack of technical knowledge of that feld.55 In 1906 Jogesh Chandra bought shares of a Swadeshi pencil-making company and suffered a huge loss. With sheer ignorance, the company selected ‘cedar wood’ whereas for pencil making the necessary ingredient was ‘bastard wood.’ Then Jogesh Chandra tried his hand at pencil making with the assistance of Nilmony Sadhukha, lecturer of mathematics at his college.56 This was for fun only, without any intention of making a proft. After a few days of experimenting, he realised that pencil making was possible and that they were also like the imported ones. Jogesh Chandra’s major invention was the wind-mill, which made him famous. He published the result of his research in the Sahitya Parishad Patrika and it demonstrated his engineering skills.57 In the year 1923, he applied for a patent for two of his appliances—one was ‘an improved hand mill’ and another was ‘an improved lift pump for liquids.’ The government sanction came in the very next year. His hand-mill consisted of a stationary upper stone and a revolving lower stone, with an arrangement for maintaining a gap between the stones, which could be regulated at will. In the ordinary grinding mill used in Indian households, the lower stone remained fxed while the upper stone rotated. Splitting the pulses without pulverising them was diffcult to perform with the old grinding machine, which tended to crush the pulses rather than split them. This diffculty, Jogesh Chandra claimed, had been overcome in his improved hand-mill entirely.58 Jogesh Chandra’s improved lift-pump for liquids was perhaps one of the most interesting feats of his career. The following description, quoted from the testimony of the inventor to the Patent Offce, ascertains the nature of his invention: This invention relates to a lift pump which is capable of raising water from any depth and which can be worked by means of levers operated by foot, or by hand, or jointly by foot and hand, or with the addition of a suitable gear of bullock power. Ordinary suction pumps cannot raise water from depths below twenty-fve feet. This defect has been overcome in my invention by using a long pump barrel, of which one end is submerged in water and the other end extends right up to the delivery point. A long-stroke piston is used and the portion of the barrel below the piston functions as an ordinary suction pump, while the portion above acts in the manner of a force pump. Another defect in common hand pumps is the rapid wear of the pump bucket or hide cup. This has been overcome in my invention by dispensing with the hide cup or any other packing for the piston and by using a 97

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loose piston which is long enough to prevent any considerable sideslip or leakage past it of water. Leather or hide is not necessary for any of the working parts, which is an advantage.59 Jogesh Chandra was keen on having proper facilities for technical education in the country. On several occasions, he demanded better facilities to train the ‘Architects and Engineers.’60 He realised the inherent gulf between mainstream education and technical training—as the prevalent dominant societal notion was that the former was for the Brahmins whereas the latter was meant for the Shudras only. Jogesh Chandra ridiculed the popular demand for technical education which, according to him, was without any clear conception of what such education meant.61 Mere training in pottery, carpentry, etc. was not enough. Industrial application of technical knowledge was necessary. He felt that there was little effort to increase the inventive capacity of the students in the engineering colleges. Behind the achievements of Germany and America in the modern world, he pointed out, were their inventive skills. Jogesh Chandra knew that Newton or Darwin rarely appeared, but he hoped that at least there could be an Edison or a Rontgen in India.62 According to Jogesh Chandra, the lack of adequate industry to absorb the science students was an acute problem in India. The only successful industrial application of scientifc knowledge, he pointed out, was a pharmaceutical works (Bengal Chemical & Pharmaceutical Works Ltd). He was upset with the trend of foreign technical training which he thought was unable to alter the industrial scenario. Jogesh Chandra reminded us of two points—technical education alone was not the gateway to industry, and without knowing the country no one could succeed in running an industry successfully with his foreign degrees of technology.63 It is evident from his autobiography that Jogesh Chandra Ray was a wellknown fgure of early twentieth-century Calcutta. He had personal contact with the contemporary intellectuals—Rabindranath Tagore, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Gooroo Das Banerjee, CV Raman and Prafulla Chandra Ray, to name a few. He was also a regular contributor to various prestigious journals of the time. The Calcutta University conferred him an honorary DLit degree in 1956. In that sense, Jogesh Chandra was the most privileged person on the list of our ‘subaltern technologists.’ But as the word ‘subaltern’ suggests, he remains absent in the academic discussion on the Bengali attainments in modern techno-science even today.

Bepin Behari Das: an Indian edition of Henry Ford The last luminary of our ‘House of Unknown Fame’ is Bepin Behari Das, a self-taught mechanic, who can safely be termed as the frst builder of an 98

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Indian motor car. When motor cars frst appeared in early twentieth-century Calcutta, the famous coach-builders of the time like Steuart & Co or Dykes & Co found little diffculty in reorienting their expertise and built elegant car bodies.64 But these initiatives were entirely dependent on foreign technologies and expertise. Indian engineers were not yet ready to think about car manufacturing. But an unknown person arrived on the scene. The protagonist was a self-taught mechanic deprived of any advanced training in technology. Bepin Behari Das, working in a small shed near the Ballygunge–Bondel Road crossing, Calcutta, built all the components of a car including its body and chassis except for tyres, spark plugs, carburettor and magneto. ‘Swadeshi,’ as named by its builder, was a ‘15 hp. L-head 4-cylinder 5 seater and 4 door touring model car.’65 Bepin Behari sold his frst car to Benaras Hindu University in 1931. One DP Khaitan, councillor of the Calcutta Corporation, noted in 1933 that the car was still running and was used by Pandit Motilal Nehru and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya.66 Thus, the frst car manufactured by an Indian was actually used by the leading Indian nationalists of the time. The Calcutta Corporation entrusted Bepin Behari with the task of building a second car for them at a cost of 3,000 rupees. Arrangements were made to pay him 300 rupees per month as advance for six months on the condition that any defect being disclosed in any part or parts of the car during the period of two years, he will examine the same and should any fault be due to defective material or workmanship, he will repair the defective part or supply a new part in place thereof free of charge.67 However, he would not be held responsible for tyres, tubes, speedometer or any electrical equipment not manufactured by him. The car would be 12.5 feet in length for which ‘an imported car would cost Rs. 5 or 6 thousands.’68 It is interesting to note that when the delivery of the car was a little delayed, almost all the councillors expressed serious doubts regarding the capability of Bepin Behari and were convinced of misuse of public money. Luckily, he was supported by the then Mayor of the corporation, Santosh Kumar Basu, and a few others, and the project continued.69 At the end of the day, Bepin Behari proved again his technological skills. After the frst trial run of the ‘Swadeshi Motor Car’ on the road of Calcutta, the editor of Advance happily noted in 1933, last week an event, which will perhaps stand out as epoch-making in Indian industrial history, took place, comparatively quietly when the frst motor car manufactured in Bengal by a Bengali, was passed by the police for registration and awarded the number 35977. The car did up to 35 mph. and the ease in steering and its good acceleration were praised by the correspondent.70 99

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But Bepin Behari’s endeavour found little appreciation and patronage. He built another car for Gwalior State which ran satisfactorily for many years.71 He was engaged with another car-making project at the time of his death in 1938. Bepin Behari Das was only 55 then.72 The garage of Bepin Behari was not very far from Jadavpur, where the biggest educational experiment, including technological studies, was going on in the early twentieth century; but we never fnd any reference of him in the correspondence of the National Council of Education, Jadavpur. His example reveals that not only the British government but also the Indian erudite thought little of the people who were thought to be at the lower rung of the technological hierarchy created by the modern state. It would be wrong to assume that the persons dealt with here were the only examples of creative aptitude in the feld of technology in India. One can give many instances where the humble technologists toiled their hands far away from the intellectual limelight. Modern Viswakarmas were scattered all over the country. But one must know the local languages to read the contemporary texts to tap their attainments in the colonial context.

Conclusion Our study reveals that Indian attainment in the feld of technology was not confned to the so-called educated strata of society. Institutional training does not always lead to technological profciency. So, we have numerous semiliterate or illiterate Viswakarmas with their distinctive accomplishments in techno-science. Intuition perhaps played a major role in their case. How many of us know about Goluk Chunder or Shiv Chunder Nundy? Without training in the science of electricity, Nundy excelled in the feld of the electric telegraph which was considered high-level technology in those days. Kalidas Moitra was the frst writer in Bengali on the complicated issues of technology. One Jawaharlal Dhar, self-made electrician, actively participated in the electric installation project of the Old Howrah Bridge. Later, he was involved in the electrifcation of the Eden Gardens also. The major invention of this selfstyled engineer was the safety-door lock for which he received the patent from the government. He also invented a machine to generate solar electricity.73 The case of Bepin Behari Das, a self-taught mechanic, was equally interesting. The ‘House of Unknown Fame’ is long. They need the individual attention of the scholars. But unfortunately, the ‘subaltern technologists’ remain hidden and forgotten. Even the contemporary elites of Indian society were reluctant to acknowledge them. Except for Jogesh Chandra Ray, who himself belonged to that section, other practitioners never received their due recognition. In Western Europe, the Industrial Revolution witnessed the emergence of the millwright from the village carpenters, blacksmiths and wheelwrights. This was the transitional stage from traditional techniques to modern engineering. How can one forget that James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, began his career as a self-taught skilled artisan? But 100

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technical education did not help Indians in any signifcant way, as it did their counterparts in Western Europe. On the contrary, the system of technical education created a gulf between the illiterate or semi-literate mistry and the Babu engineers. While the mistry with their traditional skill did not ft into the colonial agenda of education, the engineer with his training in European technology preferred white-collar jobs. A few notable exceptions were Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee or Nilmony Mitra, the frst-generation Bengali engineers, who pursued their trade independently.74 There was hardly any scope for creative application for the Indian engineer. So, there was a ‘delink’ between the intellectual elite of the society and the ground-level technicians. The result was obvious—disjunction in the circulation of knowledge. The historians of Indian science and technology, while discussing great Indian scientists and science enthusiasts, like Akshay Kumar Dutta, Master Ramachandra, Jagadis Chandra Bose or Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, have focused more on their scientifc calibre than on their technological acumen. For example, regarding JC Bose, they problematise his endeavour to make a modern independent Indian science. A recent critic argues that Bose made pure science a credible occupation for Indians to the rest of the world and here lies his ultimate signifcance.75 Bose also invented the crescograph, an electrical instrument to measure plant growth, with the help of semi-literate attendants. This was an example of his great technological profciency. But can we judge Bose or others through the prism of technology only? Can we even think of discussing the careers of Putiram, Jamshed, Barik and Malek, the Indian technicians employed by Bose to build his instruments? If we continue to ignore these fgures from our past, we will probably continue, in future, to produce several eminent scientists, but not engineer-inventors like James Watt or Thomas Edison.

Acknowledgement This is a humble initiative to present the histories of a few unknown Viswakarmas (subaltern technologists) and a homage to Siddhartha Ghosh, who originally started the project in early 1990 but was unable to complete it due to his sad demise. I would like to express my gratitude for the invaluable suggestions offered by Professor Deepak Kumar, Professor Smritikumar Sarkar, Professor Suranjan Das, Professor Ranjan Chakrabarti, Professor Ross Bassett, Professor Sujata Mukherjee, Professor Arabinda Samanta and Professor Achintya Kumar Dutta. Whatever faults remain are mine alone.

Notes 1 Arthik Unnoti, Vol. 2, No. 7, Kartik 1334 Bangla Sal (hereafter B.S.), p. 439. 2 Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India 1857–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Third Edition, 2011, p. 116.

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3 Dhruv Raina, ‘Prafulla Chandra Ray and Marcelin Berthelot: ChemistHistorians,’ Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 49–82. Also see Suvobrata Sarkar, Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880-1945, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 94-105. 4 Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, Second paperback edition, 2012. 5 Ibid., pp. 305–7. 6 Wiebe E Bijker, Thomas P Hughes and Trevor J Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987. 7 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 3. 8 David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 9 Smritikumar Sarkar, Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 10 PC Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, Vol. I, Calcutta: Chuckerverty, Chatterjee & Co Ltd, 1932. 11 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,’ in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 1. 12 David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukhherji (eds.), Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating subaltern therapeutics, London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 13 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Traditions of Technology,’ A Very Popular Exile, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 85–6. 14 A few recent examples: Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Second edition, 2006; Robert S Anderson, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks and Power in India, Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2010; Indira Chowdhury, Growing the Tree of Science: Homi Bhaba and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. 15 Aparajith Ramnath, The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry and the State, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017. 16 Dhruv Raina and S Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Modern India, New Delhi: Tulika, 2004, pp. 84–130. 17 One blacksmith from Kanchannagar, Burdwan district, Premchand Mistri, excelled in the cutlery industry (and needless to mention, without any formal technical training). The knives, including superior surgical knives, and scissors were made of cast-steel and all the fttings were made in his workshop. The Journal of Indian Art, published from London, mentioned (1886): ‘Of late, one Premchand Mistri of Kanchannagar has succeeded in turning out good knives and other articles, which he occasionally supplies to the Government Stationary Offce.’ Quoted in Achintya Kumar Dutta, ‘Indigenous Technique and Artisanal Works: Blacksmiths in Colonial Rarh Bengal,’ in Nupur Dasgupta and Amit Bhattacharyya (eds.), Essays in History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Kolkata: Setu, 2014, pp. 170–2. 18 This ‘autonomous consciousness’ had evolved out of the experiences of subordination—out of the struggle, despite the daily routine of exploitation and servitude, to preserve their collective identity. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,’ in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. IV, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 338–63. 20 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post-colonial thought and historical difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. 21 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Partha Chatterjee (ed.), Texts of Power: The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000; etc. 22 Subrata Dasgupta, Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 1999. 23 Amitabha Ghosh, ‘Some Eminent Indian Pioneers in the Field of Technology,’ Indian Journal of History of Science, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1994, pp. 63–75. 24 The 12-horse-power steam engine of Thwaites Hick & Rothwells, imported from England, was an object of wonder. One contemporary journal reported: ‘Even the Steam Engine although it has been in operation for four years does not cease to draw crowds of natives to inspect it from week to week, who…quietly inspect it at leisure, and departed convinced that all knowledge was not engrossed by their fore-fathers.’ Calcutta Gazette, 27 May 1824; quoted in Anil Chandra Das Gupta (ed.), The Days of the John Company: Selections from Calcutta Gazette 1824–1832, Calcutta: West Bengal Government Press, 1959, pp. 13–5. 25 Calcutta Gazette, 17 January 1828; quoted in ibid., pp. 272–3. 26 George Smith, The Life of William Carey: Shoe-Maker and Missionary, Calcutta: Everyman’s Library, 1885, p. 231. 27 JD Bernal, Science in History, London: Watts, 1954, p. 390. 28 Sidhartha Ghosh, Karigari Kalpana O Bangali Udyog, Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 1988, p. 48. 29 Krishnalal Shridharani, Story of the Indian Telegraph: A Century of Progress, New Delhi: Post & Telegraph Department, 1953, p. 13. 30 During the construction of the Calcutta–Dacca line, it became necessary to lay seven miles of underwater cable across River Padma. With no steamer company willing to lend their vessels for the work at less than 10,000 rupees, a determined Nundy got it done by hiring country fshing boats. See Hemendra Prasad Ghosh, ‘Shiv Chandra Nundy,’Masik Basumati, Kartik 1360 B.S. (1953), pp. 107–14. 31 Krishnalal Shridharani, Story of the Indian Telegraph, p. 15. 32 The Statesman commented on 25 April 1902, ‘A Rai Bahadurship seems to have been a poor reward for his excellent services.’ 33 Kalidas Moitra, Electric Telegraph ba Taritbartabaha Prakaran, Serampore: J. H. Peters, 1855; again Kalidas Moitra, Baspiya Kal O Bharatiya Railway, Serampore: J. H. Peters, 1855. 34 Kalidas Moitra, Manabdehotatwa or the Human Frame, Serampore: J. H. Peters, 1855. 35 Kalidas Moitra, Electric Telegraph, pp. 120–31. 36 Ibid., pp. 150–3. 37 Kalidas Moitra, Baspiya Kal, p. 4. 38 Ibid., p. 48. 39 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830–1920, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 26. 40 The frst session of the Mela was held in 1867 and it’s one of the objectives was the exhibition of indigenous products by local artisans. The Thakur family was

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41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58

behind the Mela from the beginning. Dwijendranath Thakur, the eldest brother of Rabindranath, was one of the prime movers of the Mela. Jogindra Nath Samaddar, ‘Sitanath Ghosh,’ Prabasi, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1319 B.S. (1912), pp. 237–9. Sulav Samachar, 21 February 1871; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 March 1871. Chittabrata Palit, Scientifc Bengal: Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment under the Raj, Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006, p. 75. Sitanath himself said: ‘In the summer of the year 1871, being requested by some of my friends, I delivered two successive addresses at the National Society’s meeting in the Calcutta Training Academy’s Hall on the ideas I conceived about the electrical and magnetic importance of the said practices.’ Quoted in Jogesh Chandra Bagal, Jatiyatar Nabamantra O Hindu Melar Itibritta, Calcutta: Salil Kumar Mitra, 1945, p. 40. For example, Sitanath Ghosh, ‘Taritbishoyok jnan,’ Tattvobodhini Patrika, Vol. 8, No. 2, Issue 352, Pous 1794 Saka (1872), p. 148. Sadharani, 27 February 1876. Jogesh Chandra Bagal, Jatiyatar Nabamantra O Hindu Melar Itibritta, p. 55. Jogindra Nath Samaddar, ‘Sitanath Ghosh,’ p. 241. Ibid. Sitanath’s Magnetic Healer, one small and one big (two feet and four feet respectively), were composed of 6,000 and 10,000 feet of copper wire passing through a wooden frame cushioned with mat and jute, wax and leather linings. They had brass hooks at the end of which were attached the wires of the galvanic battery for creating the magnetic feld. The patient would be made to lie on this platform so that electric waves passed through the body. Sitanath Ghosh, Medical Magnetism, quoted in Jogesh Chandra Bagal, Jatiyatar Nabamantra O Hindu Melar Itibritta, p. 219. Arabinda Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Chandra Ray Vidyanidhi, Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 2009, p. 18. Professor Jagadish Chnadra Bose once remarked: ‘From what I have seen the elements of Physics and Physiography in Bengali by Babu Joges Chandra Ray, M.A., I found them in many respects superior to other books of the same class. The method of treatment is commendable and the explanations clear and concise. The woodcuts are excellent. I trust they would be found of great service to those for whom they are intended.’ Quoted in Jogesh Chandra Ray, Atmajebani, Bankura: Anandakumar Roy, 2002, p. 298. Arabinda Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Chandra Ray Vidyanidhi, p. 59. Jogesh Chandra Ray, ‘Ranjita O Chritrita Bastra,’ Nabyabharat, Vol. 10, No. 4, Sraban 1299 B.S. (1892), pp. 177–83. But despite the absence of technical knowledge, the patriotic-minded Indians were determined to start various industries. Many wealthy Indians invested a huge amount of money without knowing anything about business or scientifc production. To take advantage of the situation, many quacks emerged during the early twentieth century. They pretended to be specialists and used to seek the patronage of the wealthy class. The result was obvious—after few days they disappeared. Perhaps the best possible depiction of this era is Troilokkyanath Mukhopadhyay, Damru-Charit, Kolkata: New Age Publisher Pvt. Ltd, Fifth Edition, 2009 (frst published in 1923), pp. 98–104. Jogesh Chandra Ray, Atmajebani, p. 178. Sri Jogesh Chandra Ray, Sahitya Parishad Patrika, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1321 B.S. (1914), pp. 81–96. Government of India, The Patent Offce, 1 Council House Street, Calcutta; Specifcation No. 9355, 31st May 1923, Accepted 4th February 1924; An

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59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

73

74 75

Improved Hand Mill by Joges Chandra Ray, a Government Pensioner, residing at Bankura, Bengal; quoted in Jogesh Chandra Ray, Atmajebani, p. 239. Government of India, The Patent Offce, 1 Council House Street, Calcutta; Specifcation No. 9354, 31st May 1923, Accepted 4th August 1924; An Improved Lift Pump for Liquids by Joges Chandra Ray, a Government Pensioner, residing at Bankura, Bengal; quoted in Jogesh Chandra Ray, Atmajebani, p. 243. Jogesh Chandra Ray Vidyanidhi, ‘Kala-Siksha,’ Bharati, Vol. 26, Kartik 1309 B.S. (1902), pp. 674–87. Continued in the next issue, Agrahayan 1309, pp. 760–71. ‘Kala-Siksha,’ Bharati, Vol. 26, Kartik 1309, op.cit, p. 685. ‘Kala-Siksha,’ Bharati, Vol. 26, Agrahayan 1309, op.cit, p. 770. Sri Jogesh Chandra Ray, ‘Deshe Vijnan-Pratistha,’ Prabasi, Vol. 15, No. 1, Baisakh 1322 B.S. (1915), pp. 127–41. Arthik Unnoti, Vol. 2, No. 1, Baishak 1334 B.S. (1927), p. 13. The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Vol. XV, No. 15, 19 March 1932, p. 698. ‘The Swadeshi Motor Car,’ The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Vol. XVI, No. 1, 3 June 1933, p. 56. The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Vol. XV, No. 24, 21 May 1932, p. 1078. Ibid. ‘Swadeshi Motor,’ Banik, Vol. 7, No. 2, Jaistha 1339 B.S. (1932), p. 42. Quoted in ‘The Swadeshi Motor Car: Trial Runs in Calcutta,’ The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Vol. XVI, No. 6, 18 November 1933, pp. 1105–7. See also ‘Bangali nirmito motorcar’ (Motorcar made by a Bengali), Banik, Vol. 8, No. 9, Pous 1340 B.S. (1933), p. 285. Amitabha Ghosh, ‘Some Eminent Indian Pioneers in the Field of Technology,’ p. 72. A perfunctory obituary in The Calcutta Municipal Gazette concludes with the comment: ‘He was undoubtedly justifed in his claim to have been the only Indian manufacturer of a car in this country.’ ‘Mr. B. B. Das dead,’ The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Vol. XIX, No. 7, 9 April 1938, p. 1107. Jawaharlal Dhar, Sachitra Kolikata-Rahasya, Kolkata: Paraspathar (Reprint Volume), 2012. Originally published in 1896, this monograph is an important source on late-nineteenth-century Calcutta. The author was very much interested in magic which later pushed him towards modern science. Suvobrata Sarkar, The Quest for Technical Knowledge: Bengal in the Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Manohar, 2012. Subrata Dasgupta, Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science, p. 265.

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5 THE ADVENT OF PRIMARY EDUCATION IN BENGAL

Akash Bhattacharya

It was my aim to improve the pathshalas, not to convert them into mass schools. —AM Monteath, Under-Secretary to the Home Department, 18621 Of these schools [pathshalas], I shall not speak at much length. Their real character is that of grant-in-aid schools, freed from those technicalities which hamper the latter. —Bhoodeb Mukherjee, Inspector of Schools, North Central Division, 18702

Introduction The emergence of a mass education system in nineteenth-century India under the aegis of the colonial state is a well-known historical fact.3 This essay examines a slice of this process: the constitution of primary education in Bengal during the frst phase of the education reforms, i.e. between Wood’s Despatch of 1854 and the frst comprehensive all-India review of its operation by the Education Commission of 1882.4 The years between 1854 and 1871 witnessed an intense and anxious search by the Bengal government for an institution that could provide a stable base for primary education in the vernacular. The government looked for an institution that would be economical when deployed on a large scale and would adhere to the government-mandated vectors of improvement.5 Following the Wood’s Despatch, the government started setting up new Vernacular Schools through grants-in-aid. Within fve years of this move, however, there was a change of emphasis. From 1859 onwards, one witnesses a slow but steady policy shift towards moulding the most popular pre-existing institutions of elementary instruction—the pathshalas—into the basic unit of primary education, even as the 106

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grant-in-aid Vernacular Schools continued to expand.6 In 1871, after a decade of experimentation with a series of schemes for pathshala improvement, measures geared towards integrating a critical number of ‘improved pathshalas’ into the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) were introduced.7 Going by the tenor of the DPI reports, the Education Proceedings and the reports of the Indian Education Commission of 1882, the integration of improved pathshalas appears to have resolved the problems of scale and cost in primary education but not that of unstable vectors. The government tried to fx this by accommodating the tensions caused by unstable vectors into the policy framework. This chapter studies the shift of emphasis from grants-in-aid Vernacular Schools to pathshalas in its historical context and discusses the implications of this move for schools and pathshalas as well as for the education system in Bengal. In the process, we shed new light on the institutional practices that constituted primary education during those decades. Our study looks to historicise the relationship between governance and education.8 We have a rich historiography on colonial ideologies that reveals the place of education within shifting ideological orientations of colonial rule.9 Studies on education policies have, however, usually traced their trajectories as the unfolding of the liberal reformist state’s ideological designs.10 In this chapter, we draw attention to the process of operationalisation of education policies and suggest that the education system cannot be understood by focusing exclusively on the policies as they were pronounced.11 The system was shaped by the colonial state’s encounter with the unfamiliar and often hostile terrain that it sought to transform—one where government policies were regularly disrupted and reworked: by people and objects, by weather and disease.12 This encounter, as it played out in the context of education, produced educational practices that the state could not foresee. It left the state with little option but to respond by shifting its strategies. This essay examines an instance of this process: the emergence of the Vernacular School/pathshala dynamic in nineteenth-century Bengal and its impact on primary education in the province. The dynamic was the product of two successive processes. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers and their local allies in Bengal deployed the school for their education projects. Part of a global moment in education, this, however, led to the school’s entanglement with the pathshala—a local institution.13 Notwithstanding this deep entanglement, the government of Bengal, in the wake of Wood’s Despatch, deployed the school for mass education in the vernacular, marking it with the universalist perspectives and aspirations of reformist liberalism’s civilising mission.14 The Vernacular School could not, however, be smoothly planted onto the colonised landscape, nor did the pathshala inevitably decline.15 Disruptions to the grants-in-aid scheme led the government to shift its emphasis to pathshala reforms in order to constitute primary 107

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education. In the process, the Vernacular School got repeatedly reworked in course of its deployment while the pathshala reinvented itself despite partial absorption by the state. This produced a range of institutional practices that populated the educational landscape. The chapter demonstrates that it was this Vernacular School/pathshala dynamic, rather than a unilateral deployment of the school by the state, that shaped primary education in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Early encounters It was in the decades prior to Wood’s Despatch that two distinct templates for vernacular education, i.e. elementary education through the local vernacular as the medium of instruction, emerged. These were the Vernacular School and the improved pathshala. These took shape gradually through the combined work of Christian missionaries, Bengali reformers and secular European philanthropists, with occasional encouragement from the Company government. Christian missionaries set up new Vernacular Schools, which had a relationship of both transaction and competition with the existing pathshalas.16 While using Bengali as the medium of instruction, the missionary curriculum foregrounded European subjects (history, geography and European mathematics) and catechism. The Baptist missionaries set up a press at Serampore to produce vernacular textbooks for their schools. The pedagogy and internal organisation of these schools were shaped by the Bell-Lancaster system, which set them apart from the pathshalas.17 Having thus set up the Vernacular Schools—organised into classes, with regular registration of attendance, fxed routines and the use of textbooks to teach a European and Christian curriculum—missionaries claimed that these were of better quality than the pathshalas. There were occasional efforts towards integrating pathshala gurus (pathshala teachers) as teachers into these schools, especially for teaching the vernacular language, but the tensions with pathshalas seemed to have been quite sharp.18 These institutions, especially the gurus, occupy a prominent place in missionary documents as centres and harbingers of resistance to their activities in the villages of South Bengal—a nerve centre of early missionary work. Hence, while the missionaries set the pathshala up as an object of reform, actual efforts at moulding them seem to have been rather occasional.19 The Calcutta School Society, through its work between 1818 and 1833, secularised the missionary template of vernacular education and deployed them for moulding pathshalas. The Society brought together three categories of educators: European philanthropists, missionaries and Bengali reformers.20 David Hare, a watchmaker turned philanthrope, was the leading fgure behind this initiative. Missionaries such as William Carey were happy to patronise secular Vernacular Schools in the hope that these would eventually pave the way for mass conversion to Christianity by challenging the 108

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‘superstitions of the native mind.’21 Bengali reformers such as Radhakanta Deb and Ramcomul Sen too were ready to support these schools so long as the curriculum was secular.22 The Society schools were similar to the missionary schools in their pedagogy and organisation (viz. these were organised into classes, with regular registration of attendance and fxed routines, and textbooks were used for instruction). The schools taught history, geography, English language and literature and moral instruction as part of the secular curriculum.23 The Society used this template, i.e. a combination of secular European curriculum and novel pedagogies and organisation, to mould pathshalas. The Society functionaries encouraged the gurus to submit to periodic inspection and examination by them, to integrate a few elements of the European curriculum (history, geography and, in some cases, European arithmetic) into theirs, and to reshape their pedagogy and organisation in line with those of the Vernacular Schools. By 1821, the Society was associated with a total of 115 schools (Vernacular Schools and pathshalas combined) and had over 3,000 students under its umbrella. The Society’s approach towards pathshala improvement synced with the ideological orientation of the Company government of that time. Dominated by Orientalists, the government had adopted a policy of engraftment, i.e. a gradual integration of European knowledge with classical Indian knowledge through institutions like the Calcutta Madrasa and the Sanskrit College (Benares).24 Observing similar processes at work in schools, the government sanctioned an annual grant of 500 rupees to the Calcutta School Society in 1821. The grant was tenable for ten years. The end of the grant coincided with a shift in the ideological orientation of colonial rule. The rise of utilitarianism heralded the decline of Orientalist approaches to governance and education. At the same time, the utilitarian emphasis on the ‘civilising mission’ of colonial rule made state-led mass education a possibility in the years to come.25 Under such circumstances, Governor-General William Bentinck asked William Adam, a Unitarian missionary, to undertake a survey of indigenous education in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and suggest possible means for creating a mass-based system of elementary education. Adam suggested the use of improved pathshalas for instituting mass-based elementary education in the vernacular. He came up with several proposals for effecting improvement in pathshalas, drawing upon and adding to the secular templates developed by the Calcutta School Society. Three sets of ideas elicited most discussion in offcial circles.26 The frst was the recognition of the guru as the nodal point of the pathshala, and the improvement of the guru through not only regular inspection and supervision but also through training in Normal Schools. The second was the acceptance and strengthening of the local, rural character of the pathshala by constituting local committees for pathshala improvement and by assigning jagirs of village land as remuneration to the guru. The third, much like what the Calcutta School Society did, was the addition of elements of 109

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European knowledge and moral instruction, the modifcation of the pathshala pedagogy to include textbooks, a class-based arrangement, the use of attendance register and other elements of the school arrangement.27 To William Adams’s dismay, while the government appreciated his indepth research, his suggestions were set aside almost as soon as they were made. In 1839, Lord Auckland, the Governor-General, argued that under the current fnancial and administrative circumstances, Adams’s suggestions were not feasible.28 The production of textbooks, which had been happening under the aegis of the General Committee of Public Instruction, should continue, but for the whole scheme to come into effect, suggested Auckland, ‘the arrangements for introducing it should be on a liberal and effective scale,’ and it should not be attempted ‘until the Government is satisfed that it has at command a thoroughly zealous and qualifed superintendence.’29 The Lieutenant Governor of the North Western Provinces (NWP), Thomason, however, had a different take on Adams’s report. He found in it a useful blueprint for a possible system of elementary instruction. Upon his insistence, in 1843, the Court of Directors of the East India Company allotted a sum of two lakh rupees for school education to be used in Thomason’s jurisdiction. He set up a series of Model Vernacular Schools at tehsil headquarters (one school per tehsil) in the NWP. Fully funded by the state, these taught a combination of local and European knowledge, while their pedagogies and organisation mirrored those of the secular Vernacular Schools of Bengal.30 These schools served a dual purpose. They initiated vernacular education in the NWP and served as headquarters for efforts at improving indigenous elementary schools in their respective tehsils, along the lines suggested by William Adam. The suggestion about remunerating the teachers through jagirs was accepted by Thomason but rejected by the Court of Directors and Thomason had to settle for monetary remunerations. While the NWP moved decisively towards developing Model Vernacular Schools and in turn creating a pool of improved indigenous schools, Bengal took the opposite route. Though Adams’s suggestion had been rejected there in 1839, the possibility of state-led mass education had far from disappeared from the horizon and the government was keen to experiment with possible models. In 1844, the Governor-General of Bengal established 101 elementary schools, which came to be known as ‘Hardinge Schools,’ under the Board of Revenue.31 These too were modelled on the secular Vernacular Schools but unlike the tehsildar schools of the NWP, these taught a purely European curriculum and did not function as the headquarters for efforts at the improvement of local pathshalas.32 It was as if these were expected to have an impact on people—‘stimulate native interest’—by sheer virtue of their existence. They charged a fee of one anna a month for each pupil. Schoolbooks were left to be purchased by the students. Teachers were recruited from among the English educated sections and paid a salary on the scale of 15 to 25 rupees a month, in addition to a part of the school fees 110

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as ‘reward for the diligent and successful discharge of their duties.’ Devoid of any direct connection with the indigenous schools in the vicinity and failing to admit the rural poor by virtue of their fees, these could not perform a role like that of the Model Vernacular Schools of the NWP. By 1851 most of these were closed. The remaining 26 were transferred to the Council of Education and reconstituted as English-medium Zillah schools. In 1849, the Inspector of Natore, like other Inspectors before him, reported that villagers seemed unwilling to pay the government for vernacular education and demanded instruction in the English medium in exchange for school fees: The Native gentlemen who constructed the schoolhouse, informed me that the institution was useless. They expressed deep regret that Government should support Vernacular Schools which they do not want and withhold English schools of which they stand so much in need, in my town of Nattore. I visited a Native Patsala held in a most indifferent shed. If was taught by a Byragee, who received no salary, and did not desire the pay of Government. My stopping at the Patsala attracted a crowd and when they learnt the object of my enquiry, they at once expressed ridicule for the Government institution, whilst they were lavish in the praises of their own. They said they did not want Government to teach them their own language, and they called upon me to substitute an English school in its stead, as without the assistance of Government instruction in English was unattainable.33 Wood’s Despatch left it to the provincial governments to decide whether to use new Vernacular Schools set up through grants-in-aid or to use improved indigenous schools or both as the base for vernacular primary education. It emphasised the need for both initiatives to run simultaneously as far as possible. In Bengal, leading members of the Council of Education such as Hodgson Pratt and HH Woodrow (both became Inspectors in the newly constituted DPI) called for the adoption of the system in use in the NWP.34 By 1854, the NWP system had an added layer. The tehsil schools were now complemented by halkabandi schools in nine districts: elementary Vernacular Schools set up in clusters of four to fve villages, with pedagogies, internal organisation and fee structures broadly corresponding to that of the indigenous schools and with a curriculum that added elements of European knowledge to the local curriculum. These were funded by a combination of a local rate on land and public funds. Pratt, Woodrow and others drew attention to the closure of the Hardinge Schools and suggested that the system built up by Alexander Thomason should be adopted for the whole of Bengal and Bihar.35 The Council of Education, however, rejected the proposal, stating that the Mahalwari system of revenue at work in the NWP was more amenable to Thomason’s model than the permanent 111

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settlement was. The frst Director of Public Instruction, W Gordon Young, subsequently favoured the setting up of new Vernacular Schools through grants-in-aid rather than adopt the NWP model for Bengal. Thus, in Bengal, in the wake of Wood’s Despatch, efforts to improve pathshalas were relegated to a minor activity. Two types of Vernacular Schools, both charging fees, became signifcant.36 The Vernacular Schools started through grants-in-aid were expected to function as the primary unit of vernacular education. In this system, the state paid up to half of the annual cost of the school and left the rest to be raised through local subscriptions. At the same time, a series of 12 Vernacular Schools, fully fnanced by the government and set up in the image of the Hardinge Schools, were expected to function as model schools. These were set up in district headquarters away from Calcutta with the hope that physical distance from the nerve centre of English education would make villagers more amenable to Vernacular Schools. Under instruction from the DPI, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, now Assistant Sub Inspector of Schools, chose the sites for these model schools after personally visiting those places to ascertain if the villagers were ready to pay for vernacular education or not. Vidyasagar, by then a leading fgure in Bengali civil society, had been a strong proponent of the establishment of new Vernacular Schools—be it the grant-in-aid schools or the model schools, as opposed to investing the government’s energy in improving pathshalas.37 In his Notes on Vernacular Education, Vidyasagar was at his sharpest in his indictment of the pathshala teachers, whose supposed obduracy, he wrote, could threaten to destabilise pedagogic projects centred on pathshalas: ‘The Pathshalas, or indigenous schools under the Gooroomohashoys, such as they are now, are very worthless Institutions. Being in the hands of Teachers, generally incompetent for the task they undertake, these Schools require much improvement.’38 Nevertheless, in keeping with the guidelines of Wood’s Despatch, Vidyasagar and senior British offcials such as Beadon agreed that small scale efforts at pathshala improvement should continue. In 1855, Inspector HH Woodrow initiated the circle system of pathshala reform. It was used in parts of the central, southeast and eastern divisions of the DPI. Under this system, three or four pathshalas constituted a ‘circle’ to which a government-appointed teacher, often chosen from among the gurus of the pathshalas, was attached on a fxed salary of 15 rupees per month. The guru’s duty was to visit the pathshalas two days a week in rotation and ‘encourage’ the pathshala guru he visited to adopt elements of the European curriculum (history, geography and, in some cases, European arithmetic), use a daily attendance register, organise his school into classes and start using textbooks. It was essentially a continuation of the methods used by the Calcutta School Society. The DPI placed the circle system under the head of ‘auxiliary systems’—secondary, small scale experiments that continued alongside the mammoth task of setting up grant-in-aid Vernacular Schools. This was 112

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the task that consumed most of the attention of the DPI from 1854, till the Inspectors themselves became doubtful about its effcacy.

Grants-in-aid Vernacular Schools The politics of bilingualism that undergirded the educational vision in Wood’s Despatch explains the great signifcance that the DPI accorded to the grant-in-aid Vernacular Schools at this point in time. In brief, Wood’s education project operated through a neat conceptual distinction between the taught curriculum and the medium of instruction used for teaching it. Animated by the liberal imagination of civilisational progress, with education as its vehicle, the Despatch ‘emphatically’ declared the instruction of Indians in European knowledge to be the aim of all education in India.39 European knowledge being available in English, this language was to be the supplier of ideas. While the content of learning would be drawn from Europe, Indian vernaculars would have a key role to play in carrying European knowledge in translation to the masses. This origin–carrier relation between English and the vernaculars, in turn, shaped the institutional architecture which was tasked with putting this vision into practice. A few English-medium Zillah schools, fully fnanced and managed by the government, were to impart high-quality training in European ideas to a few people. Anglo-Vernacular Schools, where English was supposed to be taught only as a language while the rest of the instruction was supposed to be through the vernacular, was also to aid the task of cultural translation by producing a section of translators. The Vernacular Schools (either newly established ones or improved pathshalas) were to be spread out across the social landscape in large quantities. These had to be the vehicles for the instruction of the general population. In other words, whichever template a government chose for vernacular education, it had to shoulder the responsibility of mass education. The institution had to be stable and amenable to economies of scale, i.e. its numbers had to bulge in comparison with the Zillah schools while its expenses had to be met within the DPI’s fnancial constraints. Despite early encouragements, by 1857, the government of Bengal lamented the limited growth of grants-in-aid Vernacular Schools. By 1857, only fve out of the 25 districts of Bengal had more than ten aided Vernacular Schools (see Table 5.1). Seventeen districts had less than fve such schools while four had none. More importantly, the grants-in-aid system, instead of facilitating the expansion of vernacular education, seemed to swell the number of schools which taught English. In practice, since the government had initially agreed to supply grants-in-aid upon the slightest possibility of a school coming up, several grants had been given for building either English or Anglo-Vernacular Schools.40 In 1857, the number of aided English schools in Bengal stood at 54, aided Anglo-Vernacular Schools at 95 and aided Vernacular Schools at 150. Thus, the number of Vernacular 113

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Schools set up through grants-in-aid almost equalled the number of English or Anglo-Vernacular Schools taken together. Only two out of the 25 districts of Bengal bucked the trend. Burdwan had a much larger number of aided Vernacular Schools than the aided English schools and aided AngloVernacular Schools taken together, while Kamroop, exceptionally, had 14 aided Vernacular Schools and not a single aided English school. Twelve districts had almost as many, if not more, English and Anglo-Vernacular Schools as they had Vernacular Schools. In fact, there was more to the expansion of English-teaching schools than what Table 5.1 captured. The Inspectors reported that often schools that were offcially Vernacular Schools taught English surreptitiously, while Anglo-Vernacular Schools often went beyond teaching English as a language only and became de facto English-medium schools. The DPI had tried to streamline the functioning of different school types by ruling that in Table 5.1 Number of aided schools of different categories in Bengal, DPI, 1856–1857

Districts

Aided English

Aided Anglo-Vernacular

Sum of aided English and aided Anglo-Vernacular

Aided Vernacular

Calcutta 24 Pargana Sirajgunje Kamroop Howrah Baraset Hooghly Burdwan Nudea Dacca Patna Midnapore Bancoorah Sibsagur Sylhet Rangpore Chittagong Dinajpore Jessore Pubna Furredpore Backergunje Rajshahye Moorshedabad Beerbhoom

2 12 1 0 0 2 9 1 6 5 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 8 2 0 3 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 2 2 11 1 7 3 0 3 5 0 2 2 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 0

2 12 1 0 2 4 20 2 13 8 1 4 5 0 2 2 1 0 8 2 2 4 0 0 0

2 17 0 14 2 2 33 19 19 3 0 9 7 4 0 4 0 1 2 1 5 1 1 2 1

Source: Compiled from RPIB, 1856–1857, p. 36.

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Anglo-Vernacular Schools, English could be taught as a language only while the rest of the subjects had to be taught in the vernacular. The Vernacular Schools were not supposed to teach English in any form whatsoever. Such reports led Gordon Young to express his anxiety about a phenomenon that he referred to as ‘petty English Schools’: ‘the class of Aided schools that endeavoured to shape themselves on the model of Government Zillah Schools.’41 Young feared that these would disrupt the bilingual educational arrangement and in turn cause social disruption by producing more people with aspirations of upward mobility than the economy could accommodate.42 He warned: Under the present system the schools in question merely serve to create a class of persons, while too ignorant of English to be able to rise to a higher position in life, and possessing no knowledge or mental training which would enable them to exercise a healthy or enlightening infuence on those around them, are, in consequence of the superiority which their English school education gives them in their own eyes, unwilling to follow the calling of their fathers, and are consequently disconnected with their positions in life.43 Thus, on the one hand, the grants-in-aid system seemed incapable of leading to a rapid expansion in the number of Vernacular Schools. On the other hand, the ones that came about seemed to improve in directions and within a duration that did not match the vectors designated by the government. The education system seemed to accommodate aspirations for upward mobility of both individuals and schools so long as they were within designated parameters, i.e. in a designated direction and in course of a designated time period. A school could be upgraded, e.g. from vernacular to Anglovernacular or from Anglo-vernacular to an English-medium Zillah school upon application, if the schools under consideration were judged to have shown continuous improvement over a period of time.44 Individuals could move up through the educational edifce with the help of a limited number of scholarships. These ‘petty English schools’ and their clientele tended to move in ways that destabilised the designated vectors of improvement and therefore they threatened to spin out of the government’s control. In the reports of the Inspectors and in the exchanges in the Education Proceedings since 1854, local elites emerge as objects of the government’s wrath for the situation.45 They are blamed for non-cooperation in setting up aided Vernacular Schools and for surreptitiously manipulating the grants-in-aid rules to produce the ‘petty English schools.’ Dr Roer reported from South Bengal in 1857: The Pooree school, moreover, began to encounter avowed hostility of the wealthier part of the inhabitants to education. Most of them 115

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are, in some way or the other, connected with the temple, and seem to believe that education would sap the hold they have on the people and diminish their sources of income. Although this is not the case at Jagannath and yet they feel this way. The mahants and the pandas do not send their children to school. The inhabitants were called to subscribe to the building of a new schoolhouse, but no one came forward. Not enough research seems to exist for us to trace a consistent connection between local elites and English-medium schools throughout Bengal in this period. However, we do have biographical details of specifc zamindars such as Joykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarpara in the Hoogly district.46 A product of the permanent settlement, he was a new zamindar who had purchased his estates at the turn of the century. He carefully utilised ‘improvement’ projects centred on education and infrastructural development to increase his proximity with the government, and in turn, he consolidated his position in the local civil society. Towards the end of 1845, Mukherjee and his brother sent an application to GF Cockburn, Magistrate of Howrah, arguing about the necessity of opening a school to serve the villages of Uttarpara, Konnagar and Bali, in the light of the six-mile distance between Uttarpara and the nearest Hardinge School in Howrah. The school they asked for was, however, an English-medium school. The Mukherjees were ready to make a permanent endowment of landed property for the school that would yield a monthly income of 100 rupees. The government, ready to encourage local initiatives towards building schools, agreed to sanction a monthly grant out of the education fund which, together with the endowment made by the Mukherjees and the schooling fees, was good enough to start the school. The Uttarpara Government School, an English-medium school, opened on 15 May 1846. Charging fees of the level of government-funded Zillah schools, it nevertheless had free ships for students from poor Brahmin families in the locality.47 Joykrishna Mukherjee showed little interest in establishing Vernacular Schools on his estate until the government made demands for an education cess from the zamindars in the 1860s.48 In addition to the instability of vectors and problems of scale, the issue of cost seems to have played an important role in the government’s turn to the pathshala in 1859. It had slowly become clear that establishing new Vernacular Schools was costing the Bengal government more than what the process of improving indigenous schools was costing the NWP government. By 1856, Inspectors appealed to the government to agree to fund up to three-fourths of the cost of a school instead of only half, due to the diffculty of raising local subscriptions. Thus, even in absolute terms, the Government of Bengal’s costs were likely to rise if the aided Vernacular Schools had to be signifcantly scaled up. Considering school fees as part of the local contribution was another suggestion from the Inspectors for facilitating the 116

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establishment of aided Vernacular Schools. Gordon Young communicated these requests to the Government of India in 1857. Young was asked in response how much it would cost the government to set up and run these aided Vernacular Schools if the former were to pay up to three-fourths of their cost. Young replied that 40 rupees per month was the maximum and 20 per month was the minimum.49 In contrast, the Circle Schools which HH Woodrow was running cost the government 9 rupees per month, while the cost (per school per month) of the improved indigenous schools of the NWP came to 4 to 5 rupees a month during the same period.50 The issue was decisively settled in the Despatch of Lord Stanley in 1859, which came up with a few suggestions in the light of the diffculties in Bengal: the rules for assigning grants should be relaxed, no grants should be sanctioned for missionary schools and efforts to improve pathshalas into usable forms for the extension of elementary education should be proactively made.51

Pathshala reforms Between 1859 and 1862, the DPI experimented with three schemes for reforming pathshalas. The circle system that was already at work was expanded. By 1864, the circle system was in operation in the Central and South East Divisions. The scheme had started with a grant of 18,000 rupees per annum but by 1863–1864 the grant had been raised to 27,000 rupees per annum. In the same period, the number of circles went up from 37 in 1855–1856 to 302 in 1864–1865.52 JP Grant proposed a scheme for pathshala reform in 1860 which ran parallel to the circle system. It marked a deeper government penetration into the pathshala networks. Under Grant’s scheme, the DPI would be required to prepare a list showing the existing village pathshalas in every district. From this list, the Inspector of Schools, aided by the Deputy Inspectors, would choose those schools considered to be the most capable of improvement. In a departure from the circle system, now the Inspectors, rather than the pundits in the circles, were to induce the gurus or the proprietors and supporters of the selected schools to submit to periodic inspections. HH Woodrow made two important additions to Grant’s scheme. No longer happy to merely ‘encourage’ the guru, he instituted a scale of rewards to be followed in administering the grants to the gurus. The earnings of the gurus would depend on how much the students had learnt. The inspector would be the fnal judge on the matter. No guru would be paid any money if his students were unable to spell and write at least three letters upon dictation and recite the multiplication tables up to ten times. One pice monthly would be paid for every boy able to read and explain the meanings of words and sentences in a simple book, and able to do sums in simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. One anna monthly would be given for every boy who could read and explain passages from a higher book, who could successfully work easy sums in mental arithmetic and who could also work 117

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out, in his slate or plantain leaves, simple sums in compound addition, subtraction and multiplication. Two annas monthly would be given for every boy able to read and write without big mistakes, work sums in the Rule of Three, copy a map neatly, know the proper forms of address and make some progress in the knowledge of Zamindari and Mahajani accounts. And fnally, four annas monthly would be given for every pupil successfully completing the highest course prescribed for indigenous schools, i.e. knowledge of Bengali grammar, geography and history in addition to having a full grasp of arithmetic, Zamindari and Mahajani accounts, forms of agreements, mensuration and different types of letter writing.53 Woodrow also felt that in addition to incentives and encouragement, training was essential: he selected 11 gurus and prevailed upon them to study for a year at the Normal Schools, with stipends of rupees fve a month each and placed selected Normal School students to offciate for them on salaries of 12 rupees a month each, together with such other fees as they could raise. Both Woodrow’s scheme and Grant’s scheme were being experimented with at a small scale at this point in time. While economies of scale were therefore not a concern, the DPI was troubled by the recurrence of the unstable vectors yet again. If under the grants-in-aid system Vernacular Schools tended to surreptitiously morph into ‘petty English schools,’ under Grant’s scheme, pathshalas furtively morphed into Vernacular Schools. Bhoodeb Mukherjee, in his capacity as Inspector of Schools, noted that in pathshalas where gurus were under improvement, pathshala hours often changed from 6–9 a.m. and 3–6 p.m. to one continuous session from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Earlier, chalk, palm and plantain leaves were used but slowly slates and paper came to be used right from the start. European arithmetic in printed books began to be introduced in the place of local arithmetic, or alongside it, and payment in kind for gurus started getting replaced by increasing demands for money payments.54 On top of that, gurus whom Woodrow had selected for training in Normal Schools often seemed to migrate to other jobs after being trained under Grant’s scheme, especially if they were not from a lineage of pathshala teachers.55 In order to meet these challenges, Bhoodeb Mukherjee came up with yet another scheme, called the Improved Pathshala scheme. Once again, this was to be tried on a small scale. The scheme sought to address the second challenge, i.e. of gurus not returning to pathshalas after training in Normal Schools, by ruling that villages where pathshalas were already in existence or where it might be desired to set up a pathshala should send either their present guru or some other person (preferably the guru’s relative) whom they would undertake to receive as their future schoolmaster. In addition to his attempts to keep the guru’s job within the traditional guru family of a village, Bhoodeb Mukherjee also found a way to bind the guru and the village community together through an agreement and hold the village community responsible if the guru were to disappear after training. We have 118

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here a form of agreement that had to be signed by villagers when sending their guru for training: We the undersigned inhabitants of the village of … thana … Zillah … do hereby clarify that we have nominated … aged … year, son of … Inhabitant of … Village, as the future teacher of our village pathshala; we also hereby agree to place the said … in charge of our village pathshala on his return with a certifcate of qualifcation from the government training school. In case of non-fulflment on your part of the above conditions we hereby pledge ourselves severally and collectively to pay to government all expenses not exceeding Rs. 60 which may have been incurred in the education of and training of our nominee the said … . Given this day … Of the year … . The signatures in this paper were made in our presence and at…in the village by bonafde inhabitants of the said village. Educational offcer … Zamindary or Police Offce … Signatures by villagers …56 Similarly, gurus too had to sign a form whereby they committed themselves to the village where they came from and to its pathshala (either in existence or to be opened): We who sign our names, residences, &, c., in this book, do, by that act of signature, give our consent each for himself to be admitted from the dates mentioned against our names into the Training School at … on a monthly stipend of Rs. 5 payables in accordance with the rule of the Institutions. We further agree by the act of signature in this book, each for himself, to return, after receiving Certifcates of qualifcation, to the Villages whence we have been selected, and there enter upon and duly discharge the duties of Village School Masters, on the understanding that a sum not less than our present monthly stipends will be continued to us in the shape of stipends or rewards as long as we shall continue to deserve them by discharging our duties in a satisfactory manner. We bind ourselves further, each for his own part by the act of our signature in this book, to pay a fne of Rs. 60 into the hands of the Inspector of Schools … Division on account of Government, in case we wilfully fail to perform any or all of the above conditions.57 The instability of vectors, it was hoped, could be brought under control, by maintaining the original character of the pathshala—its curriculum, pedagogy, internal arrangement and fee structure—to a great extent. For this purpose, a Model Pathshala was built at each Normal School for gurus. At these 119

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Model Pathshalas, like the halkabandi schools of the NWP, utmost care was taken to ensure congruity with the pathshalas. No benches or tables were used, and classes were arranged in the palm leaf, plantain leaf and paper sections. The course retained the popular pathshala subjects. Maintaining registers of attendance, arrangement according to classes and the use of maps and blackboards were suggested to the gurus but not made compulsory. A few additions were, however, made to the curriculum. Alongside Mahajani and Zamindari accounts, the practice of reading the history of Bengal, geography of Bengal and India, European arithmetic, object lessons and the art of teaching were introduced.58 We have a glimpse of how the Normal School sought to maintain the character of the pathshalas even as improvements were introduced: in this instance how maintaining attendance registers was encouraged while keeping the pathshala timings intact. The section on teaching in a question paper for Normal School examinees included the following question: ‘The pathshala opens and closes twice a day; show how you will keep your registers of attendance?’59 The Improved Pathshala scheme spread out slowly. By 1869 there were 298 pathshalas under improvement under the circle system and 1,020 under the Improved Pathshala scheme. The series of schemes for the improvement of pathshalas eventually dissolved with George Campbell’s resolution of 30 September 1872.60 The resolution announced that a major objective of the government would be to support the extension of primary education among people and it marked a signifcant scaling up of pathshala improvement. Four lakhs of rupees were allotted for developing and encouraging indigenous education in the villages. The resolution expressly stated that the money granted was to be used in promoting indigenous education based on local standards. In keeping with Bhoodeb Mukherjee’s scheme, the resolution declared that the subjects taught in the improved pathshalas would mostly be old pathshala subjects like reading, writing and arithmetic. The local vernacular would be the language of instruction. In terms of appointment, preference would be given to the class of old gurus or people in his village or neighbourhood. The use of printed work and the teaching of history and geography was, in fact, to be discouraged. The resolution extended the grant-in-aid scheme to the pathshalas though on conditions quite different to those of the Vernacular Schools. Schools submitting to government inspection would receive grants at the rate of two to fve rupees per month depending on the circumstances. If the area they belonged to were poor and backward then a higher rate would be given. No grant was to be given to a village that did not provide a hut to be used as a school. While giving grants for existing pathshalas as well as for the setting up of new pathshalas, large villages without one would be given preference. The administration of grants was decentralised and left in the hands of the District Magistrate and sub-divisional offcers who were given the discretion to work out the details of the scheme as dictated by local conditions. 120

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The magistrate, in sanctioning grants, would have to ensure that not more than fve percent per month of the total amount of grants was given to any school. The grant was made conditional following the directives of the magistrate. The reforms launched by Campbell seem to have addressed the problems of scale and cost associated with primary education. Within a year of its implementation, the number of recognised primary schools under the DPI jumped from 68,044 to 205,934.61 The upward trend mostly continued uninterrupted over the next couple of decades. This was achieved at a low cost too. Despite the Campbell reforms, the proportion of public funds spend on primary education in Bengal was the lowest in any province in India. It was 13 percent less than in Punjab and 27 percent less than in Bombay.62 The question of unstable vectors was not, however, resolved. It had persisted during the operationalisation of the Improved Pathshala scheme. Bhoodeb Mukherjee had remarked in 1870 that the improved pathshalas were very similar to grant-in-aid schools.63 Alfred Croft toured Backergunje in December 1874, when he was the Director of Public Instruction in waiting, and noted that pathshalas often transcended their mandated curriculum: Left to their own desires some few have done well; the majority have done ill. I have found some pathshalas teaching poetry books, some teaching grammar books, and some teaching English without the least suspicion on the part of the gurus, the residents, or the supervising offcers that this was running counter to the letter and to the spirit of government orders.64 At the same time, many pathshalas seemed slow to improve. Croft continued: Most aided pathshalas are deplorably low. In Bhatsaha on Dhulia river and in Gabkhan near Jaolokati I found two pathshalas. They were both under the old class of and had 50 and 70 pupils These were teaching the true pathshala course. The former had bhadralok boys while the latter had boys from low castes. The most that the highest boys will be able to do are the following things: write out a pattah or a bond and explain correctly the nature of these documents and keep a jamakharch account.65 Till Campbell’s scheme came into effect, unstable vectors tended to destabilise schemes when pathshalas overreached their curriculum. The schemes were geared towards facilitating the slow improvement of pathshalas. At a larger scale though, with limited resources to attend to individual pathshalas, slow improvement tended to pose a problem. Thus, if on the one 121

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hand, some pathshalas continued to improve at a rate beyond what the government desired, others hardly seemed to improve. In the face of repeated transgressions over the years, and failures of multiple schemes to stop them, Croft seemed rather helpless. All that he could do, it seemed, was to write a report on it! Once Alfred Croft became the Director of Public Instruction though, he built on a novel approach that had been put in place by Lt Governor Richard Temple for addressing the problem of vectors. Marking a departure from previous government policies on the question of unstable vectors, Temple’s approach had been to offcially allow improved pathshalas to aspire to standards of Vernacular Schools. This was supposed to act as an incentive for slow improving pathshalas. This was done by raising the standard of the Primary Scholarship Examination which had earlier been opened to all pathshalas by George Campbell in 1872. Campbell put in place 233 such scholarships distributed across the districts of Bengal. These paid 3 rupees a month and were tenable for two years at any middle-class English or Vernacular School or any Normal School. The syllabus had, however, been kept close to the pathshala curriculum. The only subjects that counted were reading and writing the vernacular of the district, written and mental arithmetic, bazar and Zamindari accounts and simple mensuration. Temple altered the standard of the examination and brought it close to the Vernacular School curriculum in 1876. Whereas earlier there was no standardised examination for the scholarship, now in order to pass, the candidates would have to secure at least one-fourth of the marks in each of the following group and two-ffths of the aggregate. That aside, reading and explanation of Bodhodoy were added to the syllabus. Kazi Shahidullah has shown that these changes led to a polarisation among the pathshalas in the years between 1876 and 1882. On the one hand, despite the change in the nature of the Primary Scholarship examination, the number of schools competing for it increased by 35,000 from 1877 to 1882, which would not have been possible unless many pathshalas strove towards it. Convinced that a critical mass of improved pathshalas had been attained, the government stopped further efforts towards bringing more pathshalas under improvement, and in fact, in 1882, culled the pathshalas that were deemed to be underperforming from the departmental list. On the other hand, a sharp migration of pathshalas towards schools led to a mass drop out of poorer boys who either found the curriculum increasingly unsuitable to their needs or could not afford to pay the school fees. Precisely at this point, Shahidullah shows, there was a massive increase in the number of Private Unaided Schools. The numbers jumped from 4,300 such institutes in 1881–1882 to 11,073 in 1899.66 This has led Shahidullah to argue that the pathshalas may have continued outside the departmental system to fulfl the needs of the rural people who had dropped out as a section of pathshalas became schools. 122

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Table 5.2 The syllabus for the Primary Scholarship Examination, 1877 Group

Subject

Marks

I

Handwriting Manuscript reading Reading and explanation of Bodhodoy Arithmetic, the four rules, simple and compound Subhankari Bazar (Mahajani) accounts Zamindari accounts Simple mensuration Total

50 50 100 75 75 50 50 50 500

II III

Source: DPI, 1878, p. 23.

Conclusion The ‘pathshala to school’ framework that Kazi Shahidullah uses, which suggests that the colonial government worked with a pre-planned and ultimately successful strategy to convert pathshalas into schools, seems to capture only one part of what constituted primary education. It does not capture the entirety of the entanglement between the two sets of institutional practices which was, as we have shown, central to the making of primary education. The story of such entanglements and of the ways in which these infected education policies and shaped the system reveals three key features of primary education in nineteenth-century Bengal. First, the government did not have a pre-planned approach towards the pathshala. The approach was contingent on its failure to deploy Vernacular Schools in a way that satisfed the demands of economies of scale and stable vectors of improvement. Second, the government’s pathshala policy followed a zigzag path with long stretches of time being devoted to policies geared towards conserving the pathshala rather than converting them to schools. The institutional practices thrown up in the process were important parts of the texture of primary education. Finally, the entanglement between the pathshala and the school did not end in 1882 with the government constituting the ‘primary’ domain to its own satisfaction. Rather the entanglement changed form. While some pathshalas indeed gravitated towards the Vernacular School template, the same process produced a curious set of institutions which lay outside the departmental framework but were integral parts of the educational experience of that time.

Notes 1 AM Monteath’s Educational Minute, Calcutta Review, Vol. 45, 1867, p. 435. 2 General Reports on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, (henceforth RPIB) Calcutta, 1870. Appendix A, p. 277.

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3 The word ‘secular’ has been avoided here since, by the late nineteenth century, the government started integrating madrasas into the departmental fold. For details on madrasa reforms, see Aziz-ur-Rahman Mallick, British Policy and Muslims in Bengal, 1757–1856, Asiatic Society of Pakistan, Dhaka, 1961. 4 The replacement of the word ‘elementary’ with ‘primary’ in the education reports of Bengal in 1870 is signifcant. In pre-colonial educational arrangements in India, stratifed along lines of caste, gender and community, education in the indigenous village schools was qualitatively different from ‘higher’ learning in Hindu tols and Muslim madrasas. Colonial education sought to link all levels of formal learning in hierarchical interconnection, through a unifed, homogeneous curriculum and a system of scholarships for regulated upward mobility. The new arrangement redefned elementary instruction as the primary, or initial stage/ lower degree, of higher learning. 5 The phrase ‘vectors of improvement’ refers to the speed and direction of transformation (or the absence of the same) of a school (or pathshala) into an institution ranked higher in the educational hierarchy. 6 Vernacular Schools, with capitalised initials, refers to the statefnanced/aided Vernacular Schools that taught a European curriculum through the medium of the vernacular. Missionary Vernacular Schools have been mentioned in small letters. For a summary of pre-colonial institutions other than the pathshala in Bengal, see Poromesh Acharya, ‘Indigenous Vernacular Education in pre-British India: Traditions and Problems,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 13, No. 48, 1978, pp. 1981–1988. 7 The word ‘improvement’ implies the modifcations desired in the pathshala by the colonial state. The ‘Improved Pathshala’ scheme referred to later in this essay sought a specifc set of improvements and capitalised initials have been used to refer to the institutions that fell under this category. 8 This is a relatively new domain in Indian historiography. While colonial knowledge and its relationship to colonial power in the Indian context has been well studied, the operationalisation of the mass education system seems to have been largely ignored. Ian Hunter’s suggestions about historicising the school are useful in this regard. He has argued that one should look for the advent of the school in the political objectives and governmental technologies of the earlymodern administrative territorial state, rather than in the designs of specifc classes, and in the ways in which governmental power adapted the milieu of pastoral guidance to its own uses. See Ian Hunter, ‘Assembling the School,’ in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (ed.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 143–67. We also engage with Kazi Shahidullah’s work on pathshala reforms in Bengal. Kazi Shahidullah, Pathshalas into Schools, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1987. 9 See Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Javed Majeed, The Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s History of India and Orientalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Thomas R Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gauri Viswanathan has connected ideologies of rule with the operationalisation of curriculum and pedagogies in the context of English studies in higher education. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1990. 10 See JP Naik, Review of Modern Education in India (1813–1942), MS Godbole: Poona, 1943; DP Sinha, The Education Policy, Calcutta: Calcutta Pustak, 1964; Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The History of Education in Modern India, 1757–1998, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000.

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11 While not examining the development of the mass education system in details, nationalist histories have pointed out the signifcance of colonial education in the birth of Indian nationalism and shown that colonial education had an impact different from what the state desired. See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010. Subaltern studies scholarship, while alluding to the education system as an instrument of domination, have hardly turned their critical vision towards studying the making of the system. 12 This approach takes inspiration from multiple strands of scholarship. Krishna Kumar has studied the complex and heterogenous texture of colonial education. See Krishna Kumar, Politics of Education in Colonial India, Delhi: Routledge, 2016. A range of studies have focussed on the relationship between specifc communities and education have drawn attention to the contestations that characterised the advent of colonial education. For caste and colonial education, see Parimala V. Rao (ed.), New Perspectives in the History of Education, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014, Dwaipayan Sen, ‘Representation, Education and Agrarian Reform: Jogendranath Mandal and the nature of Scheduled Caste Politics, 1937–43,’ Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 48 (1), January 2014, pp. 77–119, Philip Constable, ‘Sitting on the School Verandah: The Ideology and Practice of Untouchable Educational Protest in Nineteenth Century Western India,’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2000. For women’s experiences of colonial education see Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, and Bharati Ray, Early Feminists of Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. 13 Andy Green has studied the global emergence of mass education systems in the nineteenth century and the role of schools in it. Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in Europe, East Asia and the USA, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 14 Uday Singh Mehta has examined the politics of the global perspectives inherent in liberal reformism. To depart from linear, state-centric approaches to colonial education policies and highlight the ways in which these were contested is a way of freeing the history of Indian education from narratives of civilisational progress. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. 15 This perspective is borne out of the recognition that the Indian education system, like its counterparts elsewhere, while being a product of nineteenth-century global developments on the one hand, was profoundly shaped by local historical confgurations on the other. For the dynamic between global and local processes in the context of global history, see Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 16 In Bengal it was primarily three missionary societies that set up schools in this period: the Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society. 17 The Bell-Lancaster system drew upon the pupil-teacher method of teaching, which was often used in pathshalas too. In this method, ‘advanced’ pupils were paired with their ‘weaker’ counterparts and the former asked to teach the latter, reducing the load on the teachers in what were usually singe-teacher schools. But the missionaries added another layer to the pupil-teacher method by grouping together similarly ‘profcient’ pairs into classes. See Jana Tschurenev, ‘A Colonial Experiment in Education: Madras, 1789-1796,’ in Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rosemaniere ed., Connecting Histories of Education, New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 105–22.

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18 John Clark Marshman, The History of the Serampore Mission Embracing the Life and Times of William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, 2 Vols, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1859. 19 See ibid. 20 For cultural exchanges between these three sections, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 21 Parna Sengupta elaborates this point in Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2011, ch. 1. 22 Radhakanta Deb, while opposing Raja Ram Mohan Roy on the question of sati nevertheless was a great proponent of women’s education. Deb had played a key role in producing the frst Bengali didactic text on women’s education called Strisikhsha Bidhayak. He had supplied the citations from various Sanskrit texts to Gourmohan Vidyalankar the author of the text. Strisiksha Bidhayak, a landmark text in the history of education, put two women in conversation, one seeking to convince the other that education for women was not only allowed as per the shastras but that also it would beneft women. The text suggested that to make education possible, different forms such as domestic instruction and co-educational pathshalas for children of certain ages could be provided for. Almost all the leading fgures in the frst generation of reformers set up schools and considered education as a key part of their reformist agenda. Ramcomul Sen, who was a proponent of Dharma Sabha, ensured that the Sabha took up educational projects. On the other end of the spectrum, Raja Ram Mohan Roy set up the Anglo Hindu School. 23 Abhijit Gupta, ‘The Calcutta School-Book Society and the Production of Knowledge,’ English Studies in Africa, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2014, pp. 55–65. 24 For details on engraftment, see Lynn Zastoupyl and Martin Moir (ed.), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Related to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999, Intro. 25 Ibid. 26 James Long (ed.). Adams’ Report on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Bihar submitted to the Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.With a Brief View of its Past and Present Condition, Calcutta, 1868, Intro, p. 240–342. 27 Ibid, pp. 240–313. 28 Zastoupil and Moir, 1999, pp. 304–32. 29 Ibid, p. 313. 30 Precise fee structures of different categories of Vernacular Schools are diffcult to obtain. The fees seem to vary from one district to another during the period under study, but for Vernacular Schools (model or grant-in-aid), for our period, it never seems to exceed 2 to 3 rupees a month. 31 For details on these schools, see JA Richey, Selection from Educational Records, Part II, 1840–1859, Calcutta: Government of Bengal, 1922, c. 3. 32 Besides Bengali, the subjects included English language and grammar, history, geography and arithmetic. The schools used spelling books and readers that had been published by the Calcutta School Book Society. For example, Keath’s Grammar, Harley’s Arithmetic, Yate’s Reader and Marshman’s History of Bengal in Bengali. 33 Ibid., p. 69. 34 Zastoupil and Moir have shown that despite the Anglicist triumph of 1835, many education offcials retained strong Orientalist sympathies which they transferred to vermicular education and to indigenous institutions once the possibility of classical Oriental education was extinguished. See Zastoupil and Moir, 1999, Intro.

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35 ‘Correspondence related to Vernacular Education in the Lower Provinces of Bengal, Calcutta, 1855,’ pp. 1–13. 36 On fees, refer to fn. 30. 37 For the ideological confguration of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, see Brian Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996. For his interest in furthering the school, since it provided a possible ladder into higher education, see Sumit Sarkar, ‘Vidyasagar and Brahminical Society,’ in Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 216–282. 38 Prabir Mukhopadhyay (ed.) Bangalir Shikshachinta, Vol. 1, Part 1, Calcutta: Dipayan, 2013, pp. 189–196. 39 For the centrality of history and progress as categories in colonial reforms including in education, see Mehta, 2007. 40 Grants-in-aid for purely English-teaching schools stopped soon after. 41 RPIB, 1857–1858, p. 13. The ‘petty English schools’ were not a well-defned category, more of an expression of fear and anxiety on the part of the government. 42 For more on the education-employment gaps and their implications for both education and society in the mid-nineteenth century, see Sarkar, ‘Vidyasagar and Brahminical Society,’ 1997. 43 RPIB, 1857–1858, p. 13. 44 Judgements were often subjectively formed as and when Inspectors visited and examined the schools. 45 Words like ‘middle class’ and ‘elites’ feature in the education records but there is no neat defnition of these categories in relation to education until 1869. 46 For the life and career of Joykrishna Mukherjee, see Nilmani Mukherjee, A Bengal Zamindar: Jaykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarpara and his times (1808– 1888), Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975. 47 Ibid. 48 Joykrishna Mukherjee was one of the strongest opponents of the education cess on land. In Bengal opposition from zamindars to this cess was so strong that this remained the only province where no such cess could be levied. 49 See the full conversation in RCPI, 1857–1858, pp. 10–39. 50 Ibid. 51 For the full text of Stanley’s Despatch, see Richey, 1922, c. 9. 52 Shahidullah, 1987, p. 42. 53 Education Proceedings, No. 64, July 1852. 54 Education Proceedings, No. 51, January 1863. 55 Ibid. 56 RPIB, 1862–1863, Appendix A, pp. 209–10. 57 RPIB, 1862–1863, Appendix A, pp. 209–10. 58 Ibid. 59 RPIB, 1863–1864, Appendix A, pp. 342–43. 60 The key points of this scheme have been summarised from Shahidullah, 1987, pp. 75–82. 61 Report of the Indian Education Commission, 1882, p. 102. 62 Ibid, p. 37. 63 RPIB,1870, Appendix A, p. 277. 64 Education Proceedings, No. 2–5, 1874. 65 Ibid. 66 Shahidullah, 1987, p. 111.

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6 EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR COAL MINERS ‘Ignorance’ and ‘knowledge’ in the collieries of Raniganj and Jharia, 1901–1930 Sandip Chatterjee

To begin with, let me raise a few questions which would become pertinent in the course of this essay. Should miners’ children become miners? In the colonial period, did they take up different kinds of mining jobs when they grew up? Did they nurture or pursue any other career options? And more importantly, did they have any other alternatives? I will address these questions in this chapter. My chapter will cater more to the history of the ‘local’ than local history per se. The coal mines I will be dealing with were situated in the regions of Raniganj (at present part of West Bengal) and Jharia (part of Jharkhand). I seek to juxtapose the issue of educating the children of miners and that of training provided to adult miners in the collieries of Raniganj and Jharia regions in the frst three decades of the twentieth century. I want to discuss the debate pertaining to grooming future miners and preserving the recruited ones.

Educating the ‘future’ miners I would like to begin with the question of child education in mines. School was not merely a site for imparting education in Raniganj and Jharia regions. It was also considered a site for ensuring safety for children. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coal mine managements and the colonial government were considering school as an alternative to childcare arrangement, i.e. a place to leave the children while their elders went to work. One option was to leave them with their elder brothers or sisters ‘[w]hen they have children old enough to look to small ones then they generally leave them at home.’1 This requirement for the children who were ‘old enough’ to stay home and look after their younger siblings must have hampered their education. The alternative was to send them to school—which begs the question of whether schooling was more about keeping miners’ 128

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children in a safe refuge while their mothers were busy working, or about fostering their intellectual development. Thus, the establishment of educational facilities for miners’ children became inextricably linked with their safety. Safety was not the only concern of the mine managements in the colliery regions. The possible mode of training the children of miners for future purpose drew equal attention. The kind of education that was to be made available for the miners’ children became a matter of prolonged debate. There were two conficting discourses concerning the need to educate miners’ children. One section of the industry as well as the colonial government feared that education would subsequently drive the children away from mining work: ‘having been able to read and write, [they] would look down with scorn on working in mines.’2 In 1894, a mine manager opined that since A child of 8 years is ft to work … both little girls and little boys should go into the mine early and become accustomed to carrying coals … it is questionable whether children should be educated, for it would … make them more miserable … they would not afterwards work as coal-cutters, but try to get other work … those who can read and write will never cut coal; on the other hand, they take a most important attitude, and demand respect from everybody.3 The other section of the mining industry was planning to build an educated, skilled and effcient future workforce that would be a boon for the industry. On occasions, some managers in Bengal reportedly lent full support for the education of miners’ children, who would, in turn, produce ‘favourable’ results. According to the inspector, ‘The most intelligent of the lot … will be required for skilled labour in the workshops, at the engines and other machinery, supervising work, and as underground Sirdars who will be able to write their own reports of inspections made.’4 The leading coal lobbies like the Indian Mining Association and the Indian Mining Federation also proposed to impart elementary technical education to miners’ children. The representatives of the Indian Mining Association, a European-dominated, leading coal lobby in India, were questioned by the Chief Inspector of Mines regarding the complete prohibition of young children from mines. The proposal of providing those children with school accommodation was put forwards, too.5 The Association, however, ruled out any such possibility and spoke against prohibition. As to education for miners’ children, the Association explained: ‘[o]nce educated, they never consent to begin life as working miners, but swell the army of unemployed clerks.’6 129

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Child education and schools in the Raniganj and Jharia regions As far as schooling facilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were concerned, some early schools for ‘aboriginals’ primarily working in collieries (in the Raniganj subdivision) were reported in 1896. Most of these collieries were privately owned; the situation in state-owned collieries looked more promising. As of 1896, the East Indian Railway Collieries Company was supporting as many as 35 schools at Giridih.7 The company was reported to have 1,400 children in their register and the schools evidently provided a place for elders to leave their children while they went to work. This also demonstrated some clarity on the differences between the infrastructures of various coal companies. Smaller collieries than the one in Giridih could not afford to provide their workers with similar kinds of facilities. The East Indian Railway Company was described to have at its back a large capital, and it is also especially fortunate in having a manager and an assistant manager who have been there for years … and who, owing to the funds at their disposal, can do more for their labourers than any other company.8 The company’s ability to support as many as 35 schools was ascribed to this ample funding and competent managerial staff. The number of schools came down to 24 by 1905 but schools like the Beniadih Industrial School became one of the most important institutes ‘where the boys were trained to be ftters and draughtsmen.’9 In 1907, a mining inspector of the circle that included Giridih heaped praise on the schooling system that the colliery company in Giridih had consistently maintained for decades. He was impressed with the way the classes for technical education for children were organised. He stated, ‘The school I visited at Giridih was an object lesson of what can be done for the native by native teachers and is extremely encouraging for the future.’10 Barring the few collieries that had adequate infrastructure to run schools for the miners’ children, however, most others found it diffcult to maintain such a system. While the conditions in places like Giridih were much appreciated by government offcials, other mining regions like Raniganj were struggling to fnd a foothold in establishing functional machinery that could provide adequate educational facilities. The system of running and maintaining schools for miners’ children in Jharia, for example, did not seem to work as effciently as initially planned by many well-wishers in the coal mining industry. After the passage of the Indian Mines Act of 1923, JM Mitra, the Registrar of Co-operative Societies, Bengal, wrote a memorandum to the Royal Commission on Labour about the condition of education in the Asansol subdivision of the Burdwan district, where most of Bengal’s collieries were located. Mentioning a number of schools that had been closed 130

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down over the previous few years, he commented: ‘My impression of the coalfelds was that there had never been any concerted attempt to bring the miners’ children to school, either by employers or any other agency.’11 He referred to a similar observation by the then-Chief Inspector of Mines in his 1927 annual report, in which the latter complained that ‘[g]enerally speaking facilities for education are poor in the vicinity of mines.’ Mitra continued with a proposal for improving the condition of education in colliery regions: there should be:- (1) A defnite policy behind a progressive and well thought-out scheme for extending primary education among the labouring classes and their children by means of- (a) Free night schools for adults; (b) free day schools for children. Attendance should be made compulsory for those in industrial areas.12 In the Annual Report for the Chief Inspector of Mines for 1929, there is a comparison with the 1927 report: in the Jharia coalfeld area with a population of 376,000 (including 138,000 rural inhabitants) there were 99 schools, of which 16 were colliery schools with an aggregate number of 617 pupils. There has since been no increase in the number of colliery schools and the number of pupils in such schools is practically the same. The total number of schools has fallen from 99 to 88.13 The same report mentions that, although children were excluded from the mines in 1924, ‘[t]here had been as yet no concerted movement for bringing into force the provisions of the Bihar and Orissa Primary Education Act, 1919, in the Jharia coalfeld.’ That Act sought to promote primary education among miners’ children, but the decrease in the number of schools proved detrimental to that initiative, defeating the very purpose of providing ‘minors’ with a safe haven while their parents were at work. Most of the larger collieries ‘made subscriptions for the maintenance of the Local Board primary schools in their neighbourhood,’14 all of which were meant for the children of miners in that region. Only four collieries provided their own primary schools. Among the collieries in Jharia, Standard Coal Company was the only one running two schools; one of the schools was for the workers’ children, but the attendance rate was quite low. Another school was run by Pure Jharia Colliery, but this school was plagued by the same poor attendance of the miners’ children as the other major collieries’ schools.15 In 1931, a manager of Kirkend Colliery in the Jharia region was asked by the Royal Commission whether miners’ children were encouraged to go to school on a regular basis. The manager’s reply was positive, but he also referred to the reluctance of some miners to send their children to school: ‘[t]here are 131

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some people who say that if they send their boys to school they may die.’16 Unfortunately, the manager did not elaborate on this remark before moving on to the Commission’s other queries. The scenario in Asansol was different. On being asked whether the miners themselves were running any schools, PC Bose, the Secretary of the Indian Colliery Employees’ Association,17 replied, ‘There are some primary schools maintained not by miners but by the collieries and high class employers in the coal area. The miners’ children are not allowed to go there; at any rate they do not go there.’18 Bose’s account claims that the miners lacked interest in their children’s education. However, there is other evidence that the miners were noticeably interested in their children’s education. The Royal Commission asked J Kirk, the superintendent at the Jamadoba Colliery, whether the miners ran any schools on their own. Kirk’s reply was as follows: ‘The miners have started one on their initiative. We have purposely not helped them with it. This effort shows a desire on the miners’ part for the education of their children.’19 B Mitter, the Indian Colliery Employees’ Association’s representative to the Royal Commission in 1931, painted the educational scene for miners’ children in rather gloomy colours: No facilities are given to laborers’ children for education; since the children are prohibited from entering in [sic] mines or to do any kind of work in mines it is advisable that some arrangement should be made to control and educate these children.20 The Indian Mining Association, in its memorandum to the Royal Commission, also did not seem impressed with the existing educational opportunities in the colliery regions: Small primary schools exist on most collieries—certainly on the larger ones—but these are admittedly not suffcient to meet the needs of the present day when so much importance is attached to the provision of educational facilities for every child.21 This seems to suggest that the Indian Mining Association was no longer arguing about the inadvisability of schooling miners’ kids but had bowed to a changing public consensus with regard to universal primary education. Giridih was the glorious exception. The condition of the educational atmosphere in Giridih continued to attract praise from different quarters: The only serious attempt to educate the Indian miner has had been made at Giridih, where twelve classes were commenced in 1894. There are now thirty classes with approximately 2,000 children. Attendance is necessary for boys up to 12 years of age.22 132

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There is scanty information on the encouragement of industrial education by agencies other than the government. The contribution of missionary endeavours towards the dissemination of such secular, technical education can also hardly be ascertained from the available sources. Missionary activities among the tribal population of India are well known, but their impact on the tribal workers of the colliery regions in Raniganj and Jharia is unclear. While commenting on missionary efforts to impart an industrial education, Balagopalan suggested that [t]he colonial state believed that the missionaries had failed to adequately separate a technical education from a literary one in their schools...Missionary schools were widely recognized as combining literary education with teaching a trade, and as a result, their “industrial school” model had been beset with ambiguity.23 The inevitable religious undertone of missionary education added to this ambiguity. This was evident from the fnal remarks from a conference on industrial education organised by missionaries in March 1924:24 ‘The Conference considers that the contact of Christian Missionaries with the industrial life of the country should have as its fnal end the application to Christian principles to industrial conditions.’25 The coal mining industry or mining industry in general seemed to have completely escaped from this conference’s sphere of considerations.26 Thus, it was essentially under the patronage of either the government or individual collieries that the education of miners’ children made some headway, though of course it never reached the level that would have achieved its original purpose, i.e. the imparting of technical information to make good workers. An important question is whether school attendance impacted the attendance of child workers at the mines. Danielle Kinsey draws our attention to the mining industries (except the coal mining sector) in Britain after 1842, when an increase in school attendance was directly proportional to a decrease in attendance in the mining industries.27 According to this study, then, the foundation of schools in mines would not only mean ensuring safety for the children who were not working but also losing part of the workforce, i.e. children who had been involved in mining activities and were now attending school. Sylvain E Dessy resorted to statistical methods to prove that the imposition of compulsory education could reduce child labour.28 Dessy’s study covers an altogether different timeframe, but the inextricable link between education and child labour is unavoidable. As Dessy further explicated, ‘under a free education regime with no compulsory education laws, an under-development trap with high incidence of child labor and high fertility rates is always at work.’29 This is not only true for different time periods, but also in different regions. For example, the situation of compulsory and free education in Barbados in and around 1938–1939 was as follows: 133

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On the one hand, the benefcence of the state in providing free education rendered the formalization of compulsory education in law unnecessary. On the other hand, laws compelling children to be in school or abolishing child labor would hurt the working classes, whose families needed the supplementary earnings of children or, in any event, simply could not afford school clothes.30 In colonial India, the frst serious attempt to make primary education free and compulsory was made by the Maharaja of Baroda in 1910.31 Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a leading nationalist leader, spoke in favour of free and compulsory education and introduced a bill in the Central Legislative Assembly on 19 March 1910. The bill was, however, withdrawn and the example of Baroda was not followed in other Indian states.32 It took almost ten years for the Primary Education Act of 1919, covering both rural and urban areas, to be passed in the state of Bihar and Orissa. The state of Bengal passed a similar act in 1919, but it only applied to boys in municipal areas; girls were not included until 1922.33 Thus, in the late nineteenth century and frst two decades of the twentieth century, the education system in India had yet to fnd a systematic structure. We do come across feeting examples of a few schools run on private initiatives; sometimes by the local zamindars and also sometimes thanks to initiatives by social reform organisations. One such primary school was Shrish Chandra Institution, which was founded in 1910 in the Asansol region; the Cossimbazar estate was behind its foundation.34 Earlier in 1906, a school for imparting primary education was established at Gourangdi near Raniganj.35 In 1928, drawing inspiration from the ideas of famous reformer Dayanand Saraswati, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic Primary School was founded in the Asansol region.36 However, it is diffcult to say for sure whether miners’ children had access to any such schools, as the children of the mine offcials and those hailing mainly from the higher strata of society had easier access to such schools. As mentioned earlier, a primary concern of the discourse about imparting education to miners’ children was whether the educated children would then be unwilling to take up mining work. To combat this, some quarters of the coal mining industry emphasised the importance for both boys and girls to have early training in underground mining activities. More generalised education was thought to be ‘detrimental to the children’s taking coal-cutting as a profession.’37 This begs the question of whether children in mines were asked to do work requiring particular skills. In most cases, they assisted their parents or elders with cutting and extracting activities. As Madhura Swaminathan has asserted in the context of high economic growth in cities of Western India in the 1990s, ‘[c]hildren work at simple repetitive manual tasks that do not require long years of training or experience. The work is low-paying, involves drudgery and is hazardous.’38 134

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Similarly, the distribution of jobs in mines ensured that most of the skilled jobs were reserved for adult workers; jobs reserved for children were by no means ‘technologically special.’39 Children were considered to be helping hands or aides for their adult counterparts, and were treated as ‘subsidiary’ earners who were ‘employed at much lower wages, “subsidiarity” stemming from the notion that children are not meant to be bread-winners.’40 Nevertheless, the physical toil of working in the mines was, needless to say, excruciating. The children who were consigned to physical labour lost the opportunity to develop their skills, and consequently, their possibility of employment in skilful and high-earning jobs also decreased in adulthood. For this reason, ‘[e]arly entrance into the work force is not associated with any advantages in skills, mobility or earnings.’41 The major question then was whether to allow children in and around mine premises even when they are not employed.

Leaving the children behind while at work On many occasions, the parents used to take their children to the workplace. The problem was where they would leave them while they were at work. It was feared by the colliery management that prohibition of employment of children would drive many women miners and family units of workers away from the workplace. The colonial government had to take local perceptions into account, which in turn became the principal reasons for the multiplicity of views within the discourse on childhood. All of the issues relating to women or child labour, the work culture of male miners and safety at work were clubbed together with the question of whether to interfere in the lives of the miners using policies and regulations. It was feared that any ‘benevolent measures’ by the government would be received with apprehension by the workers. They could even ‘emerge rebellious by forming a gang’42 in response to such interference with the ‘dustoor,’ or customs, of the miners.43 Nevertheless, the chain of protective legislation from the Indian Mines Act of 1901 to the Indian Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1923 did prove to be interventionist in approach. The Indian mines Act of 1923 fnally put an end to the employment of children below the age of 13. From the frst reports from the Chief Inspector of Mines, Chief Inspectors consistently claimed that the number of working children below the age of 12 was declining every year due to persistent dissuasion, especially from the mine owners.44 As per the Chief Inspector’s report of 1903, ‘the number of children employed below ground, has decreased’;45 the reason for this was ascribed to ‘continuous discouragement during the last 10 years.’46 According to the report, the number of children below 12 years employed in Indian coal mines in 1903 was 1,651, of which 1,158 were employed below ground in Bengal’s coal mines alone.47 The number of children employed below 135

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ground in Indian coal mines in 1901 was 1,408.48 This decrease was noteworthy, but the scenario changed within the span of a few years. In 1907 the number rose to 6,098,49 fuctuating over the following years (the number was 5,317 in 1911),50 followed by a steep rise in 1913, when the number reached 6,353.51 During the initial years of the First World War, this number did not witness any remarkable jump. On the contrary, it dropped to 5,205 in 1915.52 However, from then on the number of working children was on the ascent: in 1917, it was 7,439, followed by 7,750 in 1919,53 8,084 in 192054 and 8,548 in 1921.55 Thus it is diffcult to discern any concerted effort to cut down on child labour. This rise was, however, fnally halted due to the provision of the Indian Mines Act of 1923, which prohibited the employment or presence of children under the age of 13 in any part of the mines below ground. That year’s report demonstrated a marked decline in the number of children employed below ground, at 4,135.56 Crèches or resting houses could have been alternative solutions for childcare while miners were at work. However, these options did not fnd a place in discussions of the safety of mine children until the late 1920s; the Mines Crèche Rules were framed and passed only in the 1940s57 when the ban on the employment of women underground was in vogue. The number of women miners in the Second World War years constantly fuctuated, increasing after lifting the ban and decreasing when the ban was again imposed.58 RR Simpson, the Chief Inspector of Mines in 1930, was asked by the Royal Commission about the condition of crèches in mining districts. He replied that there had been no concrete development in regularising crèches: It is merely a shed with a shelter with drinking water provided and an old woman or two to look after the children. These crèches have been set up by some large collieries. I have not seen any lately. We are continually advising in favour of these crèches. We very often fnd these crèches disappear after a year or two and we are told that women will not bring their children because it is said that a child has been ill-treated. They prefer to have the children under their own eyes. It is all a matter of education; it will come in time.59 Evidently, only a few large collieries could afford to create crèches for their workers’ children, but colliery managements were still considering the possibility of opening ‘crèches in different places.’60 However, the Mines Crèche Rules were passed more than a decade later in 1946.61 The irony is that the demand for crèches had been there for decades. The recommendations of various committees and provisions of different acts, starting from the Indian Mines Act of 1923 and even earlier, could not induce the government to regularise the provision of crèches in mines. Lack of infrastructure, fnancial 136

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defciencies or the absence of initiative on the part of mine owners and management had been the major barriers for such provision.

‘Human factors’ in coal mine accidents: changes in the typologies of accidents When it came to training and education available to adult miners, the offcial discourse centred on the miners’ lack of ‘knowledge’ in mining principles and consequent ‘ignorance.’ As a result, the ‘human element’ became the overarching tone in the colonial discourse on mine accidents from the second decade of the twentieth century. A convincing construction of this discourse would mean glossing over managerial faults, and the seeds of this effort were sown way back in the 1890s when it was claimed that most of the accidents in 1894 did not take place due to reasons which could be termed technical, e.g. falling roof, insuffcient ventilation, explosion, the lack of safety lamps or even ‘defective safeguards and defective machinery,’ i.e. reasons which could be traced back to lapses in the management of mines.62 Some of these accidents were considered to have taken place ‘due to drunkenness, to deliberate disobedience of orders, carelessness.’63 The Chief Inspector of Mines in India regarded the ‘lamentable neglect of discipline’ among workers as the prime factor behind the high frequency of accidents.64 However, even then the general trend of blaming the miners, which gained ground from the twentieth century, was largely absent in the last decade of the nineteenth century when miners’ abilities and skills were often appreciated. In this context, it might be worthwhile to analyse, through the offcial lens, how miners and their mining skills were perceived over the years and how they began to draw more criticism than admiration. The trend of passing judgements on the miners’ abilities had not always been the same throughout the history of mining in India. It underwent various phases depending on the then-prevalent situation and the persons involved. In the 1890s, not everyone questioned the miners’ ability to adapt to mining techniques. Some showed high hopes about the miners’ effciency in honing their skills: ‘The Indian Miners have shown themselves quite capable of managing the machines.’65 That was how the Chief Inspector was praising Indian miners’ knowledge of machines in his annual report, although his prime motive was to defend the availability of cheap labour as a reason against the necessity of introducing new and expensive machinery.66 In the same vein, women miners found special mention in one of the reports where they were applauded for being more disciplined than their male counterparts and said to have sometimes outsmarted the latter in certain mining jobs.67

Ignorant miners and occupational hazards The propensity to put the blame on miners was given a concrete shape in 1912 when new categories of accidents were introduced in the annual report 137

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of the Chief Inspector of Mines. It was not that the statistical methods used to collate data were fool-proof. Questions regarding the way the statistical records of mines were compiled were raised from different quarters all over the world.68 The fnal report of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies in England, which was published on 7 June 1905, found the English mining statistics ‘inadequate and sometimes misleading.’ Similar allegations were levelled against the data compiled for the coal mines in India and other colonies because in those places the English pattern was being implemented. Back in 1889, Sir Clement Le Neve Foster raised his voice in favour of ‘an international agreement’ as to the mining statistics at an International Mining Congress.69 As far as categories of accidents in Indian mines were concerned, the standards set by the Indian Mines Act of 1901 were followed. Accordingly, workplace accidents in mines were categorised as accidents due to explosions of fredamp, falls of roofs and sides, haulage accidents, shaft accidents and surface accidents, among others. But in the report of 1912, the typology of accidents was changed to accidents due to ‘misadventure,’ due to the ‘fault of the deceased’ and due to the ‘fault of the fellow workmen,’ i.e. the burden of accidents being shifted to the miners’ shoulders. The reasons behind other accidents were ascribed to the fault of the subordinate offcials and to the fault of the management.70 Among the 133 fatal accidents, 49 and 37 were respectively attributed to misadventure and to the faults of the deceased. Only 31 accidents were considered to have been due to managerial faults. Thus, the discourse of inexperience and ignorance of miners that had remained at the subterranean level during the last decade of the nineteenth century came to the surface and became formalised in the early decades of the twentieth century, resulting in the creation of these new formal categories. Between 1915 and 1919, the causal effects of the accidents were deemed to be the ‘callousness’ of the miners, as is evident from Table 6.1. Miners were thus declared ignorant of the dangers of their work: ‘The Indian miner, in every part of India, is to a great extent ignorant of the dangerous conditions under which he works, and … there were many cases of what can be called foolhardiness and deliberate disobedience of orders.’71 Table 6.1 Causes and percentage of mine accidents Causes

Percentage

Misadventure Fault of deceased Fault of fellow workman Fault of subordinate offcial Fault of management

49.73 30.78 6.07 3.94 9.48

Source: RR Simpson, ‘Accidents in Indian Mines, and Mining Legislation’ in Transactions of the Mining and Geological Institute of India, Vol. 16, July 1921, p. 31.

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The agricultural backgrounds of most miners provided ample scope for the mine authorities and colonial administrators to question their knowledge and ability to adapt to the environment and work of mines. The image of the ignorant miner and how he and his fellow workmen were responsible for mishaps, injuries and deaths in mines became a recurrent theme: It is impossible to foresee the endless danger that may arise through ignorance and foolhardiness … The illiteracy and ignorance of the miners made it impossible for them to perceive the danger to which they were exposed by sleeping in the shadow between the railway tracks, or in the vicinity of tram lines, or sheltering in the drums of the winding engine, or entering fenced off areas, mishandling explosives, riding on running tubs, greasing and oiling machinery in motion, returning to working places before all the charges are exploded, crossing the bottom of the shafts instead of the byepasses where provided, drying gunpowder over the open fre, lighting the match in prohibited gassy areas.72 Even the Chief Inspector of Mines turned sarcastic when he took a dig at the miners’ agricultural background in 1906: In handicraft and manual labour the Indian’s method of handling tool is, as a rule, the reverse of that of western races. He prefers the pull to the thrust. The Indian adze-like spade is a good illustration of a tool made to suit the instincts of the user. That the Indian can be induced to abandon the tools of his forefathers, is seen is most Indian collieries where English shovels are commonly used, and where the pointed crow bar has been replaced by double pointed picks.73 In this quotation, the Chief Inspector draws upon the differences between the tools used in Indian agriculture and those used in the mines to cast aspersions on the workers’ ability to acquire proper mining techniques. In the 1930s, the attitude of the colonial authority vis-à-vis the miners reversed again, to some extent. At a time when trade union activities were reaching alarming heights, the mine managements were apprehensive that the miners would be swayed by the charisma of some trade union leaders. This is when the colonial discourse again started to appreciate the newfound intelligence of the Indian miners. While their ability to handle mining equipment or prevent mine accidents continued to be questioned, they were praised for being aware of their own needs and demands. Miners were lauded for not falling prey to the ill will and conspiring attitude of trade union leaders. When asked by the Royal Commission about the necessity of trade union activities in collieries, J Thomas, one of the three representatives of the Indian Mining Association replied, ‘The Association considers that 139

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the introduction of intermediaries between employers and employed might quite possibly create grievances, or wants, that at present do not exist.’74 More importantly, when asked about the literacy level among the miners, he stated, ‘Some of them [miners] are very sharp.’75 However, the discourse continued to revolve around the ineptness of the miners. Miners’ knowledge of mining principles and their skills of ‘production and protection’ came under the scanner on a number of occasions. It would be wrong to assume that this habit of blaming the worker was only targeted at miners. Managers often shifted the responsibility for an accident onto their inferiors, particularly mine sirdars and others under their immediate supervision. In 1910, at Bengal Coal Company’s Murulidih coal mine in the Jharia colliery region, an accident occurred due to the ‘irruption’ of water into working areas.76 Under normal circumstances, preventive measures like boring a hole would have been adopted once signs of eruption became evident. However, in this case, the manager did not pay attention in time; it was found that no holes had been bored, as required by the rules. The manager, however, transferred the entire responsibility for the accident to his assistant. Sirdars or the subordinate offcials in coal mines were also made scapegoats by the mine authorities, and government offcials tended to side with the managers in these disputes. In 1910, 71 per cent of the colliery accidents in India took place in Bengal; the cause, as stated by the Chief Inspector, was the ‘want of supervision,’ specifcally by the lower managers including the subordinate offcials or sirdars.77 Ironically, by 1912 the Chief Inspector of Mines would relocate his lost faith in the sirdars, as he pronounced: ‘They are often suffciently well-trained to detect dangers but they lack the power to enforce their orders. Discipline cannot be expected from miners if the Sirdars are not disciplined.’78 Despite fnding fault in the sirdars’ disciplinary habits, the Inspector seemed quite happy with whatever training the sirdars had. The next year, there was a concerted effort to train sirdars in mine work and safety. The preparatory classes under the supervision of colliery managers were meant for sirdars and ‘important workmen.’79 It was, however, not specifed who these ‘important workmen’ were. In this whole blame game, the ‘unskilled’ and ‘illiterate’ mineworkers were found to be at fault more than people from any other category. The important question is whether, under the circumstances, the workers were ever provided with systematic training for a job they had no prior experience in—whether an uninitiated cultivator was given at least the rudiments of training that could make him adept and eventually skilled at his job. Handling a miner’s tool was more of a matter of skill than was generally supposed, and at that point of time the Indian coal miner was a raw recruit and clumsy with his weapons; but when doing work to which he and his forefathers had been accustomed [e.g. loading or carrying material] he was capable of showing good results.80 140

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Training and education available to the ‘ignorant miners’ The need to train miners in the effcient working and extracting of coal had been stressed from the introduction of deeper mining in India. In 1907, the Chief Inspector of Mines stated that ‘[t]he material at hand is very unformed; labour is not applied to the best advantage; the miner in his working place tears off the coal by sheer force, whereas he might be trained to considerably increase his output by the exercise of skill.’81 Although the necessity of training was thus articulated, it failed to translate into reality. This is evident from the volumes of the Royal Commission, in which a range of oral and written evidence, from representatives of the provincial governments to various personnel associated with mines, were collated. The volume noted: The incidence of accident is closely related to the character and skill of the labour employed … For instance, in Indian mines the untrained cultivator may be allowed to work at the face on his frst day underground and, in the best of mines, the worker’s illiteracy increases the diffculty of protecting him against danger. A large staff of trained men is maintained at most mines to look after the safety of miners, but conditions at the face change quickly and safety depends to a great extent on the skill and experience of the miner himself.82 Arikshan Sinha, a representative of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha of the Muzaffarpur district, observed in 1931 that ‘There is no arrangement for Industrial and Vocational training for workers. Of course, there is Mining Institute at Dhanbad, but that is for training of educated men and for employment as offcers in mines.’83 The Indian Colliery Employees’ Association had a similar opinion: ‘So far as the miners are concerned there is no arrangement for their training or education of any kind. They are wholly ignorant of the scientifc aspect of mining. Their practical experience is the sole guide to their work.’84 From most of the written and oral evidence presented to the Royal Commission, it is evident that any kind of training excluded the miners themselves, with the sirdars or subordinate offcials instead forming the core of the trainees. Educated miners had to gain experience in practical mining for at least three years, after which they could appear for the examination to receive a sirdar’s certifcate. If the miners had access to the acquisition of higher mining skills, they could even be appointed as overmen. Before attaining the status of sirdar or overman, however, they had no access to any kind of training. JR Dain, representative of the Government of Bihar and Orissa to the Royal Commission, lamented, ‘No facilities are given for training workmen to obtain the position of over-man but the training required is largely practical and obtained by aspirants in the course of their ordinary duties in the mine.’85 Dain referred to the annual report of 141

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the Chief Inspector of Mines in India, which explained the general state of miners’ training: According to the Chief Inspector, inspection shows that in any given year the bulk of Tata’s accidents are the inevitable consequence of carrying on a heavy and inherently dangerous industry with a personnel that is, judged by common industrial standards, greatly lacking in carefulness, discipline, intelligence and training.86 Although the Commission urged mine owners and managers to ensure that ‘the newcomer [will] not [be] started at work except under skilled supervision,’ it abstained from suggesting any statutory regulation to improve the training of miners in Indian collieries.87 The case of uneducated miners was even worse: they could only appear for an oral examination to obtain a sirdar’s certifcate. The irony was that there was no provision for training, even for miners who were recruited for skilled jobs. Mine owners, managers and agents complained about the workers’ lack of skill, but practical provisions for skill development were virtually absent: ‘There are no arrangements for the theoretical training of such skilled labour as winding engine men, haulage engine men, pump men, boiler fremen, ftters etc., who are mostly illiterate.’88 In a number of collieries, there were arrangements for regular lectures targeting the group of sirdars: ‘Lectures in vernacular on mining are given in the coalfelds for training of sirdars who are however still drawn from experienced miners.’89 However, the miners themselves were conspicuously deprived of such facilities. Coherent efforts at training miners have remained notably absent throughout the history of coal mining in India, especially in the colonial era. The importance of educating miners themselves in mining skills rather than educating just the superior personnel or those responsible for the miners’ safety has never been adequately considered as a way to ensure miners’ safety in the workplace. As DK Nite has observed: The lack of constant, effcient expert safety supervision was an expression of both the colliery’s dependence on the mining sirdar and his employees responsible for accident control, and reliance on the collier’s practical skills of production and protection, which were regarded as more cost effective than any investment in training.90 The frst cogent attempt at imparting technical education to miners was made in independent India, when the Industrial Committee on Coal Mining 142

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met in Dhanbad on 23 and 24 January 1948.91 After decades of dithering, the state was not only complaining about miners’ lack of training, but it also came up with a tangible proposal for improvement. ‘Initially men will be trained as electrical and mechanical ftters and later on in operating underground machinery.’92 Among other issues, such as deciding on weekly working hours for miners, the Committee approved a scheme for the establishment of a training school intended to ‘improve the skill and effciency of the worker in handling machinery.’93 In 1953, however, the President of the Indian Mine Managers’ Association, AB Guha,94 expressed the opinion that labour training in India was still unsatisfactory and insisted that ‘Labour should be educated in regard to the correct and proper use of machinery.’95

Mine sirdars over the miners: how the miners were left out Lectures and instruction in mining areas mostly catered to the mining sirdars and their superiors. Correspondence between the Indian Mining Association (IMA) and the Mining Education Advisory Board (MEAB) proves that the evening vernacular classes on mining were mainly meant for the sirdars who, they claimed, were falling short in attendance. The common workers were, as usual, left out of these classes.96 However, the future of these classes was never certain due to fnancial problems. In 1925, the Indian Mining Federation (IMF) informed the local governments that they would be unable to continue making contributions to the mining education classes since they had only wanted to contribute for three years.97 The MEAB pursued the IMF to pay 1,500 rupees per year until the 1927–1928 fscal year.98 Again in 1925, the IMA agreed to contribute 8,000 rupees annually for the improvement of mining education in Bengal and Bihar and Orissa,99 but in 1927, the IMA informed the MEAB that they would be unable to do so beyond the 1929–1930 fscal year due to ‘the depressed state of the coal industry.’100 The IMA argued against the IMF’s proposal to discontinue their payment and demanded that IMF also continue paying their share, or 3,000 rupees.101 They also argued that apart from the coal merchant bodies like them and the Federation, local governments should be entrusted with providing funds for mining education.102 The mining classes run by the collieries came under government scrutiny. In 1932, the Government of Bengal informed the IMA that it was not happy with the lecturing fees paid to colliery managers for teaching vernacular mining classes. The IMA repeated their earlier argument and demanded that the cost of these classes should not fall on the mining industry alone and sought to pass the burden to the local governments.103 The 1933 reports for both mining industry organisations104 stated that the Government of Bengal was planning to close down vernacular mining classes.105 The Mining Education Advisory Board thought this would be a ‘very retrograde step’ and instead suggested a reduction in the number of 143

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classes and hence in expenditures. The government agreed but insisted on adequate payments to lecturers.106 While the mine managements and the colonial government deemed it crucial to educate the children of miners specifcally for the purpose of grooming a class of future miners, the adult miners drew their wrath for their alleged ignorance and lack of knowledge in mining activities. Training facilities provided to the adult miners were nothing to boast of on the part of the government. On the other hand, a number of mining and government offcials went to great lengths to train the children. Hence, the training of the present miners was insignifcant while the debate over the future ones proved to be prolonged.

Notes 1 James Grundy, Report of the Inspection of Coal Mines in India (hereafter RICMI), for the year ending 30th June 1894, Calcutta: Offce of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1894, p. 67; the remark was made by the chairman of a meeting organised by the Indian Mining Association on 20 June 1894. 2 Royal Commission on Labour in India (hereafter RCLI), vol. 4, part 1: Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, Written Evidence, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Offce, 1931, p. 26. 3 Ibid., pp. 51–53: Communication from Walter Saisse, Eastern Indian Railway Colliery Manager, Giridih. 4 RICMI for the year ending 1894, p. 26. Sirdars were the subordinate offcials working in the Indian mines. Recruiting miners and supervising their works were among their important functions. 5 Ibid., p. 62. 6 Ibid., p. 64. 7 RIMI, for the year ending 1896, p. 15. 8 Ibid., p. 23. 9 Sarada Balagopalan, Inhabiting ‘childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 64. 10 Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in India, under the Indian Mines Act of 1901, for the year ending the 31st December (hereafter RCIMI), 1907, Calcutta: Bureau of Mines Inspection in India, Government of India, 1908, p. 16. 11 RCLI, volume 5, part 1: Bengal: Excluding Coalfelds and Dooars, 1930, p. 54. 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in India (hereafter ARCIMI), for the year ending 1929, Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publication Branch, 1930, pp. 7–8. 14 RCLI, volume 4, part 1: Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, Written Evidence, 1931, p. 39. 15 Ibid., p. 40. 16 RCLI, vol. 4, part 2, Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, Oral evidence, 1931, p. 13. 17 Shantimoy Bandyopadhyay, Asansol Parikrama (History of Asansol Sub Division about Five Hundred Years), 2nd edn., Asansol: Trinity Trust, 2005,

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

p. 47; the Indian Colliery Employees’ Association was formed in 1920 and this labour association rose to prominence in the late 1920s and early 1930s. RCLI, vol. 4, part 2, Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, Oral evidence, 1931, p. 150. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p.190. Ibid., p.245. RCLI, vol. 4, part 1, Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, written evidence, p. 224. Sarada Balagopalan, Inhabiting ‘childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India, p. 67. Industrial Education in India: report of a Conference held in Allahabad, March 25th–29th 1924 under the auspices of the National Christian Council of India, Burma & Ceylon, India: National Christian Council of India, Burma & Ceylon., 1924. The Conference was held under the auspices of the National Council. Thirty-fve representatives from 13 different missionary bodies dealing with industrial education in India participated in the conference, p. 1. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 22. Danielle Kinsey, ‘Atlantic World mining, Child labor, and the Transnational Construction of Childhood in Imperial Britain in the Mid-nineteenth Century,’ Atlantic Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2014, pp. 449–72. Sylvain E. Dessy, ‘A Defense of Compulsive Measures against Child Labor,’ Journal of Development Economics, vol. 62, no. 1, June 2000, pp. 261–75. Ibid., p. 273. Cecilia A. Green, ‘The 1938–1939 Moyne Commission in Barbados: Investigating the Status of Children,’ Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, vol. 11, no. 4, October 2014, pp. 515–35. Ram Nath Sharma and Rajendra Kumar Sharma, History of Education in India, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2004, p. 137. Ibid., p.138. Ibid. Shantimoy Bandyopadhyay, Asansol Parikrama (History of Asansol Sub Division about Five Hundred Years), 2nd edn., Asansol: Trinity Trust, 2005, p. 70. Ibid. Ibid. RIMI, for the year ending 1894, p. 24. Madhura Swaminathan, ‘Economic Growth and the Persistence of Child Labor: Evidence from an Indian City,’ World Development, vol. 26, no. 8, August 1998, pp. 1513–28. CP Chandrasekhar, ‘The economic consequences of the abolition of child labour: An Indian case study,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 1997, pp. 137–79. Ibid., p. 145. Madhura Swaminathan, ‘Economic Growth and the Persistence of Child Labor: Evidence from an Indian City,’ p. 1523. RICMI, for the year ending 30 June 1894, p. 66; the remark was made by CW Gray (of the Bengal Coal Company Limited), the chairman of a meeting organised by the Indian Mining Association on 20 June 1894 (NLI). Ibid., p. 66. As mentioned above, according to the Indian Mines Act of 1901, anybody below the age of 12 was considered a child. James Grundy, Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in India, under the Indian Mines Act of 1901, for the year ending the 31st December (hereafter

145

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

RCIMI), 1903, Calcutta: Bureau of Mines Inspection in India, Government of India, 1904, p. 6 (NAI). Ibid. Ibid. Geo A Stonier, RCIMI, for the year ending 1901, p. 6. JRR Wilson, Ibid., for the year ending 1907, p. 2. GF Adams, Ibid., for the year ending 1911, p. 3. RR Simpson, Ibid., for the year ending 1913, p. 2. GF Adams, Ibid., for the year ending 1915, p. 5. RR Simpson, Ibid., for the year ending 1919, p. 2. Ibid., for the year ending 1920, p. 4. Ibid., for the year ending 1921, p. 2. RR Simpson, Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines in India (hereafter ARCIMI), for the year ending 1926, Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publication Branch, 1927, p. 3 (NLI). The noteworthy feature of this series of reports was that from 1923 onwards the Report came to be known as the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines. In 1923, the Indian Mines Act of 1901 was amended and the Indian Mines Act of 1923 came into existence. That was when the change was made. Prabhas Kumar Chakrabarti, Coal Industry in West Bengal, New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1989, p. 19; the Mines Crèche Rules were framed in 1946. ‘Exclusion of Women Workers from Underground Work in Coal Mines: Government of India Communique,’ International Labour Offce, Indian Branch (hereafter ILO), September 1937, pp. 21–2; ‘Draft Regulations for Prohibiting Employment of Women Underground in Mines,’ ILO, June, 1936, p. 20. RCLI, vol. 4, part 2, Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds, Oral Evidence, 1931, p. 312. Ibid., p. 432. JCK Peterson and CA Alexander were interviewed. They were representing the Tata Iron and Steel Company, Ltd. Government of India, the Mines Crèche Rules, 1946, New Delhi, 1946. Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Papers Regarding Legislation for the Regulation and Sanitation of Mines in India, 1896; Kumar Dakshineswar Malia’s note of dissent, p. 2. Ibid. RCIMI, for the year ending 1912, p. 4. RCIMI, for the year ending 1904, p. 9. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid. RCIMI, for the year ending 1904, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2; Sir Clement Le Neve Foster was a famous British Mineralogist and Geologist. He had books like The Elements of Mining and Quarrying (1903) to his credit. https://archive.org/details/elementsmininga00fostgoog. RCIMI, for the year ending 1904, p. 8. Ibid., for the year ending 1912, p. 4. BR Seth, Bombay: DP Taraporevala Sons & Co., Labour in the Indian Coal Industry, 1940, p. 287. RCIMI, for the year ending 1906, p. 3. RCLI, vol. 4, part 2, Bihar and Orissa with Coalfelds: Oral Evidence, 1931, p. 326. Ibid. RCIMI, for the year ending 1910, p. 18.

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77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Ibid., for the year ending 1910, p. 4. Ibid, for the year ending 1910, p. 13. Ibid, for the year ending 1911, p. 28. RCIMI, for the year ending 1905, p. 2. RCIMI, for the year ending 1907, p. 2. RCLI report, p. 131. RCLI, vol. 4, part 2: Oral Evidence, p. 92. Ibid., p. 182. RCLI, vol. 4, part 1: Written Evidence, p. 18. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid. RCIMI, for the year ending 1910, p. 23. RCIMI, for the year ending 1911, p. 28. Dhiraj Kumar Nite, ‘Slaughter Mining and the “Yielding Collier”: The Politics of Safety in the Jharia Coalfelds 1895–1950,’ in Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (ed.), The Coal Nation Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014, p. 108. ‘First Meeting of Industrial Committee in Coal Mining, Dhanbad, 23 and 24 January, 1948,’ International Labour Offce, Indian Branch (hereafter ILO), February 1948, pp. 83–4. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid. AB Guha, ‘The Indian Manager,’ Indian Mining Journal, vol. 1, nos. 4–5, AprilMay, 1953, pp. 11–13. Ibid, p. 12. Indian Mining Association (hereafter IMA) annual report for 1930, Calcutta, p. 172. The Indian Mining Federation (IMF) was a coal lobby dominated by Indian coal entrepreneurs. But they had less collieries under their ownership compared to their rival i.e. the Indian Mining Association (IMA), which was dominated by Europeans. Another Indian-based association was the Indian Colliery Owners Association (ICOA). In comparison with the former two lobbies, ICOA was less powerful and less infuential. Indian Mining Federation (hereafter IMF) annual report for 1925, Calcutta, p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. IMA, annual report for 1927, p. 54. Ibid. Ibid. IMA, annual report for 1927, p. 203. Ibid., annual report for 1932, p. 30. IMF, annual report for 1933, pp. 139–43. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid.

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Part III ADMINISTRATIVE IMPERATIVES, GOVERNMENTAL MANOEUVRES

7 MILITARY INTERVENTIONS AND SURVEYS IN SOUTHWEST BENGAL, C. 1765 Midnapore ‘frontier’ and the wider Jangal Mahal Ujjayan Bhattacharya

Colonial rule and a ‘zone of anomaly’: stages of intervention The appellation Jangal Mahal is an aggregative expression, used in the administrative parlance of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the territories that now form parts of the districts of Bankura, Manbhum or Purulia and Singbhum of Chhotanagpur. Descriptive mention of this region in the colonial texts and records occur in various manners. ‘Jungles to the westward’ and zamindars possessing a ‘kind of independence’ are some of the mentions that evoke an image of undefned and rather unknown territory; a penumbral zone emerging on the frontiers of early colonial acquisitions and thus quite misty in the early colonial vision.1 In the administrative records of Midnapore residency and of latter-day Midnapore collectorship, the Jangal Mahal is that particular administrative precinct which in the early colonial times stretched over jungle parganas of a wide region, ruled from the vantage point of Midnapore town located at the edge of this territory.2 Behind Midnapore to the east and south lay the sedentary peasant agriculturist lands, lateritic in the immediate vicinity but gradually merging with more alluvial plains.3 For the jungle zamindars in the territories to the west, Midnapore town was a sensitive spot. It was from here that the military operations originated to bring under control the jungle zamindars and ensure ‘pacifcation’ of the people who were perceived as restive. Midnapore was also sensitive to all incursions that came from the western side. In the pre-colonial times, it had to face the Marathas, and from 1769 onwards it was the threat of the paiks which made military operations imperative for colonial security.4 The British superiority of arms was demonstrated when the jungle zamindars were subdued. The zamindars held back revenue but they were either compelled to pay up or placed in confnement by the administration of the Company. 151

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This article seeks to explore the formation of a sovereign territorial sphere and to understand the intimate bond between authority and territory, and how jurisdiction and law’s application became natural features of that feld.5 The intervention by the British was not the result of military success only, but also of the deepening colonial experience which systematised the process of installation of public administration, though rather incompletely. The current study is an attempt to understand the construction of the idea of ‘sovereignty’ in the British imperium, particularly the notion of ‘frontier,’ an important ingredient of the defnition of territorial power—rather than the processes of state-making. There was a frontier in the political sense, as well as in the sense of ‘civilizational’ contacts of the time, which implied social, cultural and ethnic differences. Borrowing the philosophical insight of Giorgio Agamben, that history is not a political but an ‘administrative’ and ‘governmental’ problem, just as the living being made in the image of God reveals himself to be capable only of economy and not politics,6 I wish to argue that in the decades following the British occupation of Bengal, colonialism in Jangal Mahal was ultimately an ‘administrative’ and ‘governmental’ problem, with the British administration working as a catalyst for economic reordering. Military and economic interventions were different aspects of the ‘governmental’ concern, based on the conception of the ‘intimate bond’ between authority and territory. Thus colonialism could gain a permanent foothold in the southwest frontier region of Bengal only by the middle of the nineteenth century, when the phenomenon itself acquired a character, setting up the relationship between the metropolis and the colony on a defnite basis. The late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century present contrastive pictures of ‘development’ in the Jangal Mahals. The late eighteenth century does not show much construction activity. But colonial intervention demonstrated the tensions and the fractures inherent in the processes of implantation of colonial rule in southwestern Bengal. The early nineteenth century witnessed a spate of constructional work in southwestern Bengal, but alongside this development, Jangal Mahal witnessed major uprisings against the colonial power. Road construction in the early nineteenth century was the nodal project around which developments took place. The extension of the government’s writ depended on how far and quickly its agencies were able to reach. Between 1814 and 1826, about 500 miles of roads from Calcutta and Benares was restored and 450 miles of pucka road were added. The roads passed through major nodal points in the Jangal Mahals where bungalows and serai for travellers were constructed.7 Developments in the region were thus early instantiations of the legitimacy of colonial projects in civil-cum-military administration and land settlements. Such projects entailed a very typical colonial practice, institutionalised as ‘surveys’ and executed in a routine manner throughout the history of colonialism in India. In the frst stage of the colonial intervention, the 152

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imperative was to acquaint the administration with the lay of the land that had been formally ceded but was unknown to them. This was achieved by conducting route marches through the interiors of the country. Thus these surveys have been called route surveys.8 The objective of the administration was to reach the centres and localities of the jangal zamindars—as they were called—to compel them to settle for revenues and identify the general nature of the populace. Between 1760 and 1765 when the cession of territory by the Nawab of Bengal placed the region to the west and north of Midnapore under the control of Midnapore administration, the parganas and zamindaris of Chatna (Chhatna), Burraboom (Barabhum), Manboom (Manbhum), Simlapour (Simlipal), Amingaur (Amiyanagar), Dolboom (Dhalbhum), Jambunny (Jambani) and Jargong (Jhargram) were brought under the Resident of Midnapore. These territories now form parts of the districts of Bankura, Manbhum or Purulia and Singbhum of Chhotanagpur. The Resident of Burdwan had control of some territories which are now in Midnapore. These were Bogree (Bagri), Chandrakona and the adjacent Roypour (Raipur). So in this period, Midnapore administration had control over most of Jangal Mahal.9 The second stage of colonial intervention from 1765 to 1793 was a period of intense fscal and administrative re-organisation in Bengal marked by the Company’s anxiety to ascertain the potential of revenue-paying lands of Midnapore. Thus surveys were linked to the gathering of information about production and revenue assessments, which in turn brought the administration in direct contact with public activity like maintenance of embankments and natural phenomena like foods. Frequent administrative re-arrangements took place, but the territorial structure of the Midnapore district remained the same as shown in Rennell’s map of 1776, which included all the regions of Jangal Mahal mentioned above within the ambit of the Midnapore district. In the third stage, between 1793 and 1805, by transferring parganas from one district to another the Company took the steps that were necessary to form a block of governable territories called the Jangal Mahal district, which received its formal consecration in 1805.10 The latter was designated as the South-West Frontier Agency which extended from Bankura to Singbhum, the homeland of the Kols, Munda and Bhumij. However, mere acts of administrative arrangements or re-arrangements had not implanted colonialism directly in the heart of the forested region. On the contrary, it was only the beginning of the process of installing colonial civilian rule in the region and among people who were thought of as ‘primitive.’ But as a frst step, the limits of the new sovereign power and its territory had to be defned. The acquisition of the territory did not make British power sovereign in the region immediately. Till the end of the eighteenth century, military power supported and sustained the claim to rule those regions, collect revenues and supervise the administration. But the British could exert its 153

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force almost as a sovereign power even in felds where it was not in charge of administration formally. Much of the territory where military operations were carried out was under the control of tribal kings and princes who, though recognised by external political powers like the Mughals or the Nizamat of Bengal, had always ruled their territories autonomously.11 Those were the internal boundaries or the frontiers of the Mughal Empire which continued to exist in a semi-subdued state in the south Chhotanagpur region during the transition in the eighteenth century. The farthest limit within the boundaries of the internal frontiers extended to Palamau, inhabited by the Cheros and conquered by the Mughals in the 1660s.12 K Sivaramkrishnan has characterised the Jangal Mahal—situated within the larger sphere of southwest Bengal and the adjoining regions of densely forested Chhotanagpur—as a ‘zone of anomaly.’13 He describes the Jangal Mahal region as the ‘forest-savannah transition zone,’ in which, through historical processes, the necessary distinctions and separations between the public and private domains and state and society were created. It is on this mediatory function of state and society that the historical narrative of state-making rests.14 ET Dalton classifed the tribes inhabiting the region to the east and south of Palamau as ‘Kolarians.’15 These regions were inhabited by Kharia, Munda, Ho and Bhumij tribes. Dalton followed ancient tradition in narrating and describing the older histories of the tribes. He postulated that there was an ancient Kol empire from which the Cheros were expelled and they fell back into Palamau, while the Munda ‘race,’ as Dalton called them, made the plateau of ‘Chutia Nagpur’ (Chhotanagpur) their base.16 This population comprised of ‘Mundaris’ or Mundas of ‘Chutia Nagpur’ proper, Bhumij of Manbhum and Larka Kol or Ho of Singbhum, totalling about 850,000 people circa 1872.17 According to Dalton, the Chhotanagpur was connected geo-physically with the great Vindhya range. Explaining how the tribes led by the Mundaris came to form their autonomously ruled independent enclaves, Dalton said that: It forms the heart of a territory in which the Mundraris have been settled for ages, and in which other tribes of the aborigines of India have found a secure asylum, retreating from all sides up the courses of the rivers that have their sources on the plateau. The conquered races ascended and found refuge from the common enemy in an elevated and beautiful region that is itself a gigantic fortress.18 According to Dalton, the tribes of Chhotanagpur ‘maintained those isolated and defensive positions throughout the long series of Hindu dynasties’ and during the Nizamat rule in Bengal. Murshid Quli Khan had conferred the district of Birbhum—a border match—on one of his trusted zamindar, Assad-us-Zaman Khan, ‘to guard against the incursions of the barbarous Hindus of Jharkhand.’19 154

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Construction of a frontier and its governmental context Midnapore as a political and ecological frontier zone was recognised even in pre-colonial times. It was the southwestern frontier of the sovereign Nizamat of Bengal in the eighteenth century. In 1751, Nawab Alivardi Khan entered into a treaty with Marathas, agreeing to accept the river Subarnarekha as the line of division between Bengal and Orissa. Mir Habib was appointed as Naib Subahdar under Alivardi Khan.20 Alivardi’s selection of the River Subarnarekha as the political frontier with the Marathas was a prescient ecological choice. River Subarnarekha is now known as a distinct hydrological zone or basin, while the Kangsabati River valley, a few miles to the north and the east forms the border with another hydrological zone or basin, which is the Ganga.21 The border of Subarnarekha became a troubled political frontier between the Marathas and the Nawab of Bengal in the next decade, and the province of Midnapore lay adjacent to the Maratha territory governed from Cuttack. The region between the two rivers and further to the west was the zone of British military campaign and expansion of territorial control. In 1757, when the British power was not directly established in the region, Ram Ram Singh, the head of Nawab’s espionage corps, and a one-time confdant of Nawab Alivardi Khan, wrote to Robert Clive that he had apprehended an attack on him and his forces by Mir Jafar, the newly enthroned Nawab at Murshidabad, and if that were to happen ‘he should seek refuge wherever it was to be found which his country well afforded by the jungles and thickets with which it is covered, and the mountain which it adjoins.’22 This was a time of political anxiety for the East India Company and the Nawab. Their enemies—the French, the principal zamindars of Bengal and Bihar and the forces of Awadh—had entered an alliance to dispossess Nawab Mir Jafar and his ally the British from their seats of powers. When the British took power they found the town of Midnapore ‘defended by a fort.’ But it was rather outmoded being ‘constructed after the manner of the country but could be made usefull in preventing the Marathas who have no other entrance into Bengall from the southward but through this country.’23 In 1763, when the war broke out between Nawab Mir Kasim and the Company, the Midnapore frontier acquired importance because it was one of the ‘inlets’ to Bengal. Following Buxar in 1764, the Company acquired territory with a long frontier from Balasore in the south, and from Chhota Nagpur and Ramgarh to the Karamnasa River on the west, running through a completely unknown country and unknown peoples.24 The region was important from the point of view of security, and the Council at Calcutta wrote in 1766 to the commander in chief of the army that it is of ‘great importance to the security that we obtain a perfect knowledge of the Inlets to Bengal’ and ordered him ‘to examine the several passes into the province of Bengal from the Hills of Tilliagurry quite down to Midnapore.’25 155

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Congruence of the forested frontier of the Company’s domains with its political frontier was important for another reason. The stretch of territory towards the west from Orissa’s Balasore and ‘Mohurbunge’ and Bengal’s Burdwan towards Chhotanagpur and the borders of subah Bengal was an important zone of military movements. Experienced surveyors like Louis de Gloss and Claude Martin were dispatched to survey the entire territory after the completion of their tasks in Midnapore and the Burdwan region.26 From de Gloss’s journal, it is apparent that the stretch of jungles was extensive towards the west. Another surveyor was free-merchant Thomas Motte who surveyed the forested track from Midnapore towards Balasore and Cuttack in the south and towards Sambalpur in the east.27 This survey was motivated commercially as Motte was searching for the source of diamonds in those regions. Maps of Midnapore and Burdwan were the earliest ones to have been made in British India between 1760 and 1765. Rainfurly Knox and James Nicol had surveyed the ‘Midnapore province’ up to Piply River between 1761 and 1763.28 There is a mention of ‘Knox’s Roads in the Midnapore Province’ in Robert Orme’s history. Another surveyor, Dennis Morrison, had carried out similar surveys of the southern part of Midnapore and of the roads of that province. Rennell had made use of the surveyed material and the maps prepared at that time. He used Morrison’s surveys for the map that he prepared for Robert Clive in 1766. Rennell had also used a map of Midnapore whose author is unknown. During this period, British engagement was mainly with the zamindars of different parts of Midnapore. Though the purpose of these engagements was primarily the collection of revenues, it also entailed military confrontations. Security and fscal considerations in a frontier district were not separate but allied subjects of administrative strategy. It was during this time, when John Johnstone was the Resident and making efforts to collect revenues, that the ‘Hill Rajahs’—the Jangal Mahal zamindars—joined the Marathas and surrounded him at the Midnapore fort.29 The fort was a mud enclosure open in many places but Johnstone held out against the enemies for quite some time. The Marathas plundered Midnapore town—the Board wrote that the town was entirely destroyed—and left after reinforcements arrived. From 1765 onwards the Company’s involvement in revenue, military and public affairs intensifed. The resilience of the Jangal Mahal zamindars rendered the Company’s plans for aggregating the revenues of the district mahal by mahal infructuous. Revenue administration of the frst few years of occupation affected the semi-independent status of the Jangal Mahal zamindars, and the tenures of the paiks or the militia dominated by the Bhumij community became insecure.30 Involvement in revenue collection on the basis of assessed revenue demand in the interiors brought the administration face to face with the zamindars that guarded their own small domains very zealously. With the assumption of more responsibilities in 156

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internal administration, the surveys had to cater to many more aspects of the administration than was hitherto required. The nature of Jangal Mahal frontier can thus be understood as a peculiar Company construction. It is from this time onwards that surveying became an important part of military operations. A map of this period entitled A Map of Part of the Kingdom of Bengal drawn from the Surveys made in the year 1762 and 1763 shows the country from Balasore northwards to the Ganges and from Hooghly river to the hills. The map was probably prepared by Captain Anthony Polier, from which James Rennell made another map entitled The Hooghly and Jelenghee Rivers together with that part of the Ganges which lies to the westwards. The basis of these map constructions were the route surveys carried out during military marches or expeditions. The location and the extent of the political frontier in southwest Bengal shifted during this period of political transition from Nizamat rule to the Company’s ascendancy to political power. In the Nizamat period, the political frontier was along the banks of the river Subarnarekha—called River Pipley in the early Company records—the line of division between Maratha-controlled areas and the Nizamat-controlled areas. Later, as the Company made a bid to extend its control westwards, especially after 1764, the frontier was stretched from the southwest to the northwest, encompassing territories that were ruled by small and autonomous tribal principalities which included unsettled revenue zones. Midnapore as a province or a district under the control of the Company had a centrality within the geographical defnition of the frontier region. In order to situate the place of surveys in the history of early colonial rule a necessary correction is in order. The surveys were related to the ordering of governmental and administrative processes rather than to the ascertainment of economic value in an empirical sense. K Sivaramakrishnan, while clearly recognising the fact that ‘surveying as a powerful means of knowing was integral to establishing British rule in India’ says that ‘one reason for the Jangal Mahals becoming a zone of anomaly in an expanding British imperium was that the omissions of Rennell were not rectifed for a hundred years.’ James Rennell, according to Sivaramkrishnan, had ‘simply excluded the Jangal Mahals for they lay neither conveniently along navigable rivers nor bore repute of great resources,’ and thus stable representations could not be established in such areas. This narrative follows the logic that estimates of growing proftability of a region, or its worthiness in terms of economic value, was at the root of colonial understanding of whether a region was survey-worthy or not.31 From the point of view of the expansion of the area under British authority through military intervention, however, the argument made by Sivaramkrishnan needs to be modifed. Claude Nicolet had remarked in his study of the Roman Empire that surveys were an ‘ineluctable necessity of military expansion.’32 Nicolet’s formulation was affrmed by Matthew Edney while explaining its relevance in the context 157

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of the development of the British Empire.33 To conquer and govern simultaneously, Edney argues that a ‘certain perception of physical space’ was required to ‘understand the physical space that one occupies or that one hopes to dominate.’34 Edney’s narrative is essentially different from that of Sivaramkrishnan. Edney historicises the feld of surveys and map-making in the British Empire to demonstrate the line of axis between knowledge and power.35 Sivaramakrishnan, while admitting the value of ‘technologies’—that is maps and censuses—in modern state formation, sees those technologies as ‘more sophisticated’ tools of surveying and documenting the region and its people, than basic economic imperatives. In ordering the succession of ‘more sophisticated’ technologies Sivaramkrishnan insists on a determinate infuence of the estimates of proftability in deciding on the survey-worthiness of a region.36 Thus, to him, the Jangal Mahals were brought effectively under a standard British rule only in the early years of the twentieth century when a cadastral survey and plot-by-plot enumeration was completed in 1915.

Extension of public administration and the surveys Since the late 1760s, the British role in the pacifcation of the Midnapore country and the collection of revenue was direct. In the early days of British rule in southwest Bengal, we do not come across any policy regarding rebellious zamindars or a strategy to contain them. Other than a sketchy account by John Johnstone, the frst Resident of the province, there is no extant account of the jungle zamindars.37 It was only after John Graham became Resident in 1765, and more specifcally after 1767 when he was joined by Lt Fergusson that we fnd a policy unfolding regarding the containment of the zamindars in the western part of the province.38 The period between 1760 and 1767 is noteworthy for the Company’s dealings with zamindars in the settled part of the province, that is, the central and eastern parts of the district,39 for the re-organisation of revenue administration,40 the arrangement of the dawk or the courier system,41 and above all, for the organisation of the military to counter the principal threat, the Marathas.42 In the 1760s, military operation was a function of revenue collection in the Jangal Mahals of southwestern Bengal. For the East India Company, the base of operation for revenue collection and military operations was Midnapore.43 In 1766, efforts for revenue collection gained some momentum in this area. To investigate the state of revenues in Jangal Mahal areas, Verelst was appointed Supervisor of Midnapore Revenues, and he laid out an account of the situation of the jungles to the westward of Midnapore.44 In 1767, Major James Rennell was appointed the SurveyorGeneral of the East India Company by Clive, and he was charged with a systematic survey of southwestern Bengal. Rennell deployed three surveyors, John Adams, Thomas Carter and William Portsmouth.45 All of them were offcers of the military and were engaged in the survey of roads and passes.46 158

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In 1766, Adams began a survey of the roads of Midnapore.47 Adam’s surveys of the region were incorporated in Rennell’s maps which were presented to Robert Clive in 1767, at the time of his departure. With the arrival of Verelst and Graham, many other public activities came under the scrutiny of the surveyors. Captain Louis du Gloss who had been ordered to survey the provinces of Burdwan and Midnapore in February 1765 spent most of his time surveying the rivers of the region, their embankments and protection against foods.48 It is from this time onwards that the offcial policy of the Company desired ‘Information of all  …  Possessions, their value and the Importance they are to the Company.’ An important consideration was to save the cultivated crops from inundation by the rivers. With this particular objective, de Gloss was sent to ‘survey the Midnapore & Burdwan Provinces’ and especially to take care of an embankment at Balarampur which lay at the junction of the two territories.49 Midnapore seems to have been in the focus of the Company directors’ attention, as they wrote, much remains yet to be done before we can be convinced that we receive the full value of the Revenues of the Province (i.e. Midnapore). Therefore we direct you to be very full in your information and you must send us a Plan of the Bengal frontier towards Orixa. Du Gloss, however, left Midnapore before this instruction arrived and continued to survey the rest of the frontier.

The narrative of a military operation and planning of a route survey The Company’s hunts for revenue led them to the zamindaris of the Jangal Mahals where they began a military operation. Harry Verelst, a member of the Council at Fort William wrote to John Graham that the westward zamindars should be reduced immediately and their forts entirely demolished. Those who would readily submit and engage for regular payment of revenues ‘agreeable to the custom of other parts of the provinces’ could be continued. Those who would not ‘should be entirely routed out.’50 This policy probably marked the end of the non-interventionist approach of the state, as John Graham deplored the lack of authority ‘as highly unsuitable in the present respectable situation of our government.’51 Thus directions were for an aggressive military campaign but in its essential detail it was also a survey, which RH Phillimore later categorised as ‘route surveys.’52 George Vansittart, successor to Graham, had possession of Fergusson’s journal of the ‘Western Expedition’ but said that it was not complete enough for a map to be formed out of it.53 Harry Verelst, the thenGovernor, replied that he wished to have Lt Fergusson’s journal completed 159

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as soon as possible for the authorities to get a chart of his expedition to the westward area laid down. Verelst referred in this context to Thomas Motte’s peregrinations in the region on his way to more distant places beyond Bengal proper and advised Vansittart to use Motte’s chart in a confdential manner.54 Fergusson had used a compass for the surveys. The journal which he compiled was updated till April 1767. But due to an accidental event during the military operation the compass needle had broken off and he was unable to prepare the charts. However, he was able to give a detailed description of the places he captured during the military operation and also of the route and its surroundings during the course of his journeys. In January 1767, John Graham wrote a letter to Fergusson on the need of bringing under the Company’s control the zamindars ‘to the westward of Midnapore.’ Those zamindars, ‘taking advantage of their situation’ preserved a kind of independence. This independence, Graham felt, was ‘highly unsuitable in the present situation of the (our) government’ and were obstructing the commerce between Bengal provinces and the districts to the westward of the hills. On the eve of his departure in March 1767, Graham was able to inform the Collector-General that the districts in the western jungles had yielded a large increase in revenue, especially when compared to the peshkash amount that they used to pay earlier.55 Graham had collected information about several zamindaris and also laid out a route for Fergusson.56 In order to achieve their objective of containing the jungle zamindars it was decided to set up a base at ‘Thannah of Bulrampore,’ northwest of Midnapore. In Rennell’s map this point is located close to Barabhum (Burra Boom), Manbhum (Manboom), Amiyanagar (Aminagur) and Dhalbhum (Dolboom) parganas—towards Patcoom and Tomaar—all centres of the Bhumij revolt of the 1830s. These places were located in northwest Midnapore and the south Manbhum region (present south Purulia).57 Graham and Fergusson decided that those zamindars that would pay revenue and give assurance of good conduct for the future were to be allowed to remain free, while those refusing submission would be proceeded against. The zamindars of Dharinda and Karnagarh, which were proximate to the headquarters, were to provide support to Fergusson. The zamindaris which came under close observation of Fergusson from his encampment at Tannah Bulrampore and camp Derwah were Jhargram (Jargong), Kalyanpur (Colienpore) and Fulkusma (Phulkusama). Fergusson’s army was provided with two Indian guides or informants, who were considered competent because of their acquaintance with the families and possessions of the jungle zamindars. While on his way to encounter the zamindar of Jhargram, Fergusson had the roads repaired, and halted at a village called Bangora. He did not travel in the night as the ‘roads would not admit of proceeding further in the night.’ His campaign against the Jhargram zamindar showed that he was conversant with the terrain and also the routes that emerged from there. He was instructed to follow the northwest route towards Bulrampore 160

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after completion of business at Jhargram. These facts show that Fergusson and his contingent were not unaware of the nature of the terrain. Fergusson encountered two zamindaris, those of Jamboni (Jambuna) and Jatboni (Jatbunie), on his march towards Bulrampore. On reaching Bulrampore, he met the zamindars of Amiyanagar (Ameynagur) and Supur (Suphur). But he encountered resistance from the zamindar of Ghatsila (Gatseelea) who ‘had posted troops in all the avenues and inlets to his parganas’ and was said to be determined not to admit a Firingi in his province.58 Thus within a span of about a month, Fergusson was able to bring to submission those zamindaris that were located within the ambit of Midnapore on the east and Bulrampore on the west. These were the zamindaris located in the parganas of Ramgarh, Sankacoolia, Jamboni, Jatboni, Bulrampore and Jhargram. It is evident from the communications between Fergusson and Graham that the former could not move further to the west as he came up against unknown places, people and rulers of those territories.59 One comes across uncertainties in Fergusson’s correspondences from February 1767 onwards. He could not make himself acquainted with or be familiar with the zamindaris located farther away within the territories of Bankura and Manbhum. He was uncertain about the zamindaris of Chhatna, the Raja of Pachet and the zamindari of Barabhum. At this stage, both Fergusson and Graham had to read the signs of political acceptance of authority or reluctance amongst the mostly Bhumij zamindars. The on-feld experience of Fergusson was complemented by Graham’s distant observations that the non-attendance of the zamindars of Supur and Ameynagur, the backwardness of the zamindar of MhanBhoom, the evasion and equivocation of the zamindar of Chatna and the total silence of the zamindar of Burra Boom showed that they had not learnt to value their submission to colonial authority as they were not as ‘tractable’ or ‘civilized’ as those who were located close to the seat of British power.60 Following such misapprehensions about the people and the leaders of the localities, the aggressive military approach was chosen. Midnapore territories, as mentioned above, were ceded to the Company in late 1760 as an arrangement between the Nawab and the Company to provide the latter with a base for funds that would be suffcient for the cost of its military operations in Bengal. The Company was the power behind the throne of Bengal subah but without any claim to wield sovereign power which was formally vested in the Nawab of Murshidabad.61 From 1765 onwards, the fction of the Nawab as the sovereign continued, but the Company had power and control over every territory that the Nawabi could have within it. But in the Jangal Mahals there were territories held by princely dynasties which were autonomous, as signifed by the term peshkashi or tribute-paying. These were beyond the bounds of the settlement process under the Nawabs, and further to the west in Chhotanagpur and Palamau, there were semi-independent principalities.62 161

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Military operation as ethnographic survey The obduracy and recalcitrance of the zamindars caused military operations which brought the Company face to face with the populace of the region. In a sense, it was an ethnographic discovery. Fergusson’s notes give enough information regarding the ethnicity of the population and also about the stratifcations existing in the tribal society. The stretch of territory extending from zamindaris at a distance from the Midnapore headquarters namely Jatbunie and Jambunie, to Ghatsila and Barabhum formed the geographical region within which the political and military forces operated. While the zamindar of Dhalbhumgarh resided at Ghatsila fort, his nephew stayed at Barabhum to the north of Ghatsila. Zamindars of Jatbunie and Jambunie were rivals to the Dhalbhum zamindar, who aided the Company’s army.63 Local perception of the offcers of the Company was that as one moved away further from the centre of the district to the margins of the territory the people they encountered were less ‘tractable’ or ‘civilized.’ Thus the people of the Tannah Bulrampore, the Company’s frst military outpost away from Midnapore, to the west, were perceptibly ‘tractable’ and ‘civilized,’ but those of Amyanagur, Mhan Bhoom, Chatna and Burra Bhoom were not. It was also believed that ‘leaving them time to recollect themselves has been generally known to produce in them a degree of imperiousness, self-suffciency and obstinacy.’ This meant that there the tribal population could return to their ‘primordial’ state of existence if not held by subjugating superior forces. That the British viewed the tribal self-suffciency as a cause for the other two dispositions i.e. imperiousness and obstinacy is also signifcant.64 So the advice was that no time should be lost in subjugating the population and its leaders. Company offcers and forces were also familiarising themselves with people in their vicinity. Without any real reason for perceiving them to be more ‘civilized,’ the offcer—in this case, the Resident of Midnapore, John Graham—considered the nearby people to be more dependable. The British perhaps believed that contact with civilising forces would be the ‘best longterm pacifcation policy.’65 According to Gerald Bryant, this policy was pursued in the hope that it would wean away the tribal from a life of plunder and motivate them to cultivate under-cultivated lands. Bryant argues that Graham and Fergusson, both being Scotsmen, were familiar with the British experience of dealing with Highlanders and put that into application in Midnapore. Moreover, there was the economic motivation of spreading the cultivation of cash crops like mulberry and thereby increasing the value of the land.66 Civilising mission apart, the British were perhaps seeking neutral informants and making an attempt to create a network. This was evident in the negotiations that the British conducted through their military offcer with the Ghatsila zamindar. The offcer tried to obtain the assurances of the ‘country people’ through ‘neutral persons’ that serious repercussions would 162

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not happen if the British placed a person of their choice as zamindar.67 He informed his superior that ‘further intelligence and distant negociation with country people have enabled him to take bolder steps’. But the real challenge came from material realities involved in military operations, like the terrain, jungles and roads, availability of food and water, distances involved, and most importantly, the numbers facing the British and their social bonds. While conducting the operation against Ghatsila zamindar, the offcer informed his superior that though the zamindar’s army cannot withstand the British, ‘yet they are numerous, and I dare say against people of their own caste [the rival zamindar’s army] would still endeavour to maintain the country.’68 A social vivisection of the local region and the ruling families was the only strategy that the British could adopt and thus the offcer informed his superior that ‘the most probable method is that of setting up his nephew [in the place of the existing zamindar] as he will be able to detach a great many, if not all from his uncle.’69 Most ferce resistance came from the ‘chewars’ who spread over the villages and attacked the platoons of the army with shots—probably arrows—from inside the jungles.70 The march through the jungle could be as long as 16 coss, without water or suffcient supply of food,71 and the challenge for the leaders of the army was to fnd well-supplied plains and villages and neutral informers. The biggest challenge, however, was the terrain, which was crisscrossed with nullahs and jungles and where the mass of people resisting the entry of the Company’s forces could number anything between 200 and 2,000, depending on situations.72 The surveys through the military operations made the British hopeful about success and securing allies in the future. They found that the country was not ‘barren of a fund for commerce’ as there was an abundance of iron, wax, oil, dammer and buffaloes, ‘besides the capital article of timber.’ People could be convinced to trade in these articles and till the lands, and lead a happier life than by ‘addicting themselves to theft and robbery.’ Regarding the people, though, the Company authorities were not very keen on recruiting them into the militia or British forces fghting in the Jangal Mahals. One comes across references that ‘chewar’ fghting on the side of the British had been wounded or killed, but the most signifcant fact was that 100 ‘chewars’ fought alongside 110 ranking soldiers under the leadership of four jemadars, one subahdar and one sergeant against the forces of the zamindar of Ghatsila in March 1767. This was a regularly constituted army in which the ‘chewars’ had participated.73 But this policy of inclusion succeeded till the time the British or the Company police of agrarian settlements did not touch or affect the material interests of the people of the region at large.74

Conclusion In about 90 years since Fergusson’s march, the Jangal Mahal had come within the grip of colonial power. The 1820s was a crucial decade, as 163

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resistance and what has been called ‘insurgency’ in colonial records reached its height at that point in time. Between 1760 and 1820, the early colonial power made an attempt to confront the rather unfamiliar people very often as invaders but sometimes as a friend. Though Fergusson and Graham’s army always stood at a distance, they closed in on the tribal people and enlisted them in their army as ‘chewars.’ But when the discontent of the populace became widespread the ‘chuar’ became a byname for miscreants in colonial parlance. The colonial panacea for the tribal groups was peaceful agriculture and pasturing which could make the country valuable and enhance the possibilities of commerce. But they did not anticipate discontent which was rising gradually after the British policies of land resumption and settlement progressed in the Jangal Mahal region in the early 1770s and continued till the end of the century. Around the end of the eighteenth century, the British forces were much more consolidated and less vulnerable in the region than in the 1760s. Jangal Mahal had been invaded in 1760s and the next decade saw a continuous confrontation with zamindars of the region. The 1780s witnessed the suppression of a disturbance in the adjacent Bogree region which had resonance in Jangal Mahal also. Less sporadic, more continuous and more organised ‘chuar’ uprisings began in the last years of the eighteenth century. Such organised movement of tribal groups across the entire region of Jangal Mahal reached its peak in the 1820s and 1830s. This episode in the history of Jangal Mahals has been characterised as early resistance to colonial rule in the historiography of anti-colonial movements. The limits of the British territorial jurisdictions became defnite from a rather indefnite state. In the 1760s it was rather undefned. But over the 50 years that followed, territorial acquisitions expanded and took the British administration into regions where autonomous tribal principalities internally retained the power of independent rule. However, those rulers agreed to reach a settlement with the British. But during these decades colonial power became more invasive, as it wanted to assert its control over those regions. Midnapore was no longer the frontier which it was in the eighteenth century and was now extended to encompass a wider Jangal Mahal within it. This was the ‘south-west frontier’—a fxed entity very different from the moving military frontier of the eighteenth century—of the Bengal Presidency. This ‘frontier’ had special characteristics as it was distinctly different from its hinterland in ecological, ethnic and cultural terms, and hence the administration of society and economy was marked by a recognition of that difference. The particular and concrete expression of this administrative zone was the South-West Frontier Agency formed in 1833 by Regulation XIII after the Kol rebellion.75 This was comprised of the districts of Ramgarh, Jangal Mahal, parts of Midnapore, Ranchi and Doranda. The South-West Frontier eventually included ‘Manbhoom or Purulia, Chota Nagpore, Sub-Division of Kornda, Hazareebaugh, Sumbhulpore.’76 The wide swath of region extending from 164

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lower Bengal to northern Orissa and the borders of the Central Provinces was a settled and fxed frontier region by the mid-nineteenth century. The report of Henry Ricketts traces the bureaucratic transition from military administration to a civilian one with clear emphasis at various points on the economic potential of the region.77 Singbhoom, bordering the district of Midnapore, was another tribal region, inhabited by the Kols and led by their Peers, which was also covered by the extensive report made by Ricketts, but separately.78 The region was known as Kolhan or ‘Colehan,’ a part of which—Dhalbhum—was within Midnapore since 1760. The other important places within the Kolhan are Mohurbunge (Mayurbhanj), Keongur (Keonjhar), Porahat, Seraikela and Kursawa (Kharsawan). The focus of the administration in this district was to effect a transition from a traditional political and administrative system to a colonial one, which had become imperative for the British after the series of revolts that had engulfed the region for about three decades. The economic potential of the region was unravelled by the mid-nineteenth century. This consisted of natural resources like forest products, artisanal products like brassware, minerals and huge potential for labour. Along with this discovery, the meaning and content of surveys also changed. The surveys were now more related to the sources of public revenue, or were conceived as revenue surveys, the records of which as Welby Jackson, Judge of the Sudder Court said, were records of assets which were ‘the most important State papers.’ Thus the functions of the survey were now associated more closely with the duties of the fscal department.79 Revenue management and pacifcation of the internal domain were twin compulsions of the British Empire that was gaining importance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Surveys and military operations were instruments to realise the objectives.80 Surveys as a channel of information and knowledge and military as an institution of the colonial empire had been interlinked since the early days of British settlement as a commercial and political power in Bengal. Survey historians like RH Phillimore and CR Markham had constructed detailed periodisation for the different types of surveys that were put in operation within the empire. But the accretion of knowledge and the expansion of empire took the relation between surveys and imperial compulsions to a higher plane and empire became the feld for the demonstration of the glory of national science. In the 1760s, however, imperial glory was not a certainty and scientifc accomplishments had not scaled such heights as in the mid-nineteenth century. But by then the ‘ineluctable’ link between the imperial expansion and knowledge through the surveys had been established.

Notes 1 Lr. No. 145, John Graham, Resident at Midnapur to Lt. Fergusson, 12th March 1767 in WK Firminger (ed.), Bengal District Records, Midnapur, 1763–67, (henceforth BDRM), Calcutta, 1914, p. 115.

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2 Jadunath Sarkar (ed.) Bengal Nawabs, ‘Ahwal-i-Mahabat jang’ by Yusuf Ali, Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 1952, pp. 141–2. 3 Home Miscellaneous Series (henceforth HMS) vol. 47, Midnapore Province; in what manner divided its state when possession was taken by the Company, National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi. 4 BS Das, Civil Rebellion in the Frontier Bengal (1760-1805), Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1973, p. 45. 5 Steven DeCaroli, ‘Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty’ in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (ed.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford, 2007, pp. 48–9, p. 51; Philip Stern, The CompanyState: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 8–9, p. 65, p. 206, p. 313. Here we are at the crossroads of two notions of sovereignty: the idea of sovereignty in a plain sense following Max Weber and the Westphalian notion of sovereignty of nation-states—which is also critiqued—and the idea of sovereignty which arises through a bonding between the ruler and the subject. The acquisition of sovereignty by the Company, in the formal sense ‘of sovereign administrative and juridical authority over the great expanse of eastern India and its great populations of peasant and landlords,’ in 1765, according to Philip Stern, had a long pre-history which saw the evolution of the East India Company as a Corporate-Sovereign entity. It pushes back the history of the creation of sovereignty backwards, critiques the conventional defnition of sovereign nationstate concept and argued that a corporate entity could ‘rule as a substitute’ for subordinate subjects of the same ethnicity in an alien territory. But Stern’s discourse does not allow the question as to how the acquisition of sovereignty by the East India Company translated eventually into an accepted form of sovereignty amongst alien people. That takes the history of sovereignty creation forwards. For Stern on these points refer to pages mentioned above and for the theorisation on the Company’s devolution to an economic category, p. 313. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II,2), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, p. 3. 7 The Calcutta Magazine, No. XXIX—May 1832, Calcutta, 1832. pp. 121–126; Judicial Criminal Proceedings, Cons. 3 May 1833, Military Board to GovernorGeneral in Council, 9 April 1833, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata. 8 RH Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, Dehra Dun, 1945, pp. 27–31. 9 ‘An Actual Survey, of the Provinces of Bengal, Bahar &c. by Major James Rennell Esq. Engineer to the Honorable the East India Company.’ Published by permission of the Court of Directors from a drawing in their possession by A Dury. Andrew Dury (1742–1830) was a London-based engraver and mapmaker. 1776, London. Also Manmohan Chakrabarti, A Summary of Changes in the Jurisdiction of Districts in Bengal, 1756–1916, revised and updated by Kumud Ranjan Biswas, Calcutta, West Bengal District Gazetteers, Department of Higher Education, Government of West Bengal, 1999. 10 Chakrabarti, A Summary of Changes in the Jurisdiction of Districts in Bengal, p. 38. 11 Gerald Bryant, ‘Pacifcation in the Early British Raj, 1755–85,’ in Patrick J.N. Tuck, (ed.) The East India Company, 1600–1858: Warfare, Expansion and Resistance, Vol. V, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 70. 12 JF Richards, The Mughal Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 168–9.

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13 K Sivaramkrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 30, pp. 34–7, p. 38. 14 Ibid., pp. 4–6. 15 ET Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, Calcutta, 1872, p. 123, p. 151. The basis of this classifcation is primarily linguistic, as Dalton said that the ‘Kolarian or Munda language is the only pre-Aryan tongue now spoken in Bihar and Bengal proper.’ 16 Ibid., p. 127, pp. 163–4. 17 Ibid., p. 163. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 164. This information is from a report of the Select Committee at Fort William quoted by Dalton. 20 Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, volume one, 1739–54, Delhi 1997 [reprint], pp. 82–83. 21 Water Resources Information System – http://www.india-wris.nrsc.gov.in/wrpinf o/index.php?title=Subarnarekha; http://www.india-wris.nrsc.gov.in/wrpinfo/ind ex.php?title=Ganga. 22 Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, vol. II Section I, 1861, Madras (reprint), p. 68. 23 RR Sethi (ed.), Fort-William India-House Correspondence vol. III, Indian Records Series, New Delhi: National Archives of India, p. 298. 24 Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 25. 25 Ibid., p. 45. 26 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 27 Ibid., p. 30. 28 Ibid., p. 21. 29 RR Sethi (ed.), Fort-William India-House Correspondence vol. III, Indian Records Series, New Delhi: National Archives of India, p. 311. 30 Das, Civil Rebellion in the Frontier Bengal, p. 46. For Bhumij role in militia consult BS Das. According to Das the ‘Chuars or the Bhumij inhabiting the hills between Ghatsila and Barabhum were the original inhabitants of the Jungle Mahals of Midnapore.’ The statement is corroborated by the fact that near relations of some zamindars of Midnapur resided in Barabhum which was within the territorial jurisdiction of Midnapur’s Resident; Lr. no 152, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 17 March 1767, pp. 119–20, BDRM. Later in course of administrative re-arrangements these territories were kept out of Midnapur district. 31 Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, p. 31. 32 Matthew Edney, The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 1. 33 Ibid., quotes Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, Michigan, 1991, p. 2 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid, pp. 3–9, for the spatial history of ‘India’; and pp. 9–16, for the relationship of the ‘conceptual equivalency between the subcontinent, India and the Mughal Empire’ and ‘a legitimate delegation of the Mughal authority to the British’ (p. 12)—an important point in the consideration of the question as to how far the British authority could extend after 1765. 36 Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, pp. 30–1. 37 HMS vol. 47, Midnapore Province etc. NAI 38 Lr. no. 109, Graham to Fergusson, 30 January 1767, pp. 82–4, BDRM. 39 Home Miscellaneous Series, vol. 47, Midnapore province etc. NAI.

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40 Lr. no. 19, p. 16, Letter to Anselm Beaumont from Council Calcutta, 18 July 1764 on charges of collection and asking him to maintain a clear distinction between revenue charges and investment charges; BDRM, Lr. no. 72, Graham to Sumner, 25 May 1766, p. 60, BDRM. 41 Lr. no. 22, John Graham to Beaumont, enclosure letter to Council from Nawab, 3 September 1764, p. 18, BDRM. 42 Lr. no. 31 , Council to Watts, 27 December 1764, Colonel Champion as the leader of the army, p. 27; Lr. no. 68, Graham to Sumner, 25 April 1766, p. 57, BDRM. 43 Phillimore, Historical Records, pp. 40–2. On 21 January 1781, Col Pearse marched towards Madras from Midnapur to reinforce the British army after Haidar Ali defeated the Company’s forces in the Carnatic. This resulted in the production of more route surveys e.g. that by Patrick Douglas on Midnapur to Ganjam. 44 Lr. no 47& 48, Graham to Clive, 24 December and 29 December 1765; Lr. no. 60, Verelst to Graham, 17 March 1766; Lr. no 64, Graham to Verelst, 11 April 1766, pp. 41–3, 48–9, 52–4, BDRM. 45 Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 32. When Rennell completed his series of Provincial Maps in 1774 the map of ‘Midnapore to borders of Chota Nagpur’ was shown to be constructed on the basis of surveys by Carter, Portsmouth and Call. 46 Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 345. 47 Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 308. 48 Lr. no. 63, Graham to Verelst, 6 April 1766, pp. 50–2, Lr. no. 66 Graham to Verelst, 19 April 1766, pp. 54–5, BDRM. 49 Lr. no. 67, Verelst to Graham, 23 April 1766, pp. 55–6, BDRM; Phillimore, Historical Records, pp. 21–2. 50 Lr. no. 60, Harry Verelst to John Graham, 17 March 1766, p. 48, BDRM. 51 John Graham to Lt. Fergusson, 30 January 1767, quoted in Bryant, ‘Pacifcation in the Early British Raj,’ p. 71. 52 For an account of Fergusson’s survey in western jungles, see Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 28. 53 Lr. no. 236, George Vansittart to Harry Verelst, 3 August 1767, p. 174, BDRM. 54 Lr. no. 178, Verelst to Vansittart, 15 April 1767 BDRM; see Phillimore for Motte’s travel in Midnapur and the wider region. Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 30, p. 138. 55 Lr. no. 161, Graham to Claude Russell, 25 March 1767, p. 126, BDRM. 56 Lr. no. 109, Graham to Fergusson, ‘laid down a route for you’, 30 January 1767, p. 82, BDRM. 57 The centre of insurgency was the zamindari of Dhalbhumgarh or Ghatsila. This centre as understood from Rennell’s map was in ‘Narsingur’ located immediately south of ‘Gatseelah.’ The other adjacent centres of refractory zamindars were in ‘Coleapol’ in ‘Aminagur’ pargana, ‘Manboom’ in the same pargana and ‘Burraboom’ in the same pargana. South of ‘Narsingur’ is ‘Cowkpara’ or ‘Kokpara’ on Google Maps, which is the outer limit of this centre. The entire region is located between the River Kangsabati and the River Subarnarekha. 58 Lr. no. 121, Fergusson to Graham, 14 February 1767, p. 93, BDRM. 59 The above account of Lt John Fergusson’s operations and survey is formed on the basis of a set of correspondences between him and John Graham, Resident at Midnapur. These correspondences are BDRM, Lr. No 109 (3 January 1767), 112 (1 February 1767), 114 (3 February 1767), 115 (3 February 1767 from Dorwah), 117 (4 February 1767), 118 (5 February 1767 from Jargong Fort),

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60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77

119 (6 February 1767),120 (7 February 1767 from Jargong Fort), 121 (9 Feb 1767), 123 (11 February 1767 from Bulrampore), 124 (14 February 1767 from Bulrampore), 125 (14 February 1767 from Bulrampore), 126 (16 February 1767), 128 (18 February 1767), 129 (20 February 1767 from Bulrampore), 130 (22 February 1767 from Suphur), 131 (25 February 1767), 139 (6 March 1767 from MhanBoioon), 142 (9 March 1767 from Damar near Chhatna), 144 (12 March 1767 Bulrampore), 145(12 March 1767), 152 (17 March 1767 from Jambunie), 153 (17 March 1767 from Bind village 11 coss from Gatseela) and 156 (19 March 1767 from village Choukla). The places mentioned and the dates give us an idea that the Midnapur Resident had control over territories as far as Chhatna in Bankura and Manbhum in Manbhum district, and the operation continued for three months; pp. 81–126, BDRM. Lr. no. 131, Graham to Fergusson, 25 February 1767, p. 105, BDRM. Even in 1784 the Company’s government in Bengal was apprehensive that their measures might affront the Nawab of Bengal as an encroachment upon the exclusive right as successor to former subahdars of Mughal Bengal. There was no question of claiming sovereign rights, West Bengal State Archives, Proceedings of the Committee of Revenue cons. 17 June 1784, pp. 21–22. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, p. 127, pp. 164–5. The Cheros of Palamau had almost independent principalities till the accession of the British government and after 1813 their collateral branches had extensive estates. The Mundas or Kols had families who could qualify to be rulers of the region, like the raja of Chhotanagpur. According to Dalton, ‘The Mundaris say they had no Raja when they frst took up the country, now called Chutia Nagpur. They formed a congeries of small confederate states. Each village had its chief also called a Munda, literally “a head” in Sanskrit.’ Lr. no. 152, Lt Fergusson to Graham, pp. 119–20, BDRM. Lr. no. 134, Graham to Lt Fergusson, p. 105, BDRM. Bryant, ‘Pacifcation in the Early British Raj,’ p. 71. Ibid. Lr. no. 159, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 24 March 1767, p. 126, BDRM; also, Bryant, ‘Pacifcation in the Early British Raj,’ p. 72. Lr. no. 158, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 22 March 1767, p. 125, BDRM. Lr. no. 158 Lt Fergusson to Graham, 22 March 1767, p. 125, BDRM. Lr. no. 156, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 19 March 1767, p. 122, BDRM. Lr. no. 158, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 22 March 1767, p. 124, BDRM. Lr. no. 153, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 17 March 1767, p. 120, Lr. no. 139, Lt Fergusson to Graham, 28 February 1767, p. 109, BDRM. Lr. no. 163, Lt Fergusson to Vansittart, 29 March 1767, p. 128, Bryant, p. 73, BDRM. For a narrative of this history, see Das, Civil Rebellion in the Frontier Bengal, pp. 45–8. The South West Frontier Agency became the Chhotanagpur division and administered as a Non-Regulation Province, different from districts like Midnapur which were Regulation districts. No. XX, Papers relating to the South-West Frontier Comprising reports on Purulia or Manbhoom, Chota Nagpore, Sub-Division of Kornda, Hazareebaugh, Sumbhulpore and South-West Frontier Agency, authored and compiled by H. Ricketts. Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government 1854. ‘Considerable traffc exists between Purulia and Bancoorah chiefy in shell-lac, brass, utensils, tussur,’ was Rickett’s comment while suggesting improvements in communication between those two districts. He also instructed the administration

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to send 30 or 40 families of experienced weavers from Raghunathpur in Purulia district to Chaibasa, vide ‘Memorandum on the report on Manbhoom’, p. iii. Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government 1854, p. 14. 78 Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government 1854, pp. 63–4. 79 No. XVI, General Report of a Tour of Inspection, authored and compiled by Welby Jackson, Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government 1854, p. 2. 80 CA Bayly considered revenue management as decisive in the process of accretion of knowledge and referred to the surveys as an important aspect of that process since East India Company’s acquisition of Dewani, see CA Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 49. The subject of pacifcation is addressed in Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 124–6.

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8 RETHINKING DETECTION IN BENGAL Police work in the districts and the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Uponita Mukherjee

I have certainly never urged any pretensions to detective ability … I respectfully submit it would have taken the best detective a longer period than three days to trace the case. Mr Owen, District Superintendent of Police, Buckergunge District Bengal Police, 18691 Readers might think, on seeing this book, that I am a famous retired detective police, and that this is my account of the extraordinary and fascinating cases I have solved in my time. In order to rectify these false presumptions, I must state at the very beginning that though I have served in the Bengal police for thirty years in various districts around the province, I was never known to the authorities as a famous detective. Pulish Todonter Rohoshyo Rohini Kumar Basu, Inspector of Police, Rajshahi District Bengal Police, 19022

Two policemen open this chapter: a Superintendent of Police and an Inspector employed by the Bengal Police, stationed at a considerable remove from the urban centre in Calcutta in the countryside of southern Bengal, and both complaining about the long shadow that a certain group of police offcers styled ‘detectives’ had cast on their work and professional reputation. This chapter is about ‘detective policing’; a distinctive branch of police work that emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century in Bengal and which was the source of both Owen and Basu’s shared

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frustration. My frst attempt in this chapter is to draw historiographical attention to a branch of police work which is so often neglected in South Asian police histories, where police ‘prevention’ of gang robberies, riots and various forms of public disorder dominate; where detective policing, if mentioned at all, tends to get confated entirely with preventive policing.3 Against the dominant grain of existing police histories where the colonial police are studied to track the broader ideologies of colonial rule, in this chapter, I take a cue from a more recent body of historical work—the attention that it pays to the everyday and routine aspect of police work in South Asia—to tell the story of criminal ‘detection’ as it emerged and developed in British Bengal across the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.4 My second aim is to correct the misconception that detection was the exclusive purview of offcers of the Detective Department based in the city. Here I engage with the pioneering work of Sumanta Banerjee on police detectives in late nineteenth-century Calcutta, but I show that the history of colonial detective police extended well beyond the confnes of urban life in colonial Bengal.5 The administrative reforms which introduced the New Police System in Bengal in the early 1860s instituted ‘detective policing’ as a mandatory and essential part of regular police work for offcers in urban centres and districts alike.6 Indeed, archival records show that even before the Detective Department was instituted in the city, experiments with organising a select group of offcers for specialised detective work had already started in the Lower Provinces of Bengal around 1863.7 Banerjee is not alone in assuming that the fgure of the detective was a quintessentially urban phenomenon. The city detective’s domination of the discourse of detection, which was noted by contemporary police administrators in Bengal, continues to endure in more recent social histories of crime and popular movements in nineteenthcentury Calcutta.8 My third aim is to interrogate precisely this twinning of the city and the fgure of the police detective. Why did contemporary observers (and subsequently urban historians) of Calcutta come to identify police detectives as the exclusive product and characteristic feature of the colonial urban-scape? Why did the detective experiment never quite take off in the districts despite having started out there? How did the city detective go on to capture the imagination of the Bengali reading public and present-day historians alike? To look for an answer to these questions I will zoom in and out of the city and its surrounding districts (particularly the Lower Provinces of Bengal) to compare and contrast the ways in which practices of detecting crime developed differently across these spaces. Here, this chapter dovetails with the thematic focus of the present volume: I analyse detective work as the function of the varying local conditions in which police offcers ‘detected’ crime in Bengal. 172

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A department for detectives The idea of a Detective Department as a specialised and autonomous unit of the police was an absolute institutional anomaly in the extensive police reforms of the early 1860s which introduced the New Police System in the Bengal Province. While the Police Commission report of 1860 had clearly recognised detective policing as one of the two essential limbs of regular police work in the colony, it had explicitly stated that ‘no separate branch of the service [was to] be formed and that every part of the Police be held responsible for every duty preventive and detective properly belonging to it.’9 This structural ambiguity of detective policing—at once separate from and identifed with regular police work—coloured the way its career played out in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a striking departure from the prescriptions of the Police Commission of 1860, Detective Departments were created in Bengal in both the districts and the city: a Special Detective Force was introduced in six districts of the Lower Provinces of Bengal in 1863, and a Detective Department was set up in Calcutta in 1868.10 While these detective offcers were expected to perform ‘special’ duties, at no point was the precise nature of these duties clearly spelt out. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, detective policing was broadly understood by police authorities in opposition to the more easily defnable methods of preventive policing; the latter’s driving imperative was literally to ‘prevent’ crime by tracking the location, movements and histories of already-identifed groups of criminals and keeping them under close surveillance. Detective policing, on the other hand, involved the work of investigation after a crime had been committed. In other words, when preventive mechanisms had failed, policemen were required to ‘detect’ who had committed the crime, how and under what circumstances, from scratch, without reliance on surveillance techniques. In practice, however, the detection of crime had become reliant on preventive methods. By the middle of the nineteenth century, preventive policing had already gained a frm footing in the colonial police—its tools and methods were clearly defned and colonial policemen were largely familiar with their use and provisions. The long years of the Thuggee campaign in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the litany of iconic legislations that it had spawned, had frmly established the idea that the principal criminal threat in the colony was posed by specifc criminal ‘castes’ and ‘tribes.’ Preventive policing was organised precisely as an extension of this logic and its mainstay was the extensive body of knowledge that had been acquired about these criminal castes and tribes.11 To prevent crime, policemen simply had to keep these select set of castes and tribes under close watch. The detection of crime, in its turn, also by and large relied on this ever-expanding corpus of intelligence and surveillance reports on already-identifed criminal groups and ‘bad characters’ in the Bengal Province. A Circle Inspector’s Manual 173

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from 1919 in Bengal advised investigating offcers that in order to detect crime ‘he must know his bad characters and their movements.’12 Around 1887 a police offcer in Calcutta explained that the city abounded with professional criminals ‘who follow no other occupation than that of crime for a livelihood.’13 Detection, as a consequence, had become an exercise in bringing already-familiar, and in most cases, the ever suspect ‘bad characters’ and ‘recidivist’ criminals back to the book. Policemen foundered when they had to track a criminal about whom nothing was available in their database. In the 1860s, this unsatisfactory state of detective work of the police had drawn the attention of the authorities. In the city and the districts alike, steps were taken to ‘improve the detective abilities’ of the force. One ready corrective was the institution of autonomous Detective Departments dedicated to pre-trial investigative work. Superintendent Owen and Inspector Rohini Kumar Basu, the two policemen we started our story with, mark two points in the chequered career of criminal detection in colonial Bengal. They provide snippets of the ways in which both offcial and popular imagination of the fgure of the detective had changed from the middle of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. While both Owen’s and Basu’s account register detective offcers as a signifcant (albeit undesirable) presence which they (as regular policemen) had to grapple with, it is important for us to note that their frustration is directed at two rather different kinds of detective offcers. In 1869, Superintendent Owen was deeply resentful of the comparison that his superior executive district offcer had drawn between Owen’s work and a certain Mr Reily, who had been appointed the Special Detective Superintendent of the Lower Provinces in Bengal in 1863. In other words, his rivalry was with another provincial detective offcer. By the turn of the century, the fgure of the detective that Rohini Kumar Basu was trying to distance himself from (not without a hint of resentment) was a city detective. Indeed, long before Basu was writing in 1902, the experiment with the Detective Department in the districts of Bengal had failed spectacularly. The Special Detective Forces which were introduced in six districts in the Bengal Province in 1863 were dissolved by 1870.14 In 1868, right around the time when the Special Detective Force had begun to show its cracks in the districts, a Detective Department was instituted in Calcutta. This institution, in its turn, has had a rather long run—it continues to operate till this date. The early demise of the Detective Department in the district did not mean that the work of detecting crime had ceased; detective work continued to be carried out by regular policemen in the absence of offcers designated as ‘detective offcers.’ Rohini Kumar Basu’s diatribe against ‘detective offcers’ in 1902, however, is telling because it tells us that in the course of the nineteenth-century, detective work had become associated somewhat exclusively with the fgure of the ‘detective’ police despite the fact that detective work was daily carried out by regular policemen throughout the period 174

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and beyond. And the survival of the Detective Department in the city and its failure in the districts meant that by the closing years of the nineteenth century, detective work had become virtually synonymous with offcers of the Detective Department in Calcutta. In this chapter, I argue that the close association of police detectives and the urban environment was neither pre-given nor inevitable or natural, rather it was produced historically in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, I frst turn to the colonial archive to search for its roots in the development of policing practices and institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were specifc local factors that determined the outcomes of offcial experiments with Detective Departments, and these local conditions varied vastly between the city and the provinces. These local conditions were, at one level, structural features of the city and the district as distinct natural and social spaces. At another, they comprised of the ways in which the authorities involved in these specifc sites responded to and negotiated with these conditions. And it was the nature of these negotiations with local conditions that ultimately determined the fate of the police Detective Departments—their success in the city and failure in the district police. Second, I pay close attention to the ways in which the fgure of the detective was produced at the interface of developments within colonial administrative institutions and popular perception of police work. I will demonstrate the role that literature played in creating the virtual identifcation of the detective with the city by examining the emergence of detective fction as a distinct genre in the Bengali language in the late nineteenth century, where the city police detective emerged as a heroic fgure and captured the imagination of the larger public. We will begin our story with District Superintendent Mr Owen.

Detective debacle in the districts I In the summer of 1869, FB Simon, the Commissioner of Dacca, one of the largest divisions of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, called for a special report from Mr Owen, the District Superintendent of Police of the Buckergunge district. The gomastah or manager of the absentee landlord of Lakhepur had been murdered and Simon was extremely displeased with what he thought had been an slow, convoluted and ultimately fruitless investigation that the police had conducted under the leadership of Mr Owen. In subsequent communication with the Secretary of the Government of Bengal, Simon distilled his displeasure in a short but devastating sentence: ‘He [Mr Owen] is, I consider, wanting in detective ability.’15 He added, ‘he [Mr Owen] had always hitherto been accustomed to a slow way of doing work … all that had been done in this case in six weeks would have been effected and more by a competent detective in three days.’16 Simon’s chief grouse with Owen’s investigation had indeed been its length; it had taken the police a total of 175

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29 days, almost a month, to wrap up the investigation and send witnesses and an accused up to court for trial. If there was any rule-of-thumb for detective work in the police force, it was that ‘all depends on the frst actions of the Police.’17 That success in detection was a matter of promptness and ‘economy of time’18 was repeated time and again. In 1864, TE Ravenshaw, the Magistrate of Patna, asserted: I know the necessity of striking the iron while it is hot, and promptly following up every particle of clue  …  before the perpetrator can have had time either to concoct a plausible story or tamper with evidence, which might be disfavorable to them’19 It was a truism that found its way into police manuals and lectures in police training schools throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One lecturer at the Bengal Police Training School in Surdah explained: You may ask me: ‘If the case is reported at midnight should we start at once, may we not wait till dawn?’ My answer is: You should start at once, you should not wait till dawn, you must bid farewell to sleep for the night … your frst work should be to go to the place of occurrence without loss of time.20 Owen, therefore, had failed on precisely that ground. But this was only strike one. As it turned out, Owen was physically absent and, in fact, not in charge of the investigation for the absolutely crucial initial hours of the police inquiry. A Head Constable, an offcer far down in the offcial chain of command from the Superintendent and therefore presumed unft for conducting the investigations of a somewhat high-profle case—the murder of a local zamindar’s agent—was left to search the crime scene, question witnesses and round-up potential suspects. Owen had entered the fray (according to Commissioner Simon) six crucial days too late. Here Owen had failed the second fundamental commonsense about ‘detection’ which had gained strong grounds in the colonial police. It was widely understood that the success of criminal detection was a function of the amount and quality of supervision and guidance that superior (more educated and, more often than not, European) offcers afforded their subordinates in the force. By the 1860s, police work was inextricably tied up with the institutions of law. Police fndings in criminal cases were sent up to criminal courts for legal prosecution. The colonial administration felt that policemen at the lower levels of the force—head constables, in particular, along with Inspectors and Sub-inspectors—were generally unable to deal with legal technicalities. A well-conducted investigation was one where there was constant, close communication and coordination between offcers across the 176

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departmental chain of command, from the chowkeydars, Head Constables, Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors at the bottom to the more senior offcers at the top, especially the District Superintendent of Police. In 1876, one District Commissioner of the Lower Provinces in Bengal, refecting on the failure of the district police in a series of murder cases, stated: what [the policemen] want is not merely detective ability, but direction of their detective efforts at the hands of their District Superintendent  …  I have seen many cases in which a little judicious supervision on the part of the District Superintendent of the working of their subordinates would have contributed to no small degrees of success of cases. He went on to lament: But the tendency on the part of the District Superintendent has been to leave all the conduct of the cases to the investigating offcers, to register the result of such investigations when complete, but not to direct or control investigation while in progress.21 Indeed, the district authorities’ dissatisfaction with the ‘detective ability’ of the police often went hand in hand with complaints about the lack of supervision by the District Superintendent.22 In other words, Owen was not alone. According to the narrative presented by senior district administrators throughout the nineteenth century, District Superintendents were regularly falling short of their supervisory duties in criminal detection; the annual reports are replete with complaints from District Commissioners to exactly this effect. In fact, the initiative to form a stand-alone specialised detective unit in the districts had failed precisely on that count. Mr Reily, the offcer who had been appointed the Special Detective Superintendent to lead that enterprise in 1863, and incidentally the very person that Commissioner Simon had held as the ideal to compare Owen’s purported inferior work to in 1869, had failed in his supervisory role and had taken down the entire experiment with him.

Detective debacle in the district II In 1863, just as the existing Department for the Suppression of Dacoity was abolished and its offcers were being absorbed into the regular police, an experimental Special Detective Force was introduced in six districts of the Lower Provinces of Bengal under Mr Reily’s supervision. Following the personal recommendations of Mr Reily, the former Dacoity Commissioner, and now the newly styled Special Detective Superintendent, the police 177

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authorities made an unprecedented effort to offcially recognise and sanction the participation of criminals in police work; no less than 244 hand-picked former criminals-turned-approvers were included in this unit alongside ‘a few frst class Darogahs who have proved themselves able detectives being added as special inspectors.’23 Despite the district authority’s unfinching faith in Reily’s capabilities as a supervisor, they were understandably nervous about this proposed inclusion of criminal approvers. C Harvey, General Superintendent of Operation for the Suppression of Dacoity pointed out that it had the potential to be ‘a most hazardous experiment.’24 The solution was to make Mr Reily the centrepiece of this entire operation. The Inspectors were given no authority to take up investigation of cases on their own accord. The main idea was to fashion the Superintendent as the central and chief node of communication between the six district units, and the Inspectors were to work under Reily’s explicit and specifc orders alone. According to the ‘Rules for the Guidance of Offcers of the Detective Department’ furnished by CF Carnac, who was then the Inspector-General of the Lower Provinces, both the Inspectors/darogahs and the approvers were ‘expected to be in daily communication with the Superintendent of the Department and keep him informed of all that goes on in the district in which they are serving, or in any other district from which they may receive information.’25 Reily’s experiment, however, did not have a long successful run. It had begun to unravel just around the time when Commissioner Simon was touting Reily as the exemplary detective to reprimand Mr Owen. CT Buckland, the Commissioner of Burdwan, who examined the abstracts of the ‘confdential’ reports submitted to Reily by the darogahs who had worked under him in the Special Detective Force, was quick to identify the root of the problem. Reily, it seems, was failing precisely along the same lines as Owen. First, the investigations undertaken by the men under him were often longwinding. Second, Reily, as it turned out, was not the model supervisor that the department had expected him to be. Buckland declared that Reily and his offcers’ efforts simply ‘do not appear to me at all satisfactory.’ It was not that Reily was incompetent, it was simply that ‘it is impossible that he should give timely attention to all that is going on.’26 Buckland admitted that while it was offcially understood that the darogahs in Hooghly (whose ‘confdential diaries’ Buckland was reviewing) were under Reily’s close watch, he had now learned ‘from the Magistrate of Hooghlythat Mr. Reily has never come to the district except perhaps to Serampore for a day, and that the Magistrate has only once received offcial communication from that offcer.’27 The notes of two darogahs, Baboo Nobokishto Ghose and Moulvie Bukaoollah, who operated under Reily in the Special Detective Force presented a picture of hapless chaos. While they had both travelled in and out of villages all over the Hooghly district, sometimes to Calcutta, pursuing more than one case at a 178

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time, nothing of importance had been found in any of the cases. Buckland notes on Nobokishto Ghose’s diary, for instance, reads: several of this offcer’s diaries are useless, as merely informing … he had gone to Calcutta on instruction from the Inspector-General [Reily], or that he had missed the train, and at some place entering into his opinions and reasons, which were scarcely required.28 But what was most troublesome about these offcers’ activities was undoubtedly the fact that they had fouted explicit offcial restrictions on their power to search houses; they had seized property and had even held people in custody on several instances. In the process, they had both trespassed the jurisdiction of the local police authorities and earned a bad name for the police force in general by harassing the local inhabitants. If there was one lesson that this debacle taught the Bengal police authorities, it was the cardinal value of supervision in the running of a specialised unit of detective offcers. Without the presence of a competent senior offcer who could guide subordinate offcers every step of the way, the detective unit was not only ineffective in detecting criminals but potentially dangerous for the overall working of the police force. In 1870, the Special Detective Force was abolished, and its offcers absorbed into the regular force. The dissolution of the Detective Department in the districts, however, did not mean the end of detective work. It simply meant that the ‘detection’ of crime had to continue in the absence of a separate unit ftted with offcers styled police ‘detectives.’ The Special Detective Force’s trial run had been an attempt on the part of the district authorities to create the ideal conditions for detective work. In the end, however, the experiment taught the Bengal Police important lessons in the limitations of its own resources and organisation. The reality of criminal detection by the district police had to take into account the local conditions within which policemen operated in the vast swathes of rural Bengal.

Detective work in the districts Following the reprimand that Owen had received from Commissioner Simon for his failings in the detection of the local gomostah’s murder in Buckergunge in 1869, the agitated District Superintendent of Police had written a lengthy, if not wordy, reply. His letter, addressed to the InspectorGeneral of his district, his immediate superior in the offcial hierarchy, is a valuable historical source that affords us a glimpse into the conditions of detective work in the districts of Bengal. The reason the Head Constable had to take charge of the investigation, Mr Owen explained, was because the Sub-Inspector of the station was 179

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about a day’s journey distance from the scene of the murder, was absent at the time enquiring into another case of murder still further distant from it, and the Inspector was at a place north of Burisal investigating, by the order of the Joint-Magistrate, a charge of wrongful confnement against a zemindar. Owen himself was kept busy at the headquarters not only with regular station work but also at the Sessions Court where ‘cases fxed for trial [in] dacoity cases not being complete … [he] was obliged to wait [for] 11 days’ for its prosecution to fnish.29 The picture presented by Owen—that of a few men struggling to carry out a wide variety of offcial work across an extensive area with minimum infrastructure—was not atypical. It is important to note that both the chief and deputy Inspector-General of Police of the Lower Provinces, Owen’s immediate seniors in the department, rose to defend him as a sincere and competent police offcer. Indeed, in the course of the late nineteenth century, the top brass of the district police (i.e. Inspector-Generals and Deputy Inspector-Generals) and the executive district administrators (i.e. Magistrates and Commissioners) had begun to diverge in their evaluation of police detective work in the districts. The former, better aware of the conditions of detective work at the ground level than the executive and judicial offcers, tended to be more forgiving of the Inspectors, Sub-Inspectors and Head Constables who conducted the bulk of on-site investigative work. The annual reports of the police department of the Lower Provinces of Bengal are replete with district Inspector-Generals taking pains to point out to complaining divisional Commissioners the ‘practical diffculties in the way of subordinate investigating offcers obtaining advice from … District Superintendent.’30 In 1881, one Inspector-General explained: It is often not easy for a District Superintendent to personally investigate cases without causing detriment to his other work. Personal investigation renders it necessary for him to absent himself from Head-Quarters, and given [sic] up the control over the proceedings of his subordinates in other important cases which he may be directing. It also interfaces with his inspection duty … it is very diffcult to guide investigation … if the place of occurrence is at a distance.31 These concerns were echoed by another Inspector-General, RB Hugh-Buller in 1916. He wrote, [T]here is a considerable amount of detective ability latent in the force which would rapidly assert itself if given a fair chance. 180

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Under existing conditions the station offcer is set an impossible task. He is overwhelmed with a mass of routine and miscellaneous work … and is at the same time expected successfully to investigate on an average of hundred cases a year.32 The central idea, cogently framed by Hugh-Buller, was not new. His predecessors in the offce of the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, called upon annually to assess and report on the work of policemen in charge of investigating criminal cases in the districts, had followed exactly the same line of argument—poor police performance needed to be assessed in the light of the sheer volume of work these men had to perform in a department that was perpetually under-staffed. After all, as one offcer pointed out: ‘that the lighter the district [and] the less work to do the police do well.’33 The matter of fnding a supervisor with the required time and skill to nurture and train the ‘detective abilities’ of the investigating offcers was not an easy task given the overall organisation and strength of the Bengal police as it stood in the wake of the extensive 1860s police reform. The historian Erin Guiliani shows that the offcial policy adopted on the eve of the introduction of the New Police in Bengal was to reduce the presence of British-controlled police in the provinces as much as possible. She writes, ‘Bengal was evidently “under-policed”; the overall population was around 40 million, and the strength of the regular police force remained low at around 25,000 men.’34 This had meant an increase in both the volume and types of duties that were assigned to offcers who were enrolled on the force. There was little space for leisure and especially those offcers in the upper echelons on the department’s hierarchy—in particular, the District Superintendent of Police who was looked on most for supervisory functions—were perpetually pressed for time. It was no surprise that despite having identifed the problems which had caused the detective experiment to fail, the authorities could do little to redress them and prop the Detective Department up on its feet. The detection of crime was left to the regular police who had to carve out time from an already busy schedule cramped with an array of sundry (preventive) police work—watch and ward, daily patrol, court duty, etc.—to identify and pursue the perpetrators when a crime was reported. Added to this was the nature of the terrain that had to be managed by a limited number of men with minimal resources and infrastructural support. As one policeman pointed out, the men in the Bengal police ‘exercise jurisdiction over large areas defcient in roads or other means of communication.’35 In 1877, the Commissioner of Buckergunge admitted that ‘detection [of crime] ought to be simple impossibility … The rivers are enormous, and are fed by numerous khalls intersecting the country in all directions, the police stations are few and far between, the patrol boats insuffcient in 181

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number.’36 Owen’s letter from 1869 also provides a vivid account of these inclement working conditions. He wrote, My stay in the village for fve days, where on account of large trees there was no ventilation and cooped up in a boat, in a small tidal khall barely 30 feet wide, with hogla jungle on one bank, brought on an attack of diarrhea, accompanied by a low fever. This, combined with the fact that there was no Civil Surgeon at the time at Burisal, compelled me most reluctantly to leave the investigation of the case in the hands of the … Inspector.37 What made matters worse was the thorny issue of police jurisdiction. While the authorities had, for the smooth running of affairs, divided up the province into discrete administrative units—the province constituted of large divisions which were further divided up into districts and police circles comprising of individual thanas—illegal activities were daily carried out by individuals who paid little attention to these boundaries. Indeed, contemporary sources show that the criminals often took advantage of these administrative boundaries that restricted the mobility and actions of the policemen who were pursuing them. In the 1860s, Girish Chandra Basu was a darogah in charge of the police district of Krishnanagore. When he joined the force, Nabadwip, in the Krishnanagore district, was plagued with frequent and violent dacoities. Girish Chandra reported that after some local inquiry he found that the dacoities in his circle were being conducted by men who had their base in a neighbouring village. Girish Chandra realised the bandits had a special advantage in carrying out their raids in Nabadwip; only three villages on the western bank of the river Bhagirathi formed a part of the Nabadwip circle, and hence fell within the jurisdiction of the Krishnanagore police. The rest of the villages were under the Bardhaman police district. If a police offcer of the Krishnanagore unit wished to arrest a criminal who resided in Bardhaman, he had to get co-ordinate his investigation with the policemen in Bardhaman. This took time and the dacoits regularly took advantage of the delay and escaped.38 While some criminals, like the ones described by Girish Chandra, moved from one district in the province to another, others managed to artfully escape the reach of the Bengal Police entirely. One provincial offcer lamented that the increase of dacoity cases in the 24 Parganas was ‘the work of Calcutta burglars.’39 Around the turn of the century, the expansion of the railways was understood to have contributed further to the number of criminals in the region. An offcer commented, 182

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both the foreign expert as well as the local professional have been quick to seize the opportunity offered by the opening up of railways and new river steamer routes to visit localities where they are unsuspected and unknown against wandering criminals … the station offcer tied to his jurisdiction … has absolutely no chance.40 One Inspector-General of the Lower Provinces gave voice to the general sense of frustration when he stated: Speaking generally, I think that the offcers subordinate to the District Superintendents are as good as we can expect for the salaries paid to them, considering how irksome, diffcult and dangerous the work is and how uncongenial much of it is … it is no matter of surprise that failures occur. I think there are fewer than might have been expected.41 The problems that plagued the detective work of regular policemen in the districts remained much the same throughout the nineteenth century and with that, the notion that the ‘detection’ of crime was a distinct kind of police work, with its own requirements which could not be met by the regular force, continued to persist. The early experiments with the Special Detective Force had sown the seeds of an idea that ‘detection’ required ‘detectives.’ Despite the detective debacle in the districts, the absence of a dedicated detective unit continued to be noted by the Bengal Police authorities. In 1882, for instance, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal lamented that ‘though in repressing crime the police have been fairly successful, detective capacity is not conspicuous in the force.’ He asked the Inspector-General if he ‘could suggest any particular measures for the organization of a special detective force.’42 Decades later, in 1916, the absence of detective offcers was noted by Hughes-Buller, the Inspector-General of Police of the 24 Parganas, in the department’s annual report: ‘The Indian Police is probably the only police force in the world denied the assistance of a trained detective staff for the investigation of serious local crime.’43 And as the century drew to its end, the urban centre of the province at Calcutta became a point of reference for the Bengal Police authorities to compare and evaluate detective work in the districts. The district authorities looked to the city, particularly the presence of a specialised Detective Department in Calcutta, as a model to aspire to. RB Hugh-Buller, for instance, was a champion for the cause. While he admitted that ‘[t]he complete separation of the station staff from the detective staff is possible only in a purely city force,’ nonetheless, he argued that ‘each district should be provided with a trained detective staff to investigate serious professional 183

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crime and they should have power to follow a criminal wherever the clue leads, unhampered by consideration of jurisdiction.’44

Detectives in the city The Detective Department started its operation in Calcutta in 1868—right around the time when the Special Detective Force was coming apart in the district. The immediate circumstances which pushed the city authorities to introduce a detective police unit were somewhat different from those in the districts—police failure in a series of well-publicised murder investigations gave the police establishment in the city the fnal push, while in the districts, the Special Detective Force was organised to tackle the rising rate of dacoity and other professional and organised crimes. Despite these differences, however, both the experiments were driven by a shared aim. It was hoped that a handful of offcers selected as ‘detectives’ and formed into a discrete unit would improve the ‘detective abilities’ of the force. In other words, they would perform, what was on paper at least, an essential part of regular police work: only they were expected to do it better than the regular policemen. They were expected to rise above the structural constraints within which pre-trial investigations were usually conducted—the overt reliance of casework on preventive methods, the persistent problems of supervision, jurisdiction and lack of resources. The district authorities had tried to work past these issues and, as we have seen earlier, they had ultimately failed. In 1868, the city authorities adopted a similar model for ‘improving the detective abilities’ of the force. On 19 May 1868, Lieutenant-Governor William Grey analysed the poor state of police performance in murder and culpable homicide cases ‘as indicating some radical defect in the material and organization of the force.’45 He added that ‘[i]t may be that the absence of a special detective branch is detrimental to effciency in this respect.’46 But it seems that the offcials in the Calcutta Police had learnt their lessons from the failures of their colleagues in the districts; they knew not to repeat the latter’s mistakes. The authorities tackled several of those issues from the very start. The proposal for the organisation of the new Detective Department bears testament to it. GD Graham, the Assistant Superintendent of Police, declared at the very outset that the detective would not be an entirely separate force, ‘and thereby cast refection on, and probably give rise to jealousy in the regular force.’ This meant that in practice ‘[t]he detective force would not, without special orders, take up cases, or take them out of the hands of the regular force.’47 But the defning feature of the Detective Department in the city that marked it out as different from the Special Detective Force in the districts was the way in which the city authorities tackled the question of supervision. Stuart Sanders Hogg, the Commissioner of the Calcutta Police, who 184

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drew up the plan for the Detective Department, clearly understood that the real issue was not simply fnding an offcer who was suitable to lead the newly appointed detective offcers. His proposal made the argument that institutional space had to be carved out in order for supervision to be exercised effciently. What accompanied his proposal for the new Detective Department, therefore, were suggestions for a series of re-adjustments in the way power was distributed within the departmental hierarchy. Hogg’s vision was to undercut the elaborate chain of command within the department and ‘bring under the control and superintendence of the Deputy Commissioner, that grade of police offcers which is immediately employed in the investigation of crime.’48 He explained: the present practice of having a case frst taken up by the Inspector, and then reported and enquired into by the Superintendent of the division before it is submitted for orders of the Deputy Commissioner, is not only useless, but, in my opinion, absolutely objectionable, as my experience in executive duties leads me to the conclusion that the system will work best and show the best results [if] the working executive head of a department [is] brought into as direct communication as possible with the subordinate who actually carry out his order.49 In a clear departure from the districts, where the District Superintendent was (and as it had turned out, in vain) looked upon to supervise and guide the activities of the subordinate Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors, Calcutta’s Police Commissioner had devised a plan that would side-step this middle fgure entirely.50 He argued that ‘for a good inspector to be perpetually watched and interfered with by perhaps indifferent Superintendents,’ was not only ‘altogether wrong in principle’ but a ‘most sure method of obtaining unsatisfactory result.’51 Hogg’s alternative was to make the Inspectors ‘more independent and … solely responsible for all that goes on in their respective thannas,’ and to ‘impose a reasonable amount of confdence and thereby to fx responsibility.’52 In turn, ‘all good services [of the Detective Inspectors] in the conduct of investigations  …  would be brought under the immediate notice of the Deputy Commissioner, and the credit would belong to them alone in lieu of being shared with the Superintendent.’ This, he argued ‘could not fail to [make the Inspectors] feel a greater deal of pride and interest in the discharge of their duties.’53 This was, in short, Hogg’s formula for ensuring good and effcient work by the Detective Department. The Detective Department’s scale of operation in Calcutta was, by design, kept modest—the branch consisted of Superintendent A Younan as the head, R Lamb as Assistant Superintendent, four darogahs or Sub-inspectors, 185

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ten head constables, ten second-grade constables and ten third-grade constables. The size of the department was further pruned down in the next couple of years. When S Wauchope took over the charge of the Detective Department as the new Commissioner of Police in 1872, he seemed pleased with the state of affairs. He wrote: one inspector, three native sub-inspectors, and seven native sergeants, who are kept at head-quarters, and are not employed in enquiries into cases except by my special orders in each case, and then only in concert with the local police … the small establishment of detective offcers under my own immediate control have proved themselves extremely useful on various occasions.54 Hogg’s initial gambit seems to have paid off. Commissioner Wauchope wrote, Formerly the detective force was most unpopular, as the members of it were constantly harassed by being deputed on enquiries into every sort of offence in all parts of the town and suburbs; whereas now their duties are comparatively light and agreeable to offcers who take pleasure, as a good offcer must, in the detection of crime … I fnd that … the whole working of the police, completely centralized as it is in my hands, is extremely simple.55 According to Wauchope’s account, a certain degree of specialisation among the offcers of the Detective Department had begun to gain grounds. He was pleased to note that [s]ome offcers are particularly well acquainted with those who commit one description of offences and others with another; one offcer knows everything about burglars, another about common thieves, and my great objects is to fnd out what men may be most advantageously employed in the detection of each kind of crime.56 A second positive effect had followed—a culture of mentorship and cooperation had also taken root. Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, a Sub-Inspector who served in the Detective Department roughly between 1878 to 1911, recalled the role that his departmental senior offcer, Special Inspector JW Bell, played in training Priyanath in detective work. He mentions at least one occasion when Bell had personally assigned Priyanath the full charge of investigating a case of theft and urged him to ‘do whatever you [Priyanath] think needs to be done in the matter.’57 Several times in the course of the investigation, however, Priyanath can be found consulting Bell on the progress he has made, often using him as a sounding board to clarify doubts and 186

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run possible lines of action by him. For instance, well into the case, Priyanath received an anonymous letter. He promptly approached Bell and in his account Priyanath writes, ‘I told him [Bell] about the letter, and the conclusions I had reached about its content.’ Priyanath recounts that ‘I was pleased to note that he agreed with me.’58 During the same enquiry, Priyanath struggled to get information from a police jamadar who, he suspected, might have had something to do with the case and was extremely reluctant to cooperate. Bell intervened on Priyanath’s request and assisted him during the interrogation, asking the occasional relevant question himself. Priyanath would go on to conduct independent inquiries during his time in the department thanks in some measures to the confdence he had acquired from these early years of able training and guidance he received from a departmental senior. Wauchope read the reasons behind these positive effects back to the provisions of Hogg’s initial plan. Hogg had insisted that to ensure good performance the amount and kind of work assigned to the detective offcers had to be limited and clearly defned. Hogg’s initial proposal had stated that ‘[t]he sole duty of these men would … be to inquire into and watch heavier classes of crime, and more especially professional perpetrators.’59 Wauchope took this initial prescription a step further to resolve a problem that had created serious diffculties for police detection of crime in the districts. His plan for dealing with itinerant criminals was not to extend the mobility of the detective offcers. Rather, he took the opposite tack. He limited the services of the detective offcers to the city and its immediate suburbs; criminals beyond this area were not their concern. Wauchope wrote, I have been told, and have no reason to doubt my information, that there is a considerable amount of crime, such as burglaries, and dacoities, outside the borders of Calcutta and the suburbs, in Howrah and the 24 Pergunnahs, and that they are committed by men from Calcutta and the suburbs. Indeed, I constantly receive information from the District Superintendent of the 24 Pergunnahs Police that offences have been committed by men from Calcutta.60 While he admitted that ‘[l]ooking at the matter theoretically, the Calcutta Police should be able to prevent this state of things by watching offenders who practice in the mofussil,’ he was intent on conserving the time and energy of the detective offcers by allowing them to focus on crime in the city and city alone. He explained, ‘practically, it is impossible to … compel police to take any interest in criminals who commit no offences within its jurisdiction.’61 Within the frst few years of the establishment of the Detective Department in the city, therefore, energetic and enterprising offcers of the city’s police 187

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force had managed to carve out a niche within the departmental hierarchy where the detective offcers were afforded some of the conditions which had been deemed by police authorities across the Bengal Province, districts and the city alike, to be essential for any amount of police success in detecting crime. In this respect, the subtle but crucial ways in which the administrative structure of the city and the district differed from one another played a vital role. The 1860s administrative reforms had embedded the police establishment in the district frmly within other institutions of district administration. This overlap was personifed by the District Magistrate who was, for all practical purposes, the highest judicial and executive authority in a district. The District Magistrate was, in addition, the head of the police at the district level. Thus, a judicial offcer had been placed at the head of the district police, precisely to curtail the executive authority of the district police. As a consequence, even the highest-ranking police offcers in the districts, i.e. the Superintendents and Inspector-Generals, were left with little room to make structural and institutional re-adjustments in the police departments.62 The case of Calcutta, however, was different. By the Act XIII of 1856, the police force in Calcutta had been legally defned as separate from the city’s revenue, judicial and executive offces. The Calcutta Police was headed by a police offcer styled the Commissioner, who was responsible for police matters only and answerable directly to the Governor-General of Bengal. It was precisely this leeway, formed at the separation of judicial and executive offces in the city, which allowed enterprising men like Stuart Hogg and S Wauchope to be experimental and creative in the way they ran the city police. In addition, they had the advantage of being in charge of the city and its immediate surrounding suburbs which was much smaller, contained and less treacherous compared to the huge tracts of rural land where the Bengal Police operated. The survival of the Detective Department was therefore shaped by the timely conjunction of the appointment of particularly effcient and reformminded individuals like Hogg and Wauchope in the department and certain features which were built into the institutional layout of the city police during the decade that preceded the setting up of the Detective Department. For the police authorities of Calcutta, the Detective Department was a point of pride, though the government of Bengal was not always on the same page with them. For instance, we fnd S Wauchope, the Police Commissioner of Calcutta in 1872, not letting go of an opportunity to parade the superiority of the city detectives of the regular policemen who conducted detective work in the districts. He observed, Many of the  …  numerous classes of professional robbers and thieves in Calcutta  …  leave Calcutta for the mofussil, and I hear their performance in every part of Bengal … when arrested there, 188

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which is not often, they generally if not always, give false names and residences, so that mofussil offcers are very seldom aware of the real character of the persons they get hold of.63 Two years back, in 1870, however, the Secretary of the Government of Bengal, had observed in a short, but telling note, hand-written in the margins of offcial correspondence regarding the Detective Department in Calcutta: ‘the “success” of the schemes is not very clearly demonstrated, and I believe the police in the past years have been very “lucky.”’64 Indeed, the offcial records do not show a signifcant improvement in police detection of crime in the city. Despite that, however, the Detective Department in Calcutta had survived and most importantly over the following decades, its offcers had acquired a reputation for being more effcient and competent than their colleagues in the regular force (in the city and the districts alike). This notion was articulated by policemen like Rohini Kumar Basu—the Inspector of Police in Rajshahi we had started our chapter with. In this fnal section of the chapter we will try to put some pressure on the notion of success that had become attached to the Detective Department in Calcutta and by extension its detective offcers. Where had this perception of the superiority of the detective police offcer taken root? In this section, I argue that this image took shape and gained currency at the interface of the literary self-fashioning of certain policemen and their creative reception by the reading public in the burgeoning nineteenth-century commercial print market in Bengal.

Detectives in fction: the city detective comes into his own In 1902, Rohini Kumar Basu, an Inspector of Police in the Rajshahi district of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, authored a book titled Pulish Todonter Rohoshyo, literally The Mysteries of Police Investigation. Basu was a regular policeman, stationed at a provincial outpost in the districts, writing about his ‘real-life’ experiences of conducting investigations in the rural areas of Bengal. In several respects, Basu was not an atypical fgure in the early years of the twentieth century. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as the commercial Bengali print market was burgeoning in and around Calcutta, Bengali policemen also came into their own as published (and sometimes commercially successful) writers. Like Basu, there were some other police offcers who had turned to regale the Bengali reading public with stories of their professional life. The general reading public were no strangers to accounts of police investigations—contemporary newspapers (both English and Bengali) regularly reported accounts of ongoing police inquiries, sometimes describing the daily progress (and failure) of the police in a case at length. But accounts which were penned by policemen themselves held a special attraction for their readers: here, the readers could hear police stories from the proverbial horse’s mouth and the 189

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policemen-authors, in their turn, often made the most of this opportunity to address the general public on their own terms. A characteristic feature of these accounts is the effort that their policemen-authors took to address their readers quite directly, sometimes to ‘correct’ negative popular perceptions about the police—a profession that had garnered a singularly bad public reputation for its perceived incompetence, abuse and corruption. These accounts gave the policemen a platform to tell their own account of detective work: the effort, attention and time that individual offcers put into solving particularly challenging crimes or tracking especially wily crooks. The overall effect that these narratives aimed for by projecting individual offcers (often the authors themselves) as honest, hard-working individuals was to demonstrate to the public that not all men in the system were bad. These were appeals to the general reading public for sympathy, understanding and cooperation with the police.. Basu’s account rehashes several of these recurrent features. But Basu’s Pulish Tadanter Rohoshyo is an important historical source because in this text Basu can be found struggling to negotiate the distance that had gradually emerged between the regular and the detective police in both the realm of colonial administration and the domain of literary representation. The ‘detective’ police is a persistent presence in Basu’s text and his laboured attempts to repudiate the superiority of the detective offcers, only reinforces the latter’s primacy and ascendance. He writes, I was never known to the authorities as a famous detective, nor was I ever considered suitable for a post in the Detective Department. To be honest I never bothered to make an application to be admitted there. After joining the police, I had gradually found out that most detectives are not trusted by the court. Nor does the public hold much faith in these men. Far from receiving their adulation, the detective police are often objects of their hatred. They are not omniscient, despite which they would claim to have solved eighty to ninety per cent of their cases. This earned them many accolades from their departmental superiors. But not even ten percent of their cases could stand the test of a legal trial.65 Basu narrates the example of a detective offcer who had been found guilty of staging false crimes so that he could take credit for their pretend detection. A magistrate, apparently, had once enlightened Basu about the ‘truth of detection.’ ‘Detection,’ the Magistrate seems to have told Basu, ‘means oppression and fabrication.’ The Magistrate had, of course, added, ‘I believe you [Basu] don’t have either of these “talents.”’66 It is also clear from Rohini Kumar Basu’s writing that he was writing for an audience who had evidently made their acquaintance with policemen-turned-authors and their narratives of the police-in-action. Basu was also acutely aware of the fact 190

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that his target readership not only knew what to expect when they picked up a work authored by a member of the police force, but they had also developed a preference for stories specifcally about detectives, far worthier adversaries to criminals than ordinary policemen. Indeed, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the detective had entered the Bengali literary market quite decisively. Bengali readers had made their earliest acquaintance with the fctional sleuth in vernacular translations of European (English and French) detective novels. William Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White (1859) had been translated by Damodar Mukhopadhyay in 1884 as Shukla Basana Sundori.67 But it was only in 1893 that an author frst used the designation ‘detective stories’ to describe his literary work: he happened to be Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, an offcer of the Detective Department in Calcutta. Between 1893 and 1910 Priyanath published well over 200 stories in a serial monthly magazine called Darogar Daptar (The Detective’s Bureau). While Priyanath was quite open about adopting genre elements for his stories from European models, his stories were markedly different from European, in particular, English detective fction of the times in one crucial respect.68 Historian Haia Shpayer Mako had observed that [despite] the impact of the Detective Department at Scotland Yard on the entry of detectives in works of fction, police agents were apparently not the obvious characters to play the role of the investigators. A large proportion of the new fctional crime fghters were unconnected to the offcial forces of law and order.69 Indeed, in English detective fction, the literary sleuth, embodied in the iconic fgure of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, was a private agent whose virtuosity and genius was defned decidedly against the bumbling dim-witted police detectives of Scotland Yard. In contrast, Priyanath was the hero of his own stories. This had a massive impact on the subsequent development of the detective fction genre in Bengal. Priyanath’s self-styled ‘detective stories’ and the textual self of the detective police he created in them, seemed to have struck a chord with his readers. Darogar Daptar’s somewhat instant success had posited the detective police as the favoured hero of detective stories that were penned even by professional writers who had no connection with the police force. The iconic heroes of Bengali detective fction, in the early years of its development in Bengal during the second half of the nineteenth century, were without exception portrayed as employees of the police Detective Department. The long (but not comprehensive) list would include Panchkari Dey’s Debendrabijoy Mitra, Arindam and Akshaykumar; Kshetromohan Ghosh’s Sarat Kumar Choudhury, Saroj Kumar Mitra and Sarbabijoy Haldar; and Saracchandra Sarkar’s Shashankashekhar.70 Far from distancing their literary protagonists from the police detective, the 191

UPONITA MUKHERJEE

authors highlighted their association with the offcial forces of law and order. In 1902, Rohini Kumar Basu, the Police Inspector who had toiled in the police department of mofussil Bengal and never been associated with the Detective Department, was writing in the shadows of these police detectives.

Conclusion The city and the detective were not natural co-constitutes. As the chapter demonstrates, there were ordinary policemen carrying out detective work all across the urban, suburban and rural areas of the Bengal Province throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the career of a specialised and separate ‘Detective Department’ with specially appointed ‘Detective Offcers,’ had played out differently in the city and its rural surroundings. The detective experiment had succeeded in Calcutta, while it crashed in the districts. The chapter shows that the demise of a separate Detective Department in the districts, and its survival in the city were premised on a set of local structural factors that set the city somewhat apart from the rest of Bengal: the organisation and distribution of power within administrative institutions, the relative size of the jurisdiction of individual police units, the size of the police workforce, and the very nature of the terrain that were to be policed. The essay also shows how these structural and local factors were manoeuvred in different ways (and to starkly different effects) by individual police administrators of the Calcutta Police and the Bengal Police, respectively. The survival and endurance of the Detective Department in Calcutta had produced the general impression, among the rank and fle of the police forces, in the city and the district alike, that it took a ‘detective’ offcer to carry out the work of detection. Where there was a detective, there was detection. This historically contingent twinning of police detection with a police detective offcer was given additional and literary mileage (by at least one) urban detective offcer of the Calcutta Police, and rather successfully. I wager that our popular imagination and historiography alike have remained in thrall of that curious and contingent braiding. My attempt in this chapter has been to put some pressure on that widely held common sense through a closer inspection of the colonial archives.

Notes 1 Government Proceeding Nos. 41–43. Judicial-Police October 1869. West Bengal State Archive (WBSA). 2 Rohini Kumar Basu, Pulish Todonter Rohoshyo, Dhaka: Sheikh Abdul Gani, 1902. 3 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Basudev Chattopadhyay, Crime and Control in Early Colonial Bengal 1770–1860, Kolkata: KP Bagchi Book Sellers and

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4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Publishers, 2000; Sumanta Banerjee, The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009. Erin M. Giuliani, ‘Strangers in the Village? Colonial Policing in Rural Bengal, 1861 to 1892,’ Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 5, 2015, pp. 1378–1404; Radha Kumar, ‘Policing Everyday Life: The FIR in the Tamil Countryside, c. 1900–1950,’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2017, pp. 361–87. Banerjee, Wicked City.. The Police Commission of 1860 classifed police work broadly under the two headings ‘detection’ and ‘prevention,’ and these categories were maintained in police manuals throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1860, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, Mss Eur F161/8/11. Government Proceeding No. 27 Judicial-Police December 1863. National Archives in India (NAI). Anindita Ghosh, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860–1920, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1860. Mss Eur F161/8/11. Government Proceeding Nos. 127–34. Judicial August 1869. WBSA. Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth,” Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype—The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27 No. 2, 1990, pp. 131–64; Sanjay Nigam, ‘Discipling and Policing the “Criminals by Birth,” Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900, The Economic and Social History Review, 27, No. 3, 1990, pp. 254–87; Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; Radhika Singha, ‘Punished by Surveillance: Policing “Dangerousness” in Colonial India, 1872–1918,’ Modern Asian Studies, 49, No. 2, 2015, pp. 241–69. Kshetro Mohan Ganguly, Circle Inspectors’ Manual, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1919. Robert Reid, Every Man his Own Detective, Calcutta: W Newman & Co. Ltd, 1887, p. 195. Colonel JR Pughe, Inspector General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1871, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872. IOR/V/24/3198. Government Proceeding Nos. 127–34. Judicial, August 1869. WBSA. Government Proceeding Nos. 127–34. Judicial, August 1869. WBSA. Government Proceeding Nos. 125–8. Judicial, July 1868, WBSA. WA Gayer, Detection of Burglary in India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1920. Government Proceeding No. 145. Judicial July 1864. WBSA. Ganguly (1919) ‘An Essay on Practical Case Investigation’ addressed to the Cadets of the Police Training School, Circle Inspector’s Pamphlet. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. Colonel JR Pughe, Inspector General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1876, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877. IOR/V/24/3199, p. 96. J Monro, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1880, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1881. IOR/V/24/3199, p. 131–2. Government Proceeding No. 27 Judicial-Police Dec 1863. NAI. Government Proceeding No. 27 Judicial-Police Dec 1863. NAI.

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Government Proceeding No. 27 Judicial-Police December 1863. NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 41–3. Judicial-Police October 1869. WBSA. Government Proceeding Nos. 41–3. Judicial-Police October 1869. WBSA. Government Proceeding Nos. 41–3. Judicial-Police October 1869. WBSA. Government Nos. 127–34, Judicial August 1869. WBSA. J Monro, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1880, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1881. IOR/V/24/3199, p. 45. J Monro, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1881, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1882. IOR/V/24/3200, p. 62. CWC Plowden, Inspector General of Police, Bengal, Report of the Police Administration in the Bengal Presidency for the year 1916, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1917. IOR/V/24/3217, pp. 7–8. Colonel JR Pughe, Inspector General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1876, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877. IOR/V/24/3199. Guiliani, ‘Strangers in the Village?’, pp. 1389–90. CWC Plowden, Inspector General of Police, Bengal, Report of the Police Administration in the Bengal Presidency for the year 1916, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1917, IOR/V/24/3217, pp. 7–8. J Monro, Inspector General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1877, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1878. IOR/V/24/3212, p. 70. Government Proceeding Nos. 127–34, Judicial August 1869, WBSA. Girish Chandra Basu, ‘Sekaler Darogar Kahini’ in Arindam Dasgupta (ed.), Phire Dekha—3, Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 2011, p. 126. DR Lyall, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces,Report on the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1883, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1884. IOR/V/24/3213, p. 70. CWC Plowden, Inspector General of Police, Bengal, Report of the Police Administration in the Bengal Presidency for the year 1916, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1917, IOR/V/24/3217. DR Lyall, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces,Report on the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1883, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1884, IOR/V/24/3213, p. 95. DR Lyall, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Province,Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1882, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883, Resolution, IOR/V/24/3213, p. 17. CWC Plowden, Inspector General of Police, Bengal, Report of the Police Administration in the Bengal Presidency for the year 1916, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1917, IOR/V/24/3217, pp. 7–8. CWC Plowden, Inspector General of Police, Bengal, Report of the Police Administration in the Bengal Presidency for the year 1916, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1917, IOR/V/24/3217, p. 7–8. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. The offce of the Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent was not abolished entirely. In the revised arrangement the Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent were simply to assist the Deputy Commissioner; their supervi-

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

sory authority over the investigating Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors were terminated. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873, p. 19. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873, IOR/V/24/3198, p. 19. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873, IOR/V/24/3198, p. 24. Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, ‘Abir Jaan (Kaminir Kutilchokro Bhed),’ in Arun Mukhopadhyay, Darogar Daptar, Volume I, Kolkata: Punashcha, 2004, p. 202. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Abir Jaan’, p. 207. Government Proceeding Nos. 168–72 Finance-Expenditure A April 1868 NAI. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873, IOR/V/24/3198, p. 20. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873, IOR/V/24/3198, p. 20. The offce of the District Magistrate realized the mandate of the India Police Commission of 1860 which state, that the means to create a strong foundation for an effcient police would be to, ‘combine into one body, under a responsible Superintending Authority, and under an uniform organization and undivided control and responsibility all the numerous bodies engaged…on various duties connected with the proper civil administration of the country.’ Indian Police Commission (1860). See also Singha, ‘Punished by Surveillance’.. S. Wauchope, Offciating Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, Report on the Police of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873. IOR/V/24/3198, p. 21. Government Proceedings Nos. 21–3. Home-Police May 1870 NAI. Basu, ‘Introduction,’ Pulish Tadanter Rahasya. Basu, ‘Introduction.’ Damodar Mukhopadhyay, Shukla Basana Sundari Vol 2, Calcutta: H. M. Mukhopadhyay and Co., 1888; Mukhopadhyay, Shukla Basana Sundari Vol. 3, Calcutta: Gurudas Chatterjee, 1890. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Introduction.’ Darogar Daptar. Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 231. Panchkari De, Neel basana Sundori, Calcutta: Sailendra Nath Dey, 1904; ‘Mayabi’ (1905) inBaridbaran Ghosh, Panchkari De Rachanabali, Vol 2, Calcutta: Punashcha, 2006; Sarachhandra De Sarkar, ‘Jal Jomidar’ Goyenda Kahini, 13, No. 4 (1), Calcutta, 1896; Kshetromohan Ghosh, Chapala, 3rd Edition, Calcutta: United Press, 1910; Ghosh, Promoda, 2nd edition, Calcutta: Sri Krishna Library, 1905.

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9 INFLUX AND EFFLUX A case study of Nadia, 1947–19711 Subhasri Ghosh

Introduction This chapter looks at the demographic nuances of infux and effux affecting the Nadia district of West Bengal during the momentous time-span between the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh crisis of 1971. Culling information from census reports of pre-independent and independent India, the chapter examines, at a micro-level, how cross-border migration and subsequent relocation of population had a telling impact on the religious and demographic contours. Contrary to popular perceptions, which stress the unidirectional pattern of migration on the eastern side of India, it brings to the fore a hitherto unknown facet of partition migration. Taking a decadal view of the situation, the chapter will delve to analyse how, till the Bangladesh War of 1971, when the district was once again lashed by a huge tidal wave of migration from across the border, the fow of population remained a constant phenomenon infuencing the settlement and demographic patterns. Large-scale cross-border population movements happened along the borders of Bengal and Punjab, so that ‘a demographically signifcant population shift affecting the regional population distribution’ took place as a result of the Partition of India in 1947.2 Carved up along religious lines, the vivisection of British India led to mass displacement of minority communities on both sides of the border. The purpose of the essay is to fnd out whether this movement was unidirectional, at least in the context of the area of study. The need for the present study arises because prevalent historiography3 portrays and limits population movement along the West Bengal–East Bengal border, following the Partition of India in 1947, as essentially unidirectional, as opposed to the Punjab sector where settlement and rehabilitation of the refugees progressed through an exchange of population. The immigration of 4.9 million people from West Punjab and the adjoining areas in Pakistan was matched by an outfow of 5.5 million from East Punjab and the adjoining areas in India.4 The common refrain in the existing literature is that ‘there has been no large-scale emigration of Muslims from 196

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West Bengal’ and that migration ‘was a one-way traffc.’5 Consequently, how infux and effux affected the population composition of the border districts has somehow been glossed over in the existing historiography on displaced persons. The overall population growth of India and Pakistan between 1801 and 1961 has been studied by Mahalonobis and Bhattacharya (1976) who selected a few areas like Kanchanpur in Burdwan district of West Bengal and Broach district in Gujarat to analyse population growth.6 K Hill, W Seltzer, J Leaning, SJ Malik and SS Russell in their article, ‘The Demographic Impact of Partition: Bengal in 1947,’ take into account the three aspects of population change, namely, fertility, mortality and migration over the census decades of 1931, 1941 and 1951 (both West Bengal and East Pakistan) to analyse the changes in population growth rate.7 Their conclusion is that Bengal, between 1941 and 1951, witnessed a less dramatic homogenisation of population in religious terms as compared to Punjab and a lesser growth rate as compared to the previous decade of 1931–1941. The latter phenomenon, according to them, was essentially due to the debilitating effects of the Famine of 1943 and not by out-migration. Had the same growth rate continued, the state would have had an excess population of nine million more than what it had in 1951. Ranabir Samaddar in his The Marginal Nation: Trans-border Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal8 does highlight the aspect of the demography of the border states of West Bengal. But his focus is essentially on the post-1971 scenario, the main players being those whom the Government of India labelled as ‘illegal immigrants,’ i.e. who overstayed in India after the repatriation deadline of March 1972 or entered after that period without valid documents. Although in doing so, he sometimes refers back to the period under study, his main emphasis is on the post-1971 phase. The aim of the present study is thus to show that what Hill et al. (2005) have concluded may hold true for the whole of Bengal; but on a micro-level, if one telescopes down to an individual border district like Nadia, one can identify signifcant exceptions. The other questions that would be probed are: a) To what extent immigration from and emigration to East Bengal altered the overall demographic contours of the recipient area. b) To what extent this movement affected the constituent parts of the said areas. c) Whether the population movement had any impact on the overall religious composition. The key determinants behind population changes are fertility, mortality and migration. The present study essentially hinges on the third factor. Examining a particular sector intends to offer a more detailed understanding of the 197

SUBHASRI GHOSH

migratory fows that characterised this period and the outcome it had on the recipient areas. The fndings of demographic impact are principally based on data supplied by the Census Reports of Bengal 1941 and the Census Reports of India of 1951, 1961 and 1971. These are supplemented by information from reports of the state governments, namely various reports of the State Statistical Bureau and Intelligence Bureau reports. The main stumbling block is the disparity of data supplied by the census reports. For example, whereas in the initial years, like in 1951, one fnds a very detailed account of the displaced population, in the subsequent decades, such data are hard to fnd. While in 1941 the Hindu population has been classifed as Scheduled Castes, Other Hindus and Caste Not Returned, in 1951 the Census of India resorts to an urban–rural classifcation of religion. Again in the 1961 and 1971 reports, a detailed police-station-wise break-up of religion could be obtained. The entry point of this article, the 1941 Census, was believed to be based on manipulated data. Individual communities were believed to exaggerate in order to gain political mileage. An Intelligence Bureau report notes, ‘In Bengal, both Hindus and Muslims are determined to do all they can to insist on the proper recording (and, if possible, infation) of their population fgures.’9 On 1 March 1941, soon after the enumeration was over, Fazlul Huq, then-Chief Minister of Bengal, wrote to the Census Superintendent of Bengal, RA Dutch, that it had not been possible to stop corrupt practices in the recording of the census and that he was certain that there would be an infation of the numbers of Hindus and a decrease in the numbers of Muslims. On the other hand, the All-Bengal Hindu Mahasabha publicly thanked and lauded the enumeration agencies for carrying out their work diligently and honestly in the face of adversities, which was interpreted by the Muslim League as concrete proof of pro-Hindu bias of the enumerators. The Census Commissioner, MWM Yeatts, however, remained unmoved by such allegations and counter-allegations and felt there was nothing untoward and unusual with the Bengal fgures. Moreover, with the continuous reorganisation of district boundaries within West Bengal, the data of one decade do not frequently match with the subsequent decades. Efforts have been made to match the disparate data sets as far as possible.

The context The policy of divide and rule, which the colonial rulers had been relentlessly pursuing from the end of the nineteenth century and which gained momentum in the twentieth century with the Morley-Minto Act of 1909, ensuring for the Muslims the right of a separate electorate, fnally culminated in the creation of two separate sovereign nations, India and Pakistan, on religious lines. The Mountbatten Plan, passed by the British Parliament on 18 June 1947, formally laid down the framework for Partition. Accordingly, two separate commissions were formed, one for Bengal and the other for Punjab, 198

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with Sir Cyril Radcliffe as the common chairman, to fnalise the scheme of boundary demarcation. The main task of the commission was ‘to demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of Bengal on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, it will also take into account other factors.’10 After listening to the depositions of the concerned parties, Sir Radcliffe prepared a report on the basis of which the boundary demarcation between India and Pakistan was effected on religious lines. The event triggered off large-scale cross-border migration on the Bengal and Punjab sector in India, with the surging tide of uprooted masses lashing the newly demarcated borders of these two states. Pre-Partition Bengal comprised fve divisions and 28 districts with an area of 72,435 square miles and a total population of 60,059,472 out of which 32,998,164 (54.94 per cent) were Muslims and 27,061,308 (45.05 per cent) non-Muslims, including mainly Hindus.11 Of these, fve districts underwent alterations in their physical compositions in the sense that the police stations of these, according to the religious denomination, were divided between East and West Bengal on the Pakistan side and the Indian side respectively. Present-day Nadia lies at the heart of the Presidency division of West Bengal. On the eve of Partition, Nadia was bounded on the west by the Bhagirathi river, on the south by 24 Parganas, on the north by the Jalangi River, which separated it from Murshidabad and the Padma, which separated it from Rajshahi and Pabna, on the east by Faridpur and Jessore districts. Undivided Nadia comprised fve subdivisions and 25 police stations with a total population of 17,59,846 people, out of which 6,57,950 (37.38 per cent) were non-Muslims (mainly Hindus) and 10,78,007 (61.25 per cent) were Muslims.12 The Radcliffe Award tore the district into two, creating Nadia (West Bengal) and Kushtia (East Bengal). The former comprised two subdivisions, Sadar (later renamed Krishnagar) and Ranaghat, and 13 police stations, while the remaining three subdivisions along with 12 police stations were clubbed together to form Kushtia. However, the map appended to the Radcliffe Award that was offcially announced on 17 August 1947 told a different story. It showed that barring Nabadwip, the entire district of Nadia had gone over to East Bengal. Muslim League leaders thus hoisted Pakistan fags near the Krishnagar Rajbari and the Krishnagar Public Library ground. Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, on receiving such news, instructed Radcliffe to look into the matter. After careful scrutiny, he identifed the problem which was, in fact, a minuscule but dramatic error. A line had been drawn wrongly, due to which a large part of Nadia had erroneously gone to East Pakistan. The map was rectifed and the fnal announcement regarding the actual division took place on 18 August 1947, a full day after the formal declaration, keeping the local residents on tenterhooks.13 Newborn Nadia’s boundaries on the north, south and west, after Partition, remained unchanged. On the east, the district came to be bounded by its breakaway segment, Kushtia, and the district of Jessore of present-day 199

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Bangladesh. Nadia has a land frontier of almost 165 miles with East Bengal/ East Pakistan/Bangladesh, without any natural barrier. Of the two subdivisions of the district, Sadar accounts for the bulk of the international boundary with portions of four police stations out of eight, being contiguous to East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Ranaghat subdivision’s share in the international boundary is minimal—only two police stations: Ranaghat and Hanskhali bordering East Pakistan. The northern point is Shikarpur (PS Karimpur) and the southern extremity is Ranaghat. From north to south, Karimpur, Tehatta, Chapra, Krishnaganj, Hanskhali and Ranaghat police stations in West Bengal lie opposite Daulatpur, Gangni, Meherpur, Damurhuda, Chuadanga and Jibannagar police stations (in Kushtia). Following the 1947 partition, Nadia on the West Bengal side was fooded with migrants not only from Kushtia, its severed Siamese twin, but also from Khulna, Barisal, Dacca, Mymensingh, Pabna, Rajshahi, Noakhali and Tipperah. Overall, in terms of being a migrant-receiver, Nadia ranked third in West Bengal, behind Calcutta and 24 Parganas.

The census decades i)

1941–1951

Taking the jurisdiction of 1947, Nadia in 1941 was a Muslim-majority district with 51.25 per cent Muslims and 46.68 per cent Hindus, out of a total population of 840,303. District/ subdivision/police station Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Chapra Krishnaganj Nakasipara Kaliganj Tehatta Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah Haringhata Hanskhali Santipur

Pop. 1941

Total Hindu pop. 1941

% of Hindus to total pop.

Total % of Muslim Muslims to pop. 1941 total pop.

840,303 574,263 91,603 54,208 70,321 34,102 66,827 63,391 92,539 101,272 266,040

392,307 253,784 49,696 41,948 17,701 18,858 30,907 35,171 38,376 21,127 138,523

46.68 44.19 54.25 77.38 25.17 55.29 46.24 55.48 41.47 20.86 52.06

430,704 310,748 38,616 12,086 50,021 15,075 34,786 27,695 52,637 79,832 119,956

51.25 54.11 42.15 22.29 71.13 44.20 52.05 43.68 56.88 78.82 45.08

82,073 63,862 27,498 37,521 55,086

46,173 34,599 12,235 9,345 36,171

56.25 54.17 44.49 24.90 65.66

34,427 25,734 14,545 27,806 17,454

41.94 40.29 52.89 74.10 31.68

Source: RA Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal.

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Muslims dominated in the rural areas and Hindus in the urban: District

Rural population 1941

% of Hindus to total rural population 1941

% of Muslims to rural population 1941

Nadia

724,017

41.17

54.17

District

Urban population 1941

% of Hindus to urban population

% of Muslims to urban population

Nadia

116,286

80.98

17.20

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal

Barring the rural areas of Kaliganj (55.48 per cent), Chakdah (51.32 per cent), Santipur (61.07 per cent) and Nabadwip (50.96 per cent), the Muslims dominated the rest. While Muslims accounted for 54.17 per cent of the total rural population in 1941, they were 55.57 per cent in the Sadar subdivision and 50.80 per cent in the Ranaghat subdivision. The Karimpur-Tehatta bloc accounted for the highest concentration of Muslim population at 68.34 per cent. In case of the urban areas, the picture was just the reverse. Hindus prevailed in the urban areas of Krishnagar, Nabadwip, Ranaghat and Santipur. Post-Partition in 1947, Nadia still remained a Muslim-majority district. Out of a population of 9,01,272, Muslims formed 52.65 per cent and the Hindus 45.07 per cent. What is striking is that four years down the line, in 1951, when the fndings of the frst full-fedged census of independent India were published, there was a volte-face. The respective Hindu and Muslim share in the population of 1,144,924 now stood at 77.03 per cent and 22.36 per cent, respectively. District/subdivision/ police station Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakasipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

Total % of Total % of Hindu pop. Hindus to Muslim Muslims to Pop. 1951 1951 total pop. pop. 1951 total pop 1,144,924 881,955 702,871 502,486 249,361 214,966

77.03 71.49 86.20

256,017 194,956 29,388

22.36 27.73 11.78

116,371 159,052

78,712 91,202

67.63 57.34

35,772 67,662

30.73 42.54

178,087 442,053 286,631

117,606 379,469 188,937

66.03 85.84 65.91

58,894 61,061 22,113

33.07 13.81 7.71

155,422

96,697

62.21

31,246

20.10

Source: Asok Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia.

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The Muslim population was thus completely marginalised in terms of numbers. The signifcant growth in the Hindu population can be attributed to cross-border population movement. Between 1947 and 1951, Nadia witnessed a mammoth infux from East Bengal of nearly 426,907 Hindus. The migrants formed nearly 37.28 per cent of the total district population. The bulk of these displaced people, approximately 85.4 per cent, came from Kushtia, with the maximum infow of 93,582 recorded in 1950 following the devastating riots there in February of that year. The corresponding 1951 Pakistan Census corroborates this Hindu exodus. The Hindu population of Kushtia during the census decade of 1941–1951 consequently shows a negative growth rate of –73.33 per cent. The two border subdivisions of Meherpur and Chuadanga took a severe beating, with negative Hindu growth rates at –89.74 per cent and –80.27 per cent, respectively. The four police stations of Kushtia sharing borders with Nadia, namely, Jibannagar, Daulatpur, Gangni and Meherpur, recorded a negative growth rate of the Hindu population to the tune of –82.39 per cent, –93.22 per cent, –91.00 per cent and –89.21 per cent, respectively.14 Thus, evidently, as was also the case in Punjab along the Western borders of India, the decline of the Hindu population was greatest in the areas immediately adjacent to the new borders. This testifes to the fear psychosis that stalked the minority population also after independence and propelled their fight across the border. Fearing for their lives and property, these people, mostly agriculturists, fed to India in search of a safe haven amongst their co-religionists. The scale of migration in Nadia, stood at: Year

Number of migrants

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

5,654 47,808 74,786 65,619 226,402 6,638

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

The outcome of infux is perhaps nowhere more marked than in the district of Nadia. The following table can best illustrate this:

Year

Rate of growth of population (without displaced population)

Rate of growth of population (with displaced population)

1941–1951

–14.6%

+36.3%

Source: Asok Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

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Amongst the two subdivisions of Nadia—Sadar and Ranaghat—although Sadar’s population growth was well within the district limit, some of its police stations show an unusual rise in the growth rate. The two subdivisions, along with the high growth rate police stations are shown in the following table: District/subdivision/police Population, station 1941 Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah

840,303 574,263 91,603 37,172 266,040 82,073 63,862

Population, 1951

Rate of growth, 1941–1951

1,144,924 702,871 157,981 91,380 442,053 151,852 117,495

+36.25 +22.39 +72.46 +68.57 +66.16 +85.02 +83.98

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal

Amongst the two subdivisions of the newborn Nadia, Sadar and Ranaghat, although Sadar’s population growth (+22.39 per cent) was well within the district limit (+36.25 per cent), two of its police stations, Krishnagar and Nabadwip, show an unusual rise in the growth rate at +72.46 per cent and +68.57 per cent, respectively. On the Ranaghat side, the overall growth rate at +66.16 per cent towered well above the district growth rate, with the two police stations of Ranaghat and Chakdah showing an alarming increase in the growth rate during the decade at +85.92 per cent and +83.98 per cent, respectively. If one takes into account the settlement of displaced population in these areas, the correlation between migration and population growth would become clear:

District/subdivision/police station

Displaced pop. 1951

% of displaced Rate of growth pop. to total of total pop. pop. 1951 1941–1951

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakasipara and Kaliganj Ranaghat subdivision

426,907 215,670 108,125 39,894 17,114 211,237

37.28 30.68 43.36 34.28 10.76 47.78

+36.25 +22.39 +71.01 +11.44 +22.14 +66.16

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal

Thus unusual increase in population growth rate is directly proportional to the share of displaced population. As pointed out earlier, the majority 203

SUBHASRI GHOSH

of these migrants were engaged in agriculture and thus settled in the district’s rural areas. Hence an analysis of the rural growth rate of these areas, along with their share of displaced population, will help forge the linkages between migration and population growth better.

District/subdivision/police station

% of rural D.P. to rural Rural D.P. population

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

344,592 176,354 68,989 168,058 122,591 45,467

36.78 29.59 48.23 49.38 57.75 35.51

Rate of growth of rural population 1941–1951 +29.39 +16.58 +71.87 +60.24 +67.81 +49.10

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal

The top-migrant recipient rural blocs of Krishnagar and Nabadwip in the Sadar subdivision and Ranaghat-Hanskhali-Santipur in the Ranaghat subdivision, recorded the highest growth rate in rural population. One can thus have a fair idea as to the magnitude of infux on these two subdivisions. The district administration noted:15 About two lacs of refugees are locally estimated to have so far taken shelter in the Nadia district. Of this number more than half of the same have taken up abodes in urban areas of Nabadwip, Krishnagar, Ranaghat and Santipur while the rest are scattered all over the rural areas of the district … Of the refugees’ concentrations, Nabadwip appears to be the most congested area in Nadia … Majority of the refugees belong to low class Hindus such as fshermen, weavers etc., while many of the middle class refugees belong to medical and legal professions as also to trade and other vocations of life. Faced with the infux, the government opened several transit camps in the district. The biggest amongst them was the Ranaghat Transit Centre or Cooper’s Camp, close to Ranaghat Railway station. Around this Cooper’s Camp grew a number of small camps. The second largest camp was housed at Dhubulia at Dhubulia aerodrome on the Ranaghat Bhagwangola line. In December 1950, the population of the Camp was estimated to be 25,000. There was another group of Camps called the Chandmari Camps. In December 1950 the population of these camps was estimated to be 14,500.16 The census notes that in the tract of land bounded by Santipur, Ranaghat, Duttaphulia, Aranghata and Birnagar, the concentration of displaced population was particularly heavy. The government also took initiative in setting 204

INFLUX AND EFFLUX

up a colony of middle-class migrants in a village called Taherpur as also a brand new township called Fulia in Ranaghat. With so many happenings in the Ranaghat subdivision, its population soared up at a rate of nearly double that of the district. In the urban scenario, as noted earlier, the Hindus held the sway in preIndependence times. Their position was further consolidated in 1951 with an overall growth rate of +107.37 per cent. Urban–rural break-up of Hindu–Muslim population is: District

Rural population 1951

% of rural Hindus

% of rural Muslims

Nadia

936,823

73.29

26.16

District

Urban population

% of Hindus

% of Muslims

Nadia

208,101

93.84

5.25

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal

The urban areas of Krishnagar-Nabadwip recorded a growth rate of +91.74 per cent, while the Ranaghat subdivision showed an urban growth rate of +127.40 per cent. The new addition to the already existing towns of the subdivision was Chakdah. A non-descript sleepy hollow, the area witnessed rapid expansion after 1947, with the settlement of industrious displaced people. The growth of urban population in the Ranaghat subdivision can be explained in terms of new colonies cropping up, namely Gokulpur, Gayeshpur and Kataganj, and new townships like Kalyani, Taherpur and Fulia. All said and done, the displaced population played a seminal role in overhauling the percentage of Hindus of the district and the settlement of migrants became synonymous with an overall high growth rate of the population as also Hindu growth rate. District/subdivision/ police station Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakasipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision

Urban Urban Rate of Urban Urban Rate of Hindu Hindu growth Muslim Muslim growth pop. 1941 pop. 1951 1941–1951 pop. 1941 pop. 1951 1941–1951 94,179 52,915 52,915

195,299 101,464 101,464

+107.37 +91.74 +91.74

20,010 7,939 7,939

10,942 3,240 3,240

–45.31 –59.18 –59.18

---41,264

---93,835

---+127.40

---12,071

---7,702

---–36.19

Source: , Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

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The displaced population being Hindus meant that the Hindu growth rate would shoot up at an alarming rate, a foregone conclusion. Between 1941 and 1951, the Hindu growth rate of the district escalated to a steep rise of +124.81 per cent, with Ranaghat subdivision returning a growth rate of +173.93 per cent. Krishnagar and Nabadwip, understandably with a heavy concentration of refugee population, registered a Hindu growth of +134.56 per cent. District/subdivision/police Hindu Hindu Rate of growth station population 1941 population 1951 1941–1951 Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakasipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision

392,307 253,784 91,644

881,955 502,486 214,966

+124.81 +97.99 +134.56

36,559 66,078 59,503 138,523

78,712 91,202 117,606 379,469

+115.3 +38.02 +97.64 +173.93

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia .

If an urban–rural break-up of growth rate is resorted to, the picture that emerges is that the rural growth rate of the Hindus in the district, as can be calculated, was at +130.32 per cent. With more than half of the total rural population of the Ranaghat, Santipur and Hanskhali belt coming from across the border, the area listed a Hindu growth of +243.11 per cent. Close on its heels came the rural areas of Krishnagar-Nabadwip with a Hindu growth rate of +193.06 per cent, and Chakdah-Haringhata at +129.17 per cent. Thus the top three migrant-receiving areas of the district, Ranaghat-Santipur-Hanskhali, Krishnagar-Nabadwip and ChakdahHaringhata, where 57.75 per cent, 48.23 per cent and 35.51 per cent of the total rural population were composed of cross-border migrants, recorded not only the highest growth rates in rural population, but also in Hindu population, too. Aided by such high growth rates, rural Hindus constituted around 73.29 per cent of the total rural population in 1951 as against 41.17 per cent in 1941. Both in absolute numbers as also in terms of percentage concentration vis-à-vis the total population of the district; Sadar subdivision holds a slight edge over Ranaghat. If the decadal growth rate is tallied the following scenario emerges: District/subdivision/police station

Population 1941

Population 1951

Rate of growth of population 1941–1951

Nadia Sadar subdivision

840,303 574,263

1,144,924 702,871

+36.25 +22.39

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District/subdivision/police station

Population 1941

Krishnagar Nabadwip Chapra Krishnaganj Nakasipara Kaliganj Tehatta Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah Haringhata Hanskhali Santipur

91,603 54,208 70,321 34,102 66,827 63,391 92,539 101,272 266,040 82,073 63,862 27,498 37,521 55,086

Population 1951 157,981 91,380 77,675 38,696 81,747 77,305 90,402 87,685 442,053 151,852 117,495 37,927 55,115 79,664

Rate of growth of population 1941–1951 +72.46 +68.57 +10.45 +13.47 +22.32 +21.94 –2.30 –13.41 +66.16 +85.02 +83.98 +37.92 +46.89 +44.61

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia.

Then how come Sadar’s growth rate of +22.39 per cent remained within the district limit? To seek this answer one needs to look into the two police stations of the Sadar subdivision—Tehatta and Karimpur—registering a negative growth rate of –2.3 per cent and –13.4 per cent respectively.17 In this overall picture of unprecedented growth rate, these two were the only exceptions. This, Asok Mitra notes, is mainly because these two police stations chopped off from the Kushtia subdivision of undivided Nadia and added to the present district, witnessed large-scale emigration of the Muslims to East Bengal.18 As per the government estimate, nearly 2,23,250 Muslims left Nadia between 1947 and 1951—the highest emigration recorded in any district of West Bengal.19 Muslims overall registered a negative growth rate of 37.89 per cent with Sadar at –33.30 per cent and Ranaghat at –49.09 per cent. As to the effect of the emigration of the Muslims, the following table will illustrate the impact on the growth rate: District/subdivision/police station

Muslim population 1941

Muslim population 1951

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakashipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision

412,254 292,298 32,702 65,096 62,031 132,469 119,956

256,017 194,956 32,628 35,772 67,662 58,894 61,061

Rate of growth 1941–1951 –37.89 –33.30 –0.22 –45.04 +9.07 –55.54 –49.09

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

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The Karimpur-Tehatta bloc accounted for the heaviest casualty in Muslim population. It would be relevant to recall at this juncture that these areas had accounted for the maximum concentration of Muslim population in 1941. This proves beyond doubt that the fear factor that drove hordes of Hindus across the border to India was applicable for the Muslim minorities on the Indian side also. The other bloc that recorded a signifcant casualty in Muslim growth rate is Nakashipara-Kaliganj of the Sadar subdivision, at –45.04 per cent. Signifcantly, the latter is not a border police station bounded by East Bengal. However, the fact that it recorded a drastic fall in the Muslim growth rate attests to the sense of insecurity that pervaded the Muslim psyche across the district. Intelligence Bureau reports are replete with incidents of minority persecution, where the people concerned were often threatened with dire consequences if they did not abandon their land and migrate to East Bengal. It was like a domino effect, with the victims of minority persecution in East Bengal now turning persecutors, venting their ire on the minorities of West Bengal. For example, refugees of Dhubulia Camp pounced upon the feld of a neighbouring Muslim to catch sheep. The owner resisted this. Thereupon a Hindu crowd, mostly composed of refugees, raided the Muslim locality of Tatla village near Dhubulia Camp and set fre to the houses. In the process, 60 houses were burnt. The Muslims ran away from the village because of fear.20 On the same day in Maherganj village (Nabadwip PS), the Hindus offered pujas in a mosque in order to desecrate it.21 In another incident, a gang of a hundred refugees of Sahibnagar village in Sadar subdivision attacked 14 Muslim families of the same village. The village was earlier a predominantly Muslim village of 200 families, all but 14 of which had migrated to Pakistan. These remaining Muslims were assaulted and their properties looted. Out of the 14 families, eight fed to Pakistan the very next evening. Refugees of Dhubulia Camp and Bethuadahari Camp then barged into Dipchandrapur, a Muslim village in Sadar subdivision, and demanded rice and goats from the villagers. They further threatened the residents, stating that the entire village would be burnt and looted and the villagers killed if their demands were not met. Such incidents struck fear in the hearts of the Muslims who were left, with no other option but to abandon their home and hearth. More intriguing was the lack of any concrete police action to combat the issue. The Intelligence Bureau reports, in most cases, are inconclusive as to whether any special efforts were made to stop the recurrence of such incidents. It is evident that the normal course of actions, like a few routine arrests and registration of cases under certain sections of the Indian Penal Code, failed to curb the menace of minority bashing. The local police station reported the matter to the district administration, which in turn informed the state, but whether any concrete follow-up actions were taken is not clear. The absence of mention of any such action casts aspersions on the intentions of the government. Muslim emigration would have solved the crisis 208

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of land and other resources necessary for resettling the migrants, especially in districts like Nadia, fooded with immigrants. The government, in fact, encouraged the refugees to occupy the vacant lands and houses abandoned by Muslims. In fact, the then-Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner, Government of West Bengal, Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay, notes in the context of Nadia, ‘If the refugees had not occupied these abandoned plots and houses, I shudder to think how the Government would have shouldered the burden of accommodating thousands of refugees in the relief camps.’22 Thus while the politicians were crying hoarse over the maltreatment of the minority Hindus in East Bengal and demonising the East Bengal Government for tyrannising the Hindus, the same picture was being painted in Nadia. How did this emigration/immigration and the resultant increase/decrease in population growth rate affect the religious composition of the truncated district? The comparative population growth rates between 1941 and 1947 on one hand and of 1947 and 1951 on the other exhibit some startling facts. Between 1941 and 1947, the Hindu population recorded a measly growth of 3.54 per cent, whereas between 1947 and 1951, there was a stupendous rise of 117 per cent. The corresponding rate of growth of the Muslim population was +20.08 per cent and –48.28 per cent. % of Total Total Hindus Total Hindu Muslim to total Year population population population population

% of Muslims to total population

Rate of growth of total population

Rate of growth of Hindu population

Rate of growth of Muslim population

1941 840,303 39,2307 1947 901,272 40,6232 1951 1,144,924 88,1955

61.25 54.92 22.96

-+7.25 +27.03

-+3.54 +117.10

-+20.08 –48.28

41,2254 49,5040 25,6017

37.38 45.07 77.03

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Constituent Assembly of India, Population of India According to Communities based on the 1941 Census; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

Thus in the span of just four years the religious composition of the district was completely changed and reversed. The district administration reports: ‘The District on the date of partition had a majority of Muslim population. There has been a reversal of the position by the infux of Hindu population from East Bengal.’23 The sensitive issue of Muslim emigration had been carefully side-stepped, but if one delves into the census data and makes a comparative analysis, the phenomenon becomes marked. This complete turnaround of religious composition attests to the fact that the interplay of infux and effux is perhaps nowhere more marked than in the district of Nadia. ii)

1951–1961

1961 Nadia totalled a population of 17,13,324 with 81.59 per cent living in rural areas and 18.40 per cent concentrated in urban areas. The Hindu– Muslim split was 74.95 per cent and 24.14 per cent, respectively. In this 209

SUBHASRI GHOSH

decade, Nadia displayed the highest growth rate observed in the district in any one of the past census decades. Between 1951 and 1961, 2,81,531 persons emigrated from East Pakistan.24 They comprised about 30 per cent of the population of the district.25 As many as 15,505 persons came from Pakistan within one year preceding 1 March 1961; 91,566 between 1955 and 1960; and 1,74,440 between 1951 and 1955.26 The growth of the subdivisions of Nadia can be tabulated as follows:

District/subdivision

Population, 1951

Population, 1961

Rate of growth, 1951–1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Ranaghat subdivision

1,144,924 702,871 442,053

1,713,324 1,011,808 701,516

+49.64 +43.95 +58.69

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia ; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia.

The trend of increase continues with Ranaghat subdivision taking the lead. A police-station-wise growth rate will help to identify the areas recording high growth rates:

District/subdivision

Population, 1951

Population, 1961

Rate of growth 1951–1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Chapra Krishnaganj Nakasipara Kaliganj Tehatta Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah Haringhata Hanskhali Santipur

1,144,924 702,871 157,981 91,380 77,695 38,696 81,747 77,305 90,402 87,685 442,053 151,852 117,495 37,927 55,115 79,664

1,713,324 1,011,808 219,381 125,142 110,754 52,034 119,176 112,325 133,803 139,193 701,156 251,657 186,038 67,324 84,065 112,432

+49.64 +43.95 +38.86 +36.94 +42.58 +34.46 +45.78 +45.30 +48.00 +58.74 +58.61 +65.72 +58.33 +77.50 +52.52 +41.13

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

With the exception of Santipur, all other constituent police stations of Ranaghat subdivision recorded very high growth rates with Haringhata taking the lead. The urban–rural divide of population growth is as follows:

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District/subdivision

Rate of rural growth

Rate of urban growth

Nadia Sadar subdivision Ranaghat subdivision

+29.39 +16.58 +60.24

+78.95 +69.87 +89.54

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

With regard to the rural population, the blocs registering the maximum growth are:

District/subdivision/police station Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakashipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

Rural population 1951

Rural population 1961

Rate of growth 1951–1961

936,823 596,531 143,021 116,371 159,052 178,087 340,292 212,261

139,786 868,507 201,222 162,788 131,501 272,996 529,479 333,523

+49.22 +45.59 +40.69 +39.88 +45.55 +53.29 +55.59 +57.12

128,031

195,956

+53.05

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

With regard to the urban scenario: District/subdivision/police station

Urban Urban population Rate of growth population 1951 1961 1951–1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

208,101 106,340 106,340 101,761 74,370

315,338 143,301 143,301 172,037 114,631

+51.73 +34.75 +34.75 +69.05 +54.13

27,391

57,406

+109.57

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia;; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

The growth of the urban population in the Ranaghat subdivision can be explained in terms of new colonies coming up to house the ever-burgeoning migrant population, namely, Gokulpur, Gayeshpur and Kataganj, and new

211

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townships to accommodate the same, like Kalyani, Taherpur and Fulia. Kataganj and Gokulpur Government Colony area recorded the highest density in the district and the third highest in the state at 47,150/square mile.27 Gayeshpur Government Colony with a density of 18,467/square mile and Taherpur town at 16,501/square mile follow next.28 Between 1951 and 1961, the number of urban centres in the district increased from 8 in 1951 to 12 in 1961. The origin can be directly traced to the settlement of the displaced population. In terms of the rate of growth, the top position goes to the ChakdahHaringhata bloc. These are traditional migrant-receiving areas, as attested by the previous census reports. That the trend continued is evident from the 1961 statistics. Chakdah recorded a growth rate of 128.21 per cent over its population of 1951.29 This, according to the District Census Handbook is, due ‘to the infux of refugees from East Pakistan.’30 However, these may not be fresh arrivals, since overall migration to West Bengal somewhat petered out after the initial torrent of 1950. Compared to the previous four years from 1947–1950, when the quantum of migration touched 2,453,168, the period between 1951 and 1961, as per government estimate, was to the tune of 1,635,593. Year

Number of fresh arrivals

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

47,437 5,31,440 76,123 1,21,364 2,40,424 5,81,000 6,000 4,898 6,348 9,712 10,847

Source: Committee for Review of Rehabilitation Work in West Bengal; Report of the Working Group on the Residual Problem of Rehabilitation in West Bengal.

With the decline in migration fgures, it can be assumed that Nadia, too, recorded a fall in the number of fresh arrivals. The rise in Chakdah’s population, thus, may be attributed to the huddling of the existing migrants, who thronged Chakdah, where a bustling town had grown up. As to the religious composition, although the Hindu population of Nadia recorded a growth rate of 45.60 per cent between 1951 and 1961, much above the state level no doubt, the overall percentage of Hindus vis-à-vis the total population of the district took a slight dip at 74.95 per cent, with Sadar subdivision at 71.49 per cent and Ranaghat at 85.54 per cent. 212

INFLUX AND EFFLUX

District/subdivision

Hindus 1951

Hindus 1961

Rate of growth

Nadia Sadar subdivision Ranaghat subdivision

881,952 502,486 379,469

1,284,173 681,044 603,129

+45.60 +35.53 +58.94

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

The constituent police stations with their growth rates have been tabulated below: Rate of growth District/subdivision/police stations Hindus 1951 Hindus 1961 1951–1961 Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakashipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

881,955 502,486 214,966 78,712 91,202 117,606 379,469 188,937 96,697

1,284,173 681,044 286,834 102,785 127,586 163,839 603,129 451,747 151,382

+45.60 +35.53 +33.43 +30.58 +39.89 +39.31 +58.94 +13.90 +56.55

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia.

Ranaghat subdivision and its constituent Chakdah-Haringhata bloc stand out so far as the growth of the Hindu population is concerned. Again, these are traditional migrant-populated areas. Hence migration does have a positive role in the rise in the number of Hindus. This calls for a detailed study. In 1961, 76.97 per cent of Ranaghat’s and 82.37 per cent of ChakdahHaringhata’s population lived in the rural areas. Rural Hindu growth rate statistics are as follows: District/subdivision/ police stations

Rural Hindus, 1951

Rural Hindus, 1961

Rate of growth 1951–1961

Nadia Ranaghat subdivision Chakdah and Haringhata

686,656 285,634 96,697

986,477 441,596 151,382

+43.66 +54.60 +56.55

Source: Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

Assuming a 25 per cent increase in the overall Hindu population between 1951 and 1961, Nadia’s Hindu population soars over the expected fgure 213

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of 1,102,444 by 1,81,729.31 But even then this did not pull up the Hindu growth rate. So how do we explain the high growth rate of the district? For this, we need to take cognisance of the Muslim population. In this phase, Nadia witnessed the homecoming of around 55 per cent of the emigrating Muslims. Some 1,21,595 Muslims out of a total of 2,23,350 returned to Nadia following the assurances pledged by the governments of both countries after the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950. Side by side, illegal immigration of Muslims too peaked during this period. The District Magistrate noted, ‘Muslim migrants from Nadia are returning in large numbers from Pakistan to Nadia without any travel documents.’32 In fact, in this decade, Nadia witnessed a phenomenal growth rate of Muslim population of 63.16 per cent—the highest in the state.33 Applying the 27.5 per cent growth rate fgure, the Muslim population in Nadia should have been 3,26,422. But the actual fgure stands at 4,17,706, thus an excess of 91,284. In fact among the three districts of the Presidency Division, Nadia is the only one to harbour excess Muslim population. Amongst the two subdivisions, the most remarkable rate of increase can be noticed in the Sadar subdivision where the rate of growth of the Muslim population, courtesy of Karimpur and Tehatta, towered head and shoulders above the Hindu rate of growth, whereas in Ranaghat, the growth rate went hand in hand. This can be tabulated as:

District/subdivision

Total Hindu population, 1951

Total Hindu population, 1961

Rate of growth 1951–1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Ranaghat subdivision

881,955 502,486 379,469

1,284,173 681,044 603,129

+45.60 +28.96 +59.73

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

District/subdivision

Total Muslim Total Muslim population, population, 1951 1961

Rate of growth 1951–1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Ranaghat subdivision

256,017 194,956 61,061

+61.59 +64.81 +56.51

417,706 322,135 95,571

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia .

The statistics of the growth rates of the constituent subdivisions and police stations are as follows: 214

INFLUX AND EFFLUX

District/subdivision/police station

Muslim Muslim population, population, 1951 1961

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar and Nabadwip Chapra and Krishnaganj Nakashipara and Kaliganj Tehatta and Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat, Hanskhali and Santipur Chakdah and Haringhata

256,017 194,956 32,628 35,772 67,662 58,894 61,061 25,964 35,097

413,706 321,325 55,412 55,842 103,886 106,185 95,571 51,084 44,487

Rate of growth 1951–1961 +61.59 +64.81 +69.82 +56.10 +53.53 +80.29 +56.51 +13.10 +42.37

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia

Thus Karimpar-Tehatta bloc that witnessed the highest effux of Muslim population in the previous census decade now saw a food of returning Muslims as also panic-driven Muslims from other areas of the state. Since these areas are located adjacent to the border, the Muslims perhaps considered them safe havens, since it would be easy to cross over to East Pakistan at the slightest provocation. Coupled with these factors, the infltration of Muslims in collusion with the locals proved to be another menace that led to the crowding of the minorities in this sector. The District Intelligence offcer (DIO) outlined the modus operandi in his report in 1955:34 Those who have come with travel documents at once surrendered those and remain here as defacto Indian nationals. Surrendering of passports has become an usual affair with the Pak Muslims who enter India with the ulterior object of settling here. Another feature of their stay is the novel method of taking possession of their abandoned houses or lands through the infuence of some Hindus or by offering some temptation to those refugees who are in occupation of it. The example of Hindu-majority Dakshin Tajpur village of Karimpur PS could be cited. Many Hindus, being offered prices over and above the market price, sold their lands to the Muslims. The DIO further elaborates, One Naren Biswas of Gopalpore, P.S. Karimpur is the main prop of these Pak Muslims … His only object in helping these Pakistani Muslims so that in the near future they would be recognised as Indian nationals and they would vote for him in the next [Union Board] election.35 Along with his report, he attached a list of Pakistani nationals who had settled in Gopalpore in the following manner.36 The district administration came to learn that Muslims were coming to the district without any visa or 215

SUBHASRI GHOSH

travel documents ‘frst of all take shelter in a Muslim pocket, viz. Dhara, Pakshi, Brajanathpur, Muktadhara and Dogachi and after staying there for a considerable period … would mingle with the locals.’37 In his fortnightly secret report, the District Magistrate narrated his personal experience: I concentrated on the bordering unions and moved from village to village … I found that the Mathabhanga river, which is the boundary point was almost dry and people would easily get across the river from either side. There was nothing to stop this movement.38 The DIO rued, ‘These immigrants … were invariably taken care of their co-religionists at this end. I have so far dealt with 15 Muslim jotedars of this district who have been found to be unduly interested in such immigrants.’39 The DM, too, corroborated, ‘a number of local Union Boards were encouraging the Muslims to come back … This has resulted in an increasing number of Muslim migrants in Harekrishnapur, Shikarpur and a few other unions.’40 By way of explanation, the DIO reported, ‘Evacuees are … a foating population on whom the seekers of election cannot reasonably count. They, therefore have concentrated on the Muslim inhabitants.’41 That the unholy entente continued is proved by the anguish expressed by the DM in his fortnightly secret report for the second half of December 1955, They are being given shelter by some of the B.O.P.s [Border Outposts], who also encourage them to put up claims for restoration of their properties and help them in creating evidence to show that they had actually returned before 31.3.51 which is the date by which all applications for restoration of properties were to be submitted.42 These Pakistani Muslims were almost all ex-residents of Nadia who left the district following the disturbance of 1950. The principal motivation for their return seems to be ‘economic distress and a natural longing to get back their old properties.’43 At the same time, Pakistan Government are encouraging the landless Muslim population to come over to this end as much to embarrass the economy of this province as to strengthen the predominantly Muslim areas in the border to justify a demand for annexation fresh territories to that dominion on the basis of communal percentage.44 The problem was further complicated with the absence of any strict punitive measure. Punishment provided under the Passport Act and Rule was not a deterrent to the would-be infltrators. Even if they were punished, the violators continued to stay on after serving the sentence. The DIO expressed concern that ‘If some deterrent action is not considered now … we will fnd the entire border infested by Pak nationals as if it was a part of Pakistan.’45 216

INFLUX AND EFFLUX

The effect of this unprecedented Muslim growth on the overall population of the district can be best attested if the growth rate of 20 years from 1941–1961, the frst decade witnessing Hindu growth and the next decade showing the following Muslim growth: Year

Rate of growth

1941–1951 1951–1961

+22.39 +43.95

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia

Thus growth in Muslim population had a more potent effect than the growth in Hindu population in the previous decade. Although Nadia still remained an overwhelmingly Hindu-majority province, immigration (legal as well as illegal) of the Muslims contributed no less in catapulting the overall growth rate over the normal fgure. Urban–rural Hindu and Muslim growth rates together with the total growth rate of the two census decades show that with regard to the rural scenario the Muslim growth rate had a more telling effect whereas in the urban sphere the Hindu growth rate had the fnal say:

District/ subdivision

Rate of Rate of Rate of Rate of growth Rate of growth Rate of growth growth of growth of growth of of urban of rural of urban rural Hindus, rural Muslims, urban Hindus, Muslims, population, population, 1941–1951 1941–1951 1941–1951 1941–1951 1941–1951 1941–1951

Nadia +130.32 Sadar +99.64 subdivision Ranaghat +193.68 subdivision

–37.51 –33.30

+107.37 +91.74

–45.31 –59.38

+29.39 +16.58

+78.95 +69.87

–49.09

+127.40

–36.19

+60.24

+89.54

Source: Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal; Mitra, Census of India, 1951

District/ subdivision

Rate of growth of rural Hindus, 1951–1961

Nadia +43.66 Sadar +35.87 subdivision Ranaghat +54.60 subdivision

Rate of growth of rural Muslims, 1951–1961

Rate of Rate of growth growth of of urban urban Hindus, Muslims, 1951–1961 1951–1961

Rate of growth Rate of growth of rural of urban population, population, 1951–1961 1951–1961

+62.52 +64.94

+52.42 +34.19

+40.65 +57.64

+49.22 +45.59

+51.53 +34.57

+59.83

+72.14

+33.51

+55.59

+69.32

Source; Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia; Mitra, Census of India, 1961: District Census Handbook: Nadia

217

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iii) 1961–1971 1971 Nadia witnessed another spate of infux from across the border with unrest in East Pakistan and war clouds looming large. Within the time frame of 5 March 1971 and 31 October 1971, 9,62,000 migrants focked to Nadia.46 On top of that, the 1971 Census enumerated 540,695 inhabitants, whose place of birth had been returned as East Pakistan.47 They might not have included as fresh migrants since enumeration took place before the avalanche descended on India. The district had a population of 22,30,270, with Hindus forming 75.91 per cent of the population and Muslims 23.34 per cent. Rural population formed 81.25 per cent and urban population 18.74 per cent of the total population. The recent migrants (those migrating between 5 March 1971 and 31 October 1971) formed 43.13 per cent of the population. Out of these, 9,37,000 were housed in camps while 1,25,000 were fending for themselves. Around 274 educational institutions were requisitioned to house the refugees. There were 20 state-run Transit Relief Camps in the district, along with two centrally controlled Transit Relief Camps— Dhubulia Camp and Cooper’s Camp. Twenty-two distribution centres were opened to distribute relief material to the refugees.48 Nadia, in this decade, followed the traditional path. With a growth rate of 30.17 per cent between 1961 and 1971, Nadia proved to be no exception. Between its two subdivisions of Sadar (rechristened as Krishnagar) and Ranaghat, the latter held a slight edge over the other in regard to growth rate. The two subdivisions and their constituent police stations with their respective growth rates are: District/subdivision/ police station

Population Population 1961 1971

Rate of growth, 1961–1971

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Chapra Krishnaganj Nakasipara Kaliganj Tehatta Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah Haringhata Hanskhali Santipur

1,713,324 1,011,808 219,381 125,142 110,754 52,034 119,176 112,325 133,803 139,193 701,156 251,657 186,038 67,324 84,065 112,432

+30.17 +29.58 +24.42 +28.31 +22.46 +32.14 +32.17 +32.29 +34.45 +34.69 +31.02 +23.59 +36.54 +41.79 +35.85 +28.53

2,230,270 1,311,108 272,958 160,570 135,634 68,756 148,465 177,013 160,232 187,480 919,162 311,039 254,023 95,583 114,206 144,311

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Bhaskar Ghose, Census of India, 1971, District Census Handbook: Nadia.

218

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The urban areas of these police stations registered the following growth rates: District/subdivision/police Urban Urban Rate of growth, station population 1961 population 1971 1961–1971 Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Ranaghat subdivision Santipur Ranaghat Chakdah Taherpur Birnagar Gayeshpur Kataganj and Gokulpur Govt. Colony Kalyani Bagula Fulia

315,338 143,301 70,440 72,861 172,037 51,190 35,266 35,089 12,211 7,623 10,157 7,544

409,514 180,127 85,923 94,204 229,387 61,166 47,185 46,345 13,104 10,560 13,082 8,209

+29.86 +25.69 +21.98 +29.29 +33.33 +19.48 +33.79 +32.07 +7.31 +38.52 +28.79 +8.81

4,616 4,530 3,811

18,310 6,799 4,627

+296.66 +50.08 +21.41

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Ghose, Census of India, 1971, District Census Handbook: Nadia.

Because of its proximity to Calcutta and the growth of industries, Kalyani witnessed a massive growth of population. The rural growth rate as can be computed is: District/subdivision/ police station

Rural population Rural population Rate of growth, 1961 1971 1961–1971

Nadia Sadar subdivision Krishnagar Nabadwip Chapra Krishnaganj Nakasipara Kaliganj Tehatta Karimpur Ranaghat subdivision Ranaghat Chakdah Haringhata Hanskhali Santipur

1,397,986 868,507 148,941 52,281 110,754 52,034 119,176 112,325 133,803 139,193 529,479 196,557 128,632 67,324 79,535 57,431

1,812,211 1,123,066 187,055 66,366 135,634 68,756 152,317 148,465 177,014 187,480 689,145 239,560 139,699 95,583 107,407 78,518

+29.63 +29.30 +25.58 +26.94 +22.46 +32.13 +27.80 +32.17 +32.29 +34.69 +30.15 +21.87 +8.60 +41.97 +35.04 +36.71

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Ghose, Census of India, 1971, District Census Handbook: Nadia.

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Amongst the areas, those registering high rates of growth of the Hindu population are: District/subdivision/ police station

Total Hindu population, 1961

1,284,173 Nadia 681,044 Sadar subdivision 107,173 Nabadwip 49,099 Krishnaganj 84,311 Tehatta 66,066 Nakasipara 79,258 Karimpur 603,129 Ranaghat subdivision 161,719 Chakdah 71,292 Hanskhali 46,526 Haringhata

Total Hindu population, 1971

Rate of growth, 1961–1971

1,693,006 889,243 146,308 65,951 117,341 87,935 114,501 803,763 225,924 99,959 69,492

+31.83 +30.57 +36.51 +34.22 +39.17 +33.10 +43.97 +39.23 +39.70 +40.21 +49.36

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Ghose, Census of India, 1971, District Census Handbook: Nadia.

The rural police station of Haringhata recorded the highest growth rate in terms of the overall population and also Hindu population, as has been demonstrated by the preceding two tables. Chakdah, Hanskhali, Karimpur and Tehatta too recorded high growth rates in terms of total and Hindu population. Incidentally, Tehatta and Karimpur, in the previous decade, registered a very high Muslim growth rate. In this decade the role was reversed with the Hindu growth rate pulling up the overall growth rates of both these police stations. With the exception of Chakdah, all were rural police stations. The Muslim population, too, recorded a positive growth rate of 24.62 per cent. The following police stations recorded a growth rate over the district level:

District/subdivision/police station

Rate of growth of Muslim population, 1961–1971

Nadia Sadar subdivision Chapra Kaliganj Nakasipara

+24.62 +26.88 +31.32 +33.70 +36.03

Source: Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia; Ghose, Census of India, 1971, District Census Handbook: Nadia.

Sadar Subdivision accounts for all the major Muslim growth areas. The border police station of Kaliganj’s growth rate can be attributed to an increase in Muslim growth rate. Nakasipara had the unique distinction of recording 220

INFLUX AND EFFLUX

a high Hindu as well as a high Muslim growth rate. The most interesting picture of this decade is presented by the border police station of Chapra. With a Muslim growth rate of 31.32 per cent, Chapra emerged as a Muslimmajority police station with 51.23 per cent of its 1971 population being Muslims.

Conclusion As can be gauged from this study, cross-border population movement remained a recurrent feature decades after Partition. The general porosity of the border, coupled with the non-settlement of the border dispute along the Nadia-Kushtia sector, ensured that Nadia witnessed uninterrupted demographic mobility. The magnitude of migration was not spread out evenly throughout the district, to all the subdivisions and to all the police stations. Some specifc areas came to be earmarked and recorded a steady infow over the years. Population infow no doubt accelerated the process of urbanisation and changed the socio-economic features of the district. Many migrantdominated areas became towns due to the non-agricultural activities of the newly settled people. But it had its corresponding pitfalls also. The standard of living deteriorated because of low income and lack of gainful employment. Because of the unusual population increase due to the refugee infux, the true urban features were mostly absent in most of the urban areas. The government did not make any effort to equidistribute the displaced population throughout the state. Instead of allowing the migrants to concentrate in a few districts over the years by opening colonies and then forcing them suddenly to move out of the state, the government could have developed less migrant-populated areas like Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum, and moved the migrants out to those areas. Without cart-loading the displaced people to the unknown terrains of Dandakaranya, far removed from West Bengal, it would have been sagacious to look for suitable alternatives within the state. The migrants might not have been that reluctant and this could have effectively eased the pressure on the few affected districts and in turn dispersed the population. Those thronging districts like Nadia from across the border could have looked upon these newly developed areas as effective substitutes had the government been more proactive. Nadia, thus, still bears the brunt of Partition, where corporeal vivisection was matched by infux and effux, with infux outstripping effux.

Notes 1 This paper is a modifed version of a previously published article titled “Population Movement in West Bengal: A Case-Study of Nadia District, 1947–1951” South Asia Research, Vol. 34(2), 2014, pp. 113–132 (Sage Publications). 2 K Maudood Elahi, and Sabiha Sultana, ‘Population Redistribution and Settlement Change in South Asia: A Historical Perspective’ in Leszek A Kosinski

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

and K Maudood Elahi (Eds.) Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia (New Delhi, 1991), p. 21. Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Poitical Syndrome in West Bengal (Kolkata, 1999); U.B. Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation (Delhi, 1967). Jugantar, 4 March 1960, p. 4. UB Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation (Delhi, 1967), p. 148. PC Mahalonobis and D Bhattacharya, ‘Growth of Population of India and Pakistan, 1801–1961’ Artha Vijnana, 18(1) (March), 1976, pp. 1–10. K Hill, W Seltzer, J Leaning, SJ Malik and SS Russell (2005) The Demographic Impact of Partition: Bengal in 1947, http://iussp2005.princeton.edu/download. aspx?submissionId=52236 (accessed on 12 June 2006). Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Poitical Syndrome in West Bengal (Kolkata, 1999). Home-Public Department, 1941, F.45/11/41 National Archives of India. Government of India, Reports of the Bengal Boundary Commission and Punjab Boundary Commission (Radcliffe Awards) (New Delhi, 1958), p. 1. RA Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal (Delhi, 1942). Dutch, Census of India, 1941, Volume IV: Bengal (Delhi, 1942)., p. 2. Zamindar (2007) reports similar insecurities about the precise location of the borders in other parts of the subcontinent. Government of Pakistan, Population Census of Pakistan 1951 (Karachi, 1951). Intelligence Bureau 1948. Asok Mitra, Census of India, 1951: District Census Handbook: Nadia (Delhi, 1953), p. ix. Ibid. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. xi. Intelligence Bureau, 1950. Ibid. Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay, Udvastu (Calcutta, 1970), p. 73. Intelligence Bureau, 1948. Asok Mitra, Census of India, 1961 District Census Handbook: Nadia (New Delhi, 1964), p. 34. Ibid. Ibid. Calcutta and Titagarh in 24 Parganas occupy the frst two positions. Mitra, DCH 1961: Nadia, p. 43. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 35. Mitra, Census, 1961: Religion, p. 34. This growth rate of 25 per cent for Hindus and 27.5 per cent for the Muslims includes some amount of immigration from other states. Government of Bengal Home Political (Confdential) (hereafter referred to as GBHPC) File 1956. Ibid., p. 8. GBHPC Files 1955. Ibid. Rasul Paik, Mujabal Mahdal, Jaytan Dargaya, Lalu SK, Latib SK, Gobhash SK., Hebajuddin Mandal, Jekar Baksh Mandal, Dedar Dafadar, Son of Abdul Gani Biswas, Khuki Bewa, Nurbaksh Mandal. GBHPC Files 1955.

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

GBHPC Files 1955. GBHPC Files 1949. Ibid. Intelligence Bureau 1948. GBHPC Files 1956. Ibid. Ibid. GBHPC Files 1956. Ministry of Labour and Rehabilitation, Statistical Information relating to the Infux of Refugees from East Bengal into India till 31st October, 1971 (New Delhi, 1971), p. 1. 47 Bhaskar Ghose, Census 1971: Series 22: West Bengal, District Census Handbook: Nadia, Part X-C (Calcutta, 1973), p. 220. 48 Ibid., p. 13.

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INDEX

arson 81 Asiatic Society/Asiatic Society of Bengal 45, 47, 50, 54–6, 63 Baghmundi 74 Bankura/Bancoorah 80, 151, 153, 160 Barabhum 81 Barakar 82 Bernier, Francois 44–7, 49, 55 Beveridge, Henry 51, 53, 55–6, 60–1, 63 Bhumij 82 Blochmann, Heinrich 54, 56, 60, 63 Butea frondosa 75

Ganga Narain 81 gang robbery 81 grant-in-aid 107, 112, 120–1 guru 108–9, 112, 117–21

Chhatna 80 Chhota Nagpur 73, 151, 153, 160, 164 Chhotonagpur 73 child education 128, 130 Chuar 81–2 Chutia, The 73 collieries 11, 128, 130–3, 136, 139, 142–3 Dalma 74 Department of Public Instruction (DPI) 107, 111–14, 117–18, 121, 123 detective ability 171, 175, 177, 180 Detective Department 12, 172–5, 178–9, 181, 183–92 detective policing 12, 171–3 Dhalbhum 81 displaced 197–8, 202–6, 212, 221 dynastic histories 28, 36 economies of scale 113, 118, 123 electrical engineer 93 electricity and magnetism 95–6 electric telegraph 93–4, 100

engineer-inventors 101 frearms 19–20 frst Indian engineer 92–3 frontier 151–65

hand-mill 97 Hazaribagh 74 Hindu Mela 95–6 history of technology 90 Hunter, William Wilson 10, 25, 29, 36–7, 46–8, 51, 53, 56–7, 59–60, 65, 71, 74–6, 82 Indian Mining Association (IMA) 129, 132, 139, 143 Indian Mining Federation (IMF) 129, 143 Jadavpur 100 Jangal Mahals 80, 151–4, 156–9, 161, 163–4 Jungle Mahals 80 lift-pump 97 Lohardaga 74 Magnetic Healer 96 Malla dynasty of Bishnupur 19–20, 24, 28–34, 36–9 Manbhum 71–85 Maratha plunderers (bargis) 21 Medical Magnetism 96 memory and history 23–7, 33–4 Midnapore 151, 153, 155–62, 164–5

225

INDEX

Ramghur 80 Royal Astronomical Society 96 Royal Microscopical Society 96

migration 196–7, 199, 202–4, 212–13, 221 millwright 100 mine accidents 137–9 miner 11, 128–44 miners’ children 11, 128–34 Mining Education Advisory Board (MEAB) 143 mining jobs 128, 137 Mitra, Satishchandra 60–5 motor car 99 Mughal rulers 20, 24, 30, 35–6 Mundaris 82

safety 11, 128, 129, 133, 135–7, 140–2 sati legend 33–6 Searsole 77 secular history 27–8 self-made engineers 90 Singbhum 74, 151, 153, 160 Sirdars 129, 140–3 Special Detective Force 173–4, 177–9, 183–4 subaltern technologists 10, 89, 91, 92, 98, 100–1 Swatch of No Ground 49–50, 53, 59, 64

Nadia 196–7, 199–204, 207, 209–10, 212–14, 216–18, 221 National Council of Education 100 Orissa Famine 77 O’Shaughnessy, W. B. 93–4 palas 75 Panchakot 82 Panchet/Pachet 81 partition 196–201, 209, 221 Pratapaditya 54–6, 60–5 preventive policing 172–3 Purulia 71–85, 151, 153, 160, 164, 221 Raghunathpur/Rogonautpoor 80 Rainey/Rainey brothers 49, 54, 58–60, 65

technical education 92, 98, 101, 129–30, 133, 142 tribes 154, 173 Vaishnavism 20, 24, 30 vectors 106–7, 115–16, 118–19 Vernacular School 106–23 Viswakarma/s 92, 100–1 Wood’s Despatch 106–8, 112–13 zamindars 151, 153–6, 158–65

226