Introduction:
Market, Village, and Colonial State in South Asia
The bazaar in the title of this book resonates on two levels:
it identifies the site of investigation and it situates the scene of interrogation.[1] Indeed, the very choice of the bazaar as the site of this study is
designed to lead to a distinctive scene of interrogation, a stage for posing fundamental
questions regarding Indian society under colonialism and for posing questions about
narrative history. Certainly the search for a colonial history through the venue of the
bazaar highlights a past less familiar than the ones built around those other sites that
have come to embody colonial India. The narrative constructed around the bazaar thus draws
us to a different reality because the market itself occupies a different place in the
Indian landscape.
Markets have long been a familiar and essential feature of the
historical landscape, central places of exchange at which peasants, townspeople,
landholders, and rulers have historically converged in South Asia to conduct wholesale and
retail trade, to gather news and infor-
2
mation, and to engage in various social, cultural, religious, and
political activities. Thus, like their counterparts in other societies, markets "can
be viewed as microcosms containing a representative array of the elements comprising a
regional environment. Markets provide a compressed display of an area's economy,
technology, and societyâin brief, of the local way of life. "[2]
To read markets of the colonial era as historical texts of exchange
relations emblematic of the "local way of life," however, requires journeying
through the "Oriental market," that exoticized Other place of Western
imagination. No mere figment of Orientalism, the discourse relating to the bazaar in
colonial India comes wrapped in layers of Orientalism.[3] To
represent it therefore requires an act of deconstruction, detaching that place from its
Orientalist moorings. Such unpacking, although standard practice for historians who are
trained to sift through source materials, now demands the added rigor of sorting out the
workings of power and knowledge that Foucault has shown us is implicated in all textual
productions: "power produces knowledge . . . [and] there is no power relation without
the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations."[4]
Orientalism, in other words, "is not just a way of thinking. It is a way of
conceptualizing the landscape of the colonial world that makes it susceptible to certain
kinds of management."[5]
For historians of modern India, so dependent on working through the
documentary project of the colonial state, such sifting is even more critical. It requires
what Bernard S. Cohn has termed "exegetical and hermeneutical skill,"[6] for the legacy of the elitist historiography that
3
hitherto dominated South Asian studies does not ease the task of
reconstruction and representation. Nevertheless, neither the biases of the historical
record nor those of the historiography have prevented scholarsâRanajit Guha
and the Subaltern Studies collective, for exampleâfrom pursuing the voices of
subjects and subjectivity submerged in but not completely silenced by the historical
record and the received historiography.[7]
To begin by problematizing the interrelationship between reading bazaars
as historical texts of social, political, economic, and cultural worlds and recovering
markets textualized in the historical records is to draw attention to the problems of
representation and evocation. For in trying to extract history from such texts, I face
several questionsânot only how to represent the bazaar in history but also
how to construct its narrative history and in what voice to present it.
Such questions turn on the implicit notion that the writing of history
involves textual construction, that the act of writing itself, regardless of the
discipline, necessarily entails poetics and involves artifice.[8]
That is, the rhetorical strategies deployed here to unravel the history of the bazaar in
colonial India and the authorial and authoritative conventions used to present this
history are problematics of this investigation.
To appreciate the literary or even the aesthetic quality of historical
writing does not mean that I accept all the premises of postmodernism. Certainly, I
do not share in the postmodernist enterprise of aestheticizing history and severing
"it from its formerly accepted grounding in
4
conditions of truth and reality."[9] I do
not take this as an opportunity to rehearse and demonstrate the predominantly rhetorical
character of history. Rather, I seek to write about relations of power in the colonial
period from a specific point of view: that of a postcolonial historian writing about the
past with a conscious nod to present-day issuesâthe lived experiences of
people in a world increasingly dominated by a market economy, by a capitalist
world-system, to use a term and concept coined by Immanuel Wallerstein;[10]
the interplay of the market with modes of power and relations of production; the project
of the colonial state and its effects on peasant society; and the interrelationship
between the projects of the colonial and the postcolonial state.
I therefore do not approach the documentary record as a detached
observer, and my reconstruction of the past from this record is not an innocent or neutral
recounting of what contemporary texts themselves had to say about their times. I am
interested in different textual strategies, ones that break with or at least interrogate
the conventional historical technique of writing from an Olympian and omniscient narrative
voice in order to approach polyphony. It is not that I am so confident of my ability to
reproduce the voices of the past without my own mediations, but I would like to generate a
more dialogical history. I would like to build a reconstruction in which I am not the
voice over all other voices but rather a voice in conversation with the voices of
historical contemporaries as well as of present-day historians. Historical writing, in
this conception, is hewn of the fabric of intertextuality, a fabric that weaves together
history, historian, and historiography. This intertextuality of past and present is forged
by the contamination and complicity generated by the historian's source materials
emanating from particular fields of knowledge and power. Such a narrative seeks to
privilege different points of view in the reconstruction of history. Not that this
necessarily overcomes the problems of trying to recover the past from the subjects' own
points of view, but such an emphasis at
5
least represents more of a stretch to capture the inherent
multivocality of all texts.[11]
The intention in foregrounding the texts of this historical
investigation is not to follow the "Descent into Discourse," to use the title of
a spirited attack on the "reification of language" in recent social historical
writing.[12] The so-called linguistic turn in history, a direction
advocated by the postmodern project, has currency here only insofar as it emphasizes a
critical scrutiny of the hegemonic texts produced by colonial power and knowledge (the
bulk of our standard historical sources), a scrutiny necessitated further by the
recognition that ordinary men and women in history (mostly peasants in this case) occupied
ideological and power positions that were subordinated to, but that also resisted, the
articulations of this hegemony. Nor does the postmodernist belief in the death of the
subject have much play in this work: its central concern is to rescue subjects and their
subjectivity from the hegemonic systems of power and knowledge that subordinated them and
not to privilege textual attitudes and discursive practices. Postmodernism and the new
turn in history figure here in the sense that this study shares the rising interest in the
cultural context of relationships between state and society and between the groups
comprising indigenous society, as well as in their representations in history.[13]
To investigate the historiographical rupture provided by the bazaar, let
us begin by contextualizing, by drawing its spatial and textual coordinates in relation to
the more scrutinized sites in the historiographical landscapeâthose of caste
and village. Like caste, the village was isolated by the colonial discourse as one of the
major sites at which the "real India" was knowable. And like caste, the
villageâcast in the role
6
of the "Indian village republic"âattained
paradigmatic status as a representation of rural society and as a template of the
structure and organization of indigenous society and economy.
A classic formulation is the description of village India limned by Sir
Charles Metcalfe in 1830:
Hindoo, Patan, Mogul, Mahratta, Sikh, English, are all masters in
turn; but the village community remains the same. . . . The sons will take the places of
their fathers; the same site for the village, the same positions for the houses, the same
lands will be reoccupied by the descendants of those who were driven out when the village
was depopulated. . . . This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate
little state in itself, has . . . contributed more than any other cause to the
preservation of the people of India through all the revolutions and changes which they
have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment
of a great portion of freedom and independence.[14]
From such stirrings in the pages of early-nineteenth-century
administrative reports, where the idea of the "village republic" or
"village community" was "primarily [as] a political society," there
emerged a second notion of it as "a body of co-owners of the soil."
Subsequently, it developed into the "emblem of traditional economy and polity, a
watchword of Indian patriotism."[15]
The political version of village India issued from the pens of Sir Henry
Maine and Karl Marx who, although "poles apart in other respects . . . came together
retrospectively as the two foremost writers who have drawn the Indian Village Community
into the circle of world history. In keeping with
contemporaryâVictorianâevolutionary ideas and preoccupations,
both saw in it a remnant or survival from what Maine called 'the infancy of society.'
"[16] For both men the village denoted a community of
interests forged by collective economic and political interests: economic in that the
"organized society" of the village tied together by real or fictive kinship held
land and cultivated it jointly, political in that authority was wielded by the village
council of five, the panchayat .[17]
7
Such a view of village India as self-sufficient economically and
politically meshed commodiously with the rising nationalist sentiment of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Romesh Dutt, for one, deployed these images in
attacking the colonial condition whereby such "ancient and self-governing
institutions" had passed away "under the too centralised administration of
British rulers," their destruction construed as proof that "an alien Government
lacks that popular basis, that touch with the people, which Hindu and Mahomedan
Governments wisely maintained through centuries."[18]
Periodically transformed but never completely transfigured by shifting
intellectual currents, the representations of this imagined village persisted well into
the twentieth century, the village's many-layered images accommodating the projections of
colonial administrators and scholars (e.g., Metcalf and B. H. Baden Powell), theoreticians
(e.g., Marx and Maine), and nationalist leaders and scholars (e.g., Gandhi, Nehru, Dutt).
Although scholars since the 1950s have been steadily dismantling the village that the Raj
builtâsome argue that this edifice has by now not only been condemned but
also razedâthe mythologized village, like caste, has not entirely
relinquished the considerable analytical and theoretical domains it annexed and possessed
for more than a century and a half. Indeed, it has persisted, although with less vigor
than has caste, as one of the "few simple theoretical handles [that have] become
metonyms and surrogates for the civilization or society as a whole."[19]
8
The concept of the village republic has its roots as much in
"European ideas" as in "Indian prejudice." "Like the Mughals, the
Nizam of Hyderabad, Sultans of Mysore, and Nawabs of Dacca and Arcot worked revenue
systems in which ruling elites knew the countryside only as a set of points for revenue
collection. At every point, settled agriculture and trade generated state revenue."[20] In other words, the colonial state settled on the village as the
core of the Indian social, economic, and political body because of its primary interests
in maintaining law and order and in extracting taxes from the subject population. Fiscal
concerns demanded that the countryside be conceived of as a fixed set of points.
An instrumental space for the project of the colonial state, the
Indian village, as constructed in the colonial discourse, did not, however, fit squarely
with British revenue arrangements. In north India the unit of revenue management was the mahal
(estate, parcel of land), which increasingly did not coincide with the mauza , the
revenue village; most settlements, moreover, were made with specific individuals
(landholders, or zamindars) and not the village community. The idea of the village
republic also ran counter to the raiyatwari settlement of south India, which sought
to engage the cultivator (raiyat) directly. "For, if the village was the basic
unit of agrarian organization," as Burton Stein has noted, the "proposal for
revenue [in south India to be] paid by individual cultivators on specific fields appears
misconceived."[21] Explaining away this contradiction required
a rhetorical incorporation that "altered the idea of 'raiyat,' who is changed from
being a part of a corporate village body into an equivalent of 'tenant,' thereby
generating the transcultural metaphor or analogyâIndian sovereign or East
India Company to landlord, raiyat to individualized tenant. In this way both the corporate
village and the individual peasant cultivator were preserved . . . while at the same time
maintaining the purportedly-direct historical relationship between cultivator 'tenant' and
government 'landlord.' "[22] Contradictions between revenue
theory and revenue
9
practice notwithstanding, village India remained at the core of the
colonial ideology precisely because it was more valuable as an invented tradition. And in
this capacity it serviced colonial power and knowledge, which, to follow the lead of
Foucault and others, focused on the manipulation of the body, relying on techniques of
discipline and technologies of power to fix people in space by restricting or encouraging
their movements and actions and their development and reproduction.
Furthermore, the historically constituted and constructed notion of
village India illustrates not only how the technology of colonial power conceptualized one
key siteâcategorizing, classifying, rationalizing, and delimiting in space
indigenous societyâbut also how such ideas expressed the imaginative
geography of Orientalism. The village, in other words, comprised one of the many sites or
units (others being criminal tribes, urban spaces, forests, women, and communities of one
sort or another) appropriated by colonialism. It therefore speaks to us about the workings
of colonial power, not only in exercising political, social, and economic control and
domination but also in inscribing itself into the domain of culture and consciousness.
A site at which colonial power could produce the "colonized as a
fixed reality," the village also qualified as a worthy object of colonial knowledge
and power because it was "at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and
visible."[23] As an Other, it belonged to a different time; it
embodied tradition.[24] The village as tradition, moreover,
strengthened the colonial ideology because it represented the backwardness of the subject
peoplesâit legitimated the right of the rule of modernity, of the Raj.
10
Thus the notion of a conservative rustic population glued to its
villages reflected the penchant of disciplinary power for fixing people in space and time,
a penchant whose preferred category was naturally a sedentary population. How closely this
tied in-as cause or effect or both-with the changes sweeping the subcontinent over the
first century of colonial rule remains to be worked out fully. (So do the many
applications of this process, whether targeting other sites or units, e.g., caste, or
other groups in the population, e.g., women.) But initial findings suggest that changes in
ecology (e.g., extensive deforestation, the advance of the plow) and in modes of
agricultural production and exchange, and the shifting fortunes of the once prominent
nomadic and pastoral sector, all converged on advancing settled agriculture and peasant
petty commodity production.[25]
Did such villages ever exist? Stratification within the village
community may have occurred as early as the first millennium B.C. The
"self-sufficient village," as Romila Thapar states, may have been undermined by
the integration of villages via "horizontal links" with "local markets and
fairs, networks of religious centres playing an economic role as well[,] and trade in
essential items by itinerant herders, artisans and traders."[26]
Similarly, Cohn and Marriott note the many connections linking villages to the wider
world, ranging from "trading networks" to "networks of marriage ties"
to "political networks" consisting "primarily of ties of clan and kinship
among rulers and the dominant landlord groups of the countryside."[27]
Morris E. Opler's classic 1956 article identified various "extensions" of the
Indian village, fashioned by common origin and descent, with a cluster of villages
encompassing an area of seventy square miles; village exogamy, which established ties to
other villages; ties of caste to people of similar castes residing in other villages;
customary work obligations involving artisans or workers from other villages; supravillage
religious or political movements; pilgrimages to sacred sites and visits to the village by
religious specialists; the pull of the market town, which offered goods
11
and services not available in the village; and migration to take
advantage of education facilities available elsewhere.[28]
"Networks of trade, worship, royal authority, kinship, and caste," as David
Ludden has observed recently, "enmeshed a characteristic South Asian village in 1750
within a web of social relations that was essential to agricultural production."[29]
These links, networks, and extensions, however, have yet to be mapped
out fully. Because the village was elevated so far above all other sites in significance,
much of the rural landscape remains beyond the pale of scholarly investigation. The
peripheralization of other sites is especially apparent regarding the "whole subject
of agricultural marketing."[30] As Shahid Amin's introduction
to the glossary of the colonial ethnographer William Crooke notes, the "prior notion
of the changelessness of the physical world of the Indian peasant," led to undue
emphasis on the "production process" and put "exchange
relations in parenthesis." Thus, in Crooke's reconstruction, the world of his
peasants is "principally inhabited by implements and gadgets, utensils and
appliances." "Awkwardly squashed between weights and measures and the rituals of
rural life, 'trade and moneylending' are almost pushed out of reckoning."[31]
In part this oversight reflects an historiographical orientation that
"has often been peculiarly antagonistic to the rural market; on the basis of
rural-romantic or primitive-communistic views of rural self-sufficiency, it has viewed the
market as a specifically alien institution. In particular it has often portrayed the
denizens of the market as low types who were able to steal the major part of the peasant's
produce."[32] In part the historiographical blinders stem from
the "obsessive British concern with Indian Land Revenue."[33]
In part the bazaar
12
has remained largely occulted in a historiographical terrain over
which the dominant monuments of village and caste have cast their giant shadows. The
biases of the historiography, that is, reflect the biases of the colonial record in which
village and caste were tropes of an unchanging India.
Indeed, relatively little scholarly research has been conducted on the
crucial role of markets in articulating the economy and society of an area. Nor have they
been systematically analyzed as parts of a wider network of markets. Instead, studies of
marketing in India, as for other areas of the world (Africa, Asia, and Latin America),[34] are predominantly ethnographies of individual marketplaces and
their settings and about certain aspects of market exchange.[35] A
few works, primarily by economists, have looked at the efficiency of food grain marketing
but only to evaluate their functioning as measured against the models of competitive
markets. There are, however, some significant exceptions: Hagen's scrutiny of the system
of colonial education in Patna district in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within
the context of the local society's marketing system; Bayly's examination of the roles of
"urban, mercantile and service people" in the towns and bazaars of north India
in the period from 1770 to 1870; and Wanmali's synchronic analysis of the lowest level of
marketing, periodic markets, in Singhbhum district.[36] Notable
alsoâalthough largely synchronic in their focusâare the recent
studies of local and regional markets and fairs by geogra-
13
phers and anthropologists that concentrate on the spatial, economic,
and anthropological dimensions of patterns of exchange.[37]
Studies of markets in India as well as in other parts of the world,
while continuing to draw their conceptual sustenance from the central-place theory
developed initially in the 1930s by the German economic geographer Walter Christaller,
offer a diversity of models of market organization.[38] But they
share a common interest in highlighting markets as nodes in a complex pattern of economic
and social exchanges organized hierarchically as well as by such factors as economy,
geography, transportation, politics, and administration. However, the tendency in the
literatureâuntil recently largely the product of geographers and
economistsâhas been to follow the classical idea of central place to see
either how markets organize the geography of retailing or how they serve as collection
points for the available goods and services of an area. An underlying theoretical
construct in this literature is the notion of a central place as "a settlement or an
aggregation of economic functions that is the hub of a hierarchical system which includes
other settlements or communities relating to it on a regular basis; . . . the hub of a
region because goods, people, and information flow primarily between it and its less
differentiated hinterland."[39] Increasingly, locational and
economic analyses of marketsâwith their emphasis on such geographical and
economic variables as population, ecology, transportation, and a competitive market
economyâhave been enriched by studies (many by anthropologists) recognizing
other factors relating to social, political, and cultural conditions and circumstances
also involved in structuring marketing systems. This body of scholarship,
14
much of it largely synchronic in focus,[40]
relies on and reinterprets and modifies central-place theory.
Although the central-place theory of the structure and function of
marketing systems is critical to this analysis, it is not applied indiscriminately. On the
contrary, in seeking to fashion a narrative history around the bazaar, this study takes
its inspiration from Karl Polanyi's "substantivist" insistence on recognizing
the social parameters of economic action and economizing behavior. Indeed, this study is
very much grounded in its local contexts defined by the society and culture of the
northeastern Indian region of Bihar. Although I do not seek to revive the well-known
substantivist-formalist polemics of the 1960s, I consider the Polanyi contribution
valuable for directing "us away from narrow tautological functionalist arguments and
from Parsonian conceptualizations of societies as functionally interlinked subsystems, to
the significance of institutional control of distributive systems and its consequent
effect on production."[41]
The spotlight on bazaars, conceptualized as an empirical counterweight
to the imagined village, is therefore designed to emphasize the links, networks, and
extensions that enmeshed villages within larger units of rural society organized around
the marketing system. At this level of analysis, the investigation examines the structure
and functioning of the rural marketing system in north India by focusing on the specific
economic and social setting of Gangetic Bihar, that area along the Ganges River in the
former province (now state) of Bihar. The data utilized here will draw particularly on
information relating to that substantial portion of Gangetic Bihar carved out
administratively in the colonial period as Patna Division. (See Map 1)
Much of Gangetic Bihar forms part of the "Middle Gangetic
Plain" that extends into present-day Uttar Pradesh (formerly United Provinces and the
North-Western Provinces before that) and represents a transitional zone between the drier
Upper Gangetic Plain, with less than thirty inches of rainfall annually, and the Lower
Plain of Bengal with
15
more than sixty. This transitional area falls between the
predominantly wheat culture of the upper plains and the predominantly rice cultivation of
the lower plain. Gangetic Bihar is largely a flat alluvial plain, except for the Himalayan
foothills in the north occupying 364 square miles of the northernmost extremity of
Champaran, the Barabar Hills of Gaya, and the Kaimur plateau of Shahabad in the south.
North of the Ganges lie the old districts of Saran, Champaran, Tirhut (divided in 1877
into Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur), and the northern portions of Bhagalpur, Monghyr, and
Purnia. The Gangetic plain area of south Bihar is made up of the old districts of Patna,
Gaya, Shahabad, and the southern extensions of Bhagalpur and Monghyr.[42]
Further to the south is the area known as the Chotangapur plateau, where the land rises
one to two thousand feet above sea level, setting that area apart as an ecological region
different from the Gangetic plain. Patna, Gaya, and Shahabad south of the Ganges and
Saran, Champaran, Muzaffarpur, and Darbhanga north of the Ganges together comprised Patna
Division, an area totaling 23,675 square miles and inhabited by more than 15 million
people in the late nineteenth century, and almost 17 million in 1931. After 1908 this
division was split into two: Patna Division consisting of Patna, Gaya, and Shahabad, and
Tirhut Division comprising Saran, Champaran, Muzaffarpur, and Darbhanga.[43]
This study will reconstruct the dynamics of the regional and local
(district-level) marketing systems of this area, down to the lowest level, the haat
, or periodic market. Of interest here are the organization and interrelationships of
markets spatially (in terms of the taxonomy of sites as well as their hierarchical
relationships) as well as temporally (including their relation to the local agricultural
and religious calendar). The structure of the marketing systems will also be considered
within the framework of the pattern of horizontal and vertical trade: the movement of
local agricultural and craft commodities and of nonlocal products from higher-level
markets.
16
In contrast to many other studies of marketing, however, the emphasis
here is not exclusively on mapping the spatial aspects of the human landscape as patterned
by markets or looking at markets as economic phenomena. Rather, the focus is on
reconstructing and narrating the lived experiences of people as played out in the arena
of, and against the backdrop of, markets. I also look at the role of marketing systems as
units of social, cultural, and political organizationâunits within which
power and influence were dispersed and exercised and within which people increasingly
developed and acquired notions of identity and community. And throughout I am interested
in the evolving relationships between the colonial state and indigenous society as
mediated through the local marketing systems. Finally, this book also considers rural
society against the template of the local marketing system.
On the one hand, such concerns are intended to reveal the organization
and interrelationships of markets spatially and temporally; on the other, they can bring
out the fit of the locality and the region in the larger national and world systems. In
part, the lens of the market reveals the changing relations of power and dominance between
and among the different categories on the land. However, because the emphasis is on
viewing local society and culture through the lens of the marketplace, not much attention
is directed at highlighting the incorporation of the region into the capitalist world
system.[44]
The book is permeated by a sense of the market as the "epitome of a
spatial boundary," a "space where local society materially and culturally
reproduced itself." Against this vernacular space are featured events and people that
foreground the market as a "social nexus," as a "typical site of collective
discourse," as a container and crucible of solidarities as well as of antagonisms and
contradictions of a particular locality.[45]
Bazaars realign our imaginative geography by insisting on a more dynamic
view of agrarian society than has hitherto been emphasized in a historiography that has
defined colonial society largely in structural and legal categories. Both as an analytical
unit and at a metaphoric level, bazaars speak the language of exchange and negotiation, of
17
movement and flow, of circulation and redistributionâin
short, of extracommunity or supracommunity connections and institutions. The India of Bazaar
is therefore not confined to a particular site at the expense of wider ties. Such
linkages, after all, did exist, and the village never suffered from that rather artificial
quality of isolation that had been constructed for it in the colonial imagination.
The heart of the bookâchapters 2, 3, and
4âcenters on the perspective of three different sites in the regional system
of marketing. Framed by two contextual chapters (chapters 1 and 5), each of the three core
chapters attempts to engage the possibility of narrating history from different points of
view by looking at the lived experiences of a specific individual or specific groups; each
of these chapters is located at a different point in time; and finally each of these three
frames of perspective, level, and temporality is organized into episodes.
Chapter 2 starts at the apex of the regional marketing system. Its
locale is the central place of Patna, the "City of Discontent" in the
late-eighteenth-century age of "revolution," as seen through the lens crafted by
its contemporary historian, Ghulam Husain. It concentrates on a period that saw the
emergence of British colonial power, the incorporation of the subcontinent into an
expanding European world-system, and the beginnings of a process of deindustrialization
characterized by a decline in the nonagricultural sector of the regional economy.[46] While not entirely accepting the Patna historian's version of the
deleterious effects of the "revolution" on the city and the region, it
acknowledgesâalbeit with modificationsâhis argument about the
reduced salience of the city and its local and regional aristocracy.
The focus then shifts in chapter 3 to the fairs (melas) of Bihar
as portrayed from afar and near by pilgrims, particularly Enugula Veeraswamy, in the first
half of the nineteenth century, when colonial hegemony was firmly established. By
highlighting pilgrimages and fairs, I have placed the emphasis here on situating markets
and the process of exchange in a larger cultural and religious setting. This chapter also
demonstrates the extent to which the local centers of political gravity in the
consolidated colonial system of power and control had shifted
18
away from cities and towns and their urban elite to the countryside
and its local controllers, the landholders, or zamindars. The shift in focus to rural
society in the early nineteenth century also fits in well with the rise of
deindustrialization and the related growth of a peasant economy, developments that were
accompanied by the "collapse of artisanal crafts and domestic urban markets" on
the one hand and the rise of "peasant petty commodity production" on the other.
"The new world economy of the nineteenth century, into which South Asia was now
inserted," to continue in the words of Washbrook, "decreed mass 'peasantization'
as the latter's fate."[47]
Chapter 4 then moves out to the hinterland to dramatize the workings of
the rural markets by setting them against the backdrop of the early-twentieth-century
"Age of Gandhi" and the rise of anticolonial resistance by nationalist and
subaltern groups. An era whose economic conditions were shaped by worldwide dislocations
resulting from World War I and its aftermath, it was a period in which well-to-do peasants
and petty traders played key roles in generating a mass nationalist movement opposing
colonial rule and in mounting resistance to continuing landholder dominance. That the
Gandhi-led Noncooperation Movement of the early 1920s targeted, among other things,
foreign cloth indicates not only the nationalist understanding of the symbolic and
practical capital to be realized from challenging the colonial economy but also of
reversing the processes of deindustrialization and displacement of indigenous capital.
This chapter anticipates the later development of a national market and economy in which
indigenous capital and the rise of domestic markets signaled the emergence of business and
industry. It also sets the stage for a story that one scholar has narrated as the rise of
Indian industrial capitalists from their erstwhile positions as merchants and traders
involved in bazaar trade and banking.[48]
By anchoring each of these episodes at a particular
siteâthe urban center of Patna, the fairs, and the rural
marketsâI intend to privilege the locale itself and its place in the larger
networks of sites and boundaries, as well to utilize it as a setting for a "thick
description" of local worlds and local knowledge. The shift from the city to the fair
to the
19
village market and from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century
is by design. Such movement across space and time mirrors the emergence and development of
colonialism and capitalism in South Asia. The colonial state was initially anchored in the
coastal cities, the port cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, from which it branched
out into the interior. In northeastern India the movement was from Calcutta to the
hinterland via the inland port cities of Murshidabad and Patna and then farther into the
interior, to Banaras. By the mid-nineteenth century, at the conclusion of the first
century of colonial rule, the regime had reached into the countryside, setting up its
apparatus of control in towns and larger settlements that were typically also the sites of
fairs. And in the late nineteenth century, prior to the rise of large-scale elite and
subaltern anticolonial movements, the colonial state sought to tighten its administrative
grip over the countryside by forging links particularly to those nodal points that were
the settings of small town and periodic village markets. As chapter 4 reveals, it was
these markets at the grassroots level that became the locus in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries for the great contest between rulers and ruled. The colonial
state is a presence throughout the work, but it is not portrayed as a static dominating
force from the very outset or an architect of such power that it did not have its own
contradictions or did not have to reproduce itself continually to maintain its control.
The movement from city to towns (and fairs) to village is also aimed at
foregrounding in situ the principal actors of this historical drama: urban elites, rural
magnates, merchants and traders, and peasants. The emphasis is as much on their prominent
roles at particular sites in the system of exchange as it is on their interrelationships
with one another and to the colonial state.
Each of these settings is further intended to be a period piece evoking
a particular milieu: from the city of discontent in the late eighteenth century to the
fairs with their communitas and carnival dimensions in the nineteenth to the
countryside that resounded with the voices of resistance in the twentieth. Each shows the
extent to which any system of exchange is shaped by social and cultural forces as it is by
economic and political conditions.
The opening chapter is the mise-en-scène, which focuses on the
circuits and nodes of Gangetic Bihar as they were reconfigured into a colonial geometry
whose points and lines were determined by its own political and economic imperatives. The
final chapter details, over the course of the longue durée of colonial rule, the
changing experiences of
20
the principal actors in the system of exchange. At the village and
local marketing level the winners were rich peasants and petty traders (beoparis)
who carved out positions of dominance through their access to land, either as its owners
or tenants and through their involvement in petty moneylending and agricultural trade. In
the city and in the towns of the region, this chapter traces the rise of traders and
merchants (mahajans) who occupied the "sphere of bazaar bankers and merchants
working at inland exchanges. . . . Operating through an older indigenous financial nexus
of commission agencies (arhat) and bills of exchange (hundi) , they enabled
inland produce and credit transactions before and after the war [World War I] to take
place increasingly on an all-India basis."[49]
The conclusionâin part an epilogue because it has less of
the limiting and restricting quality that the very word conclusion connotes on the
one hand and the finality of outcome that it implies on the other
handâreaches its own end by connecting the multiple stories in BazaarIndia
. Thus, the bazaar as a site and scene of colonial history is the setting for a narrative
history of the lived experiences of subjects whose lives and livelihood were played out in
the larger contexts defined increasingly by the market and the colonial state in Bihar
between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. These stories rest on the
reconstructions we as historians build from the textual materials of their experiences.
21
Map 1.
Gangetic Bihar
22
Map 2.
The City of Patna
23
Map 3.
North Bihar |
