Kurmi
Kurmi is traditionally a non-elite
Etymology
There are several late-19th century theories of the etymology of Kurmi. According to
According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926), the Bengali word kuṛmī or kurmī derives from Sanskrit kuṭumbin.[7] This view is endorsed in Ralph Lilley Turner's A Comparitive Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1962-1985), where he lists cognates across many Indo-Aryan languages including Bhojpuri, Bihari, and Eastern Hindi.[8]
History
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
With the continued waning of
The Kurmi were famed as market gardeners. In western and northern Awadh, for example, for much of the eighteenth century, the Muslim gentry offered the Kurmi highly discounted rental rates for clearing the jungle and cultivating it. Once the land had been brought stably under the plough, however, the land rent was usually raised to 30 to 80 per cent above the going rate. Although British revenue officials later ascribed the high rent to the prejudice among the elite rural castes against handling the plough, the main reason was the greater productivity of the Kurmi, whose success lay in superior manuring.[2] According to historian Christopher Bayly,
Whereas the majority of cultivators manured only the lands immediately around the village and used these lands for growing food grains, Kurmis avoided using animal dung for fuel and manured the poorer lands farther from the village (the manjha). They were able, therefore, to grow valuable market crops such as potatoes, melons and tobacco immediately around the village, sow fine grains in the manjha, and restrict the poor millet subsistence crops to the periphery. A network of ganjs (fixed rural markets) and Kurmi or Kacchi settlements could transform a local economy within a year or two.[3]
Cross-cultural influences were felt also. Hindu tillers worshipped at Muslim shrines in the small towns founded by their Muslim overlords. The Hindu Kurmis of
Rajputs of Awadh, who along with brahmans constituted the main beneficiaries of what historian Richard Barnett characterizes as "Asaf's permissive program of social mobility," were not willing to let that mobility reach beyond certain arbitrary socio-cultural boundaries. ... The divergent claims to status in the nineteenth century (and earlier) illustrate the point that for non-Muslims, while varna was generally accepted as the basis for identity, on the whole little agreement prevailed with respect to the place of the individual and the jati within a varna hierarchy.[9]
Although the free peasant farm was the mainstay of farming in many parts of north India in the 18th century, in some regions, a combination of climatic, political, and demographic factors led to the increased dependence of peasant cultivators such as the Kurmi. In the Benares division, which had come under the revenue purview of the British East India Company in 1779, the Chalisa famine of 1783 and the relentless revenue demand from the Company reduced the status of many Kurmi cultivators. A British revenue agent wrote in 1790, "It unfortunately happened that during the famine aforesaid a great proportion of the Kurmis, Kacchis and Koeris were in this district as well as in others supplanted by Brahmans ... " and bemoaned the loss of agricultural revenue in part due to, "this unfavourable mutation amongst the cultivators ..."[2]
In the first half of the nineteenth century, economic pressures on the large landowning classes increased noticeably. The prices of agricultural lands fell at the same time that the East India Company, after acquiring the
In some instances these were attempts to stave off decline by reinvigorating or intensifying existing forms of customary service. Elsewhere these were wholly novel demands, many being imposed on 'clean' tillers and cattle-keepers like the Ram- and Krishna-loving Koeris, Kurmis and Ahirs ... In either case, these calls were buttressed with appeals to Sanskritic varna theory and Brahmanical caste convention. ... Kurmi and Goala/Ahir tillers who held tenancies from these 'squireens' found themselves being identified as Shudras, that is, people who were mandated to serve those of the superior Kshatriya and Brahman varnas.[4]
The elite landowning classes, such as Rajputs and Bhumihars, now sought to present themselves as flagbearers of the ancient Hindu tradition. At the same time, there was a proliferation of Brahmanical rituals in the daily life of the elite, a greater stress on pure bloodlines, more stringent conditions placed on matrimonial alliances, and, as noted by some social reformers of the day, an increase among the Rajputs of female infanticide, a practice that had little history among the Kurmi.[4]
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The map of the prevailing "races" of India (now discredited) based on the 1901 Census of British India. The Kurmi are shown both in the United Provinces (UP) and the Central Provinces.
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An "ethnographic" photograph from 1916 showing Kurmi farmers, both men and women, sowing a field
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Another ethnographic print from 1916 showing a Kurmi family employing its beasts of burden to thresh wheat
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A third print from the same collection showing the Kurmi family winnowing
The second half of the nineteenth century also largely overlapped with the coming of age of ethnology—interpreted then as the science of race—in the study of societies the world over. Although later to be discredited, the methods of this discipline were eagerly absorbed and adopted in British India, as were those of the emerging science of anthropology. Driven in part by the intellectual ferment of the discipline and in part by the political compulsions in both Britain and India, two dominant views of caste emerged among the administrator-scholars of the day.[4] According to Susan Bayly:
Those like (Sir William) Hunter, as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley (1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke (1848–1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt.[4]
Seeing caste as a fundamental force in Indian life, Risley, especially, influenced official views as expressed in both the Censuses of British India and the
In the writings of the occupational theorists, the Kurmis and the Jats came to be extolled for their yeoman-like purposefulness, tirelessness, and thrift, all of which, according to writers such as Crooke, Ibbetson, and Blunt had been largely abandoned by the landed elite.[4] Crooke wrote about the Kurmi in 1897:
They are about the most industrious and hard-working agricultural tribe in the Province. The industry of his wife has passed into a proverb:
Bhali jât Kurmin, khurpi hât,
Khet nirâwê apan pî kê sâth.
"A good lot is the Kurmi woman; she takes her spud and weeds the field with her lord."[18]
According to Susan Bayly,
By the mid-nineteenth century, influential revenue specialists were reporting that they could tell the caste of a landed man by simply glancing at his crops. In the north, these observers claimed, a field of 'second-rate barley' would belong to a Rajput or Brahman who took pride in shunning the plough and secluding his womenfolk. Such a man was to be blamed for his own decline, fecklessly mortgaging and then selling off his lands to maintain his unproductive dependents. By the same logic, a flourishing field of wheat would belong to a non-twice-born tiller, wheat being a crop requiring skill and enterprise on the part of the cultivator. These, said such commentators as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt, were the qualities of the non-patrician 'peasant' – the thrifty Jat or canny Kurmi in upper India, .... Similar virtues would be found among the smaller market-gardening populations, these being the people known as Keoris in Hindustan, ....[19]
Twentieth century
As the economic pressures on the patrician landed groups continued through the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, there were increasing demands for unpaid labour directed at the Kurmi and other non-elite cultivators.[4] The landed elites' demands were couched in avowals of their ancient rights as "twice-born" landowners and of the Kurmi's alleged lowly, even servile, status, which required them to serve. At times encouraged by sympathetic British officials and at other times carried by the groundswell of egalitarian sentiment being espoused then by the devotional Vaishnava movements, especially those based on Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, the Kurmi largely resisted these demands.[4] Their resistance, however, did not take the form of denial of caste or of caste-based imposition, but rather of disagreement about where they stood in the caste ranking.[4] A noteworthy attribute of the resulting Kurmi-kshatriya movement was the leadership provided by educated Kurmis who were now filling the lower and middle levels of government jobs.[9] According to William Pinch:
The mantle of leadership in this phase befell the well-connected Ramdin Sinha, a government forester who had gained notoriety by resigning from his official post to protest a provincial circular of 1894 that included Kurmis as a "depressed community" and barred them therefore from recruitment into the police service. The governor’s office was flooded with letters from an outraged Kurmi-kshatriya public and was soon obliged to rescind the allegation in an 1896 communique to the police department "His Honor [the governor] is ... of the opinion that Kurmis constitute a respectable community which he would be reluctant to exclude from Government service."[9]
The first Kurmi caste association had been formed in 1894 at
In 1930, the Kurmis of Bihar joined with the Yadav and
Again in the 1970s, the India Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha attempted to bring the Koeris under their wing, but disunity troubled this alliance.[21][22]
Many private caste-based armies surfaced in Bihar between the 1970s and 1990s, largely influenced by landlord farmers reacting to the growing influence of left extremist groups. Among these was the Bhumi Sena, the membership of which was drawn mainly from youths who had a Kurmi origin.[4][23] Bhumi Sena was much feared in the Patna region and also had influence in the districts of Nalanda, Jehanabad and Gaya.[24]
Kurmis in Nepal
The Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal classifies the Kurmi as a subgroup within the broader social group of Madheshi Other Caste.[25] At the time of the 2011 Nepal census, 231,129 people (0.9% of the population of Nepal) were Kurmi. The frequency of Kurmis by province was as follows:
- Madhesh Province (2.8%)
- Lumbini Province (1.6%)
- Koshi Province (0.1%)
- Bagmati Province (0.0%)
- Gandaki Province (0.0%)
- Karnali Province (0.0%)
- Sudurpashchim Province (0.0%)
The frequency of Kurmis was higher than national average (0.9%) in the following districts:[26]
- Parsa (8.4%)
- Kapilvastu (6.3%)
- Rautahat (5.7%)
- Bara (3.9%)
- Banke (2.2%)
- Sarlahi (2.2%)
- Rupandehi (2.0%)
- Parasi(1.7%)
- Dhanusha (1.3%)
See also
References
Notes
- ^ Although influential, Risley's attempt did not achieve the end which he sought: people were unable to determine in which group they should classify themselves, the localised system he adopted could not be transposed onto the national stage, and some groups took advantage of the situation deliberately to seek reclassification and therefore satisfy their aspirations. L. I. and S. H. Rudolph have commented that "Risley's work, as a scientific effort, seemed based on mistaken premises. Varna was not a behavioral concept."[11]
Citations
- ISBN 978-0-521-79842-6,
In southern Awadh, eastern NWP, and much of Bihar, non-labouring gentry groups lived in tightly-knit enclaves among much larger populations of non-elite 'peasants' and labouring people. These other groupings included ... non-elite tilling and cattle-keeping people who came to be known by such titles as Kurmi, Koeri and Goala/Ahir.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-79842-6
- ^ Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya (1896). Hindu castes and sects: an exposition of the origin of the Hindu caste system and the bearing of the sects towards each other and towards other religious systems / Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya. Thacker, Spink. pp. 270–.
- ISBN 978-0-405-10557-9.
- ^ Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1926). The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta University Press. p. 333.
- ^ Turner, Ralph Lilley (1962–1985). A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages. Oxford University Press. p. 166.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-520-20061-6.
- ISBN 978-0-226-73137-7.
- ISBN 978-0-226-73137-7.
- ^ Quote: "The Hindu draws a distinction between kachcha food, which is cooked in water, and pakka food, which is cooked in ghi (clarified butter). This distinction depends on the principle that ghi, like all products of the sacred cow protects from impurity ... and enables the Hindu to be less particular in the case of pakka than of kachcha food, and allows him to relax his restrictions accordingly." In Blunt, Sir Edward Arthur Henry (1931). The caste system of northern India: with special reference to the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. H. Milford, Oxford University Press. p. 89.
- ^ India. Census Commissioner; Risley, Sir Herbert Hope (1903). Census of India, 1901: Volume I. India. Ethnographic appendices, being the data upon which the caste chapter of the Report is based. Calcutta: Office of the Supt. of Govt. Printing, India. pp. 56–57.
- ISBN 978-0-405-09775-1.
... a vast army of enumerators are utilized, many of whom have a very limited understanding of what is required. Hence the Indian census provides at times more food for merriment than is usually connected with statistical compilations.
Maheshwari, Shriram (1996). The census administration under the raj and after. Concept Publishing Company. pp. 104–116.ISBN 978-81-7022-585-0. - ISBN 978-81-7017-042-6.
- ISBN 978-1-85973-632-6.
- ISBN 978-81-7764-044-1.
- ^ Crooke, William (1896). The tribes and castes of the North-western Provinces and Oudh, Volume III. Office of the superintendent of government printing. pp. 353–354.
- ISBN 978-0-521-79842-6
- ^ ISBN 978-1-85065-670-8. Archivedfrom the original on 2 February 2023. Retrieved 3 October 2016.
- ^ Mukul, Akshaya (12 March 2004). "Mighty Kurmis of Bihar". The Times of India. Archived from the original on 27 November 2010. Retrieved 17 June 2011.
- ^ Gargi Parsai (31 October 2003). "Fernandes to head Janata Dal (United)". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 4 February 2012.
- ^ Chaudhuri, Kalyan (27 September 2002). "End of a terror trail". Frontline. Retrieved 19 December 2018.
- ^ "A lasting signature on Bihar's most violent years". The Indian Express. Archived from the original on 2 June 2020. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
- ^ Population Monograph of Nepal, Volume II [1] Archived 26 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "2011 Nepal Census, District Level Detail Report" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 March 2023. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
Further reading
- Bhattacharya, Ranjit Kumar; Das, Nava Kishor; Anthropological Survey of India (1 January 1993). Anthropology of weaker sections. Concept Publishing Company. ISBN 978-81-7022-491-4. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- Gooptu, Nandini (1 July 2001). The politics of the urban poor in early twentieth-century India. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-44366-1. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- Singer, Milton; Cohn, Bernard S., eds. (2007). Structure and Change in Indian Society. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-202-36138-3. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- Yang, Anand A. (1989). The limited Raj: agrarian relations in colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-05711-1. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- Jassal, Smita Tewari (2001). Daughters of The Earth. Technical Publications. p. 57. ISBN 978-8-17304-375-8.
- Viswanath, Sashikala (1985). Anthropological Methods for Communication Research: Experiences and Encounters During SITE. Concept Publishing Company.