Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 10:47, 2 April 2012

The neutrality of this article's introduction is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (March 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Kurmi are a Hindu Peasant Community associated with Agriculture (Krishi Karmi Jāti) in India.

The group has been associated with the Kunbi, though scholars differ as to whether the terms are synonymous. In 2006, the Indian government announced that Kurmi was considered synonymous with the Kunbi and Yellam castes in Maharashtra. Kurmis are traditionally classified as Shudra under Hindu Varna system. By the early twentieth century Kurmis defined for themselves Similar Kshatriya identities. The Kurmis also affiliated themselves with lowly horticulturists Kories or Kolis to demand a superior location in the administrative ordering.

Etymology

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (March 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The term Kurmi may have been derived from an Indian tribal language, or may be a Sanskrit compound term krishi karmi, "peasant", or "farmer" Other theories include its being a derivative of kṛṣmi, "ploughman", or Kurma a tortoise avatar of Hindu Lord Vishnu, whether because tortoise is the totem (family deity) of the caste or because, Kurmi supports the population of India as tortoise supports the Earth. The name seems therefore either to come from 'krishi' (cultivation) or from some other unknown source.

History

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

After the decline of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, increasingly interacted with settled townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such martial and nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organization lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Kurmi or Ahirs, were part of a social spectrum that blended only indistinctly into the elite landowning classes at one end, and the menial or ritually polluting classes at the other.

The Kurmi were famed as cultivators and 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. 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.

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 Chunar and Jaunpur, for instance, took up the Muslim custom of marrying first cousins and of burying their dead. In some regions, the Kurmis' success as tillers led to land ownership, and to avowals of high status, as noted, for examples, by Francis Buchanan in the early 19th century among the Ayodhya Kurmis of the Awadh. Earlier, in the late eighteenth century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, attempted to grant the kshatriya title of Raja to a group of influential landed Ayodhya Kurmis, he was thwarted by a united opposition of Rajputs, who were themselves (as described by Buchanan), "a group of newcomers to the court, who had been peasant soldiers only a few years before ..." According to historian William Pinch:

(The) 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.

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 ... "

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 Ceded and Conquered Provinces (later the North-Western Provinces) in 1805, began to press landowners for more land revenue. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 created more fear and discontent among the landed elite, and may have contributed to the Indian rebellion of 1857. Economic pressures also opened marginal areas to intensive agriculture and turned the fortunes of the non-elite peasants, such as the Kurmi, who worked them. After the rebellion, the landowning classes, defeated but still pressed economically in the new British Raj, attempted to treat their tenants and labourers as people of lowly birth and to demand unpaid labour from them. According to historical anthropologist Susan Bayly,

In some instances these were attempts to stave off decline by reinvigorating or intensifying existing froms 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.

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 blood lines, 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.

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. 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.

Seeing caste as a fundamental force in Indian life, Risley, especially, influenced official views as expressed in the Censuses of British India as well as the Imperial Gazetteer brought out by Hunter. Risley is best known for the now discounted attribution of all differences in caste to varying proportions of seven racial types which included "Dravidian," "Aryo-Dravidian," and "Indo-Aryan". The Kurmi fell into two such categories. In the ethnological map of India published in the 1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India and based on the 1901 Census supervised by Risley, the Kurmi of the United Provinces were classified as "Aryo-Dravidian," whereas the Kurmi of the Central Provinces were counted among "Dravidians". (See figure.) In the 1901 Census of India, the category of varna, the four-fold graded system, was included in the official classification of caste, the only time to have been so. In the United Provinces (UP), the Kurmi were classified under "Class VIII: Castes from whom some of the twice-born would take water and pakki (food cooked with ghee), without question;" whereas, in Bihar, they were listed under: "Class III, Clean Sudra, Subclass (a)." According to William Pinch, "Risley's hierarchy (for United Provinces) was far more elaborate than that for Bihar, suggesting that contending claims of social respectability may have been more deeply entrenched in the western half of the Gangetic Plain."

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. 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."

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, ....

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. 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. 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. 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. 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 is ... of the opinion that Kurmis constitute a respectable community which he would be reluctant to exclude from Government service."

The first Kurmi caste association had been formed in 1894 at Lucknow in order to protest against the police recruitment policy. This was followed by an organisation in Awadh that sought to draw other communities - such as the Patidars, Marathas, Kapus and Naidus - under the umbrella of the Kurmi name. This body then campaigned for Kurmis to classify themselves as Kshatriya in the 1901 census and, in 1910, led to the formation of the All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha. Simultaneously, newly constituted farmers' unions, or Kisan Sabhas—composed of cultivators and pastoralists, many of whom were Kurmi, Ahir, and Yadav (Goala), and inspired by Hindu mendicants, such as Baba Ram Chandra and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati—denounced the Brahman and Rajput landlords as ineffective and their morality as false. In the rural Ganges valley of Bihar and Eastern United Provinces, the Bhakti cults of Lord Rama, the incorruptible Kshatriya god-king of Hindu tradition, and Lord Krishna, the divine Kshatriya guardian of cows, had long been entrenched among the Kurmi and Ahir. The leaders of the Kisan Sabhas urged their Kurmi and Ahir followers to lay claim to the Kshatriya mantle. Promoting what was advertised as soldierly manliness, the Kisan Sabhas agitated for the entry of non-elite farmers into the British Indian army during World War I; they formed cow protection societies; they asked their members to wear the sacred thread of the twice-born, and, in contrast to the Kurmis own traditions, to sequester their women in the manner of Rajputs and Brahmins.

In 1930, the Kurmis of Bihar joined with the Yadav and Koeri agriculturalists to enter local elections. They lost badly but in 1934 the three communities formed the Triveni Sangh political party, which allegedly had a million dues-paying members by 1936. However, the organisation was hobbled by competition from the Congress-backed Backward Class Federation, which was formed around the same time, and by co-option of community leaders by the Congress party. The Triveni Sangh suffered badly in the 1937 elections, although it did win in some areas. The organisation also suffered from caste rivalries, notably the superior organisational ability of the higher castes who opposed it, as well as the inability of the Yadavs to renounce their belief that they were natural leaders and that the Kurmi were somehow inferior. Similar problems beset a later planned caste union, the Raghav Samaj, with the Koeris.

Again in the 1970s, the India Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha attempted to bring the Koeris under their wing, but again a disunity troubled this alliance. Kurmi politician Nitish Kumar formed the Samata Party in 1994, forming a backward-upper caste alliance with the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, which achieved only initial success. In 1998, politician Laloo Prasad Yadav took advantage of this lack of unity in the IKKS, portraying Koeri Shakuni Chaudhry as an incarnation of Kush. Under Yadav, the IKSS became less and less advantageous to the Kurmi, favouring instead the priorities of the Yadav caste, and this combined with the competition of the Kurmi-based Samata led to a divide between these intermittently allied castes.

Language

The Kurmi of Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Assam commonly speak Kurmali. In Bihar, Kurmi people speak Magahi and Angika, while in Uttar Pradesh they use Hindi. In other states they generally speak their native and regional languages.

References

Notes

1. 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."
2. Indian censuses of the British Raj period are not usually considered to be particularly reliable except for overall population figures. Those for some areas of the country could be more reliable than others.

Citations

1. Tewari Jassal, Smita (2001). Daughters of the earth: women and land in Uttar Pradesh. p. 52. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
2. Various census of India. 1867. pp. 36–. Retrieved 13 May 2011.
3. ^ 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–. Retrieved 13 May 2011.
4. Central nod for OBC list modification. The Hindu, January 07, 2006 Union Cabinet approved inclusion and modification of certain castes and communities in the Central list of Other Backward Classes (OBCs)
5. Gooptu, Nandini (2001). The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. p. 203. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
6. Pandey, Aditya (2005). South Asia: Politics of South Asia. p. 150. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
7. Tewari Jassal, Smita (2001). Daughters of the earth: women and land in Uttar Pradesh. p. 52. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
8. Pinch, William R. (1996). Peasants and monks in British India. p. 75. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
9. Lal, A. K. (2003). Social exclusion: essays in honour of Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak: Volume 1. p. 157. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
10. Gustav Salomon Oppert (February 1978). On the original inhabitants of Bharatavarṣa or India. Arno Press. Retrieved 13 May 2011.
11. Russell, R. V.; Lai, R. B. H. (1916). The tribes and castes of the central provinces of India. Macmillan. p. 56. Retrieved 23 July 2011.
12. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, p. 41, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
13. Bayly, C. A. (1988). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. CUP Archive. p. 478. ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
14. ^ Bayly, C. A. (1988). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. CUP Archive. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
15. ^ Bayly, C. A. (1988). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. CUP Archive. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
16. ^ William R. Pinch (1996). Peasants and monks in British India. University of California Press. p. 85. ISBN 9780520200616. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
17. William R. Pinch (1996). Peasants and monks in British India. University of California Press. pp. 86–87. ISBN 9780520200616. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
18. ^ Bayly, C. A. (1988). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. CUP Archive. pp. 47–48. ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3. Retrieved 25 August 2011.
19. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–201, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
20. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–205, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
21. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 126–127, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
22. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 129–132, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
23. Rudolph, Lloyd I.; Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber (1984). The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. University of Chicago Press. p. 116. ISBN 9780226731377. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
24. Rudolph, Lloyd I.; Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber (1984). The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. University of Chicago Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780226731377. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
25. 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. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
26. 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. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
27. Anstey, Vera Powell (1977) . The economic development of India (Reprinted ed.). Ayer Publishing. p. 60. ISBN 9780405097751. Retrieved 4 August 2011. ... 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 9788170225850. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
28. Atal, Yogesh (2003). Social Sciences: The Indian Scene. Abhinav Publications. p. 124. ISBN 9788170170426. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
29. Caplan, Lionel (2003). Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World. Berg. pp. 66–67. ISBN 9781859736326. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
30. Sinha, E. Zacharia. Elements Of Demography. Allied Publishers. p. 290. ISBN 9788177640441.
31. ^ William R. Pinch (1996). Peasants and monks in British India. University of California Press. p. 84. ISBN 9780520200616. Retrieved 25 August 2011. Cite error: The named reference "Pinch1996-p84" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
32. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, p. 212, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
33. 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. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
34. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 205–206, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
35. Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, p. 207, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
36. ^ Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003). India's silent revolution: the rise of the lower castes in North India. London: C. Hurst & Co. p. 197. ISBN 978-1-85065-670-8. Retrieved 29 August 2011.
37. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 208–209, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
38. Bayly, Susan (2001), Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–210, ISBN 9780521798426, retrieved 1 August 2011
39. Akshaya Mukul.Mighty Kurmis of Bihar. Times of India, March 12, 2004

Further reading

• Bhattacharya, Ranjit Kumar; Das, Nava Kishor; Anthropological Survey of India (1 January 1993), Anthropology of weaker sections, Concept Publishing Company, ISBN 9788170224914, retrieved 1 August 2011
• Gooptu, Nandini (1 July 2001), The politics of the urban poor in early twentieth-century India, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521443661, retrieved 1 August 2011
• Singer, Milton (editor); Cohn, Bernard S. (editor) (2007), Structure and Change in Indian Society, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 9780202361383, retrieved 1 August 2011 {{citation}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
• Yang, Anand A. (1989), The limited Raj: agrarian relations in colonial India, Saran District, 1793-1920, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520057111, retrieved 1 August 2011

• Misplaced Pages neutral point of view disputes from March 2012
• Use dmy dates from April 2011
• Social groups of India
• Social groups of Bihar
• Social groups of Uttar Pradesh
• Agricultural castes