THE PROVINCIAL KISAN SABHA, 19291942

On December 5th, 1920, in , the Dasnami sannyasi encountered for the first time. Sahajanand was already known in social-reform circles in Bihar as an energetic activist and educator working to promote Brahman identity. Inspired by the Mahatma’s radical reformulation of , ‘the Swami’ (as Sahajanand would soon come to be known) threw himself into nationalist politics and the . Within a decade, moved by the plight of tenant-farmers struggling against excessive rent demands and abusive landlord ‘exactions’, the Swami had spearheaded the formation of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha. This organization quickly became the largest organization of its kind in , catapulting the Swami onto the national stage. By the early mid-1930s the Swami had publicly broken with both the Mahatma and the ‘Gandhians’ and had made common cause with the left wing of the Congress. Later, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered on the horizon, he joined forces with the Forward Bloc and the . By the time of his death in 1950, the Swami, disillusioned with politics, had dissociated himself from all parties. This pioneering 1961 study by Walter Hauser, tracks the history of the Bihar as it both influenced and was buffeted by national and international politics. Hauser offers here a penetrating analysis of the character of the movement and the mind of its leader as he grappled with and gravitated toward Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s and 1940s. Initially written as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, Hauser’s path-breaking Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929-1942 is now being published in its entirety for the first time. The volume includes a ‘Foreword’ by one of Hauser’s many students, William R. Pinch.

Walter Hauser is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of , where he taught modern South Asian history from 1960 to 1995. While at Virginia he trained numerous postgraduate students and built the South Asian Studies Program. Since the mid-1990s he has produced, with his friend and collaborator Kailash Chandra Jha, three major scholarly translations of the writings of the social reformer, peasant leader, and Dasnami sannyasi, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929-1942 A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement

WALTER HAUSER

Foreword by WILLIAM R. PINCH

Curated with an Afterword by

KAILASH CHANDRA JHA ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

MANOHAR 2019 First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Walter Hauser and Manohar Publishers & Distributors The right of Walter Hauser to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him 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 identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-22597-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27593-7 (ebk) Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro 12/16 by Manohar, New Delhi 110 002

MANOHAR Contents

Foreword by William R. Pinch 7 Acknowledgements 29 Introduction 31 1. The Agrarian Condition of Society 35 The Province and its Population 35 The Land System 40 Zamindars and Peasants 40 Tenancy and Rent 51 2. Formation of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 63 Preliminary Developments 65 The Effects of Civil Disobedience 70 Agrarian Policy of the Bihar Congress 81 Emergence of the Kisan Sabha 89 Socialism and the Kisan Sabha 98 3. Character of the Movement 106 Leadership 106 Organization and Method 119 Ideology and Program 127 4. The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and the Congress 141 The Left-Right Controversy and the 1937 Elections 143 The Ministry and the Kisan Sabha: Compromise and Conflict 151 6 CONTENTS

5. National Politics and the Decline of the Bihar Kisan Sabha 166

Conclusions 186

Appendices Appendix I 193 Appendix II 197 Appendix III 201 Appendix IV 202 Appendix V 204 Appendix VI 212 Appendix VII 218 Appendix VIII 226 Appendix IX 228 Appendix X 235 Appendix XI 237

Bibliography 245

Afterword 259

Index 261 Foreword

as i write this foreword, Walter Hauser, emeritus Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the author of the volume in front of you, is in his ninety-first year. Walter completed the present study in 1960 as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago.1 The dissertation immediately garnered attention as a pioneering work on peasant politics and history and consequently gained wide circulation, especially in India.2 To take only two examples, Arvind Narayan Das relied heavily on it in the early 1980s for his widely read books on agrarian movements in India;3 and in the mid/late 1980s one ‘Chandra Bhushan’ (a nom de plume)

1 He defended the dissertation in the summer of 1960 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1961. 2 Walter provided copies of the dissertation to the A. N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies in Patna and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi. 3 See Arvind N. Das, Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on 20th Century Bihar (London: Frank Cass, 1982), esp. p. 40 (where he explicitly acknowledges his debt to Walter); Agrarian Unrest and Socio-economic Change in Bihar, 1900-1980 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), passim. Also revealing is his ‘Swami and Friends’, in William R. Pinch, ed., Speaking of Peasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), esp. p. 228. 8 FOREWORD translated it into and published it as part of an under- ground ‘Naxalite’ tract entitled Kisan Andolan ka Vikas: Sahajanand se Charu aur Ab.4 Walter had given thought to publishing the dissertation in the 1960s, well before the events at Naxalbari village in northern West Bengal, from which the ‘Naxalites’ took their inspiration. Shorter publications by Walter appeared in the 1960s and early 1970s that drew on key parts of the work.5 But circumstances prevented its publication as a standalone monograph. Not least among these was the fact that in 1960 Walter had taken up the post of assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he was the sole ‘Asianist’ among a faculty of about twenty mostly US historians with a smattering of Europeanists.6 Virginia was at the time a

4 Trans: The Development of the Peasant Movement: From Sahajanand to Charu [Majumdar] and Now. (Charu Majumdar was the intellectual progenitor of the Naxalite movement.) No date or copyright page is included in the volume, however the publisher is listed on the back cover as the Sahajanand Adhyayan-Shodh-Prakashan Sansthan or ‘Sahajanand Study-Research-Publication Institute.’ The volume began circulating in 1987. Though ‘Chandra Bhushan’ as ‘compiler and editor’ named Walter as the ‘main author’ or pradhan lekhak of the work, he unfortunately had not sought Walter’s prior permission. Given the charged sociopolitical context, with a decades-long history of Maoist ‘red guard’ actions against landlords by so-called ‘Naxalites’, especially in Bihar – in a pattern of conflict that was overlaid with deep-seeded caste divisions (and armies) and supplemented by the increasingly coordinated counterinsurgency operations of the Bihar police and the Indian state – this was a matter of no small concern. 5 For a full list of Walter’s publications prior to 2008, see Philip McEldowney, ‘Bibliography of Walter Hauser’, in Pinch, ed., Speaking of Peasants, pp. 489-95. 6 Walter describes these years in ‘South Asian Studies at Virginia’, in Pinch, ed., Speaking of Peasants, pp. 474-87 (esp. pp. 474-8). FOREWORD 9 well-regarded regional university but nothing like the institution it would become by the late 1980s. Walter was initially responsible for covering not just South Asia but China and Japan as well. He would prove, too, to be an immensely talented and energetic program builder and soon turned his energies toward creating the University’s Center for South Asian Studies. Fate further intervened in 1968 in the form of the Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of its peripheral nervous system, which hit Walter while he happened to be on a research trip to India. His condition, which included complete paralysis, required that he be medically evacuated to the US for hospitalization and rehabilitation. By the early 1970s he had recovered and regained control of his body, but only after much painstaking physical therapy. In all, the experience robbed him of well over two years and considerable physical strength, all when he was just hitting his stride as a recently promoted associate professor. The increasingly high historiographical profile, and circuitous evolution, of peasant studies in the 1970s and 1980s (about which I will have more to say later) prompted Walter, on two or three subsequent occasions, to contemplate a revised and updated manuscript for publication.7 However, by the 1970s Walter’s reputation was such that he had begun attracting graduate students in agrarian history. In addition

7 Ravinder Kumar, director of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library from 1980 to 1997, was among those who urged Walter to publish the dissertation in these decades. Usage of the dissertation at the NMML reportedly was so heavy that the microfilm copies that had been made (to protect the original) were reduced to shreds. 10 FOREWORD to the fact that graduate students take up an enormous amount of time, with which Walter was generous to a fault, a whole new research field had to be assembled in the Department of History. Similarly the South Asia Center, which by the mid 1970s was eligible for and increasingly receiving federal funding, demanded ever larger amounts of time and effort. Meanwhile much new work in social history and peasant studies continued to appear, most notably (in 1982) the scholarly enterprise known as ‘Subaltern Studies’.8 The neo- Marxist/Gramscian politics that underwrote the Subaltern Studies project, its favorable reception among postmodernists and deconstructionists, and its reverberations in the Indian body politic – especially amid the internecine battles royal that dominated ‘left academic’ politics in India in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership – added additional layers of historiographical complexity to an already daunting task of revision. During the late 1980s, as Walter began contemplating retirement from active teaching, he increasingly focused his efforts on completing a series of closely annotated translations from the Hindi corpus of the peasant leader who was at the center of his dissertation, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. These translations, begun in the 1970s but brought to completion with Walter’s longtime friend and collaborator Kailash Chandra Jha, appeared in 1994 (Khet Mazdoor),9 1995

8 See C.A. Bayly, ‘Rallying around the Subaltern’, Journal of Peasant Studies 16 (October 1988), pp. 110-20, for a discussion of subaltern studies in comparison to earlier work in ‘peasant studies’, including Walter’s own contribution. 9 ‘Agricultural Laborers’. The full title is Sahajanand on Agricultural Labour and the Rural Poor (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994). FOREWORD 11

(Jharkhand ke Kisan),10 and 2015 (Mera Jivan Sangharsh).11 As the title ‘Swami’ suggests, Sahajanand Saraswati was an unusual peasant leader. Born ‘Navrang Rai’ in 1889 to a high- caste family of peasant tenant-cultivators of District, in what is now eastern , Sahajanand took the vow of sannyas or renunciation in 1907 and became a ‘Dasnami Sannyasi’. The term ‘dasnami sannyasi’ invokes a complex history, the full explication of which is beyond the space limitations of this brief foreword (but see Walter’s extended comments on this theme in the 2015 volume). Suffice it to say that when the eighteen-year-old Navrang ‘renounced’ the social world of family and caste in 1907 and adopted the name ‘Sahajanand Saraswati’, he entered a religio-ascetic universe that boasted an all-India network of shrines, pilgrimage routes, and monasteries, and claimed institutional descent from the ninth-century sage Shankaracharya, the revered proponent of Advaita Vedanta or post-Vedic phil- osophical ‘non-dualism’. Navrang Rai thus migrated from the rather restricted world of a small village near the Ganges in north India in the early twentieth century, to a much wider civilizational spatio-temporal frame that traversed the subcontinent and an entire millennium. It was noteworthy, too, that ‘the Swami’, as we (that is, Walter’s students) typically referred to him, never abandoned his ascetic affiliation. He recognized that his robes accorded him immense cultural capital, which he harnessed to an uncompromising sense of

10 ‘Peasants of Jharkhand’. The full title is Swami Sahajanand and the Peasants of Jharkhand: A View from 1941 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). 11 ‘My Life Struggle’. The full title isCulture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2015). 12 FOREWORD social and economic justice and a razor-sharp intellect. But his was not simply an ‘instrumentalization’ of religious asceticism. While in prison in the 1940s he was urged by some of his younger fellow inmates to teach a class on the , which he undertook with pleasure and which became the basis for his carefully argued text, Gita-Hriday (1948).12 In short, the Swami’s personal qualities, his village origins, and his institutional credentials combined to make him an extremely effective advocate for peasants, especially (over time) for landless agricultural laborers. Indeed, it was Sahajanand’s life story and religio-ascetic commitments as much as the agrarian politics that he spearheaded, that attracted Walter to Bihar in the late 1950s and kept him coming back over the following decades. I return to this point later. It is now nearly sixty years since the writing of Walter’s Ph.D. dissertation. Last year Kailash, his aforementioned friend and collaborator, urged Walter to again consider publishing the dissertation. Walter agreed and, furthermore, decided that rather than try to reconcile and incorporate the various forays into revision from the 1970s to the early 2000s, he would instead publish the work in the form that was approved by his doctoral committee in 1961. This will make Walter’s study, which has become a part of the history of agrarian radicalism and intellectual politics, more easily available for students and researchers. This long-overdue

12 Or: The Heart of the Gita. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Gita-Hriday (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1948), esp. pp. 61, 210-14 for his reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of activism, especially for mobilizing leaders. FOREWORD 13 publication also follows, and indeed punctuates, the recent return to Bihar of research materials relating to the Swami that were collected and preserved by Walter, to a discussion of which I now turn.

* * * On 1 July 2018, I had the honor of participating in a remarkable ceremony in Patna, the capital of Bihar. Many dignitaries were present, including the Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar, Sushil Kumar Modi. The organizers of the ceremony were the aforementioned Kailash Jha, who first met Walter in 1975, and Satyajit Kumar Singh, President of the Chintaharan Singh Social Development Trust and Secretary of the Shri Sitaram Ashram Trust.13 The main occasion for the celebration was the formal arrival from Virginia of the aforementioned collection of documents that had been held for over five decades at Virginia and previously had been held by the Shri Sitaram Ashram, Raghavpur (Bihta).14 These were documents generated by the Swami and dated from the late 1920s to 1950 while he led the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and, later, the All-India Kisan Sabha.The Sitaram Ashram had been the Swami’s headquarters during those decades and the documents had been among the records that remained

13 Chintaharan Singh, the father of Satyajit Kumar Singh, was a devoted follower and admirer of the Swami. He grew up in Amhara, which adjoins Raghavpur (the location of the ashram), just south of the town of Bihta. A happy coincidence that aided in aligning the stars for this ceremony, and the archival development described in this section, was the marriage in April 2016 of Kailash’s daughter Archita and Satyajit’s son Avijit. 14 Raghavpur (Bihta) is about 35 kilometers west of Patna. 14 FOREWORD there after his death in 1950. Walter visited the ashram for the first time in 1958, on a tip from political scientist Myron Weiner, who would later serve as a member of Walter’s dissertation committee before shifting to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.15 Till then he had been focusing his research energies in Allahabad, where he had come with his wife Rosemary and where their daughter Sheila was born. He followed his initial visit to the ashram with two or three additional trips in 1959 and the early and mid 1960s. Raghavpur (Bihta), the site of the ashram, is situated near the confluence of the Son and the Ganga. Indeed the Son River flows just 4 kilometers to the east of the village. Two other major rivers, the Ghaghara and Gandak, join the Ganga nearby from the north – the former at Chhapra, the latter at Hajipur directly across from Patna.16 Consequently, the entire area is rich agricultural land, with the soils replenished by

15 Walter describes the circumstances of his early visits to the ashram in the ‘Editor’s Preface’, Culture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950, an edited translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle), trans. and ed. Walter Hauser with Kailash Chandra Jha (New Delhi: Manohar, 2015), xviii-xix. 16 Additionally, the Punpun flows north-east along the southern edge of Patna District and meets the Ganga just east of Patna. See Vipul Singh,‘Gangetic Floods: Landscape Transformation, Embankments, and Clay Brick-Making’, RCC Perspectives (published by the Rachel Carson Center), 3 (2014), p. 25, for a map and a description of the shifting course of the rivers, particularly the Son and Ganga which have migrated west and north respectively over the past millennium. Singh notes that the northward migration of the Ganga has accelerated in recent years due to the construction of embankments along the southern bank from Maner (near Bihta) to Patna. The region that stretches from Monghyr (east of Patna) to the Son thus sits in the historic floodplain of the migrating rivers. FOREWORD 15 periodic monsoon flooding, the intensity of which depends mainly on the (more unpredictable) pressure from the northward-flowing Son. While this creates excellent potential for cultivation in the diara (alluvium) left in the wake of flooding, it also creates conditions of periodic high humidity and waterlogging that are not conducive to the preservation of documents. It was in this context, with many of the papers of the ashram having deteriorated due to moisture damage, that materials were brought to the University of Virginia where they could be professionally archived in acid-free folders in an effort to maintain and preserve them. Last year Walter decided with Kailash that the time was now right to return the documents to the Sitaram Ashram Trust.Therefore Walter and Kailash catalogued and packed the documents into five boxes and dispatched them to New Delhi.Kailash received the documents after they had cleared customs in New Delhi and, in early 2018, transferred them to Patna.On 1 July 2018 the documents were formally handed over to the assembled members of the Shri Sitaram Ashram Trust. As Walter was too frail to make the journey in person, Wendy Singer of Kenyon College (another of Walter’s students) and I were present on his behalf. The collection that was returned to the Sitaram Ashram Trust consists of printed booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, speeches, resolutions, reports, petitions, copies of journals, posters, and correspondence. Of the correspondence, which was both handwritten and typed, 85 per cent is in Hindi, 14 per cent in English, and 1 per cent in different Indian languages.17

17 Email from Kailash Jha to Philip McEldowney, 6 October 2018, with a copy forwarded to William Pinch on 7 October 2018. This narrative 16 FOREWORD

Many of these items were replicas of documents that remained at the ashram. Because the ashram lacks the necessary archival facilities and staff for regular research consultation, the ‘Hauser collection’ is currently being held in the office of the Chintaharan Social Development Trust in Patna. The immediate plan is to publish the portions most likely to interest the wider public, namely, the Swami’s correspondence. Over the longer term, once proper archival facilities at the ashram are constructed, the collection of both the returned and residual documents (the collection that remained at the ashram), as well as the Swami’s personal effects and other material artifacts, will be available for consultation by researchers. For historians, the removal of documents from their original institutional setting is complicated and fraught with risk. Given the importance of those documents to the dis- sertation and to Walter and Kailash’s subsequent translation work, to say nothing of the rumors and accusations that began to circulate in the 1970s about the fate of the collection,18 about the documents and their return to the Sitaram Ashram Trust is based partly on my own memory, partly on the narrative provided by Kailash Jha both at the July 1st ceremony and in writing to McEldowney, and partly on numerous conversations and (more recently) email exchanges with Walter between 1982 and 2018. 18 For the flavor of these, see Abhay Singh, ‘American Social Scientist Hauser Not a CIA Agent’, Times of India (Patna edition), 2 July 2018; and for the Cold War context, Arvind Das, ‘Swami and Friends’, in Pinch ed., Speaking of Peasants, p. 227. According to Kailash Jha, email com- munication of 21 October 2018, the New Age (from New Delhi) and Jan Shakti (Patna), both CPI organs, went so far as to make the ludicrous claim that Walter was a CIA agent! The suggestion that records had been FOREWORD 17 some additional comment is appropriate here.Walter’s decision to take the documents to Virginia was pro mpted by the fact that the records were in a perilous state and the ashram possessed no archival facilities to properly preserve them. Few scholars in India in the late 1950s and early 1960s (save Walter, of course) actually considered the documents to be of any historical value. This is partly because the events of the 1920s and 1930s were still fresh and from the point of view of most historians peasants did not qualify as the proper subjects of ‘history’ as such. The 1950s, it will be recalled, predated the rise to prominence of social history, or ‘history from below’ as E.P. Thompson put it in 1966, in the Anglo- American (and Indian) academy. Also relevant, however, was the fact that by the time of his death in 1950 the Swami had become something of a political persona non grata, having alienated his associates in the Congress leadership as well as his closer allies in the Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party (the reasons for this are detailed in the chapters that follow). Similarly the Swami had long since burned his bridges to powerful Bhumihar Brahman patrons (many of whom had, in any case, become prominent ‘Congressites’), on whose behalf he had worked in a social reformist context in the 1910s and early 1920s. Indeed, it was due to his political ‘untouchability’ at the time of his death

‘stolen’ from the ashram was raised in parliament in the mid 1980s and Congress MP L.P. Shahi, Minister of State for Education, assured the House that the matter would be looked into. Among left academicians the rumors spread mostly by word of mouth and innuendo. I was asked many times about the matter, in both India and the US, from the late 1980s till as recently as 2017. 18 FOREWORD that the ashram and the school that the Swami established in the 1920s had subsequently fallen onto hard times. Walter was thus confronted with a unique and unenviable dilemma. On the one hand, he had the great good fortune of having ‘discovered’ a gold mine of archival materials for his doctoral research, something that every Ph.D. researcher dreams of. On the other hand, were he to leave the papers in the ashram it was only a matter of time until they were destroyed or sold for scrap. He had previously tried to interest senior historians at Patna University in the collection, as well as officials at the State Central Records Office in Patna and the National Library in Calcutta, but to no avail. No one in a position to actually do anything to preserve and/or properly archive the papers felt that materials of such recent provenance, dealing with the interests of mere peasants, and then too of such a politically isolated figure, were worth the expenditure of resources. Faced with these circumstances, Walter made the decision to preserve the collection by bringing it to the University of Virginia. It is, of course, easy to second-guess actions taken by Walter in the mid 1960s. But as Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi put it at the 1 July 2018 ceremony, with full appreciation for the delicious irony of the situation and a strong sense of intellectual gratitude, ‘By taking away the papers related to Swami to the US, he has helped preserve them.’19A similarly eloquent sentiment of heartfelt thanks to Walter was expressed by Vijay Kumar Chaudhary, Speaker

19 Abhay Singh, ‘American Social Scientist Hauser Not a CIA Agent’, Times of India (Patna edition), 2 July 2018. FOREWORD 19 of the Bihar Assembly, on 4 March 2018, on the occasion of the launch of the popular edition of Walter and Kailash’s translation of Mera Jivan Sangharsh.20 Walter was unable to attend either of these celebrations due to his advanced years. But on 1 October 2018, Satyajit Kumar Singh, Secretary of the Shri Sitaram Ashram Trust, traveled to Charlottesville to meet Walter and personally express the collective gratitude of the members of the Trust for both having preserved and returned the records, and for his writing on and translations of the Swami’s work. If peasants were marginal for historians in the 1950s and early 1960s, they began moving toward historiographical center stage over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s.21 This was reflected in the creation of scholarly journals such as The

20 See S.M. Shahbaz, ‘Struggle to Inspire, now in English’, Telegraph, 5 March 2018; and ‘Sahajanand’s Memoir Released’, Times of India (Patna edition), 5 March 2018. The full 4th March launch ceremony is available on youtube at https://youtube/Vl9RDB7CdRo. See minutes 33:30 to 58:40 for Speaker Chaudhary’s remarks, esp. minutes 57:00 to 58:10. 21 The French, of course, were far ahead in this, as evident in the work of Marc Bloch and the Annales ‘school’. It is also worth noting that while peasants did not arrive at center-stage historiographically in India till the late 1960s, there had been important analytical work done by activist- scholars writing from ‘stage left’ from the 1920s onwards, particularly by N.G. Ranga (sometimes writing with the Swami), M. Abdullah Rasul, and E.M.S. Namboodiripad. For discussion, see Walter Hauser, ‘Peasants, Activists, and Scholars: A Late Twentieth-Century Reflection on Definitions’, in Chittabrata Palit, Amit Bhattacharya, and Ranjan Chakrabarti (eds.), Political Economy and Protest in : Professor Sunil Kumar Sen Commemoration Volume (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1997), pp. 255-6 and the relevant endnotes for titles. Clearly much depends on how and by whom the academic boundaries of the historiographical stage are defined. 20 FOREWORD

Indian Economic and Social History Review in 1963,22 The Journal of Social History in 1967, and The Journal of Peasant Studies in 1973. Central to all three journals, and many like them, were the structural transformations that shaped the lives of ordinary people, including importantly the rise of capitalism and its effect on agricultural production and peasant societies. Among the landmark works that appeared in these decades were Eric Wolf ’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969); Teodor Shanin’s edited volume Peasants and Peasant Societies (1971); and James Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976). Peasants were acquiring a historical dimensionality even as scholars argued about the very definition, historical genealogy, and analytical applicability of the term ‘peasant’. (Shanin was a major contributor to this particular debate.) However, as these particular titles (or rather, their authors’ identities) suggest, pioneering work in peasant history was, as often as not, being written by scholars in adjacent disciplines. Wolf was an anthropologist; Shanin a sociologist; Scott a political scientist. Indeed, the inter- disciplinarity of peasant studies was already reflected in Walter’s dissertation committee, which in addition to the aforementioned Myron Weiner (political science) also included Bernard Cohn (anthropology).23

22 Indeed vol. 1, no. 1 of IESHR included an essay by Walter, drawing on his dissertation, entitled ‘The Indian National Congress and Land Policy in the Early Twentieth Century.’This was part of a forum on land and tenancy rights that included additional essays by Thomas E. Metcalf and John (‘Jock’) R. McLane. Bernard (‘Barney’) S. Cohn offered a comment in the following issue, no. 2. The papers were first presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1963. 23 For Walter’s own reflections on this rapidly shifting historiographical FOREWORD 21

The University of Chicago was particularly noted for encouraging an atmosphere of interdisciplinary inquiry in the social sciences, and especially for the study of peasant societies. This was due in large part to the presence of the anthropologist Robert Redfield, whose landmark ethnographic work in Mexico marked anthropology’s ‘discovery’ of peasants a full generation before historians arrived on the scene.24 Redfield, whose entire education and career took place at Chicago, would become Dean of Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946, and would remain a key figure at Chicago until his early death from leukemia in 1958. His influence on the shape and content of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences at Chicago in the post-World War II era was enormous. This was evident in the form ‘area studies’ took at Chicago as well as the way in which geo-cultural areas were understood in the unfolding of the story of human civilization.25 Hence it is no surprise moment, see his ‘The Life of a Text and Its Meanings: Reflections on Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh’, in Mushirul Hasan and Narayani Gupta, eds., India’s Colonial Encounter: Essays in Memory of Eric Stokes (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), pp. 155-61. 24 See Stephen Murray, American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), especially the chapter, ‘American Anthropologists Discover Peasants’. 25 Richard Davis, ‘South Asia at Chicago: A History’, Committee on South Asian Society, new series, no. 1 (April 1985), p. 29; and Nicholas Dirks, ‘South Asian Studies: Future’s Past’, in his The Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 273-5. Both authors make the point that area studies developed in a post-World-War-II/Cold War context, and both point to the centrality of Sanskritist W. Norman Brown who headed up the South Asia desk at the Office of Strategic Services in WW II, the forerunner to the CIA. Davis notes that Redfield, critical of emerging ‘war-time area 22 FOREWORD that Chicago was where history and anthropology began their long and fruitful conversation.26Redfield’s work in the 1930s and 1940s unfolded into a theory of civilization and culture, structured around the interplay of ‘great’ (or civilized) and ‘little’ (or folk) traditions, which would find its most elaborated form in the 1950s with the publication of The Primitive World and its Transformation (1953) and Peasant Society and Culture (1956). Redfield initially posited a contrast between folk and civilized society, embedded within which was a theory about the nature of change. William McNeill, who took over the chairmanship of the Department of History at the University of Chicago in 1961, the very year Walter’s Ph.D. was approved,and who had his own abiding fascination with the problem of civilization, remembered Redfield’s early formulations thus:

Folk society was one in which well-established customs met all ordinary circumstances of life, and fitted smoothly together to create an almost complete and unquestioned guide to life. Redfield argued that a remote Yucatan village he had studied approached his ideal type of folk society. Nearly isolated from outside encounters, the people of the village had reconciled their Spanish Christian and Mayan heritages, blending what had once been conflicting ways of life into a more or less seamless whole. Conflict and change were reprehensible, checked by the sacralizing power of binding custom. Civilized society, exemplified by Yucatan’s port city of studies programs as lacking a clear intellectual purpose’, was eager to give area studies at Chicago more robust scholarly substance. 26 Especially evident in Marshal Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). FOREWORD 23

Merida, was at the opposite pole. There Catholicism clashed with residual pagan rites, and continual contacts among strangers meant that customary rules binding everyone to a consistent body of behavior could not arise. Instead, conflicting moral claims provoked variable, unpredictable conduct. Social conflict and change was [sic] obvious and pervasive, feared by some and welcomed by others.27

By the 1950s Redfield, in collaboration with Milton Singer (the leading figure in establishing South Asian studies at Chicago), was turning his attention toward Indian society, an effort that was enshrined in the landmark volume Village India.28 A greater emphasis was now placed on the ties between folk and civilized, rural and urban, as a productive tension rather than an oppositional contrast. In the words of Nicholas Dirks, a later Cohn student, the application of Redfield’s intellectual program to the study of India was framed around the conviction, as expressed in the chapters to the volume, that ‘villages in India were not self-sufficient units, isolated in conventional anthropological terms from larger civilizational forms and processes’. Rather, ‘classical and folk forms, and by implication civilizational and village sites, were vitally connected’.29 While it may be an overstatement to say that these were the big ideas with which Walter was armed in 1957 when he arrived in India, there is no doubt that, at the very least, Redfield’s theoretical reframing of civilization as developed

27 William McNeill, ‘The Changing Shape of World History’, History and Theory, 34, 2 (May 1995), p. 15. 28 Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), ed. McKim Marriott. 29 Dirks, ‘South Asian Studies: Futures Past’, p. 273. 24 FOREWORD in dialogue with Milton Singer and company contributed to his own scholarly formation as a historian and profoundly informed his research inquiry. Walter had originally arrived at Chicago in 1951 planning to study European history, in the ‘naïve but not unreasonable’ hope of ‘understanding my roots’ as he later put it.30 But, he added, ‘a funny thing happened on the way to that Ph.D., namely, India’. Writing in 2004, he recalled that the Redfield-Singer ‘Village India’ seminar in 1954 was ‘for me the defining influence in the serendipitous journey to India on which I was now embarking.’ Redfield’s seminar performance was ‘an exercise in intellectual candour, recognizing how little we knew about the social and political present of the subcontinent and its people;’ as a group, the seminar presenters were ‘more interested in raising questions about process and meaning in the lives of the people, the peasants of this Great Civilization, than in providing answers’.31 We can thus easily imagine Walter’s excitement when he came to Raghavpur (Bihta) in 1958 and glimpsed, through the scattered papers in the Sitaram Ashram, a world where change was being propelled not in urban centers but in the village and countryside, and a world in which a leading proponent of that change was a man who insistently defined himself as a sannyasi, a staunch representative of a brahmani-

30 Walter’s family on his father’s side had been daily wage laborers on a large landed estate in Austria-controlled eastern Poland before migrating to the United States. See Walter Hauser, ‘The Life of a Text and its Meanings’, pp. 155 and 183n2. 31 Walter Hauser, ‘The Life of a Text and its Meanings’, pp. 156-7. Also see Walter Hauser, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Culture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950, an edited translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle), p. xviii. FOREWORD 25 cal religio-ascetic tradition with deep civilizational roots. Furthermore, it was significant for Walter that the Swami emphasized his status as a dandi sannyasi by virtue of his high-caste birth. As the Swami said many times, he understood that dand, the ritual staff, as a weapon (lathi) to be used on behalf of the peasants.32 He would deploy the weight of brahmanical religious tradition, in other words, to demolish structures of oppression and create radical transformation. This was tradition in the service of change.33

* * * To make a long story short, the upshot of all these intellectual transformations was that by 1970 peasants had arrived at center stage in historical scholarship. Meanwhile in India, as has already been noted, the historiographical arrival of peasants was punctuated by the explosion of the ‘Naxalite’ movement, in which the already splintering Communist Party of India was further divided by how best to respond to an armed and largely spontaneous insurgency in northern Bengal (in Naxalbari) of mostly middle and low caste landless agricultural workers ranged against a largely upper-middle and high-caste landlord class that controlled the state police

32 See Culture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950, an edited translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle), p. 541. 33 This productive tension would, of course, characterize the work of another key Chicago team, the political scientists/political sociologists Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, esp. in The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 26 FOREWORD machinery. The Naxalite phenomenon saw a frustrated younger generation of idealists, who increasingly regarded themselves as Maoists (no small matter from a national security angle, given the 1962 war between India and China), took to the villages to drink from the well of agrarian in- surgency. This turn to the villages reflected a widening sense on the younger left that the old guard communist establish- ment, whether CPI or CPM, had failed to account for or satisfactorily respond to the realities of (South) Asian agrarian relations. The war in Vietnam also cast a long shadow and lent an epic, global dimension to the battles being fought in the distant fields of Bengal and, increasingly, Bihar. All this prompted a growing demand for scholarship that understood Asian peasants in Asian terms, not according to political theorists from the distant industrialized West. Suddenly Swami Sahajanand Saraswati began to take on enormous significance. It was at this point that embarrassing questions began to be asked about why and how so many of the key papers of the ashram were located in Virginia – embarrassing less for Walter, who had had the presence of mind to know their value, but for those historians and archivists who had turned a deaf ear to Walter’s entreaties a decade earlier, many of whom (in Bihar) were themselves members of or fellow travelers with the now splintered Communist Party of India.34 Walter, meanwhile, continued to visit India in the 1970s and 1980s, for short and long visits (often accompanied by Rosemary, who was no less committed

34 And who, with the tightening grip of Indira Gandhi and her ‘Emergency’ realpolitik, had been appointed to senior positions in the academic establishment in New Delhi. FOREWORD 27 to the progress of the research), and was instrumental, in 1974, in having a very substantial portion of the papers in the ashram microfilmed by the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi.35 It was an interest in the Swami’s leadership of the peasant movement, and the place of religion and asceticism in Indian political and social history more generally, that drew me to Walter when I myself became one of those graduate students that took up so much of his time in the 1980s. By then, of course, the intellectual winds had shifted. ‘Peasant studies’ had given way to, or been subsumed by, ‘Subaltern Studies’, and the stark black-and-white contrasts of Marxist class conflict were overtaken by the stylish shaded greys of Gramscian cultural hegemony. And even though Gramsci had conjured the ‘organic intellectual’ in ways that seemed to nicely anticipate the Swami’s complex positionality, the question of the day had become whether or not the ‘subaltern could speak’. The political stakes of South Asian studies in those days was further sharpened by Edward Said, author of the paradigm-shifting volume, Orientalism (1978). The target of Said’s critique, at least as amplified by Ronald Inden (another Chicago historian), was the notion (again) that religion – Hinduism – and caste were unchanging features of India’s social and cultural landscape, indeed that caste and Hinduism prevented India, in both a Hegelian and Marxist sense, from entering the grand stream of history (on which the West seemed to have a monopoly).36 It seemed to me in

35 This was accomplished with the key involvement of James Hagen, yet another Hauser student, and senior IAS officer Kumar Suresh Singh. 36 See Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian 28 FOREWORD the mid 1980s that Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (and the dynamic culture of asceticism in Bihar generally) offered en- ormous potential to challenge such antiquated notions once and for all.37 In retrospect, it is clear that what excited me about Bihar was little different from what excited Walter in the 1950s. I hope that these all-too-brief contextualizing remarks, and more importantly the publication of Walter’s remarkable Ph.D. dissertation, will help to inspire a new generation of students to discover an excitement about Bihar in 2018. Wesleyan University William R. Pinch 7 December 2018

Studies, vol. 20, no. 3. (1986), pp. 401-46, later expanded into Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 37 See William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), esp. the introduction, for a wider historiographical and theoretical treatment. Acknowledgements

i am greatly indebted to Professors Myron Weiner and Bernard S. Cohn for their many valuable criticisms and suggestions in the preparation of this study. Their ideas helped materially in stimulating my own thought about the processes of Indian pol itics. I also want to thank Professors Robert I. Crane and Stephen N. Hay for their encouragement and advice. Thanks are also due the many Indian political leaders, especially of Bihar, who were always cooperative in numerous discussions and interviews. The director and personnel of the State Central Records Office, Patna, were helpful in making available important documents. Dr. K.K. Datta and Aditya Prasad Jha made my task there an easier one. In addition, materials were used in the Sachchidanand Sinha Library, the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee Library, and the Searchlight Press, all in Patna. Jadunandan Prasad and G.P. Singh helped with translations from Hindi materials. This study was made possible by an extended Fulbright grant and by Carnegie funds made available through the Committee on South Asian Studies of the University of Chicago. I appreciate this support and assistance. However, I am alone responsible for any errors of fact and interpretation. Walter Hauser Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com Introduction

the study of nationalist politics in recent Indian history has been primarily concerned with the program and ideology of the Congress, and to a lesser extent of the Socialists and Communists, as subsidiary political groups. By contrast, the role of the mass organization as an element of nationalism has been treated only as an incidental aspect of these broader interests; the movements of students, trade unionists and peasants are viewed essentially as facets of policy and action of the larger political groups. This approach is seen in the studies of Crane, Rusch, and Overstreet and Windmiller.1 In their respective monographs of the Congress, the Congress Socialists and the Communists, these authors introduce brief and perceptive analyses of one or more of the mass organizations as factors functioning in the broader political framework of these parties. This compre hensive approach, from the top, is both necessary and valuable and reflects the significant

1 See Robert I. Crane, ‘The Indian National Congress and the Indian Agrarian Problem’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, Yale University, 1951); Thomas A. Rusch, ‘Role of the Congress Socialist Party in the Indian National Congress’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 1955) and Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 32 INTRODUCTION relationships between the mass group and the parties. It is important, however, to go beyond this general approach in an attempt to understand the mechanics of Indian politics, by looking specifically at one of the mass organizations, and in a regional context, where its operations are more apparent. This study is an attempt at such an approach to the peasant movement in the province of Bihar. It is an analysis made at the intermediate level of the political structure. The peasant movement, characterized in its organizational form as the Kisan Sabha, was undoubtedly the most important of the mass organizations and Bihar was the place of its greatest strength.2 Its beginnings lay in the political and economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s. The movements of non-cooperation and civil disobedience of those years projected India’s rural masses into the maelstrom of nationalist politics for the first time. This significant event coincided with a very grave social and economic crisis in agrarian society. Its immediate cause was the fall in prices actuated by the Great Depression, which accentuated in a critical way the existing problem of a growing population faced with increasing rents and static crop production.3 The resulting rise in indebtedness, rent arrears, dispossession and attempted dispossession created an agrarian situation that seemed to hold the prospects of an organized peasant move- ment, if not of conflict. described the prospects in this way:

2 The term Kisan Sabha is defined as peasant association, or peasant society. 3 See Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 33

The wind is blowing to the villages and to the mud huts where dwell our poverty-stricken peasantry, and it is likely to become a hurricane if relief does not come to them soon. All our political problems and discussions are but the background for the outstanding and overwhelming problem of India – the land problem.4

The fact is of course, that conflict appeared only in the most isolated instances and that the organization of a class- oriented peasant movement was a regional rather than a national phenomenon. Even with the formation of the in 1936, the strength of the movement was limited to the Andhra region, Bihar, the Punjab, the United Provinces, and Bengal in any measurable degree, and of these the movement in Bihar was by far the most significant. A descriptive analysis of the peasant movement in Bihar – its formation, growth and decline – form the substance of this study. While it is not the object here to determine why mass peasant organizations did not prosper in other regions, an understanding of developments in Bihar may permit some tentative generalizations as to the nature of peasant organization in India. A definitive determination of the problem, however, must await a broader study for which this is but a point of departure. In order to provide a clear understanding of the distinctive features of the agrarian system in Bihar, it has been necessary in the first chapter to consider in some detail the system of tenure and rent, especially with reference to the south Bihar districts, where peasant agitation was centered. The unique character of the land system, with what a conservative observer

4 Cited in H.D. Malaviya, Land Reforms in India (New Delhi: All India Congress Committee, 1954), p. 55. 34 INTRODUCTION has called a ‘rapacious’ social and economic relationship, was indeed an extremely important consideration in determining the course of peasant politics in the 1930s.5 The main body of the dissertation comprises four chapters which consider in chronological order the several phases of Kisan Sabha development, namely its formation in the years of non-cooperation, its organizational period through the mid-1930s, the period of most active agitation to the beginning of Second World War, and finally its demise in the war years. A major consideration throughout is how the movement operated and what relationships it established with peasants, politicians and administrators. The year 1942 is taken as the terminal point, both for the reason that the war introduced new and significant changes into the political life of the country, and because in that year Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who was the dominant figure in the Bihar peasant movement, came out of prison as an exponent of a political view that was incompatible with his role as a peasant leader in India and Bihar.

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