Kurmi

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Kurmi is a Hindu agricultural caste in northern India.

etymology

There are several theories on the etymology of Kurmi from the late 19th century . According to Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya (1896) the word can be derived from an Indian tribal language or a compound Sanskrit term, Krishi Karmi = farmer. According to a theory by Gustav Salomon Oppert (1893), it is a derivation of kṛṣmi , which means “the plowman”.

history

18th and 19th centuries

Records from this period show that the Kurmi in western Bihar formed an alliance with the ruling Ujjainiya Rajputs . Many Kurmi community leaders fought side by side with the Ujjainiya king when he rebelled against the Mughals in 1712 . Among the leaders of the Kurmi community who joined in his revolt were Nima Seema Rawat and Dheka Rawat.

With the decline of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the hinterland dwellers of the Indian subcontinent, many of whom lived as nomads, appeared more frequently in populated areas and interacted with townspeople and farmers. Many new rulers in the 18th century came from such nomadic backgrounds. The effects of this interaction on Indian society lasted well into the colonial era. For much of this period, non-elitist farmers and pastoralists like the Kurmi were part of a social spectrum that only vaguely fitted into the elite landowning classes on the one hand and the lower or ritually "polluting" classes on the other.

The Kurmi were famous as gardeners. In western and northern Awadh, for example, the Muslim nobility offered the Kurmi discounted rents to cultivate the jungle for much of the 18th century. After the land was cultivated stably, the rent was usually increased to 30 to 80 percent above the usual rate. Although British tax officials later mockingly attributed the rents to the prejudice of the rural castes' elite against plowing, it was the main reason why the Kurmi were more productive in the superior method of manuring. According to historian Christopher Bayle, most farmers just manured the land immediately around the village and used that land for growing grain. The Kurmis, on the other hand, did not use the dung as fuel, but also fertilized the less fertile land further away from the village (the Manjha). They were therefore able to grow valuable crops such as potatoes, melons and tobacco directly in the village, cultivate finer crops and limit the subsistence crops of millet to the periphery. A network of Ganjs (fixed rural markets) and settlements of Kurmi or Kacchi could transform a local economy in a year or two. Intercultural influences could also be felt. Hindu farmers also worshiped Muslim shrines in the small towns that were founded by their Muslim overlords. The Hindu Kurmi, Chunar and Jaunpur adopted the Muslim custom of marrying first cousins ​​and burying the dead. In some regions, the Kurmi’s success as arable farmers led to land ownership and high status gains.

In the late 18th century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, tried the Kshatriya title of a group of influential Ayodhya Kurmi Raja loan, he was prevented by a united opposition of Rajputs in mind that there themselves, newcomers at the court and had been peasant soldiers only a few years earlier.0 Although the free farms were the main producers of agricultural products in many parts of northern India in the 18th century, a bundle of climatic, political and demographic factors led to an increasing dependence on peasants such as the Kurmi. In the Benares division, which came under the revenue of the British East India Company in 1779, the 1783 famine in Chalisa and the relentless demand for revenue from the company reduced the status of many kurmi cultivators.

In the first half of the 19th century, economic pressure on the large landowning classes increased markedly. Farmland prices fell at the same time as the East India Company began pushing landowners for more land revenue after acquiring the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (later the North-Western Provinces) in 1805. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 caused more fear and discontent among the country elite and may have contributed to the Indian rebellion of 1857. Economic pressure also opened up peripheral areas to intensive agriculture and changed the position of non-elite farmers like the Kurmi. After the uprising, the landowning classes, defeated in the new British Raj but still under economic pressure, tried to ostracize their tenants and workers as people of little birth and to demand unpaid work from them. At the same time, there was an increase in brahmin rituals in the daily life of the elite, an increased emphasis on pure bloodlines , stricter rules for marriages and, as noted by some social reformers of the time, an increase in female infanticide , a practice rarely practiced among the Kurmi has been.

20th century

As economic pressure on the patrician land groups continued through the 19th century and into the early 20th century, there was an increasing demand for unpaid labor directed at the Kurmi and other non-elite farmers. The demands of the land elites were based on confessions of their old rights as "twice-born" landowners and the allegedly low, even inferior status of the Kurmi, which required their service. At times encouraged by British officials, and at times sustained by the fundamental wave of egalitarian sentiment then advocated by the Vaishnava movements, particularly those based on Tulsidas ' Ramcharitmanas, the Kurmi largely opposed these demands. Their resistance, however, was not a fundamental rejection of the caste system, but a disagreement about where they were in the caste list. A feature of the resulting Kurmi kshatriya movement was leadership by educated Kurmi who now occupied the lower and middle levels of government.

The first Kurmi caste association was established in Lucknow in 1894 to protest against police recruitment methods. This was followed by an organization in Awadh that wanted to bring together other communities - such as the Patidare, Marathas, Kapus, Reddys and Naidus - under the umbrella of the name Kurmi. This body worked to ensure that Kurmi members classified themselves as Kshatriya in the 1901 census , and in 1910 led to the formation of the All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha . At the same time, newly formed farmers' unions or Kisan Sabhas - consisting of farmers and pastoralists, many of whom were Kurmi, Ahir and Yadav (Goala) and were inspired by Hindu beggars like Baba Ram Chandra and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati - denounced which Brahman and Rajput landlords were inefficient and labeled their morality as wrong. In the rural Ganges Valley of Bihar and the eastern provinces of India, the Bhakti cults of Rama from the Hindu tradition, and Krishna had long been rooted among the Kurmi and Ahir . The leaders of the Kisan Sabhas urged their followers of Kurmi and Ahir to lay claim to the rank of Kshatriya. The Kisan Sabhas promoted what was advertised as soldierly quality and advocated the entry of non-elite peasants into the British-Indian Army during World War I.

In 1930, the Kurmi of Bihar joined forces with the farmers of Yadav and Koeri to vote in local elections. They lost, but founded the political party Triveni Sangh with three parishes in 1934, which by 1936 supposedly had one million members who paid dues. The organization, however, was hampered by competition from the Congress-sponsored Backward Class Federation , which was formed around the same time and through cooperation between community leaders and the Congress Party. The Triveni Sangh suffered badly in the 1937 election, although it won in some areas. The organization also suffered from caste rivalries, particularly from the superior organizational skills of the higher castes who opposed it and the inability of the Yadav to give up their opinion that they were natural leaders and that the Kurmi were inferior. Similar problems concerned a later planned caste union, the Raghav Samaj, with the Koeri.

In the 1970s, the Indian Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha tried to integrate the Koeri, but disagreement affected this alliance.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, many private caste-based armies emerged in Bihar, largely supported by farmers, and responding to the growing influence of left-wing extremist groups. Among these was the Bhumi Sena, whose members were mainly recruited from young people of Kurmish origin. Bhumi Sena was greatly feared in the Patna region and also had an impact on the Nalanda , Jehanabad and Gaya districts .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Susan Bayly: Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age . Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-521-79842-6 , pp. 41 ( books.google.co.in - excerpt).
  2. ↑ Prabhu Bapu: Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930: Constructing Nation and History . Routledge, 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-67165-1 ( books.google.co.in - reading sample).
  3. ^ C. Gupta: Sexuality, Obscenity and Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India . Palgrave, New York 2002, ISBN 0-230-10819-9 , pp. 340 ( books.google.co.in - excerpt).
  4. ↑ University of Michigan: Hindu Castes and Sects: An Exposition of the Origin of the Hindu Caste ... Thacker, Spink, 1896, pp. 270 ( archive.org [accessed May 18, 2020]).
  5. ^ Gustav Salomon Oppert: On the Original Inhabitants of Bharatavarṣa Or India . Arno Press, 1978.
  6. ↑ Surendra Gopal: Mapping Bihar: From Medieval to Modern Times . Routledge, 2017, ISBN 978-1-351-03416-6 , pp. 313 ( books.google.co.in - excerpt).
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i C. A. Bayly: Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 . CUP Archive, 1988, ISBN 0-521-31054-7 , pp. 478 .
  8. ↑ CA Bayly: Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 . CUP Archive, 1988, ISBN 0-521-31054-7 , pp. 101 .
  9. ↑ a b c Internet Archive: Peasants and monks in British India . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 85 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive - reading sample).
  10. ↑ a b Christophe Jaffrelot: India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India . Hurst, 2003, ISBN 978-1-85065-670-8 , pp. 197 ( books.google.com - excerpt).
  11. ↑ Mighty Kurmis of Bihar. In: Times of India. Retrieved May 18, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Gargi Parsai: Fernandes to head Janata Dal (United) . In: The Hindu . New Delhi October 31, 2003 ( thehindu.com ).
  13. ↑ Kalyan Chaudhuri: End of a terror trail. Retrieved May 18, 2020 .
  14. ^ A lasting signature on Bihar's most violent years. In: Indian Express. Retrieved May 18, 2020 .