KURMI
This article is
about the Hindu agricultural community. For the people of Greater Jharkhand,
see Kurmi / Kudumi Mahato.
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Kurmi
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Religions
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Languages
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Populated States
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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. There are
differences of opinion regarding the group's classification in the traditional varna system.
Contents
Etymology
There are
several theories regarding the etymology of the term Kurmi. It may be
derived from an Indian tribal language, or may be a Sanskrit compound term krishi
karmi, "agriculturalist." Another theory holds that it was
derived from kṛṣmi, meaning
"ploughman"
History
Eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries
With the waning
of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's
hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, began to appear more
frequently in settled areas and interact with townspeople and agriculturists.
Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such 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.[11] 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 Bhumihar Brahmins, 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.
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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 both the Censuses of British India and 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".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 this was the case. 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.
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
Kurmi
women in "Hindustani dress" (1916)
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 [the governor] 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 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 Rama,
the incorruptible Kshatriya god-king of Hindu tradition, and 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.[30]
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 IKKS 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.
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