The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929-1942: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement

266 Pages·2019·2.204 MB·English

by  Walter Hauser

THE BIHAR PROVINCIAL
KISAN SABHA, 19291942
On December 5th, 1920, in Patna, the Dasnami sannyasi Sahajanand
Saraswati encountered Mahatma Gandhi for the first time. Sahajanand
was already known in social-reform circles in Bihar as an energetic
activist and educator working to promote Bhumihar Brahman identity.
Inspired by the Mahatma’s radical reformulation of Indian nationalism,
‘the Swami’ (as Sahajanand would soon come to be known) threw
himself into nationalist politics and the Indian National Congress.
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 India, 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 Communist Party of India. 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 peasant movement 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
Virginia, 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 transl ations 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
WA LT E R H A U S E R
Foreword by
WILLIAM R. PINCH
Curated with an Afterword by
KAILASH CHANDRA JHA
OR Routledge
GDELTU Taylor & Francis Group
E
LONDON AND NEW YORK
MANOHAR
2019
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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 Hindi 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.