Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-century North India 019565787X, 9780195657876

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Embattled Identities

Embattled Identities Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India

M alavika K asturi

OXTORD U N IV E R SITY PRESS

ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARY c

I I

;

O XPORD U N I V E RS I T Y TRESS

YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road. New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark o f Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India By Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press, 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2002 All rights reserved. No part o f this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department. Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquiror ISBN 019 565 787 X Typeset in Palatine 10/12 Byjojy Philip Printed by Roopak Printers. Delhi 110 032 Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road. New Delhi 110 001

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I

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

vii xiii

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

1

Rajputs: Pride, Honour and Political Economy

24

2

Taming the ‘Dangerous’ Rajput

64

3

Marriage and Female Infanticide

102

4

Law, Litigation, and Lineage

137

5

Bhumeawat and Rajput Rebellion

172

6

The Bandit as King

200

Epilogue

229

Glossary

239

Select Bibliography

249

Index

265

m

Preface

Among the noble houses of the nations of this earth there are none that can boast of a longer pedigree, or of a more splendid history than the Rajpoots of India.1 In ancient times, the two functions of this race were ruling and fighting. Only one of these, the latter, still remains... Formerly, they could command armies, or divisions and sub-division^of armies, and were employed as rulers over provinces and districts, or else governed in their own right. Such occupations gave scope to their ambition, and an object on which their intelligence and energy might expend themselves. But all that has changed. Not being employed now in such offices, or in any other of great national or social interest, life is to many of them without a purpose.2

he Rajputs have passed into popular memory as brave and glorious warriors, with a strong sense of honour, pride, and sacrifice. Such perceptions have been reproduced repeatedly in popular literature and film. In the nineteenth century, British officials and ethnographers tempered their fascination for the Rajput past by contrasting the present pitiable condition of this ‘ancient race’ with their erstwhile position as the military victors and ‘feudal’ conquerors of yore.3These observations were echoed by members of the Rajput qaum or community, who bewailed the fact that their peers had abandoned the sword and were now known less for their acts of valour than for squandering their

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1 M. A. Sharing, Hindu Tribes and Castes as Represented in Benares (London, 1872; rpt, Delhi, 1974). vol. 1. p. 117. 2 Ibid., p. 118. 3 Ibid., p. 119.

viii / Preface

energies, strength, and resources fighting with one another and pursuing a profligate lifestyle.4 In the context of this varied discourse of decline, I focus on the ways in which Rajput political and social relations were reconstituted in the period of ‘colonial modernization’. Rather than focus on the oft-studied Rajputs in the erstwhile princely states of Rajasthan, I train the historical lens on their equally important but neglected compatriots in north India (in the North-Western Provinces), in a region ruled directly by the British from the early nineteenth century. This was a period during which the resource base, power, influence, and way of life of this caste faced a fundamental threat from colonial state forms, ideologies, and the changing political economy. Despite a general concern with identity formation, pre­ existing historiography has not exhibited an interest in the ways in which the Rajput definition of ‘self’ and lineage structures responded to and adapted to colonial rule. In this book, I seek to understand this complex process. Here, I use the term ’Rajput’ to refer to a specific social group which recognized and affirmed each other’s claims to Rajput status and origins. Within this imagined community, a number of hierarchical distinctions existed which dictated the rank and position of the lineages under study. Rajputhood, was, until comparatively recently, probably the most important ideological, cultural, and behavioural social model, coveted and appropriated by various upwardly mobile castes in this region, even as they set themselves up in opposition to ruling patrician Elites asserting a high Rajput social and ritual rank. The Rajput kinship structure constituted an important site for the articulation of power and social identities, which were defined at various axes and were multiple in origin. One or more levels of identity were invoked by Rajput lineages at any point in time. While caste/ritual ranking was an extremely important measure of position, economic status and access to political power played a significant role in constructing hierarchies between and within lineages. The pressures of age, gender, and wealth were equally important in creating boundaries within lineages. More importantly, I suggest, these identities were constantly contested and required continuous revalidation by the imagined Rajput community. Therefore, the parameters of the overlapping status and power 4 Thakur Hanumanth Singh Varma, Kshatiyakul Timirprabhakar (Agra, 1863), p. 43; Kesari Simha Dewda, Rajput fati ko Sandesa (Agra, 1924), p. 1.

Preface / ix hierarchies defining the position of the lineage in agrarian society were constantly reshaped through a process of negotiation, confrontation, and resistance. Status and varna categories were imposed upon subordinated groups by the social and ritual 61ite and were inseparable from the changing relations of domination and power. The reinvention of ‘traditions’ and social practices through which these groups articulated anew their sense of self was also a fundamental part of this process. I found that Rajput status positions and identities were complicated and shifting categories, and almost impossible to fix conclusively, responding as they did to the demands of economics, power, and politics. That the Rajputs and the British in their own ways attempted to fix the identities and social boundaries in the nineteenth century added to the complexity of developments, which this study seeks to elucidate. Assertions to Rajput identity were dependent to a large extent on how various lineages responded to the environment created by colonial state structures, discourses, ideologies, and material realities. I argue that status-conscious Elites at the top of the Rajput social ladder increasingly sharpened power equations within ritual, lineage, and family hierarchies to separate themselves from ‘outsiders’, especially those of low ritual and economic status. In so doing, these groups imposed a more exclusive definition of the social category ‘Rajput’ upon agrarian society in a period during which social structures became far more polarized and caste and lineage boundaries less permeable. While redefining their sources of power, Rajput lineages fought internal and external sources of threat at all levels with even greater vigour and in various ways, including a display of collective violence, called bhumeawat. The Rajput lineage and household were also important sites of the battle for status, honour, and power. Despite the apparent detachment of Rajput households from the world of politics, service, and landholding relations, they had always been central to the process of adaptation and change in political and social relations. In this book, I suggest that domestic space (comprising the private sphere of the household and the family), so far largely neglected by scholars working on other aspects of £lite Rajput lineages, became one of the primary arenas within which influence, authority, and rank were visibly articulated and expressed. It was also the core site for the articulation and transformation of gender and power relations. With this focus, I

x / Preface

examine how political, ritual, and masculine social identities were redefined in a period of structural transition. My analysis of social practices, such as property and inheritance and marriage strategies and female infanticide within the family, indicates that Rajput men manipulated social strategies of reproduction to ensure their access to economic resources and networks of support, power, and influence in the reconfigured public and private space. In a parallel development, in our period, the status of women declined, as ‘male’ power was consolidated within the lineage in various spheres. Through these issues, this book engages with the growing historical interest in the relationship between family, gender, and identity. None of the problems I examine in this book (and which are discussed at great length in colonial records), are peculiar to the nineteenth century. However, the specificities of the colonial context lent the articulation of identities amongst various social groups a new significance. Having said that, no simplistic linkages can be drawn between colonialism and its impact on the Rajputs. The ways in which die lineages under study negotiated and reformulated their sense of self depended on a number of localized variables. Rajputs chose a multiplicity of strategies in response to their changing position in interlocking social and political structures. All these factors accounted for the differential position of the lineages under study in the North-Western Provinces. Consequently, it is difficult to speak of an absolute decline when speaking of the Rajputs. Colonial state discourses and structures interacted at various levels with the Rajputs. The collection of knowledge on Rajput identities occurred in an environment in which the colonial state sought to collate data on the various communities peopling the regions under its control to further paramountcy, establish the ‘rule of law*, and ensure the stability of its rule within its boundaries. However, the British engagement with the brave but ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ Rajput (whose unbridled masculinity, claims to power and social practices were supposedly based on an alternative moral code), was full of contradictions. Criminal and civil law, for example, grappled with Rajput normative codes and values and refashioned ‘tradition’ and claims to authority and rank, as they created a new political and legal space within which identities were negotiated and contested at various levels. Official intervention in the realm of the family and domestic space was especially

Preface / xi problematic. Here, as we shall see, colonial discourses and codes of power were open to compliance, manipulation, or alternatively to resistance by their colonial subjects, adding a complexity to the British relationship with the Rajputs. Colonial debates on the Rajputs were integrally linked to larger questions such as caste, the due processes of law, the legitimization of colonial rule, and the nature of British intervention in local society. These themes provide entry points through which I seek to engage in various interrelated debates on caste, community, gender, kinship, and indeed colonialism itself. The version of Rajput social practice and status positions obtained by officials were those of the ‘male’ lineage. Indeed, official records, on which I have largely depended for my narrative, cast little light on Rajput women. The use of official categories and descriptions are also problematic. The detailed information on the nature of ‘traditions’ and social practices amongst the Rajputs in colonial files, which was gleaned from discussions with local informants, was mediated by official perceptions of Indian society and power structures. Therefore, I have interrogated the value judgements embedded in official narratives on subjects such as female infanticide, plunder, and feuding, even as I examine their internal logic, linkages to larger structures of power and the extent to which they mirrored ongoing social, cultural, and political adjustments to the fundamental changes taking place in colonial India.

I

Acknowledgements

his book began as an M Phil dissertation at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, on marriage and female infanticide amongst the Rajputs in north India and took some of its present shape when I wrote my PhD thesis at Cambridge. The advice and suggestions of Neeladri Bhattacharya and Chris Bayly have been invaluable at each step of the way and have informed every page of this project. Chris Bayly’s timely direction, guidance, and support provided the gentle backdrop against which I finished the PhD. Neeladri Bhattacharya’s incisive comments on the manuscript helped me look at my evidence and arguments afresh. This work has also benefited from the comments of participants at seminars in Delhi, Cambridge, Oxford, London, and New Haven. Numerous archivists and librarians helped me access the archival and secondary material collected at the National Archives (Delhi), the Uttar Pradesh Regional Archives (Allahabad), the Uttar Pradesh State Archives (Lucknow), the Madhya Pradesh Central Record Room (Nagpur), the Commissioner’s and Collectors Offices in Jhansi and Lalitpur, the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library in London, and the University Library and the Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge. In particular, I thank Dr Sandhya Nagar and Rekha Trivedi for helping the wheels of the bureaucracy turn more smoothly at the archives in Lucknow and Allahabad respectively and Dr Lionel Carter at the Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge for his help. During the PhD, my research was financially supported at various points by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Charles Wallace Trust, and Churchill College. Subsequently, while holding an Indian Council of Historical Research post-doctoral fellowship

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xiv / Acknowledgements

at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teenmurti, Delhi, I rewrote large sections of this book. The Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University provided an encouraging environment in which to put the final touches to the project. I am obliged to friends who read or commented on various parts of my work, including Carey Watt, Riho Isaka, Francesca Orsini, Sanjay Sharma, Rohan D’Souza, Vasant Saberwal, Shilpa Phadke, Abhay Sardesai, Rahul Srivastava, and Joerg Schendel. I have especially benefited from discussions with Sanjay on the peculiarities of the social history of north India and from Rohan’s emphasis on clarity of thought and argument. A number of people made the world an easier place for me to live in while I was working on the book: In particular, I would like to mention my sister Kamu, my aunt Uma, Zahid, Jeannie, Viji, Rina, Rohan, Anindita, Sanjay, Pragati, Shilpa, Jateen, Gratia, Amrita, Tana, Riho, Julia, and Donia for being the warmest of friends and sources of great encouragement, always. I shall also remain eternally in debt to Dr B. K. Joshi and Bino, who have acted as in loco parentis with consummate ease and affection ever since I turned up on their doorstep in Lucknow about ten years ago. Professor Majid Siddiqqi has been a source of good advice and an under­ standing friend. Finally, I am grateful to Joerg for his friendship, support, and unflagging interest in my work as it was being re­ written for publication. My parents were my greatest source of reassurance and motivation as I went through the highs and lows of writing both the dissertation and the manuscript. I cannot thank them enough and in appropriate words. My mother read and copyedited my work in its various incarnations many times, well beyond the call of duty. To her and to my father I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

ACO

Agra Commissioner’s Office

AD

Agra Division

AllD

Allahabad Division

AGG

Agent to Governor General

App.

Appendix

Asst

Assistant

Atg

Acting

BA

Bundelkhand Agency

BC

Board’s Collections

BCJC

Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations

BCO BD BJC BR

Banaras Commissioner’s Records Banaras Division Bengal Judicial Consultations Board of Revenue

BPC BRJC BRC BSBR

Bengal Bengal Bengal Bengal

CD Chf

Ceded Districts Chief

Political Consultations Revenue Judicial Consultations Revenue Consultations Sadar Board of Revenue Proceedings

xvi / Abbreviations Cl

Central India

CIA

Central India Agency

CIS

Contributions to Indian Sociology

CRR

Crown Representative Records

CSSH

Comparative Studies in Society and History

DG

District Gazetteer

DSP

District Superintendent of Police

Dept

Department

Dty

Deputy

FD

Foreign Department

FI

Foreign Internal

FPC

Foreign and Political Consultations

FS

Foreign Secret

GColl

Ghazipur Collectorate

GCO

Gorukhpur Commissioner's Office

GG

Governor General

GGC

Governor General in Council

GOI

Government of India

Govt

Government

1ESHR

Indian Economic and Social History Review

IJGS

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

IGP

Inspector General of Police

JAR

Journal of Asiatic Researches

ILRALL

Indian Law Report, Allahabad Series

JCERR

Jhansi Collectorate English Record Room

Abbreviations / xvii JCOERR

Jhansi Commissioner’s English Record Room

JCR

Judicial Criminal

JD

Jhansi Division

JDBC

Jabalpur Division Bundle Correspondence

JID

Judicial Infanticide Department

JPS

Journal of Peasant Studies

It

Joint

Jud.

Judicial

LG

Lieutenant Governor

MAS

Modem Asian Studies

MPCRON

Madhya Pradesh Central Record Room Nagpur

NA

Nizamat Adalat

NAI

National Archives of India

NWP

North-Western Provinces

NWP&A

North-Western Provinces and Awadh

NWPAR

North-Western Provinces Administrative Report

NWPCS

North-Western Provinces Civil Statements

NWPCWR

North-Western Provinces Court of Wards Report

NWPCRJP

North-Western Provinces Criminal Judicial Proceedings

NWPPAR

North-Western Provinces Police Administrative Report

NWPSDAR

North-Western Provinces Sadar Nizamat Adalat Report

Offt.

Officiating

OIOC

Oriental and India Office Collections

PA

Political Agent

xviii / Abbreviations PCF

Political Case File

Pre-MR

Pre-Mutiny Records

Post-MR

Post-Mutiny Records

PP

Parliamentary Papers

Progs

Proceedings

SDOB

Superintendent for Dacoity Operations in Bundelkhand

Secy

Secretary

SNT

Sagar and Narmada Territories

SDA

Sadar Diwani Adalat

SNAD

Sadar Diwani Adalat Decisions

SGR

Selections from Government Records

SIH

Studies in History

SR

Settlement Report

Supt

Superintendent

TDD

Thuggee and Dacoity Department

ULC

University Library, Cambridge

UPRAA

Uttar Pradesh Regional Archives, Allahabad

UPSA

Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow

WP

Western Provinces

Introduction

olonial ethnographic accounts and stereotypes of the Rajputs have exercised an enduring influence on the public imagination. Interestingly, recent popular histories of the Rajputs, whether accounts of local lineages or specific kingdoms, have, in one way or the other, engaged with and appropriated the legends and lore collected by British enthusiasts.1 During the course of my field­ work, even my Rajput informants directed me to the works of James Tod, William Crooke, and the district gazetteers as works invoking an authoritative account of lineage pasts. In various ways, colonial perceptions have also wormed their way into scholarly analyses of the Rajputs. None exercised more influence on subsequent generations than James Tod, whose detailed and picturesque account of Rajasthan, published in the 1820s, immortalized the image of the Rajput as a brave, noble, and chivalrous warrior, and has possibly remained the single-most authoritative history of this social group. Subsequent writers merely fleshed out perceptions of the Rajputs as the ‘fighting’ caste, brave yet primitive. The tales and myths collected by Tod likened the Rajputs to the feudal barons of medieval Europe in their manners, customs, thoughts, and deeds.2 He suggested that the bonds that bound the Rajputs together was a ‘martial system’, feudal in origin and based on bonds of ‘vassalage’ connecting kindred and ’aliens of blood’ to their chiefs.3For Tod, ‘the ties of blood and

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1 Lakshman Thakur Gaur, Orchha Ka Ithihas (Tikamgarh. 1994); Thakur Eshwar Singh Madod, Rajput Vamshavali (New Delhi, 1987); D. S. Mandhva, Kshatriya Shakhaon Ka Ithihas (Bikaner, 1998). 2J. Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan* Or the Central and Western Rajpoot States o f India, Vol. 1 (London. 1829; rpt Delhi, 1997). pp. 107-71. 3 Ibid.. pp. 127-8.

2 / Embattled Identities

kindred’ merely strengthened local variants of a ‘national’ identity rooted in the same creed, religion, and character; in warrior traditions and culture.4 By the late nineteenth century, there was a shift from an emphasis on questions regarding the political relations amongst the Rajputs to a concern with kinship. Writers such as Lyall and BadenPowell popularized an understanding of Rajputs as ‘tribal’, which was premised on a social organization based on kinship.5The fact that genealogies (vamshavalis), systematically collected by settlement and revenue officials, now became the basis of authenticating rights to property helped move colonial ‘models’ and theories on Rajput kinship centre-stage. Colonial anthropology was soon replete with Rajput lineage histories, focusing on their supposedly ‘pristine’ origins. While officials traced the actual kinship bonds binding members of a genealogical tree together, they were more interested in investigating the symbolic kinship ties of these groups to a ritual hierarchy of thirty-six ‘royal’ clans. In this period, there was a corresponding increase in interest in Rajput social structures, on which copious information was collected. Most British officials perceived lineage and caste structures as timeless rigid hierarchies, based on elaborate and mechanical networks and rules of status, precedence, and rank. Also, officials were puzzled when families evoked more than one level of identity, for members of the same clan often called themselves by different names. What they did not understand was that most lineages subscribed to multiple identities, which overlapped and coalesced, working against an absolute definition imposed from above. Although official analyses perceived the flexibility of these hierarchies in the face of overwhelming evidence, they seldom recognized the historical circumstances shaping Rajput identities.6 4 Ibid., p. 100. For the view that Tod viewed ‘feudal’ Rajput polities as local nationalities, see N. Peabody, ‘Tod’s ‘Rajas'than’ and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in 19th Century India’, Modem Asian Studies (MAS), 30:1 (1996), pp. 204-14. 5 R. Irtden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990), pp. 176-80. Some nineteenth century ethnographic studies referring to the Rajputs include Tod, Annals and Antiquities, 2 vols; Sherring, Hindu Tribes, 3 vols; W. Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the NorthWestern Provinces o f India, 4 vols (London, 1894); A. H. Bingley, Handbook on Rajput (London, 1899, rpt, Delhi, 1986); D. C. Ibbertson, Castes, Races and Tribes of the People of India, 4 vols (London, 1899). 6 Lineages were linked to different networks, both sacred and profane. Branches of a stratified lineage could be either Hindu or Muslim. While acknowledging these complexities, this study will focus on ‘Hindu’ Rajputs.

Introduction / 3 In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism, efforts have been made to uncover the parallel discourses securing colonial domination through particular representations of Indian society and culture. Ronald Inden, for example, argued that colonial officials and ethnographers, obsessed by constructs such as caste, kinship and the ‘village community’ which they felt ordered Indian society, viewed most social and political forms as fixed and timeless 'essences’.7This understanding not only underlay colonial policies, but also influenced the construction of caste identities such as that of the ‘Rajput*. However, there were variations, contradictions and tensions within British constructions of caste identities. The ideas on which Indological discourses were based need to be contextualized in the circumstances in which they were written and read.8 Ironically, the historiographical recognition that the British understood caste as ‘the only relevant social site for the contextualization of Indian identity’9 has often deflected attention from the way the colonized historically constituted and articulated these identities. While it is necessary to recognize that colonial discourses constructed versions of caste identities, which en­ gendered stereotypes about various communities, there is an equal need to recover the evidence of structural transition available in official records, mediated as it was by British perceptions and ideologies. Anthropological studies on the Rajputs,10some of which were influenced by lineage and descent theorists working on Africa, inadvertently subsumed the colonial understanding of Rajput kinship and caste.11Richard Fox’s analysis of Rajput brotherhoods 7 R. Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, MAS. 20:3 (1996), pp. 401-46; Inden, Imagining India, pp. 172-88. Also see E. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979). 8 N. Peabody, 'Boundaries of Imperial Rule’, MAS, pp. 188-93. 9 N.B. Dirks, ‘Castes of Mind’, Representations, 37 (Winter, 1992), p. 66. 10 Louis Dumont and his successors, who emphasized that caste above all else held Indian society together, contributed to the understanding of scholars focusing on specific social groups such as the Rajputs. L. Dumont. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, trans. M. Sandsburg (London, 1970). More specifically, on the Rajputs, see J. P. Parry, Caste and Kinship in Kangra (New Delhi, 1977). For recent critiques of the ‘Dumontian’ school of thought see G. G. Raheja, 'India, Castes, Kingship and Dominance Reconsidered’, Annual Review o f Anthropology, vol. 17 (1988), pp. 497-522 and Dirks, ‘Castes of Mind’, Representations, pp. 56-78. For a general review of debates on caste see S. Bayly, introduction’. Caste Society and Politics in India, New Cambridge History o f India (London, 1999), pp. 1-24. 11 For a useful critique of hypotheses borrowing from the work of African anthropology, see B. S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other

4 / Embattled Identities

in ‘pre-industrial’ India suggested that Rajput clans formed the basic building blocks from which pre-colonial state structures were created in north India.12Pargana (a revenue and administrative unit made up of an aggregate of villages) politics were supposedly clan politics; during crises, when state power was weak, in Fox’s view the parganas controlled by lineages reined supreme.13 In Fox’s framework, ‘clan regions’ such as the pargana are perceived as self-sufficient, and social categories such as caste and kinship as autonomous of more generalized historical processes. His influential analysis views kinship as the sole driving force behind Rajput identity and social change. While the developmental cycle of the lineage is of central importance to Fox, and is linked to politics and history, his explanation for this is rooted in lineage stratification and size. Further, the assumption underlying his work, which is that genealogical entities such as the Rajput lineage have fixed social identities, is problematic.14More recently, Maya Unnithan’s anthropological study of the Girasias and Rajputs of Rajasthan acknowledges that categories such as ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ identities are constructed, negotiated, and invested with meaning by various social groups, depending on the ‘social, political and economic strategies of the individuals and communities concerned’.15 She rightly emphasizes the importance of the creation of various types of boundaries within and between social groups to articulate kinship and gender identity. However, while her work concedes the importance of a multiplicity of historical processes in constructing social and gender boundaries between and within castes and Essays (Delhi, 1987), pp. 200-6 and D. Washbrook, ‘Review of R. G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule, State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-industrial India, California, 1971’, MAS. 6:3 (July 1972), pp. 360-4. 12Fox, Kin, Clan, pp. 164-7. For a modified reading of Fox’s hypothesis, see. H. Tambe-Lyche, Power, Profit and Poetry, Traditional Society in Kathiawar, Western Indie (New Delhi, 1997); M. Unnithan-Kumar, Identity, Gender and Poverty. Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan (Providence, 1997), pp. 59-63. 13 Pargana: an aggregate of villages; also a revenue and administrative unit within a district. 14D. H. A.. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Evolution o f the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge. 1990); S. Gordon and ). F. Richards, ‘Kinship and Pargana in Eighteenth-Century Khandesh’, S. Gordon, in Marathas, Marauders and State Formation (Delhi, 1994), pp. 123-4. ,s Unnithan. Gender and Poverty, p. 3; M. Unnithan-Kumar, ‘The State. Rajput Identity and Women’s Agency in 19th and 20th Century Rajasthan’. Indian Journal o f Gender Studies (IJGS), 7:1 (2000), pp. 49-70.

Introduction / 5 lineages, these connections are neither examined in depth, nor are they at the forefront of her analysis. My evidence indicates that long-term political, economic, and social processes played a fundamental role in structuring identities and reconstituting social hierarchies, which were in constant flux. Lineal descent and kinship have always played a significant role in defining Rajput caste identity. Having said that, it is important to understand that Rajput identities were not coeval with pristine genealogies. Locally, Rajput biradaris (lineages) com­ prised groups bound by actual or official ties of descent. These bonds may be viewed as a language of relationships manipulated to satisfy important material and symbolic interests and did not have fixed boundaries. The evidence analysed in this book suggests that at the level of the lineage, although the ‘official’ ties of kinship were inscribed in the genealogical table, in reality, ‘practical relationships’, articulated in various ways, were renewed or fell by the wayside, depending on the agency of the actors involved.16 At another level, membership of biradaris in the ‘great’ Rajput tradition was defined by inclusion in a network of symbolic17 or fictive kinship ties deriving from a number of clans, which in turn drew sustenance from a Kshatriya-centred ideology. Recent studies on the social history of caste emphasize that by the eighteenth century, ‘lordly caste values’ played an important role in the construction of Rajput identities and in fostering claims to power within the system of social and political relations in north India.18 Further, clans and lineages were open and fluid social networks, especially at the lower end, in a continuing process of renewal through interaction and matrimonial alliances with different castes in their search for power and resources, especially after the conquest of new zones.19 ‘Rajputhood’, it appears, was consciously and wPierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge. 1977), pp. 33-43. Boundieu differentiated between official and practical kinship within genealogically linked groups. While official kinship consists of the official definition of social reality presented by the group, practical relationships are continuously sustained and cultivated. The genealogical tree is likened by Bourdieu to a 'spatial diagram’ in which the various permutations and combinations of kinship relations exist in totality as a theoretical construct. Ibid., pp. 39-43. 17 Ibid. 18 Bayly, Caste Society and Politics, pp. 32-46. 19 British ethnographers distinguished between pure and ‘spurious’ Rajputs; the latter were supposedly of ‘inferior’ or ‘mixed blood’ and ‘more or less connected with the ‘royal races’ through marriage. Sherring, Hindu Tribes, Vol. 1, pp. 161. 121;

6 / Embattled Identities

imaginatively constructed by mobilizing different aspects of overlapping group identities, refracted through a multiplicity of variables. Thus, Rajput lineages were known variously by family, local, or caste names at different points in time.20 The analytical frameworks of Kolff and Gordon demonstrate that ‘Rajputhood’ was inextricably linked to naukari, or the service tradition. The cultural identity of a ‘Rajput’ was an ‘attributional’ or ‘relational’ one, revolving around kingship, power, and military entrepreneurship, to which numerous social lineages of varied social origins subscribed. ‘Martial culture’, it appears, fed into codes of kingship in the subcontinent in three distinct zones of ‘military entrepreneurship’, marked by cultural rather than military differences. Rajputhood, therefore, was a collective identity, applied to members of open status groups in a world where jobber commanders gathered groups in search of patronage all over the subcontinent,21 making it possible for a variety of social groups to trace symbolic ties of kinship to clans of high ritual status. The cultural codes of military entrepreneurship available in the pre­ colonial arms-bearing cultural milieu, along with kinship and identity were also inextricably linked to 61ite definitions of martial masculinity. Politics, power, and structures of authority also moulded kinship and caste identities in pre-colonial ‘little kingdoms’.22 Norman Ziegler showed how the ideology of identity, service, kinship structures, politics, and power coalesced to create a sense of ‘Rajputhood’ in Rajasthan during the Mughal period. Norbert Peabody’s work on pre-colonial Kota demonstrated the complex interrelationship between ‘Hindu’ kingship, realpolitik and the rise and fall of lineage power and influence.23 Moreover, the On ‘becoming’ a high caste Rajput, see K. S. Singh, *State Formation in THbal Society, Some Preliminary Observations', Journal o f Indian Anthropological Society, vol. 6 (1971), pp. 161-61. 20 R. Pant, ‘The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of Some Literature in the NWP and Oudh’, Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR), 24 (1987). pp. 153-4. 21 Gordon, Marathas, pp. 182-92; Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, pp. 59-64. 22 There was a close relationship between sovereignty, kinship, caste, service, honour, gifting, and status. See N. B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: An Ethnohistory o f an Indian Kingdom (Delhi, 1987), pp. 6-7, 259. 23 N. P. Ziegler, ‘Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties During the Mughal Period’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Wisconsin, 1978), pp. 215-40.

Introduction / 7 historiography of the eighteenth century highlighted the links between the dynamic of economic expansion, the assertion of political authority, and Rajput regional identities. Economic prosperity was the dynamic pushing lineages to build upon the strengths of their strong clan organization, assert their independence, and often establish polities of varying size.24Indeed, the role of economic processes in the reconstitution of caste and lineage hierarchies cannot be underestimated. My research suggests that the colonial political economy had an important role to play in influencing claims to Rajput identity. Further, Rajputs, as some studies have pointed out, were deeply differentiated along class lines. Even within lineages, distinctions in status were based on their access and control over property.25 However, the relationship between economic (and political) processes, on the one hand, and honour, status, and the articulation of identity, on the other, was expressed in a multiplicity of ways and on many levels within the house­ hold, family, and more generally in agrarian society in varying historical contexts. The decline of pre-colonial political culture and the concomitant rise of colonial power in north India had great significance for the construction of caste identities. Many studies have testified to the fact that religious and community boundaries were reinvented in the nineteenth century in response to radically altered forms of politics, public spaces and the nature of state.26 In contrast to the pre-colonial period, when the sense of identity had been ‘fuzzier’, the ‘enumerated’ community of the British period became far more ‘concerned with numerical strength, well-defined boundaries, exclusive rights, and the ability to defend its rights’27 in the public arena. This is especially true of caste statuses, which, as the literature of the period argues, became less permeable. This 24 M. Alam, The Crisis o f Empire in North India: Punjab and Awadh 1707-48 (Delhi, 1985), pp. 303-7; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age o f British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983, Indian edn Delhi. 1992), pp. 17-20. 25 H. Singh, ‘Kin, Caste and Kisan Movement in Marwar: Some Questions to the Conventional Sociology of Kin and Caste’, Journal o f Peasant Studies (JPS), 7:1, (1979), pp. 111-13, 115. “ S. Freitag, Collective Action and Community; Public Arenas in the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Oxford/Berkeley, 1989); G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1990); N. Datta, Forming an Identity, A Social History of the fats (Delhi, 1998). 27 Sudipto Kaviraj quoted in Pandey, Construction of Communalism, p. 159.

8 / Embattled Identities

work studies the implications of this general shift for Rajput identities. One set of studies on the Rajputs during the colonial period focuses on Rajasthan and is primarily concerned with shifts in the nature of 61ite politics, state forms, and social formations in the princely states.28The prevailing historiography dealing with those parts of north India ruled over directly by the colonial state, with which I am more concerned, has largely focused on the Rajputs insofar as they constituted part of the landholding 61ite. Thus, Thomas Metcalf and Eric Stokes examined the complexities of the loss of land rights and economic resources by Rajput rural magnates and zamindars, arguing that long-term state settlement and economic policies had a profound impact on Rajput social stratification, social ties, and political consciousness before and after 1857.29In opposition, Bernard Cohn suggested that the Rajputs retained their status, position, and influence as the dominant caste in north India in the late nineteenth century notwithstanding their apparent loss of control over land and economic resources.30 His analysis provides a useful corrective to official assertions of a total decline of this social group. The evidence relating to Rajput social history indicates, however, that the response of status and power hierarchies to the generalized forces of structural change was more complicated than depicted by either analysis. Efforts have been made only comparatively recently to establish direct linkages between the history of martial groups in north India (including the Rajputs) to larger questions of identity, gender, status, and power 31Rosalind O’ Hanlon, in particular, has highlighted 28 There is a large clutch of material on Rajasthan. Amongst others, see S. H. and L. I. Rudolph, Essays on Rajputana, Reflections on History, Culture and Administration (Delhi, 1984); N. Peabody. '“Kota Mahajagat 'or the Great Universe of Kota: Sovereignty and Territory in 18th Century Rajasthan', Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS), NS, 25: 1 (1991); V. Joshi. Polygamy and Purdah: Women and Society Amongst the Rajputs (Jaipur. 1995); D. Vidal, Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority (Delhi, 1997); H. Singh, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants and Popular Resistance (Delhi, 1998). 29 E. T. Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1978); T. Metcalf, bind, Landlords and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1979). 30 Cohn, An Anthropologist, pp. 343-421. 31 Research on the military culture of north India has shown that the East India Company successfully manipulated and marshalled pre-existing military traditions for the purpose of forming its own army prior to 1857. Early perceptions of

Introduction / 9 the connections between codes of martial masculinity and political culture in the context of the reinvention of ‘martial identities’ (of which the Rajput ethos was one variant) by patrimonial Elites during the eighteenth century and after. She persuasively argues that the colonial drive towards pacification and disarmament, which led to a direct attack on codes of military entrepreneurship, had profound implications for social and gender identities within and outside the household amongst such groups.32 Such arguments acquire great significance in the light of analytical frameworks such as that of Nickolas Dirks which posits that during the British period, kinship and caste were separated from the political and cultural world of which they had hitherto formed an integral part. Thereafter they were converted into ‘isolated’ and ‘autonomous’ social categories and placed in the colonial ‘deep freeze’. This scenario is contrasted to pre-colonial India, where kinship and ritual-symbolic networks, were closely integrated into state-society relationships at each level.33 However, while it is true that caste and kinship were detached from the complex structure of pre-exisiting political relations during colonial rule, they were reshaped and reconstituted anew in the colonial period. Indeed, this book contends that lineages and households were the epicentre of many of the structural transformations and struggles occurring over Rajput identity and status in the nineteenth century as Rajput lineages sought to retain their ‘economic’ and ‘symbolic’ capital in agrarian society.34This was largely because the expression of ‘Rajput’ masculine martial culture was increasingly delimited in the public space as the colonial state mapped and refashioned ‘martial culture’ laid the groundwork for the ‘martial race theories’ of the late nineteenth century. See D. Ommisi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army 18601940 (London, 1994); S. Alavi. The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770-1830 (Delhi, 1995). 32 R. O'Hanlon. ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History: The Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad’. J/GS, 4:1 (1997), p. 17. 33 Dirks, Hollow Crown, pp. 322, 335. 34 Bourdieu differentiated between economic and symbolic capital. While economic capital consisted of land, instruments of production, and human resources, symbolic capital took the form of the prestige, honour, and renown attached to a family which could be converted into economic capital whenever necessary. Powerful families organized exhibitions of symbolic capital, which was accumulated at the expense of economic capital. Both economic and symbolic capital were inextricably linked in defining the power and status of such kin groups. Bourdieu, Outline, pp. 178-80.

10 / Embattled Identities

boundaries and sought to establish total control over social spaces and indigenous populations in agrarian society. Very generally, the family and the household have played a crucial role in mediating ‘material interests’ and ‘emotions’ in social structures through history, and in furnishing ‘the idiom for relations external to itself and for the symbolic structuring of social reality’.35 Unlike the numerous sociological studies on the Indian ‘joint family’ which have largely taken its structure for granted,36 historical interest in the family during the colonial period has been linked to larger questions such as the state, law, gender, community, and nationalism.37There seems to be a general consensus amongst scholars that the colonial state moved away from intervening in the private lives of its subjects after 1857. More specifically, the influential framework of Partha Chatterjee suggests that in the late nineteenth century, amongst the colonized, the family and household increasingly became a ‘fiercely guarded zone lodged deep inside the precincts of community life’.38Indeed, Chatterjee contends that the family became ‘the original site on which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched’ and all efforts by the state to intervene in this space were fiercely con­ tested.39My evidence supports the argument that the family became 35 H. Medick and D. Sabean, introduction’, H. Medick and D. Sabean (eds), Interests and Emotions: Essays in the Studies o f Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 6, 9-10. 36 For an updated bibliography and debates revolving around the family in social anthropology and sociology, see P. Uberoi (ed.). Family. Kinship and Marriage in India (Delhi, 1994). 37The literature on the family and gender is varied and vast. Amongst others, see K. Leonard, The Social History of an Indian Caste: Kayasthas o f Hyderabad (Delhi, 1978); U. Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times o f Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi, 1998); P. Chatterji, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses (Delhi, 1994); K. Sangari and S. Vaid, ‘Recasting Women, An Introduction’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Delhi, 1989), pp. 1-26; P. Chowdry, The Veiled Woman: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana 1880-1990 (Delhi, 1994); T. Sarkar, ‘Colonial Lawmaking and Lives/Deaths of Indian Women: Different Readings of Law and Community', in R. Kapur (ed.), Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains. Interdisciplinary Esssays on Women and Law in India (Delhi, 1996); R. Singha, ‘ ‘ Making the Domestic More Domestic”: Criminal Law and the Head of the Household, 1772-1843’. IESHR, 33:3 (1996), pp. 309-43; G. Arunima, ‘Multiple Meanings, Changing Conceptions of Matrilineal Kinship', IESHR, 33:3 (1996), 283-307; I. Chatterjee, Gender, Law and Slaxxry in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1999). 38Chatterji, The Nation and its Fragments, p. 149. 39 Ibid., p. 147. For a critique of Chatterjee’s position, see H. Banerjee, ‘Projects of Hegemony: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies. Resolution of the Women’s

Introduction / I I one of the most significant arenas for the re-articulation of identities and power hierarchies in our period. However, a detailed examination of the linkages between the British and the Rajput kinship unit has helped me uncover complicated layers of meaning to this relationship, which adds subtle nuances to the current scholarly analyses of the conflicted relationship between the family and the colonial state after 1857. The book suggests that the British did not retreat from intervening in the Rajput private space in this period, but sought, instead, to forcibly discipline and reorder the domestic life of these groups to eliminate female infanticide. In response, Rajput lineages attempted, with some success, to place the household in an ‘inner domain of sovereignty’,40 to resist the coercive arm of the colonial state. In other contexts, in which it suited their interests, these biradaris consciously and selectively appropriated colonial legal codes to transform relationships in the ‘inner world’. It has recently been shown that gender relationships and power hierarchies in upper caste/class households in the nineteenth century were reshaped in response to colonial state structures, ideologies, and discourses as well as the agenda of ‘paternalistic reformers’ and internal tensions within the kinship unit.41 The impact of these developments on the ‘domestic space’ was immense, for, as Uma Chakravarti argues, the kinship group now became 'a major site for conflict engendered by different world-views re­ producing the conflicts of the public sphere within it’.42 As this book seeks to demonstrate, Rajput identities at various levels of the social ladder were moulded and transformed as much by clashes and tensions within the ‘embattled family’, as by developments in the public space. As regards the Rajputs in the North-Western Provinces, the focus of this study, their socially constructed perceptions of family operated through localized lineages holding and inheriting land as a joint co-sharing unit, often spread over more than one house­ hold.43 Lineages were also one of the main sites of gender relations. Question’, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), vol. 35, no. 11, March 2000, pp. 902-20. 40See chap. 3, 4. 41 Chakravarti, Retvriting History, pp. 121, 200. 42 Ibid., p. 201. 43 For definitions of the family and household, see L. Mckie, S. Bowlby, and S. Gregory, ‘Connecting Gender, Power and the Household’, L. Mckie, S. Bowlby

1 2 / Embattled Identities Rajput families and households were not ‘fixed magnitudes’, but were shaped by fundamental and broader social, political, and economic processes.44 Thus, this study is concerned with how the relationship between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ space influenced Rajput cultural expectations, honour, sense of self, and the strategies of advancement chosen by various lineages for the social reproduction of the kinship unit. It also examines how friction and strife over ritual rank, economic status, and authority shaped relationships within the Rajput family and impacted on masculine identities. At a broader theoretical level, I do not attempt to analyse social and political structures through the prism of kinship. Instead, I deal with the lineage and household within a wider analytical canvas of gender and property relations, caste, social hierarchies of rank and honour, state formation, economics and politics.45 The examination of kinship within a larger matrix of relationships, is, I argue, an important means through which to understand how power, hierarchy, stratification, and identity related to one another as the ‘imagined’ Rajput community reinvented itself through conflict and struggle.46

‘Domestic Space’ and Rajput Lineages The ‘domestic space’ (the world of social relationships within the family and the household) was of great importance to the colonial subject in asserting and redefining gender and social identities in a period of transition and stress, and was also the site of tension, conflict, and change. As far as families claiming Rajput ancestry were concerned, they were differentiated from one another on the basis of shifting economic, social, and ritual statuses; by age, sex, wealth, and local circumstances. In the pre-colonial period, the predominantly masculine m artial culture based on aggrandizement, power, rank, and status had been reflected within and S. Gregory (eds), Gender Power and the Household (London, 1999), pp. 3-21 and David Morgan 'Gendering the Household: Some Theoretical Considerations’, Ibid., pp. 22-40. ^Medick and Sabean (eds). Interests and Emotions, pp. 13-20. 45 There have been many critiques of older perspectives on kinship. See, for example, Bourdieu, Outline, pp. 16-30; J. D. Fabion, 'Kinship is Dead, Long Live Kinship: A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 38:1 (1996), pp. 67-91. 46 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism (London, 1983).

Introduction / 13 the household. Honour (izzat), status, and power were inextricably linked to the family, the ‘centre of a political economy based on giving’, while the composition of the £lite Rajput household, its consumption patterns and network of alliances ‘advertised’ its attractiveness as a ‘distributive force’.47 Matrimonial alliances, in particular, were one of the major mechanisms for reinforcing social and ritual hierarchies and building networks of support and loyalty. Control over property and women had increased the bargaining chips possessed by lineages to negotiate power networks in the outside world. In this book I argue that shifts took place within the lineage and household in response to the structural changes taking place in agrarian society in nineteenth-century north India. Now, both political culture and proprietary rights were transformed under the impact of the East India Company’s revenue and settlement policies, as opportunities for service, warfare, and the aggressive aggrandizement of resources diminished. As the coercive authority of the colonial state grew, the ability of Rajput lineages to articulate their political power contracted. Lineages were no longer able to expand outwards and build up the resource base of their ‘little kingdoms’ through conquest and warfare. These processes led to a fierce struggle amongst landed Elites (including the Rajputs) to retain their power and influence in agrarian society and within the family. The evidence points out that this conflict generated great social and economic differentiation amongst those classified as ‘Rajput’ in official records. If many biradaris lost land, influence, rank, and power, other families husbanded their resources. Prosperity as much as poverty deeply influenced lineage strategies for social advancement and prestige and relationships between kin. Economic determinants, it appears, played a crucial, if indirect role in influ­ encing social transformation in status and rank hierarchies and in the larger imagined Rajput community. The records reflect the conscious choices and strategies adopted by most biradaris in a number of spheres. Within and without the ‘embattled’ household and kinship group, men fought one another and women to control property, wealth, authority, and status. Given the growing social stratification and struggle over land, men fought to retain patriarchal power within lineages through control of and succession to property. Comparative studies in 47 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, pp. 101, 109.

14 / Embattled Identities

European history indicate that landholding and inheritance strategies played a profound role in the life cycles of dom estic groups. Proprietorial rights and inheritance influenced residence patterns, the fission of familial units, marriage strategies, customs, norms, rites of passage, and obligations and rights between various kinship networks.48 Rights to land, important in determining the authority of a lineage over specific territories, exercised a considerable influence on shifting status and power positions. Amongst the Rajputs, the changes in the nature of land tenures, proprietary rights, and sale of land in the nineteenth century transformed hierarchies based on gender, age, kinship, class, and power. The ‘crucial asset’ helping males within lineages claiming ‘Rajput’ origins survive these various developments was the adoption of practices and strategies emphasizing their lordly position and the recognition of their claims to status by their high-ranking peers.49 High-status Rajput families increasingly looked askance at lineages that were unable to provide genealogical proof of high ritual rank, while efforts were made to push groups practising bride-price, divorce, and other social practices outside the ‘great Rajput tradition’. Increasingly, symbolic descent came to be the central marker of origin within the lineage, as service was relegated to the margins. Now, status-conscious patrilineages stressed their ‘pure’ bloodlines and ‘pristine’ genealogies as the only signifier of ‘Rajputhood’. The widening of the cleavage between ‘pure’ and ‘spurious’ clans, which is so much a part of official discourse, was probably a product of this period. This development was accompanied by the hardening of ritual and social boundaries between Rajputs and the lower castes. To assert status in a largely hostile world, lineages gave undue prominence to ritual, symlx>l, and conspicuous consumption. More relevant is the fundamental change occurring in matrimonial strategies, a principal loci for the reinvention of Rajput ritual and social identities and hierarchies. Officials argued that the practice 48 On broad questions relating to family and kinship in western Europe, see amongst others, J. Goody (ed.), The Development Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge, 1958); J. Goody and E. P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance-. Rural Society in Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge, 1976); J. Goody (ed.), Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, (Cambridge, 1983); Medick and Sabean (eds), Interests and Emotions; D. Sabean, Property, Production and Family in Neckerhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 1992). 49 Bayly, Caste Society and Politics, pp. 200-5.

Introduction / 15 of female infanticide was the consequence of poverty amongst high-status Rajputs, who were now unable to arrange dowry marriages for their daughters in exchange for status and power. My argument is, however, that both rich and poor Rajput families who claimed high ritual and social status killed their girl children, in large part, to stave off a potential decline in status because of their inability to find grooms of higher rank for them. These choices were, I maintain, linked to structural contradictions in Rajput marriage strategies, which contributed to a decline in the status of women in many families seeking to strengthen the honour, power, and position of the patrilineage. Often, the perplexing varieties and patterns visible in the evidence relating to female infanticide were linked to a series of localized choices made by various lineages, in turn connected to considerations of economics or power. It seems clear that the ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains, each with its boundaries and norms, overlapped with and influenced each other. Changing structures and ideologies in the ‘outside world’ shaped gender and power relationships within the private space, reordering the internal structures of lineages, bolstering patriarchy, sharpening conflict between members of the kinship group, and contesting normative standards and values in the domestic space. Colonial discourse had to engage with lineages through the shifting cultural veils of rank, honour, and kinship. An investigation of Rajput identities has, therefore, to be linked to an examination of colonial state policies.

Colonial State Structures, Discourses and the Recasting of Rajput ‘Tradition’ Institutional and economic changes occurring in the colonial period indirectly led to the reshaping of caste identities. British settlement and revenue policies, structural shifts in the nature of property rights and long-term economic changes had a differential impact on Rajput fortunes. Furthermore, the study proposes that the colonial state actively intervened in the ‘domestic space’ by privileging certain forms of patriarchal relationships within the ‘joint’ co­ sharing family unit over others, creating a hierarchy of kinship relationships and strategies and forcibly monitoring and ‘normalising’ family life before and after 1857. Concomitantly, colonial law legally marginalized those who had previously held rights in the

16 / Embattled Identities

kinship group, whether women or ‘illegitimate’ children.50 The evidence relating to succession and inheritance to proprietary rights amongst Rajput lineages indicates that the primacy given to pedigrees by British revenue and settlement policies often created confusion, marginalizing other claims and relationships central to customary practice. The British also sought to tamper with Rajput status hierarchies, in the mistaken belief that they were constant and fixed in time. State policies may be roughly divided into three main phases. Until the 1830s, the East India Company focused on pacification, stamping out armed opposition to its rule and extending the legal and punitive arm of the state. From the 1830s until 1857, the British engaged with indigenous centres of authority and established their own legitimacy to rule through a mixture of conciliatory and coercive means. After 1857, fear lent wings to state attempts to bolster the ‘traditional* world of the Rajputs. However, official efforts in this direction were tempered by their focus on the eradication of social and cultural practices seen as ‘deviant’ as well as collective violence viewed as threatening to state power. Lineages resisted and subverted legal, coercive, and administrative structures for their own purposes. Official discourses and policies were also reshaped in the process of interaction with the Rajputs, who either adapted to, or alternatively, contested colonial imperatives. However, the impact of state structures on the Rajputs was neither totalizing nor monolithic. The hold of the colonial state over patrimonial Elites in some areas was more ‘limited’ than in others.51 In all areas the state, however complex a structure in administrative and political terms, shared an ambivalent relation­ ship with the Rajputs, vacillating between accommodation, collaboration, and control. Lines of loyalty and rebellion were reshaped depending upon the individual equation that the state built with £lite Rajput zamindars when loyalty was exchanged for titles, land, and limited power. In any case, coercive action was tempered with caution, for the state did not wish to alienate lineages that seemed able to raise impromptu armies on a small scale. Official discourse on the Rajputs, then, did not constitute a coherent and homogenous body of bought. Debates and discussions depict hesitation and compromise, and were fuelled by a multiplicity 50 Chatterjee. Gender, Slavery, pp. 225-39. 51 A. Yang, The Limited Raj, Saran District, 1770-1947: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793-1920 (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 6-8.

Introduction / 17 of considerations. Dealing with £lite social groups inhabiting a different cultural and political universe involved constant negotiations. As work on colonial criminal law has indicated, contradictions in official policies set in when the exercise of a new type of state authority combined a monopoly of the assertion of force with a moral influence that clashed with indigenous normative cultural codes and values.52Officials attempted to deal with the problems arising out of such a situation in myriad ways. On the one hand, the British sought to undermine Rajput kinship, rank, power, and patriarchal gender hierarchies based on alternative belief systems and conceptions of authority. At another level, colonial law recognized, accommodated and legitimized these multiple hierarchies and identities, thus belying its own intention to define a ‘universal legal subject’.53 Lata Mani and Radhika Singha have demonstrated that the state incorporated indigenous discourses into its own narratives of power, legal or otherwise, as it grappled with indigenous social practices and customs.54Thus, aspects of Rajput ‘tradition’ were reinvented and reinterpreted by colonial criminal and civil law from the beginning of the nineteenth century to strengthen certain aspects of patriarchal rights, customs, and ‘tradition’ within the ‘domestic space’ of £lite groups. In the realm of civil law, in particular, the British distinguished between ‘personal’ law governing family and kinship relations and ‘public’ law. In civil courts, Rajputs were governed by the Anglo-Hindu law code, which relied almost wholly on the scriptural tradition. This move was to profoundly influence the reconstitution of gender and power hierarchies within the Rajput household.55 However, as it has been pointed out, the colonial state was not always able to recast ‘tradition’ according to its own dictates.56 On various occasions when officials intervened via legislation to modify social structures, as in the case of Rajput marriage strategies 32 S. Freitag, ‘Collective Crime and Authority’, in A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Arizona, 1983), pp. 141-2. 53 R. Singha, A Despotism of Law, Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi, 1998), pp. vii-xvii. 54 L. Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colorial India (Delhi, 1999), pp. 26-41, Singha, Despotism, pp. viii, 82-4. 55D. A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India'. MAS, 15:3 (1981), pp. 649-721. 56 Singha, Despotism, pp. 83-4.

18 / Embattled Identities

and status hierarchies, they met with failure. While this often occurred because the British failed to understand how social and power networks perpetuated themselves, in other cases, the reason was resistance to intervention. Moreover, indigenous and colonial discourses appear to have partaken of each other, but used the same narrative to legitimize different concerns. Thus, the AngloHindu law code was twisted in various ways by warring biradaris in civil courts to alter ‘traditions’ relating to inheritance and succession to suit their needs. Rajput brotherhoods, therefore, were not passive vessels on which colonial rule and institutions left their imprint. As the authority of the colonial state was never absolute, the colonized always managed to retain a measure of autonomy.571 argue that the lineages under study reinvent their traditions and customs, consciously choosing particular strategies and bending and adapting their social practices in response to the political and cultural context of colonial rule. The Rajputs expressed their agency in various ways, whether it was negotiating with hierarchies within the household based on age, kinship, and sex, or with other biradaris and state institutions in the ‘outside’ world. Rajput ‘agency’ was also used to successfully stonewall colonial intervention in the world of the lineage and family. Of course, the state also had to bear the brunt of overt Rajput opposition to its encroaching rule. As the British attempted to domesticate agrarian society, all activities that were openly untameable were either suppressed or pushed to the frontiers. In the North-Western Provinces, state control was more evident in areas closer to the central nodes of power, as opposed to regions on the political and economic margins, bordering the princely states. Areas such as Bundelkhand constituted such twilight zones, increasingly transformed in the nineteenth century into the poorest and most ecologically vulnerable parts of the Provinces. In response to the systemic crisis, the Rajputs in this region, largely perceived as especially ‘wild’ and uncontrollable, participated with greater zest in banditry and other forms of agrarian violence in comparison to their compatriots in more centralized zones. 57 R. Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’, R. Guha (ed.). Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1989). pp. 210-309. For a critique of Guha’s position, see V. Dalmia, The Nationalisation of Indian Traditions, Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (New Delhi, 1996), pp. 15-18.

Introduction / 19

M asculinity, Violence and the ‘Prim itive’ Rajput The British privileged and reinvented certain prototypes of indigenous masculinity such as Kshatriya martial culture, which they argued exemplified bravery, chivalry and sacrifice.58 Throughout our period, the Rajputs were viewed by many British writers and officials as a romantic band of adventurers, reminiscent in some ways of the Highland clans in Scotland because of ‘their clanship and their intense love and admiration for the blood feud’.59 The hegemony of gentrified and aristocratic social values in Britain coupled with a preference for the Indian £lite was also influential in this regard. From the beginning of British rule, officials exercised a decided partiality in favour of certain sections of the elite: landholders, the aristocracy, and communities with a tradition of bearing arms (such as the Rajputs) who, once subdued, were wooed to collaborate with the colonial state. Such values influenced the martial race theories of the late nineteenth century, which justified the recruitment of specific communities into the Indian army.60 Having said this, colonial officials feared and disapproved of the Rajput ‘man of prowess’. Recent literature has suggested that colonial discourse was continually engaged in the construction of ‘otherness’: in most discussions and debates, Western ‘civilization’ and ‘order’ were contrasted with the ‘wildness’ and ‘unbridled masculinities’ of many colonized subjects. The establishment of control over such groups underscored the power of imperial masculinity and symbolized the triumph of ‘civilization’ and indivisible political authority.61 By 1864, officials argued that the aim of the state was to ‘reward the industrious cultivator to 58 M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the Effeminate Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995, rpt. New Delhi, 19%), p. 11. In this context, compare the colonial construct of the 'effeminate' Bengali with that of the ‘primitive’, ‘violent’, but ‘brave’ Rajput. For details on colonial perceptions of Rajputs, see ch. 2. Also see Ommisi, Sepoy and the Raj-, Alavi, Sepoys; K. Roy, ‘Recruitment Doctrines of the Colonial Indian Army. 1859-1913’, IESHR, 34:3 (1997), pp. 321-4. 59 District Supd. of Police (DSP), Hamirpur, to Personal Assistant, Inspector General of Police (IGP), North-Western Provinces (NWP), 9 Feb. 1869, NWP Police Progs (NWPPP), 13 Nov. 1869, vol. 50, Index 185, Progs. 37 ( Uttar Pradesh State Archives, hereafter UPSA). 60 Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, p. 71. 61 A. Skaria, Hybrid Histories, Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (Delhi, 1999), pp. 192-8.

20 / Embattled Identities

reclaim the turbulent and the freebooter by giving them the opportunity of earning an honest living’.62Thus, biradaris ‘addicted’ to feuding, banditry, and rebellion were systematically put outside the pale in a period devoted to the rule of law and agrarian productivity, improvement and expansion.63The British also viewed with particular seriousness the Rajput claim to perpetrate culturally-specific acts of violence within the domestic space such as female infanticide. Consequently, Rajputs were perceived as ‘primitive’, ‘turbulent’, and inherently violent. While violence cannot be identified with any particular community, specific types of aggressive acts may be associated with particular social/class groups. In general, collective violence was an integral part of all dynamically ‘male’ landholding cultures, where insti­ tutionalized aggression was formalized in a number of sports, war, and feuding.64 Feuding brotherhoods, for example, were linked together in a fraternity of violence. Group warfare was another method of enhancing group honour among Rajput bhaibandu As we shall see later, in most lineages, brotherly amity existed alongside fratricidal strife. More importantly, the specific form this violence took needs to be understood within a particular cultural and historical context. Individual acts of cultural violence, such as female infanticide need to be linked to the broader processes of social change and identity formation. Likewise, what appeared as ‘random’ acts of violence in colonial discourse, together with tribal rebellions and collective suicide by Brahmins and bards, was very often a cultural form of protest, which played a significant role in regulating society.65The political meanings attached to the specific patterns of protest adopted by various communities to uphold their rights were embedded in pre-colonial political culture, which was based on a social order very different from its colonial counterpart.66 62 Settlement Officer, Lalitpur, to Commissioner, Jhansi Division (JD). Bundle 56, Department (Dept) 1, F/139/1869 (Jhansi Commissioners Office English Record Room, hereafter JCOERR). a N. Bhattacharya, ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World', in D. Arnold and R. Guha (eds). Nature. Culture and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History o f South Asia (New Delhi, 1995), p. 73; Guha. 'Dominance without Hegemony’, Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI. pp. 272-309. 64 L. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modem Europe (London, 1994), pp. 113-16. 65 Vidal, Violence and Truth, pp. 5, 12. 66 Ibid., p. 12; on colonial efforts to deal with cultural suicide, see Singha, Despotism, pp. 85-105.

Introduction / 21 More specifically, Rajput collective violence (whether dakaiti, the feud or rebellion)) was characterized by its links with bhumeawat, the process through which Rajput biradaris redefined identities and the boundaries of social and power hierarchies. Bhumeawat was a political and cultural process operating within a specific matrix of variables. It may be defined as the fight for identity, status, and power by £lite Rajputs, arising out of a sense of commitment and attachment to territory, and more specifically, to the homeland, or bhum and was made up of a multiplicity of strands; rebellions, feuds and banditry. The right of the Rajputs to agitate in favour of their grievances or to enhance their power using violence was built into the normative codes of pre-colonial states. The politics of bhumeawat was an important hallmark of these kingdoms. Bhumeawat could, I argue, manifest itself in a number of violent actions directed against other lineages or the state. Bhumeawat did not come to an end with British rule. The tran­ sition to colonial rule, at odds with local social, economic, and political structures, resulted in shifts in the nature and intensity oibhumeawat, which, increasingly was marginalized as an ‘irrational’ and ‘primitive’ impulse.67 Rebellions by Rajputs in this period often constituted responses to the transformation of political culture and the social and economic dislocation caused by colonial rule. Other acts of ‘banditry’ and ‘affrays’ also mirrored aspects of bhumeawat, which was linked to economic variables in indirect and complex ways.

Plan of the Study The book studies the themes outlined above in six chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for the themes analysed in the rest of the book. It studies how status, rank, power, and identity responded to demilitarization and the contraction of the military labour market, changing proprietorial rights, patterns of land tenure, the decline of the princely kingdoms, and the complex economic fluctuations of the period. The second chapter analyses how colonial structures, ideologies, and processes of rule provided the backdrop against which both state imperatives and the culturallyspecific reactions of Rajput Elites based on violence, honour, and 47 Vidal, Violence and Truth, pp. 61-3.

22 / Embattled Identities

the search for power reacted to and reshaped each other. Here, I analyse how the establishment of the rule of law, the redrawing of spatial boundaries, colonial courts and the police made an impact on the lives of elite biradaris both within and outside the household. Through such measures, the British aimed to domesticate the Rajput, pushing to the peripheries all that was ‘irrational’ and ‘uncivilized’. >The third and fourth chapters look closely at the ways in which kinship, gender, ritual hierarchies, and social practices in the family and household responded to the shifts in power and status. I study these themes through an extensive examination of changing matrimonial strategies and their relationship with female infanticide. Through marriage, various lineages validated their claims to status, defined themselves against other parties, and accumulated power and influence. I also look at official efforts to fix social hierarchies of status and rank in their attempts to eliminate female infanticide. The study suggests that state efforts to penetrate the ‘domestic space’ were defined and limited by kinship and gender hierarchies. The fourth chapter continues the investigation of this theme by examining how colonial civil law intervened in matters of property, and succession and the effect this had on kinship re­ lations. I assert that codified ‘Hindu’ law and the courts refashioned customary practices and ‘tradition’ to buttress the position of the joint landholding unit, protect patriarchal rights, and garner revenue, which with varied ends had a complex fallout on the rights of inheritance and disputes over land ownership within lineages. In turn, Rajput lineages manipulated the colonial legal system to their own ends. This chapter speculates that in our period there may have been a rise in the intensity of feuding and disputes, which I link to bhumeawat. I study these themes against the backdrop of larger issues related to the political economy, stratification, identity and power raised in the first and second chapters. The fifth and sixth chapters examine in greater depth the reasons behind Rajput bhumeawat and collective violence. The fifth chapter traces the trajectory of Rajput rebellion against the colonial state in the nineteenth century. Finally, the sixth chapter focuses on banditry or dakaiti with bhumeawat, against the backdrop of colonial criminal law. It focuses on Rajput banditry in Bundelkhand, a frontier zone, where bhumeawat and rebellion survived after it had been eradicated from the rest of the North-Western Provinces. Here, I analyse in depth the role of kinship and social networks

Introduction / 23 in providing the necessary infrastructure of protection for those engaging in collective violence. I argue that the ‘restless’ Rajputs of Bundelkhand, regarded as the relatively untamed frontier, were perceived as the repository of uncontrolled and primitive impulses long controlled in the rest of the Provinces.

A Note on Political Geography Rajput clans lived in all parts of the North-Western Provinces and the areas immediately overlapping its borders. The British conquered the North-Western Provinces, consisting of over twenty districts, in several stages. In 1801, the nawab of Awadh made over the Ceded Provinces to the East India Company in exchange for a guarantee of protection against external aggression. The ‘ceded’ districts comprised most of the Gorakhpur, Rohilkhand, Allahabad, and Agra Divisions. In 1803 the conquered provinces were acquired from the Marathas. This area consisted of the Meerut and Agra Divisions, Banda, Hamirpur, and small tracts belonging to Jalaun. In 1834, both the ‘ceded’ and ‘conquered’ districts were formed into the Presidency of Agra. In 1836, the name of the region was changed to the North-Western Provinces. Both the North-Western Provinces and Awadh (annexed in 1856), were brought under a single central administration in 1877 and formed part of the Bengal Presidency. Further reorganization took place at the end of the nineteenth century, after which the area was given the new name United Provinces. The region is now called Uttar Pradesh.

e

i The Rajputs Pride, Honour, and the Political Economy

he Rajputs of the North-Western Provinces comprised a large number of dispersed intermarrying clans. The interactive units of these stratified exogamous groups were made up of myriad landholding patrilineages of varying genealogical depth, ritual, and social status called biradaris or brotherhoods scattered in the various districts. The biradari, or the lineage, was one of the principal units of reference for the Rajputs, constituting ‘units of natural affinity’ and calling forth sentiments of reciprocity, support, and loyalty.1Biradaris traced their ancestral linkages amongst an extensive group of immediate kin, and their origins, history, and traditions to the supposed progenitors of their respective gotras and clans, which identities existed alongside their local affiliations.2 Brotherhoods lent their names to particular tracts of land associated with them. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the Kachwahas reigned supreme in the area known as Kachwahagarh, the Bais in Baiswara, the centre of criss-crossing trade routes, and the Bundelas in the prosperous states and jagirs of Bundelkhand. Within these tracts, the Rajputs held the largest share of land in proportion to their relatively small numbers in agrarian society in social and political

T

1 Ziegler, ‘Notes on Rajput Loyalties’, in Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority, p. 224. 2 The lack of precise definitions of terms such as gotras and dans mirrors the lack of uniformity in the internal organization of various castes, the levels of segmentation, and the principles upon which such segmentation was based. In this context, see Fox, Kin, Clan, pp. 18-23; Pant, ‘The Cognitive Status of Caste’, IESHR, pp. 153-4.

The Rajputs / 25 territorial units variously called talukas, tappas, and tarafs.3 Often lineages inhabited clusters of settlements called chaurasis (84 villages), chattisis (36 villages), and chhabisis (26 villages).4 Land, or bhunt, was also closely linked to lineage identity, honour, and the assertion of power. The evidence available for the nineteenth century suggests that Rajput control over land was far more complete in the eastern districts than in the western and central parts of the Provinces, where property rights were far more differentiated.5 Rajputs, with other high caste zamindars or rural magnates, held legal proprietary rights over land, whether uncultivated or cultivated, and claimed a share in the produce. In addition, the term zamindar referred to men straddling the top of the political and social hierarchy who were called raja and rana. Many of these rajas were autonomous chieftains whose proprietary rights had increased in the eighteenth century. Additionally, the heads of many biradaris were taluqdars, revenue-collecting intermediaries between the pre-colonial states and the pargana. Rajputs also held land on a number of military and service tenures, in which capacity they were called jagirdars, ubariars, and batotadars. Rajputs also abounded as cultivators alongside Brahmins, Lodhis, Kurmis, Jats, and Ahirs in various parts of north India. In the nineteenth century, the rights of zamindars and raiyats (cultivators of various castes and communities), which were interpenetrating and intricate, were transformed as a consequence of colonial intervention in the system of proprietary rights. The political order of the eighteenth century had given rise to principalities ruled over by Jats, Bhumihars, Rajputs, Rohillas, and Afghans. To strengthen their claims to kingship, many powerful magnates linked themselves to the Kshatriya genealogical ‘tradition’ and emphasized their 61ite social and ritual status.6 Patrician Elites claiming Rajput origins lived in garhis (forts) and controlled 3 See ch. 2 for details. 4D. L. Brockman, The Gazetteers o f the United Provinces o f Agra and Oudh, Banda (DC), vol. 21 (Allahabad, 1909), p. 93. 5 Metcalf, Land. Landlords, ch. 3. By 1887. the Rajputs, Bhumihars, and Brahmins constituted 67 per cent of the landholding body in Banaras. M. Bhargava, State. Society and Ecology, Gorukhpur in Transition, 1750-1830 (Delhi, 1999), p. 124. In Jhansi and Lalitpur, the thakurs, as they were known, made up 6.09 per cent of the total population by 1909. In Jhansi. thakurs owned about 38.56 per cent of the district and in Lalitpur approximately 52.37 per cent. Jhansi Division DG, vol. 23, pp. 115-30. 6 S. Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics, pp. 32-46.

26 / Embattled Identities

large armies employing relations, allies, and mercenaries throughout north India. Strong lineage and clan networks were the basis of much of their power and success. These men wielded immense economic and political authority over the men and materials in their territories, strengthening their ties with other powerful families through marriage and political alliances. Men claiming Rajput status also supplied the military labour market of north India with soldiers and had a fine reputation for service throughout Hindustan. Indeed, arms-bearing groups from various communities subscribed to the Rajput martial service tradition during a period when caste and community boundaries were far more flexible than they were in the colonial era. While hierarchies based on ideologies of ritual status and varna were important in the pre­ colonial period, the service or naukari tradition ensured that the status category ‘Rajput’ accommodated a multiplicity of groups with varied social origins.7 Rajput fortunes were inextricably linked to the political reorganization occurring in the eighteenth century. Earlier, scholars argued that this was characterized by ‘chaos’ and universal political and economic decline after the weakening of the Mughal empire. However, the picture has been altered by recent studies highlighting the linkages between political and economic dynamism in many parts of north India, where local and regional groups were emerging as powerful political forces.8Indeed, some historians have suggested that this period saw the emergence of proto-capitalism fused with international capital, subsequently nipped in the bud after the arrival of the British.9 There is a considerable difference of opinion regarding the ability of northern India to ‘take off’ into a stage of capitalist growth during this period. At any rate, the 7 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, pp. 59-64. 8 For the eighteenth century, see C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983, Indian edn. New Delhi, 1992); A. Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics Under the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge, 1986); M. Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Punjab and Awadh. 1707-48 (New Delhi, 1986); S. Subrahmanyam (ed.), Merchants. Markets and the State in Early Modem India (New Delhi. 1990), pp. 1-17; M. Alam and S. Subramanyam, ‘Introduction’, The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (Delhi, 1998), pp. 1-77; Bhargava. Society and Ecology. 9 F. Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan; Extended Class Relations, Rights and the Problem of Autonomy under the Old Regime’, JPS, 5:2 (1978), pp. 172-237; F. Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialisation and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, 98 (1983), pp. 30-95.

The Rajputs / 27 evidence indicates that cash economies, trade, and thriving urban centres peopled by dynamic merchant groups existed in north India in regional kingdoms such as Banaras and Awadh where state-building processes were at work.10 Here, rulers and other Elites generated a demand for a wide variety of goods and services, providing a secure context for commerce, and encouraging the foundation of ganjs (small markets) and long-distance trade.11 Capital and population from the relatively ‘unstable’ western districts immigrated to these regions to bolster their economies.12 As Muzaffar Alam argues, this process was the product of ‘an emerging sense of regional identity, which buttressed both political, and, to a degree, economic decentralization’.13 The available evidence appears to suggest that many Rajput rajas, ‘big’ and ‘little’, came into their own in the dynamic regions of growth during this period. Thus, in 1801 Sindwaha in Chanderi was described as: the m ost com pletely cultivated that I have ever beheld in H industan. The plain as far as the eye can reach, is covered w ith a luxuriant crop of wheat and barley. It belongs to a Rajpoot chief, who is in som e m easure independent of the Raja, only paying chout to the M ahrattas.14

In Awadh, the Bais of Baiswara emerged as a powerful local force in a region endowed with intensive cultivation on rich soil, growing market towns, and thriving trade. The Bais, as merchants and traders, spearheaded this process, resulting in the assertion of the strength and authority of their biradarO5 These lineages, groping their way towards the expression of a new political and social identity, often revolted against central authority in states such as Awadh in a bid to establish their own centres of power and move up the ritual hierarchy. Interestingly, the members of 10 Bayly, Rulers, pp. 35-72. 11 Ibid., p. 75. 12 Ibid., pp. 84-92. The western districts were not completely bereft of economic development. Collector, Saharanpur, to Commissioner, Northern Division, 1 Oct. 1835, Saharanpur Collectorate Records (SColl), Settlement Miscellaneous (Misc.), Vol. 131 (Uttar Pradesh Regional Archives, Allahabad, hereafter UPRAA). Also see S. Commander, The Agrarian Economy of Northern India, 1800-1880: Aspects of Growth and Stagnation in the Doab', PhD dissertation, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 59-60. 13 Alam, Crisis of Empire, p. 14. 14 W. Hunter, 'Narrative of a Journey from Agra to Oojein*, Journal of Asiatic Researches, vol. 6 (London, 1801), p. 27. 15 Alam, Crisis o f Empire, p. 105.

28 / Embattled Identities

these biradaris were intermediary landholders fighting for an independent or semi-independent position, not rajas or tributary chieftains.16 While all pre-colonial states and ‘little kingdoms’ under discussion had an extractive arm, they also redistributed wealth to political units at different levels through rituals, honour, patronage, and gift-giving revolving around notions of ‘service’. These kingdoms were characterized by a vibrant political culture made up of a complex mix of protection, hegemony, and domination.17 The colonial state, by contrast, was based on a very different set of politics, institutions, and ideologies.18The East India Company subverted the urban culture, mercantile and trading networks created by the pre-colonial polities to create the foundations of its own rule.19 Unlike the earlier regimes, this new state formation, which was driven by a purely extractive dynamic, was not interested in the creation of a viable surplus to reinvest in the local economy in north India or elsewhere.20 To gain their own ends, from the early nineteenth century, the thrust of British economic policies shifted from mercantalism to selective ‘non intervention’ and ‘free’ trade, depending on the needs of state power, and imperial expansion, which were geared towards the ‘drain of wealth’ from India to Britain.21Not surprisingly, a potentially competitive market economy did not come into being in India by the end of the nineteenth century despite the general increase in population, the growing scarcity of land, and the end of the long depression in the rural economy.22This was largely because of the contradictions 16 Ibid., p. 108. 17 Dirks. Hollow Crown, p. 7. While sophisticated, Dirks' analysis of pre­ colonial state structures did not give enough importance to the economy. See S. Guha, ‘Theatre State or Box Office State: A Note on the Political Economy of 18**1 Century India’, IESHR, 31:4 i, 213n

282 / Index

Ray, R. 29n rebellion 20. 21, 22, 79. 86, 135, 176, 177, 212, 233, 235 of 1857 see Great Rebellion, Mutiny in north India 199 participation by civilian population in 189 punishment for participation in 197-S turbulence and 179-83 Regulation III of 1804, on prevention and punishment for female infanticide 121 religious funds and charity 95 rent, rights of collection 65 resource base, of Rajput lineages 38-44 revenue 45, 97, 179,180 arrears 42 British policies regarding 38, 44 and civil courts 146, 147 collection 40, 47, 177,196, 197 rebellions against British 78 law 140, 169 Richards, J.F. 4n, 6n, 24n, 65n, 66n, 68n, 104n. 138n, 175n rights, of brotherhood 48 of inheritance 158 in land, 'legitimate' and ‘illegitimate’ 156 to maintenance 161. 162 to property 142, 164 of representation 155 to shrines and temples 138 ritual(s) 91. 92 hierarchy ix. 108. 122-3 and honour 67 identities x and social rank 14. 55-7. 233 status 6, 9, 25, 26, 30 riyasats, Rajput 52, 137, 162 Rizvi, S.A.A. 192n, 194«, 195«, 197n robberies 183

Robinson, B. 203n Rohilkhand 23, 60, 119 Rajputs of 196 Rohilla (s) 25, 34 Pathans 55n Roper. H. 151n Roper, L. 20n Rose, Hugh 193 Roy. Tapti 173. 178 Rudolph. L.I. 8n Rudolph. Susan 8n ‘rule of law’ x. 20. 72. 75. 83. 142n, 152 ryots/raiyats 25, 50, 57, 58 Saberwal, Satish 141 n Sabean, David 12n, 14n sadachatta 151 Sadar Board of Revenue 161 sadar diwani adalats 48. 142-4, 146-8, 162. 172 sagai 57, 58, 104 Sagar 88, 118, 183, 190 military detachment in 187 Sagar and Narmada Territories 174, 189 value of land in 173 see also Bundela Rebellion of 1842 sagotra sapinda 155 Sah, Hirdi, Lodhi raja 190 Sah, Madhukar. of Narhat 188. 189 revolt by 190 Saharanpur 89. 105. 120. 181 female infanticide in 105. l l l n , 120

Said, Edward 3 Saiyads 55n, 59n saltpetre, trade in 89 samanadokas 155. 163 Samru, Begam 33 Sandsburg, M. 3n Sangari. Kumkum lOn 'sanskritization' 120

Index / 283 Sansiyas 208 sapinda relations 156 Sarkar, Tanika lOn, 140n Schmidt, S.W. 57n Scindia, Daulat Rao 37n Scindia, amils of 213 army of 33n territories of 184 Scotland, Highland clan of, and Rajputs 19 Scott, J.C. 57n scriptures (al) 17, 97, 141, 151, 163 Searle-Chatterji, M. 238n Sengar Rajputs 26, 28, 40, 53, 55n, 57, 76, 81, 94, 113, 152 ‘service’, decline of 31-8 settlement policies, colonial 15, 16, 97, 140 Shahjahanpur 195 banditry in 211 Shakespear, A. 180n Sharma, Sanjay 28n, 42n, 183n, 204n Sharma, Ursula 107n, 238n shastras, on kanyadana marriages 108 Sherring, M.A. viin, 2n, 5n, 70 shradh (funeral) ceremony 155 Shulman, David 66n Skaria, Ajay 19n Siddiqi, Asiya 38n, 46n Siveking, I.G. 192n Sikarwars 113 Singh, Bakht, jagirdar the rao of Chirgaon 185, 186 Singh, Dilip, of Mainpuri 181 Singh, Gambhir, Raja of Banpur 174n Singh, H. 7n, 8n Singh, Janki, of Garhchappa 52 Singh, Jaswant 218 Singh, Jhujhar 200 Singh. K.N. 73n Singh, K.S. 6«

Singh, Kunwar 192 Singh, Maharban 225-6 Singh, Mazbut. bandit 200 Singh, Nirbhay, quarrel with Rao Bijay Bahadur 145 Singh, Thakur Chandar, of Gubhana 162 Singh, Thakur Inderjit 188n, 190 Singh, Umrao, of Jaklone. Bundelkhand 172,174 Singh, Vijay, Gujar zamindar 181 Singh, Zalim 175 Singha, R. lOn, 17, 18n. 20n, 60n, 80n, 83n, 98n, 107n, 203n, 206n, 207m, 208n Sinha, Mrinalini 19n, 140n sir land 50, 59 Simet Rajputs 94 Sleeman, William 32, 33, 39n, 92, 95n, 115, 119n, 126, 127, 158, 159n, 172, 174, 175«, 176n, 207n, 212n, 218, 223 Smeaton, Robert 105 Smith, J.D. 71 n, 104n Smith, R.S. 46« Smith, V.A. 32n, 33n, 167n smritis 149 social banditry 191, 201, 202, 227 boundaries ix, 138, 231 change 4, 98, 134, 148 formation 8 hierarchy 5, 30, 136, 142, 170 identity 229, 233, 234 and religious identities 97 reproduction 102 and ritual boundaries, amongst elite Rajputs 120 and ritual rank viii, 55-7 stratification, in agrarian society 8, 13, 63, 234 ‘spurious’ Rajputs 116,120 and female infanticide 116, 119, 120

284 / Index

and marriage practices 116, 117

and ritual rank 116, 120 state 10 and bhumeawat 65, 173, 175, 214, 227, 230 -building 202, 203 coercive power of 230 formation 8, 31, 203 and regulation of status 121-6

structures, impact of, on Rajputs 16 status, of Rajputs viii, xi, 7, 13, 79, 125, 134, 136, 169, 171 and caste hierarchy 60-1 -conscious patrilineages 14 and female infanticide 15. 113-15, 118, 121 hierarchies 16, 17, 63, 121, 122. 230, 231 regulation by state of 121-6 and varna ix, 238 of women 15, 104, 105 Stein, Burton 28n, 64n, 6 6 n , 6 8 m Stern, H. 104n Stokes, Eric 8, 28n, 38m, 41, 42, 44m, 51m, 56m, 178, 179, 191, 196m stridhan 163 Strachey, JohM 142 Strachey, Henry 150m Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 26m

succession, and inheritance disputes 147 law and women 1 6 0 -4 Sumaon, and reform of marriages 122, 123 Sumptuary codes 122, 125 Sunorias, and banditry 203m Surajbansi Rajputs 161, 194 in Amroha, female infanticide among 111, 112 surveys 7 6 -7 symbols 92

‘symbolic capital’ 9, 92 ‘system of depredation’, containment of 207 takhi 177 taksim namukammal 169 taluqdars 25, 44. 52, 65, 122 exemption from Arms Act 90 talukas 25, 72, 74 Tambiah, Stanley 107n Tambs-Lyche, H. 4m tappas 11, 25, 7 2 -3 , 74, 75, 76, 77 origins of 73 tarafs 25, 72 taxes, in estates 41 temples 94, 95 conflict over worship in 138 importance of 138 Tennant, William 47m tenures 41, 42, 44, 45, 168 complexity of, and colonial revenue policies 34 multiplicity of 4 6 -7 rights 45, 154 territorial sovereignty, concept of pre-colonial 66 thakur(s) 25, 77, 139, 191 bandits 212 cultivation by 53 of Dongra 188 and ‘equal marriages’ 113 ‘immemorial custom’ of 133 of Jaklone 188 lineages 217 thoke(s) 138, 139, 169 panchayats 147 Thompson, E.P. 14n thuggi 206. 208 legislation 208 see also brigandage, bhumeawat, dakaiti Thuggee and Dacoity Department 199. 206, 208. 213. 214

Tod, James 1, 2m Tombs, Maj-Gen. 188m

Index / 285 Tope, Tantia 193 Tori Fatehpur, jagirs of 187 Toria biradari 219-20. 224, 229 banditry, and bhumeawat in 219, 220 colonial state’s allowance to 221 Towers 114 tradition ix, x, 170 and colonial criminal law 17 colonial discourse and. the definition of Rajput 15-18 Tupper, C.L. 160n turbulence, and early rebellions against the British 179-83 Turner. V.W. 138m ubari holdings 34n jama, of Narhat estates 192 tenure 34 ubariars 25 Uberoi, Patricia lOn Ujjanies, and service 31 n ‘undivided’ Hindu ‘joint’ family 170 lineages 165-6 United Provinces 23 Unnithan, Maya 4 Utilitarianism, and civil law 151 Uttar Pradesh 23

Vaid, Sudesh lOn Vaishnava identities 237 vamshavalis 2, 47, 48, 154, 158 charans as custodians of 146 Vandergeest, P. 72n Varma, Thakur Hanumanth Singh viiin, 137, 124n varna 26 Vatuk, S. 103n Vidal. D. 8n, 20n, 21 n, 173n ‘village communities’ 3, 51,152 rights of 44 village statistics 128 Vindhyas 187

violence 20. 69, 87, 172 disputes and 85 Rajput masculinity and 19-21 see also collective viojence Visaria, P.M. 134n vyavasthas 150 waji-ul-arz 45 wajib-ul-arzs 48, 152, 156, 157, 161, 162. 165 Walsh. C.B. 86, 87, 138 Waris, Mohammad 226 Warren Hastings Plan, for Administration of Justice 149 Washbrook, David 4n, 17n, 28n, 140n, 142m weddings, costs/expenses at 96, 108-09 see also marriages West. H. 163m, 166n Whitcomb, Elizabeth 28n, 59n, 61m widows 156 and property rights 162 -remarriage 116 rights of 160 ‘wild’ frontier 226-8 Wilson. S. 202n Wink. Andrl 26n, 175n Winther, C. 201 n, 222n wives, rights of 160 women, at the periphery in ‘joint’ families 140 declining position of 136 demand for, among highranking Rajputs 116 devaluation of 103 and heirs, claims to land 170 kidnapping of, and selling for matrimonial purposes 115, 116 law, succession and 160-4 and manual labour, as degrading and polluting 104

286 / Index

role of 110 in female infanticide 12930, 133 seclusion of 1203 status/power of x. 15, 104, 233-4 Yadubansi Rajputs 117 Yang, Anand 16m. 17m, 67n, 80m, 203m

zamindari 46 armies 32, 182 estates 168 m zamindars. Rajput 8, 25, 39, 44, 58. 62. 167

and bandits 215 exemption from Arms Act 90 rights of 25. 59. 155 slow response to civil courts 144

Ziegler. Norman P. 6. 24n. 104m, Zamania pargana 43 thakurs of 38

138n, 139n Zmora, H. 138m