The Local Roots of Indian politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920

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THOMAS ]. BATA LI BRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

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THE LOCAL ROOTS OF INDIAN POLITICS

The Local Roots of Indian Politics ALLAHABAD 1880-1920

BY

C. A. BAYLY

CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD I975

Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W.i GLASGOW CAPE TOWN DELHI

NEW YORK

IBADAN

BOMBAY

TORONTO

NAIROBI

CALCUTTA

KUALA LUMPUR

MADRAS

SINGAPORE

ISBN O

MELBOURNE

DAR ES SALAAM

WELLINGTON

LUSAKA

KARACHI

HONG KONG

19 821562

ADDIS ABABA

LAHORE

DACCA

TOKYO

2

©OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1975

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HAZELL WATSON AND VINEY LTD AYLESBURY, BUCKS

TO MY PARENTS

T

PREFACE

book is history from a local standpoint rather than a local history. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive social analysis of Allahabad locality, still less a guide to its administration or government. The aim of the work is to describe the broad events of Indian public politics at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, in the context of local political systems and men of local influence. The book is a substantially revised version of my D.Phil. thesis, presented at Oxford University in 1970. During the six years that have passed since research was initiated, its progress has been forwarded by many people and institutions. The bulk of research was carried out while I was a student of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and I have to thank the Warden and Fellows for their support over this important period. But the writing has been com¬ pleted during the tenure of a research appointment in the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. I would like to thank the Centre’s Director, Mr. B. H. Farmer, its Committee of Management, and its staff, for the facilities and encouragement that they have made available to me. The Cambridge Indian History Project of the Social Sciences’ Research Council has greatly aided in the preparation of translations and statistical material. The staffs of public offices in Allahabad and Lucknow were kind and accommodating, while those of the National Archives of India, the Nehru Memorial Museum, the India Office Library, the Indian Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge University Library, have always provided a source of much-needed expertise. During the last stages of the work, the Master and Fellows of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, were kind enough to aid me with a grant towards expenses. Among individuals, my foremost debt has been to Professor J. A. Gallagher, who has helped this work on its way from first to last. He has always been able to rescue me from a morass of detail with a line of clarity. Dr. S. Gopal both suggested the topic and maintained a keen interest in its later development. Then there are a large number of friends and colleagues in Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex, and London Universities who have contributed enorhis

mously to the climate of research. Where their ideas and insights have found their way into this book, I can only hope that they remain in a form which does justice to their originators’ intentions. I must thank particularly, Richard Gordon, John Harrison, Gor¬ don Johnson, Peter Musgrave, Francis Robinson, Anil Seal, Gyanandera Pandey, Eric Stokes, and David Washbrook. Sri Padma Kant Malaviya kindly made available to me his files of the Abhyudaya. (now in the National Archives of India), while Sri R. Dave, G. P. Tandon, and the late Admiral Chatterji of Allahabad showed me interesting family documents. Sri Beni Prasad, Harimohan Das, and Lalji Tandon spent much time talking with me and helping me to understand traditional commercial practice. The firm of Sri Beni Prasad and Harimohan Das, which figures prominently in this work, still does business in Allahabad, and I am particularly grateful to the latter for taking time to help me by translating some of the firm’s mercantile books. Mr. A. Kalsi has also aided me with translation and benefited me by his knowledge of Indian literary history. It remains to be said that many of the conclusions of this work are tentative. I hope at least that it has thrown up a good range of questions. C. A. Bayly St. Catharine1 s College, Cambridge July igj3

CONTENTS LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES

xjii

ABBREVIATIONS SELECT GLOSSARY

xi

OF

INDIAN WORDS

XV

i. INTRODUCTION The Problem for Analysis

i

ii. ALLAHABAD IN 1880

i9

hi.

Administration, the Courts, and Education

21

Allahabad as a Trading Town

32

The Physical Setting: Communities and Residential Areas

39

Allahabad and its District

47

SOCIAL GROUPS AND THEIR POLITICAL HORIZONS Eurasians and Anglo-Indians

52

Service and Professional People

57

District Landholders and the Town

68

Bankers, Traders, and their Connections

72

‘Old Corporations’ and the Neighbourhoods

77

The Prospects for Local Control

87

iv. THE LOCAL POLITICAL RESPONSE, 1880—1894 Government and the Political Community

93

The Early Years of an Elective Municipality

99

The Political Undergrowth—Hinduism and Social Reform

104

Secular Associations at Allahabad in the 1880s

117

Conclusion

120

v. THE CONGRESS IN A LOCALITY, 1885-1892

122

Congress and Local Society, 1881-1891: Neighbourhood Leaderships and Raises

128

Congress and the Service Communities

133

Lecturers and Political Rhetoric

139

vi. LOCAL POLITICS IN EQUILIBRIUM, 1894-1906

145

Government Takes the Initiative

147

Rais Faction and the Allahabad Municipality

157

l.r.i.p.—1*

Contents

X

Education and Local Control—The Kayastha Pathshala

162

Hindu and Muslim Interest Groups

169

The Alliances Hold, 1905-1908

175

vii. THE

EXTREMIST MOVEMENT IN ALLAHABAD, 1906-1909

177

The United Provinces Provincial Conference, 1907

183

The ‘Nationalists’

188

viii. THE DRIFT INTO RADICALISM, 1909-1918

194

Government Alienates the Local Leadership

199

Hindu and Muslim Associations Deepen their Constituencies

212

Hindu Populism and the District Board

217

Town Government and the Politicians, 1909-1917

226

The Political Outlook

243

ix. THE NON-COOPERATION MOVEMENT IN ALLAHABAD, 1918-1922

245

The Satyagraha Sabha—1907 Again?

248

The Emergence of the Khilafat Movement

250

Council Boycott at Allahabad

256

Politics in the Mohullas, 1918-1923

261

Prospect

267

x. CONCLUSION

271

APPENDIX

285

Some Major Allahabad Commercial Families, 1880-1900

286

Prominent Allahabad Landlords with Town Connections, 1880-1900

290

BIBLIOGRAPHY

293

INDEX

305

LIST OF MAPS 1. The United Provinces xviii 2. Branch Agencies of some Major Allahabad-Based Indigenous Banking Firms, 1800-1850 35 3. Allahabad, c. 1909 40 4. Allahabad District 48

LIST OF TABLES 1. Broad Regional or Communal Ascription of Persons Earning more than Rs. 10 per Month in Some Major Government Offices, Allahabad, 1876 2. Numbers and Percentage of Population Dependent on Various Occupations by Town Police Circles, 1891 3. Broad Regional or Communal Ascription of Town-Based Darbaris, Elected Municipal Commissioners, and Honorary Magistrates, Allahabad, 1883-1899 4. Primary Occupation of Status of Town Darbaris, etc. 5. Some Comparative Incomes and Expenditures, Allahabad 6. Composition of Allahabad Municipal Electorate, 1884 7. Some Members of the Prayag Hindu Samaj, 1882-1892 8. Franchises Established under the 1909 Indian Councils Act, Allahabad 9. Occupation and Communal Background of Allahabad Dele¬ gates to Congress Sessions, 1887-1919 10. Registered Voters, Allahabad Municipality, 1883-1916

24 42

88 89 90 100 no 204 211 226

'

ABBREVIATIONS A.I.C.C. A.P.Z.A. C.A. C.I.D. C. M.S. Collr. Commr. D. C. D.C.C. D.C.I. D.G.

D.G. 1888

D.L. D.P. D. P.I. E. C. G.A.D. G.N.W.P. G.O.I. G.P. G.U.P.

Home Poll.

All-India Congress Committee Agra Province Zamindars’ Association Records of the Commissioner, Allahabad Division Criminal Investigation Department Records of the Church Missionary Society The Collector, Allahabad District The Commissioner, Allahabad Division Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Decentralization in the United Provinces District Congress Committee Director, Central Intelligence Bureau H. R. Nevill, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, vol. xxiii, Allahabad (Allahabad, 1911) H. C. Conybeare, F. H. Fisher, and J. P. Hewett A Statistical, Descriptive and Historical Account of the North-Western Provinces of India, vol. viii, Part 2 (Allahabad, 1884) Allahabad Darbar List, 1892 Collection of the Dave Family Director of Public Instruction Report of the Indian Education Commission, 1882 General Administration Department (previously General Department) See G.U.P. Government of India Papers of Gopal Krishna Gokhale Government of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (formerly G.N.W.P., Government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh) Home Department, Political, of the Government of India

I.E.S.H.R. I.N.C. I. O.L. J. A.S. J. and P. K. W. K.P.

Indian Economic and Social History Review Report of the Indian National Congress India Office Library and Records The Journal of Asian Studies Judicial and Public Papers, India Office Library Keep-with (appendage to government file) The Kayastha Pathshala, Allahabad

XIV

L.S.G. L. G. M. A.R. MAS. M. P. N. A.I. N.P. N.W.P. and O. P.S.C. P.P. P.S.V. P.W.C. Rev. Rs. S.R. 1878 S.R. igi6

St. U.P.N.N.R.

U.P.S.

Abbreviations Local Self-Government Department Lieutenant-Governor Annual Report on the Administration of the Allahabad Municipality Modern Asian Studies Papers of the Earl of Minto National Archives of India Nehru Papers The North-Western Provinces and Oudh Report of the Public Service Commission, 1886-7, with appendices Parliamentary Papers Private Secretary to the Viceroy Proceedings of the Working Committee, Allahabad Municipal Board Revenue Department Rupees F. W. Porter, Final Settlement Report of the Allahabad District (Allahabad, 1878) D. L. Drake-Brockman, Final Report on the Revision of Settlement in the Allahabad District (Excluding the Jumnapar Tract) (Allahabad, 1916) Sambat (Indian era) United Provinces Native Newspaper Reports (pre¬ viously, Reports on the Vernacular Press of Upper India, etc.) Uttar Pradesh Secretariat Record Room, Lucknow

SELECT GLOSSARY OF INDIAN WORDS Abkari Government revenue from the sale of liquor, drugs, etc. Akhara The residence of a body of Hindu ascetics. Alim A man learned in Islamic jurisprudence or law; pi. Ulama. Anjuman An association or club. Arya Samaj A reformist Hindu sect founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Dayananda Saraswati. Bahi The account book of a Hindu commercial class. Rokarh Bahi is a daily cash book; Lekha Bahi, a book made up from or consisting of individual accounts, usually on an annual basis. Basti See Mohulla Bhang Dried leaves of the hemp plant; a narcotic. Bharat Dharm Mahamandal All-India Religious Association, a latenineteenth-century orthodox religious movement. Biradari Lit. ‘brotherhood’; often used to mean the caste elders of an ancestral village or town quarter. Chaukidar A village watchman, guardian of property. Dacoit Bandit; in law, one of a band of more than five persons. Darbar A ceremonial assembly. Dharamshala A charitable institution provided as a resting place for Hindu pilgrims or travellers. Gotra The subdivision of a tribe or caste, ‘clan’. Exogamous among Hindu mercantile castes. Gram A coarse pulse grown for the spring harvest. Hartal A traditional form of strike. Hundi A credit note passed in traditional commercial transactions. jfati Here used to designate a subcaste division. Kanungo A supervisor of village accountants or patwaris. Karbala A burial place for Tazias. Kothi Agency, place; here used to designate the agencies of indigenous banking firms, or the residence of a landowner. Kotzval The town police chief. Lakh 100,000. Lathi A bamboo staff, hence lathizvalla, a person employed for offensive or defensive purposes. Mahant The head of a Hindu religious trust. Majlis Here a periodic religious meeting of the Shia community. Maulad-i-Sharif Religious meeting held on the anniversary of the death of the Prophet. Cf. Rajab-i-Sharif, periodic discussions of the virtues of the Prophet,

xvi

Select Glossary of Indian Words

Maulvi A Muslim teacher. Maund A measure of weight in general use throughout India but varying from region to region; about 80 lb. in N.W.P. Mofussil Provincial or suburban. Mohulla A quarter of a town or city, sometimes called basti. Mukhtar A legal agent not possessing the right to plead in a district court or above. Munsijf A subordinate magistrate in the judicial service. Octroi A town tax on consumable articles. Panchayat A council (originally of five); used here to designate the body of ritual arbitration within a sub-caste or a body of local assessors. Pargana A subdivision of a district, usually congruent with or smaller than a tahsil. Pathshala

A school.

Pattidari A form of joint landholding in which the land is divided out in ancestral shares. Patwari The village accountant and record keeper. Pragzval An Allahabad bathing priest living at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. Rais A notable, patron, or prominent person; used of landowners, lineage heads, and in Allahabad and Benares of prominent town commercial people. Ramlila A Hindu religious festival held in September-October cul¬ minating in Dussehra. Sabha Samaj

An association or society. A society, association.

Satnbat The Hindu era, about 57 years in advance of the Christian. Samiti A society, association. Sariatan Dharm Sahba Hindu religion. Sanyasi

A society for the propagation of orthodox

A religious mendicant.

Satyagralm tives.

The application of moral pressure for political objec¬

Skia A major sect of Islam, followers of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, and his descendants, as the only true leaders of the faith after the death of the Prophet. Sunni One who does not deviate from the practices of the catholic Muslim community. Swadeshi tones. Swaraj Tahsil

A movement for ‘home industry’ with anti-British under¬ Self-government.

The subdivision of a district in the charge of a tahsildar.

Select Glossary of Indian Words

xvii

Taluqdar A landed magnate holding a title-deed or sannad in South Oudh; originally a major revenue farmer. Tazia A float taken out, by Shia Muslims, during Mohurrum. Thana A police station and hence the administrative division attached to it. Vakil A senior legal practitioner or pleader; carries the force of ‘representative’. Waqf A religious or charitable trust in origin; later a way of immobi¬ lizing land rights and securing taxation relief. Zamindar A landholder individually and jointly engaged to pay land revenue and receive rent.

Map i. The United Provinces

I INTRODUCTION

B

THE PROBLEM FOR ANALYSIS

1925, the Indian National Congress had established itself as a significant political force in the towns of north India. During the 1920s and ’30s it was to be plagued by faction in the localities and dissension in its leadership. It was to be resisted by powerful political groups claiming to speak for wide sections of the population. Conservative magnates standing as representative of the generality of landed society would oppose it, as would disappointed Congressmen combining with religious enthusiasts to claim a Hindu constituency, and also the dispersed fragments of the Muslim political movement of the immediate post-War years. Yet already, the congeries of professional politicians, local publi¬ cists, and political associations, which had been hammered into the semblance of organization during the first non-cooperation move¬ ment, were the earliest and most classic paradigm of nationalism in the colonies of Asia and Africa. The Congress had a small and relatively stable central leadership and a network of town and district committees. During the struggle with government, it had apparently been able to mobilize important sections of the town population. Less surely, it had succeeded in associating itself with an unusually generalized cycle of agrarian disturbances in the plains of the mid-Ganges valley. In the early 1920s, it was also to demonstrate a capacity which was ultimately more significant, that of running a regular ‘ticket’ in local elections and maintaining a small body of committed Congressmen on the municipal and district boards of most localities in the United Provinces, Bihar, and East Punjab. Congress had emerged as the only political group, besides government itself, which could deploy and attempt to control representatives at all levels of political life. In the United Provinces, no alternative regional or sectional party emerged. Congress was reluctantly accepted by government as a channel of petition; it was capable of containing the most disaffected groups in the political y

Introduction

2

constellation, and yet could at the same time work for relatively circumscribed aims within the maturing organs of local and provincial self-government. Less obviously, the events of non¬ cooperation had given Congress a mythology and an indefinable status in revolt, marking it out from previous more localized dissidences, which at least among service and professional people never ultimately challenged the paramountcy of British govern¬ ment. The rapid growth of the nationalist movement in the United Provinces,1 and the commanding influence which some of its leaders, especially Motilal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya, came to have in all-India politics, would have been difficult to predict even a decade earlier. In 1908 Congress seemed no more than the hobby of the Allahabad High Court Bar. The leadership and its local supporters were determined to exclude all manifesta¬ tions of the ‘noisy Bengali boycott’, and the extremist party in the area was almost entirely composed of Bengali and Punjabi expat¬ riates. This earlier quiescence has been attributed to the educational backwardness of the United Provinces,2 and to the predominance of conservative landed interests.3 Yet neither can afford a complete explanation. No great expansion of literacy, nor jolt to the struc¬ ture of landed society, occurred between 1908 and 1917. But by this latter date the United Provinces was already regarded by its lieutenant-governor as the seat of an advanced political movement, ‘the most active and well organised outside Bombay’,4 whose features were ‘Brahmin domination’5 and a ‘vigorous campaign . . .

1 The Provinces were originally known as the Agra Province, and later the North-Western Provinces; a new title, the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, was adopted when the Chief Commissionership of Oudh was merged with them in 1877. In 1901, the name was changed once again to the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh which became the present state of Uttar Pradesh after Independence. 2 A. Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, 1968), Ch. VII, passim. 3 D. A. Low (ed.), Soundings in Modern South Asian History (London, 1968), pp. 1-22. 4 Sir James Meston to Lord Chelmsford, 20 Aug. 1917, Chelmsford Papers, MSS. Eur. E.264, correspondence in India, IIIA, India Office Library (I.O.L.). 5 This clumsy communal category should be taken to mean that the radical Congress leadership of 1916-17 had been closely connected with Hindu sec¬ tional interest groups. Despite the near-obsession of officials with Muslim political movements, it was the populist wing of an overwhelmingly Hindu Congress which emerged into the the 1920s as a substantial political force.

The Problem for Analysis

3

for the purpose of awakening this province from its former apathy’.1 Moreover, the swing of the United Provinces’ nationalist leader¬ ship towards a more aggressive political stance, and the stirrings in the localities, were achieved under the auspices of what was broadly the old ‘moderate’ leadership of 1908. This new radicalism anticipated not only the emergence of Gandhian politics in the region, but also the impact of the Muslim Khilafat movement and the post-War agrarian disturbances on the Congress. The ‘political mobilization’ of the United Provinces in the decade 1910-20 was an aspect of the decisive shift of influence within the Indian nationalist movement from the urbanized coastal cities of the Presidencies to the rural towns of Upper India. But the problems connected with it have a more general significance. Historians of nationalisms have come to challenge the older dis¬ tinctions between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ movements. They stress the connections between secular liberation movements and localized resistances which express cultural continuities. Above all, they emphasize the creation of new political arenas by the colonial powers. What precisely happened in the United Provinces to ‘bring it into’ politics? How did these nationalist politics relate to other more mundane forms of political activity in which the United Provinces was clearly not backward? Even a brief reading of secondary sources suggested that this question could not be adequately answered either with a study which concentrated on a brief period, or with one which restricted itself to regional arenas of political activity. The interpretation would also have to take account of the events of the 1880s. For despite Hindustan’s low level of economic development and literacy, the years 1887-92 stand out as a sharp exception to the usual picture of the early Congress as a limited constitutionalist movement developed in the interest of rootless publicists and frustrated small lawyers. Delegate lists alone suggest that even at this stage it was capable of enlisting the support of local notables and of engaging the cooperation of millenarian stump-orators, whose extremism and ubiquity appalled local officials. This early burst of advanced nationalist activity suggested from the beginning 1 Note on the Provincial Congress Committee, file 553 of 1917, General Administration Department (G.A.D.), Uttar Pradesh Secretariat Record Room, Lucknow (U.P.S.).

4

Introduction

that the growth of Congress was not simply a function of educational and economic development. Two things are of interest about the local men who ‘came into politics’, and vitalized the national movement in the late 1880s, and again during the First World War. First, there were some strik¬ ing similarities between them. On both occasions, merchant groups, local religious leaders, town-property owners, and even small landowners from around the towns were added to the usual lists of English-educated professional people. Secondly, many of these men were already powerful as brokers or notables in other, more restricted types of politics. One line of research, then, was already clear. A more exact picture was needed of the relationship between local power and regional forms of publicity and protest. It seemed desirable, as a preliminary, to describe the economic and social position of the powerful men in a single local society. Allahabad was chosen as the focus of such a study because of its pre-eminent position as the seat of the all-India Congress Com¬ mittee in the 1920 and ’30s, and also because little was known of the local background of men such as the Nehrus, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and Purshottam Das Tandon. Once political development was related to important social groups in the locality, however, the perspective altered consider¬ ably. Initially the question had been: how did the Congress come to enlist and attract local organizations and notables in its cam¬ paigns? But often during the period under review, this perspective was difficult to maintain. A different formulation was required: why did powerful local interests, and the organizations which they created, from time to time associate themselves with the early Congress and provide it with finance, organization, and social depth? For in the calculations of many local leaders, the Congress was essentially a secondary organization, and their association with it derived from the need to pursue within this regional and allIndia skeleton of organization and aspiration the much more cir¬ cumscribed local and sectional aims which derived from lower levels of politics. Despite the weight of literature which treats the early Congress as a unified and permanent force in politics, con¬ sciously broadening its appeal and moving upwards and onwards to the climactic emergence of Gandhi, this perspective seemed more convincing. For long years, even in a major political and adminis¬ trative centre such as Allahabad, the local Congress Committee

The Problem for Analysis

^

was little more than a letter-head in the study of some High Court lawyer. When the organization was successful in involving large sections of the population in its protests and rallies, especially before 1919, this often reflected the explosion of local crises and tensions rather than conditions in the Subcontinent as a whole. The various ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs’ within the political history of the United Provinces also became more explicable. For the emphasis could swing away from the very dubious procedure of explaining different rates of development within the Congress movement by general considerations of social and economic structure. Instead, it seemed appropriate to analyse the specific aims of a wide range of local organizations and leadership within the context of the institutions of colonial government and Indian society. There are, of course, two distinct styles of approach to the study of Indian nationalism which can easily be mistaken for sharply antithetical interpretations. One approach seeks to answer the question ‘what is nationalism?’. It is properly con¬ cerned with the origins and dissemination of nationalist ideology and with the political values of nationalist leaders. The second approach is concerned with the conditions under which a nationalist movement developed to become a serious threat to colonial government, and with the social origins of its support. The study of nationalist ideology must take a lower priority in this second approach, because it is of little help in explaining the sharp fluctu¬ ation in active support for the movement, regional and local differences induced by official coercion or concession, and the adherence to Congress of groups which were never ‘nationalist’ in any meaningful sense. In a local study such as this one, the general movement of ideas cannot be treated fully. Intellectual currents are best examined in a wider context and against the background of more general educational and social change. It must be said from the beginning, however, that this work does not dissent from the claim made by both the supporters and the opponents of Congress as an all-India organization, that its prime aim was to change the colonial standing of India. This alone explains the persistence of the Congress organization through periods when it was not vitalized by the support of local or regional dissidences, and when its leaders had much to gain, in the short term, by quiet compromise with the government. It also, surely, helps to explain the appeal of the movement to students, young men, and political

6

Introduction

workers who were important, if only because some of them went on, in the 1920s and ’30s, to exercise real political power in the bodies where Congress had already secured it. This demand for political reform as has been pointed out many times before, was based on western, liberal, and rationalist ideas disseminated initially by Bengalis, through new means of com¬ munication: the railways, the telegraph, and the press. Certain features of Congress ideology and appeal in Hindustan benefited, however, from the strong local tradition of Hindu revivalism. At the level of the town elites, this was expressed in a literary form by writers such as Raja Shiva Prasad and Harish Chandra of Benares.1 Christian missionaries, obnoxious western practices, the Muslim court language, and Muslim predominance in the subordinate services were the first targets of this new writing in Hindi. But later, in the pages of Harish Chandra’s journal, Kavi Vachan Sudha, and Balkrishna Bhatta’s Hindi Pradip, revivalist themes became con¬ founded with a conservative assault on British education and taxation policies which was expressed with a distinct undertone of cultural reaction. At the popular level also, in so far as any system of ideas was expounded by early Congress lecturers, these were almost unavoidably expressed in terms of religious tradition, because this was the language of social comment. One further intellectual current in Hindustan which was ultimately of equal significance was the expansive and culturally liberal attitudes of the old ‘curial’ families of the Moghul court and, in particular, of the Kashmiri Brahmins. Probably no coherent set of ideas passed down from men like Ajudhia Nath Kunzru, the orthodox Allahabad nationalist of the 1880s, to Jawaharlal Nehru, the socialist of the 1930s. But these families showed an unusual combination of adaptability and tolerance, modified by a consistently patrician style. The early political pamphlets and local broadsheets circulated in Hindustan in the first generation after the Rebellion provide some clues to the sets of attitudes with which people regarded politics. First, there was the strong emphasis on the obligations to government which ‘service’ imposed. ‘My profession is to serve’ was a formula used frequently in the courts by the literate classes in the early part of the century. The ideal of loyalty to one’s salt

1 See J. Liitt, Hindu-Nationalismus in Uttar Prades i86y-igoo (Stuttgart, 1970).

The Problem for Analysis

7

or employment was particularly strong among those who sur¬ vived the events of 1857, and it was given a more general context when ‘the Crown’ was introduced to legitimate British government in the East. ‘Loyalty is part of our constitution’, declared the most outspoken of Allahabad’s early Congressmen. The concept of loyalism had acquired a force of its own and was not merely a cynical reflection of society’s need for government patronage. Second, and in sharp opposition to this, there was even in the earliest days a striking undercurrent of anti-British feeling of a most strident kind. Much of this was expressed in a religious idiom. The foreign rulers were cow-eaters or false believers; their tyranny was even more deplorable than that of native rulers because they were impure. Covenanted officers of the civil service were widely subjected to abuse for corruption and arrogance even in the years immediately after 1857. Failures in grain distribution were almost automatically attributed to the impoverishment of India by the white rulers. Indeed, were it possible ever to measure the quantum of anti-British feeling in India at any one time, it might be found to have remained remarkably constant through from i860 to 1947. Against this background, the importance of the secular nationalist and reformist Hindu ideologies of the 1870s and ’80s was not that they spread wholly new ways of seeing govern¬ ment, but that they helped to make legitimate the banding together of these more localized aspirations and resentments into organizations which directly challenged the colonial regime. The idea that government had failed in its obligations to society, judged by western and rationalist criteria, made it easier to bring to an overtly nationalist posture individuals whose family profession for generation had been ‘to serve’. The Hindu populists’ arguments regarding the need to consult the good of the people by an intro¬ duction of the Hindi script in the courts or by a general ban on the slaughter of cattle, generalized to a wider level the notion, long current in the localities, that revolt in the defence of religion was the only legitimate form of revolt. But the wider currency of more articulate ideologies of opposition could not in itself create a political movement which seriously limited the colonial govern¬ ment’s freedom of action. Nor is their diffusion of much help in explaining the development of Indian politics in the short term. These ideologies had in no sense retreated in the United Prov¬ inces of the 1890s, yet the advanced Congress movement which

8

Introduction

affected the region in the 1880s had fragmented and subsided. In Punjab and Madras, again, where nationalist ideas were as much in evidence during the 1880s as in the United Provinces, and where the growth of education had been more sustained, the colonial government was able to retain a much greater degree of real control by working through complaisant property-owning interests. In Bengal and Maharashtra, where the ideologies of nationalism were first expressed in violence and where, perhaps, more people were sympathetic to nationalist appeals than any¬ where else in India, Congress went into a political decline in the second and third decades of the present century. The Congress leaders’ ability to extend their appeal within an area depended to a much greater extent on the social and economic pressures on its inhabitants. Men did not become ‘nationalists’ simply because their revenue was raised or their employment opportunities curtailed. These events, however, made them more aware of their lack of rights, of control over their own futures, and poverty of self-respect in a colonial regime. The general disturb¬ ance resulting from high prices, dwindling income, and the frustration of all efforts to open dialogues with their rulers im¬ pelled people of widely different backgrounds to express openly through organizations views which they may have held covertly before. To emphasize the role of nationalism as a mediator for dissidences arising from the growing imbalance of a colonial system should not be taken as an attempt to degrade the politics of nationalism to the status of a mere calculus of profit and loss. Similarly, an emphasis on the role of government in those politics should not be taken as an attempt to breathe life into the old Imperial Factor. Government was important not because, as used to be argued, it was British and western, or because it was the only moving force in a static society, an impossible argument to main¬ tain. Above all, it was important as the mechanism which deter¬ mined the redistribution of the agricultural surplus derived from the operations of the land revenue system. In a political society of extended towns inhabited largely by rentiers directed to government service or by middlemen such as merchants in cash crops and lawyers, the detail of this redistribution was bound to be crucial. Other autonomous economic and social changes, such as inflation, the slow commercialization of agriculture, the frag¬ mentation of estates by the indigenous system of inheritance,

The Problem for Analysis

9

increased the pressures on government and the townsman. Con¬ flicts at village level were also ultimately to impinge on the politics of the towns, though throughout much of our period an uneasy balance of interests persisted between the village-controlling peasant and the area-zamindar. It was, however, inequalities in the distribution of appointments and grants-in-aid, in town taxation and rural revenues which first signalled the emergence of new strains and frustrations in the localities between the colonial regime and its most articulate subjects. In the early nineteenth century just as government needed the aid of landowners and other notables to bring it near the sources of power and influence in local society, it also required the expertise of social groups with the ability to discharge the various tasks of administration which were secondary to its paramount role as a revenue-collecting agency. This was not so much a bureaucracy in the modern sense as a system of administrative contract. Here, the new European government followed the practice of Indian rulers and large landowners. Revenue collection was farmed out to zamindars (landholders), officials of government, and local potentates who knew the capabilities of the land and the tenancy. The guarantors of the large landholders controlled agricultural credit and could assess the value of their charges or buy them out if they failed.1 At the sub-district and village level, government, hard-pressed to raise the revenue on time, was content generally to farm out all its secondary functions to the traditional service communities through the agency of the landholders. In the villages, where there had been little social mobility, functional groups were generally confined within caste categories. Thus in Allahabad, low-caste Chamars and Pasis remained village police¬ men while scribal Kayasth and Muslim families retained their grip on the office of village accountant and overseer (patwari and kanungo). Government also remained the source of educational patronage and the village religious teachers were confirmed in their traditional callings and revenue-free grants in the primary school system introduced by Thomason, Governor in the 1840s.2 1 For Allahabad, F. W. Porter, Final Settlement Report of the Allahabad District (Allahabad, 1878), p. 54; B. S. Cohn, ‘Structural Change in Indian Rural Society’, in R. E. Frykenberg (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison, 1969). 2 Circular letter dated June 1845 from Government North-Western Provinces (N.W.P.), J. A. Richey (ed.), Selections from Educational Records (Calcutta,

10

Introduction

At the widest level, the European commercial magistracy farmed out the task of supervising the collection of land revenue to the old service communities which had a monopoly of expertise in the official language, Persian, and the complicated system of estate management. Indigenous banking firms provided government with direct credit in remote districts, arranged the management of treasuries, or provided the commercial expertise required in the conversion of local to Bengali coinage.* 1 The most valuable fruits of Indian administration after land-revenue, taxation on opium and ‘country spirits’, were left in the hands of enterprising members of the lower entrepreneurial classes who were drawn from the Pasi, Kalwar, and Teli castes. Certainly, the patronage of individual officers, the need for one or two English speakers in every office, and the penetration ‘up country’ of Anglo-Indians and Eurasians with the Post Office and railways, caused some disturbance. A degree of rationalization was also introduced into the revenue system as the haphazard early settlements gave way to more regular systems of assessment.2 Even before the 1857 Rebellion, government attempted to exert more influence over the subordinate revenue establishments and bring village accountants and overseers partly out of the control of the landlords.3 Resumption proceedings were taken to ration¬ alize the accumulation of revenue-free (muafi) grants,4 and the endless search for titles and deeds to verify alien concepts of land rights had begun to reduce custom and the ‘sense of the neighbour¬ hood’ into the more rigid formulation of the village accountant’s books. Yet the motives of institutional change were probably not

1922), ii, 1840-59, 237; cf., letter dated 18 Nov. 1846 from Government N.W.P. to Government India, ibid. 240—2. 1 See, L. C. Jain, Indigenous Banking in India (London, 1929), pp. 22-6; C. N. Cooke, The Rise, Progress and Present Condition of Banking in India (Calcutta, 1863). 2 See Sir J. E. Colebrooke’s minute on settlement in the N.W.P., Mar. 1820, and the Report of the Commissioners of 1818, N.W.P., Selections from the Revenue Records of the North-West Provinces, 1818-1820 (Calcutta, 1866), pp. 1-1973 Ibid., p. 336, Lord Moira’s note on revenue administration, N.W.P., 21 Sept. 1815, recommendation that patwaris should be made servants of govern¬ ment; cf., unrepealed circulars of the Board of Revenue, 1847-9, no. 5, Indian Institute, Oxford. 4 W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans (reprinted Calcutta, 1945), p. 181; P. Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 38-45.

The Problem for Analysis

II

markedly different in the first half of the nineteenth century from those induced by the stronger of the eighteenth-century Indian powers. These had always sought to strengthen their control over a locality by eroding the power of intermediary groups which might engross the prestige and profits of government. After 1857 there were further spurs to institutional change, besides the traditional jealousy of government of its parochial contractors, and foreign rulers’ desire for written proof of custom. The suppression of the Rebellion and increased police charges, necessary to guarantee rural order, threw the government’s budget into deficit.1 From the late 1860s there began a general rise in prices, which reached their first peak in the 1880s.2 This reflected the fall in value of the silver rupee against gold on the international market, and was largely out of the control of the Government of India.3 But it posed an almost insoluble problem. Land revenue could hardly be pushed up much further. The memory of the Rebellion was too fresh, and even the maximized revenue settle¬ ments of the 1870s had put too much pressure on landholder and tenant. Indeed, Allahabad District itself was taken by the Govern¬ ment of India as an example of the dangers implicit in thought¬ lessly raising the revenue demand.4 Instead, the authorities sought to resolve their problem in several less drastic ways. In the first place, they attempted to tap new areas of wealth in society by the imposition of income tax, first in the late 1860s5 and again in 1886.6 The tax was designed to complement existing local charges, such as the licence tax and the district road cesses; it was also designed to reach the moneylenders and lawyers who had done well out of the rise in the value of land after the coming of the railway. Secondly, the development of local self-government,7 and 1 P. Banerjea, Provincial Finance in India (London, 1929), p. 18, n. 2. Census of India i8gi, xvi, N.W.P. and Oudh, p. 142, and diagram 6. 3 See B. R. Ambedkar, History of Indian Currency and Banking (Bombay,

2

1947),

PP- 46-82. 4 N.W.P. and Oudh Revenue ‘A’ Proceedings, Apr. 1885, 28, Government of India’s orders on the Allahabad Settlement Report, 627 Revenue, June 1883, India Office Library (I.O.L.). 5 ‘N.W.P.: Report on the Income Tax Acts IX and XXIII, 1869,’ Parlia¬ mentary Papers, 1872 Session, xliv, 213 f. 6 V. Rao, Taxation of Income in India (London, 1931), chs. I and II. 7 The major steps in administrative decentralization were paralleled by periods of financial decentralization; for the background see Banerjea, Provincial Finance, pp. 56-9, cf. pp. 93—7; Imperial Gazeteer of India, United Provinces (Calcutta 1908), i. 106-8.

12

Introduction

in particular, the Municipalities Acts of 18681 and 1883,2 were conceived as devices for local self-taxation. ‘No representation without taxation’ might have been the motto of the officers who acquiesced in Ripon’s Whiggism in 1883, and the change could not have been made had not bodies like the North-Western Provinces’ Board of Revenue felt that ‘members of a Municipal Committee are far better judges than Collectors and Tahsildars can be, of the relative means of their neighbours who are to be taxed, and graduate the assessments much more correctly’.3 Finally, and most significantly, government tried to solve its financial problem by breaking the hold of the wide variety of service groups which had proliferated around it. An inefficient service would inevitably be an expensive one. The local authorities in Allahabad and Benares attempted, for instance, to break down the rings which had grown up for the semi-illegal distilling of liquor or distribution of opium. They also sought to raise the yield of the annual contracts to the licensed vendors of these products who were felt to be reaping an undue profit at the expense of government.4 The result was prolonged outcry from the wealthy Kalwar distillers of the eastern districts and their resort to novel methods of petition and agitation. Similarly, attempts after 1879 t0 iron away differential rates of reimburse¬ ment or rewards in kind for village officers,5 or to gather into official hands residual local transit dues,6 add to a general picture

1 Report on the Administration of the North Western Provinces for the year 1868—9 (Allahabad, 1870), p. 50. 2 See F. C. R. Robinson, ‘Consultation and Control: the United Provinces’ Government and its allies 1860-1910’, Modern Asian Studies, v. 4 (1971). 3 Sec. to Board of Revenue to Sec. Government North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 17 Oct. 1882, N.W.P. and Oudh, Local Self-Government ‘A’, Feb. 1884, 43, I.O.L. 4 H. R. Nevill, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, xxiii, Allahabad (Allahabad, 1911) (D.G.), 138-41; Report on the Excise Adminis¬ tration of the North-Western Provinces, 1870-1 (Allahabad, 1871), p. 8, and following reports; cf. Excise Administration Report 1871-2 (Allahabad, 1872), p. 17, for the regularization of the sale of opium. 5 For reduction of patwari establishment, Secretary Board of Revenue to Secretary Government N.W.P. and Oudh, 3 Oct. 1883, N.W.P. and Oudh Financial ‘A’, Jan. 1884, 59, I.O.L. Cf., case of Kazi, Muslim law officer, divested of his registration powers, Proceedings of the Public Services Com¬ mission, Proceedings Relating to the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (P.S.C.), Subcommittee Proceedings: Registration Department (Simla, 1887), p. 12. 6 Nur-id-Absar, 1 June 1871, Reports on the Vernacular Press of Upper India for 1871 (later United Provinces Native Newspaper Reports) (U.P.N.N.R.), I.O.L.

The Problem for Analysis

13

of rationalization for fiscal purposes. At all levels from the humble rural revenue servants to the Indian elite of the provincial service, government increasingly sought to standardize and regularize methods of entry, qualifications, and reimbursement.1 Political considerations also played an important part. A monopoly of skills and local resources in the hands of a single group was regarded with greater suspicion after 1857. For instance, the Inspector General of Police remarked on the predominance of the Pasi caste in the ranks of village watchmen as follows: There can be no doubt that where one single element prevails to the exclusion of all others it may be both necessary and advisable to introduce an admixture of other castes. But this should always be done with care and discrimination, and so as to carry the people with us and not have them arrayed against us.2 This attitude was apparent in many of the government’s measures to reform its own service. It underlay the attempt of 1878 to fix Hindu-Muslim percentages within the police and the judiciary.3 It lay behind the new rules introduced for the training and exami¬ nation of tahsildars after 1873. Echoes of it were still strong in the late 1890s when the Lieutenant-Governor, Lord MacDonnell, introduced measures to ‘correct the preponderance’ of certain groups of Muslims in the police and displayed disfavour toward members of the Kayasth caste in government service.4 It seems clear that these rather crude explosions of Anglo-Indian ethno¬ logical prejudice were a heavy-handed answer to a real problem— the progressive inertia of public authority at a local level and the tendency of ascriptive considerations of recruitment to any form of elite to give way to prescriptive considerations of family and kin, thus reducing efficiency. This in turn reflected limited avenues of mobility in a society where government service was one of the few lucrative callings which did not reflect adversely on ritual status. However, the very tendency of the functions of government to atrophy at a local level, the fact, for instance, that the office of 1 See Robinson, ‘Consultation and Control’. Provinces Police Administration Report, 1869-70 (Allahabad, 1870), p. 53B. 3 Minute by Sir A. P. MacDonnell, 1901, p. 7, MacDonnell Papers c 355, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

2 North-Western

4 MacDonnell to Elgin, 22 Aug. 1897, MacDonnell Papers c 353, and MacDonnell’s Minute, c 355, p. 37; for the Kayasth response, see, Kayastha Samachar, v. (1902), 109-11; Prayag Samachar, Apr. 1882, U.P.N.N.R. 1882.

H

Introduction

village overseer (kanungo) had become a mark of status and respect rather than a function to be performed, meant that attempts by government to reform itself struck at one of the main planks of social organization, the perception of statuses within a neighbour¬ hood. Where the ambitions of service families had been directed for decades towards assured employment by patronage in a local office, the sudden imposition of educational qualifications could cause profound disturbance, even if these restrictions and quali¬ fications proved impossible to enforce in practice. From this arose the strong local reactions againstpatwari schools,1 the cheating and fraud in the tahsildari and kanungo examinations in the 1880s,2 and the emotional reaction of the old service communities to the attempt to replace the Persian script by English or the Nagri script.3 In this last case, mastery of the script had allowed certain social groups to monopolize government business at a local level. But the script itself became more than simply a tool of employ¬ ment, it was a badge of status, connected in the minds of Muslims, at least, with religion. The confused fretting of Hindustani society in the 1870s and 1880s reflected a deep ambiguity of attitude which was induced when an old service society was sharply disturbed by change in the terms of its employment. A new range of defensive impulses arose. Some of these were dissipated in localized protest or bought off by official concessions. But many were channelled into more formal and permanent groupings. Caste and communal associations (the Kayasth associations; the Urdu Defence Society)4 were given new significance as they became platforms for the grievances of a wide swathe of service people. In the recently established associations and debating societies of the towns new secular and rationalist ideas converged with the dissidences of a service gentry faced with administrative change. The drive for schools and colleges gained new supporters among groups which had traditionally employed private tutors and learned religious men. But what fixed these new political elements more firmly into the pattern of politics were the institutions of regional and local 1 N.W.P. and Oudh Revenue ‘A’, Dec. 1885, 5, I.O.L. 2 On dismissal of kanungos, Dabir-i-Hind, 27 Sept., 11, 13 Oct., 1 Nov. 1879, U.P.N.N.R. 1879. 3 e.g. complaints about High Court, N.W.P. orders that examinations of district court pleaders should take place in English from 1880, Nazim-i-Agra, 10 Apr. 1878, U.P.N.N.R. 1878. 4 See below, pp. 65-8.

The Problem for Analysis

15

self-government which the authorities had introduced as one part of their programme of financial retrenchment. When men had to deal with the demands of a more intrusive and supposedly repre¬ sentative government, any form of organization assumed new importance. Throughout this study we shall see the associations and movements which were moulded in the immediate postMutiny years, jumping into cooperation with and opposition to local and regional authority. Opposition might lead to a temporary absorption into the Indian National Congress; it might also express itself through movements designed to promote or preserve supposed Hindu or Muslim interests. Changes working within Indian society also formed the back¬ ground to change and moulded political leaderships. Economic advance and the patchy swing into cash cropping were closely connected with the development of the railways.1 Market towns and villages increased in number between 1850 and 1880. In a good year the excess production of the many small agricultural units of the Doab and southern Oudh was exported by rail.2 This accumulation of wealth by some elements of the agricultural popu¬ lation made the towns more important as distribution centres. The increased value of cash crops and greater access to courts also benefited the town legal classes. The impression remains, however, that these changes were generally absorbed into the social structure of the localities without markedly increasing the number of assertive groups with which colonial government, or the national¬ ists, were faced. Contractors for the railway were most often relatives of the powerful commercial magnates who had passed British bills in the early nineteenth century. The intrusion of a few enterprising Marwaris and Bengalis apart, it was in the main the wealthy Khattri and Agarwal families which financed upcountry trades in the new cash crops, and serviced the sumptuary expenditure of landed magnates.3 Equally, the legal classes which helped extract wealth from landed society in the form of pleaders’ 1 The picture is beginning to emerge from settlement reports, etc. See, B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India, 1860-1945 (New York, 1963); E. Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, vol. 1 (Berkeley, Calif., 1972); P. J. Musgrave, ‘Agrarian Conditions in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 1860-1920’, unpubl. MS. in the author’s possession. 2 W. W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, x (London, 1886), 392-4. 3 See for instance, N. Madhava Rau, An Encylopedia of North and Central India (Madras, 1932), part vii, part viii, ‘trades’; Agrawal jfati ka Itihasa (Bhanpura, Indore, 1938). l.r.I.p.—2

i6

Introduction

fees do not appear to have been revolutionized in composition during these years.1 A few lawyers could dominate the litigation of both district and High Court, and since traditional relation¬ ships were crucial in the development of a practice, scions of the old itinerant service families of Mogul rule continued to bulk large in the British Courts until well into the present century. Nevertheless, new wealth generated in society gave force and permanence to institutions which might have failed had it not been for Indian entrepreneurs in the towns. Wealthy patrons don¬ ated large sums to charitable schools and religious associations. These often became the focus of independent leaderships in the localities. So too, the newly rich legal men employed their re¬ sources to escape from a dependence on wealthy landlords and bankers which had previously characterized the upper Indian lawyer. The new associations and institutions of local government gave them a platform on which to express this independence. A particular concern of this study is the manner in which local leaderships gained allies outside their localities. Throughout the period connections created by government service and the British courts provided crucial means of communication. But the insti¬ tutions of Indian society which only remotely or indirectly reflected the action of governmental agencies were also engaged. The solidarities created by the patterns of migration and marriage of commercial men from the Punjab down the Ganges valley, for instance, provided one important pool of informal organization;2 the links of Kayasth lawyers and estate managers fanning out from the Benares-Bihar borderlands into the towns of upper India served similar purposes.3 They were both vitalized from time to time to form associations dedicated to ritual or political improve¬ ment. In north India, two greater unifying forces, the Hindu and Muslim religions, could also be brought into play. The categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ no doubt acquired greater significance during this period as government increasingly structured its policies in employment and education within them. Yet the period from 1850 to 1890 saw a distinct under-swell of aspiration and 1 G. F. M. Buckee, ‘An Examination of the Development and Structure of the Legal Profession at Allahabad, 1866-1935,’ unpubl. Ph.D. Thesis, Univer¬ sity of London, 1972. 2 See below, pp. 75-6. 3 See below, pp. 60-2.

The Problem for Analysis

17

discontent expressed in a Hindu idiom.1 Its origins lie outside the scope of this work, but the greater wealth and independence of town Hindu society and the relative decline of rentier Muslim society in some parts of Hindustan created the conditions for its growth. A variety of stimuli—the printing press, the influence of Christian and Sikh doctrines, and official intervention—gave it form. For our purposes, it is significant that the impulse of Hindu revivalism was passed from locality to locality and switched into political articulation along a variety of more traditional means of communication. The annual excursions of itinerant holy men, the routes from rest house to rest house along the old pilgrimage route, or the links established by the reforming Arya Samaj and cow-protection movements, were all used by ‘secular’ political leaderships later in the century. In the same way, the aspirations of Muslims could be generalized beyond a locality by the impercept¬ ible threads linking teacher with pupil in the Islamic religious schools, or by the sympathies linking Urdu literary societies in far-distant district towns. During the 1870s and ’80s the ranges of new organization created by bureaucratic change converged with these more arcane reformations and the as yet superficial changes wrought by a modern ideology. Though Hindustan remained overwhelmingly rural and its town society quite fragmented, it was in the towns that the old connections and the new organizations were most closely bunched together. Here were novel possibilities for political integration, and it was in the towns that colonial authority was first to confront dissidences which could not be smothered by military action. The outcome of the local conflicts and compro¬ mises between Indian leaders and government was quite unpre¬ dictable in 1880. As this study will show, changes in local govern¬ ment and society had made the outcome more certain by 1923, but it was not inevitable until the later 1930s. Undoubtedly economic changes were slowly modifying the society of the United Provinces. Before the closing date of this study, something like a north Indian middle class was emerging from out of the cluster of rentier service families and commercial notables. So, too, village-con1 See J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (London, 1929); K. W. Jones, ‘The Arya Samaj in the Punjab: A Study of Social Reform and Religious Revivalism’, unpubl. Ph.D. Thesis, Berkeley, Calif., 1966; J. R. Graham, ‘The Arya Samaj as a Reformation in Hinduism with Special Reference to Caste’, unpubl. Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, 1943.

i8

Introduction

trolling peasants had begun to join the followings of town politi¬ cians as administrative pressures and the impact of new marketing systems forced them to look outside their localities for allies. Yet the implication of a detailed analysis of political change such as this is that there was no social teleology which dictated that advanced nationalism would inevitably be advantaged in the short term by these developments. On the contrary, had the British employed different policies to direct and canalize Indian political aspirations in the United Provinces, they might have perpetuated their control over a variety of dissidences as they did until rather later in other parts of India, notably in the Provinces of Punjab and Madras. In this case the history of nationalism and imperialism in India would have taken a different course.

II

ALLAHABAD IN 1880

T

rapid ebb and flow of political power in the Ganges valley had been the major influence on the growth and decline of its towns. When the dependents of a raja, or superior revenue collector, had camped near a market village, many intermediaries between town and country had benefited. Trade was brought to the grain merchant and horse-dealer. The scribal classes found place in the revenue accounting service and established an unsteady hold on grants of land around the towns; learned men of the Muslim religion secured the patronage of aristocratic disciples. When the political authority struck camp, it left a dead hearth—declining merchants, an otiose service class subdividing its grants of land, and decaying mosques and shrines. The commercial magistracy of the East India Company modified the indigenous system sometimes through misunderstanding and often when it seemed possible to maximize takings in landrevenue. But in its early days, it too was an itinerant commission, roaming the western extremities of the old Bengal Presidency. Bareilly, Mirzapur, and Agra rose and declined as government, its contractors, and commercial agents came and went. Allahabad itself, once the second capital of the Mogul Empire, was pushed through a cycle of boom and contraction while the government of the Agra Province temporarily settled there between 1836 and 1838. After the Mutiny when the government, seeking an easily defensible position and rail links with Calcutta, came to rest there more permanently, such a cycle began again. The process by which the town of Allahabad grew was complex. New service quarters (mohullas) grew up around the old admini¬ strative areas; new retail markets for railborne goods distorted the older trading patterns.1 But social and economic relations in the town remained similar to those of a large market village. The number of ‘agriculturalists’ recorded within municipal limits in he

1 Ujagir Singh, Allahabad: A Study in Urban Geography (Varanasi, 1966); town maps, I.O.L., Royal Geographical Society, and British Museum.

20

Allahabad in 1880

1891 is striking.1 The caste councils of the lower castes spanned the boundary between town and country,2 and much political power remained with outlying landholding groups.3 Broadly, it was local service communities, retaining strong links of kinship with the district’s rural service gentry, which took up opportunities within the local administrative system. Even immigrants and nouveaux riches among the commercial magnates fell into a pattern of religious philanthropy and prestige moneylending to landowners which had been characteristic of upper Indian commercial communities. For though it is convenient to call Allahabad a city, ‘urbanization’, as distinct from town-growth, had not proceeded far before 1900—perhaps even before 1920.4 Specialized eco¬ nomic and professional institutions, secular values, the weakening of ritual restraints, and the replacement of patronage by contractual relationships were characteristic only of the new Europeandominated professional enclave. Families of sophisticated Indian service people had begun to adopt westernized styles of life here, but they were very small in number. The following two chapters describe the social and political relations created by expanding Indian commercial and service interests within the shell of colonial institutions. Since it was in the main, already powerful local groups which bent these institutions to their use, the British impact on the social structure remained superficial. Yet, because a more cohesive urban elite group with common values and interests did not emerge in Allahabad, the local authorities were at first able to control the political impulses which arose from the variety of its leaderships. In Upper India the major advantage of government in local control has been the close relationship of many of the impulses within political life to the formal apparatus of administration. Hopeful groups and dissidents directed their energies to points in the administrative system where patronage and executive power had already accrued. Equally, the new organs of local self-govern¬ ment were at first mere extensions of district, sub-district, and 1 See below, p. 42, Table 2. 2 See below, pp. 78-9. 3 See below, pp. 68-9. 4 The application of this distinction to Allahabad was suggested by Professor B. D. Graham. Other authors have written of ‘rurban’ centres (Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule, Berkeley, Calif., 1970), or ‘rural cities’ (O. M. Lynch ‘Rural Cities in India: Continuities and Discontinuities’, in P. Mason (ed.) India and Ceylon: Unity and Diversity, London, 1967).

Administration, the Courts, and Education

21

provincial executive authority. This leading role of government in social and political life can be explained partly by the absence of wealthy and independent corporate bodies between the town neighbourhood or village elites and the state and its servants. The merchant and service notables who figure in this work were to a large extent creations of administrative need and could not long maintain themselves as a free-standing bourgeoisie. Religious and cultural institutions, at least in north India, were also weak and fissiparous beyond neighbourhood level. On the other hand, the locus of power within the administrative body itself was not fixed. In some districts, low-level government servants in collusion with powerful local men monopolized it. In Allahabad, however, the presence of provincial administration ensured that the colonial rulers’ control, though defective, was more real. ADMINISTRATION, THE COURTS, AND EDUCATION

The collector headed the revenue establishment of the district and was also its chief magistrate. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the collector of Allahabad was assisted by two European joint-magistrates or senior assistant magistrates, and two Indian deputy-magistrates who were members of the Provincial Civil Service, but not of the Indian Civil Service.1 In 1877, the collec¬ tor’s office was served by a permanent staff of thirty-six officers who received more than ten rupees per month and a floating staff of clerks, messengers, and orderlies of about the same number.2 The office was divided into four major departments: the Revenue Department, the Persian Department, the Treasury Department, and the Record Keeper’s Department. Within the office the most powerful men were the head clerk and the superintendent of the Persian Department. These officials were able to control the flow of information to the collector and had considerable influence over the appointment of new men in the office. The lengthy settlements of land revenue also swelled the top echelons of the revenue service with a settlement officer, three settlement deputy-collectors, and their respective staffs. During the Allahabad settlement of 1866-78, there were several occasions when it seemed that the settlement 1 A. C. Tapp, District Gazetteer of the North Western Provinces (Special) (Allahabad, 1876), p. 23. 2 ‘Detailed Statements of the Establishment of Civil Officers in the NorthWestern Provinces and Oudh as it stood on the 1 April 1876’, I.O.L.; see also establishment lists in the Allahabad Collector’s and Commissioner’s Archives.

22

Allahabad in 1880

office had supplanted the regular establishment, so great was its power over the landowners.1 But in normal years, the crucial link in the revenue establishment ran between the collector, or his head clerk, and the tahsildar, the Indian official who headed both the revenue and magisterial establishments of the seven subdistrict units. The tahsildar was the most important official of the district. Many tahsils were quite remote, and petty rent and boundary cases which were the staple litigation of the countryside were taken by him. The tahsildars of the largest tahsils in Allahabad District, Phulpur, Handia, and Khairagarh, were each taking as many as six hundred cases a year in 1877-8; the district magistrate and deputy-magistrate took about three hundred each, and the honorary magistrates about one hundred.2 In terms of sheer contact with the population, the tahsildars ruled India.3 The tahsil establishment, headed by the tahsildar, consisted in 1877 of six officers who drew more than ten rupees a month and large numbers of assorted clerks, orderlies, and runners.4 There was a deputy tahsildar, who presided over cases in the tahsil court in the absence of the tahsildar on tour. This was the level in the service at which many young Indians began their careers. There were also two kanungos, originally the revenue representative of Mogul government at local level, now the officials who theoretically supervised the work of the village accountants. The office of kanungo generally remained hereditary in certain families, but even where it did not, the opinion of the neighbourhood and the patronage of the subdivisional officers remained more important than educational qualifications in filling the post. Two further vernacular clerks ran the tahsil office. But just as the head clerk or the manager of the Persian department could exercise great power over the discharge of business in the district office, so these officials could manipulate an inexperienced or weak tahsildar. The regular tahsil establishment was completed by the treasury assistant who was responsible for the tahsil treasuries through which government contractors were paid or agricultural relief was distributed, and where the land revenue was collected every quarter. The treasury assistant was usually ‘the nominee and 1 ‘Reorganization of the boundaries of Bara and Khairagarh tahsils’, Collr. to Commr. Allahabad, 29 Jan. 1878, N.W.P. and Oudh Revenue ‘A’, May 1879, 15, I.O.L. 2 Ibid. 3 Pioneer, 6 Oct. 1886, ‘The Tahsildar’. 4 N.W.P. Civil Establishment, 1876, I.O.L.

Administration, the Courts, and Education

23

creature of the treasurer,’ and, ‘not in effect a servant of govern¬ ment’.1 His job was one of the several points in the hierarchy of service where non-official influence could impinge very closely on the workings of government, since the tahsil treasurers were drawn from among the large landowning or moneylending families and the district treasurer was one of the town banking magnates. Beneath the tahsil offices, the pyramid of formal government service in Allahabad broadened out to include over a thousand village accountants (patwaris).2 Of these, the vast majority were Kayasth or Muslim villagers who had some basic skill in account¬ ing and could fill in the rudimentary village documents and surveys. The patwari could attain a position of enormous influence in the village since he was the only effective channel of communication between landlord and tenant, and between them and the remote government. The efficiency of revenue policy was dependent on the patwari,3 4 As we have seen, government sought in the later nineteenth century to purge and make more efficient its workings, but change at the local level was limited. Substantial realignments of local power were either associated with particular official flurries designed to break up ‘family circles’ or with the periodic land revenue settlements. During the period covered by this study there were two full land revenue settlements in the district. One was conducted by F. W. Porter and a succession of other officers between 1867 and 1877;4 the other was carried out by D. L. Drake-Brockman between 1913 and 1916 and applied only to the areas north of the river Jumna.5 The settlement of 1867-77 broadly reflected the policy of the Allahabad Board of Revenue which was to iron out the advantageous revenue rates which had accrued to the servants and dependants of early Company govern¬ ment. It fell particularly hard on the small landed proprietors of the

1 Rules on the security of treasuries, Board of Revenue Circular Order, 3 July 1867, collected Board circulars, Indian Institute, Oxford. 2 N.W.P. and Oudh Financial ‘A’, Jan. 1884, 57, I.O.L. 3 Director, Department Agriculture and Commerce, N.W.P. to Sec. to Board of Revenue, N.W.P., 17 Aug. 1883, N.W.P. and Oudh Financial ‘A’, Jan. 1884, 60, I.O.L. 4 F. W. Porter, Final Settlement Report of the Allahabad District (Allahabad, 1878) (S.R. 1878). 5 D. L. Drake-Brockman, Final Report on the Revision of Settlement in the Allahabad District (excluding the Jnmnapar Tract (Allahabad, 1916) (S.R. 1916). l.r.i.p.—2*

Allahabad in 1880

24

Doab part of the district.1 Here, discontent was increased in a section of the population which was already noted for its unruli¬ ness,2 and which was also connected by service migration with the town.3 The broad composition of the government service classes in Allahabad was typical of the North-Western Provinces. Posts in Table i

Broad Regional or Communal Ascription of Persons Earning more than Rs. 10 per month in Some Major Government Offices, Allahabad,

i8j6 European, Eurasian

Bengali

Collectorate

—

I I

9

I I

Tahsil establishment

—

I

24

35

Commissioner ’ s Bd. of Revenue and Accountant Genl.

2

2

I

5

39

67

3

63

Muslim

Local Hindu

Source: calculated from N.W.P. Civil Establishments, 1876.

the tahsil offices were monopolized by members of the old service communities, particularly Muslims and Kayasths, while Brahmins were also numerous. In the service catchment areas of rural Kara and Chad, the proportion of Muslims was higher, but this reflected their predominance in the primary schools of these areas. In the district and higher offices, a wider range of service communities, including domiciled Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, occupied posts. The dictum that ‘personal interest is the key to advancement in the Public Service’ is borne out by the distribution of employment in these offices. Where the head clerk was of long standing in a department, other appointments were made from men of recog¬ nizably the same social group. Shia Muslims from Machhlishahr4 1 C. D. Steel, F. H. Fisher, and J. P. Hewett, Statistical, Descriptive and His¬ torical Account of the North Western Provinces of India (D.G. 1884) (Allahabad, 1884), vol. viii, Part II, 105, m. 2 District Superintendent of Police to District Magistrate, Allahabad, 30 Jan. 1891, basta 29, 97 Judicial of 1892, Records of the Commissioner, Alla¬ habad Division (C.A.). 3 S.R. 1916, pp. 10, 13. 4 Koh-i-Nur, 17 Aug. 1881, U.P.N.N.R. 1881 ; cf. Prayag Samachar, 18 July 1895, U.P.N.N.R. 1895.

Administration, the Courts, and Education

25

in nearby Jaunpur district, local Srivastava Kayasths,1 and Ben¬ galis formed notorious ‘family circles’. But around Allahabad government had a wide range of communities from which to recruit. It was difficult for any single group to establish control over the working of government from village level up to district head¬ quarters, and officials maintained that cliques were not as objec¬ tionable in Allahabad as in other, more remote districts.2 Justice was a major industry in any district headquarters. In 1880 Allahabad had several courts above the tahsil level.3 There was one court presided over by a munsiff,4 a judicial officer recruited from the younger members of the High Court Bar to take civil cases. Next, there was a Small Cause Court designed to take account of low-value commercial suits in the old town. Superior to these courts on the civil side was the court of the subordinate judge, who was a member of the Provincial Civil Service. On the criminal side, magistrates with ‘second’ and ‘third class’ powers had petty jurisdiction. There was also a bench of honorary magistrates with such powers which in the 1880s was six in number, and recruited from among local bankers and land¬ lords. These magnates already acted as informal arbitrators within their estates and quarters. The collector himself, in the guise of a first class magistrate, was allowed to take cases carrying penalties of not more than Rs. 1,000 or two years’ imprisonment. Finally, a civil and sessions judge, based on Allahabad, was appointed to co-ordinate the workings of subordinate courts on both the civil and criminal side. District judgeships of this sort remained an I.C.S. and so virtually a European monopoly throughout the period.5 But a Provincial Judicial Service established in 1886 was supposed to make Indian candidates available. 1 Qaisar-ul-Akhbar, 8 June 1879, U.P.N.N.R. 1879. 2 In fact, when investigated in 1864, Allahabad was not singled out as un¬ usually ridden with family circles, N.W.P. G.A.D. ‘A’, Aug. 1868, 132, I.O.L. This is not, however, to deny that extensive if random corruption existed in Allahabad, see e.g. cases of treasury corruption in Allahabad locality, cited in Board of Revenue Circular Order, 5, 29 Jan. 1868, Indian Institute, Oxford. 3 A. C. Tupp, Gazetteer, p. 23, D.G., p. 121. 4 Under a notification of 17 May 1881, munsiffs were to be qualified pleaders of the High Court, officials of the High Court, officials of the subordinate execu¬ tive or judicial service who were pleaders of the upper subordinate grade, or B.A.s and law graduates of Calcutta University. 5 G. F. M. Buckee, ‘An Examination of the Development and Structure of the Legal Profession at Allahabad, 1866-1935’, unpubl. Ph.D. Thesis, Univer¬ sity of London, 1972. p. 36 passim.

26

Allahabad in 1880

These subordinate courts were maintained by court fees or the sale of stamps for registration. They had their own retinue of pleaders, or of inferior legal practitioners known as mukhtars,1 who were predominantly members of the Urdu-writing service com¬ munities. Before 1900, most of the litigation seems to have fallen heavily into two categories.2 Firstly, there were numerous small commercial suits for recovery of debt on bonds or entries in moneylenders’ day-books. Secondly, a mass of litigation was thrown up by the extremely litigious small proprietors of Pargana Chail in which the town was situated. Following the Indian High Courts Act of 1861, the Allahabad High Court also came into existence (under letters patent of 17 March 1866) to supersede the old Sudder Diwani Adaulat at Agra.3 Before 1870, the Allahabad Bar was functioning fully, served by a number of European barristers who had been admitted as advocates of the Court. By 1877 over fifty advocates had been admitted, including three Indians who were members of the English Bar.4 The second grade of legal practitioner was the pleader or vakil. In 1877 there were more than one hundred vakils. They were members of a Vakils’ Association, a body founded in that year to press the interests of the vakils, if necessary against those of the Bar Association.5 But although the volume and value of litigation rose during the period, swelled by lucrative land cases from the Allahabad rural areas and southern Oudh, compe¬ tition at the Bar became fierce. Barristers as well as pleaders were soon found taking cases in lower courts,6 and many of those who were admitted at the High Court spent their working lives in the district courts outside Allahabad. A small band of Indian pleaders, who were experts in land law, quickly came to dominate the lucrative first appeal work of the Court.7 They were to become 1 Mukhtars were required to pass an examination in order to practice. They were able to plead in courts below the district level, and in higher jurisdiction they acted as unofficial solicitors, acting between the client and the solicitor. 2 Records of the District Judge, Allahabad District, 1880-1, judgements. 3 Allahabad High Court Commemoration (1866-1966) (Allahabad, 1966), i, 1-7. 4 Ibid., p. 9. 5 Buckee, ‘The Legal Profession’, p. 101. 6 Pioneer, 15 May 1875. 7 During the period 1 June 1887 to 16 June 1888, the following pleaders alone appeared before the bench more than three times: Ajudhia Nath (Kash¬ miri Brahmin, Agra), 17 times; Hanuman Prasad (Srivastava Kayasth, Benares— Agra connections) 13; J. N. Chaudhri (Bengali), 10; Kashi Prasad (Kayasth),

Administration, the Courts, and Education

27

the foremost element in the local nationalist leadership. Pleaders could become immensely wealthy, earning up to Rs. 100,000 per annum, but they were cut off from the status and patronage of the Bench by a provision that only High Court Advocates could be admitted judges. Although the High Courts Act provided that the proportion of members of the English or Scottish Bar to members of the I.C.S. on the Bench could not fall below one-third, only one Indian had become a Judge of the High Court before 1890.* 1 This was because the local government had a dominant voice in their nomination and excluded Indians on political grounds. The origins and regional affiliations of legal families will be discussed in more detail below.2 At the beginning of our period, the most prestigious were Bengalis or men drawn from the Provinces’ regional centres of Mogul power.3 High Court pleaders came from a rather wider range of service communities and inclu¬ ded Europeans, of course; but among them there were very few whose families had not long been connected with government. During the period, there was a slight broadening of the groups from which lawyers were recruited. Among the Europeans, for instance, a more heterogeneous collection of men from the colonies and adventurers replaced the ‘old India families’ to some extent.4 In the case of Indians, men from humbler backgrounds, though still often Kayasths or Brahmins, and some of commercial origin, had begun to appear in vakils' lists.5 Generally, however, the old families continued to hold their place among leaders of the Bar until well into the present century. In part, this reflected the structure of legal practices. Prominent lawyers generally patronized 10; Abdul Majid (Jaunpur conns.), 10; Sunder Lai (Gujerati Nagar), 9; Motilal Nehru (Kashmiri Brahmin), 8; Ram Prasad (govt.’pleader, Srivastava Kayasth), 7; Jawala Prasad (Bihari Srivastava Kayasth), 7; Ratan Chand (Jain), 6; Amiruddin (Muslim), 6. Indian Law Reports, Allahabad Series, x; communal attributions from a variety of sources, Reports of the Indian National Congress, family histories, High Court Commemoration Volume, etc. 1 Sayyid Mahmud, son of Sayyid Ahmed Khan; Buckee, ‘The Legal Pro¬ fession’, p. 49. 2 Below, pp. 59-65. 3 Of the 22 men noted in Thacker’s Indian Directory, 1894, p. 581, as prac¬ tising in the District and Munsiff’s Courts, Allahabad, 6 were Bengalis, 7 Kayasths, 7 Muslims, and 2 local Brahmins. 4 Buckee, ‘The Legal Profession’, pp. 156-65. 5 e.g., Datti Lai and Kampta Prasad, leaders of the District Bar in the 1920s, who were Khattris; the Baleshwar Prasad Agarwal family; or the several Malavi Brahmins of the Malaviya and Vyasa families.

28

Allahabad in 1880

family members in their chambers, and would pass briefs and second appeal work to caste-fellows but no further afield. This was not so much a question of caste solidarity, but because young men from outstations would need to board with caste-fellows in order to avoid ritual problems.1 Regional affiliations also helped to reinforce the hierarchical nature of the Bar. Lawyers practising at the High Court expected to draw many of their briefs from home districts and practices of this sort tended to be passed on from father to son en bloc. Alongside the restrictive aspects of the legal profession, however, should be mentioned its importance as an integrating factor. The very connections between neighbourhood, district, and provincial courts created parallel social and profes¬ sional organizations among Indian lawyers, and linked together town neighbourhoods and parganas. Again, while Muslim lawyers continued to take inferior criminal litigation predominantly from the many Muslim accused,2 big civil lawyers were resorted to by all classes of the community regardless of religion. The final, and least accountable, division of government in the district was the police.3 The establishment was headed by a European District Inspector and his deputy. But the most important Indian officer was the City Chief Inspector or kotwal. This officer was lineal descendant of the powerful kotzvals who managed the Mogul towns, and though he had lost his judicial and para-military functions, a clever officer could exercise considerable influence on local affairs. Even a blameless kotwal played an important part in the politics of the neighbourhoods, compromis¬ ing disputes and acting as an unofficial channel between govern¬ ment and local leaders. But one who aligned himself openly with a bazaar faction had at his disposal immense resources of patronage or coercion.4 In 1877, the police establishment included 118 inspectors and head constables who were arranged by police circle or thana throughout the district, and several thousand constables.5 There was also a special railway and prison police force. In a small 1 e.g., K. N. Katju, The Days I Remember (Calcutta, 1963), ch. i passim. 2 Note appended to annual police administration report, 28 Jan. 1889, basta 24B, files nil, Records of the Commissioner, Allahabad (C.A.). 3 For the police establishment, see Public Service Commission 1887, Proceed¬ ings of the Subcommittee, Police Department (Simla, 1887), pp. 47-68. 4 e.g., Qaisar-ul-Akhbar, 11 May 1879; Dabir-i-Hind, 12 June 1880; Hindi Pradip, for Apr. 1882, U.P.N.N.R. 1879, ’80, and ’82. 5 N.W.P. Civil Establishments, 1876.

Administration, the Courts, and Education

29

way, each of these inspectors could aspire to the position of a kotwal within his circle, particularly if his posting was remote from district headquarters. The police establishment remained a preserve of Muslims and among Hindus, of Rajput families.1 But the broad categories convey little. In fact the police seem to have been recruited from small coparcenary village communities in the immediate vicinity of the town and along the Grand Trunk Road. More than once between 1880 and 1920, Hindu publicists hinted at collusion between the police and the turbulent small Muslim landowners of Allahabad’s outlying villages. However, new centres of power were springing up outside the kotwal's purview. In the system which the British inherited from the Moguls, the executive officers of the district, especially the tahsildar of Allahabad tahsil and the kotwal, were associated with the chief men of the wards for the purposes of policing and conservancy. From these informal contacts grew the beginnings of self-government in the localities.2 But an element of election was allowed for the municipal com¬ mittees under acts of 1868 and 1872 which were designed to ‘draw forth local resources’ for the aid of government. Later, under the North-Western Provinces Municipalities Act of 1883, the elective element was increased, and the power of the executive officers was curtailed. The case of the kotwal and also that of the tahsildar illustrates one aspect of change in the local political structure during this period. Before 1857, and on into the 1860s, officials such as these had been despotic local potentates. Some had been relations of powerful landlords; others had remained so long in their posts that they built up ‘family circles’ or pockets of landholding, despite rules against practices of this sort.3 While the later changes should not be exaggerated, two developments had begun to circumscribe the influence of these officers. Firstly, as we have noted, the new organs of local self-government began slowly to impinge on their freedom of action.4 Secondly, officers were moved from district to

1 N.W.P. Police Administration Report for the Year Ending 31 December, 1885 (Allahabad, 1886), statement F. 2 See below, pp. 99-104. 3 e.g. Sayyid Madad Ali who was tahsildar in Khairagarh for nearly 30 years, Collr. to Commr., 29 June 1878, N.W.P. Revenue ‘A’, May 1879, 15, I.O.L. 4 e.g. ‘A.P.W.’ to Pioneer, 7 Apr. 1888, regarding an honorary magistrate and police oppression; the kotwal and the Magh Mela, below, pp. 106-8.

3°

Allahabad in 1880

district with greater speed.1 During the 1880s struggles for the favour of incoming officials were common in Allahabad. But aided by the press, political associations, and the Municipality, local men began to be more effective in restraining or fighting off pressure from subordinate officers. This had other, longer-term implica¬ tions. As official and non-official patterns of local influence became more separated, at least in town politics, it was lawyers, professional men, and publicists who moved in to fill the breach, and bring complaints and requests from one to the other. Though it was the seat of the Provincial Government, Allahabad was not remarkable for its rate of literacy.2 The town possessed, it is true, the second largest concentration of English literates in the Provinces, but vernacular literacy was considerably lower than it was in either Lucknow or Benares. The rate was pulled down by the backward trans-Jumna areas. Nevertheless, Allahabad’s educa¬ tional institutions had grown rapidly with the expansion of the European population after i860. Missionary schools, and schools designed to cater for the needs of the Anglo-Indian and Eurasian families, had sprung up in some numbers before 1880.3 The development of government service and the courts also encouraged a growth of Indian educational establishments. A number of private schools were founded alongside pandits’ schools and Muslim ecclesiastical schools of the traditional sort. Notable was the Anglo-Bengali School, founded in 1872 by High Court pleaders and Bengali commercial people.4 It later secured a grant from the Municipality and went on to become one of the major feeders for the Allahabad High School. In the service catchment areas of the Doab, where Muslim and Kayasth service gentry had established themselves, private schools and government circle and tahsil 1 For change in the nature of the tahsildari, Collr. to Commr., 9 Jan. 1869, N.W.P. Revenue ‘A’, Jan. 1879, 35, I.O.L. Between 1880 and 1889, 31 tahsildars were in office in the 8 tahsils divisions. Some tahsils saw almost continuous change, Thacker’s Indian Directory, 1880—g. 2 Number of male literates Allahabad District, 1881, 54 per 1,000; 1891, 61; 1901, 80; 1911, 90, Census 1911, U.P., XV, i, 271. Male literates in English per 10,000, 1891, 121; 1901, 214; 1911, 308, ibid., p.270; total male literates Allahabad town, 1911, 18,396 of population 171, 697; in English, 7,868, ibid., ii, 146. 3 D.G. 1884, p.91. 4 Annual Report of the Progress of Education, N.W.P., [872-3 (Allahabad, 1873), p. (122),

Administration, the Courts, and Education

31

schools flourished.1 Families here sent their children to Allahabad to finish their education.2 Allahabad’s most remarkable example of private enterprise in education was, however, the Kayastha Pathshala. This was a school founded in the interests of the ‘Kayastha community’, but it was not exclusive of other high-caste service people. The Kayastha Pathshala Trust was founded about 1873 by Kali Prasad, a Lucknow pleader with ancestral property in Allahabad. By 1882, its annual income from landed property, subscriptions to the house-journal, Kayastha Samachar, and local collections amounted to Rs. 8,483 per annum A Before 1903 the annual income had risen to as much as Rs. 77,558,4 and by 1920, the Trust was administer¬ ing landed property to the value of more than Rs. 200,000, which was the equivalent of one of the Provinces’ medium-sized estates. Management of the Trust had become a complex business enter¬ prise as the Pathshala expanded from a primary school with a mere 16 boarders and 198 pupils overall in 1884, to a High School with 48 boarders, 518 pupils, and 84 under instruction for the University entrance examination in 1912.5 As the Pathshala took no government grant, the authorities could only maintain control over its trustees by informal influence or by contriving to deny it the recognition of the Allahabad University which supervised college level examinations throughout north and central India. The Allahabad University was, of course, an important institu¬ tion of educational control for the government. But it also provided a further set of links between Allahabad and other service towns and acted as a focus for public discussion among the educated.6 The

1 Annual Report of the Progress of Education, N.W.P., 1874-5, part II (Alla¬ habad, 1875), p. (22). 2 e.g., letter of Qudrut Ali from Kara, Tribune, 14 Mar. 1888. 3 Education Commission. Report by the North-Western Provinces and Oudh Provincial Committee, with Evidence taken before the Committee, and Memorials addressed to the Education Commission (Calcutta, 1884) (E.C.), pp. 376-7, ‘Account of the Kayastha Pathshala, Allahabad’, cf. Kayastha Samachar, iii (1901), 63-7. 4 Printed Budgets, K. P. Trust Records, Allahabad; Hindustan Review and Kayastha Samachar, ix (1904), 100. Rs. 42,401 of this sum came from zamindari property and another Rs. 10,000 from dividends on joint-stock investments, fixed deposits, and from town rentals; the remainder was largely derived from fees. 5 Murli Dhar, ‘The Kayastha Pathshala, Allahabad. Its Origin, Objects and Progress’ (Allahabad, 1912), pp. 3-4. 6 See, A. Jha (ed.), A History of the Muir Central College, 1872-1(422 (Allaha¬ bad, 1938).

32

Allahabad in 1880

University grew out of the Muir Central College which had been established in 1877 by the private subscription of wealthy landowners, bankers, and pleaders of the locality.1 The College was initially without residential accommodation and was affiliated to the Calcutta University, but in 1887 it became the core of the new, regional University. Incorporated along the lines of London Uni¬ versity, Allahabad was governed by a Senate which was initially thirty-two in number.2 Members of the Senate were either officials appointed ex officio or government nominees from among ‘promin¬ ent educationists and public figures’. By another provision, some Fellows could be elected by the Senate as a whole. But in any case, the Act provided that the number of elected members, which came to include independent Indian leaders, was not to exceed government nominees in number. In practice, the Syndicate, the executive committee of the Senate, carried out most of the daily administration of the University which included important matters such as the affiliation of colleges and supervision of examinations. Officials were careful to maintain a majority in this body whose recommendations were almost always adopted by the Senate. ALLAHABAD AS A TRADING TOWN

Though the trading and banking interest plays an important part in this study, Allahabad was not a major centre of trade. What local manufacture there had been in cloth and brass vessels had declined to nothing before the beginning of our period.3 The town was, however, a distribution centre for its locality and an entrepot for the upper India routes. As a new railhead and a port for the now declining river trade, it was a natural collection point for the cash crops of the richer, trans-Ganges tahsils and for the agri¬ cultural products of southern Oudh. There was a substantial trade in grain, tobacco, and sugar,4 and a much larger one in oil-seed which grew during the 1870s and 1880s to be of provincial import¬ ance.5 Southwards from the town, improved road communications and the railway had begun to open up the backward, hilly regions 1 List of Subscribers to Allahabad College Building Fund, J. P. Naik (ed.) Selections from. Educational Records of the Government of India (Dehli, 1963), ii, 135; D.G. 1884, p. 178. 2 Act XVIII of 1887, ibid., 461-72. 3 S.R. 1878, pp. 40-5. 4 Ibid., p. 43. 5 See, Annual Reports on the Railway-Borne Traffic of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, i886-igo5; D.G. 1884, pp. 119, 174,

Allahabad as a Trading Town

33

of Bundelkhand in the central Indian plateau, and Allahabad provided an outlet for its cash crops. As wealth and population grew after i860, a substantial import trade in European goods, especially broadcloth, also grew up.1 Dealers in Allahabad old town supplied the Civil Lines area and set up branch agencies there, while other imported goods were distributed to the small towns of southern Oudh and Allahabad District. The town con¬ tinued to provide bonded warehouses and other mercantile facilities for the Punjab-Bengal trade in silks, shawls, wood, and grain,2 so that in the first decade after the Mutiny, entrepre¬ neurs occupied an important point at the railhead for upper India. Railborne goods from Calcutta, bound for Delhi and beyond, were transferred to boats and insured in Allahabad for the remainder of their journey.3 Local mercantile men had two other major resources. They could lend money to the large class of medium¬ sized but precarious landlords around Allahabad and in central India.4 They could also service the various functions of govern¬ ment and the military arsenal which was situated in the town.5 For a relatively small trading centre, then, Allahabad was the residence of a large and powerful mercantile class. The lower ranks of this class were typical of any Hindustani town. Petty moneylenders lent to government servants and to other traders in the mohullas; some concentrated on the labouring and artisan classes. Bullion dealers changed money and accepted silver and gold at a discount. Jain jewellers supplied luxury items for town landlords especially during the marriage season. The majority of artisans in brass and gold, bookbinders, and merchants in vegetables, meat, or kerosene were Muslims, who accounted for nearly a third of the total population of the town. But Allahabad also supported a large and varied elite of bankers, contractors, and 1 D.G. 1884, p. 174; 11 lakhs of cloth alone were imported in 1881-2. 2 H. R. Ghosal, Economic Transition in the Bengal Presidency, 1793-1833 (Patna, 1950), pp. 201-5; P- r7> n. 59; D.G. 1884, pp. 173-4. 3 Interviews with Sri Harimohan Das Tandon (‘of the firm ‘Gapoo Mai Kandheya Lai’), Allahabad, and Sri Kishen Prasad (‘Chunna Mai Saligram’), Delhi, Aug. 1972, and scrutiny of bahis 1886-8, 1892-3 in their possession. 4 These following generalizations are based on a study of the bahi khatas (account books) of two branches of the Tandon family firm, Ranimandi, Alla¬ habad, for the years 1892-1917, cf. ‘debts of the Raja of Bara”, basta 41, 44 G.A.D. of 1885, C.A.; S.R. 1878, passim. 5 H. A. Young, The East India Company's Arsenals and Manufactories (Oxford, 1937)

PP-

42-5;

D.G. 1884, p. 174.

34

Allahabad in 1880

grain merchants. Often these men stood in the position of both caste head and creditor to the poorer merchants. They had arbi¬ trated their disputes for the British courts and continued to do so by informal agreement;1 they fixed bazaar rates, and controlled religious festivals. Not unnaturally, they were, with locally resident landowners, the most powerful group in the old town. The upper mercantile establishment was diverse, but five of the families which dominated credit provision and much of local trade in the later nineteenth century were descended from immigrants from the Punjab who arrived between 1760 and 1830. There were also two powerful families of Bengali Kayasth traders and con¬ tractors, and one local family of Keserwani Banias, which had flourished in grain trading before 1857. The three most important Agarwal families, Megh Raj-Harbilas,2 Sankar Lal-Fakir Chand,3 and Piru Mal-Radha Rawan,4 as well as some minor commercial and service families,5 were all related members of the Agarwal Garg gotra (‘clan’) who originated in the village of Javandhan in Karnal District, east Punjab. Two important Allahabad Khattri families6 and one Bhargava7 also came from nearby villages, around Karnal and Panipat. Family members established networks of commercial concerns in the early nineteenth century down the Gangetic river system as far as Patna, Murshidabad, and even Calcutta. The extent of these concerns is shown in the Map 2, but particularly interesting is the bunching of kothis and branches on the Ganges between Ghazipur and Patna, which suggests the strong economic considerations behind the spread of these families throughout the region. For this stretch of the river had

1 Under Regulation 16 of 1824 ‘respectable mahajans’ (merchant bankers), had investigated books for the antin’s courts, see, Zilla Court Decisions, N.W.P. (weekly), c. 1840-65, High Court, Allahabad. 2 Agrawal Jati ka Itihas, ii, 14; Lala Megh Raj the founder of the firm migrated from the Punjab in 1808; also D.G., p. 60. 3 Agrawal Jati, ii. 99; this family was related to the Megh Raj-Fakir Chand family through a common ancestor. 4 D.G., p. 60; Agrawal Jati, ii. 45; related to both the above families. Piru Mai settled at Allahabad some time before his kinsman (about 1780). 5 D.G., pp. 59-60. Families of Gappoo Mai and Kesri Narayan. 6 e.g-, the families of Sangam Lai Agarwal, a prominent Allahabad lawyer and nationalist, and of Rai Baleshwar Prasad, another family of small shopkeepers and service people which flourished later in the century, Agrawal Jati, ii. 88-4 [st'c] and 304-6. 7 D.G., p. 60.

Map

2. Branch Agencies of some major Allahabad-based Indigenous Banking Firms, 1800-1850

36

Allahabad in 1880

formerly been the riverhead for Calcutta-based East India Com¬ pany steamboats.1 Once established in a locality, commercial interests accumulated local status and rights over land with varying speed.2 But their ability to penetrate a local society depended initially on partici¬ pation in a regional complex of economic institutions which was closely related to the patterns of political authority. The towns were nodal points where local and regional networks coincided, and it was through them that mobile groups from outside could move into a locality and establish land rights down to estate, if not village, level. Major banking families became government treasu¬ rers, court treasurers, and contractors. They also accumulated land in and around the town as collateral security for lapsed debts.3 This close relationship with the colonial government was reinforced during the 1857 revolt when the trading and banking firms gave conspicuous support to the British,4 supplied forts, sheltered European families, and in one case financed expeditions against the insurgents.5 Their role in part reflected a Punjabi or Bengali origin. But clearly their business interests would also have suffered from an interruption of the riverine trade routes and of the British courts which enforced their suits for debt. In the 1880s the major bankers, contractors, and most presti¬ gious grain-merchant families formed a commercial oligarchy of about twenty extended families. The most important Khattri families were the Tandons, Bhallas, and Chaddhas. The two former were ‘eastern’ Khattris who had moved into the Ganges valley at an early date. The ‘western’ (often ‘Punjabi’) Khattris were immigrants in the late eighteenth century. The Tandons were the most notable commercial family in Allahabad and Manohar 1 D. L. Drake-Brockman, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, xxvii, Mirzapur (Allahabad, 1911), p. 82. 2 Besides acquiring land around Allahabad these families were landowners in other localities where their commercial interest led them, e.g., Harbilas of the family of Ganesh Prasad held land in Muzaffarpur and Patna (Bihar) and Naini (U.P.), Agrawaljfati, ii. 15. 3 S.R. 1878, pp. 54-6; ‘Baniyas’ had increased their holdings in the District from 4 4 per cent to 9-6 per cent between the settlements of 1839 and 1877. 4 See basta 12, 15 Judicial of 1861, ‘Progress of the Mutiny in Chail pargana’; basta 36, 11 Judicial of 1861, confiscations and rewards; Darbar List 1892, appended comments, C.A.; Agrawal Jati, ii. 25, 45-6, etc. The family of Manik Chand of Phulpur fortified this small town against the insurgents and protected the treasury; he received a large estate as reward, N. H. Siddiqui, The Landlords of Agra and Avadh (Lucknow, 1950), p. 50.

Allahabad as a Trading Town

37

Das Tandon had acquired a controlling position in the town’s credit mechanisms well before 1857.1 Later he became government treasurer and treasurer of the currency office as well as emerging as the largest landowner in the Civil Station.2 His second son, Ram Charan Das, was treasurer to the High Court3 and treasurer of all branches of the new Allahabad Bank.4 No attempt can be made here to assess the nature of local trade in detail, but a Tandon cash book for 1892-3 5 gives us some insight into the structure of commercial relations in the town. Several entries suggest that the unity of the central ‘rais [notable] and banker’ group was reflected in mutual commercial services which were offered profit free or at minimal charge. Firms which were of a lower caste (e.g. Lakshmi Narayan of Muthiganj)6 and members of the Chadda family7 with which the Tandons were factionally at odds, appear in the books. The bahis (account books) also reveal the continued importance of family connections inside and outside the town. Thus dealings were continued with the cloth firm Ganga Sahai Bundhu Lai,8 with a more distant branch of the family, the contractors Kunni Lai Debi Prasad,9 and which the Cawnpore branch, Sheo Charan Lai Munni Lai.10 But while the books sug¬ gest a bias in favour of dealings with Khattri firms outside Alla¬ habad, this reflected not so much the restriction of business practice by caste concerns as the way in which credit-worthiness was guaranteed by social connection. Marwari11 and Agarwal12 firms dealing in indigo, oil-seed, and sugar with Calcutta, Farrukhabad, and Benares were also serviced. Within the district, other clients fall into three groups. First 1 D.G. p. 69; C. A. Bayly, ‘Patrons and Politics in Northern India, 1880-1920’ Modern Asian Studies, vii, 3 (1973), 349-88. 2 They owned at least 20 properties in the Civil Station before 1880, see estate documents, Ranimandi, Allahabad. 3 U.P. Government Gazette, v (6 Feb. 1909), 23, Ram Charan Das reappointed as High Court Treasurer. 4 Indian People, 13 Feb. 1908. Ram Charan Das was also Treasurer of the ‘Uncovenanted Service Bank’. 5 Rokarh Bahi, ‘Manohar Das Kandheya Lai’, Sambat 1950, Ranimandi Mohulla, Allahabad. 6 Ibid., entry under Sambat date Bhadon Badi 4. 7 Ibid., entry under Sambat date Bhadon Sudi 9. 8 A grandson of Manohar Das; family tree, Ranimandi Mohulla. 9 Family tree, Ranimandi Mohulla. 10 See MS. history of the Cawnpore Tandon branch, Ranimandi Mohulla. 11 e.g., Jit Mai Kalu Mai Marwari, a firm which still exists in Allahabad. 12 e.g., Lakshmi Chand Radha Kishen, Calcutta.

38

Allahabad in 1880

there were twelve cloth, grain, and general merchants who were regularly serviced for sums above Rs.ioo during the year, either by loan or by discounting credit notes passed on them. These included two district firms based outside Allahabad town and others which apparently dealt in Banda, Mirzapur, and south Oudh. There were also eight brokers, jewellers, brass-merchants and other individuals who appear to have been inferior money¬ lenders of Allahabad. Finally, eleven rajas, rajas’ widows, and other landowners took loans, deposited items, or made payments into the loan account. These included a European house-owner and the Raja of Baraon in Allahabad District. In such transactions, hundi (credit note) charges were minimal; rates charged to merchants appear to have been between 4 and 6 per cent, while landowners paid 6 to 12 per cent per annum depending on their supposed reliability. Obviously, there was tension between the moneylending and landowning classes, but long-standing commercial relations with powerful local zamindars speeded the assimilation of prestigious moneylenders and bankers into the magnate group. When we come to assess the relationship between the com¬ mercial magnates and the poorer classes, we are on much less firm ground. Immediate dependants included the town’s 169 members of bankers’ and moneylenders’ establishments,1 numbers of bazaar brokers, and cloth and grain merchants who were closely related to the bankers in their peripheral trades or through their use of the bankers’ warehouses.2 Clearly, one pattern of credit distribution existed where bankers lent to small mohulla moneylenders and these in turn lent out to poorer people.3 Another was based on mohulla moneylenders, religious foundations, and other wealthy people who worked entirely on their own capital. But for the 1920s and 1930s at least we have evidence of large bankers lending direct to small artisans, weavers, betel-nut sellers, and so on. Since this appears to have been common in Hindustani towns from an early period, it was probably also common in Allahabad in the 1880s. Of course, patterns of economic dependence were not reflected directly in political situations of a more overt kind. Debtors some-

1D.G. 1884, p.160. 2 See e g. the entries for deposits on warehouses under date Aghun Badi 3, Tandon Rokarh, Sambat 1950, Ranimandi Mohulla. 3 Report of the United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, i929-3o, ii. 422, S. P. Shukla, ‘A Survey of Small Urban Industries of Allaha¬ bad City’; interview with Sri B. P. Tandon, Jan. 1972.

The Physical Setting: Communities and Residential Areas

39

times voted against, or rioted against, creditors; Muslim weavers resented debt bondage to Hindu moneylenders. But the tendency of a great variety of economic resources to accrue to a few men did put them in a position where they were likely to fulfil the role of rats or patron in local society. Conversely, the striking fact about Allahabad’s social structure was not so much the differences of caste status, as the enormous gulf which separated the 1,071 professional and trading people who paid income tax on incomes exceeding Rs. 1,000 per annum in the town in 1886-7 and the overwhelming majority of the population which earned less than Rs. 100 per annum.1 In such circumstances the social and political value of credit control or even of minor acts of patronage was considerable.

THE PHYSICAL SETTING: COMMUNITIES AND RESIDENTIAL AREAS

A Census taken in 1853 ennumerated a town population of 72,093. By 1865 it had risen to 105,926 and by 1881 to 148,547.2 Although these figures are not altogether reliable, Allahabad had clearly experienced considerable growth in the two decades before this study begins. About 28 per cent of this population was Muslim;3 they lived predominantly in the south-west of the municipal area and in the outlying villages; Hindus, Jains, a few Parsis, and Christians made up the other religious categories within the population. In 1891, the distribution of occupations clearly reflected the composite nature of Allahabad, part trading and part service town. Government servants, servants of the Municipality, lawyers, and other professional people comprised an unusually large percentage. They also monopolized a great proportion of its wealth. In 1887, for instance, lawyers alone paid about 15 per cent of the district’s total income tax demand com1 Income Tax Report, 1886-j, Appendix I and III, cf. Prices and Wages in India (Calcutta, 1910), Part III, wages for Allahabad District, 1885; agricultural worker (c. 30,000 within municipal limits 1881), Rs. 48 per annum; domestic service (c. 12,000), Rs. 60; artisan, mason, etc. (c. 18,000) Rs. 140 per annum; office peon, Rs. 120. These figures are bound to be impressionistic; they take no note of non-cash payments, division of earnings in joint families, etc.; the income tax figures are exclusive of town residents who subsisted on agricultural rents. 2 D.G. 1884, p. 160 3 Ibid., p. 39.

Map 3. Allahabad,

c.

1909

4° Allahabad in 1880

The Physical Setting: Communities and Residential Areas

41

pared with a proportion of 3 per cent only for the North-Western Provinces as a whole.1 Members of the commercial establishments and Hindu religious foundations also made up other significantly large sections of the population. Table 2 gives the percentage of the population dependent on various occupations by town police circles. Noticeable are the high figures for ‘agriculturalists’ in most neighbourhoods, the number of ‘labourers’ in the MuthiganjKydganj area, and the overwhelming concentration of professional people within the Cannington (Civil Lines) and Cantonments. As a complex of residential and marketing areas Allahabad in the mid-nineteenth century could be compared to three concentric rings. At the centre was the old town and its focus, the commercial district of Mirganj where the cloth and grain merchants did busi¬ ness. Around the central market-place, or Chauk, there had devel¬ oped a complex of trading and residential quarters.2 Merchants and service people were often thrown together, but the quarters of Chauk Ganga Das and Rani ki Mandi were predominantly trading areas, while Yahiyapur, which lay near the administrative centre of the Mogul town, was inhabited by old service families. Weavers and artisans lived to the north and south of the Chauk area. Outside the old town, there was a second ring of settlement which comprised the villages of Dariabad, Rasulpur, and Saidiapur to the south3 and Sarai Salem and Niwan to the west. Originally, these had been settlements for the military and clerical servants of the Muslim rulers, who acquired grants of land in joint ownership, and the villages remained distinctly agricultural until the end of the century. They were also notoriously turbulent. The third, and outlying ring of settlement had grown up on the banks of the rivers Ganges and Jumna. Townships here served a dual function as entrepot points for the riverborne trade in cloth, grain and indigo, and also as service points for Hindu religious 1 Darbar List 1892; First Annual Report on the Administration of the Income Tax, Act II of 1886, in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad, 1887), Appendix III and p. 22. 2 D.G. 1884, pp. 168-70; 105 separate mohullas were enumerated in 1884. 3 These villages were inhabited by Afghan and Pathan small zamindars, along with some Mewatis or Rajputs converted to Islam. Muslim saints were worshipped at Dariabad (D.G., p. 67), while the Shia sect was particularly prominent there, having its own karbala or burial ground, basta 147, 279 Judicial of 1886, C.A.

Allahabad in 1880

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212

The Drift into Radicalism

viya wing of the Congress made deliberate attempts to get ‘culti¬ vators’ as delegates to Congress sessions.1 These turned out to be high-caste men from large villages. But the fact that premeditated attempts were made to work these interests into the Congress movement does not mean that, as officials assumed, they were purely ‘paper organizations’ and had no autonomous existence. HINDU AND MUSLIM ASSOCIATIONS DEEPEN THEIR CONSTITUENCIES

During the 1880s social movements claiming a Hindu con¬ stituency had been spontaneous and loosely organized expressions of cultural identity or protest against the Urdu-writing service establishment. Bengalis had been prominent in them, and specific government policies had provided the impetus to forge associa¬ tions. By 1909, such associations had longer-term and more ‘secular’ aims. They pursued campaigns at a regional level in order to force or pre-empt changes in the municipalities or dis¬ trict boards.2 Itinerant preachers and pious magnates still took part, but their aims were now much more closely allied with those of the publicists and council politicians whose stature had grown as a result of the median position which they now held between the arenas of regional and local representation. The attribution ‘Hindu’, and sometimes ‘Muslim’, was useful as an umbrella under which groups could pursue interest often quite unrelated to religion as such. In addition, improved communica¬ tions and rising vernacular literacy enabled leaders of interest groups to make contact with sections of the population outside the town, or at lower social levels within it, which slow economic and social change had pushed over the boundary of parochial political consciousness. In Allahabad, some developments had taken place within the more radical and westernized circles associated with the ‘new’ trustees of the Kayastha Pathshala, the Theosophical Societies, and English-language journalism. Theosophy had gained many new adherents. Between 1901 and 1904, a European, Brooks, ‘the soul of the movement at Allahabad’,3 had founded three lodges. 1 I.N.C. 1918, pp. cxiv-cxvi. 2 See R. A. Gordon, ‘The Hindu Mahasabha and the Indian National Con¬ gress, 1919-26’, unpubl. MSS., Cambridge University Centre of South Asian Studies. 3 Theosophy in India (1912), p. 61.

Hindu and Muslim Associations Deepen Their Constituencies

213

Though two of these later lapsed, activity was revived in 1906-7, and the sums collected from entrance fees suggest that the Allaha¬ bad lodges were among the most thriving in the Provinces.1 One lodge maintained a dispensary which treated about seven hundred patients a year, and local members acquired some note in the All-India Society. Theosophy had always been popular among outstation professional people residing in the new residential areas. Some of these had been Kayasth pleaders.2 But the second victory of the ‘new’ trustees of the Pathshala in 1913, working a provincial constituency of professional men and notables, sharply changed the tone of the institution. After the death of Govind Prasad, who had himself been a theosophist,3 Dr. Ranjit Singh appointed Sanjiva Rao, a Madrasi theosophist and close follower of Mrs. Besant, as its principal. At a time when the movement was being galvanized into political activity, Rao played an important part in spreading radical ideas among the students. During 1916 and ’17 he was alleged to have dissuaded boys from joining the government-inspired Indian Defence Force,4 and was shortly afterwards eased out of his job. But it was Sanjiva Rao, Iswar Saran, students, and radical professional men who provided the early drive for the Home Rule League in Allahabad before Mrs. Besant’s internment.5 At the same time, the Servants of India Society developed a small but active branch at Allahabad under the direction of V. N. Tiwari of the Abhyudaya and Pt. Hirday Nath Kunzru, son of Pt. Ajudhia Nath. They were responsible for the foundation of a number of district Congress committees6 and took part in the Executive Council7 and Municipalities Bill8 agitations. They were also involved in propagating the elementary education and co¬ operative movements in the small towns.9 As the residential areas grew more sophisticated politically, ward committees and reform 1 Theosophy in India (1907), Appendix A. 2 Others who may not have been theosophists were connected with the Central Hindu College movement, e.g., D. R. Ranjit Singh, S. Sinha, and Iswar Saran, Theosophy in India (1913), pp. 170-2. 3 Leader, 7 Oct. 1917. 4 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 2 Nov. 1917, Home Poll. ‘D’, Nov. 1917, 14, N.A.I.; Independent, 29 Oct., 2 Nov. 1920; Leader, 2 Nov. 1920. 5 Leader, 22 Dec. 1915; interview with Dr. Tara Chand, Delhi, Jan. 1968. 6 A Brief Account of the Work of the Servants of India Society, Poona, from June 1905 to December 1916 (Poona, 1917), p. 8. 7 Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 21.

214

The Drift into Radicalism

societies, such as the George Town Young Men’s Association,1 sprang up. These were concerned to weaken the hold of the raises on town government, but also had contacts with reformers and public figures outside the town. Similarly, the women of the Nehru family and their friends combined demands for female emanci¬ pation with colonial liberation. Their opinions were expressed through a monthly magazine, the Stri Darpan (‘Woman’s Paper'), edited by Mrs. Rameshwari Devi Nehru.2 During the home rule movement Allahabad’s female intelligentsia, led by Uma Nehru, Shyam Lai’s wife, emerged as one of the town’s most tireless political pressure groups.3 Before 1916 several cells where radical and secular ideas were purveyed had come into existence, and it was into the circle of those associations that the young Jawaharlal Nehru was to step on his return from Cambridge in 1912. The existence of this small intelligentsia can be attributed to the continuing role of the High Court in bringing together educated and experienced men with no restraining stake in the commercial and landed society around them. In particular it reflected the broad tolerant tradition and the genius for advocacy of the town’s leading Kashmiri Brahmin families. It would have been difficult to find a more formidably educated body of patrician service people anywhere else in India, and it was among them that a particular brand of ‘Allahabad Socialism’ was to emerge in the 1920s and ’30s. But the turning outwards to the small towns and large villages of Allahabad’s radical political tradition must largely be accounted for by its convergence with another tradition of social activity which was a much closer reflection of the nature of local society. This we have hitherto called Hindu revivalism, a tradition associated with the Mela, the commercial elite and the Hindi writers of the old town. By the 1900s, however, this strand of social activity had become in practice something more like a Hindu populism which stressed vernacular education, village work, and a reform of the landholding system in the interests of the smallholder. To a very large extent the priorities of the proponents of this form of public service accorded with those of leaders who emphasized the regeneration of Hindu society for its own sake. In Allahabad, as 1 Leader, 25 Sept. 1913. 2 Quarterly statement of press, 3rd quarter 1914, U.P.N.N.R. 1914. 3 e.g., womens’ meetings, Leader, 17 Feb. 1917, 4 July 1917.

Hindu and Muslim Associations Deepen Their Constituencies

215

in Benares and the Kumaon hills, the congregation in the town of numbers of literate Brahmin smallholders and the traditions of social service associated with the bathing festivals provided appropriate networks for the propagation of these impulses. Locally, speakers such as Devi Dutt and Bishen Dutt were taking the temperance movement, the Arya Samaj, and the sanatan dharm movement out into the large villages and down to the panchayats of the lower castes.1 Increased vernacular literacy, primary education, and the expansion of the Hindi press provided malleable material. Yet still the most profound element in the new direction of Hindu revivalism was the energy of Madan Mohan Malaviya, which reached its peak between 1907 and 1917. Malaviya’s influence over public life in Allahabad was an out¬ growth of the relationship between Congress and the interest groups. He was personally president, office holder, founder, or celebrity of almost every organization which could become involved with Congress. It was from the width of his contacts among the professional men, commercial magnates, and landowners of northern India that he derived his ‘great and justifiable belief in his capacity to engineer an agitation’.2 Yet ambiguity of aim and diffidence made it impossible for him to draw around himself a tight-knit organization like Motilal Nehru’s Congress machine of the 1920s. Malaviya’s Independent Congress Party of 1926, no less than the all-India Hindu Mahasabha, was simply a further loose gathering of those contacts which had been pioneered in the Hindu University movement, or even earlier in the Madhya Hindu Samaj of the 1880s. But whereas less flexible politicians could be ousted by the destruction of their base organizations, as Surendranath Banerjea lost control of the town associations of Calcutta or as Mrs. Besant’s Home Rule Leagues were superseded, Malaviya could always ride out the political storm in the guise of a Nagri enthusiast, an apostle of Dharma, or a cow-protectionist. While Gandhi in a crisis would polarize opinion by forcing division on a moral issue, Malaviya by contrast would tend to smooth away difficulties in the half-light of racial self-pity and lead out, as in a morality play, all those old symbols which could be guaran1 Indian People, 27 Mar. 1909; Leader, 28 Feb. 1911, 10 Feb. 1912, 7 Aug. I9i3-

2 Meston to Hardinge, 24 Aug. 1915, Hardinge Papers, vol. x, Cambridge University Library. l.r.i.p.—8*

2i6

The Drift into Radicalism

,

teed to reduce to tears the most hardened group of practical politicians. In 1907 his vigorous declamations against the use of impure substances in foreign sugars diverted attention from the political conflicts of the swadeshi movement. In 1919, as President of the Congress session, he sought to obliterate Congress differences by focusing attention on the plight of the peasant. For two generations the Cow remained tethered by his side awaiting her periodic milking. Yet Malaviya was one of the most creative public figures of the Indian national movement. He founded two of India’s most pres¬ tigious English dailies, the Leader and the Times of India, along with one of the foremost Hindi newspapers, Abhyudaya. His over¬ riding concern for education was reflected in the Allahabad Hindu Hostel and his life’s work, the Benares Hindu University. His attempts to direct and give cohesion to the Hindu revivalist movement form a procession of mounting political importance from the Prayag Hindu Samaj of the 1880s to the all-India Hindu Mahasabha of the 1920s. Throughout northern India, service corps, scouts’ associations, and religious societies owed their existence to his energy and ability to milk funds from bankers and landowners. But the obscurity of his character and real political aims resulted in widespread distrust which seems strangely at variance with his moral uprightness and relative mildness of per¬ sonal ambition. To officials he seemed a crypto-extremist; in Delhi he was regarded as a ‘snake in the grass’; to the Muslim leaders he appeared the personification of aggressive Hinduism and to non-Brahmins the symbol of Brahmin domination. Yet he always adhered to the spirit of representative government, it is difficult to find evidence of active anti-Muslim behaviour, and he anticipated Gandhi in distributing charity to the lower castes and deploring the status of untouchables. Much of Malaviya’s charac¬ ter is out of range of European experience. This was less true of Gandhi who, consciously or unconsciously, had an eye to a place in the western moral pantheon. Malaviya’s nearly compulsive personal hygiene, his ritualistic attention to dress, his daily baths in the Ganges, and fundamental social conservatism were all products of a true Brahminical upbringing while his mastery of the English language and the niceties of council government masked a deeply traditional mentality. By contrast, Gandhi’s loin cloth and Sadhu’s spirituality masked a character more deeply

Hindu Populism and the District Board

217

impregnated with western values. It was the penetrating and logical moral imperative which earned Gandhi his place among the saints; Malaviya’s forte was the strangely static ritual of indi¬ vidual and racial self-chastisement and exhortation to selfimprovement which is a pervasive feature of north Indian public morality. As he grew older, Malaviya became more of a symbol than a political leader, but between 1907 and 1917, borne aloft on new contacts made through the Benares Hindu University move¬ ment and in the Viceroy’s council, Malaviya and the Abhyudaya group gave the Hindu wing of the Allahabad Congress a new energy and depth. HINDU POPULISM AND THE DISTRICT BOARD

The Abhyudaya itself, a weekly newspaper in demotic Hindi with a circulation of about 2,000,1 was at various times edited by Malaviya himself (1907-10), Purshottam Das Tandon (1910-n),2 Krishna Kant Malaviya (1912-15; 1919-31),3 and Venkatesh Narayan Tiwari (1915-19).4 Its foundation in 1907 was a response to the new direction of Hindu revivalism established by the Mahasamelan of 1906 and throughout its early years the paper was closely connected with the campaign for the Benares Hindu University. Abhyudaya was later joined by a literary magazine, the Maryada, which was run as a rival to the parent journal by Krishna Kant Malaviya during 1917 and ’18 when it was felt to have become too moderate under the editorial control of Tiwari. Later, the Abhyudaya press also produced an English intellectual production, Crucible, and a Hindi broadsheet in the ‘peasant’ interest, the Kisan. This second period of journalistic develop¬ ment in Hindi also saw the foundation of vernacular journals such as the Aj of Benares, Bhagwan Das’s organ, and the Pratap of 1 Quarterly statements of the press, U.P.N.N.R. 1910. 2 Purshottam Das Tandon. Though unrelated to the Tandon bankers, he participated in the caste associations which they patronized. His career in Allahabad was forwarded by his uncle, Mulchand Tandon, doctor and house¬ owner, who was active with Motilal Nehru on the Municipal Board. 3 Krishna Kant Malaviya. Nephew of Madan Mohan. He was a ‘moderate’ during the Swadeshi period. Less orthodox on social matters than his uncle, he imbibed radical and neo-socialist ideas. 4 V. N. Tiwari. He came under Malaviya’s influence through the Hindu Boarding House and later became the most prominent local member of the Servants of India Society by whom he was ‘lent’ to the Abhyudaya in 1915. His activities always showed a strong populist bias, and he later became Congress President of the District Board.

2l8

The Drift into Radicalism

Cawnpore. The new journals found common ground in the Hindi Journalists Conference organized in Allahabad after 1911 by the Malaviya group and Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi of the literary magazine Saraswati.1 The preparations for the Census of 19112 and the elaboration of communal themes after the 1909 Reforms also set the back¬ ground for the formation in 1910 of the Allahabad Society for Hindi Literature (Hindi Sahitya Samelan). It organized an annual conference in close association with the Benares Sabha,3 and provided a further focus for the diverse energies of Hindi interest groups. The Samelan published a periodical Patnka and urged government to abolish the use of Urdu on coins, extend the use of Hindi in school textbooks, and use the Hindi script in dis¬ trict board business.4 Its officers included members of the Mala¬ viya group and other active politicians,5 and it was less govern¬ ment-orientated than the Benares society. One of the strengths of the Hindi movement, however, was its ability to attract govern¬ ment officials to what were in fact quasi-political societies. It seems that the type of individual involved in the Benares society was likely to be the subordinate civil servant, district and muni¬ cipal board schoolmaster, or village pandit.6 Significant is an entry in the Nagri Patrika of 1907 admitting to membership of the society Pandit Inder Narayan Dwivedi and two of his relations from Sarai Akil, Allahabad.7 This was the first recorded appearance of someone who was as representative of the local activities of the Hindu populists as was Malaviya of their more general aims. Dwivedi knew little English, was versed in astrology, and was a minor landholder in Sarai Akil, a small town laying in the belt of powerful Muslim landholders who dominated the Chail Local Board. Dwivedi was also an adherent of sanatan dharm, in pursuit of which he published for a few months in 1911 1 Abhyudaya, 25 Dec. 1910. 2 Ce?isus 1911, xv. 1. 285. 3 e.g. Abhyudaya, 28 Sept. 1911. 4 e.g. Brahman Sarvaswa, Mar. 1913, p. 126. 5 Particularly, P. D. Tandon, K. K. Malaviya, C. Y. Chintamani, and Krishna Ram Mehta of the Leader. 6 Local members registered between 1907 and 1915 included journalists of Abhyudaya group, a subordinate judge, the accountant of the Bengal Bank, Allahabad, senior auditor of the Local Fund, Allahabad, two officers of the Secretariat, a Deputy-Collector, two headmasters, and two raises', applications for membership from Allahabad, Nagri Pracharini Patrika, 1908-15. 7 Nagri Pracharini Patrika, 27 Ian. 1907.

Hindu Populism and the District Board

219

the Vedic Samachar from Sarai Akil.1 But from 1910 to 1916 he carried on a consistent campaign in the Abhyudaya against the franchise, administration, and Urdu bias2 of the district and local boards of Allahabad, with sallies against those of Fatehpur and Banda. In 1913 and 1916 he ventured unsuccessfully into electoral politics and stood for the Allahabad District Board against a powerful non-resident commercial landowner who was also an official of the local landlords’ association. He was a paradigm case of the manner in which the Hindu interest groups were deepened during this period. Significantly, he forsook electoral activity in 1916, and became involved in the attempts to spread the home rule movement to the ‘agricultural population’ through religious fairs. Finally in December 1917 Dwivedi became general secretary of the Allahabad Peasants’ Association (Kisan Sabha), founded by Malaviya to advance the political interests of the peasantry in the era of council reforms, but initially limited in its appeal to a few high-caste tenants and small proprietors such as Dwivedi himself. The ‘Kisans’ Charter’ drawn up in 1917 by Dwivedi and Malaviya for presentation to the Secretary of State for India during his visit went beyond demands for a permanent revenue settlement and an ending of unilateral ejectment by landlords, to issues such as the protection of cattle and the use of Nagri in local revenue and judicial proceedings, which had been typical of Hindu populist aims.3 In moving out into the large villages and small towns, the local-level Hindu leadership used older lines of communication pioneered by religious teachers and service migration. But just as the devolution of greater powers to the Allahabad Municipal Board had sharpened the political conflicts there, so it was the accumulation of greater educational and financial resources in the District Board after 19094 which speeded the tempo of rural politics. Issues such as the appointment of village schoolmasters,5 1 Quarterly list of newspapers, 2nd quarter 1911, U.P.N.N.R. 1911. 2 Abhyudaya, 21 June 1913, I. N. Dwivedi on district board circulars. 3 Address of the United Provinces Kisan Sabha, ref. 569, ‘Visit of the Secre¬ tary of State for India to India’, 553 G.A.D. of 1917. U.P.S. 4 Total Receipts Allahabad District Board 1911-12, Rs. 223,860; 1913-14, Rs. 408,195, U.P. District Board Reports, 1911-12,1913-14, statement 2. Average attendance of members of Board 1910-11, 416 per cent; 1911-12, 51 per cent; 1915-16, 51-78 per cent, ibid., 1911-12, 1915-16, statement 1; Indian People, 11 Apr. 1909. 5 Inder Narayan Dwivedi to Abhyudaya, 23 Apr. 1910.

220

The Drift into Radicalism

the use of Hindi or Urdu in debates and in text-books,1 and the modification of a franchise dominated by Chail small landlords,2 engaged the attention of the Hindu populists. Unable to secure representation by institutional means, the district leaders joined their contacts in the ‘Hindu’ wing of the local Congress to stage a less restrained series of agitations in 1916 and ’17. It seems likely that much of the push continued to come from the town, but social changes in the more accessible parts of the countryside gave townsmen with rural contacts a better reception. Claims for higher ritual status fostered by the few newly rich or newly educated men among depressed communities gave lecturers ready-made audiences among Kalwars,3 Chamars,4 and Pasis.5 But the more privileged levels of rural society were also feeling the effects of partition and price-rise. Highly subdivided but quite literate Brahmin and Rajput smallholding communities provided much support for the Allahabad Peasants’ Association in its first phase.6 Later, thrifty but underprotected middle tenantry, pressed by landlord demands for customary dues in kind, were to provide the drive for the second stage of rural disorder after the spring of 1920.7 Yet the effect of these stirrings on the development of local politics was limited at first. It merely gave established town politicians and connected populist lecturers a further range of articulate dissidences to parade before the eyes of a disturbed government. During 1921, when the rural situation became more volatile, both moderate and extremist politicians were quick to disengage.8 This was not yet a case of a rural ‘second wave’ over¬ whelming and revolutionizing the town leadership. There had, indeed, been social changes. But they were to feed into the 1 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1913. 2 Abhyudaya, 31 May 1913, 4 May and 29 July 1916. 3 Kalivar Kshatriya Mitra, Mar. 1919, for Allahabad Kalwar organizations and politics; C. A. Bayly, ‘Patrons and Politics’. 4 Leader, 10 Feb. 1912. 5 See e.g. attempts of rich Pasis to get the caste off the Register of Criminal Tribes, Pratap, 22 Mar. 1921, U.P.N.N.R. 1921; and to outlaw thieving, Leader, 18, 19 June 1919. 6 Bayly, ‘The Development of Political Oragnization’, p. 362, n. 1, analysis of officer holders and ‘cultivator’ delegates to the 1918 and 1919 Congresses. 7 Kisan Sabha in Allahabad, U.P. C.I.D. memo, Home Poll. ‘D’, Feb. 1921, 13, N.A.I.; Majid Hayat Siddiqi, ‘The Peasant Movement in Pratapgarh, 1920’, I.E.S.H.R., ix, 3 (1972), pp. 305-26. 8 W. F. Crawley, ‘Kisan Sabhas and Agrarian Revolt in the United Provinces 1920 to 1921’, M.A.S., v, 2 (1971), 95-109.

Hindu Populism and the District Board

221

political system slowly, during the district board elections and agitations of the 1920s and 1930s. Muslim interest groups working mainly in regional politics were subject to their own pressures and developed different priorities from the men who emphasized their Muslim status at a local level. The Council of the United Provinces Muslim League was small, and few Allahabad residents participated. Before 1913, it reflected the opinions of the ‘old party’ of the trustees of Aligarh College. Its contacts in the town were with High Court lawyers of the major service families who were influential and articulate but lacked any real stake in local politics. They included Abdul Majid of Jaunpur, Justice Karamat Hussain,1 and Sayyid Abdul Rauf—men who had been connected with the Mohammedan Boarding House or the University Senate, and who looked longingly to the bench or the Viceregal honours list. In 1913 these men began to lose their power in the Provincial Muslim League.2 But their co-operation was translated into a new form in the Mohammedan Defence Association of 1917 which was a club of high service people and large landlords who objected to the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League. They were stirred into opposition to it by the Chief Secretary to Government.3 Having benefited from the judgeships and other administrative perquisites which had become available with the elaboration of provincial administration, men like this had much in common with members of the Kashmiri Brahmin families or the Kayastha Pathshala radical intelligentsia who went into the United Provinces Liberal Federation after 1919. They found it useful to emphasize their Muslim character from time to time. But these professional men had less and less in common with the group of all-India publicists without administrative ambitions which dominated the Muslim League after 1913. Though the small landholders and minor service people of the locality em¬ ployed them as intermediaries with the provincial authorities, their influence in the old quarters of Allahabad was to remain limited. At the local level, political changes after 1909 had increased the 1 Biography, Indian People, 9 Jan. 1908. 2 Leader, 16 Jan. 1914, report of session of Provincial Muslim League. 3 Address of the Muslim Defence Association, and secretariat noting, G.A.D. 553 of I9i7» U.P.S.

222

The Drift into Radicalism

number of groups claiming Muslim constituencies. The landlords, district bar lawyers, and idama whom the local authorities had previously regarded as ‘spokesmen of the Muslim community’ found themselves challenged on several fronts. For whereas the effect of the 1909 Reforms was to bring different levels of Hindu leadership temporarily together in order to oppose separate elec¬ torates, the converse was true of the Muslim community. Different social groups found their places within the expanded system of representative politics as landlords, professional men, or politi¬ cians with cross-communal interests, rather than simply as Muslims. To this extent the Islamic movement of 1920-2 was to be an exceptional period in the history of Allahabad’s Muslims, rather than the culmination of a trend towards community politics. By a paradox, however, the increasing competition of sectional interests claiming a Muslim constituency encouraged the wide use of shrill communal rhetoric for the purposes of mobilizing support at elections and public meetings. As far as its activists were concerned, the Allahabad District Muslim League1 was at first the preserve of middling proprietors and small service families. Its antecedents were the Urdu defence associations of 1873 and 1900. Indeed, with the exception of Abdul Baqi Khan, contractor, and two others, the forbears of all the thirteen men who appear as patrons of the local League in 1912 had been members of the Central Committee of the Urdu Associa¬ tion of 1873.2 Of all the Muslim landholding families, it was the Shaikhs of Mau Aima, relatives of the turbulent Nasiruddin,3 who played the fullest part in the affairs of the District League. This family was a typical case of the links between catchment area zamindars and the town. Shaikh Abdul Rauf, his relatives, Ghulam Murtaza and Ghulam Mujtaba, and his son Zahur Ahmed were all among the few members of the central League in the 1900s.4 The latter three were all district bar lawyers with small or diminishing 1 Its aims included local demands for the increase of grants-in-aid to Muslim schools, appointment of equal numbers of Hindu and Muslim teachers in district schools, and the protection of Urdu, Leader, 18 June 1912, report of annual meeting. 2 Ibid., cf. 1873 List, Appendix, Z. Umer, ‘Islamic Revivalism’; cf. Muslim Franchise List, U.P. Gazette, i9°9> which gives fathers’ names and residences of zamindars. 3 Above, pp. 70-1. 4 Muslim League Report, Nagpur 1910 (Allahabad, 1911), list of members.

Hindu Populism and the District Board

223

practices.1 Other houseowning and landed relatives were M. Faizullah, a manager of a religious trust and honorary magistrate, and Shaikh Tufail Ahmed, who were members of the District Board.2 By 1913 the Mau Aima Shaikhs had infiltrated the Council of the United Provinces Muslim League and, aided by Zahur Ahmed’s friend Kamalludin Ahmed Jaffry, played a prominent part in ousting the ‘old party’ from positions of power.3 Zahur Ahmed’s brother, Nazir Ahmed, later became editor of the radical newspaper Musawat, which supported the extremist Ali brothers during their wartime internment, and came under sus¬ picion of the government for its pan-Islamic radicalism.4 Some of these middling zamindar families went on at first to support the more militant line taken by the Provincial League after 1913. But the constraints of their social background sooner or later limited an early radicalism. They found it difficult to remain in the vanguard of a movement now working in concert with the very same Hindu publicists who were beginning to pose a threat to their dominance within the District Board and were later to challenge them through the Peasants’ Asso¬ ciations. The divergence from the League of three of the more active of Allahabad’s middle zamindars after 1913 is an illustration. Jamal Ahmed of Kara, for instance, was typical of a whole class of zamindars throughout the United Provinces who inherited a pre¬ carious economic situation and a history of tension with their tenants. Pie had been active in local educational and religious associations and had published from Kara a broadsheet demanding a Muslim political association. But as the younger professional men and pro-Congress elements gained predominance at regional and local level after 1913, Jamal Ahmed found himself isolated from the League. His small estate became a target for the atten¬ tions of political workers after the foundation of the Kisan Sabha in 1917. In 1919, he opposed the concession of occupancy rights to tenants5 and became active in the anti-Congress Loyal Leagues of 1921-2.6 Sayyid Mahomed Isa, who was zamindar of Niwan 1 Leader, 8 Aug. 1914, obituary for Ishaq Nomani; Home Poll. 1925-24, p. 253, N.A.I. 2 D.G., p. hi. 3 Leader, 24 Jan. 1914, M. A. Khwaja on Muslim League session. 4 53 G.A.D. of 1918, U.P.S. 5 Leader, 9 Feb. 1919. 6 Leader, 3 Feb. 1922.

224

The Drift into Radicalism

just outside Allahabad, had also been a stalwart of the early Dis¬ trict League, hut in 1919-21 he was found working against both Congress and populist Khilafat preachers in rural Chail.1 The early connection of Sheikh Abdul Rauf of Mau Aima was also weakening before 1916 when he led the ‘anti-Congress group’ within the League council.2 But in the case of his son Zahur Ahmed, the tension between a zamindari background and the requirements of political cooperation with town-based Congress¬ men did not become overwhelming until 1931 when Congress volunteers began to burn his threshing-floors.3 After 1909, differences between groups of town Muslims also became more acute. In 1912, the authorities nominated Abdul Baqi Khan as Municipal Commissioner. The appointment of this conservative general merchant and contractor to the Board offended the educated Muslims of the High Court Bar.4 But the police and the collectorate perpetuated their control of the Muslim tradesmen and artisans of the town centre through him. Relations with the heads of the Diaras also continued amicable. In Allaha¬ bad, the communal tension which followed the dispute over separate provincial electorates was not unduly violent owing to their intervention. More significantly, when some more radical lawyers attempted to bring the agitation over the demolition of a mosque at Cawnpore to Allahabad, Baqi Khan stepped in to help suppress this first foray of the local ‘young party’.5 Baqi Khan and his supporters continued powerful while they appeared to be the only link between the old Muslim quarters and the Municipal Board or the Collector’s Office. Independent local men such as Zahur Ahmed and his friend Kamalludin Ahmed Jaffry who wished for a closer cooperation with the Congress, remained suspect when Muslim neighbourhood leaders still con¬ sidered that a Hindu majority prevented them from securing fair 1 Collr. to Commr., 8 Nov. 1921, dept. XII, 1922, C.A.; cf. correspondence between Collr. and Isa preserved in Niwan Kothi with Sayyid Mahamed Faruqi. 2 Reports on the Congress and conferences of 1916, Muslim League session, 140 G.A.D. of 1917, U.P.S. 3 Reports on the agrarian disturbances in Allahabad, Home Poll. 33/50 of 1931, N.A.I. 4 Leader, 21 Sept, and 2 Oct. 1912. 5 Commr. Allahabad’s notes, ‘The state of Muslim feeling in India’, Home Poll. ‘A’, Oct. 1913, 100-18, N.A.I.; Leader, 13-16 Aug. 1914; Musazvat, 12 June 1913, U.P.N.N.R., 1913.

Hindu Populism and the District Board

225

representation on the Board.1 But the implementation of the 19x6 Act changed the situation radically. Eight Muslims, including Jaffry, Zahur Ahmed, and two supporters took seats on the Board and became viable intermediaries for Muslims in the old town.2 At the same time the boycott of the Board by most Hindu members left the administration in the hands of the Jain banker Sheo Charan Lai and his ally Baqi Khan. Their regime became increas¬ ingly embarrassing even to the town Muslims, and piety seemed on the point of overwhelming good sense when the Baqi Khan group vetoed a proposal for universal primary education on the grounds that it conflicted with the Koran.3 It was clear that for reasons of efficiency alone, some pact would have to be made with the boycotting Hindu members and that only the educated radical men were likely to be able to cooperate with them. Another feature of the situation during the War was increasing unease among the local ulama and heads of the old corporations. Extremist secret societies already flourished in Allahabad, fed by doubts about British policies in the Middle East. Traditional leaders were concerned by the increasing intervention of the state in the management of religious trusts. In Allahabad, however, old rivalries between the Diaras were overlaid with new political attitudes. Sayyid Mahomed Fakhir of the Diara Shah Ajmal had already attended extremist swadeshi meetings in 1907 ;4 in 1914, he was found supporting ‘Congress’ candidates in local elections.5 The initial pressure for an aggressive Muslim political movement against government was to come from the secret societies, Maulana Fakhir, and men on the fringes of the Zahur Ahmed group. None of them belonged to the dominant Muslim factions. Yet in 1917 it was still impossible to predict the emergence of a general Muslim movement. On the contrary, the effect of the institutional changes since 1909 had been to propel the elements which had sometimes come together on a Muslim platform in different directions, com¬ plicating the problems of local control, but providing no viable Muslim leadership either. The events before 1917 make the sub¬ sequent collapse of both the League and the Khilafat movement more explicable. 1 e.g. Leader, 12 Nov. 1913, dissension caused by participation of some Muslim Leaguers in public meeting on treatment of Indians in South Africa. 2 Board Debates; Leader, 2, 10 Oct. 1916. 3 Leader, 25, 29 Jan. 1918, Board debates. 4 Bengalee, 19 Mar. 1907. 5 Leader, 7, 10 Feb. 1914.

The Drift into Radicalism

226

TOWN GOVERNMENT AND THE POLITICIANS,

1909-1917

The more volatile situation with which the authorities were faced in the mid-War years was reflected in sharper conflicts at the local level. In the case of the Allahabad Municipality, economic and social changes combined with institutional innovations to weaken the bases of government’s control and put men with wider political ambitions in a more strategic position. At the same time, professional men and local political leaders were beginning to exercise their power in new town-wide organizations and arenas which had resulted from the slow binding together of the old township clusters. Allahabad Municipality had expanded both as an electoral and as an administrative organization. Table io

Registered Voters, Allahabad Municipality, i88j-igi6

co 00 00 191 I 1916

Hindu

Muslim

Others

Total

1,948 3,016 4,016

592 918 i,i7S

318 S12 854

2,858 4,446 6,045

Sources: Pioneer, 20 Oct. 1884; Home Education—Municipalities ‘A’, Apr. 1914, 22-31, N.A.I.; Leader, 26 July 1916.

The price-rise and an overall growth in prosperity was pushing people over the limit of the basic rental qualification for municipal franchise. In 1912, the Municipality enfranchised graduates of over five years’ standing,1 and other minor extensions of the fran¬ chise were made.2 These changes did not disturb the balance between sections of the electorate very much. Even the European proportion remained fairly constant until 1923. But there was now a very much larger Indian population in Wards I and II which could hope to return an Indian to the Board every two or three years. On the Board itself, the provision for an elected non-official chairman in 1913 had already deepened divisions, alarming 1 Leader, 29 Oct. 1912, Board debate. 2 Board Proceedings, 3 July 1911, Municipal Office, reduction of basic franchise from Rs. 72 to Rs. 60 per annum in old town.

Town Government and the Politicians

227

Anglo-Indian and Muslim leaders who considered their best interests protected by a strong official presence. But the institution in 1916 of a municipal executive officer ordinarily controlled by the majority on the Board opened yet further avenues for place¬ ment and favour.1 Hitherto, Indians had only directly adminis¬ tered political resources at mohulla level, now they could do so at town level. Newly secured patronage was to deepen faction, but it could also provide fuel for a politically motivated municipal administration. Significant alterations in the flow of goods and services between the Board and the wards also accompanied these changes. Between 1892 and 1920, the income of the Municipality rose from Rs. 400,072 to Rs. 832, 268.2 Much more of the wealth of Allahabad passed through the municipal political system in 1920. Expenditure on ward conservancy had increased, but so had the direct burden on local houseowners. In 1903-4 the institution of taxation on houses and lands tripled the income from taxes other than octroi and water-rate which had hitherto been the predominant sources.3 Further increases took place in the next two decades, and these ran ahead of general price inflation. By 1920-1 ‘other taxes’ accounted for Rs. 102, 059, compared with octroi of Rs. 307,852. So while the octroi taxation, which directly affected only the mercantile community, still predominated in 1920, many more people in the town had become concerned with municipal taxation policies. Ward committees and ratepayers’ associations sprang up in some numbers after 1909,4 and after 1918 a well-organized municipal reform movement led by Prof. Jevons of the Muir Central College and Kampta Prasad Kackar, a High Court pleader, played an increasingly important part in local politics.5 Ward committees 1 Leader, 2 Oct. 1916, Board debate 1 Oct. 1916, cf. note on Qazi Makhdum Hassan, Independent, 21 Sept. 1919. 2 D.G., Supplementary Notes and Statistics, ‘B’ Volume (Allahabad, 1914), Table XVI, ‘C’ Volume (Allahabad, 1927), Table XVI. 3 D.G., Supplementary Notes and Statistics, ‘B’ Volume (1914), Table XVI. Government had pressed the Board to raise its revenue, Commr’s. endorsement, 17 Apr. 1901 forwarding General Order 4 Apr. 1901; P.W.C., 5 of 1901-2. Response to the increased water rate was severe, P.W.C., 12 and 33 of 1903-4; see also, Report of the Municipal Taxation Committee, U.P., pp. 31-3. 4 e.g. Katra-Colonelganj Rate Payers’ Association, Leader, 7 Apr. 1910; Ward IV conservancy dispute, Leader, 30 Mar. 1912; Bengali voters, Ward III, Leader, 17 Nov. 1912; Leader, 5 Feb. 1913, etc. 5 Independent, 23 Mar. 1919; Leader, 16 June 1919. Note also activities of Allahabad Improvement Trust, 1916-19, N.P.

228

The Drift into Radicalism .

initiated by the People’s Association had, of course, been active in the 1880s, but after 1900, meetings of ratepayers to censure the representatives of their ward, especially old municipal councillors who monopolized the disbursement of conservancy grants, became frequent at election time.1 Economic and social changes also impinged directly on town politics. Prices rose sharply after 1907, and the First World War created shortages of commodities, though it also consolidated some fortunes. The scramble for benefits became sharper among servants of the Municipality and among ordinary citizens, par¬ ticularly government pensioners and others on fixed incomes.2 At the same time, perceptible changes had come about in the pattern of local influence. Allahabad’s commercial oligarchy had broadened, and the prestigious Khattri and Agarwal families’ influence as town-wide magnates had been curtailed. Throughout northern India, indigenous banking was coming under pressure, and many of the old families had moved back into cloth or grain trading as their major enterprise.3 In Allahabad, the provisions of the Bundelkhand Encumbered Estates Act of 1903 had limited the financial opportunities of the big bankers by throwing doubt on the value of land as collateral security for loans.4 But care must be exercised in tying the changes in Allahabad’s local politics too closely to these more general economic changes. Some points emerge quite clearly. First the number of indi¬ genous banks in Allahabad declined between 19085 and 1929 when the United Provinces Banking Enquiry Committee found only five working in the town.6 This decline in numbers clearly preceded 1 e g. Ward IV meetings, Leader 13, 15, 17 Feb. 1914. Chintamani remarked that this was the first time there was ‘a real attempt to educate public opinion on the duties of voters’. 2 The pressure of immigrant groups on town resources was not, however, a major factor in increased social tension. Plague, the dysentery epidemic of 1908, and the 1918 influenza, as well as emigration by indentured labourers, slowed down the growth-rate of the town population of the 1870s and 80s. Between the Censuses of 1911 and 1921, the population of police circle Kotwali declined from 97,566 to 86,551; that of Kydganj, the concourse of wage-labour, increased only from 10,398 to 13,137, D.G., Supplementary Notes and Statistics (1914), and ‘B’ Volume (1927); Census 1911, xv. I. 98. 3 L. C. Jain, Indigenous Banking in India, pp. 44—5. 4 United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee (Allahabad, 1930), ii. 129. 5 D.G., 59-61. 6 Banking Enquiry Committee, ii. 124.

Town Government and the Politicians

229

the effects of the world depression which forced the closure of many more. Secondly, as we shall see, there was a much wider group of commercial services and credit-giving organizations available in the town before 1910. Generally, social and economic change would work to the disadvantage of the close personal style of the older firms, though of course universal suspicion of the joint-stock banks and the inaccessibility of credit to smaller men meant that traces of the system would linger on until the present. Probably, it was also the smaller and less viable units which first gave up the struggle and concentrated on their trading and land¬ owning concerns. But in Allahabad, some of the big families, which had, after all, been the major political patrons, continued to flourish until the inter-war depression. True, the Bhalla bank was rent with disputes attendant on the partition between Raja Ram and Bhowani Prasad,1 and the Jagat Narayan family seems to have run down its small banking business and concentrated on landholding. But others went from strength to strength. The Radha Rawan family of Daraganj appears to have prospered during this period, as did two of the three branches of the divided Tandon firm.2 Only Chunni Lai’s branch went into an overall decline, having speculated in indigo and mild drugs in the mean¬ time. In the case of the ‘Manohar Das Munni Lai’ branch, in fact, we have exact evidence of its development over these years. The partition of 1893, before the death of Lala Manohar Das, seems to have left about Rs. 650,000 in the hands of the firm; by 1928, this had swollen to a working capital of Rs. 1,200,960,3 an increase which ran considerably ahead of general money inflation. The bank was a very large one indeed by north Indian standards, and though the hundi peripheral businesses had declined, major town merchants as well as big zamindars continued to be serviced. Even in the case of the successful businesses, however, there was a change in the tone of the activities of the heads of the rais and banker families. Lala Bihari Lai was less concerned with the 1 Raja Rant v. Alauddin, case 37 of 19x3, District Court. on ‘Manohar Das Kandheya Lai’ (?) rokarh, St. 1950 (a.d. 1892-3); ‘Manohar Das Chunni Lai’ rokarh (cash book) St. 1962 (a.d. 1904-5), ‘Manohar Das Chunni Lai’ rokarh, St. 1975 (a.d. 1917-18), kindly read by Sri Harimohan Das Tandon of the firm ‘Gapoo Mai Kandheya Lai’ and made available by Sri Beni Prasad Tandon and Sri Lalji Tandon. 3 See e.g., ‘Manohar Das Munni Lai’ lekha (account book), St. 1984-5 (a.d. 1927-8) which shows total working capital of Rs. 1,200,960—a very large sum by north Indian standards; kindly lent by Sri G. P. Tandon.

2 Based

230

The Drift into Radicalism

Municipality than Ram Charan Das had been, and concentrated instead on the District Board and the Agra Provinces Zamindars’ Association.1 Ram Charan Das’s immediate descendants con¬ tinued charitable activities in the town,2 but were shy of nationalist political involvements. Family members were delegated to deal with the rural landholding side of the business which had been left to a clerk in the nineteenth century. Similarly, both the Jagat Narayan family and the Bhallas dropped out of municipal and town politics, at least as major actors, but are to be found in landlord and district politics in the 1920s and ’30s. These changes in the business and political priorities of the major commercial families coincided with the development of new commercial institutions in the town, with increased litigation connected with commercial activity, and with a growth of communications. The bankers of the central mohullas did not bulk as large in the lives of their inhabitants in 1910 as they had in 1880. But it is on the development of new services and dependencies rather than on the absolute decline of the old that the emphasis must lie. By 1910, sources of credit in the town had become much more diffuse. The Allahabad Bank had a working capital which was certainly at least three times as large as any of the old kothis,3 and the Post Office appealed as a form of savings to the clerical classes.4 Professional people and government servants were also involved in several north Indian joint-stock banks. The Kayastha Pathshala and its individual trustees, for instance, were heavily invested in the People’s Industrial Bank of India which went into liquidation in 1915.5 Insurance had been another function discharged through the old firms but between 1908 and 1911 three different insurance and provident societies came into existence in Allahabad. The years 1902-12 also saw the emergence of thirteen registered general trading companies, as the town pulled out of the depres¬ sion of the late 1890s.6 Nine of these appear to have been located in the new residential areas which indicates the swing of com1 Siddiqui, Landlords, p. 54; Pioneer, 26 Oct. 1930). 2 e.g. Manmohan Das contributed to the Leader as a shareholder, to the Sewa Samiti service group, and to the town’s various vernacular libraries. 3 At least three other joint-stock banks had appeared in Allahabad by this date, Annual Report on the Working of Joint-Stock Companies, the United Pro¬ vinces of Agra and Oudh, for 1911-12 (Allahabad, 1912), App. A. 4 Banking Enquiry Committee, iii. 473, and Statement A. 5 Hindustan Review, xxxi (1915), 138; Leader, 25 Sept. 1913. 6 Joint-Stock Company Report, 1911-12, App. A.

Town Government and the Politicians

231

mercial activity away from the central marketing area. The two major ‘modern’ general trading companies of Allahabad, Guzder and Co. and Gandhi and Co., traced their rise to this period.1 It would be wrong to suggest that there was no continuity between the old commercial enterprises and the new firms. The Tandons, at least, worked closely with several joint-stock banks and put up money for joint-stock trading companies.2 But major Allahabad bankers did not widely introduce new methods into their business,3 and family histories suggest that younger members moved into service and not into industrial enterprise.4 Apart from credit control, commercial magnates in the 1880s had deployed influence through their role as assessors in trade dis¬ putes and through property ownership. In both these areas, new, more formalized arenas had come into being before the First World War in which the raw families were no longer dominant. The emergence of the Allahabad Indian Traders’ Association after 1908 provided a new organ for the compromise of commercial dis¬ putes.5 Its committee was eclectic but it displayed a definite bias towards the newer trading areas and groups. Moreover, Y. N. Tiwari and Harnandan Prasad, two Congress publicists, and S. Gandhi, who was closely connected with Motilal Nehru, played an increasingly important part in its deliberations.6 After 1916, its reserved seat on the Allahabad Municipal Board provided a political entree for a Congress activist. Municipal house assessment lists suggest that in the period 1910-14 members of the older banking families, government ser¬ vants and district landlords continued to hold and build many of the most valuable properties even in the new residential areas.7 1 Significantly, Motilal Nehru was connected with both these firms as partner or client. 2 e.g. the ‘Allahabad Deshi Co.’, Leader, 3 Sept. 1908. 3 Banking Enquiry Committee, ii. 124, only five bankers working on ‘the old lines’ were recorded in 1928, and none had converted to modern practices. 4 e.g. Tandon family trees, Ranimandi; Agrawal Jati, vol. ii, passim. 5 Abhyudaya, 17 June 1916, compromise of a dispute between two Muslim traders. 6 Leader, 29 Sept. 1911; Leader, 20 June 1920, executive committees. 7 P.W.C., 1910-14, house assessment lists. A sample of 358 properties was taken. Houses above Rs. 500 were exclusively Hindu; 8 were recognizably the property of the Tandon family, 6 of the Jagat Narayan family. The lekha (account book), St. 1984-5 of Manohar Das Munni Lai has 144 accounts of town prop¬ erties, about 80 of which appear to have been bungalows and houses; Manmohan Das appears to have owned more than 50 properties in the early 1920s.

232

The Drift into Radicalism

But ‘new’ trading people such as the Gandhis and Aratoons con¬ trolled large areas of housing, while rich High Court lawyers were also building many of the most valuable houses. Numbers are less important than the composition of the amorphous houseowning interest. In 1920 when Allahabad landlords raised an outcry against the projected movement of government offices to Luck¬ now, its heterogeneous nature was suggested.1 Ram Charan Das’s son and great-nephew were signatories, but so were two Parsi houseowners, one Armenian, and five High Court lawyers, who had done well since 1900. From the beginning, however, profes¬ sional men and particularly lawyers controlled the Allahabad Improvement Trust, a body designed to survey and provide new accommodation and facilities within the municipal limits.2 The technical knowledge and energy of men such as Motilal Nehru and D. R. Ranjit Singh was required to get the project moving at its inception in 1915-16. Yet it rapidly became a further arena for discussion and distribution of town resources and maintained much independence of the Municipality itself. While new arenas were forming at town level and old mohullabased forms of patronage were becoming less significant, thechanges in the composition of the Municipal Board itself were most striking. The years between 1909 and 1920 saw the high point of the influence of organs of municipal self-government in the development of Indian politics. Before 1909, the powers of Indian members were limited and dispersed; after the MontaguChelmsford franchise, the municipalities were diminished in importance by concerns which arose from a sudden development of electoral politics in the rural areas. But the short intervening period saw Indian politicians forging pacts and alliances to meet the new situation caused by this first, and most local, transfer of power. The actual powers and resources transferred were still, in fact, relatively small, but the access that municipal boards gave to the councils and the importance to Indian leaders of local positions of influence in a colonial situation, gave the municipal arenas disproportionate significance. Particularly striking in Allahabad was the speed with which the system of Mogul origin, by which town notables were associated 1 Allahabad Citizens’ Memorial presented to Butler, 23 July 1921, Butler Papers, MSS. Eur. F 116/17, I.O.L. 2 ‘Allahabad Improvement Committee’ file, N.P.

Town Government and the Politicians

233

with the local officials of government, gave way to a situation where professional men and politicians had a dominant voice in municipal affairs. During the years 1900-6 fifteen traders or raises had sat on the Board as elected members and only five professional men; between 1912 and 1917 thirteen professional men and ten traders or raises were elected to the Board.1 The figures, however, conceal the real changes. As late as 1908, the connections of Ram Charan Das, Jagat Narayan, and Charu Chunder Mitter had still maintained a loose control over Indian members of the Municipal Board. Both heads of the Khattri kin-groups had retired from active participation but their supporters, Sheo Charan Lai, the Jain banker-landowner, Beni Prasad Kapoor, printing magnate of Katra, and the Muthiganj Kalwars, retained influence. Clinging to the Ram Charan Das group was the Shia houseowner, Sayyid Mahomed Zamin, while their rivals seem to have picked up some support from other Muslim groups. The reforms of 1909 and the changes in local taxation acted as a catalyst on municipal politics. The subsequent emergence of the Nehru family, Dr. D. R. Ranjit Singh, and some of the younger Malaviyas was initially directed against the weaker links in the rais followings. Men who were thought to be corrupt, or who were resented by their constituency, came under immediate assault. The results of this intrusion of new interests into the limited politics of the Municipality was to deepen divisions along ‘communal’ or ‘caste’ lines, and to release a whole range of tensions which had been suppressed or minimized in the period of rais politics. Thus the drive in 1910 of the reform party against the rais, Zahur-ul-Hussain, and the new house assess¬ ments2 was interpreted by some publicists as a case of ‘Hindu’ against ‘Muslim’. At the election in the Katra (Ward II) in March 1910, Zahur-ul-Hussain, houseowner and business-man who had been closely connected with the Ram Charan Das group,3 was opposed by Mohan Lai Nehru, High Court lawyer and cousin of Motilal. Previously, the ward had been uncontested for eight years because, according to Motilal Nehru, the people feared Zahur-ul-Hussain.4 Canvassing proceeded hotly and Mohan Lai 1 Election returns, U.P. Government Gazette, Mar.-Apr., part III, annually. 2 M.A.R. 1900-10, p. 6. 3 Prayag Samachar, 28 Mar. 1901, U.P.N.N.R. 1901. 4 Motilal Nehru to Jawaharlal Nehru, 29 Apr. 1910, N.P. Novel canvassing methods were used: ‘My car Suresh’ car and a fourth [sic\ from the city are

234

The Drift into Radicalism

Nehru said ‘it was time that the old municipal commissioners made room for younger men’.* 1 But Mohan Lai’s campaign soon developed into a general attack on the ‘Old Board’; Charu Chunder Mitter, Sayyid Mahomed Zamin, and other members of the rump of the Ram Charan Das party came to Hussain’s defence.2 The campaign resulted in the defeat of Zahur-ul-Hussain and the suspension of the house assessments. But the decision was contested in the district magistrate’s court and the evidence pre¬ sented in this and three other similar cases over the next five years gives us some insight into the tensions that were connected with the decline of the old connections. In fact, the election was not fought on ‘communal lines’. Zahur-ul-Hussain was supported both by members of the old Ram Charan Das group and by erst¬ while adherents of Jagat Narayan, who were predominantly Hindu. The fact that Zahur-ul-Hussain got 324 votes in a ward where there were only 217 Muslim voters is also fairly conclusive.3 But the new journal Muslim Review held that the election had been entirely conducted on Hindu-Muslim lines. This attitude pre¬ saged the emergence of the District Muslim League, hitherto no more than a group of local lawyers and landowners, as an active party in municipal politics. Towards the end of 1910, some Mus¬ lim leaders began actively to press for separate electorates on the Municipal Board,4 and while the background to this demand must be sought in all-India events, its actual timing in Allahabad had much to do with the faster tempo of local politics there. In the elections of the spring of 1911, the ‘communal’ element was even stronger. In Ward II a Muslim candidate, Sajjad Ali, was backed by the ‘Muslim League’ and was said to have can¬ vassed exclusively Muslim voters.5 In Ward III, a more complex running up and down conveying Mohan’s voters to the poll. The other fellow has also tried a car, but I am told it has broken down’. 1 Leader, 5 Mar. 1910. 2 Leader, 4 Mar. 1910. 3 Leader, 25 Mar. 1910. 4 Charu Chunder Mitter said ‘He was satified that no Hindu-Mahomedan question was raised but that the fact that a Hindu was opposing a Mahomedan was bound to create bad feeling among the Mahomedans’, Leader, 5 Mar. 1911; P.W.C., nos. 5, 6, 19 of 1911-12. 5 Leader, 14 Mar. 1911, a letter stated that the failure of all Muslim candi¬ dates in this ward was now a foregone conclusion, even though they picked up a good deal of Hindu and Christian support. Previously, a Muslim who ‘com¬ mands considerable influence among his Hindu and Mahomedan constituents [Zahur-ul-Hussain]’ had held the ward for many years. A Leader correspondent, 11 Mar. 1911, stated that the official ‘League’ candidate had canvassed no Hindu votes and secured only 61 of 125 Muslim votes for the ward.

Town Government and the Politicians

235

situation developed with Sayyid Mahomed Zamin as the target. There were several important aspects of this case. Sayyid Mahomed Zamin was leader of the Shia community in Allahabad and sec¬ tarian issues were introduced into the election. One of the wit¬ nesses at the subsequent court case deposed: ‘I heard about the Sunni-Shia feeling a month or twenty days before the election. There was a majlis [meeting] the next day of maulood, I invited both parties to it. After the election all the Shias came but several of the Sunnis did not come.’1 This was only one of a number of ‘communal’ issues introduced. It seems fairly clear, for instance, that the self-styled Muslim League party also put around a rumour that Sayyid Mahomed Zamin had caused a temple to be dug up, a tactic designed to deprive him of Hindu support as well.2 But behind the rhetorical aspects of this campaign were more substantive facts. Sayyid Mahomed Zamin had been one of the closest supporters of the Ram Charan Das group on the Muni¬ cipal Board;3 he had been a business partner of Ganesh Prasad Seth,4 an Agarwal rais5, and he also mixed with other landholding commercial men in the ‘Landholders Association of the Provinces of Agra and Oudh’6 whose secretary was Charu Chunder Mitter. Significantly, a Hindu witness deposed that he had voted for Zamin ‘because he was a “rais” of the city’ and because ‘Abdul Haq’s practice would have suffered’7 had he been elected. Here, then, the ‘Muslim League’ professional element was using various communal themes against one of the older magnates in much the same way as comparable professional elements had used the cry of municipal improvement and over-taxation to unseat Zahur-ulHussain in the previous year. The deeper political change was a growing assault on the rais class by new interests which were only superficially communal or political parties. The earlier struggle between the Ram Charan Das and the Jagat Narayan party was reflected in the new factions. Electoral agent for the so-called Muslim League party of Abdul Haq was 1 Hearings of Ward III election petition case before the additional munsiff, deposition of Ghulam Ahmad Khan, Leader, 26 July 1911. 2 Evidence of B. Jhumak Lai, Leader, 25 July 1911. 3 e.g. see support of the Ram Charan Das newspaper for him, Natya Patra, Apr. 1899, U.P.P.N.R. 1899. * Evidence of Mahabir Prasad, Leader, 6 Jun 1911. The reference is to jointly-held ilaka, which could meen business, bank, or company. 5 Agrawal jfati, ii. 16-17. 7 Ibid. 6 Evidence of Jhumak Lai, Leader, 25 July 1911.

236

The Drift into Radicalism

none other than Bageshwari Narayan, Jagat Narayan’s son, who ordered his tenants to vote for Abdul Haq against Sayyid Mahomed Zamin, supporter of the erstwhile Ram Charan Das faction.1 This provides an example of the persistence of the themes of the old ‘connection politics’ in a period of political change. The series of Allahabad election cases from 1910 to 1915 demonstrate the com¬ plexity of change at the very point when the connections were beginning to give way to a wider variety of political forms. Over the next five years the professional western-educated elements from the new areas employed a number of devices to reduce the influence of the older interests on the Board. They employed the technique of ratepayers’ associations to replace the system of ‘nomination’ and avoidance of poll which had charac¬ terized rais politics. Institutional and economic change had com¬ bined to give them a more diverse audience in the mohullas. The theme of ‘improvement’ was used with some success. The tradi¬ tional hold of the Rani ki Mandi Tandons on Ward IV was challenged in 1912 and 1913 when Lala Bisheshwar Das, cousin of Ram Charan Das, was criticized on the grounds that he was inefficient.2 In the following year, when his son, Bihari Lai, tried for the same ward, there was a barrage of protest against the patronage that this implied.3 Lala Bihari Lai came onto the Board later and he served for some years as a respected member. But his influence was less than that previously enjoyed by his great-uncle, Lala Ram Charan Das, and his ability to discharge his financial interests through the Municipality always depended to some extent on playing along with the ‘improvers’ and politi¬ cians whose political resources within the municipality had so obviously increased. The tenor of the campaign against raises is well illustrated in a letter to the Leader challenging the election of the Jain banker and landowner, Lala Sheo Charan Lai. Sheo Charan Lai belonged it was said, to the ‘richer classes’ and could not possibly represent the ‘middle and poorer classes’ who ‘had had no representation from Ward III, since Bhagwati Narayan and Beni Prasad Kapoor [the sitting members] are both raises.’ The writer concluded that ‘there is undoubtedly a party which arro¬ gates to itself the right of selecting and descending, making and 1 Cross-examination of Siraj-ul Hassan, Leader, 7 June 1911. 2 Abhyudaya, 29 Feb., 12 and 14 Mar. 1912. 3 Leader, 6, 26 Feb., 1 Mar. 1914.

Town Government and the Politicians

237

unmaking, municipal members. Much of the racial bitterness in Allahabad is due to this party.’1 The ‘Observer’ was certainly right in making the connection between rats politics and racial bitterness, but it was not exclusive. In fact, representatives of the ‘middle and poorer’ classes con¬ sistently used Hindu, Muslim, and caste themes in their attempts to break the raises' hold on the Municipality, just as some of the old patrons sought to discredit members of the Nehru family on the grounds of their unorthodox social practice.2 Abhyudaya, for instance, claimed that Bhagwati Narayan was aligned with the Muslim League,3 that Lala Bisheshwar Das had been successful in the same election on the ground that he had collected ‘all the Sunni and Muslim League votes’,4 but it is clear that a good deal of the Muslim support enjoyed by these men derived not from immediate factional alliances but from long-standing patronage connections and affiliations.5 We also see a similar deliberate attempt to fracture existing connections by appeals to ‘Bengali’ sentiment.6 About the same time the Leader remarked on the undesirable novelty whereby a meeting of the Allahabad Kayasths was convened to endorse a Kayasth candidate, rejecting Charu Chunder Mitter who was a Bengali, albeit a Bengali Kayasth.7 Social and institutional changes made it more likely that these communal calls would figure in electoral politics. But this does not mean that there was an irreversible movement towards political activity based upon caste or communal categories. Such appeals were particularly appropriate to groups trying to displace a dominant oligarchy. Having once grasped power, politicians might need to revert to a more catholic political rhetoric, as did Allaha¬ bad’s radical Muslim politicians after 1917. The degree to which the transformation of communal themes was tied up with the attempt of new interests to penetrate the Municipal Board is fully illustrated by the complex events of 1 ‘Observer’ to Leader, 20 Nov. 1912. 2 Motilal Mehru to Leader, 29 Mar. 1912. 3 Abhyudaya, 14 Mar. 1912. 4 Abhyudaya, 17 Mar. 1912. 5 The Chaddha Family to which Bhagwati Narayan belonged had long owned considerable property in prominent Muslim localities such as Dariabad and Chauk. Interview with Dr. T. N. Chaddha Allahabad, January 1974. 6 Leader, 20 Nov. 1912, correspondence between C. C. Mitter and D. C. Banerji. 7 Leader, 13 Nov. 1912.

238

The Drift into Radicalism

1916-19.1 During this period the ‘Hindus’, led by Malaviya and Motilal Nehru, effected an almost complete boycott of the Board, forcing recalcitrant candidates to resign from the newly constituted ‘non-Mohammedan’ municipal electorates by putting up low caste persons to oppose them. The leaders of the ‘Hindu Sabha’ were, of course, not united in their motives, still less in their degree of commitment to Hinduism. The Malaviya-Tandon group pursued the boycott as part of their total opposition to ‘separate electorates’ under the 1916 Act.2 Motilal Nehru and his supporters had already acceded to the demand for Muslim elec¬ torates3 in order to cement their alliance with the Young Muslim party in provincial politics.4 They boycotted the Allahabad Board ostensibly because they thought that the Muslims had been given too many seats, actually because they assumed that local officials intended to perpetuate their control through a conservative Muslim and Anglo-Indian alliance, and possibly also because they could not afford a further weakening of their shaky local base among Allahabad Hindus. But once again ‘communalism’ masked the pursuit ot the politics of interest by other means. The muni¬ cipal commissioners who were thrown off the Board for betraying the Hindu cause were members of the rump of the rais group, especially Lalas Manmohan Lai and Damodar Das, individuals who had been, in fact, uncompromising supporters of Hindu interests in matters of ceremonial and precedence.5 We see a similar process happening within the newly consti¬ tuted Muslim electorates. Here a variety of communal and political themes were used to dismiss the old Muslim party of Baqi Khan, the kerosene contractor, and Abdul Haq, the district lawyer, from the Municipal Board in April 1919.6 It should come as no more than a faint surprise to us that the elections saw the victory of an alliance between one group of politicians claiming to defend Hindu electoral interests against Muslim representation and another 1 The best succinct account of this dispute appears in M.A.R. ig20-i (Allahabad, 1921); see also ‘Allahabad Improvement Committee’ file, N.P. 2 Leader, 19 Apr. 1916. 3 As early as 1911 Nehru had conceded the need for separate electorates for tactical reasons, Board debate, Leader, 23-6 Apr. 1911. 4 Robinson, ‘Muslim Separatism’, pp. 72-86; Nehru to Indian Daily Tele¬ graph (Lucknow), 30 Aug. 1916, U.P.N.N.R. 1916. 5 Leader, 30 July, 16 Dec. 1916, 14 Mar., 12 Apr. 1917; Abhyudaya, 9 Dec. 1916. 6 Abhyudaya, 12 Mar. 1919.

Town Government and the Politicians

239

group of politicians whose new-found popularity in their own electorate derived from the belief of orthodox Muslims that their rights in the Ramlila-Dussehra festival had been sacrificed to Hindus by their erstwhile representative, Baqi Khan. Equally, it is not surprising that once having seized the municipal helm the new representatives fell out with ea h other almost immediately. The demise of the old rais connections as controlling interests on the Municipal Board derived frc m the complication of themes of municipal reform, with a whole range of new tensions inevitable as a relatively stable political system began to alter under the pressure of institutional and economic change. The high point of representation of new professional and now Congress interests on the Board came in 1923 when they were able to capitalize on the emotion generated by the non-cooperation movement.1 The resurgence of administrative and patronage problems, and of interests working within communal idioms,2 resulted in an equally drastic diminution of the front rank Congress politicians on the Board in 1925-6. As Kapil Deva Malaviya wrote, Groups of members sworn to a political programme may not be able to cohere and continue intact in local bodies such as ours. In our own board the old Congress party has dissolved and merged into groups divided on municipal and not political questions.3 The Allahabad Congressmen had discovered a problem which was to dog them inexorably from the Municipal Chamber to the Secretariat in Lucknow and, ultimately, to the Cabinet of the Republic of India. When we reviewed the political resources of the rais groups in the 1870s and 1880s, it was clear that they were cumulative: that power as moneylender, religious patron, and municipal com¬ missioner reinforced each other. To this extent it was to be expected that the changing nature of local control, reflecting both 1 M.A.R. 1923-4, Appendix. Of the 35 members who sat on The Board, 10 were active Congressmen and professional men, 4 were ‘reforming’ professional men who had sat on the Board since the early 1910s, 4 were old-style town notables. The remainder were mercantile people who were not comparable with the old-style raises but had connections with the old 61ite families in 8 cases. 2 e.g. Leader, 3 and 5 Apr. 1923; Kapil Deva Malaviya to Commr., 15 June 1925, opening remarks on M.A.R. 1924—5. 3 M.A.R. 1924-5-, Leader, 25 Apr., 16 June 1923, notes by J. Nehru on municipal patronage problems; P.W.C., 1923-4. l.r.i.p.—9

240

The Drift into Radicalism

the political decline of the indigenous banking and commercial families and the complication of the whole category of town-wide political patron would be apparent outside the Municipality. But outside a formal arena, such changes cannot be measured effec¬ tively. The descendants of the rais families continued powerful either as neighbourhood leaders and patrons, or in some cases, as commissioners and officers in an expanded and more nationallyconscious Municipality. Government was also slow to endorse the rising power of the new professional and trading element in society. Despite protests, it was not until the mid-i920s that the benches of honorary magistrates and the darbar lists were revised to incorporate new and perhaps more radical politicians. On the other hand, the increased importance of doctors, school teachers, and lawyers, and the increasing unreliability of ‘Rai Bahadurs’ and ‘Rai Sahibs’ as intermediaries, had already become apparent during town riots, and other local disputes. Political leaders as wrell as raises were consulted during the Katra-Kydganj disturbances of 1910-n.1 This was inevitable since the renewed tension was closely connected with developments in regional politics and the concession of separate regional electorates. In 1916, the Collector of Allahabad stated that Madan Mohan Malaviya created rather than reflected public opinion in Allahabad,2 and that he remained the key to the solution of the municipal dispute. In the communal riots of 1917 and 1918, Motilal Nehru, Tandon, Malaviya, and Zahur Ahmed appeared as representatives of bodies such as pragwals and taziadars3 which in the 1880s had usually worked through the town magnates. Moreover, a body of obscure pleaders played an important part in compromising or exacerbating tension both in the mohullas of Allahabad and in small towns such as Jhusi and Phulpur.4 Government noted that it was professional men and publicists who increasingly took up the demands of movements such as cow protection or the promotion of Nagri 1 Home Police ‘D’, Feb. 1911, 14, N.A.I. " Collr. to Motilal Nehru, 14 May 1917, ‘Allahabad Improvement Com¬ mittee Papers’, N.P. These papers make it clear how closely ‘Communal peace’ was connected with power on the Board. A change of power here inevitably reflected on the whole question of local control. 3 See, Leader, 19 Oct. 1917; Independent, 12 Oct. 1919; Home Poll. 1924, 249/12, 1925, 333, N.A.I. 4 Note by district magistrate, Allahabad, 28 Nov. 1917, ‘Move of armed police to areas affected by the Baqr Id, 1918’, 603 G.A.D. of 1918, U.P.S.

Town Government and the Politicians

241

which had previously been more the purview of itinerant lec¬ turers and raises.1 In labour disputes too, lawyers and publicists were taking an increasingly prominent part as intermediaries between depart¬ ments of government or local authorities and working men. This came to a head during the years 1918-21, when Congress politicians were in close touch with striking postmen,2 arsenal workers,3 rickshawmen,4 and railwaymen.5 For several years previously their new influence on the Board had enabled professional men to intervene at crucial points in an increasingly complex labour market. Finally, we have seen that the rais families had guaranteed their influence through a series of covert pacts with the police and local government servants. Scandals sometimes uncovered them. It might be expected, then, that the relative decline of the old patrons in town politics would also be reflected in this shady area. ‘New men’ would either need to break alliances between raises and their friends in the administration, or create their own. The case of Subordinate Judge Gokal Prasad provides some confusing evidence of how this happened in Allahabad. Instigated by some lawyers, in 1913 the C.I.D. brought several charges of bribery against Gokal Prasad, a member of an old Kayasth service family.6 He was alleged to have taken bribes from members of the Bhalla family whose banking business was at this time in the throes of a messy and damaging partition. Manni Lai Tandon of the Debi Prasad contracting family, and a series of mohulla money-lenders, also seem to have been involved. The local professional men seem here to have been trying to break down a relationship which they found both repugnant and politically embarrassing at a time when they were beginning to show their power in the Municipality and other areas of town life. In his defence, Gokal Prasad, how¬ ever, presented another explanation of the affair, which, irrespec¬ tive of its truth, suggests that other old alliances were also under assault during these years. 1 Home Poll. ‘A’, Dec. 1914, 1-4. N.A.I. 2 Independent, 30 Mar. 1919; G.U.P. to G.O.I., 2 May 1919, Home Poll. ‘D\ July 1919, 47, N.A.I. 3 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 18 Apr. 1921, Home Poll. ‘D’, June 1921, 13, N.A.I. * Leader, 13-15 Apr. 1918. 5 Leader, 2 Jan. 1918, 21 May 1919. 6 The Defence of B. Gokal Prasad, Subjudge (Trade Journal Press, Allahabad, 1916).

242

The Drift into Radicalism

In Allahabad there is a party of young pleaders, who have very little work and who, on account of my being too technical and less obliging, are much dissatisfied; and as now comes to light are under the impres¬ sion that I show undue favours to Mahommedan vakils Mir Abid Ali and Sheikh Abdul Haq [members of Baqi Khan’s faction]. This is not a fact. Both these pleaders are seniors and have commanded a good practice for a long time and do their work in such a way as not to allow me any occasion for raising any sort of objection.1 In the years after 1910, local publicists were evidently becoming powerful allies, as well as enemies to fear, as far as subordinate officials were concerned. In 1917, for instance, Sardar Mangal Singh was removed from his post of kotwal of Allahabad after a communal clash in which he played a controversial, and sup¬ posedly pro-Hindu, part. This resulted in a sustained outcry from the politicians of the Abhyudaya group2 which very nearly caused the government to retract. Indeed, in small ways, the decisive shift of influence from the government officer to the local publicists had already begun. The next half-century was to see even the lordly collector reduced in stature. But the position of officials did not come seriously under pressure until after the MontaguChelmsford Reforms. For it was not until 1920 that politicians and publicists were enabled to bring in the patronage and pres¬ tige of provincial government to redress the balance of local power. Local influence generated status, and status was still a heavy¬ weight to be thrown on the political balance. In the new politics of franchises and regional political interest groups in the 1920s and ’30s, the man with the most advantages would often be a man closely linked by birth to magnate families or to the rural lineages who had managed to acquire education and professional status as well. But he could no longer claim a following simply as a town rais. A complex of political and economic forces had pushed these magnates out of the strategic position they had hitherto occupied at the centre of a variety of webs of patronage. They remained powerful at neighbourhood level, but in wider encounters, the position was more uncertain and more complex. The holding net of town-wide control, always flimsy, had been weakened; the local 1 Ibid., p. 79. 2 See pamphlet ‘Must Hindus and Mussulmans Fight?’ (Allahabad, c. 1917) in possession of Sri Padma Kant Malaviya, Allahabad.

The Political Outlook

243

authorities and incipient political parties were drawn into a sharper melee. THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK

In 1910, Harcourt Butler, who drew his examples and much of his experience from the United Provinces, wrote a pithy and acute assessment of the ‘political out-look in India’.1 He noted the apparent quiescence of the situation and the enhanced power of the executive. The Reforms had ‘checked the predominant influence of the professional politicians and the educated class’. They had ‘accentuated the antagonism of creeds and groups of Hindus and Mohammedans, of the old and new ideas in each community ... of professional men and the landed aristocracy, of lawyers and men of business’. They had ‘drowned nationalism in provincial and local sentiment’. But within five years, govern¬ ment in north India was facing its greatest political crisis yet, and the novel prospect of established political leaders contemplating the abandonment of the organs of local government within which their political ambitions had been successfully contained since the mid-i88os. The First World War undoubtedly acted as a catalyst to politics, and social change had perceptibly broadened the political community at local as well as regional level. But Butler could also have argued a more pessimistic set of conse¬ quences from his own premises. By broadening the basis of representative institutions and by accentuating fissiparous tendencies within provincial and local political communities, the Reforms had released younger men, radicals, and local dissidents from the control of existing inter¬ mediaries, whether publicist or notable. At the same time the broad categories of ‘landlords’ and ‘Muslims’ which government had introduced in its scheme alienated populist groups which employed the rhetoric of Hindu revivalism, and also the orthodox town Hindus whom Butler saw as a key force in provincial politics. The ‘mild, progressive policy’ which he regarded as important in perpetuating the divisions of Indian political groups, was vitiated first by the aftermath of the extremist movement, then by the wartime clampdown and stagnation of political advance. Most seriously, at the local level, important changes had taken place 1 ‘Note on the Political Out-look in India’, Minto Papers, Box 232, 5, National Library of Scotland.

244

The Drift into Radicalism

which were to shift the balance of local control decisively against the colonial government. The advance in local self-government, signalled by the Decentralization Commission and demanded by the greater sophistication of local political society, had deposited crucial powers into Indian hands. By 1924, British officials were to complain that their influence in the municipalities was gone and that it was ebbing in the district boards.1 Butler’s moral, distilled in 1910 from a decade of political observation, was That India is non-political, and that the only permanent political parties are the party for the Government which is always in power, and the party against it, which is always in opposition. Other combinations are transitory.2

By 1916, progressive professional men, many of whom were associated with the Congress, were rapidly becoming the ‘party in power’ at the local level of politics. 1 Chief Sec. G U.P. to Sec. G.O.I., 2 July 1924, Home Poll. 1924, 270, N.A.I. 2 Butler, ‘Note’.

IX THE NON-COOPERATION MOVEMENT IN ALLAHABAD, 1918-1922

T

years from 1918-22 saw the coincidence of an economic crisis with much political uncertainty and a great upsurge of popular feeling. But there was no violent change either in the objectives of local politics or in the groups which partici¬ pated in them. The economic crisis was brought about by the culmination of the sharp rise in prices which had begun about 1905. It was deepened by the results of the dislocation caused by the First World War.1 In the town, fixed-income groups, especially government servants, students, and school-teachers were hard pressed by the high price of foodstuffs and shortages of essential goods. But the rentier classes of service gentry and small non¬ resident landlords were also under pressure. Their personal cul¬ tivation was minimal, so they gained little benefit from the pricerise in cash crops; attempts to revive lapsed dues in kind or labour services merely sparked off a reaction amongst the village¬ controlling tenants.2 The Doab, in particular, saw sharp confron¬ tations between service gentry, tenants, and village menials which complicated political alliances in the town.3 Bad harvests, the influenza epidemic of 1918, and the ending of wartime contracts he

1 The economic background to these years can be traced in annual U.P. Revenue Administration Reports, U.P. Police Reports (which give figures for riots and affrays), and Census of India, 1921 and 1931 (which summarize seasons and price levels). Information on Allahabad is available in papers appended to annual revenue and police administration reports, depts. VII and XII, C.A., especially revenue report for 1921. 2 Even small-scale cultivators often failed to benefit, see revenue administra¬ tion report, 1915-16, dept. XII, C.A. Increased tension between service gentry and tenants had already been noted; it appears to have been exacerbated by 1913-16 settlement operations, S.R. 1916, p. 29. 3 Bayly, ‘The Development of Political Organization’, pp. 360-91. There is evidence that town politicians deliberately refrained from capitalizing on dissidences among the middle tenantry because ‘there was the likelihood of the kisans and the landlords falling at each others’ throats at the critical juncture when they [the Congress leaders] wanted both to unite,’ P. D. Tandon at a Kisan Sabha Conference, Allahabad, 1924, Leader, 12 June 1924.

246

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

also afflicted sections of the population whose‘economic outlook in the previous few years had apparently been improving. Frus¬ tration was expressed in sharp challenges to authority. General unease was deepened by apocalyptic bazaar rumours and by a revival of millenarian activity in the arcane world of itinerant holy men. A crisis of administration was closely related to this. In the 1880s, service groups had been perturbed by problems connected with admission to the services, but the concern after 1916 was one of remuneration. Lower revenue servants, patwaris, kanungos, and the police were in near-mutiny because of the inadequacy of their wages, at the very time when the authorities were facing a major political challenge.1 Government added fuel to the fire in trying to reap the benefit from higher prices by increasing the returns from its farms and auctions. This drove distillers and other entrepreneurs into reaction.2 The better harvests of 1922 and ’23, and rounds of wage increases, improved the situation. The year 1923 also saw a general conservative reaction to disorder in the countryside. Government’s increased success in enlisting the help of men of local influence and even of erstwhile radical lecturers was apparent in the Loyal Leagues which sprang up during that year. Yet doubts about the political future were not abated. Politicians had come to realize that the electoral structure had been completely overhauled and that new powers were avail¬ able to them.3 Imperial rule had secured respite, for quarrels over patronage and the inability of any town-based group to capitalize, as yet, on the new rural franchises ensured that the 1920s were to be years of tension and division. While the years 1917-19 saw social and economic dislocation in Allahabad on a scale unprecedented since the 1880s, the town was by no means in the grip of a permanent or mounting political crisis which reached its peak with the emergence of Gandhi. On

1 Abhyudaya, 1 Jan., 7 Feb. 1921; Report on the Administration of Land Records in the United Provinces, 1920—1 (Allahabad, 1921), p. 3. 2 Report on the Excise Administration of the United Provinces for 1921-2 (.Allahabad, 1922), pp. 14-15; Independent, 16 Feb. 1921. 3 About 28,000 people in Allahabad were enfranchised; the vast majority of these were zamindars paying more than Rs. 25 land revenue and tenants paying more than Rs. 50 rent; politicians calculated on zamindari domination of the electorate for some years, see ‘Proposals of the Government of the United Provinces,’ evidence before the Reforms Committee (Franchise), 1919, I.O.L., J. and P. Papers (Reforms), 1919, 427, I.O.L.

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

247

the contrary, the dominant feature of this period was the extent to which public political life seemed to have retreated to the narrow boundaries of the swadeshi period. Despite a hostile reaction to the form of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report from all except the Leader group, the Kayastha Pathshala intelligentsia, and T. B. Sapru,1 both Malaviya’s supporters2 and the Nehrus seemed to be the process of resigning themselves to the slow rate of political advance. The outbursts of anger in the town over the ‘Punjab wrongs’ and the Delhi disturbances, or even the real fury with which Motilal Nehru greeted the Hunter Report,3 did not seem, on the face of it, more likely to shatter the political priorities of the local leaders than did the arrest of Lajpat Rai and the Sedi¬ tious Meetings Act of a decade previously. There were, in fact, many points of comparison between the late War years and the swadeshi period. The political movement of 1915 and 1916 had been arrested by the Secretary of State’s declaration of August 1917. Most associates of the Congress, par¬ ticularly educationists or the Hindu lobby, who were at last within sight of taking real power in the municipalities and the semblance of power in the Council, had as much to gain by cooperation with the government in 1918 as they had in 1907. The old lines of political faction still held. They were broken only by Shyam Lai Nehru, whose distaste for western habits4 impelled him into the Malaviya camp, and by Kapil Deva Malaviya, whose social radicalism made of him a convert to the Nehrus. Resentment between the two leaders, which had sprung from Motilal’s scep¬ ticism of Malaviya’s moral postures, flared up from time to time during these years.5 But neither allied themselves with the western Indian nationalists grouped around Horniman’s Bombay Chronicle and Gandhi’s Gujerati supporters. The indications are that Motilal at first found Gandhi as tiresome and faddist as Malaviya, and 1 Leader, 12, 14, and 22 Aug. 1918; reports and discussions of the United Provinces Special Conference, G.U.P. to G.O.I., 3 Feb. 1918, Home Poll. ‘D’, Mar. 1918, 39, N.A.I. 2 Substantial differences over the Reforms had arisen between Malaviya and Chintamani before August 1920. See Chintamani to Srinivasa Sastri, 28 May 1918, Sastri Papers, N.A.I. 3 See Nehru’s correspondence regarding Congress Punjab Enquiry Com¬ mission August-November 1919, N.P. 4 Note on Shyam Lai Nehru, Home Poll. 66 of 1923, N.A.I. 5 Over the treatment of Malaviya’s ‘peasant’ delegates at the 1919 Congress, and over the management of the sessions’ committees. l.R.i.p.—9*

248

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

tended to assume some kind of political pact between them. Both politicians certainly came under increasing pressure from their more radical supporters grouped in the Satyagraha Sabha of the spring of 1919 and later from the deepening appeal of the Khilafat move¬ ment. To begin with, however, the Bombay-based extremism of 1919 was no more successful than the Calcutta-based extremism of 1907. Both movements failed to find a real base with the local asso¬ ciates of Congress or to seize control of the organization itself. THE SATYAGRAHA SABHA-—1907 AGAIN?

The Allahabad Satyagraha Sabha was founded in response to Gandhi’s call for passive resistance in the face of the Rowlatt Act. Its secretary and main activist was Sundar Lai, the extremist of 1907 who had emerged from retirement to edit the Bhavishya, the only newspaper in the Provinces which consistently supported Gandhi prior to the summer of 1920. The radicals made their first foray onto the political scene at a meeting of the Home Rule League held under Motilal Nehru’s presidency on 2 March 1919. Their object was to discuss Gandhi’s call for passive resistance. But from the outset Motilal Nehru made it clear that he regarded the issue as one of individual conscience and that he personally would not submit to a decision on the right attitude to ‘other laws’ (legislation other than the Rowlatt Act) made in Bombay ‘by a potential committee whose personnel he did not know’.1 Among younger men there was some support for the call for a general passive resistance and P. D. Tandon, for instance, thought that to resist effectively even the Rowlatt Acts, ‘what was required was to break some such law the breaking of which could at once be noted by the executive.’2 But nothing substantial was decided and at the end of the meeting Sundar Lai announced, in the tradition of 1907, that a further meeting would be held for those who were prepared to sign the ‘satyagraha pledge’.3 Nehru denied Sundar Lai’s authority for this declaration in his capacity as chairman of both the town Congress committee and the Home Rule League,4 but fifty names were said to have been collected in Allahabad by the time Gandhi himself arrived there some days later.5 Within a few weeks a provincial Satyagraha 1 Independent, 4 Mar. 1919. 2 Leader, 5 Mar. 1919. See, R. Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics: the Rowlatt Satyagraha 0/1919 (Oxford, 1971). 4 Independent, 4 Mar. 1919. 5 Independent, 13 Mar. 1919.

3

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

249

Sabha composed largely of residents of Allahabad had also appeared and the membership of this committee gives some idea of the most radical politicians in the early months of 1919. Of twelve members of the committee,1 six were Muslim publicists, which suggests that it was they who led the local pressure to extremism even before the full development of the Khilafat movement; and of these, two had clear Bombay connections. But though these individuals tended to adhere to the Zahur Ahmad faction in local politics, they were far more advanced in their attitude to cooperation with the Congress, had few electoral or social interests, and were of little note in local society compared with the later leaders of the Khilafat movement. In this, again, they were more akin to the few Muslim publicists whom the swadeshi lecturers managed to recruit to their colours in 1907, than to the non-cooperators of 1920. The Hindus connected with the Satyagraha Sabha were on the fringes of both the major political groups in the town. There were three members of the Malaviya group who had been associated with the Sewa Samiti’s Punjab mission,2 and in addition to Manzar Ali Sokhta, two members of the Nehru group, Jawaharalal and his cousin, Mohan Lai Nehru. Gandhi’s assault on the Rowlatt Acts undoubtedly gained much wider tacit support. Among those who demonstrated their anger by attending his meetings, against the advice of Nehru, Malaviya, and Iswar Saran, were members of the staff of the Independent, Anandi Prasad Dube, V. N. Tiwari, and a large number of women, including ladies in purdah.3 However, the satyagraha movement itself made no appreciable impact on Allahabad’s political life for some weeks.4 At the beginning of March when news of the disturbances in Delhi 1 Leader, 3 Apr. 1919. The Muslims were: Sayyid Hussain, deputy-editor of Nehru’s Independent who had been ‘lent’ to the newspaper by the Bombay Chronicle in January 1919; Shaikh Hamid Ahmed, a dyer by profession and a scrap-metal merchant, who had been externed from Bombay in June 1916 under the Defence of India Act; Manzar Ali Sokhta, the student leader of 1907; Hyder Mehdi, Shia and ‘political suspect’; Kamaluddin Ahmed Jaffry, extremist lawyer; and Mohiuddin, a poor merchant connected with the Khudam-i-Kaaba. The last three had all been associated with Hindu politics since the 1910s. 2 Purshottam Das Tandon; Inder Narayan Dwivedi, general-secretary of the Kisan Sabha; and Ram Naresh Tripathi, resident of Benares, officer of the Kisan Sabha, and later biographer of Malaviya. 3 Independent, 13 Mar. 1919. 4 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 18 Apr. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1919, 47, N.A.I.

250

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

reached the town some semblance of support’was temporarily manifested, and a successful strike organized through panchayats and supported by the political leaders took place.1 Malaviya, who was well-connected in Delhi, admitted differences with Gandhi but called for a common front on the ‘Delhi outrages’. Then, for the first time since the autumn of 1917, the situation became really unsettled. Political disquiet was deepened by a sudden leap in prices, a shortage of essential items such as kero¬ sene, and by strikes on the post and railways.2 Cut the extremists were still unable to do more than capitalize on public irritation. By the beginning of July, Gandhi’s own failure to take a strong lead, the onset of hot weather, and misgivings amongst Hindus over the Afghan War, brought the cause to its lowest ebb. Having pre¬ viously bided its time, government stepped in to prosecute Sundar Lai under section 108 of the Criminal Code.3 4 He avoided arrest for the time by moving to Bombay to seek funds for the languishing BhavishyaA THE EMERGENCE OF THE KHILAFAT MOVEMENT

The turmoil among the Muslims began almost as tamely, but sporadic agitations for the release of the Ali brothers, imprisoned under wartime regulations merged imperceptibly into the Khilafat movement during the spring and summer of 1919. The Muslim protagonists were much the same initially and drew their inspira¬ tion and funds from the ularna of Faranghi Mahal or from Bom¬ bay. They too made little impact. The Nai Roshni, whose editor, Wahid Yah Khan, had called for prayers for the interned Ali brothers in the Jama Masjid in 1918,5 6 had ceased publication. A new paper, the Muslim Herald, adhered to the relatively moderate line propagated at this time by Sayyid Hussain and the Inde¬ pendentA But the all-India Muslim leaders were not impressed. In May 1919 the C.I.D. intercepted a letter from Shaukat Ali to the Herald in which he advised the paper to proclaim as an avenger the Amir of Afghanistan, with whom India was at war. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Independent, 7 Apr. 1919. G.U.P. to G.O.I., 2 May 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1919, 47, N.A.I. G.U.P. to G.O.I., 30 June 1919, Home Poll.' D’, Aug. 1919, 51, N.A.I. G.U.P. to G.O.I., 17 July 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, Aug. 1919, 54, N.A.I. G.U.P. to G.O.I., 17 Mar. 1918, Home Poll. ‘D’, May 1918, 21, N.A.I. G.U.P. to G.O.I., 4 Jan. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, Jan. 1919, 42, N.A.I.

The Emergence of the Khilafat Movement

251

This attitude, he claimed, was shared by Gandhi.1 Still, little coherent political activity took place. The few public meetings held by itinerant lecturers in the Muslim areas of the town since 1916 continued.2 The Khuddam-i-Kaaba secret society held its clandestine meetings, while Hamid Ahmed, its local organizer, was trying to arrange for the publication in pamphlet form of Dr. Ansari’s recent inflammatory addresses on the Khilafat problem.3 Amongst the mass of the Muslim publicists, Gandhi’s call for satycigraha seems to have caused even less stir. Both the Cawnpore and the Allahabad ulama were averse to taking part in the move¬ ment,4 despite the feverish attempts of Abdul Bari at Lucknow to obtain religious pronouncements in its favour. As far as the local political leaders were concerned, in fact, the situation still hung in the balance that had held since the Lucknow Pact. The unity between the local ‘Hindu Sabha’ and Zahur Ahmed’s faction in municipal politics held long enough to sweep the old Muslim patrons, led by Baqi Khan, off the Board in March 1919. But immediately, Tandon, K. K. Malaviya and others brought up the question of additional Hindu representation and most Muslim leaders except Jaffry and Hamid Ahmed closed ranks once again behind the conservatives in opposition to them.5 Similarly, though the worst of the communal tension which had charac¬ terized late 1917 had subsided, the riots in other parts of India served to strengthen the hands of conservatives and heads of the old corporations who were averse to compromise. The orthodox of both communities were also offended by the increasing use of temples and mosques for political purposes.6 The Muslim leader¬ ship had as little reason as the rank and file to follow the more extreme anti-government line of the Delhi Muslim League. Riza Ali, a radical lawyer from the west of the United Provinces who might have been expected to take a lead in view of his connections with the Ali brothers,7 was essentially a practical politician and his 1 Weekly report of Director Central Intelligence, 26 May 1919, Home Poll. ‘B’, June 1919, 497. N.A.I, 2 53 G.A.D. of 1918, U.P.S. 3 G.U.P. to G.O.I., s Feb. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D\ Feb. 1919, 42, N.A.I. 4 See Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, ch. IX; G.U.P. to G.O.I., 22 Mar. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, Apr. 1919, 48, N.A.I. 5 Independent, 30 May 1919; Board debates, 28, 29 May 1919. 6 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 2 May 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1919, 47, N.A.I. 7 Riza Ali was senior counsel to the Ali brothers during their internment.

252

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

deep distrust of the Lucknow Pact1 paralleled the attitude which his local colleague, Zahur Ahmed, held in regard to increased Hindu representation on the Municipal Board. Clearly, con¬ siderable pressure would be required to push these two men into a thoroughgoing political alliance with the Congress. Yet there can be no doubt of the effect of the deepening of the Turkish crisis on Muslim opinion and on the political situation in the United Provinces as a whole. In Allahabad, both those cautious pan-Islamists, Riza Ali and Zahur Ahmed, were quick to sign the general manifesto to the British populace put out by the all-India leaders.2 By the end of September, the activists had even succeeded in getting Maulana Vilayat Hussain and his rival Mahomed Fakhir on a platform for the first time. They appeared alongside radical Hindus such as Tandon and Krishna Kant Malaviya. A public meeting was also staged to demand the ‘re¬ demption of pledges’ given on the Turkish question by the Secretary of State.3 Once the cry of religion in danger had been raised few, however powerful in the community, could or would resist it. The extreme politicians were in a position to secure the support or at least acquiescence of their opponents amongst the raises of the community, men such as Baqi Khan and Mir Khairuddin Hussain, who both became involved in Khilafat deputations and meetings before the end of 1919.4 The real depth of feeling on the Khilafat issue was reflected in the fraternization which took place during the Dussehra-Mohurrum of early October when ‘the city fathers’ patrolled the streets, Hindu and Muslim leaders embraced each other, and Muslim butchers exchanged betelnut and cigarettes with passing Hindus instead of lathi blows.5 As elsewhere in the Provinces, the con¬ current celebration of the first anniversary of the Armistice was used by the nationalists as a convenient symbol against which to direct popular feeling. At first, attempts by Shyam Lai Nehru, Manzar Ali Sokhta, and others to break up the meetings convened to arrange the celebrations failed. But the resolutions of the Delhi Khilafat Conference decidedly affected the attitude of the Mus1 See Riza Ali’s suggestion of a separate address from the Provincial Muslim League to the Secretary of State, Notes and orders, 26 Oct. 1917, 552 G.A.D. of 1917, U.P.S. 2 Independent, 7 Sept. 1919. 3 Independent, 18 Sept. 1919; Leader, 19 Sept. 1919. 4 Independent, 17 Oct. 1919. 5 Leader, 18 Sept. 1919.

The Emergence of the Khilafat Movement

253

lims,1 and many, including Vilayat Hussain himself, withdrew from participation. It was reported that ‘the extremists appear to have got most of the city on their side’;2 and they were able to make use of their newly won power on the Municipal Board to organize an opposition and threaten a civil suit for misappropria¬ tion of the Boards’ funds,3 should the Board vote for peace cele¬ brations at such a time of ‘national mourning’. The adherence of Maulana Vilayat Hussain to the Khilafat movement was perhaps the most striking single result of the revelation of the Turkish peace terms. For his family history since 1857 had been one of close cooperation with the British Government. His reasons were entirely connected with his faith, to an extent that some of the Hindu extremists affected to regard him as a police spy and no real well-wisher of the ‘Hindu-Muslim alliance’. Muslims, he said, ‘could not be the dutiful spiritual sub¬ jects of the Caliph unless he retained his power and temporal grandeur’.4 But though at first Vilayat Hussain refused to join either the officially sponsored peace celebrations or the anti-peace celebrations arranged by the nationalists,5 his attitude to govern¬ ment quickly hardened. At the Delhi joint Hindu-Muslim Khilafat Conference of 24 November 1919, he supported the non¬ cooperation motion of Sayyid Hussain of the Independent and Abdul Bari of the Lucknow seminary, Faranghi Mahal, stated that he would give up the title Rai Bahadur granted him by govern¬ ment, and said that further connection with the government would be ‘tantamount to killing their faith’.6 Vilayat Hussain went on to serve on the committee appointed by the conference to devise ways of severing this connection, and throughout the winter and spring of 1920 he was an active lecturer on the Khilafat issue in Allahabad and in neighbouring towns along with other con1 Leader, 9 Nov. 1919. 2 ‘Attempts to tamper with the Army’, Home Poll. ‘A’, Feb. 1921, 334, p. 55, N.A.I. 3 Special Bureau report on the Khilafat Conference, Home Poll. ‘D’, Apr. 1920, 19, N.A.I. 4 Independent, 12 Oct. 1919. 5 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 17 Dec. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, June 1920, 49, N.A.I. This Conference was held on 24 November 1919. Allahabad delegates were Riza Ali, Vilayat Hussain, Zahur Ahmed, Sayyid Hussain, M'r Khairuddin Hussain, honorary magistrate, Sayyid Hyder Mehdi, Shah Mahomed Rashid (Mahomed Fakhir), sajjada nashin, Jaffry, Shamsuddin Hyder, contractor, and Mir Mubiruddin, zamindar. Independent, 19 Nov. 1919. 6 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 1 Dec. 1919, Home Poll. ‘D’, June 1920, 44, N.A.I.

254

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

servative members of the Jamiaat-ul-Ulama (Ulama Association) such as Maulvi Abdul Kafi. Yet unlike Sayyid Mahomed Fakhir, Vilayat Hussain always strictly adhered to the spirit of passive resistance. This, and the high esteem with which he was regarded by the conservative classes, probably saved him from prosecution by government. Mahomed Fakhir of the rival religious establishment which had, as we have seen, a history of political involvement with radical Congress leaders, was from the first a determined radical. At the Bombay Khilafat Conference of December 1919 the Special Branch reported that he had gone so far as to urge a ‘BolshevikIslamic Combination’ against British Imperialism;1 both Mahomed Fakhir and Hamid Ahmed were unusually active in all the frenetic conferences which resulted in the takeover of the Khilafat Com¬ mittee by Gandhi and the Ali brothers. In the new year, when more and more details of the form of the Turkish peace terms became available, Mahomed Fakhir’s speeches became steadily more inflammatory. At Allahabad on 22 February 1920 he worked up a crowd of artisans to fever pitch. Between 14 and 19 March he made a tour from Benares to Basti.2 He followed this with radical speeches at the Meerut Provincial Khilafat Conference on 22 March, then at the Home Rule Offices in Allahabad on 9 April, and finally on 5 April at the Cawnpore Ulama Conference. Prose¬ cution followed swiftly under section 108 of the Criminal Code. On 17 May 1920 he attended court ‘presenting a most picturesque appearance in his pontifical robes and pink hood’.3 He was ordered to pay securities, refused, and was led in triumph to jail, escorted by crowds shouting ‘Allah Akbar!’. Despite the Becket-like outbursts of its leading pastors, the Allahabad ulama was hardly a militant body. The Calcutta ulti¬ matum, which was virtually a declaration of holy war, adopted in the explosive west of the Province, was never affirmed at Allahabad.4 The Allahabad Khilafat Committee, still dominated by moderates like Zahur Ahmed and Riza Ali, did not threaten the government with ‘consequences’ over the prosecutions even of its own leaders, as did those of Agra, Delhi, and Lucknow.5 1 2 3 4 5

Independent, 30 Nov. 1919. Report on hartal, 19 Mar. 1920, Home Poll. ‘D’, Apr. 1920, 9, N.A.I. Leader, 19 May 1920; also Leader, 9, 16, 17 May 1920. Home Poll. ‘D’, Apr. 1920, g, N.A.I. Leader, 16 May 1920.

The Emergence of the Khilafat Movement

255

Throughout the Khilafat movement in the town, the maulvis in fact reflected the political platform, rather than vice versa and in 1923 the body of the ulama quickly retreated to a moderate stand and the traditional opposition to Hindu corporations, revived by the shudhi and sangathan movements or reconversion to Hin¬ duism,1 some time before the Khilafat was pronounced dead and buried by Attaturk. If the traditionalism and orthodoxy of Allaha¬ bad’s Muslim religious made the ‘clash of allegiances’ a real problem for them, the parochial attitude from which it arose made it equally impossible for most of them to convert themselves into a political cell, as did elements in the militant seminaries of Deoband and Faranghi Mahal. Of more significance, and danger to the authorities, were the activities of the agents of the Khilafat committees who appeared in the countryside and country towns of eastern United Provinces in the spring of 1920.2 Often of lower-class origin as petty traders or weavers,3 these individuals were responsible for the politicians’ first push into the small towns, which was later consolidated during the ‘volunteer board’ struggle of late 1921. The foundation in district towns and large villages of Khilafat and Congress com¬ mittees during non-cooperation was a more permanent feature of political development than even the peasant associations amongst the Kurmis and Ahirs, and they were later incorporated into the Congress district board electoral organization during more settled times. In Allahabad, artisans and weavers formed a substantial proportion of the population of small towns such as Kara, Phulpur, Sayyid Sarawan, and Soraon. The pious lower classes here were depressed by the long-term decline of small industries, such as weaving, cloth-printing, and brass-making, and also by the general conditions of the year 1920. They proved a fertile field for itinerant lecturers. The first prosecution of Hamid Ahmed of the Khuddam-i-Kaaba in fact resulted from speeches that he had made in the courtyard of a mosque at Kara to a curious audience of bhatiyaras or Muslim ‘inn-keepers’, travellers, and horsedealers.4 So also, Khilafat meetings and collections for the Angora 1 Allahabad disturbances, Home Poll. 249-XII of 1924, N.A.I. 2 C.I.D. report, 10 May 1920, Home Poll. ‘D’, June 1920, 78, N.A.I. 3 Release of persons connected with political movements in the United Provinces, Home Poll. 56—IV of 1923, N.A.I. * Independent, 10, 17, and 26 Mar. 1920.

256

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad.

and Smyrna Relief Funds took place in large bazaars such as Sayyid Sarawan, Mahgaon, Kara, and Sirsa. The Khilafatists formed the spearhead of non-cooperation in Allahabad. Five out of the first nine students and schoolchildren who withdrew or were withdrawn from colleges and schools after the visit of Gandhi and the Ali brothers in November 1920 were Muslims.1 Three out of the first five sub-inspectors of police who withdrew from the service at the same time were also Muslims. Jaffry, Hyder Mehdi, and Zahur Ahmed were among the seven major lawyers in Allahabad who suspended their practices. The cloth boycott was at first propagated largely among the Muslims by Jaffry and Hyder Mehdi who declared flatly that ‘Government was at war with Islam’.2 The Muslim press and especially broad¬ sheets like Khilafat were also notably more hostile than Hindu organs in the early phase and accounted for five out of the seven forfeitures of deposit in the town before November 1921.3 COUNCIL BOYCOTT AT ALLAHABAD

If the pressure of the Muslim political community was res¬ ponsible for so many of the tactical developments of the non¬ cooperation movement, was it not also responsible for the most remarkable political development of the period, the decision to boycott the reformed Councils? The attraction of this theory is that it provides an explanation of an apparent sudden break in the continuity of local political traditions and aspirations which had hitherto centred on the need to control the Provincial Council and the social expenditure of the local government. As late as 16 June 1920, these considerations still clearly held between the Provinces’ two foremost political leaders. Motilal Nehru wrote: I think Malaviya and I should make up our minds about the Council elections. ... It will be too late to do anything if we sit tight till the Special Congress has met. As far as I can see, it is not likely that the 1 File (5) of 1920, A.I.C.C., ‘Non-cooperators from various districts’; Independent, Oct.-Nov. 1920. 2 Collr. to Commr., Allahabad Division, 23 Sept. 1921 (end.), G.A.D. 568 ot 1921, U.P.S. See also A.I.C.C. (5) of 1921, ‘boycott of foreign goods’, Con¬ gress circular dated 22 July 1921 urging organization of weavers to produce handspun yarn. 3 United Provinces Gazette, Nov. 1920, Pt. VI, statement of forfeitures of presses under the Press Act.

Council Boycott at Allahabad

257

Congress as such will bind itself to N.C.O. It is too big an organization for this.1 Did Nehru and his associates later concur in the decision of the Calcutta Congress because of great pressure from the Muslim leadership which might have been expected to split the Lucknow alliance altogether if the Congressmen had not taken heed of it? The answer appears to be that Muslim politicians both in the United Provinces delegation and throughout India were primarily responsible for the success of the non-cooperators in securing a favourable result.2 But there is little evidence of any overwhelming desire for Council boycott among the established local Muslim leaders at Allahabad, or even amongst the advanced Khilafatists. On the contrary, the aims of the Muslim leaders had been firmly centred on the Council since 1916, when they first achieved a measure of success against the larger landowners of their own community. Indeed the zamindari background and interests of many of the Muslim leaders guaranteed them a much greater likelihood of success in the forthcoming elections than could be expected among town Congress politicians, who foresaw complete landlord domination of their general electorates.3 Strictly, then, there was even less reason for Muslim leaders to boycott the Councils than for the Congressmen. Moreover, non-cooperation had never been clearly interpreted as including Council boycott. Far from being lightly sacrificed in the interests of religious solidarity, disputes over the Council seats in Allahabad seriously threatened the unity of the Khilafat Committee itself during May and June 1920.4 The resolution of this conflict indicates what Council boycott might actually have meant to a Muslim local politician. On 14 May 1920, Zahur Ahmed wrote to the Leader suggesting that Riza Ali ought not to stand for the Allahabad-Benares Muslim urban seat, but should find an amenable constituency in his native Rohilkhand.5 His own personal services to the community were well known, Zahur Ahmed proclaimed, and besides, he had 1 Motilal to Jawaharlal Nehru, 16 June 1920, N.P. 2 J. M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power (Cambridge, 1972), p. 269. 3 Evidence of U.P. Congress Committee, Motilal Nehru and M. M. Malaviya, ‘Evidence before the Reforms Committee (Franchise)’, i. 108-12, J. and P. Papers (Reforms), 1919, 407-90, I-O.L. 4 G.U.P. to G.O.E, 31 May 1920, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1920, 96, N.A.I. 5 Leader, 17 May 1920.

258

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

announced his candidature sometime before Riza Ali. But at this stage much ot the local Khilafat Committee supported Riza Ali who was experienced and respected beyond Allahabad. Zahur Ahmed was regarded as rather disreputable. Kamaluddin Jaffry, a long-time supporter of Zahur Ahmed in Allahabad Municipal Board politics, wrote that it was a question of provincial versus local requirements, and that Zahur Ahmed had, in fact, promised to withdraw should Riza Ali be unable to find a suitable Rohilkhand seat.1 But Zahur Ahmed was still able to pick up some local support. To reinforce his position, he made a shrewd attempt to corner extremist Khilafat goodwill by emerging, rather abruptly, as a leading supporter of the movement at the very time when Riza Ali had already declared himself adamantly opposed to non¬ cooperation in the columns of the Independent. During the controversy, the Khilafat movement as a whole took a lurch in the direction of more extreme policies and Gandhi’s programme of non-cooperation in four stages was endorsed by an Allahabad Muslim conference of 2-4 June 1920 which was held, significantly, in Zahur Ahmed’s own house.2 At this meeting Riza Ali and his supporters already labelled ‘moderates’ were defeated at a meeting dominated by allegedly ‘young and irresponsible persons’ who voted in favour of all stages of non-cooperation.3 The pressure for non-cooperation was indeed building up within Allahabad, but council boycott itself was still a matter in dispute. On 13 June, Yakub Hassan of the local Khilafat Committee issued a circular stating that the committee would support the candidates who were not predisposed ‘to equivocate in this matter of national life and death’.4 Zahur Ahmed took his cue and at a meeting in Allahabad on 17 June, at which Riza Ali was not present, he gave ‘full support’ to all major points in the non-cooperation pro¬ gramme and castigated office-holders and the ‘upper classes’.5 Yet according to a later report, even at this stage he still managed to advocate the return to the Councils of members who would non-cooperate from within.6 Hitherto, then, Zahur Ahmed seems to have outrun Riza Ali in loyalty to non-cooperation partly as an 1 Leader, 31 May 1920. 2 Weekly report of D.C.I., 7 and 14 June 1920, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1920, 13, N.A.I. 3 G.U.P. to G.O.I., 16 June 1920, Home Poll. ‘D’, July 1920, N.A.I. 4 A. R. Khan to Leader, 15 July 1920. 5 Independent, 23 June 1920. 6 A. R. Khan to Leader, 15 July 1920.

Council Boycott at Allahabad

259

electioneering tactic, probably in the belief that there would never be a wholesale Congress-Khilafat swing to Council boycott. But when Hafiz Alam Junaidy, secretary of the local Anjuman Khuddam-i-Watan, put forward its official list of candidates, Zahur Ahmed still did not appear alongside the names of Jaffry, Hyder Mehdi, and Riza Ali.1 Zahur Ahmed’s dilemma was unexpectedly resolved, and all calculations thrown to the winds on 2 June, when the Khilafat Non-cooperation Committee, which had been sitting for nearly a month, declared in favour of full Council boycott. Zahur Ahmed immediately began to reap credit from not having officially announced his candidature. Yet faction had already bitten so deep that his opponents still would not believe that he did not intend to stand for election himself. Junaidy’s next circular crying ‘Islam in danger’ and urging Council boycott was addressed specifically to Zahur Ahmed although he had still not announced his candidature. Abdul Razzak Khan, one of Zahur Ahmed’s close supporters, wrote angrily that all this was merely a tactic by their opponents to force Zahur Ahmed to withdraw from the election, so that Riza Ali could be returned unopposed. Yet he mentioned in the same letter that it was well known that Zahur Ahmed had been a supporter of full non-cooperation all along;2 for that matter, what were the positions of Jaffry and Hyder Mehdi, he inquired. In fact, far from being irresistibly swept along by panIslamic sentiment into Council boycott, neither finally withdrew their candidature until September when the verdict of the special session of Congress in favour of boycott was known.3 Meanwhile, Abdul Razzak Khan (who now took up Zahur Ahmed’s seat), along with Riza Ali and Abdul Majid of Jaunpur, went on to contest the elections in spite of the Khilafat Committee. This political burlesque in which Zahur Ahmed played sausageseller to Riza Ali’s Cleon was more than an embarrassing interlude for Allahabad’s nationalist politicians for it illustrates that, far from pressing Council boycott on unwilling Congress colleagues, the local Muslim politicians waited to the last moment before 1 Junaidy to Leader, 4 July 1920. Junaidy seems to have secured a provisional statement in favour of all stages of N.C.O. from Riza Ali to satisfy his extremist colleagues which was printed in Hamdard (Lucknow) June 26; but whether this included boycott was still in dispute. 2 A. R. Khan to Leader, 15 July 1920. 3 File (5) of 1920, A.I.C.C., non-cooperators in various districts.

260

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

burning their electoral boats. Those who finally Withdrew included two individuals who had little chance of election: Zahur Ahmed himself, and Hyder Mehdi, a Shia with Lucknow connections who stood against the power of Nawab Abdul Majid in a rural seat. The decision to boycott the Councils and the more extreme forms of non-cooperation, such as the withdrawal of children from schools and the termination of government grants, were out¬ growths of the all-India strategy of the political leaders and of the struggle for power within the Congress organization. Council boycott in particular ran flatly contrary to the pattern of local politics, and until the Calcutta session of the autumn of 1920 the mass of local political opinion and spokesmen for the associates of Congress were opposed to it. Malaviya came out strongly against all stages of non-cooperation1 and he was followed by Krishna Kant Malaviya2 and others of his supporters in the Kisan Sabha3 and Sewa Samiti. Iswar Saran, several of the Kayastha Pathshala radical party which still adhered to Congress,4 the educational lobby, the municipal reformers, and powerful elements within the Hindu populist movement were equally opposed. Before the Calcutta Congress ‘full non-cooperation’ in Allahabad drew support only from extremist Muslim publicists, from those who had been electorally outmanoeuvred, or from idealistic younger supporters of Gandhi such as Gauri Shanker Misra and Jawaharlal Nehru. During the session it gained the adherence of the supporters of Motilal Nehru. Nehru appears to have doubted whether the Congress could successfully contest the election, and since he was under pressure from his son and other younger extremists, Council boycott may have seemed the best way to cut the Gordian knot.5 Finally, after the election, P. D. Tandon, K. D. Malaviya, and others of the Abhyudaya group threw up their electoral nominations out of concern for ‘Congress dis1 See Malaviya’s lecture, ‘The Present Situation’, Leader, 3, 6, 7 Oct. 1920. Malaviya used the example of the boycott of the Allahabad Municipal Board (1916-19) to exemplify the failure of this type of tactic. 2 Krishna Kant Malaviya was reported to be inducing cultivators to vote against non-cooperation at the Nagpur session as late as December 1920, Bhavishya, 19 Dec. 1920, U.P.N.N.R. 1920. 3 e.g. ‘A Kisan’ (Peasant), Inder Narayan Dwivedi, to Leader, 17 Oct. 1920. 4 Iswar Saran to Leader, 30 Sept. 1920. 5 R. A. Gordon, ‘Non-cooperation and Council Entry, 1919-20’, M.A.S., vii. 3 (1973). PP- 465-6.

Politics in the Mohullas

261

cipline’.1 The dangers to be courted by isolation from the organiza¬ tion were plain to see in the present negligibility of Sapru, Chintamani, and the Allahabad Liberals. On the other hand, withdrawal from the election does not seem to have prevented Tandon, at least, from continuing to campaign for the abrogation at the next Congress session of the Council boycott clause.2 Interest groups which had grown out of the populist, Hindu revivalist strand of local Congress activity, such as the Sewa Samiti,3 Peasants’ Association,4 and Patwaris’ Association,5 consequently split, or became the object of struggles between the various factions during the winter of 1920-1. As was expected, a collection of Liberals, landlords, and members of the rump of the Malaviya party were elected to the Council in November-December 1920 after a campaign characterized by public ignorance or by the hostility towards the elections generated during Gandhi’s visits to the town in the autumn. Politicians were now more and more forced to adjust their immediate goals in local politics to longer-term interests in regional or continental politics. Yet at the same time, they had to take into account developments in the municipalities and neighbourhoods where powerful interests, less concerned with these wider issues, continued to maintain themselves. Ultimately, the demands of provincial and local representation and patronage were still to outweigh the advantages of a general political move¬ ment. In the spring of 1923, most town Congressmen, with the exception of Tandon and Jawaharlal Nehru, endorsed the stand taken by C. R. Das and the elder Nehru in founding the Swarajya Party which was pledged to non-cooperate within the Councils. POLITICS IN THE MOHULLAS, 1918-1923

During non-cooperation nationalist politicians first mounted a sustained campaign of recruitment and propaganda at the mohulla level. This statement must immediately be qualified. It does not deny that neighbourhood leaderships had previously been enlisted in overt nationalist activities from time to time. Indeed, the very 1 File 5 of 1920, A.I.C.C.; interview with Pt. Padma Kant Malaviya, Jan. 1968. 2 Bhavishya, 19 Dec. 1920, U.P.N.N.R. 1920; Abhyudaya, 29 Jan. 1921. 3 Bhavishya, 3 Jan. 1921, U.P.N.N.R. 1921. 4 See Leader, n, 21 Feb. 1921; Abhyudaya, 24 Sept. 1945. 5 Abhyudaya, 23 Jan., 5 Feb. 1921.

262

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

first appearance of the Congress in the town in' 1888 witnessed a remarkable, if temporary, political mobilization; and important neighbourhood leaderships had been drawn into Congress again between 1914 and 1919. We must also beware of using the term ‘mass politics’. The success of the non-cooperation and Khilafat Committee politicians in the wards derived particularly from their influence within the traditional corporations, their ability to tap persistently turbulent neighbourhoods, and to rouse existing con¬ tacts in the service and commercial communities. All these cells of organization remained embedded in the fabric of the new politics of separate electorates and municipal autonomy. Certainly, the weakening of the power of the old-style town patron, and opportunities for wider political communication which attended the growth of the vernacular press, had increased the influence of the professional man and the publicist. But the events of 1920-3 did not capitalize on the movement of new groups into politics, whether these are construed as castes or classes. Rather it saw the successful strengthening of existing links by the poli¬ ticians. This view makes more comprehensible the recession of public activity in 1923 to something nearer the pre-1916 level. We do not have to assume that any such ‘new groups’ retreated from politics once again; simply that the ties of interest and sentiment which obtained between the nationalist leadership, publicists, and neighbourhood leaders had atrophied. Some examples will show that the old forms of political life in Allahabad were enlisted in, rather than overwhelmed by, the emotional events of 1919-23. The Ramlila Committees, for instance, were used as sounding boards for nationalist propaganda in 1921 and 1922. But the varied response of the committees representing different areas and communities reflected quite closely the degree to which the older patterns of influence in the town had been eroded. Thus the Katra Ramlila Committee, repre¬ senting the centre of the new residential areas, was subject to great pressure from the Nehrus and their supporters.1 In the case of the Khattri and Agarwal Ramlila Committees, the power and affiliations of the raises remained the crucial factor. Lala Bihari 1 Extract from confidential diary, Suptd. of Police, Allahabad, 20 Oct. 1920, Commr. to Chief Sec. G.U.P., 1 Apr. 1922, encloses report on 1921 Ramlila by Collr. Allahabad, ‘Innovations at the Ramlila Processions at Allahabad, 1920 and ’21’, 568 G.A.D. of 1921, U.P.S.

Politics in the Mohullas

263

Lai, who followed Ram Charan Das as major patron within the Khattri community, was unable to prevent the parade of ‘objec¬ tionable’ carnival floats at the 1921 festival, though he later apologized to the Commissioner’.1 According to the police, younger Khattris were more ‘amenable to follow the wishes of the Malaviya family’.2 But as early as 1910 Munni Lai, one of the grandsons of Ram Charan Das, and some other members of the Tandon family had reaffirmed their political independence by flaunting placards of the rebellious Rani of Jhansi at the festival.3 The nationalist political tradition of the major Khattri family combined with the diminished power of its conservative raises to bring the Khattri Committee into the non-cooperation movement. The situation within the Agarwal community organizations was more confused. Lala Damodar Das, a conservative lawyer and property owner,4 maintained a firm grip on the Agarwal Com¬ mittee proper, and even tore down portraits of nationalist leaders which had been surreptitiously placed on the tableaux. But mean¬ while, the biggest of the Agarwal cloth merchants, Sangam Lai, was active in arranging the cloth boycott in the Chauk.5 This boycott successfully encompassed not only the newer merchants but also the old firms linked to the branches of the indigenous banks.6 Any attempt here to replace a ‘caste’ interpretation of these events with a simple model of ‘new men’ against traditional leaders is also at variance with the facts. It was Rai Amar Nath Agarwal,7 younger member of the Piru Mal-Radha Rawan family 1 Extract from confidential diary, Suptd. of Police, Allahabad, 22 Oct. 1920, 568 G.A.D. of 1921, U.P.S. 2 Ibid. 3 Deputy Inspector Genl. of Police, C.I.D., U.P., ‘Report on innovations in the Ramlila Processions in various districts’, para. 3, end. in Chief Sec. G.U.P. to all Commrs., 5 July 1911, G.A.D. ‘A’, July 1911, 5-7, U.P.S. 4 For Damodar Das see Agrawal jfati, ii. 409. Born 1876 into a less wealthy branch of one of the major Agarwal service families, M.A., LL.B., legal adviser to Allahabad Municipal Board; partner in the Tribeni Sugar Mill Co. He ignored the boycott of Hindu leaders against the newly constituted municipal board in 1916, Motilal Nehru to Leader, 13 July 1916. 5 Stood as a Swarajist candidate for the council elections 1923. Contributed to funds of Allahabad Kisan Sabha, Abhyudaya, 19 Mar. 1921; member Allaha¬ bad Municipal Board, Leader, 25 Jan. 1925. For activities of cloth boycott group, Leader, 15 May 1922. 6 Independent, 30 Sept. 1921. Older cloth and banking firms involved in the boycott included ‘Munni Lai’, ‘Chunni Lai’, ‘Ram Din Vaish’, and ‘Gaya Prasad Manohar Das’. 7 Agrawal jfati, ii. 46-7; Independent, 5 Aug., 14 Sept., 27 Nov. 1921.

264

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

of Daraganj, who became largely responsible for Congress organization in the township. Even among the Jaiswal Kalwars, who were to some degree a ‘new’ economic group, the insertion of motions at the local conference in favour of temperance and boycott of liquor shops1 was the work of powerful patrons who had been connected with the Malaviya wing of Congress in Allaha¬ bad since the 1880s.2 Though the commercial raises were some¬ what diminished as a political category, their political affiliations remained as ambiguous in 1920 as they had been in 1888. The support of Muslim neighbourhood institutions also accounted for much of the success of Allahabad’s Khilafat politicians. The Diara Shah Ajmal and its religious head, had long been favourable to the Congress. Mahomed Fakhir appeared at extremist meetings in 19073 and Hindu electoral meetings in 1914.4 But during 1918 the influence of the progressive Zahur Ahmed faction with the Bara Taziadars and the rival Diaras had decisively increased5. Broadly this resulted from the growing importance of the young Muslim party after the concession of separate electorates in 1916. Zahur Ahmed and Kamalludin Jaffry might well have differed widely on the degree of conces¬ sion to be made to the Hindu leaders who were at this time boycotting the Municipal Board. Yet even to conservative sections of the Muslim electorate it must have been clear that some com¬ pact with the Hindu leaders was necessary if only to guarantee the continuance of municipal services. Indeed the whole drift of municipal politics since 1913 had tended to favour the younger 1 For the intrusion of ‘political’ issues into the Allahabad Kalwar Con¬ ference, Kalwar Kshatriya Mitra, Feb. 1919, pp. 20 and 21. 2 It was Babus Mewa Lai and Radhe Shyam, for instance, who proposed boycott of liquor shops and the foundation of a ‘national Bank’, Independent, 16 Feb. 1921. As raises they had first made an appearance at the Congress of 1892. 3 Bengalee, 19 Mar. 1907. 4 Leader, 7 Feb. 1914, he is found opposing the party supported by the town Muslim League; Leader, 18 Nov. 1915, convenor of Allahabad meeting against the U.P. Municipalities Bill along with the majority of local Congressmen 5 In November 1917, after trouble during Hindus and Muslims over the Bakr-Id festival, the Muslim League party had reached its lowest point with the Bara Taziadars. According to the Collector, W. Gaskell, the Muslim League party had ‘been disgraced in the eyes of the city by the statement of the bara taziadars that, so far from listening to them, they will not even allow them to sit in their presence’. D.O., 28 Nov. 1917, ‘Move of armed police to areas affected by the Baqr Id 1918’, 603 G.A.D. of 1918, U.P.S. Within a year the position had almost reversed.

Politics in the Mohullas

265

professional men as against the conservative district bar lawyers and merchants led by Baqi Khan. During 1917 and 1918 their position had improved further. Ironically, the conservative raises and Maulana Vilayat Hussain had fostered considerable dissatis¬ faction within their orthodox constituency by capitulating to Hindu demands on precedence in the Ramlila-Dussehra festival.1 The raises had failed in their pre-eminent role as guardians of sectional interests. They went out of favour in the Diaras and the Bara Tazia some months before they were swept off the Municipal Board at the elections of March 1919 by an alliance of the Muslim professional men and the Hindu party which had decided to con¬ test the elections again.2 This undoubtedly cleared a path for the Khilafat politicians and they successfully employed the con¬ siderable resources of the Diaras, the Tazias, and the mosques during the campaign against government in 1920 and 1921.3 Here again we see the close interaction of several levels of political activity. The actual state of factions at the mohulla and the municipal level, viewed over some years, provided the context for the development or otherwise of the Khilafat movement. Agglo¬ merates such as ‘the ulamd’ or the ‘young party’ are mere abstrac¬ tion if taken out of their exact context in the pattern of local politics and local status. So too, the evaporation of the Khilafat movement in 1922 and 1923 becomes more comprehensible. The resurgence of trouble at the Ramlilas, when Congress politicians failed to prevent pragwals and mendicants from bringing out their 1 Evidence of sub-inspector Raghunath Prasad in case of Abdul Razak, shoe merchant, Chauk. ‘He knew that there were some Muslims who sided with Mr. Baqi Khan and some Musalmans who sided with Zahur Ahmed . . . there were certain Hindus who thought that the collector acted on the advice of Baqi Khan.’ ‘. . . a certain majority of the Muslims . . . say in common with the Hindu committee that the general body of the Mohamadans should be con¬ sulted.’ The case reveals that as soon as Baqi Khan abandoned his role as spokesman for the old corporations and began to seek compromise with the Hindu committee (probably under pressure from the collectorate), support began to drift to Zahur Ahmed, despite his publicly pro-Congress stance. Leader, 27, 28 Sept. 1918. To maintain his new position, Zahur Ahmed, ‘under pressure from the Taziadars’, maintained an intransigent position on the Dussehra-Mohurrum 1918. 2 Abhyudaya, 15 Mar. 1919, ‘Victory of the Hindu Sabha’. Only one repre¬ sentative of the Baqi Khan party was returned by the Muslim electorate while Zahur Ahmed, Kamaluddin Jaffry, and Sayyid Hyder Mehdi, all extreme Muslim Leaguers, topped Baqi Khan’s own poll in Ward III. 3 For use of mosques and Diaras see Independent, 10, 26 Mar. 1920; case of Hamid Ahmed, Independent, 17 June, 1920.

266

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

weapons,1 swung the balance subtly back towards the apolitical ulama and the Baqi Khan faction.2 Equally, general dissatisfaction with the ‘nationalist’ Municipal Board resulted in the resurgence of militant interest groups working with communal idioms. During 1924, Baqi Khan brought into being a Muslim traders’ association which turned its own weapon of passive resistance against the Congress-controlled Municipal Board.3 The changes of 1920-3 were strategic shifts in an atmosphere of high emotion but not structural changes. A striking example of this was the degree to which the recruitment to the CongressKhilafat volunteer movements during the autumn of 1921 drew on areas where there had been traditionally turbulent and antiBritish neighbourhood leaderships. Two levels can certainly be distinguished. Students, shopkeepers and small professional people became involved in Congress activities in some numbers.4 Economic discontent and appeals to national unity were most effective with them. The experience of political activity was not forgotten and was enlisted in the ward and town Congress com¬ mittee and Congress tickets for municipal elections after 1923. But beneath this still limited group, the vegetable market, Shahganj, and Dariabad yielded up their usual ballast of disturbance.5 The mass arrests of 1921 netted a large number of weavers and artisans, and, according to the Leader, a number whose only political motivation was a desire to ride in the police lorries.6 Such a cautious historiography is in some ways disappointing. Mass movements and the marching cohorts of castes and social classes dissolve under scrutiny. Politics rarely changes abruptly 1 ‘Allahabad Disturbances, 1924’ p. 1, Home Poll. 249-XII of 1924, N.A.I. 17-24 Mar. 1923. 3 M.A.R. 1924-5, pp. 2-3. 4 Fairly full reports of volunteer trials appeared in Leader, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 22 Dec. 1921. 5 Leader, 26 Dec. 1921, mass arrests in the central market place of a crowd ‘almost all Mohammedans’. The predominance of Muslim artisans and small shopkeepers is also suggested by the names of Congress volunteers published Independent, 17 and 18 Dec. 1921. Of 124 volunteers recorded on 17 December, 68 were residents of the vegetable market (Sabzi Mandi), the butchers’ quarter (Atala), the poor marketing area adjoining the railway line (Bahadurganj), and residents of the Diara Shah Ajmal quarter including novices at the seminary; 22 Hindus came from the congested retail trade area of Muthiganj-Mirganj; the remainder from Congress offices and the Tilak National School. On Decem¬ ber 18 the list included a lower percentage of Muslims (42 of 109). There were a number of shopkeepers and artisans from Johnstonganj and Badshahi Mandi or Chauk. A good number of Hindus came from Daraganj and Georgetown. 6 Leader, 28 Dec. 1921.

2 Leader, 1

Prospect

267

even in periods of great tension. Certain long standing shifts in the balance of local political systems had placed the men who were more likely to be nationalists and Congressmen in a more advan¬ tageous position. British government had withdrawn from the Municipality as an effective force. The increased importance of professional men and publicists as municipal commissioners added to their stock amongst subordinate service communities—post¬ men, workers at the arsenal, clerks at the Pioneer press. The transient protests of such service pressure groups were bound closer into Congress’s own web of dissidence, now strengthened with a romantic and compulsive ideology of national struggle. PROSPECT

What results did the crisis of non-cooperation leave on Allahabad and the United Provinces? Broadly, it had seen the further develop¬ ment of movements in local and provincial politics which can be traced back much earlier. The reorganization of the Provincial Congress Committees during the struggle with government1 pushed forwards a process which the ‘moderates’ had inaugurated during the Convention at Allahabad in 1908. The Congress organization was now strong enough to support a few men of little wealth or social standing as full-time Congress workers. Council boycott and the question of withdrawal from schools had split the Malaviya wing of the Allahabad Congress and the interest groups associated with it, even though in the minds of most radical leaders these had been only temporary expedients.2 But Malaviya himself continued to work in the old style of public politics which characterized the pre-1917 Congress. The Independent Congress Party and the Mahasabna were typically groupings of dissident local leaderships roughly accommodated within a Hindu idiom— only now the dissidents were opponents of the formal Congress leadership as well as of government. But the Swarajya Party of Motilal Nehru also inherited many of the contacts which had been pioneered by the earlier politicians. Through P. D. Tandon, Gauri Shanker Misra, and other converts from the Malaviya group, they maintained contacts with big men in the wards of the town and among the upper tenantry. The con1 See U.P. C.I.D. note, 19 Dec. 1921, Home Poll. 767 of 1922, N.A.I.; Independent, 13 May 1921. 2 R. A. Gordon, ‘Non-Cooperation and Council Entry’.

268

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

tinued importance of notables and local interest groups was demonstrated again and again throughout the 1920s. Even if many of the old raises could not, or would not, appear on the Congress ticket in municipal elections, their younger relations and proteges continued to be selected to give weight to the mixture of profes¬ sional men and small publicists. Regional leaders could not afford to ignore important local interest groups either, for these provided sanctuaries from which oppositions could work. During the 1926 council elections, Motilal Nehru, who had in the meantime appeared at meetings of orthodox religious associations, attempted to gain control of the Allahabad Hindu Sabha from the rump of the Malaviya group.1 The attempt misfired, but the once pro¬ posed member of the Allahabad Club was making a further belated gesture of conciliation to the traditions of his own society. The political ambitions of regional publicists who had worked from informal political bases in Allahabad now became increas¬ ingly drawn into the formal politics of the Legislative Council. Already in 1920 men with Province-wide connections and support were being preferred over men with a purely local base by some political formations fighting the council elections.2 But throughout the 1920s regional political actors continued to come from a wide variety of backgrounds and command differing types of political resource. If we add the men connected with Allahabad who sat on the Imperial and Local Legislative Councils between 1923 and 1927 to the few individuals such as Jawaharlal Nehru and P. D. Tandon who influenced the course of legislative politics without actually sitting on the legislative bodies, we have a core of twentysix important regional figures.3 Of these, seven were powerful local landowners, pleaders, or commercial men who had little stake in regional organizations, but had acquired the support of a political organization.4 A second group consisted of six publicists who had been editors of journals or who had worked from secular 1 Motilal Nehru to Sitla Sahai, 11 July 1926, 1926 election files, A.I.C.C. 2 e.g. selection of C. Y. Chintamani by the Liberal Federation over Kampta Prasad Kackar for the Allahabad—Jhansi rural seat; also preference of Sayyid Riza Ali over Zahur Ahmed, Leader, 31 May 1920. 3 ‘U.P. dossiers’, Home Poll. 66/1924, N.A.I. Leader, Nov.—Dec. 1923; R. A. Gordon, ‘Aspects of the Indian National Congress’, Appendices. 4 Sangam Lai Agarwala (cloth merchants), Kampta Prasad Kackar (rais and lawyer), Nawab Mahomed Yusuf (Jaunpur), J. N. Chaddha (rais, commercial origin), Zahur Ahmed, Sheo Charan Lai, Ragho Prasad Narain Singh of Baraon.

Prospect

269

or community associations, having themselves little wealth or investment in local society.1 Another distinct group of six men, basically the old Malaviya faction of the local Congress, had emerged from a background closely connected with the moneyed, orthodox Hindus of the towns.2 Finally, there were seven men who had connections with the old Province-wide, Persian-literate service communities.3 Some of these, such as the Nehrus or Iqbal Narayan Gurtu, had made considerable investments in local power since 1909, but others such as T. B. Sapru were to remain highly prestigious intermediaries, dispensers of caution and encouragement to Congressmen and Governors, rather than of patronage. Truly, even a public figure from ouside the Provinces such as C. Y. Chintamani might in his hour of office as Minister of Education distribute government grants to the Trustees of the Kayastha Pathshala.4 But the men who were to stay on the political horizon were those who combined regional influence with local contacts. Indian ministers, especially at election time, were sometimes as hesitant as British officials had been of stirring up opposition in district and municipal boards.5 The continuities in the conduct of local politics were also clearly demonstrated in the concern with which all political groups regarded the outcome of conflicts in the organs of ward, town, and provincial self-government. In these bodies the Khilafatists of 1920 now worked as Muslim traders’ associations, as landlords, or as independents. The Swarajya Party was gradually bound into the toils of provincial ministerial faction, while in Allahabad Municipality, enrages such as Jawaharlal Nehru and P. D. Tandon had grappled for a time with the petty problems of local patronage which had enlivened the days of Ram Charan Das and Jagat Narayan. Despite the cautious response of Allahabad’s political leaders to Gandhi’s campaign, there is no doubt of the surge of popular 1 Iswar Saran, Sachhidananda Sinha (Kayasth community associations and the Bihar movement), V. N. Tiwari, H. N. Kunzru (Servants of India Associa¬ tion), Anandi Prasad Dube, C. Y. Chintamani (journalism and regional Hindu associations). 2 M. M., R. K., and K. K. Malaviya, P. D. Tandon, Gauri Shankar Misra, Thakur Narbada Singh. 3 The Nehrus (Motilal, Jawaharlal, Kishen Lai, Shyam Lai), Sapru, Riza Ali, Iqbal Narayan Gurtu. 4 Kayastha Pathshala Golden Jubilee Souvenire (Allahabad, 1923), p. 4. 5 Marris to Irwin, 1 June 1926, Halifax Papers, 20, I.O.L.

270

The Non-Cooperation Movement in Allahabad

feeling which they unleashed. Regardless of the fragmentation of 1923 a potent political myth of national struggle and sacrifice had been born which formed the background to all contacts between the British and Indian leaders thereafter. Moreover the Congress had shifted decisively towards an inclusive populist idiom, even if the social background and immediate political priorities of its leadership remained constant. One crucial feature of the non¬ cooperation movement was negative—that Congress did not have its flank turned by a more radical group of leaders. It retained the monopoly on national aspiration and the articulation of dissidence which it had established in the 1880s; this was all the more remarkable in view of the political and economic tensions of the years immediately after the First World War. Congress’s appro¬ priation of much of the ideology and personnel of the Khilafat movement, for instance, was important despite the later collapse of that movement. After 1923 it continued to hold the allegiance of a large body of ulama and nationalist Muslims. Congress remained a body of town-based service and commercial people with their connections among rural rentiers. Yet it had been to the leaders of Congress that striking postmen and rickshaw drivers and the oppressed tenants-at-will of Oudh had turned in 1921. In Allahabad the populism of the Malaviya group came together with the more personal political style propagated by Gandhi. This combination prevented a breakaway by the radical young intel¬ ligentsia of the Nehru following, or by the extreme Khilafatists, or by the millenarian lecturers who might have marshalled the land-hungry labourers of the districts. That the Congress survived this period of stress can only seem inevitable because we take for granted its unique ability to broaden its appeal and re-establish a consensus at a lower social level.

X CONCLUSION AN attempt has been made in this work to demonstrate that ZJk political change in northern India between 1880 and 1920 i .a. can be fruitfully approached through a detailed examina¬ tion of the alliances and dissidences of groups in local society. The locality chosen for study was the city of Allahabad, or rather, the cluster of townships gathered within the Allahabad Municipality and the small-town service area of the lower Doab, which was intimately connected with it. Because Allahabad supported a powerful elite of new professional men and also significant local indigenous banking and agricultural trading services, the links between parochial, local and regional activities, and also between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ political forms, can be studied here in some detail. In this work we have tried to isolate the category of local notable and to show how they were related to the educated pro¬ fessional men and politicians such as the Nehrus, Tandons, and Malaviyas, who have usually formed the focus for studies of Indian politics. Both types of leader have been shown in action, not merely in regional and nationalist politics, but in local govern¬ ment and in the institutions of caste, community, and sectional interest thrown up by Indian society. The complexity is startling. In a cluster of townships such as Allahabad no single occupational group was able to command sufficient patronage, social or ritual status, or to control enough avenues of consultation with the authorities to dominate the town area. Instead various men of different occupation, religion, and caste made up a group of local notables which exercised an uneasy control of other, yet more parochial interests. Their tools were credit control, houseownership, religious philanthropy, and understandings with a variety of local government officers. Most prominent among Allahabad patrons were the families of indigenous bankers and traders which monopolized credit and had a finger in most of the town’s business and services. Of great L.R.I.P.-IO

272

Conclusion

importance also were members of the Mogul 'service gentry who projected their power as rentiers in the outlying villages back into the central quarters of the town as property-owners and religious patrons. These people were usually drawn from the old service communities of Kayasths and ‘pedigree’ Muslims. They were often divided on matters of religion, but in face-to-face local confron¬ tations, they had in common an administrative culture based on the Urdu court language and mixed areas of smallholding around the town. These groups were common to most localities in the Ganges valley, but in Allahabad a further element was added. This was composed of Europeans and English-educated Indian professional people who had gathered around the High Court of Allahabad and the offices of regional government. As immigrants, often divided from local society by residential area, social habit, and education, they were only late and conditional contestants for local power and patronage. But the Indians among them became increasingly important as communicators with regional govern¬ ment, just as the local notable had been important as a com¬ municator between district-level and neighbourhood politics. The tools employed by these ‘major service families’ were the organs of mass publicity and the new-style political associations. Their leading actors have been called publicists, though these men were a different group from the humble publicists who wrote broadsheets and petitions for local notables. During the early part of our period changes had taken place in the position and influence of the local notable and the provincial service community. The local notables and their representatives had been brought together at a town level by the creation of a partly elective Municipal Board through which caches of patronage had become available to Indians. Generalized movements of religious revival, the creation of regional representative institutions such as Allahabad University Senate (1887), and the Provincial Legislative Council (1886 and 1892), also involved local patrons more closely in wider activities pioneered by educated professional men and publicists. These included the Indian National Congress which even in the 1880s attracted some magnates as a national movement but drew others in through associations generated by their patronage of a variety of semi-political and religious associa¬ tions. By 1920, however, further changes had taken place. The political

Conclusion

273

power of the town-wide group of notables had declined. Politics had become more open, and there were now more actors on the stage. These included immigrant trading people who carried on modern business enterprises in the newer parts of Allahabad; there were also wealthy members of the major service communities such as the Nehrus who had begun to project their provincial status back into the localities through houseownership and participation in municipal government. At the same time, some men who had been in positions of near clientage to the notable class in the 1880s had been enabled by the general development of association, publicity, and regional organs of representation to break free and conduct political movements which were now much less constrained by the limits imposed by local patronage. Madan Mohan Malaviya, leader of the ‘Hindu’ wing of the local Congress, was one impor¬ tant example of a political leader of this sort. These men, and the associations and interest groups which they directed, were now in a position to bypass the town notable and make contact directly with turbulent neighbourhood in the mohullas and suburban villages, old religious corporations or petty tradesmen. New arenas of town-wide politics associated with housing improve¬ ment, a more consolidated labour market, and new mercantile associations had also developed. In these arenas, professional men and local publicists acted as dispensers of patronage or inter¬ mediaries with the authorities. They also had access through associations, the organs of Congress, and personal and familial ties to men who were beginning to achieve influence in provincial politics. In this way there began to develop patronage connections between region and locality which paralleled the structure of administration itself, and diminished the importance of purely local power. The greater ‘urbanization’ of Allahabad in 1920 obviously played a part in this change. More specialized systems of credit, the assumption of new legal entities by neighbourhood corpora¬ tions, and the development of links across the old township cluster by centralized marketing, weakened the tight networks of mohulla-based patronage headed by the notables. But a most important motor of change had also been the efforts at adminis¬ trative devolution of the government which had arisen mainly in response to its pressing financial needs. Men had begun to take a sharper interest in local and neighbourhood politics when more L.R.I.P.—IO*

274

Conclusion

valuable political resources of money and status had become available to them in municipalities and district boards. A related change had taken place at the regional level of politics. Here the stature of important families of higher professional people and successful publicist-journalists had grown. This reflected improved communications, the ever-so-slow growth of literacy, and the percolation throughout north India of western, secular and nationalist ideas. But it also reflected the increasing specialization of regional government which was forced by administrative convenience as well as political pressure to make available to Indians judgeships, university vice-chancellorships, and ultimately in 1920, responsible ministries in some ‘trans¬ ferred’ departments of government. It became possible for instance for C. Y. Chintamani—a man devoid of local contacts in Allahabad except those built up as a successful editor of the Leader—to become Minister of Education and control for a time the passage of important funds to the localities. Here a decisive shift had taken place in politics, so that important resources, partly out of control of the colonial administration, had accrued to Indians working at the regional level. By this time executive power in the municipalities and district boards had also firmly passed into Indian hands so that two important milestones along the road to Independence had been passed. The degree of structural change within local political society during this period should not be exaggerated. ‘Big men’ employing similar resources to the Allahabad patrons of the 1880s continued to help determine the pace of local politics and to bring supporters and finance to the local election booth or political rally during the 1920s and ’30s; they continued powerful in the neighbourhoods even if their town-wide influence was now limited. Perhaps indeed, the only fundamental changes in Hindustani town society after British occupation accompanied the Depression of the 1930s, the demolition of the zamindari in the 1950s and the accretion of powerful enclaves of Punjabi business men in the towns’ suburbs after Partition. Yet some of the changes mentioned in this volume had parallels with these more drastic developments. In many ways, the town magnate of the 1880s had stood in a similar relationship to government and local society as the large zamindar in the countryside before 1951. The erosion of the power of this rank of social controller by institutional and social

Conclusion

275

innovations in both town and country released new tensions. But at the same time it was a necessary preliminary to the consolida¬ tion of power by ‘modern’ professional politicians and publicists. How representative were the conditions of Allahabad of other Indian towns? Studies have already appeared which show that local administration, the ‘mix’ of notables and neighbourhood leaders, or the nature of regional service communities varied widely. But there is also much to suggest that the local political physiology of Allahabad was not unique. In several regions, towns supported influential groups of trading magnates which controlled the major flows of credit and supplemented their local importance through property-ownership and patronage of religious activities. In north India some began their rise to wealth in the early days of British rule; others were descendants of families which had financed revenue farms of the pre-British states. Very generally the conditions of British rule encouraged the consolidation of their local position. The action of the courts, the early British revenue settlements and later municipalities, tended to erode the power of the old service gentry and of the intrusive Rajput lineages which were the other main components of the town notable class. But it is striking that even in the new cities of Calcutta and Bombay, where more direct association with the East Indian Company and British commerce provided many avenues for the socially mobile, small and close-knit groups of merchants1 and financial entre¬ preneurs2 achieved a similar dominance over credit and town property-ownership. Despite the wider range of economic oppor¬ tunities, the patronage networks (dais) of Calcutta urban society seem similar to the rais connections of upper Indian towns. Indeed the most striking general feature of Indian towns and cities in the mid-nineteenth century was an extreme social stratification and the great differences of wealth which reinforced it. One contri¬ butory cause was the sharply seasonal nature of the demand for credit. Both in a rent- and revenue-based economy and in a sail¬ using maritime economy, entrepreneurs were dependent on men who could make large advances at certain times of the year. As a 1 See C. E. Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Com¬ munities in Bombay City, 1840-1885 (Oxford, 1972), and J. C. Masselos, ‘Bom¬ bay in the 1870s: A ‘Study of Changing Patterns in Urban Politics’, South Asia (1971), 1. 29-55. 2 S. N. Mukherjee, ‘Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta, 1815-1838’, in E. Leach and S. N. Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia (Cambridge, 1970).

276

Conclusion

result, wealth and credit tended to polarize in a few mens’ hands. Social attitudes were also significant. The importance of festivals in Indian social life hardly needs to be emphasized, and merchant groups traditionally patronized such festivals. Patterns of clientage grew up around the rich patrons, as in any pre-industrial society, landed or urban, but in India this was strengthened by the system of ritual ranking. Thus quite generally throughout north India we glimpse a relationship between high status commercial people and town-dwelling Brahmins.1 Since Brahmins with their tradi¬ tional literacy were likely more quickly to take up the tools of press, publicity, and peripatetic agitation which became common in the later nineteenth century, these social relationships became significant in linking together local power and new political organizations. At the same time, some of the tensions which we have seen in the town and town catchment area of Allahabad also had parallels in other parts of the Subcontinent. This relationship between the commercial magnates and the old service gentry was ambiguous. We find them gathered together in municipalities and other official bodies, but there were many points of division. There was the traditional hostility between the moneylender and declining service gentry; between the Islamicized Urdu literate and pious Hindu. But there was also the distinction between tight, localized forms of political power exercised by the commercial magnates and the expansive, regional contacts which gave the old service classes their leverage. Though the distinction between the com¬ munities was never absolute, in Allahabad these tensions were fed into a more general opposition between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ styles of politics, and contributed to the development of com¬ munal tensions. A similar pattern developed in the towns of the western part of the United Provinces2 and East Punjab. But in Benares, for instance, the late Mogul service gentry appears to have declined much earlier. The patronage of the court of Benares had ensured that there was considerable assimilation between the commercial magnates and the eighteenth-century Bhumihar aristocracy, giving Benares much greater stability and a distinctive 1 For Punjab, see L. W. Hazlehurst, ‘Entrepreneurship and the Merchant Castes in a Punjabi City’ (Duke University Commonwealth-Studies Center, Monograph i, 1966). 2 F. C. R. Robinson, ‘Municipal Government and Muslim Separatism’.

Conclusion

277

style of conservative Hindu political activity.1 Court patronage and a cohesive mercantile oligarchy of ancient origin was also a feature of Ahmedabad,2 where rich merchant groups also played a significant part in the development of a conservative and Hindu nationalism. A decisive factor in the north Indian town politics of the nineteenth century seems, then, to have been the balance between various elements within the class of local notable. Yet there are also points of comparison with southern India. A much more varied town merchant class composed of Chetties, north Indian immigrants, and a variety of local entrepreneurial groups such as Komatis and Nadars, fulfilled a similar role here as credit and market controllers.3 But in the south, the intrusive provincial service community was provided by families of Tamil and Telegu Brahmins whose power was increased by the govern¬ mental changes of the later nineteenth century. It has been argued that in this case the tensions between local oligarchies and provincial service communities fed into the political conflict between ‘Brahmin’ and ‘Non-Brahmin’.4 In western India a similar pattern will probably emerge. Here, the Chitpavan Brahmins were the archetypal intrusive, regional service com¬ munity5 and the tensions between them and local landed and court oligarchies are becoming plain.6 As yet, little is known about the structure of western Indian towns in the nineteenth century, but in both Indore and Nagpur7, town-based commercial magnates appear to have played a shadowy role in the emergence of moderate nationalism. Our conclusion can only be that no generalization about Indian politics, or the politics of an Indian region, can be regarded as wholly acceptable until much more is 1 C. A. Bayly, ‘Patrons and Politics in North India’. 2 K. L. O. Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, Calif., 1968); cf., Howard Spodek, ‘Urban Politics in the Local Kingdoms of India’. M.A.S., vii, 2 (1973). 253-75. 3 See D. A. Washbrook, Politics and Society in the Madras Presidency, 1880ig20 (Cambridge, forthcoming). 4 D. A. Washbrook, ‘Political Change in the Madras Presidency, 1880-1920’, unpubl. Fellowship Dissertation, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1971. 5 Gordon Johnson, ‘Chitpavan Brahmins and Politics in Western India in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Leach and Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia. 6 e.g. Ian Copland, ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Non-Brahmin Movement 1902-10’, M.A.S., vii, 2 (i973)» 209-25. 7 G. Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880-1915 (Cambridge, 1973). P- T54-

278

Conclusion

known about the local structures upon which Indian public men themselves built their careers. These themes concern the nature of political society between 1880 and 1920. But another theme of this work has been the growth of the nationalist movement in and around Allahabad, and in par¬ ticular why the British government was successful in isolating or suppressing dissident groups and nationalist leaderships at some times; and why it failed at others, notably in the later 1880s and again after 1909. This second level of analysis has been particularly concerned with organizations and leaderships called interest groups which had begun in the 1870s and 1880s to function at a regional level of politics. They included religious movements such as the Arya Samaj and the associations for orthodox religion [sanatan dharma sabhas). There were ad hoc collections of notables and publicists organizing to protect or extend local interests, education, or conditions of government service, which were sometimes congruent with the ‘sentimental’ categories of Hindu, Muslim, or caste group. Again there were a variety of cultural movements with more material undertones—the movement for the promotion of the Devanagri script, for instance. What distinguished ‘interest groups’ was that they had more immediate regional, local, or sectional aims than the Indian National Congress. All the same, they formed a link between the nationalist leadership and the local notable and publicist. We have suggested that the several ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs’ of Congress activity and opposition to British government during this period reflected very closely the desire or reluctance of the leaders of interest groups to merge their own more parochial constituencies into the broader constituency of publicity provided by the skeletal Congress organization. As far as their long term aims were con¬ cerned they might be no less ‘nationalist’ but the two determining factors in the direction taken by the more parochial leaderships were, firstly, the state of their relationships with the local colonial administration and secondly, a variety of fissures and factions generated independently within Indian social movements. In the late 1880s, the shocks administered to a whole range of service communities by a changing bureaucracy, the pressures of land revenue and price rise, and a common interest in the reform of the local Legislative Council determined that the Congress

Conclusion

279

movement at a local level would be a loose, somewhat contradic¬ tory alliance of dissident groups with a sprinkling of local notables and intelligentsia. ‘Electorates’ representing anything from muni¬ cipal wards to caste associations had elected delegates who squeezed into the Congress tent. After 1894, a more subtle policy on the part of administrators and the political benefits of local self-government pulled apart this cartel of dissidences and bought off some of the most important groups working within a Hindu idiom. Congress remained a skeletal organization through¬ out the period 1900 to 1909 when major political movements were developing in Bengal, Punjab, and Maharashtra. This was not primarily because of the political ‘backwardness’ of the United Provinces or because of its low rate of literacy or economic development, but because of the better state of relations between government and the local political community. The ‘moderate’ leadership of the provincial Congress was a group of men of high status, committed to the programmes of the interest groups, and these were most likely to come to fruition with government help. They had little reason at this stage to join in widespread dis¬ sidences for ideological reasons or to expend their own political resources in conflicts which arose from disputes in Bengal and the Punjab. Thus by contrast with the Congress of 1888 or 1892, the Allahabad Congress session of 1910 was in itself a tame affair enlisting the support of a few voluntary associations and a much narrower range of delegates. This Congress was much nearer to the stereotype of ‘mendicancy’ and devotion to constitutional forms. Yet within a decade, and several years before the emergence of Gandhi or the Muslim Khilafat movement, it had swung back to a radicalism tinged with themes of Hindu revivalism. Again, no sudden expansion of literacy, economic development, or ‘rural second wave’ was sufficient to make the moderates of 1907 the extremists of 1917. Instead, the years after the concession of the 1909 Reforms saw the slow breaking of links between the established leaders, secondary leaderships, and government, which culminated in the wartime home rule movement. Leaders working at both these levels within Hindu and populist constituencies were goaded into new organizations by government’s desire to perpetuate its local and regional power through the concession of separate electorates to ‘landlords’ and ‘Muslims’. At the same time, younger and

280

Conclusion

professional men within the Muslim community were also stirred into action to seize the political resources which government had conceded to them. Congress leaders, publicists, and important men in the localities found the greatest level of agreement in their demand for an extension of the elective element in local and provincial govern¬ ment. This issue remained at the hub of the political problem between 1917 and 1923. The more spectacular non-cooperation, Khilafat, and peasants’ movements were squalls which tem¬ porarily blew the political leaders off their course. T. hey certainly gave rise to a tradition of militant organization and a new political idiom. But they did not signal the development of a wholly new variety of ‘mass’ politics. In 1920 local political leaders were most reluctant to abandon the prospect of seats in the new Legislative Council, and they never abandoned the strategic position they had now gained in the municipalities. Even the large scale protests and rallies of the non-cooperation movement often attested to the involvement through existing connections of groups and notables which had been articulate at the local level of politics in the 1880s or before. In so far as these politics were new, it reflected the closer binding together of dissidences by a few well-placed activists who now had a degree of real patronage and a compulsive populist ideology. But this process of binding together had com¬ menced in 1883 and had received a fresh impetus in 1916; it was not simply a result of the events of 1919-22. Some problems which have received emphasis in earlier studies, have seemed less significant from the perspective of this work. Others have come to the fore. Broadly, less weight has been given to general organizing principles in Indian society such as com¬ munity, caste, and class. Links created by common interests, culture, or patronage very widely over-rode these distinctions. Caste has appeared most significant in local politics, when it is used to mean patterns of kinship linking men across neighbour¬ hoods or localities—the down-river Agarwal marriage networks, for instance. These links could be revived to build political associations. But when caste was merely perception of a vaguely equivalent position in a system of ritual ranking between groups who did not marry or eat together, its importance as an organizing principle for social action is much less clear. All one can say is

Conclusion

281

that caste here might provide a ready-made ‘constituency’ in which prominent notables or public men could solicit political support, or official patronage. In this case, however, caste organization was a reflection of the social or political ambitions of a few men, not of a caste as such. However important the undergrowth of religious organization, the occasions when local society actually polarized along the lines of religious community were also relatively rare. In general, political impulses carried over the bounds between Hindu and Muslim. It is not really possible to write of ‘Hindu politics’ or ‘Muslim politics’ in Allahabad except in so far as religious ideas acted as a restraint on the freedom of politicians. Even when we find Hindu and Muslim interest groups working in local or regional politics these religious attributions were often banners under which different economic and social groups organized whose motives had little to do with religion. In the case of the cow-protection movement at the beginning of the period and the Khilafat movement at the end we can point to populist movements of a religious character which significantly affected the direction of political activity. But however deeply felt the emotions which informed these movements, they were ephemeral, they were divisive, and they provided few positions from which to parley with the authorities. In both cases, the more substantial notables and publicists quickly withdrew their political investment from them. Again, it would be difficult to see a direct relationship between the short-term development of nationalism and the emergence of an Indian middle class during the later nineteenth century. In the townships of Allahabad a great gulf separated the High Court lawyer and the salaried district office clerk, as also the commercial rais and the petty grain-dealer. The success and failures of the nationalist movement in the 1880s and the 1920s derived from its ability to tap old connections as well as new professions and economic groups. Congress continued to be an organ for the political expression of social elements which were still not a homogeneous class, except in so far as much of Indian society above village level was ultimately reliant on precarious rental income and related to centres of official patronage. Government as the major employer and chief mechanism for redistributing the forced surplus of the village, was bound to emerge as one of the central forces in this work. But the relation-

282

Conclusion

ship between official and informal power also' lies near the heart of the problem of political development in India. Along the whole spectrum of political activity from the dissident village faction to the emerging regional parties of the twentieth century, groups moved in and out of the ambit of government patronage. A band of village proprietors at odds with a revenue official apparently had little in common with an anti-ministerial coalition of all-India publicists, beyond opposition to an established authority. Yet it was precisely the growing competence of the nationalist leadership to forge a fleeting alliance of sentiment and interest between a progression of local, regional, and continental expressions of dissidence, which was a marked feature of political change in modern India. Nationalism, of course, was always much more than the fusion of militant service interest groups, but its strength as a movement of political organization was that it had begun to accomplish a binding together of scattered opposition to put pressure on government at several political levels. The raw material of this opposition was always at hand, for throughout the later nineteenth century, rising prices, an inflexible revenue system and growing frustration with colonial status were at work. On the other hand, government’s weakness masked its strength. For the satisfaction of these dissident groups could often be purchased by small concessions within a village, district, or profession. Nor was there always a conflict between the material interests which prompted ‘collaboration’ and other forms of status within society. Government’s strength did not lie in its coercive power, still less in the allegiance of its subjects, but in a certain ubiquity, and in the paralysis induced by the complex interlocking of many parochial statuses and forms of patronage which were distantly validated in Government House at Calcutta. Nationalist ideas legitimated the more general dissidences brought about by the administration’s efforts to modify its own structure. Government shook the kaleidoscope of local statuses and formed a political pattern in which dissidences had begun to polarize against itself. It created wider franchises and arenas of politics where the upward piling of its supporters was matched by that of the groups it had disappointed and the statuses it had trampled. The most successful tactic adopted by oppositions in India has therefore been the slow penetration of the lowest levels of govern¬ ment, whether these were the municipal boards of the 1910s or the

Conclusion

283

rural panchayats of the 1950s. At these levels, opposition could engross and choke the channels of communication between government and its local supporters, first deploying statuses and rewards as an alternative party, soon as an alternative government. Where opposition concentrated on random violence and failed to relate to big men in the town wards or to village-controllers, government demonstrated again and again how easily it could divide, absorb, or smother such dissidences. This was as true of Allahabad during the swadeshi period as it was of Calcutta under the Naxalite siege. But ultimately, this has also meant that opposi¬ tion, to be successful, has tended to social conservatism. It has eroded the power of the town notable and eliminated that of the great area landlord, but it has found itself dependent on a still diminutive class of new merchants, lawyers, and rich peasants. Only the creation of general new wealth in society could release government from its dependence on an ever-receding range of tiny elites. This the British signally failed to achieve in north India in the nineteenth century. But even where a government with the will to radical change has supervened, big men in the town wards and villages may yet prove formidable obstacles to social progress.

L.R.I.P.—II

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APPENDIX

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