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The Kahar Chronicle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Extract
Untouchable agricultural servants in the Indian countryside are among the lowliest people on earth. Such illiterate folk leave no written record to enable historians to comprehend their world from their own angle of vision. To write their history from below, historians have to search for contemporaneous observations which—even though made by an outsider—show some degree of empathy with their consciousness. The gifted novelist is able to enter recesses of the mind which elude the most acute scientific investigator. Among the several Bengali novels which have taken for their theme the wretched of the earth, perhaps the most empathetic is the Kahar Chronicle of Tarashankar Banerjee which thankfully avoids painting their life in unrelieved black. In Hansuli Banker Upakatha, the novelist, a small landlord in Birbhum district, descends to the bottom of rural society to give us—as far as possible for a gifted novelist of gentry origin—a view from within.
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References
1 The Chronicle (upakatha) of Half Moon Bend (Hansuli Bank). The first edition was dated 1948. The second expanded edition came out in the same year. It is this edition—and not the final version included in the collected works which was prepared several years afterwards—that I have used. Unless otherwise stated all page numbers refer to Hansuli Banker Upakatha (2nd edn, Calcutta, 1948).Google Scholar
2 p. 450.
3 Some of the characters in the novel, as Banerjee tells us in his literary memoirs, were real persons. Banerjee, Tarashankar, Amar Sahitya Jivana (1st book, 1966), pp. 28–30.Google Scholar
4 Mukherjee, R., Land Problems of India (London, 1933), pp. 225fGoogle Scholar, quoted in Breman, Jan, Patronage and Exploitation (Berkeley, 1974), p. 7.Google Scholar
5 The importance of indigenous terms in understanding the older Bengali society has been emphasized by Inden, Ronald, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Society (Berkeley, 1976).Google Scholar Inden, however, ignores the material context in which the indigenous forms of kinship developed in medieval Bengal, concentrating his attention only on the specific and unique cultural categories of Bengali kinship. But sociologists are not wanting who have rejected this narrow culturalist approach and who, like Tarashankar Banerjee, have sought to understand agrarian stratification in terms material as well as cultural. Béteille, André, Studies in Agrarian Social Structure (Delhi, 1974)Google Scholar, has emphasized that the rural Bengali people themselves had their own native economic categories to differentiate between groups playing different roles in the productive system.
6 This limitation of the untouchable's possibilities on the agrarian ladder, heavily stressed by Banerjee in the action of the novel, is confirmed by a sample survey carried out during the settlement operations in Birbhum in the 1920s. It was found that Brahmans held 16.75 per cent of the total land held by ryots; Sadgops and Muslims 23.23 per cent and 23.81 per cent respectively; and three untouchable castes—Bauri, Bagdi and Dom—1.61 per cent together. Rai Bijay Behari Mukharjee Bahadur, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Birbhum 1924–32 (Alipore, 1937), p. 71.Google Scholar
7 A magnum opus in two parts: Ganadevata (Chandimandap) and Panchagram (Calcutta, 1942–1943).Google Scholar It portrays the Sadgop peasants of Labpur locality.
8 Interview with Parvatishankar Banerjee, Labpur, 16 August 1980.
9 Hansuli Banker Upakatha, p. 7.Google Scholar
10 pp. 8, 21
11 p. 24.
12 p. 309.
13 p. 131.
14 p. 83.
15 p. 24.
16 p. 149.
17 p. 55.
18 p. 226.
19 p. 185.
20 p. 208.
21 p. 162–3.
22 p. 212.
23 pp. 29, 303.
24 p. 31.
25 p. 31.
26 p. 33
27 pp. 71–2.
28 p. 57.
29 Guards for eight (=at) prahars (1 prahar = 3 hours).
30 pp. 21–3.
31 pp. 79–81.
32 pp. 185–7.
33 p. 135.
34 p. 380.
35 pp. 108–11, 187.
36 p. 135.
37 p. 37.
38 p. 108.
39 p. 95.
40 p. 232.
41 p. 233.
42 p. 135.
43 p. 36.
44 p. 160.
45 p. 168.
46 p. 278.
47 pp. 251–2.
48 p. 107.
49 pp. 416, 420.
50 p. 86.
51 p. 74
52 pp. 108–9.
53 p. 442.
54 p. 393.
55 p. 66.
56 p. 223.
57 p. 393.
58 p. 100.
59 p. 101.
60 p. 181.
61 p. 198.
62 p. 79.
63 pp. 185–6.
64 p. 185.
65 p. 120.
66 p. 56.
67 p. 59.
68 p. 53.
69 p. 101.
70 p. 112.
71 pp. 54–5.
72 p. 113.
73 p. 45.
74 p. 35.
75 p. 111.
76 p. 135.
77 pp. 134–5.
78 p. 217.
79 p. 302.
80 pp. 123, 216, 223, 227, 279.
81 p. 223.
82 p. 308.
83 pp. 57–8.
84 pp. 279, 338.
85 p. 61.
86 p. 155.
87 pp. 155–6.
88 p. 248.
89 p. 43–4.
90 p. 42.
91 p. 235.
92 p. 254.
93 p. 274.
94 pp. 242, 341.
95 p. 242.
96 p. 64.
97 p. 142.
98 pp. 287–8.
99 p. 206.
100 p. 243.
101 p. 29.
102 pp. 266, 424.
103 p. 454.
104 Ganadevata, p. 10.Google Scholar
105 Hansuli Banker Upakatha, p. 420.Google Scholar
106 p. 66.
107 pp. 67–8.
108 p. 70.
109 pp. 70–1.
110 pp. 10–12.
111 p. 62.
112 p. 50.
113 p. 66.
114 p. 127.
115 pp. 51, 215–16.
116 pp. 238–9.
117 p. 241.
118 p. 252.
119 p. 343.
120 p. 387.
121 pp. 359–60.
122 p. 152.
123 p. 364.
124 p. 298.
125 p. 296.
126 p. 128.
127 p. 178.
128 p. 206.
129 p. 205.
130 p. 179.
131 p. 231.
132 p. 165.
133 p. 176.
134 pp. 144–6.
135 p. 139.
136 p. 143.
137 p. 284.
138 p. 233.
139 pp. 232–3.
140 pp. 112–13.
141 pp. 113–14.
142 pp. 233–4.
143 p. 112.
144 pp. 123–5.
145 p. 16.
146 p. 17.
147 pp. 78–9.
148 p. 86.
149 pp. 72–5.
150 p. 142.
151 p. 243.
152 p. 267.
153 p. 270.
154 p. 86.
155 p. 445.
156 p. 378.
157 p. 329.
158 p. 378.
159 p. 384.
160 p. 67.
161 p. 183.
162 pp. 65–8.
163 p. 70.
164 pp. 75–6.
165 pp. 371–4.
166 On this controversy, see Stokes, Eric, The Peasant and the Raj (Delhi, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Neil Charlesworth, ‘The Russian Stratification Debate and India’, in Modern Asian Studies, February 1979. The late Professor Stokes was critical of the Leninist conception of rich, middle and poor peasants, but he was too aware of caste divisions in Indian society to incline heavily towards the rival Chayanovian notion of an egalitarian peasantry.
167 Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge, 1965), p. 190.Google Scholar
168 Breman, , Patronage and Exploitation, p. 38.Google Scholar
169 Ibid., pp. 40, 65.
170 Kumar, , Land and Caste, p. 47.Google Scholar
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