Introduction
During the 1920s, a new genre of Islamic poetry emerged from the printing presses of eastern Bengal's mofussil towns.Footnote 1 These were printed boyans—long poems of several hundred lines of rhyming couplets of even beat that were meant to be performed orally in rural and small-town public spaces, at weekly bazars, country fairs, town centres, railway stations, and river ports. Boyans sought to instruct the delta's Muslim peasantry in the proper Islamic conduct of everyday life. Poets narrated tales of Muslim peasant life, decried Muslim peasant poverty, and relentlessly mocked Muslim peasants for their stupidity, ignorance, indolence, dishonesty, litigiousness, and dandified mannerisms. Poets urged programmes of Islamic reform of everyday peasant life—of work, commerce, consumption, attire and hairstyle, patriarchal control over wives and children, and neighbourly relations. The proper Islamic conduct of everyday life, poets promised, would bring Muslim peasants this-worldly salvation—that is, an escape from poverty and, perhaps, even prosperity. The sentiments embodied in these poems—in poets’ condemnation of the present state of the Bengali Muslim peasantry and in their idealized depiction of a just, moral, and ethical Muslim peasantry—constituted an agrarian form of Islam.
Discourses of agrarian Islam focused on worldly matters and were unconcerned with ritual practices, Koranic exegesis, and discussions of Hadith. Instead, poets and authors of agrarian Islam mandated reforms in the material realms of work, commerce, and consumption. As Abdul Aziz rhymed in his Dunia O Akherat Do Jahaner Najat (Salvation in This World and the Next), published in Noakhali in 1922–23:
Agrarian Islamic discourses, this article argues, were concerned primarily with peasant market entanglements. Poets argued that the roots of peasant poverty and the means to this-worldly salvation lay in fiscal responsibility, in balancing peasant household budgets so that earnings from sales of peasant produce exceeded expenditure on market-based consumption. Fiscal responsibility, in turn, entailed hard work, restrained consumption, appropriate attire and hairstyles, and the proper patriarchal control of wives and children. These practices constituted being a good Muslim and a good peasant, and deviations from such practices resulted in impoverishment. Agrarian Islam was deeply concerned with peasant poverty, and most poems began with a paean to the impoverished state of Bengal's Muslim peasantry. Poets argued that poverty resulted from the failure to practise Islam in everyday life, from the peasant patriarch's indolence, frivolity, dishonesty, vanity, and the over-indulgence of wives and children. These failures related back to the peasant market entanglements and manifested in excessive and unrestrained market-based consumption.
Agrarian Islamic texts were produced as cheap and flimsy chapbooks, printed on low-quality thin paper, loosely bound with thread, and priced at between one and six annas. Texts signalled their Islamic content in material form of the printed book. Some boyans had Arabic words in their titles, such as Abdul Aziz's Dunia O Akherat Do Jahaner Najat and Abul Mohsen Mohammad Asghar Hossain's Kalamal Haq ba Hok Katha (True Words), published in Sirajganj in 1932. Some texts had Arabic inscriptions, in the Arabic script, on their cover; others had ‘Allahu Akbar’ printed prominently in Bengali at the top of the cover page. The first edition of Abdul Hai's Adarsha Krishak (Ideal Peasant), published in Mymensingh in 1920, had the Muslim crescent-moon-and-star symbol on its cover. Some texts had epigraphs in an Arabic script, often the Islamic invocation to begin in God's name, bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim, and occasionally longer quotations from the Quran or a Hadith, such as in the second, expanded edition of Adarsha Krishak, published in 1922. Texts also signalled their Islamic content by opening from the right, like an Arabic book—Hossain's Kalamal Haq signalled its Islamic content by opening from the right, as well as the Arabic words in its title.
These printed books, adorned with Islamic symbols, circulated between literate and oral spheres. The printed boyan was the spoken word written down, printed, and mass-produced, so as to be read out aloud once again.Footnote 3 Printed texts and their public, oral performance connected the vibrant print cultures of the delta's small towns to the impoverished agrarian countryside. Agrarian Islamic texts were produced out of the particular dynamics of peasant differentiation in the Bengal delta, where a group of peasant families diversified away from purely agrarian livelihoods, became established in small towns and prospered, while households reliant on solely agricultural incomes in the rural countryside were rendered destitute. The former group emerged as a mofussil Muslim intelligentsia that authored and produced agrarian Islamic texts addressing the impoverished rural peasantry.Footnote 4
Their texts were primarily concerned with the causes and solutions to Muslim peasant poverty, which they located in peasant market entanglements. This focus on marketplaces should not be surprising. Agrarian Islamic texts were produced out of a market-driven process of peasant differentiation, with a group of peasant households enriched by the buoyant jute markets of the early 1900s addressing another section of the peasantry being immiserated by the depressed jute markets of the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, market entanglement was the defining feature of economic life for the overwhelming majority of the Bengal peasantry, regardless of the size of their smallholdings or their security of tenure over diminishing smallholdings. The vast majority of the delta's peasantry cultivated plots of land too small to produce sufficient food for household subsistence. These households produced jute as part of a market-based subsistence strategy—that is, they relied on sales of jute to purchase subsistence rice. Sharecroppers who typically cultivated smaller plots and turned over half of their produce to landholders similarly depended on markets to obtain household subsistence.Footnote 5 In the Bengal delta, peasant society as a whole—from sharecroppers to large farmers—were entangled in markets.
Agrarian Islamic texts did not, however, portray peasant market engagements as desperate efforts to eke out subsistence but instead derided peasant market entanglements as signs of indolence, extravagance, and frivolousness. Texts mocked dandified peasants and their expensive attire and hairstyles, and dwelt on the loss of patriarchal authority over quarrelsome wives and wayward sons who had been over-indulged with expensive gifts and lavish ceremonies. Poets prescribed individual programmes of self-reform that would restore peasant household economy, focusing on hard work, abstinence, and savvy market operations. These programmes, however, were impracticable. It was simply not possible for peasant households to produce the variety of goods required for household subsistence. The imperative to abjure consumption was not applicable to the vast majority of cultivators who were not conspicuous consumers but were barely scraping together basic subsistence. Even though this-worldly, agrarian Islam represented idealized market-oriented lives that the impoverished peasantry could admire, perhaps even strive towards, but not realistically realize. Despite its pretences to the contrary, agrarian Islam was not an actionable programme for individual self-improvement. Instead, agrarian Islamic discourses consisted of a condemnation of the present state of Bengali Muslim peasant society and depictions of idealized moral and ethical peasant economic lives.
In locating Bengali Muslim peasant subjectivity in their market entanglements, this article departs from the predominant historiographic focus on communalism and communalization—the formation of an exclusive and separatist Muslim identity against a consolidated Hindu ‘other’, which led inexorably to partition and Pakistan in 1947. Following Ayesha Jalal's call to ‘explode communalism’, this article eschews communal frames of analysis in analysing agrarian Islamic discourses in the Bengal delta.Footnote 6 Agrarian Islamic texts, this article argues, were not primarily concerned with an antagonistic Hindu other, but with forms of market engagements that enabled Bengali Muslim peasants to be good Muslims and good peasants.
Historians of communalism in agrarian Bengal have noted the overlaps of class and religion in the delta's agrarian economy—whereby most peasants were Muslim and most landlords and moneylenders were Hindu. Therefore, peasant movements against economic exploitation would frequently take the form of inter-religious violence. Notably, Sugata Bose has shown that the economic dislocations wrought by the great depression resulted in ‘communal’ protests by Muslim peasants against Hindu moneylenders in Kishoreganj in 1930.Footnote 7 While Bose's argument explains the specificities of the Kishoreganj riots, it does not account for the fact that the Muslim peasantry did not target the substantial numbers of Muslim landlords and moneylenders in class/communal conflicts throughout the late colonial period. Partha Chatterjee has argued more generally that, in the feudalistic colonial agrarian economy, peasants perceived social relations of production as religio-cultural rather than class-based. Hence, all Muslims would be seen as fellow peasants, regardless of whether they were rent-receivers or moneylenders. The feudalistic structures of the colonial economy meant that peasant protest could only express itself in a ‘communal mode’ in violence against Hindu zamindars and moneylenders.Footnote 8 Hence, for Chatterjee, agrarian Islamic texts expressed an ‘entire complex of feelings against feudal authority and commercial exploitation’ and these ‘feelings’ manifested in communal violence: they were ‘transformed ideologically into political action against the enemies of a peasant community united by religion’.Footnote 9
Pradip Datta offers a more nuanced reading of the ideological content of ‘communalism’, characterizing communalism as a flexible ideology with multiple representations of the ‘other’ that can be pressed into different political projects.Footnote 10 Datta reads ‘peasant improvement literature’—the same literature that I have labelled agrarian Islamic—as urging Muslim peasants to excise Hindu customs and practices from their lives. He argues that authors of peasant improvement literature depicted extravagances—expensive weddings, dowry, fancy clothing—as Hindu traits. Hence, cutting down on extravagances would purify Bengali Muslim peasants of their inner Hinduness. Datta's reading is very persuasive: agrarian Islamic poets decried certain forms of peasant extravagance as babugiri—that is, as peasants styling themselves through attire and hairstyles as middle-class Hindu babus. However, as Andrew Sartori has rightly argued, communalism—even Datta's analysis of a flexible communal ideology—does not adequately explain ‘Bengali Muslimness’, where to be a good Muslim was to be a good peasant and, conversely, to be a good peasant was to be a good Muslim.Footnote 11 Sartori locates Bengali Muslimness in a Lockean conception of the property-constituting powers of labour. Hence, Bengali Muslimness was exemplified in the popular slogan of the period—‘the land belongs to the tiller’. Sartori reads the emphasis on hard work and labour in agrarian Islamic texts as evidence of this Lockean idea: texts urge peasants to work hard and make their own things—furniture, clothing, ponds—because they can justly claim ownership of such things.
Agrarian Islamic texts, I argue, did much more than express resentment of Hindu zamindars and moneylenders: they prescribed positive programmes for Muslim peasant emancipation, advocated wide-ranging reforms in everyday peasant life, and depicted idealized Muslim peasant households. Not all reforms proposed by agrarian Islamic texts related to excising the inner Hindu residing within Muslim peasants as claimed by Pradip Datta. Rather, agrarian Islamic texts addressed a range of everyday practices that compromised fiscal solvency and prevented capital accumulation, only some of which were described as Hindu. Further, agrarian Islamic texts extensively used Hindu concepts in depicting Muslim peasant impoverishment. These texts commonly labelled the present state of Muslim peasantry as signs of the kalikal or kaliyuga, the Hindu age of vice, and describing impoverished cultivators as abandoned by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. Also, contrary to Andrew Sartori's claims, the purpose of labour was not primarily to claim ownership of the products of labour. Rather, it was to reduce expenditure by substituting market-purchased commodities with home production. Agrarian Islamic texts argued that indolence resulted from market dependence: cultivators found it easier to purchase goods from markets rather than labouring to produce it themselves.
This article argues that agrarian Islam was primarily concerned with peasant market entanglements, locating both the impoverishment and the possible salvation of the Bengal peasantry in their market engagements. Market dependence was the defining feature of the agrarian economy in the Bengal delta during the early twentieth century. The boom in jute prices during the 1900s created the mofussil Muslim intelligentsia that authored agrarian Islamic texts. Reversals in jute prices during and after the First World War immiserated the bulk of the delta's cultivators, who had not diversified livelihoods and continued to rely on sales of jute to purchase subsistence from markets. As a religion of peasant poverty and prosperity, agrarian Islam was thus necessarily focused on peasant market entanglements. The next section of this article will examine how commodity markets—particularly jute markets—differentiated the peasantry into a mofussil Muslim intelligentsia and an impoverished class of rural smallholders dependent solely on agriculture. The following section will examine the range of reforms proposed by agrarian Islamic texts, demonstrating how these reforms ultimately related to peasant market engagements.
Mofussil Muslim intelligentsia
Agrarian Islamic texts were produced out of mofussil printing presses in the Bengal delta, in towns like Faridpur, Mymensingh, Sirajganj, Noakhali, and Brahmanbaria. Texts were authored and financed by a mofussil Muslim intelligentsia, consisting of salaried professionals, businessmen, and property-holders and rent-receivers based in the Bengal delta's small towns. Through these texts, the mofussil Muslim intelligentsia addressed a rural and mostly illiterate Muslim peasantry—berating, mocking, and instructing the impoverished peasantry. To understand the production and circulation of agrarian Islam, it is necessary to understand the processes of social and economic differentiation that created, on the one hand, a mofussil Muslim intelligentsia and a vibrant small-town print economy and, on the other, an utterly destitute rural peasantry.
This process of differentiation began in the early twentieth century, during the jute boom of 1905–1913—a period of high jute prices and expanding jute cultivation. During this period, the bulk of the delta's cultivators turned from subsistence rice production to commercial jute cultivation. They adopted market-based subsistence livelihoods, cultivating jute for sale to markets in order to purchase subsistence food and other consumer goods. While jute prices were high relative to the price of rice and consumer commodities, market-based subsistence livelihoods were not only viable, but also profitable. The increased market integration of cultivators spurred transformations in peasant material life—in work and leisure, housing, furnishing, and clothing, in relations within the household and with the community. Corrugated-iron roofing, more than other peasant-consumed commodities, came to symbolize peasant prosperity and the broader transformations in peasant life spurred by peasant market entanglements. As Mokhtar Ahmed Siddiqi, the Sub-Inspector of Madrassas in Sirajganj, noted in 1914: ‘The jute trade has improved the conditions of ordinary people so much that there is no poverty in these parts. In every village and in every neighbourhood we see many tin houses—only because of jute.’Footnote 12
Market entanglement not only brought consumer-driven changes in peasant life, but also increased vulnerability. Peasant wellbeing was now dependent on volatile global commodity markets. Moreover, jute production and market integration were accompanied by rising indebtedness. Jute was a labour-intensive and expensive plant to cultivate, and peasant households incurred debt to finance production costs. Further, as jute displaced subsistence food, peasant households relied on loans to tide them through lean months, when stocks of grain and cash were low. For contemporary commentators, increased indebtedness signified excessive, frivolous, and extravagant consumption—it meant that peasant households were living beyond their means. Writing in February 1914, K. C. Dey, a junior official in the civil service, offered a seemingly contradictory view of the delta's jute-cultivating peasantry—extravagant and sanitary, indulgent and educated, frivolous and healthy, prosperous, and indebted. As we shall see, these concerns about an ‘upset domestic economy’ were integral to agrarian Islam:
The jute cultivator is notoriously improvident. The high prices he has been getting during the past ten years has turned his head altogether and upset his domestic economy. The large amount of cash that he handles has made him extravagant, and his style of living has risen in a remarkable degree. He eats much better, wears better clothes, and lives a cleaner and more sanitary life than before. His house has improved, corrugated-iron has taken the place of thatch, and the compounds and gardens are cleaner. He educates his children in many cases, sending them to English schools, which are fast springing up, and calls in doctors in case of illness. He indulges more frequently in litigation and marries more wives, paying a good deal more for each than before. But all this advance in the ways of living is much more than is warranted by his material prosperity. The money that he gets by the sale of his crop he squanders in a few months, and very often, I am inclined to think, almost universally, he runs into debt before he can sell his next harvest.Footnote 13
The outbreak of the First World War, mere months after Siddiqi's and Dey's comments on peasant wellbeing, brought an abrupt end to this brief period of market-driven peasant prosperity. Britain declared war on Germany just as cultivators were preparing to reap the standing jute plants. The beginnings of war in Europe led to a virtual cessation of all international shipping and markets for fibre virtually disappeared. When markets resumed activity in September, prices were absurdly low—2 rupees a maund for the best jute, compared to the 10–12 rupees that ordinary jute sold for during 1913.Footnote 14 At the same time, the price of peasant-consumed commodities—and particularly of subsistence rice—rose steeply. Terms of trade between jute and subsistence and consumer commodities worsened during the 1920s and 1930s, and the delta's rice and jute cultivators slipped further into debt and even liquidated assets to stave off hunger and starvation. Further, adverse market conditions were compounded by ecological shocks. Railroad construction had blocked the delta's drainage, leading to more frequent and severe floods and epidemics of water-borne disease. Ecology and markets combined to drive the bulk of the delta's peasantry into utter destitution. The pace of immiseration became even more rapid during the depression decade of the 1930s, when jute prices fell faster and lower than the prices of other commodities and finally culminated in the tragedy of famine in 1943–44, when the price of rice and subsistence goods rose far higher than that of jute. By the 1930s, the corrugated-iron roofs that had marked an earlier period of peasant prosperity had lost their lustre, and appeared as ruins of former wealth dotting the countryside. The survey and settlement report of Rangpur (1930–38) noted that, in ‘the principal jute area [to the south-east of the district, along the Brahmaputra] . . . the country is open evincing by its large tin-roofed homesteads and orchards of graceful betel-nut palms, evidence of past prosperity’.Footnote 15
While the bulk of the peasantry was being immiserated, a small number of rural households prospered. These were households that had invested profits during the jute boom of 1905–13 to diversify livelihoods away from agriculture. The most common form of diversification was through money-lending, but some peasant households had also invested in sons’ education and in establishing businesses. Young peasant men (rarely women) moved to the delta's small towns, to take up salaried professional employment or to manage businesses in mofussil bazaars. During the 1920s, these young Muslim men became closely involved with the burgeoning small-town print industry—as authors, readers, patrons, and financiers of printed texts. They authored and financed the publication of agrarian Islamic texts, through which they addressed the destitute peasantry who had not diversified out of purely agrarian livelihoods. These young men transformed the intellectual and cultural life of the mofussil.
Eastern Bengal's mofussil towns were very small and their population was dwarfed by the surrounding countryside. In 1901, the delta's towns housed only 2 per cent of the total population and, with the exception of Dacca with a population of 90,000, no other had more than 25,000 residents. The towns’ population, however, was growing: between 1891 and 1901, the town population had increased by 12.7 per cent. The expanding jute trade and the increased penetration of colonial state institutions into the jute-cultivating hinterland drove the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century growth of mofussil towns. The 1901 census noted regarding eastern Bengal that ‘the country is prosperous and trade is increasing, and the most progressive towns are those connected with the export trade in jute’.Footnote 16 Jute traders concentrated in the delta's riverine and railway market towns, constructing warehouses, baling presses, railway sidings, and river docks. As was generally the case in colonial South Asia, the state followed closely on the heels of capital, and the late nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of the paraphernalia of the colonial state in administrative towns, in district and sub-divisional headquarters.
The initial growth in mofussil towns during the late nineteenth century was driven by the arrivals of merchant and professional classes from outside the Bengal delta—notably, Marwari merchants from western India who moved into market towns to participate in the jute trade and Calcutta-educated Bengali professionals took up employment as clerks, lawyers, and schoolteachers in administrative towns. Hence, until the 1920s, the towns were culturally and intellectually isolated from the surrounding countryside and much more closely integrated to the distant metropolis of Calcutta. This distinction of town and country was reflected in the religious composition of town and country: towns were mostly Hindu while surrounding villages were mostly Muslim.Footnote 17 The political and intellectual disconnect between mostly Hindu towns and mostly Muslim villages came to the fore during the Swadeshi movement of 1905–09, when Swadeshi activists, who were mostly Hindu townsmen, failed to enlist the support of the mostly Muslim rural peasantry in the Swadeshi programme of economic boycott. In analysing the failure of the Swadeshi movement to gain traction in east Bengal, Aurobindo Ghosh pointed to townsmen's intellectual dependence on Calcutta, noting that they ‘always waited for an intellectual initiative and sanction from the leaders in Calcutta’. ‘Calcutta is to Bengal what Paris is to France,’ continued Ghosh, ‘it is from Calcutta that Bengal takes its opinions, its inspirations, its leaders, its tone, its programme of action.’Footnote 18 The intellectual and political life of mofussil towns changed after the First World War, with the increasing arrivals of young Muslim men from the surrounding countryside.
The post-War period saw a boom in the delta's print and publishing industry. New local newspapers were established and many first-time mofussil authors published their first and often only books during this decade. Mofussil authors wrote on diverse topics, ranging from political and economic pamphlets; poems, short stories, and novellas; histories of localities, families, or castes; religious instruction for Hindus and Muslims; compilations of laws and regulations, agricultural manuals, and guidebooks for the management of zamindari estates. Even tiny Noakhali, with fewer than 8,000 residents, possessed at least two printing presses which printed at least three weekly newspapers and more than 30 original books during the 1920s. Medium-sized Faridpur, with a population of about 15,000, also possessed at least two presses and produced at least three newspapers. Mymensingh possessed perhaps the most vibrant print industry of these towns, and Mymensingh presses published some of the most widely read pamphlets of the period.Footnote 19 Mofussil newspapers’ circulation was limited to the towns and the surrounding countryside, but circles of readership had expanded and constituted a sufficiently large market to sustain such newspapers.
Recently arrived Muslim migrants from surrounding villages contributed significantly to the mofussil publishing boom, and were prominent members of the circles of authorship, readership, and patronage that constituted mofussil intellectual life. They authored political and economic pamphlets, poems and novellas, and edited newspapers. Authors and editors were drawn from a mofussil professional class, individuals with advanced degrees working as lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, and clerks in the towns. The costs of publishing pamphlets and running newspapers were usually borne by wealthier individuals—usually merchants and prominent landholders. The publication of the first edition of A. F. M. Abdul Hai's Adarsha Krishak was financed by a jute merchant and childhood friend of Hai: Abdul Majid of Shilashi, Gaffargaon. The Mymensingh District Board contributed 200 rupees towards and expanded second edition, and the text was dedicated to the Board's first elected Chairman—Khan Bahadur Maulvi Syed Ahmed Chowdhury, a local zamindar. Ashrafuddin Ahmed's poem Muslim Bani (Muslim Declaration), published in Comilla in 1927, was partially financed by Munshi Keramat Ali, the patron of the school in Laksham where Ashrafuddin Ahmed taught. The publication of Shah Abdul Hamid's Krishak Bilap (Peasant Lament) was partly financed through small contributions, ranging from two to ten rupees, from 21 different Muslim men from Mymensingh and surrounding villages, several of whom held bachelors of law or bachelors of arts degrees.Footnote 20 The Noakhali Sammilani, a weekly newspaper published out of Noakhali, had nine owners—four merchants operating in Noakhali town's bazaars, three taluqdars, and two zamindars. Bogurar Katha, a weekly published in Bogra, was owned by an informal group of shareholders drawn from a broad spectrum of Bogra's Muslim community.Footnote 21 This complex of mofussil Muslim schoolteachers, lawyers, pleaders, doctors, merchants and shopkeepers, zamindars, taluqdars, jotedars, politicians, legislators, and elected members in municipalities and district boards constituted the circles of authorship, readership, and patronage that sustained the print and publishing boom in the Bengal delta.
The efflorescence of intellectual life in the small towns caught the attention of external observers, though usually they failed to note the autonomy of the mofussil from metropolitan Calcutta. Thus, a colonial report of 1929 stated:
Town life [in eastern Bengal] is centred in important railway or steamer stations, or at the headquarters of the civil administration. In the former, trading interests predominate, and many Indians who have had years of contact with foreign business, show a considerable knowledge of modern commerce and its methods. In the latter, a more official atmosphere prevails. The scholastic, legal and medical professions are strongly represented; and, with the official classes and land-owners of moderate income, form a society which is in close intellectual touch with the metropolis and, at the same time, has steady contact of a professional or legal character with the country villager. The Calcutta newspapers are read daily, and local and provincial politics are a subject of constant discussion, while a real knowledge of village life and thought is maintained.Footnote 22
While the report's author was correct in noting the rise of a politically conscious and intellectually engaged small-town middle class, he was mistaken in two important respects. First, he placed undue emphasis on the readership of Calcutta articles and the ‘close intellectual touch with the metropolis’ and failed to note the relatively autonomous mofussil print industry. Townsmen did not merely imbibe Calcutta texts, but also consumed and produced texts printed by the towns’ vibrant publishing industry. Second, he was mistaken in characterizing the relationship of the mofussil middle class with the ‘country villager’ as being solely of a ‘professional or legal character’. In fact, connections ran much deeper. Many small-town professionals, particularly Muslims, had origins and close family ties to the countryside—the ‘country villager’ was not just client or patient, but also a close relative. The newly created mofussil Muslim intelligentsia overturned Aurobindo Ghosh's assertion that ‘it is from Calcutta that Bengal takes its opinions, its inspirations, its leaders, its tone, its programme of action’.Footnote 23 The mofussil Muslim intelligentsia did not take its cues from Calcutta, but constituted an autonomous political domain maintaining relative independence from the metropolis. This intellectual milieu produced agrarian Islamic texts.
For this newly created mofussil Muslim intelligentsia, peasant immiseration was the burning issue of the day and the topic of a significant portion of the mofussil literary output. The mofussil intelligentsia conceived of themselves as an engaged and politically conscious elite working for the benefit of an impoverished and backward peasantry. In his foreword to Shah Abdul Hamid's Krishak Bilap, Sheikh Bashiruddin Ahmed wrote: ‘The Bengal peasant's sorrows and difficulties have been discussed in civil society (shudhi shamaj) for some time. But no one could have thought that the last moment of their lives would come so soon, no one could have foreseen that.’Footnote 24 Similarly, in his preface to Abul Hossain's Bangla'r Bolshi (Bengal's Bolsheviks), Muhammad Fazlul Karim Mullick—a zamindar in Dacca district—wrote that the book will ‘benefit those who are engaging themselves in serving the country or wish to think about the real condition of the nation’.Footnote 25 Mofussil Muslim authors wrote agrarian Islamic texts to address peasant impoverishment. Through agrarian Islamic texts, this intelligentsia directly addressed Bengal's Muslim peasantry, urging them to undertake comprehensive programmes of self-reform. The didactic form of agrarian Islamic texts differentiated rural and small-town Muslim society into an elite intelligentsia and peasant masses, with the former instructing the latter in the proper conduct of their material lives. Agrarian Islam was a religion of the marketplace, concerned above all else with reforming peasant market engagements, to balance household budgets, reduce indebtedness, and enable capital accumulation.
Agrarian forms of Islam
Agrarian Islam was a market-oriented religion, concerned primarily with extravagant, frivolous, and wasteful expenditure in the marketplace. Perhaps the most widely circulated and glossiest agrarian Islamic text was Abdul Hai's Adarsha Krishak. In his introduction to Krishak Bilap, Shah Abdul Hamid celebrated Adarsha Krishak as the Bengal peasant's ‘buker dhon’, or heart-wealth.Footnote 26 Hai claimed to have written Adarsha Krishak to ‘advise peasants on the way out of poverty’ and to present vignettes of ‘ideal peasant life’ as examples to be emulated by the impoverished peasantry. The first and longest vignette is about the ideal farmer Osman, a pious man who works hard and all day. He is a man who says: ‘I will do first and then if I have time, I will advise other people to do the same.’ At the end of a hard day's work in the fields, Osman returns home to tend chilli plants and betel vines, spin cloth, make his own furniture, and dig a pond by hand, scooping out earth bit by bit. He also abjures luxuries and vices—Osman does not smoke hookah. He is a benevolent patriarch—he does not beat his wife. And Osman is pious—the only breaks he takes from his days of constant labour are to call out the azaan (the call to prayer) from the village mosque and to say his prayers. Through hard work, abstinence, and piety, Osman has managed to prosper. The hardworking and abstemious Osman is the counter-example to the Bengal peasantry:
Hey Bengal's illiterate peasant brothers, it was just the other day that you had used money from jute sales to build tin houses, borrowed 500 rupees to dig a large pond, borrowed money to pay for the wedding of your adored, piece-of-your-liver son . . . but today almost all of you are taking your families into the jungles of Assam. Shame, shame shame, (chhi: chhi: chhi:), weren't you the brave warriors who had won this country.
Know for certain that no one has defeated you; you have defeated yourselves. Greed, cupidity, materialism and ignorance (lobh, mouho, maya o murkhota) are your eternal enemies.Footnote 27
The subsequent vignettes present similar tales of labour, production, and asceticism. The second vignette is of an ideal farm called Shahbagh, where 2.5 acres of land supported rice, jute, a vegetable garden growing potatoes, chillies, garlic, onions, peas, tobacco and all kinds of vegetables, betel-nuts and vines, fruit trees, climbers that produce gourd and beans, and ducks, chickens, pigeons, and goats. The farm belonged to Shah Ahmed, an educated man who had worked for the Mymensingh District Board and taught at several schools and madrassas before returning to the life of an agriculturist. The third vignette is of a farmer who has two tamarind trees in his house and supplements his income by making tamarind chutney and selling that in a nearby town. The fourth vignette is of a zamindar returning from fishing—having caught a large carp or rui mach—and running into two boys returning from market, one having purchased a gourd and the other having bought koi fish, a kind of freshwater perch. The zamindar calls over the boys’ father to his house—an addict who sold his plough oxen to support his opium habit. He lectures the man, saying ‘I, a zamindar, grow my own vegetables and catch my own fish and you, a peasant, send your children to market to buy the same. You are lazy, so you can't make your rent payments to me’.Footnote 28
Hai concludes his book with a 21-point programme for ‘mukti’—freedom. The first of point in the programme regarding peasant budgets: ‘Every peasant will keep accounts of revenue and expenditure and will completely desist from all wasteful expenditure.’ The 21-point programme consisted of reforming peasant production and consumption: farmers should keep aside enough land to grow sufficient rice for household subsistence; they should plant cotton, sugar cane, date palms, betel vines, and tobacco; they should not visit markets empty-handed, but with some goods to sell; they should avoid litigation; they must not sell their land and use cash earnings to buy more land; they should not buy fish, but catch their own fish; they should not smoke tobacco or chew betel leaf, unless they grow their own; they should make their own umbrellas from bamboo, rather than purchase expensive imported umbrellas for five or six rupees at marketplaces; and so forth. The peasant patriarch is urged to make burkas for his wife and not spend money on palanquins, and to educate their sons. The programme of peasant mukti consisted of the male patriarch carefully balancing household budgets, disciplining household members, and reducing market consumption by working harder to produce household necessities.
Andrew Sartori correctly points to Abdul Hai's Adarsha Krishak and its relentless promotion of labour as indicative of a Lockean theory of property. Sartori rightly calls attention to Hai's insistence that Osman's belongings—clothing, furniture, the pond, so forth—truly belong to him as he made them with his own hands. However, as the 21-point programme for mukti makes clear, the point of labour is not so much to claim to property, but to balance peasant households’ budgets—to increase revenue by producing more goods for sale and reduce expenditure by producing instead of purchasing household necessities. Peasants are instructed to make their own umbrellas because they will save five rupees by not purchasing an expensive umbrella at the marketplace. Shahbag is a successful farm because it produces a wide variety of goods for sale, rather than relying on a single cash crop: jute. Emancipation was to be achieved through careful and savvy engagements with markets, and labour was related to peasant households’ market earnings and expenditure.
The marketplace orientation of agrarian Islamic texts is made more explicit in printed boyans, a far more accessible and affordable genre than the glossy and expensive Adarsha Krishak. Boyans were not only cheaper—one to six annas as against one rupee and four paisa for the second edition of Adarsha Krishak—but they were also performed orally in bazaars and public spaces in rural Bengal. The boyans repeat the same focus on work, abstemious consumption, and balancing household expenditure as Adarsha Krishak, but also address peasant life more broadly, focusing on attire, hairstyle, wives, youths, village leaders, and so forth. As I will argue, even in expanding the field of agrarian Islam beyond labour and consumption, these boyans maintained their focus on the marketplace and peasant household finances. These boyans argued that un-Islamic practices, habits, and comportments led to financially ruinous market engagements that impoverished peasants. Freedom or mukti was to be achieved by restoring household finances through the cultivation of proper Islamic practices in all spheres of everyday material life.
Most agrarian Islamic boyans open with a lament about Muslim poverty. Abdul Aziz's Dunia o Akherat Dojahaner Najat opens with: ‘Looking at Muslims today/Hai Hai, my heart explodes.’Footnote 29 Ashrafuddin Ahmed's Muslim Bani begins: ‘I begin my poem by holding your feet and crying/We Bengalis suffer so much sorrow.’Footnote 30 Akram Ali's Keno Lok Gorib Hoy (Why Do People Become Poor) opens with the lines: ‘Seeing the situation of people in this age/My soul becomes restless and frightened/Does not get to eat, no clothes on their backs/Going hungry for a day, two days.’Footnote 31 The boyans then proceed to identify poverty as a specifically Muslim issue. Aziz proceeds to ask and answer a series of rhetorical questions in the opening lines to his poem: Who are the beggars? Muslims. Who lose their lands and homes through debt? Muslims. Whose households are depleted by malaria, cholera, small-pox, and plague? Again, Muslims.
Material deprivation was closely related to moral depravity. Abdur Rahim's Nurul Islam characterized the present age as a kali kal—a dark age—where people cannot tell right from wrong and do not fear Allah or his prophet.Footnote 32 The kali kal was an age of disrespect, dishonesty, cheating, theft, lying, bestiality, and adultery covered over by a veil of false religious practice, by ostentatious prayers, fasts, hajj, and beards. Contrary to Pradip Datta's arguments about the purification of Muslim peasants by the excision of Hindu traits, or Asim Roy's claims about replacing syncreticism with more pure practices of Islam, the poets of agrarian Islam often invoked Hindu ideas—hence, the Hindu idea of the dark age or the kaliyuga is a period of declining Islamic practice. The kali kal is also a period of Muslim subjugation by ‘other races’ or bijatis—a word that could refer to the British, non-Bengalis, or Bengali Hindus. The trope of a once proud people—Abdul Hai's ‘brave warriors’ or Abdul Aziz's ‘those who had brought the world civilization’—having been reduced to servitude was a common feature of these poems, captured in the image of the Muslim peasant swallowing their pride and going to the Marwari moneylender or Hindu lawyer with bowed heads and palms pressed together in supplication.
These boyans narrate how the Muslim fall from glory was due to ostentatious consumption, an aversion to business, the inability to exercise patriarchal authority over wives and children, deceit and dishonesty, a lack of unity, and a lack of education. Abdul Aziz's Najat consists of five sections, each section corresponding to a reason why Muslims have been impoverished: a loss of faith (iman), a lack of unity (ekota), an aversion to business and trade, frivolous expenditure, and a lack of education. Abdur Rahim's Nurul Islam is similarly composed of five sections, with each section illustrating an aspect of the dark ages: the first concerns a land transaction where the seller attempts to cheat the buyer by not handing over the title deeds upon receiving the cash; the second is about a boatman who steals a portion of mangoes entrusted to him to transport to a wholesaler in Dhaka; the third narrates the stories of spoilt and wayward sons of indulgent fathers; the fourth concerns an extravagant wedding that leads to a bad marriage, as the young husband and wife have been spoilt by a lifetime of indulgence; and the fifth is about bad-tempered and unveiled peasant wives spoilt by indulgent patriarchs, their husbands, and fathers-in-law.
Even as they addressed diverse aspects of everyday peasant life, the boyans were ultimately concerned with the marketplace. Agrarian Islam promoted abjuring consumption and producing goods for household use, always visiting markets with something to sell, not relying on markets for subsistence rice, and so forth. These kinds of market engagement were not just economically sensible—they were Islamic. Mofussil boyans are replete with stories of excessive, frivolous consumption by peasant households. As Abdul Aziz rhymes: ‘He who spends frivolously/Is Satan's brother.’Footnote 33 Ashrafuddin Ahmed's Muslim Bani narrates a tale of the peasant patriarch who takes out a loan of 300 takas for his son's wedding ceremony, who is ultimately driven to destitution by the interest payments. Frivolous expenditure was not simply impoverishing—it was not true to an idealized and truly Islamic self-sufficient and market-independent peasant. The ideal peasant caught his own fish, grew his own vegetables, made his own furniture, spun his own cloth, made his own umbrellas, and did not buy anything from the marketplace—like Osman.
In Muslim Bani, Ashrafuddin Ahmed compared the market-dependent peasantry of his times unfavourably to the ‘independent’ peasantry of the past, who made their own mustard oil to rub on their bodies, light lamps, and cook food; cultivated eggplants, chillies, ginger, and turmeric; and were satisfied with homespun cloth. This independent peasantry ‘lacked for nothing’, ‘never experienced the moneylender's pressures’, ‘would be displeased by unnecessary expenditure’, and ‘maintained their full honour’.Footnote 34 On the other hand, Ahmed argued, contemporary peasants consumed at will, and were losing their true peasant identity. Contemporary peasants were, Ahmed argues, styling themselves as ‘babus’—as middle-class, salaried Hindus. He reserved special contempt for peasants with an ‘Albert cut’—a distinctive hairstyle with a side parting and slightly waved that was named after Prince Albert, Empress Victoria's grandson, who had toured India in 1889–90:
For Ahmed, Albert cuts, oiled hair, and fancy clothes were forms of ‘babugiri’—of cultivating the habits and appearance of middle-class and Hindu babus. ‘Babugiri’ was implicated in a loss of peasant ethic and, more significantly, in financially ruinous market behaviour. Cultivators had stopped working as cultivators and were not devoting sufficient time to the diverse forms of production that would, Ahmed thought, sustain the ideal and profitable peasant household. Ahmed concludes his poem with a series of instructions that are emblematic of this agrarian form of Islam, akin to Abdul Hai's 21-point programme for freedom: do not spend unnecessarily, forsake luxury, work hard to produce useful things, avoid litigation, quit smoking, save money, and accumulate capital.
Babugiri was also closely related to litigiousness—another financially ruinous form of peasant expenditure through lawsuits. Ashrafuddin Ahmed alleged that today's peasants were found not to be working in their fields, but in courthouses contesting lawsuits. The image of ‘babugiri’ was captured in Ahmed's description of a farmer, dressed in his newest clothes and oiled Albert-cut hair, running to catch the train: he was on his way to town to meet with his lawyer, a Hindu babu. This dandified peasant was contributing to a breakdown in Muslim peasant unity and, also, Muslim subjugation by Hindus: ‘The Hindu lawyer, when he gets you, will kick you in the ass/Your son, ignorant shala, is thinning the jute field.’Footnote 36
To abjure consumption was not, however, to forsake markets entirely. In fact, peasants are urged to engage with markets, not as buyers, but as traders. Hence, the farmer who makes tamarind chutney and sells them in marketplaces—one of the vignettes of the ideal peasant in Hai's Adarsha Krishak—is praiseworthy. Abdul Aziz identifies Muslim aversion to trade as one of the five major causes for their impoverishment, stating in a couplet: ‘Those races that forsook commerce/They drowned in this world and the next.’Footnote 37 Aziz claims those who object to commerce and trade on religious grounds, as being too this-worldly, are traitors: ‘There is no shame in doing halal work/Those who hate this work are traitors.’Footnote 38 They are traitors precisely because the Muslim aversion to commerce and trade had led to their subjugation by ‘different races’—that is, Hindus and the British. As Aziz rhymes:
A recurrent villain in mofussil Muslim poetry were Marwari merchants—a trading community with origins in Rajasthan who had moved into the Bengal delta starting in the late nineteenth century to participate in the jute trade. By the early twentieth century, Marwari merchants had carved out a dominant position in the delta's market towns as wholesalers and moneylenders. Mofussil boyans repeated the narrative of Marwari merchants coming from afar with few belongings and amassing enormous wealth out of peasant labour. The ‘blood-sucking’ Marwari merchant was a frequent villain. In Haq Katha, Asghar Hossain locates Bengali Muslim downfall in British and Marwari commercial prowess, which enabled the British to conquer India and the Marwaris to suck dry the cultivators’ wealth:
Hossain, like Aziz, urged Muslim peasants to go into commerce. He offered the example of a farmer dividing his substantial holdings between four sons, each fragmented holding too small to sustain the peasant household. As a solution, he advises four brothers to go into four types of business, to specialize in trading four different commodities.
The mofussil poets’ insistent appeal for Muslim peasants to engage in business was accompanied by their emphasis on ethical business practices. Even as he urged cultivators to go into different forms of commerce, Hossain emphasized how certain forms of commerce were un-Islamic. The jute trade was corrupting because it was characterized by deceit and dishonesty: ‘In jute, all I see is theft/Look and see for yourselves, men and women.’Footnote 41 Hossain proceeds to narrate a long list of thefts that take place in jute cultivation and trade: the theft of seeds from a neighbour's field, the theft of a few strands from the peasant homestead to buy a cigarette in the market, the trader's theft when weighing small lots of peasant produce, the graders’ bribe in assessing quality, the theft in prices by brokers, and the theft on rails and steamers. In a market practice unique to jute, negotiations over price took place silently, with a buyer and seller indicating prices by tracing the figures on each other's palms under a piece of cloth. All of this secrecy and dishonesty was geared towards cheating cultivators of a just price for their commodity:
No other mofussil poet goes to the same lengths as Hossain in describing an entire commodity as un-Islamic. For most mofussil poets, the emphasis was on specific dishonest practices—on lying, stealing, and cheating. Abdur Rahim's Nurul Islam narrates an incident of a boatman stealing mangoes entrusted to him for transport by a cultivator. The boatman sells a portion of the cargo entrusted to him at another trader's docks by the riverside, though he swore—on the Koran—to deliver the entire cargo intact. When the wholesaler in Dhaka receives fewer mangos, he does not complain, but makes up the money by cheating customers on weight and price—all the while swearing upon the Koran and by Allah. The point of Rahim's narrative is that an individual act of dishonesty leads to a series of dishonest acts, a sequence of deceit and lies sworn upon the Koran. Hence, the boatman's simple theft of mangoes added up, sequentially, into an entire society based on deceit and dishonesty—the kali kal or dark ages. It was not enough for Muslims to engage in commerce and business; they had to do so honestly and ethically.
Agrarian Islamic boyans were focused on patriarchal authority over wives and children. Quarrelsome wives and daughters-in-law and disrespectful youths were, these boyans contended, the results of a failure to exercise proper patriarchal authority. The most common condemnation of women is through a caricatured image of the bad-tempered (bodmejaji), quarrelsome (jhograte), and unveiled (bepurdah) peasant wife—the female equivalent of the dandified male peasant. Abdur Rahim's dark ages, or kali kal, were characterized by such women, who demand luxuries, scream at their husbands, and neglect their children. These women, Rahim contends, are the products of failed patriarchal authority—of over-indulgent fathers and husbands who lavish their daughters and wives with expensive clothes and ornaments. Patriarchal over-indulgence also created the wastrel youth that characterize kali kal—lazy and disrespectful boys who smoke cigarettes in front of their elders. Patriarchal over-indulgence is marked by frivolous expenditure—on luxuries for wives and children. Three of the five sections of Rahim's Nurul Islam were concerned with the peasant household: with bad-tempered, quarrelsome, and unveiled women, failed marriages, and indulgent fathers and their spoilt brats. The failed marriage, in Rahim's narrative, directly results from a lavish wedding, which creates unreasonable expectations of material comfort for the new bride and conflict around the bride's dowry. Hence, in Adarsha Krishak, when Abdul Hai upbraided the Bengal peasant for borrowing money for the wedding of his ‘adored, piece-of-his-liver son’, he was concerned not solely with the household budget, but also with patriarchal over-indulgence and its moral effects on women and male youths. The degeneracy of peasant women and youths were, hence, a product of frivolous consumption.
Some agrarian Islamic texts condemned women's participation in producing for markets—even though it would contribute to strengthening household finances. The marketplace is an exclusively male space, and women's participation in markets would, mofussil poets maintained, lead to their degeneracy. In Haq Katha, Asghar Hossain narrates a lengthy condemnation against poultry and eggs. He begins his diatribe against eggs with the following couplet: ‘In this world there are too many chickens and ducks/These two things destroy religion and work.’Footnote 43 Hossain's main issue was that poultry rearing was women's work, leading to women leaving the homestead and male strangers entering the homestead: chickens and ducks compromised women's virtue. Women leave the home to collect feed for their birds and strange men—egg wholesalers—enter the homestead to buy eggs. Not only do women lose virtue; they are also unable to negotiate a just price for their eggs:
These grasping and frivolous peasant women were responsible for a breakdown in peasant unity—or ekota. In Abdul Aziz's Najat, the lack of ekota was one of the five causes of Muslim decline and his example of the breakdown of unity centred on quarrelsome women. Aziz narrates a story about two brothers buying meat for their wives: one wife complains that there are too many bones in her share of the meat, while the other wife feels that she is being accused of stealing by putting bones in her share, leading to an intense family squabble and the disintegration of the family unity. Quarrelsome and ill-tempered women were grasping and greedy, dissatisfied and demanding, and they caused conflict between men. Hence, consumption and the lack of Muslim peasant unity were closely inter-related.
Alongside women, the breakdown of ekata was due to litigiousness—the tendency of peasants to embroil themselves in litigation against neighbours and kin. For Nurul Islam, litigiousness was a symptom of the dishonesty and deceit that characterized the dark ages. He narrates a tale of an ‘imandar’, a person of faith who sells a portion of his land to repay the moneylender, except that the person who buys the land is a ‘trusting soul’ and does not ask for the title deeds. This imandar then claims that he never sold the land, and the resulting dispute lands up in the village council and then the district court. At each venue, this imandar swears upon the Koran that he never sold the land. This breakdown in trust through deceit, lies, and lawsuits was, according to Islam, symptomatic of kali kal. As he rhymes: ‘Uncles and nephews form factions and constantly fight/Uncles and nephews are always in the courts.’Footnote 45
For mofussil poets, the marketplace and the household were intertwined spaces, ultimately relating back to consumption. Unrestrained consumption in marketplaces led to the corruption of peasant wives in the household and to a breakdown in Muslim unity in the community. The dandified peasant man who spent recklessly on clothes, haircuts, and lawsuits was also a failed patriarch, over-indulging his wife and children, creating the ill-tempered and uncontrollable women and disrespectful youth that characterized kali kal. Agrarian Islam was a religion of restoration: freedom (mukti) and salvation (najat) meant restoring Muslim peasants to a past prosperity and a lost glory. This task of restoration was to be achieved by the peasants themselves, though individual self-reforms in the inter-related spaces of the farm, the household, and the market.
Conclusion
Agrarian Islamic texts’ focus on markets reflected the realities of economic life in the Bengal delta. Small and large peasant smallholders, sharecroppers, and landless wage-labourers participated in markets and depended on markets to procure simple household subsistence. The overarching dependence on markets in the agrarian delta was tragically revealed during the Bengal famine of 1943–44—a famine that resulted from the sharp rise in the price of rice in markets. As Amartya Sen demonstrated, rice prices rose far more sharply than the earnings of a range of other goods—agricultural wage-labour, haircuts, fish, etc. Rice prices also rose far more sharply than the price of jute and famine mortality in the delta's jute tracts included marginal jute cultivators who depended on sales of fibre to purchase subsistence grain.Footnote 46 In focusing on peasant market entanglements, these texts focused on an overarching and inescapable feature of economic life in the agrarian delta.
The Hindu moneylender, trader, and lawyer figured in agrarian Islamic texts and were portrayed as exploiting the Muslim peasantry; certain forms of extravagant expenditure were derided as Hindu behaviour, as peasant forms of babugiri. Partha Chatterjee's and Pradip Datta's readings of agrarian Islamic texts within a communal frame are, in a strict sense, correct. However, such communal readings miss out on the broader construction of Bengali Muslim peasant subjectivity. The Hindu, whether the Hindu mahajan or the figurative inner Hindu residing within Muslim peasants, were peripheral to the primary concern of these texts: the possibility of a viable, prosperous, ethical, and moral peasant life in a market-entangled agrarian economy. As Ayesha Jalal has demonstrated in her study of North Indian Muslim intellectuals, to eschew communal frames in understanding Muslim subjectivity is to allow for more complex and multiple ways of being Muslim and Indian.Footnote 47 Neilesh Bose's recent study of Bengali Muslim intellectuals similarly eschews communal frames to examine how Bengali Muslim staked claims to Bengali-ness amongst a largely Hindu Bengali literati.Footnote 48 Similarly, this article attempts to show how Bengali Muslim peasant subjectivity was grounded in being both a good Muslim and a good peasant, and not in an antagonistic relationship with an imagined or real Hindu ‘other’.
Further, this article argues that being a good peasant in the Bengal delta was premised not on the social relations of production, but on peasant market entanglements—on the sales and purchases of commodities from markets. The idea of a market-oriented peasantry is a departure from the dominant frames through which historians have interpreted the South Asian peasantry—through the social relations of land and the relationship of ryot and zamindar. As Sugata Bose has demonstrated, the zamindar’s rent declined in real terms since the tenancy act of 1885 and constituted a minor and declining portion of peasant expenditure in eastern Bengal.Footnote 49 Further, as Iftekhar Iqbal has recently demonstrated, east Bengal's zamindars struggled to assert power over the fluid ecology of the delta.Footnote 50 The dominant feature of peasant life in eastern Bengal was not the social relations of land, but global commodity markets and the relative prices of peasant-produced and peasant-consumed commodities. Further, commodity and credit markets were interlinked, as many traders offered goods on credit and many wholesale purchasers also acted as moneylenders. Agrarian Islam's concerns with peasant market entanglements is, thus, also a departure from the subalternist idea of peasant subjectivity forming an autonomous domain rooted in a pre-colonial and pre-modern worldview that was radically different from the enlightenment ideals of nationalist and colonial elites.Footnote 51 Instead, I have argued that Muslim peasant subjectivity in late colonial Bengal was grounded in the very modern ideals of fiscal solvency and prudent market engagements.
Ultimately, however, the actual reforms prescribed by agrarian Islamic poems were unrealistic and impracticable—it was simply not possible to be like Osman, to make everything with one's hands and to dig a pond by oneself. The imperative to abjure consumption was not applicable to the vast majority of cultivators who were not conspicuous consumers, but were barely scraping together basic subsistence. Peasant audiences listening to these poems in rural bazaars would not respond to didactic couplets of reform as an actionable programme for themselves and their households. Instead, they might have thought about the lifestyles of wealthier neighbours, and may have condemned them for their un-Islamic lavishness or, perhaps, praised them for a more Islamic asceticism. It is possible that ideals of agrarian Islam rendered possible a kind of ostentatious asceticism: peasant households that managed to both visibly display wealth and asceticism would be deemed heroic and virtuous. Asceticism without wealth was, after all, just poverty. Agrarian Islam was, in the end, not an actionable programme for individual peasant self-improvement. Rather, the appeal of agrarian Islam lay in its condemnation of the present depressed state of agrarian society and in its depiction of an idealized peasant utopia. In this utopian world, peasant patriarchs were hardworking and honest, peasant women and children were modest and respectful, peasant households accumulated wealth and capital, and poverty was banished.
