Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800-1980

Culture and Power in Banaras

Culture and Power

in Banaras

Community,

Performance,

and Environment,

1800—1980

EDITED BY

Sandria B. Freitag

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1989 by

The Regents of the University of California

First Paperback Printing 1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Culture and power in Banaras: community, performance, and environment, 1800-1980/edited by Sandria B. Freitag.

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-520-08094-7

1. Varanasi (India)—Civilization. 2. Power (Social Sciences)

1. Freitag, Sandria B.

DS486.B4C85 1989

954’.2—dcl9 88-21092

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CONTRIBUTORS

PREFACE

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION

Introduction: The History and Political Economy of Banaras

PART ONE Performance and Patronage

Introduction to Part 1 Performance and Patronage

ONE Rām’s Story in Shiva’s City: Public Arenas and Private Patronage Philip Lutgendorf

TWO The Birth of Hindi Drama in Banaras, 1868-1885 Kathryn Hansen

THREE The Rise of a Folk Music Genre: Birahā Scott L. Marcus

PART TWO Identity and Constructions of Community in Banaras

Introduction to Part 2 Identity and Constructions of Community in Banaras

FOUR Protection and Identity: Banaras’s Bir Babas as Neighborhood Guardian Deities Diane M. Coccari

FIVE Work and Leisure in the Formation of Identity: Muslim Weavers in a Hindu City Nita Kumar

PART THREE Banaras in Wider Arenas

Introduction to Part 3 Banaras in Wider Arenas

SIX Forging a New Linguistic Identity: The Hindi Movement in Banaras, 1868-1914 Christopher R. King

SEVEN State and Community: Symbolic Popular Protest in Banaras’s Public Arenas Sandria B. Freitag

EIGHT Land Use and Environmental Change in the Gangetic Plain: Nineteenth-Century Human Activity in the Banaras Region Robert G. Varady

NINE The Ecology and Cosmology of Disease in the Banaras Region David Arnold

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. South Asia about 1785/2

2. North India about 1860/5

3. U.P. Districts about 1860/20

4. City of Banaras: Sacred Sites/24

5. City of Banaras/116

FIGURES

1. Drawing of the river festival of Ganesh / 4

2. The podium and a section of the crowd at a Manas-katha festival/55

3. The late Narayankant Tripathi, a venerable

Ramcharitmanas expounder / 49

4. Pandit Ramnarayan Shukla expounding the Ramcharitmanas 152

5. One hundred and eight Brahmins chant the Ramcharitmanas 155

6. The cover of Sangit Raja Harichandra ka, by Jiya Lal / 68

7. The cast of the drama Bin Badshdhzadl / 72

8. Bihari (center) and two of his main disciples / 95

9. A neighborhood street in Banaras in about 1910/124

10. Lahura Bir’s annual decoration ceremony/131

11. Karman Bir, Banaras Hindu University campus 1138

12. Brocade weaver in Banaras working at pit loom /149

13. Tazia being paraded at Muslim observance of Muharram/160

14. Begam Urdu, in the garb of a courtesan, addresses Queen Devanagari, attired as a proper Hindu wife /180

15. Drawing of a tazia procession during the Muharram

observance, 1831 / 207

16. Cholera deaths among pilgrims dispersing from Allahabad Kumbh Mela, February 1894/256

17. Cholera mortality in Banaras district, 1875-1945/ 257

CONTRIBUTORS

David Arnold holds the chair in South Asian history at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He received his D. Phil. from Sussex University. He is the author of The Congress in Tamil- nod: Nationalist Politics in South India, 1919—37 (1977) and Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1839-1947 (1986). His current research is on epidemics and famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.

Diane M. Coccari recently completed her Ph.D. in the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin and is affiliated with that institution. Her dissertation is entitled The Bir Babas of Banaras: An Analysis of a Folk Deity in North Indian Hinduism.

Sandria B. Freitag, academic administrator and adjunct lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, recently completed a monograph, Collective Activity and Community: Public Arenas in the Emergence of Commu- nalism in North India. Interested in general in the interaction between the British colonial state and collective activities, including protest and popular culture, she is currently working on collective crime.

Kathryn Hansen is an associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her publications include an anthology of translations, The Third Vow and Other Stories, by Phanishwarnath Renu (1986), a special issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature devoted to Renu (1982), and articles on Hindi fiction, Indian cinema, folk theatre, classical music, and South Asian women. She is writing a book on the Nautanki theatre tradition.

Christopher R. King received his training in Indian history and Hindi at the University of Wisconsin and now teaches Intercultural Communication and related subjects, as well as Hindi, in the Department of Com munication Studies at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His previous work has included translations of Hindi literature into English, and studies in the social, cultural, and political aspects of language in modern north India.

Nita Kumar teaches South Asian history at Brown University. Her book The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1800—1986 has been published by Princeton University Press. She is working on a monograph, Primary School Curricula in Twentieth Century India: The Social Construction of Meaning.

Philip Lutgendorfis an assistant professor in Asian Studies at the University of Iowa. His dissertation for the University of Chicago, completed in 1986, was entitled "The Life of a Text: Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas in Performance."

Scott L. Marcus has conducted extensive fieldwork on Indian folk and classical music in Banaras and the surrounding villages. His Ph.D. dissertation for the University of California at Los Angeles, based on fieldwork conducted in Egypt, is on the melodic modes (the magamat) of Arabic music.

Robert G. Varady obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, specializing in the nineteenth-century history of South Asian transportation systems. Since 1981 he has been a member of the faculty of the Office of Arid Lands Studies at the University of Arizona.

PREFACE

Several purposes informed the collaborative work behind this volume. First, it provides a sustained examination, from a variety of viewpoints, of one urban place. Banaras was chosen primarily because it had attracted a sufficient critical mass of new scholarship to be especially suggestive. (The extent to which it can be considered typical is examined below.) But even though the contributors sketch the outlines of north Indian urban history over the preceding two centuries, they do not claim that their essays provide a definitive picture.

Rather, the essays explore new vistas, either methodologically or topically. Our second purpose, then, was to suggest by these juxtaposed examinations new ways to approach the history of South Asia. The topical implications of such new approaches are discussed in greater detail below; here it will suffice to note that the authors have shared as a focal point the participation of nonelite groups in the developments, events, and political narrative that previously have constituted history. As a collective effort to expand the methodologies and topics that constitute history, these studies are intended not only for South Asianist scholars, but also for scholars of other cultural regions interested in comparative discussions of what has been called popular culture, as well as undergraduate students just learning about South Asia. (Given the limits of space, however, the volume does presuppose a rudimentary familiarity with the decline of the Mughal Empire, the initial infiltration of the East India Company into the subcontinent, and the general outlines of the South Asian political narrative for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.)

The third purpose in putting together this collection of essays is suggested by the topics included. The authors have shared an interest in looking at everyday activities to see what these could tell us about shared values and motivations, processes of identity formation, and the self-conscious constructions of community that have marked the last century and a half in South Asia. Most of us shared as well a conviction that these elements of everyday life have significance on two levels: taken on their own terms, they identify the important building blocks of South Asian urban culture; and, related to the larger geographical, ecological, and political worlds in which they operate, they provide rational explanations for the actions of the ordinary person in these larger contexts.

The working title of the volume used a shorthand term, popular history, to imply that we were interested in the role of popular participation in the processes of history. As a group, we also often used the term popular culture in our discussions, without worrying overmuch about the analytical problems the term has presented to scholars, or the debates that have emerged, particularly among Europeanists. Because the term is so imprecise, however, we ultimately decided not to use it. The analytical problems inherent in the concept may have been best expressed by Roger Chartier, who pointed out that no one questioned the basic assumption, … namely, that it was possible to identify popular culture by describing a certain number of corpora (sets of texts, gestures, and beliefs). [But] … they made no critical examination of the categories and the intellectual distinctions on which they were based. Moreover, the study is often shaped by a dichotomous understanding of the uses made of these corpora; perhaps Chartier’s greatest contribution to the discussion is his nuanced analysis of the ways in which printed matter, for instance, could be used by semiliterate, or even illiterate, consumers (Chartier 1984:229 et seq.).

Nevertheless, from the literature developed by Europeanists on so- called popular culture, two contributions emerged that have proved useful to this volume. Chartier’s work makes clear the extent of overlap in the meanings imputed by those who participated from different levels in society. This provides a very helpful gloss on Peter Burke’s discussion of popular culture as majority culture, suggesting that the significance of such collective activities, while similar, need not necessarily have been precisely the same. In his definition Burke posited, as well, a withdrawal over time of the European literate elite into a minority culture, which worked to distinguish itself from the common culture, previously shared, that had characterized activities in public spaces (Burke 1978:28, 270-81). As the essays included here make clear, this definition (particularly as nuanced by Chartier) is appropriate for South Asia in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century as well, because it highlights the process by which the elite withdrew from a shared, or more precisely an overlapping, popular culture.

Similarly, a more recent definition of popular culture, which emphasizes the underlying power relationships and social conflicts inherent in these work and leisure activities, has proved particularly helpful (Yeo and Yeo 1981). The collection of essays by the Yeos emphasizes the importance of focusing on change, power, and conflict—three characteristics that quickened the cultural and associational forms of English public life between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. This volume, too, focuses on cultural activities in order to reveal power relations in a particular urban space and to see how these change over time.

Change is, indeed, at the heart of our enterprise, for it is through change in popular culture activities that adjustments to the power relationships in Banaras were accomplished. Each of the essays that follow deals with change differently. Taken together, however, they suggest how important a continuously evolving structure with a changing content can be for expressing popular convictions. As Chartier noted, popular religion (or culture, writ large) is both acculturated and acculturating (Chartier 1984:233). I mention here only a few of the structures examined here for change: these include the alterations in Manas recitations to accommodate both changes in patronage and in the audience’s own view of the Manas; evolution of the birahd folk music form to a more professionalized genre with an appeal beyond a particular lower caste (but, significantly, retaining the ability to incorporate lyrics about recent and localized scandals and stories of great interest); changing perceptions of particular city spaces and the ceremonial (and historical) significance attributed to these; elaborations of certain associational forms—particularly akhdras—used to mobilize people who see themselves as connected. Each of these adjustments may also be used to chart changes in the nuanced power relationships in the city: culture and power are thus, as our title suggests, inextricably entwined in the history of Banaras.

To those familiar with the historiography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, this pairing of culture and power will also signify a very straightforward commentary on what previously has been treated as a dichotomy between studies of cultural activities and discussions of political developments. It may be argued that, in this juxtaposition of essays, we have tried to make one additional historiographical comment to distinguish this collective work from what has gone before. Many of us were concerned that our work demonstrate that both culture and environment made up a single, coherent whole. Beyond approaching both topics in several guises in the following essays, we wanted a dynamic way to organize the essays, in order to avoid the traditional division into ecological, cultural, and political topics: many felt that such an organization assigned more reality to either culture or environment, depending on the order. To solve this problem, the volume treats as a single whole the variety of topics that provided interest and order to everyday life in Banaras. The essays are organized around three related focii. In Part 1 the essays focus on performances that would have drawn audiences from throughout the city; these performances—by taking place in public spaces and attracting citywide patronage—express an essential aspect of Banarsi public life and thus reveal important aspects of the belief systems and world views of the city’s residents. Part 2 turns to the more localized constituents of identity in an urban space—those of neighborhood, leisure, and work—to examine the processes by which urban residents use a sense of identity to make sense of life and to organize activity. Part 3 links these experiences within Banaras to the larger world. It is hoped that this different format will juxtapose subjects (that otherwise have been treated as discrete) in a productive and provocative way. The environmental setting, the material conditions of life, and the changes in both of these have figured as important pieces in the cultural puzzle we are trying to reconstruct historically.

As this summary of our discussions suggests, this volume—much more than is usually the case—has been a collaborative enterprise. The editor began by consulting widely to discover scholars working on Banaras and its environs. Thanks are due to all those who enthusiastically participated in this process. Special recognition goes to Nita Kumar, whose dissertation provided much of the original inspiration for the project, and whose suggestions proved particularly helpful in initiating the volume. Those invited to contribute agreed as well to begin by presenting, in different combinations, preliminary drafts at scholarly gatherings: these included the Southeastern Association for Asian Studies (Raleigh, January 1985); the South Asia Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin (Madision, November 1985); and the Association for Asian Studies (Chicago, March 1986). We wish to thank those in the audience and the commentators in each of those venues for their contributions to our individual essays and to the volume as a whole. Because of considerations especially of length, some of the essays originally prepared for the volume could not be included here. We thank those authors for their insights and participation in the discussion: their work contributed much to the collective whole. Special references to these papers are included where appropriate in the text.

Following on these preliminary presentations, contributors met for a weekend workshop (Berkeley, March 1986) to discuss one another’s essays and to set certain guiding principles to inform their revisions. The most important of these, as was suggested above, involved the interplay between culture and environment and the fact that we wanted to em phasize what was typically urban about Banaras, rather than what was unique. On the basis of this latter decision, some subjects that would otherwise have seemed essential to a discussion of Banaras were ignored—including death specialists and dying, pilgrimage, and the like—and certain additional essays were solicited to illuminate processes and values essential to understanding an urban environment. This workshop was open to other interested scholars, and we thank them for their friendly participation in this process. As she worked on revising the volume, the editor continued to consult freely with appropriate contributors, particularly David Arnold, Philip Lutgendorf, Scott Marcus, and Kathryn Hansen, and appreciates their comments and responses to her drafts. It should be noted, however, that much of the introductory material that follows reflects her own work and interpretations and may not be shared by all the authors included herein.

Collectively, as our citations will attest, we also owe a great debt to the three scholars who sufficiently mined the field of classical and historical Banaras to enable us to concentrate on these refinements: Diana Eck for her elegant description of the Kashi of Hindu high culture philosophy and practice; Chris Bayly for his inspired vision of economic and political change in the region—we each found him there, before us, during moments of discovery; and Barney Cohn for his pioneering, still unmatched lucid insights into the processes that formed early colonial Banaras. We refer readers interested in these particular subjects to their work.

Finally, we wish to thank those who provided the green support necessary to make this collaborative project successful in an astonishingly short two years. The South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies provided seed money that not only covered the inevitable costs of communication and revision that go into creating a volume, but that also encouraged contributions from the University of California to support a weekend workshop. To cover the costs of the latter, we also thank three institutions located on the University of California—Berkeley campus: the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies; its parent organization, the Institute for International Studies; and the Graduate Division. Tangible support beyond the green was provided by Steven Gilmartin, Barbara Howell, and Christine Noelle, for whose research assistance and wordprocessing skills we are very grateful.

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION

Introduction:

The History and Political Economy

of Banaras

To place in context the essays that follow, we begin with an examination of the political economy of the city—that conjunction of political, economic, and social structures which provided the context for historical events and processes. Not least important, in this respect, was the city’s location—occupying that auspicious niche of land where the Ganges and Varana rivers meet. We tend to see the significance of Banaras primarily in terms of auspiciousness, in its function, that is, as one of the premier pilgrimage sites in the subcontinent. At the same time, however, we must remember that it was also the largest urban center in the eastern Gangetic plain (see map i). Thus the political economy of this central place affected a densely populated hinterland with a high level of agricultural production. Furthermore, as the center of the Bhojpuri cultural region, Banaras provided a focal point for a vernacularly based culture that encompassed what is now eastern U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) and western Bihar (see G. Pandey 1983a for an interesting discussion of the potential of this culture for mobilization).1 Within the city itself the population grew rapidly in the last half of the eighteenth century, coming to number about 200,000 for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a good-sized urban site in the days following the decline of Mughal imperial centers.

Although the history of Banaras reaches back into the mists of time, tempting the historian to follow,2 our narrative begins with the eigh

teenth century: it is in this century that new politicocultural alignments emerged which have profoundly affected the processes and people analyzed in this volume. Physically, too, the period produced most of the architectural landmarks that anchor the contemporary city. Such widespread construction became possible, in part, because much of the reli-

gious architecture of the city had been razed (c. 1660s) by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1657-1707). Following the pattern of a good Muslim ruler, he observed the dictates to build mosques in every city— in the process superimposing an Islamic city on the site of Banaras, which he tried to call Muhammadabad.3 Neither the name nor the qasba cultural style took root, however.4 Instead, an alternative cultural collaboration emerged between an upstart dynasty, merchant bankers, and mendicant soldier-traders. It is to the impact of this collaboration that we now turn.

NATIONAL, REGIONAL, AND LOCAL POLITICAL POWER

For our purposes, the most important elements of Banaras’s political economy include its place within the larger political structures of the subcontinent (as these were expressed at the national, regional, and local levels); the composition of its economic cum social and cultural elite; and the characteristics of its population—as well as the relationships of these subgroups to each other. The significance of beginning with the eighteenth century as we establish a context for our studies stems largely from the fact that these elements of the political economy un-

derwent significant change then, prompted primarily by the ebbing of power and influence from the centralized Mughal Empire, which had dominated north India for two preceding centuries. Indeed, during the last half of the eighteenth century Banaras became the subcontinent’s inland commercial capital … [receiving] immigrant merchant capital from the whole of north India and [standing] astride the growing trade route from Bengal to the Maratha territories. Its strength came in large part from the integrated regional economy that had been achieved by the 1780s around holdings of the Raja of Banaras, based on a larger pattern for the period of commercial development which arose within the agricultural society and then linked up with growing urban demand produced by the emergence of the new kingdoms (Bayly 1983:104-6).

As the Mughal Empire declined, what Cohn (1960) has characterized as the national level political responsibility for Banaras came to rest, first, with the Nawab Wazir of Awadh and, by the end of the century, with the British East India Company. Just below this national level, actors at the regional level—what is usually referred to as the Mughal Empire’s successor states—proved particularly important for our narrative. But contenders for control moved rather easily during this century between the national, regional, and local levels of power, often using resources accumulated at one level to build claims for power in the next. While neither the research nor the space available allow us to discuss these eighteenth-century changes in detail, we should note that the most important actors moving among the levels of power included the Maratha empire in the west; the nearby Nawabi of Awadh, with its capital at Lucknow; and the family that came to be known in this period as the Rajas of Banaras, whose zamindari (estate) eventually encompassed the present districts of Ballia, Banaras, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, and Mirzapur (see maps 1 and 3).

Much of our narrative refers to Awadh and Banaras. But we should not minimize the interests of the Marathas in the old urban centers of north India: the military collaboration of the Marathas with the Nawabi against the Rohillas (in the hills of the area; see map 1) included a condition that, in return for their military support, the Marathas would acquire control over Mathura, Prayag (Allahabad), Banaras, and Gaya (B. N. Singh 1941:27); all were urban centers significant for their prominence on Hindu pilgrimage routes. While this Maratha desire to exercise direct political control was thwarted when the British replaced Awadh as ruler of the area, the Marathas remained culturally important in the city of Banaras itself. Reflecting their intellectual as well as their trading interests there,5 Marathas financed much of the eighteenth-century Hindu reconstruction of the city, which encompassed dharmshalas (rest houses) for pilgrims, temples and feasting to support Brahmin priests, and palaces for themselves and their local kin and agents (and see fig. 1).6

Without treating in detail the political history or functional realignments that marked the eighteenth century, we must recognize the significance of the emerging economic and cultural collaboration between the Raja, mendicant trader-soldiers (usually referred to as Gosains), and the merchant-banker families of Banaras (whose most prominent members constituted a tightly knit oligarchy called the Naupatti ). Although full histories of all three of these groups of collaborators await closer scholarly scrutiny, we do know something about each.

The Gosains—the largest owners of urban property in Banaras in the late eighteenth century—have been identified as possessing several important characteristics. They formed a religio-commercial sect, militarized to some degree, and organized according to the guru-chela principle,7 recruiting without regard to caste, and thus admitting any person of abilities among them (Kolff 1971:213-17). This combination of religion, trade, and military prowess may not be as peculiar as it seems at first glance. Moneylenders and merchants worked together to establish credit as well as transport for a particular shipment of goods to a far-flung urban destination; since long distance trade needed armed protection, the dividing line between trading and soldiering must have been a thin one (Kolff 1971:217; Gordon 1971:219). As the principal merchants dealing with the Maratha empire in the Deccan, these Gosains resided at Benaras and transported their goods to Mirzapur, there to sell them to other members of their own sect who came annually from the Deccan to buy them (Kolff, quoting Shakespear 1873:17-21). Thus the Gosains possessed a commercial edge on other merchants, able to utilize their pilgrimage networks for trading purposes. At the same time, they could amass the capital needed for trade through inheritance procedures, which permitted them to pass on a larger share to one chela (Cohn 1964:175-82). To these advantages, bestowed by their unique organization of resources, they added other significant characteristics. Numerous in Banaras, they could call on religious connections with other sadhus to be reckoned a major force in the city.8 Indeed, they constituted a body of brokers between different social groups. They attracted veneration from the mass of the people and also had a close hand in the running of the merchant communities (Bayly 1983:181-84).

As for merchant-bankers, H. R. Nevill notes, in the gazetteer produced for Banaras early in the twentieth century, that in the palmy days of Benares many large fortunes were accumulated, so that there is a good deal of money in the place. The banking family firms described in the Gazetteer include many whose histories are suggestive of the ways in which ties were established between Banaras and other trading centers, as well as the paths to political and social influence within Banaras itself. One was a Maratha family who benefited from the Deccan’s elaborate trading, intellectual, religious, and political ties described above. Another, a family with extensive dealings with the Bengali community, had originally owned the site of Fort William (the military center of the East India Company in Calcutta). Once settled in Banaras, this latter family proved to be important local citizens, giving land for the Grand Trunk Road, proving their loyalty during the Mutiny/Revolt of 1857, and becoming noted for their public spirit and charitable works … the present heads being honorary magistrates and members of the municipal board. Another family came from Jhind, where they had held the hereditary office of kanungo (revenue official); they had followed the former Mughal royal family to Banaras and by the early twentieth century boasted both an honorary magistrate and a government treasurer. Yet another firm was started by brothers resident in Allahabad; their sons and grandsons had become connected by marriage with most of the leading Benaras families. Two banking families were noted as well for their dealings in silk and other costly fabrics and as chaudhari (headman) of the kincob merchants (a type of silk fabric: see DuBois 1987). Other large bankers functioned as considerable landowners in the district (Nevill 1909a:53-55).

Such merchant-bankers were drawn to Banaras for the commercial opportunities provided by this trading center located on the main west- to-east trade route. They provided important connections with their constituent groups back home in Jhind, Allahabad, and the like. To regulate so complex a trading and banking world as that of Banaras, they further organized internally. Building on the Naupatti (Society of Nine Sharers)—which had become a self-perpetuating oligarchy of status which no aspiring family could enter—other merchants and bankers grouped themselves in a structure whose pinnacle was occupied by the Naupatti families. The resulting linkages were based variously on organization within a particular trade, among those trading in a particular region, or among those performing a particular function in the trading structure. Most particularly, all shared conceptions of status and mercantile honor (Bayly 1983:177-80).

Especially important for us is the emergence of the Raja of Banaras as the regional ruler of the area.9 Bayly notes that, particularly during this period of political flux, the establishment after migration of the great agricultural clans of Bhumihars or Rajputs led to the creation of new commercial centers. Building on the model sketched by Richard Fox (1969), Bayly suggests that a two-stage process linked economic development to the political emergence of a raja from the previously democratic clan organization. Working from a relatively small estate (zamindari), between the 1730s and 1750s, this Bhumihar family10 used its position as tax official for Awadh to become zamindar for most of Banaras province, and to gain the title of Raja.11 Functioning as the virtually independent regional-level ruler, it paid only a lump-sum tax or tribute to Awadh. What enabled the family to preserve this distance from Awadh was its own ability to profit from the changing economic and legal circumstances affecting control of land—particularly that introduced by the British (see Cohn 1960 for details)—as well as the interdependent relationship the family developed with the Banaras merchant-bankers for meeting Awadh’s demand for tribute.

These histories of successful banking families, and the evolution of a landlord family into local dynasty, personalize the larger trend of shifting economic and political structures which marks out the eighteenth century. If, as Bayly argues, the intermediate economy emerging in the eighteenth century rested on the distribution of local political power expressed in revenue assignments (Bayly 1983:52), then this ability of the banker-merchants to command resources located deep in the countryside gave them considerable, if covert, political power within the state. It was not only that they had the capacity to float huge loans to the Raja when his tribute was owing to Awadh. It was also that they possessed important rural connections to generate such resources, mobilizing shadowy groups of substantial rural men of capital.12

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURAL PATTERN

AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS

Local political power became intimately connected, as well, to cultural patronage (discussed in more detail in Part 1). The merchants and the Raja figured prominently in this patronage, which expanded at the re gional and local levels as the Mughal Empire faltered. In part, such patronage conveyed legitimation for these emerging power-holders. Most important, the devolution of the locus of cultural patronage from the national to the regional and local levels, together with the ability to mobilize the intermediate economy, provided significant linkage between the newly emerging Hindu merchant elite, the regional political figure of the Raja of Banaras, and the artisans and others who made up the lower classes of Banaras.

The interaction of these power and culture relationships developed in ways unique to Banaras.13 In the early eighteenth century, like many of the other celebrated holy places such as Prayag (Allahabad) and Ajodhya, Banaras had been a mughalizing city, owing much to the cultural patterns established first by the Mughals and then fostered by the Nawab of Awadh’s court. The physical world of Banaras certainly reflected this mughalization—in its Muslim buildings, the establishment of muhallas (neighborhoods: see below), and the dotting of Muslim shrines. The social world, too, had been mughalized, with configurations of such urban functionaries as the service types, sufi orders, pirs … and scribal groups. No doubt this mughalized style accounted, in part, for the strong ties established early in the career of the Banaras dynasty with the Muslim lower-caste groups such as the weavers.

Nevertheless, the pattern in Banaras, unlike that in other mughalizing urban centers in north India, changed so that, by the early nineteenth century, a Hindu tradition had been reinvented14 to serve certain goals cherished by the triumvirate of power-holding groups in Banaras. More will be said, below,15 about the importance of this reinvented Hindu style for the Raja of Banaras. Here it will suffice to point to the other actors in Banaras who could also respond to this reinvention, including the Marathas, the immigrant Bengalis, and those from the eastern U.P. countryside. The nexus of culture and power in nineteenth-century Banaras, then, was located in a reformulation of Hindu culture that drew together a disparate group of power holders. Such a style, nevertheless, made room for the substantial numbers of (generally lower class) Muslims resident in the city as well.16 Equally important, this special amalgam that marked Banaras also protected it, to a surprising degree, from British intrusions, particularly in the early nineteenth century and again after 1910.

In recognition of the virtual independence of the Raja of Banaras, the British did not attempt to rule the area directly when they took Banaras over from the Nawab in 1775, but simply replaced Awadh as the national-level authority. Indeed, as a special mark of favor, the East India Company Governor-General, Warren Hastings, gave further rights to Raja Chait Singh, allowing him to coin money and administer penaljustice (A History, 1873:100—7). Hastings established a Resident there but did not interfere directly in the administration of Banaras until the pressures of war with France led him to make extortionate money demands