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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

Title Pages

(p.i) At the Margins (p.ii)

(p.iii) At the Margins

(p.iv)

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Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India

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First Edition published in 2015

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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

Dedication (p.v)

For my father (p.vi)

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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgements

To borrow a phrase from an iconic historian with slight modifications, this book, like the proverbial Indian elephant and the Permanent Settlement, has had a long gestation. In writing it, I have incurred many debts. The research that has gone into it was originally funded by a Foreign and Commonwealth Office Scholarship awarded by the British Council, which enabled me to complete a doctoral dissertation in the University of Cambridge in the 1990s. Back then, I was also generously assisted by the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Prince Consort and Thirlwall Fund, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust, and Clare Hall, Cambridge, who all funded my fieldwork trips to India and shored up the crumbling life of a poor research student in various other ways. More recently, the completion of this book project has been facilitated by two Fulbright grants at the University of Pennsylvania and Utah State University, a Baden-Württemberg Visiting Fellowship at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg, a UGC Visiting Fellowship in the University of Calcutta, and a very generous research grant from the University of Notre Dame.

I wish to record my gratitude for the kind assistance of the librarians and staff of the India Office Library in London, the Cambridge University Library, the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, the Orissa State Archives and the Orissa Legislative Assembly Library in (p.x) Bhubaneswar, the Orissa Board of Revenue Library in Cuttack, the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, the National Library and the West Bengal State Archives in Kolkata, the Library of the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, and the libraries of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Notre Dame in the United States. I am especially indebted to Dr M.P. Dash of the Orissa State Archives and to Dr D.G. Panda of the Orissa Legislative Assembly Library for producing documents at very short notice.

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The origins of this book go back to the late-1980s when I had brief stints as a research student in the University of Calcutta and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Binay Chaudhuri initiated me into the complexities of Orissa’s history and society, and the late Barun De helped me pose my first questions about them. Since then, I have benefited immensely from many discussions with Partha Chatterjee, Rajat Kanta Ray, the late Hitesranjan Sanyal, the late Surajit Sinha, Subrata Mitra, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Hari Vasudevan, Himadri Banerjee, Sir Christopher Bayly, Gordon Johnson, David Washbrook, Anthony Low, Joya Chatterji, Biswamoy Pati, Basanta Kumar Mallik, Sudha Pai, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Hermann Kulke, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Georg Berkemer, and Angelika Malinar. Subhas Bhattacharya and Gautam Bhadra have taught me in the classroom, but they have taught me much more by just being the persons they are.

My greatest debt is to my Supervisor, the late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, who for more than a decade—till his untimely death in 2005—gave me unsparingly his time, patience, and encouragement. It is still hard for me to reconcile with a world without Raj. He enlivened many typically gloomy and blustery Cambridge days with new ideas and suggestions, and sought to energize my gingerly approach to research with occasional admonishments served up with a ruthlessly sardonic flair. Over the years he became a friend, with a piece of advice for all occasions, seasoned with acerbic wit and spicy bits of intercontinental academic gossip. It’s only now, when he is no longer around, that I realize how deep his influence has run, shaping the ways in which I think and speak and write.

Research can sometimes be a tedious, even frustrating, business. I could have scarcely made any progress in it without the convivial and supportive friendship of my many colleagues, friends, and mentors in (p.xi) different parts of the world. For my former colleagues and students in the Department of History, Jadavpur University—where I taught for nearly two decades—I have a deep sense of gratitude for providing me with the collegiality and support that have shaped my personal growth. During the last few years, I found a hospitable home and stimulating intellectual climate in the Department of History, University of Notre Dame, where many of the foundational ideas of this book took their final shape. I must especially thank Jim Turner, Julia Thomas, Patrick Griffin, Tom Kselman, Mikolaj Kunicki, Tom Noble, Alex Martin, Dan Graff, Asher Kaufman, Karen Graubart, Chris Hamlin, Dian Murray, and Mike Westrate for the friendship that nurtured this book. At the University of Pennsylvania, Rosane and Ludo Rocher were wonderful hosts and mentors, as were Carolyn Rhodes, Peter Mentzel and David Goetze at Utah State University. At Heidelberg, Mala al-Farooq took me under her capacious wings. Abhijit, Amaresh, Anil, Anjan and Gargi, Damayanti, Debashis and Samita, Dwaipayan, Kushal, Rajiv, Ravi, Satyajit, Somak, Subho and Mallika, Sudeep and Alaka, Sudit and Mita, Sugata and Sarmistha, Supratim, and many others have provided friendship, and

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contributed to this book in more ways than they would give themselves credit for. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak, Suman Chattopadhyay, Suranjan Das, Geraldine Forbes, Sudipta Sen, and Jawhar Sircar have unfailingly provided support and encouragement on the countless instances I have drawn upon them. Anit and Sudeshna Bhattacharya, Amit and Shyamali Das, D.G. and Flora Dutta, Alpana and Amit Dutta-Ray, Krishna and the late Sukhamoy Lahiri, Amitava and Harolyn Dutt, Srilata Ganguly, and Basudeb Biswas have provided homes away from home in Cambridge, Kolkata, London, South Bend, Philadelphia, and Logan. My special debt is to Dilip and Sima Chakrabarty, who have provided not only unstinting generosity and friendship, but also rescued us from the dubious experience of ‘homelessness’ during the last stages of my doctoral research.

Over the past year or so, this book has been finally brought out of incubation by people who have shown to it a dedication and commitment that I wish I could count among my own attributes. Two anonymous referees have provided invaluable suggestions that have helped me recalibrate my own critical questions. I am forever grateful to the editorial team of Oxford University Press, New Delhi, for shepherding (p.xii) this project with so much care and interest. If there is anything to like in this book, it is because of them. The responsibility for any and all errors that may have remained is of course mine alone.

One should, in the end, look back to one’s roots. Without the many sacrifices made by my parents, the late Shyamal Sengupta and Gita Sengupta, this book could never have been written. My parents-in-law, Amit Ranjan Dasgupta and the late Santi Dasgupta were always keenly supportive of my academic pursuits, and it saddens me to think that my mother-in-law passed away even before I finished my doctoral dissertation. It will be my lasting regret that my father, who made a huge investment of energy and emotion in my education, and taught me through his life and thought, did not live to see this book. I can never repay his debt, but I dedicate this book to his memory.

The comforting experience of being surrounded by one’s family has taken a lot of stress and tedium away from research. This book would never have seen the light of day without Aparajita, who is the reason why I chose to be an academic. She has been a constant motivator through thick and thin, and it is her nagging insistence that kept the candle constantly burning under my chair, and eventually teased the book out of a reticent writer. Rik has now spent almost all of his life with this book in various stages of its making. He has not only been a delightful distraction in its formative stages, but a most supportive presence all along. I hope one day he will read this book to find out what the fuss all these years was about.

Kolkata, October 2014

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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa Jayanta

Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

(p.xiii) Abbreviations

ABVPA

Akhil Bhartiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram

AICC

All India Congress Committee

AICWC

All India Congress Working Committee

AISPC

All India States’ Peoples Conference

APCC

Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee

BJD

Biju Janata Dal

BJP

Bharatiya Janata Party

CLP

Congress Legislature Party

CPI

Communist Party of India

CRR

Crown Representative Record

CWMG

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi

DCC

District Congress Committee

DMK

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

FRBO

Fortnightly Report for the province of Bihar and Orissa

FRO

Fortnightly Report for the province of Orissa

Ganatantra Parishad

GP-SRC

Ganatrantra Parishad’s Memorandum submitted to the States

Reorganization Commission

ICR

India Conciliation Group

IDRF

India Development and Relief Fund

(p.xiv) IOR

India Office Records (London)

Janata Dal

MLA

Member of Legislative Assembly

NAI

National Archives of India

NDA

National Democratic Alliance

NMML

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

OBC

Other Backward Class

OBOR

Orissa Board of Revenue

OSA

Orissa State Archive

OSPC

Orissa States’ People’s Conference

PJP

Praja Socialist Party

RABO

Report on the Administration of Bihar and Orissa

RSS

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Scheduled Caste

Scheduled Tribe

SIUK

Sewa International United Kingdom

TDP

Telugu Desam Party

UPCC

Utkal Provincial Congress Committee

UUC

Utkal Union Conference

UUC-SRC

Utkal Union Conference memorandum submitted to the States

Reorganization Commission

VHP

Vishwa Hindu Parishad

WBSA

West Bengal State Archive

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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

Introduction

Imagined Communities of Language before and after Democracy—Problems and Perspectives from Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter sets forth the starting premise of this book–if Orissa was historically disadvantaged by administrative disunity, different patterns of rule in its constituent areas, and powerful cleavages between hill and coast, caste and tribe, British and Princely areas, and if such diversity made any pan-regional identity extremely difficult to forge, then how was Orissa able to pioneer the politics of linguistic regionalism under colonial rule, and to become, in fact, the first linguistic state of modern India in 1936? It then gives a brief overview of the social and political circumstances in the early twentieth century that made it possible to sustain an ‘imagined community’ of language. This is followed by an examination of the chequered career of this discursive construct in the period of postcolonial democracy.

Keywords: colonialism,nationalism,regionalism,identity politics,imagined community, postcolonialism,democracy,development

This book examines the interrelationships between linguistic identity, perceptions of development and marginality, and popular politics in Orissa during the whole of the twentieth century. I call this Indian state ‘Orissa’ advisedly, notwithstanding the official change of its name to ‘Odisha’ in 2011, accompanied by a similar renaming of its language from ‘Oriya’ to ‘Odia.’

Although these new nomenclatures were designed to vernacularize longstanding ‘English’ expressions, and thus connect with the issue of the politics of regional

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identity that undergirds this book, I pass them by because of two reasons. First, I stop a few years before the germination of the demand for name change, and secondly, such a demand hardly stamped its presence on the discourses, straddling an entire century, that I have covered. This book therefore will stick to ‘Orissa’ and ‘Oriya,’ names that made sense to—and worked their evocative charm upon—the countless people who constitute its dramatis personae.

(p.2) There are several compelling reasons for an examination of the kind this book makes. In the first place, nearly two decades before the first major spate of the linguistic reorganization of states in postcolonial India in the 1950s, Orissa became the first linguistic state in modern India in 1936 by successfully organizing a movement for language-based cultural identity and harnessing its energies in favour of provincial autonomy. The Oriya story of the making of a language-based regional identity is therefore a paradigmatic one, and readers interested in other parts of India or even other parts of the world will recognize pieces of this story that I believe will prompt new understandings of related processes elsewhere.

One major advantage of studying the case of Oriya identity in comparison to other well-known linguistic movements in India (the Andhra or the Tamil movement, for instance) is that it is the single instance of the imagination of a pan-regional linguistic identity that made a successful negotiation with the colonial state by using mainly constitutional means within the framework of colonial power. Subsequently, like many other linguistic movements that culminated in statehood in postcolonial India, its appeal waxed and waned, and over the long run gradually declined in the second half of the twentieth century, as language came to be displaced by issues of development and underdevelopment as the prime movers of identity politics under electoral democracy. But since the chequered career of this movement panned out over the entire twentieth century, it revealed different patterns of negotiation with the state—both colonial and postcolonial—as well as the changing mass base of the linguistic movement and its shifting relationships with various strands of popular politics. To this day, therefore, it remains the only case in India for examining, across the colonial–postcolonial divide, the shelf-life and appeal of ‘successful’ linguistic identity movements of colonial India that needed to employ—with varying degrees of effectiveness—completely new methods of accommodation and control to cope with the pressures and demands of democratic politics that vented themselves through the electoral system, but also quite frequently, through extra-constitutional means. Orissa offers an additional measure of interest because here questions of development did not really substitute language as the principal marker of identity politics after 1947; rather, it was within an overarching narrative of imbricating (p.3) perceptions of marginality and underdevelopment that this whole drama of the forging, management, and eventual fragmentation of this politics of regional identity was played out. Orissa thus provides a unique and compelling mix of long-term

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continuities and momentous transformations in which language, regionalism, and perceptions of subalternity variously interacted with one another in a political system that transitioned from the colonial to the postcolonial and from a severely limited constitutional political arena to an electoral democracy based on universal adult franchise.

So, why is Orissa a vantage window from which to look at the politics of identity in twentieth-century India? I have already stated some of the most compelling reasons at the outset, but in addition to those, Orissa’s society and its myriad cleavages offer nothing less than a treasure trove for anybody interested in the political articulation of social identities. It has upper-caste Hindus as well as lower castes and a considerable tribal population; it has coastal stretches of fertile alluvial land and huge stretches of hilly, inhospitable terrain; and, for much of the period discussed in this book, it had areas directly administered by the British and areas under the suzerainty of India’s native princes who were not formally the subjects of the British Empire. These diverse communities and areas had different trajectories of historical evolution, different exposures to colonial and indigenous ruling traditions, and highly differential access to power and resources. In other words, the huge ethnic, geographical, and historical diversity in Orissa apparently made any pan-regional identity extremely difficult to forge. And yet, Orissa belied these obstacles by doing precisely this and becoming the first linguistic state of modern India in 1936.

This is an intriguing paradox for any scholar interested in the shadowy, often transient processes in which social identities are churned into political ones. The question that this book addresses is: how was this regional identity forged, and what were its ingredients or binding factors? Language was evidently one crucial ingredient, but it still needs explaining how one single language was able to bind together diverse groups and communities that lived largely disparate lives otherwise. And, the even more intriguing question that follows is: if language could emerge as such an integrative and mobilizing force in colonial India, what happened to such linguistic identity in postcolonial India, (p.4) when electoral democracy recast the rules of competitive bargaining and negotiation? As the perceived political benefits of tribal mobilization brutalize political competition between fundamentalist groups today, and as the anger and anxieties of marginal groups against the unsettling impact of large industrialization are vented though vociferous subaltern protests against giant steel projects in a state traditionally short-changed in terms of developmental resources, we are confronted with that vexing question once again. Why and under what circumstances do regional linguistic solidarities—forged as the ‘imagined communities’ of a colonial educated elite in the decades before independence—fail to sustain their unifying, homogenizing appeal for vast sections of ‘political society’ in the smouldering cauldron of postcolonial democratic politics?

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This is the central question addressed by this book, and I think it is important enough to bear repeating: how did language appear as a marker of ethnicity and inform regional identities in colonial India, and what did the politics of postcolonial electoral democracy do to such identities? Orissa, as already stated, is a particularly good case to choose for looking at these processes because it was here that several dominant strands of the political discourse of postcolonial India converged, like ‘scarcity’ and ‘backwardness’, ‘development’ and ‘displacement’, central power and states’ rights, linguistic and cultural nationalism, tribal identity and minority politics, religious conversion and community conflict, the ‘integration’ and ‘mainstreaming’ of ex-princely areas, and the plaintive cry for the preferential treatment of the ‘sons-of-the-soil’. In short, to think about Orissa across 1947 is to think about the most important political signposts of twentieth-century India as a whole.

The book treads novel ground, because Orissa’s centrality in the intermeshed grid of social and political developments in modern India has scarcely been perceived, and it is somehow always seen as being at the margins of everything. This image originally arose out of actual social and economic realities affecting the Oriyas in the colonial period. The piecemeal nature of the British annexation of Indian territories meant that the Oriya-speaking population was scattered over several different provinces, like Bengal, Madras, and the Central Provinces. Economically too, colonial Orissa was one of the poorest of Indian states, with very few towns and virtually no industrial (p.5) production. A great number of Oriyas migrated to serve as labourers in the factories of Calcutta. Simultaneously, a considerable number of the Bengali literati took advantage of their early start in English education to swarm over the coastal districts of Orissa and take up jobs in the administration and the literate professions. These led many Oriyas to complain that their land had been turned virtually into a colony of Bengal. Educational opportunities were severely restricted in Orissa, and, consequently, the size of the Oriya educated middle class (the equivalent of the Bengali bhadralok)—which provided the Indian National Congress with its leadership in the Presidency capitals of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras—was very small in this region. Due to the relatively limited size of the structure of opportunities created by colonial rule, this small Oriya regional elite found itself competing with those who had easier access to English education and the bhadralok professions, including not only the Bengali middle class, but also English-knowing Tamils and Telugus in the southern districts.

For much of the colonial period, elite publicists attempted to articulate a broad vision rooted in the perceived notion of ‘peripherality’ among the Oriyas, which cut across cleavages of class and caste and became, in time, the cornerstone of a political rhetoric of Oriya regional identity. This rhetoric was used to make demands on the British Raj and after 1947 on the postcolonial Indian state, with a view to securing a greater allocation of administrative and economic resources. The Oriya movement drew much of its inspiration from the colonial

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constitutional initiative of the early-twentieth century, which conceded, among other things, the desirability of the redistribution of provinces on a linguistic basis. Accordingly, the Oriya nationalist rhetoric that evolved around this time put a heavy premium on the past traditions of the ‘Oriya race’, emasculated by successive centuries of ‘territorial disintegration’ and ‘official apathy’. The interesting feature of this ‘rhetoric of deprivation’ was the manner in which it divorced identity from any specific class context, and defined the linguistic community in terms of historical ancestry and common culture, which made class irrelevant. The plight of immiserized Oriya peasants and labourers and the aspirations of a distraught regional elite were thus fashioned together into a collective, imagined community of ‘suffering Oriyas’.

(p.6) The creation of a separate province in 1936 has been seen by Orissa’s historians as the crowning achievement of an autonomist movement born out of the Oriya reaction to the loss of cultural identity. In general there is very little interrogation in existing accounts—including the relatively recent scholarly ones —of the narrative strategies by which the Oriya-speaking people were constructed into the ‘Oriya nation’ in the original, contemporaneous nationalist histories of the movement itself. As a result, the chief landmarks in the progress of Oriya nationalism continue to be signposted in recent scholarship in virtually the same teleological fashion. In this ‘creative past’, the high point is placed in the ancient period, when Orissa’s territories straddled India’s entire eastern seaboard. Starting with Muslim annexation in 1568, successive periods of ‘foreign’ domination, in the form of Mughal, Maratha, and British rule, are then claimed to have reduced Orissa to a ‘terra incognita’, and deprived the Oriyas of any experience of indigenous political rule, arrested their economic development, even threatened their extinction as a ‘race’. However, as this narrative goes on to tell us, the unifying thread of Oriya cultural affinity survived all such ‘foreign conquests’ to become the most powerful weapon of the educated Oriya elite in their struggle against political and economic subordination. It stirred feelings that ‘slowly but steadily grew into a phenomenon embracing the whole of the Oriya nation’, so that the British, after years of intransigence and procrastination, were forced to concede provincial autonomy in 1936. What we get in such nationalist historiography is thus the classic theme of the ‘Orissa wrong’—the narrative of an epic struggle of a suffering people to create a regional political identity against the formidable odds of administrative apathy, dominant neighbours, and economic backwardness. Surprisingly enough, as I have said above, this redemptive element and its linear inexorability—a carry-over from the late-nineteenth century—resonate even now in recent studies of the Oriya movement that shy away from examining the tenuous postcolonial afterlife of a movement seemingly attaining its crowning glory in 1936.

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The existence of the compelling regional priority that I indicate above enables most historians of Oriya nationalism to explain away the region’s relative political quietude, even during the most tumultuous phases of Gandhian mass politics. Here in the early decades of the (p.7) twentieth century, as they contend, anticolonial nationalism was not an all-consuming political passion as in, say, neighbouring Bengal, since the regional need commanded the immediate attention of the Oriyas. But as soon as this provincial autonomy was realized, the argument follows, Orissa plunged headlong into the nationalist vortex and the Congress became a domineering force after 1936. The muted Oriya nationalist response to the Gandhian upsurges of the 1920s and early 1930s thus fits in perfectly with the thesis of the ‘Orissa wrong’. For the Oriya politician it was a question, as it were, of getting his priorities right, of choosing between ‘immediate’ and ‘secondary’ political objectives. His foremost task was to right a wrong, to give a ‘terra incognita’ a political identity. His duties to the Indian nation came afterwards.

This linear narrative of the ‘Orissa wrong’ and its inexorable redemption through provincial autonomy, however, hides the sobering fact that language-based cultural identity, for all its sweeping representative claims, was hardly ever the dominant organizing principle for popular mobilization in colonial Orissa. Notwithstanding the introduction of linguistically defined provincial committees in 1920, the Congress subsequently showed little inclination to support the Oriya movement, with leaders like Gandhi and Nehru always insisting that provincial autonomy must never be allowed to take precedence over the more pressing needs of the national struggle for freedom. Congress ‘stepmotherliness’, in fact, became a stock phrase in the Oriya politicians’ rich vocabulary of deprivation in the 1920s and 30s. And yet, the Congress became a considerable force in the province after 1936, sweeping elections, inspiring anti-feudal agitation in the Orissa princely states, and courting the peasantry in the British districts by trying to introduce agrarian legislation detrimental to landlord interests. This raises a crucial question: if provincial autonomy was granted by the British in order to accommodate—or, indeed, mollify—Oriya ‘popular’ cultural nationalism, how did the Congress manage to mobilize very significant support behind its own movements over the next decade or thereabouts? In other words, even after the ‘rectification’ of the ‘Orissa wrong’, what were the issues left seething behind for the Congress to take up, and transform, thereby, the region’s political tone from ‘constitutional’ to ‘agitational’?

(p.8) I argue in this book that the answer to this question lies in other issues in provincial politics that—compared to the high symbolic and rhetorical appeal of ‘cultural identity’—were closer to the ground, and proved to be stronger founts of popular political action. The discourse of Oriya nationalism was conceived by middle-class literate professionals and landed aristocrats using the rhetorical methods of round table diplomacy. The emotive exhortations of such high politics fell mostly flat on Oriya peasants, who rallied round local agrarian issues that

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concerned them at a more immediate level. The linguistic movement that found expression in the politics of provincial autonomy, and the peasant politics that buttressed Congress nationalism, thus developed parallel trajectories that were difficult to conjoin in a single movement. The analysis that this book makes of the organization of the Congress movements in Orissa during the 1920s through the 1940s shows that the party’s support was mobilized by addressing mostly local-level political issues that had nothing to do with the question of regional cultural identity. In fact, a good measure of the Congress’s success, as already indicated above, was achieved by rallying against the very landlords and princes who had lent themselves to the Oriya cause.

Why did the dramatis personae of the Oriya regional movement wield relatively marginal influence on the Congress activities in their own backyard? What does this really reveal about the populist credentials of movements of regional identity that profess to represent unfractured solidarities of language-based ethnicity? A close examination reveals that the realities were much starker than assumed in unproblematic constructions of the ‘imagined cultural community’. For most of the colonial period, as this book shows, the Oriya ‘people’ remained a vast, heterogeneous mass submerged in a quagmire of essentially local-level concerns. They were mobilized purely as an idea, as a discursive construct, to lend the weight of their numbers to claims for provincial autonomy in an age when objectification and enumeration were the twin pillars of the colonial sociology of India. But for all practical purposes, cultural or linguistic identity remained essentially a handmaiden of the Oriya middle-class elite in their struggle for more political power and economic advantage within the colonial set-up, rather than an expression of the primordial ‘givens’ of Oriya society.

(p.9) Such usage of regional identity continued in the same vein in the postcolonial period. Indeed, at first glance it would seem that the rhetoric of Oriya regional identity—coloured by the collective self-perception of being at the margins of development—has remained remarkably unchanging through the twentieth century. As the Oriya nationalist of the 1920s and 30s complained of ‘administrative apathy’ and ‘hostile neighbours’, and clamoured for a ‘fair deal’ in the form of provincial autonomy and central subventions, so did his postcolonial successor—at least till the coming of economic liberalization in the 1990s and the ascendancy of private initiative—protest in the same vein against ‘central neglect’ and demand a greater allocation of resources, an increased share of federally funded development projects, an ‘Orissa for the Oriyas’.

But this book is scarcely a vindication of what in recent South Asian historiography has been called the ‘continuity thesis’. Its principal themes— perceptions of development and marginality, discourses of democracy, and the relationship between ethnicity and identity—all straddle both halves of the twentieth century, but manifest themselves in remarkably different formats. Notwithstanding the obvious surface continuity in the rhetoric of Oriya

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nationalism, its political practices have shown myriad mutations. Nowhere was this change more startling than in the social settings in which this politics was played out, respectively, before and after 1947.

Endowed with meagre conventional ‘mainstream’ political and legislative resources, as well as the smallest electorate of all British provinces, colonial Orissa had few linkages connecting its ‘local’ and ‘provincial’ political arenas through well-established networks of power, patronage, or governance. While the totalizing imperatives of the Oriya nationalist rhetoric sought to project the ‘cultural identity’ of an undifferentiated ‘people’, the actually fragmented nature of political loyalties, interests, and linkages in the countryside created a hiatus between the regionalist concerns of the Oriya elite and the movements led by the Congress, which depended mainly on the participation of peasants and tribals, including those in the princely states. Thus the ‘imagined communities’ of language, for all their dependence on an aggregative rhetoric, remained at several removes from the real dynamics of popular politics.

(p.10) The diminishing purchase of this rhetoric was laid starkly bare by the much sterner test of postcolonial democratic politics. This became evident soon after independence in the tortuous attempts at the political integration of Orissa’s ex-princely and ex-British areas, which closely approximated the state’s fundamental geographical cleavage between hill and coast. Following their merger with the province in 1949, Orissa’s former princely states—located mostly in the highlands of the western districts—began to smart under what they perceived as the political domination of the coastal districts of Cuttack, Balasore, and Puri, all former British-ruled areas that had an overwhelming presence in the administrative and legislative institutions of the new postcolonial state. But curiously enough, even as this disenchantment with the appeal of pre-1947 pan-Oriyan identity politics found expression through a new party, Ganatantra Parishad, Orissa’s state-level leaders, too, came to see themselves as being perpetually in short supply of central patronage. In other words, the basic contours of centre–state relations in post-1947 Orissa were replicated within the state itself in something of a core–periphery relationship between the coast and the hills. This further fractured the politics of Oriya identity and exposed the severe limitations of the integrative claims of linguistic nationalism.

Orissa’s post-1947 initiation into electoral democracy, therefore, was an event of momentous transformative import. For the very first time in its career, linguistic nationalism was removed from its niche of narrow elite politics by universal adult franchise, which gave it the opportunity to tap into new and vastly larger constituencies. However, the exponential widening of the political arena also threw up newer challenges for the Oriya middle-class elite’s older techniques of publicization. With the time-tested avenues of bargaining and negotiating with colonial rulers now gone, the cultural politics of Oriya nationalism had to recalibrate itself to make sense in a transformed world. Region, previously

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defined by an overarching penumbra of language, now came to be overwritten— or even ‘undercut’—by various localisms, or ‘fragments’, that jostled for political space and clout in a democratic arena characterized by fractured identities and competitive bargaining. I examine this phenomenon in this book through an analysis of how Oriya nationalism has adapted itself to these new exigencies of postcolonial politics, especially to the changing politics of (p.11) democratic negotiations associated with regional issues like scarcity, underdevelopment, and planning. By foregrounding the changing expressions of identity politics in twentieth-century India in an in-depth examination of the evolving interrelationships of nationalism, regionalism, language-based ethnicity, electoral democracy, and questions of poverty and underdevelopment, I believe I make some contribution towards understanding the varied political usage and symbolic power of representations of marginality and peripherality in significant areas of the world’s largest democracy.

In the last sections of this book I take a critical look at the transformative political impact that recent developments like economic liberalization and the end of the ‘Congress system’ have brought about in Oriya politics. Orissa’s significant strides in industrial development since the 1990s and its emergent new identity as a dynamically enterprising, liberalizing state have had very serious ramifications for popular politics. As large-scale private investment has come barging in a traditionally cash-strapped state, the exploitation—real as well as imagined—by the coastal elite of previously undeveloped, resource-rich tribal areas has also surged ahead, dramatizing the inherent tensions between development and displacement, and giving a radical new edge to questions of equity in a highly divided society. The festering resentment this has generated in Orissa’s ‘backward’ hinterland has in recent times fawned violent anti-state, anti-capitalist demonstrations or has fed into sporadic extreme left-wing movements influenced by Maoist activists. Simultaneously, the traditional image of Orissa’s quiescence has been churned beyond recognition in the past decade or thereabouts also by the rise of extremist Hindutva politics in extensive areas of the Orissa countryside, and the violent persecution of Christian minorities— shockingly brought forth by the brutal murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines in 1999. I argue that such bloody showdowns, between the state and its subaltern citizens over development and its discontents, or between religious majorities and minorities over the question of conversion, are testament to the ultimate failure of linguistic nationalism to effectively negotiate and accommodate the fractious character of political bargaining in postcolonial democracy, resist the gradual alienation of tribal interests and its corrosive effects on hegemonic discourses of development, and contain the swelling tide of dalit and minority pressure politics.

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At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198099154

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.001.0001

Social Structure and Political Arithmetic under Colonial Rule

Jayanta Sengupta

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099154.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter looks at the basic features of colonial Orissa’s society and economy, and discusses how economic impoverishment and limited political and legislative resources provided the material basis for the rhetoric of ‘marginality’/‘backwardness’ that defined the politics of Oriya identity. The political geography of the Oriya-speaking country, and the different patterns of historical evolution, governance and economic development in the coastal and the hill areas are explored in detail. On the whole, this chapter demonstrates two things: (i) the pervasive self-perception of marginality shared by the Oriya educated middle classes gave Oriya nationalism its defining theme; and (ii) though the subsequent Oriya nationalist emphasis on linguistic unity sought to encompass the coasts and the hills in a single cultural community, this endeavour was complicated by dichotomous traditions of rule and divergent patterns of social and political development in the two sub-regions.

Keywords: colonialism,caste,religion,community,jagannath,agrarian,language,ethnicity, marginalization,tribes

It begs the question to say that in modern Indian historiography, Orissa has been largely neglected. Much of the voluminous outpouring on a range of academic subjects in India in recent times—from nationalism and elite competition to postcolonial democracy and new social movements—has passed it by. In an India taking confident strides into the twenty-first century and increasingly asserting its claim to be recognized as a major world power, it seems somehow tucked into a remote corner, away from the din and bustle of the Great Indian Political

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Drama, a place where things move little and times change slowly. For one thing, it is far too quiet to command scholarly or media attention, except for all the wrong reasons—a drought showing up with unerring regularity as a scourge to a parched land, a coast ravaged by devastating cyclones, a missionary or two murdered by fanatical and violent mobs. But for these occasional ripples, its sea of equanimity—lapping forever with quiet assurance at the shores of the temple town of Puri—is hardly stirred at all. And its political quiescence (p.13) leads scholars to conclude that its politics is—and has always been—dull and uneventful.

On the face of it, it comes as no surprise. Its failure to catch the scholar’s imagination has, in fact, a long history. Even in the nineteenth century, Oriyas were considered too unremarkable to be of interest to the historian.W.W. Hunter, whose two-volume Orissa (1872)was a pioneering work in the region’s history, set out to do nothing more ambitious than chart the history of a nondescript ‘race.’ His book, he confessed, was:

embellished by no splendid historical characters….To the world’s call-roll of heroes it will add not one name. The people of whom it treats have fought no great battle for human liberty, nor have they succeeded even in the more primary task of subduing the forces of nature to the control of man. To them the world stands indebted for not a single discovery which augments the comforts or mitigates the calamities of life. Even in literature —the peculiar glory of the Indian race—they have won no conspicuous triumph. They have written no famous epic; they have struck out no separate school of philosophy; they have elaborated no new school of law.1

Hunter therefore found it hardly surprising that ‘no part of India has attracted less notice from the historian or from the scholar’.2 Nearly half a century later, this observation still held good. In May 1920, on the eve of non-cooperation, Mahatma Gandhi gave himself a moment of self-reflection on a people who had always escaped national attention:

Most of us perhaps do not even know where Orissa is…. Orissa is a part of one of the poorest regions in India. We do not hear much about the suffering there because the people are backward in every way.3 For most (p.14) of us, it [Orissa] is a mere geographical expression….nobody knows whether the people of Orissa are happy or unhappy.4

Gandhi’s observation succinctly summed up the situation of the Oriyas in the early twentieth century: Oriyas were ‘poor’ and ‘backward’, and their ‘suffering’ was unnoticed, even uncared for. In a way Gandhi was echoing Hunter, and between the two of them they were putting together an image of Oriyas that was to prove enduring. But how did these epithets come to attach to the Oriya people between 1872 and 1920? Were these statements seeking merely to essentialize,

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or did they arise out of actual social and economic realities affecting the Oriyas? What follows is an attempt to answer this question by looking into Orissa’s social and political institutions, and the transformations wrought by colonial rule.

The modern state of Orissa, which nestles between the eastern Indian states of West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, and shares its western border with Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, incorporates two distinctly separate subregions—the coastal plains and the hilly inland areas. This geographical divide also represents a longstanding cleavage of history and political culture, and its origins date far back into Orissa’s pre-colonial past. Colonial rule perpetuated this cleavage by creating and perpetuating different administrative systems for each of these two subregions. The eastern coastal districts of Cuttack, Balasore, and Puri remained under the direct control of the Commissioner of the Orissa Division, who after 1905 took additional charge of Sambalpur district. By contrast, the hilly and forested tracts of western Orissa were governed by 26 feudatory chiefs, each commonly referred to as Raja. As subordinates to British Paramountcy, these Rajas were allowed to rule their respective states as part of India’s ‘princely states’ system, which remained outside the direct jurisdiction of colonial laws. Such a dichotomy in patterns of rule thus created divergent patterns of social and political development in Orissa’s two subregions. In 1948–9, these princely states came to be merged with the Orissa state, giving shape to its present territorial contours. This merger gave the state a total area in excess of 60,000 square miles, a dramatic increase (p.15) from the approximately 9,000 square miles that the British Division of Orissa had covered through most of the nineteenth century. In between, as one of the key early nineteenth century texts of Oriya nationalism argued, there lay a long and tortuous history of territorial adjustments, in ‘a country hopelessly dismembered [time and again] like a veritable neo-Poland’.5 The only time in postcolonial India when another territorial readjustment of Orissa’s state borders was a possibility was briefly during 1956, when Oriyas agitated unsuccessfully for the incorporation of the two districts of Seraikela and Kharswan from Bihar. Several districts of the modern state were subdivided in the 1990s to create smaller units. The state, renamed Odisha in 2011, currently has 30 districts, though its territorial frontiers have not really changed from the time of the merger of the ex-princely states.

Coastal Orissa: A Social and Demographic Profile

The emergence of Orissa as a distinctive region was the outcome of a long and tortuous process of state formation over more than a millennium. Though it did not feature among ancient India’s so-called 16 mahajanapadas or ‘great republics’, the region of Kalinga is referenced several times in the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, in other ‘classical’ ancient texts like the treatise on statecraft, Arthasastra, or the book of Sanskrit grammar, Ashtadhyai, as well as in the earliest Greek accounts of India. In such ancient usage, the term denoted the upper half of the eastern Indian seaboard, especially the areas south of the

river Mahanadi.6 The Mauryan emperor Asoka’s landmark military campaign in Kalinga—the precursor to his conversion to Buddhism—is well documented in ancient Buddhist texts. The region was part of the Mauryan and Gupta empires, but it was really in the extended period of post-Gupta regionalization that Orissa first emerged as a (p.16) clearly identifiable regional polity with distinctive trajectories of culture and rule. Through a prolonged process of territorial expansion ‘from within’, in which more powerful local ruling groups overcame their neighbours and merged contiguous ‘nuclear states’, Orissa emerged as an imperial kingdom between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, straddling a major part of the seaboard and joining together the areas north (Utkala) and south (Kalinga) of the Mahanadi.7 Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Bengal came under the rule of the sultans of Delhi, Orissa retained its status as an independent Hindu kingdom, despite facing occasional military campaigns launched by Muslim rulers, most notably by Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq in 1361. Towards the later part of the fifteenth century, however, it began to lose much of its southern territories to more powerful neighbours like Vijayanagar and the Bahamani sultanate. To add to this, there was the threat from an increasingly powerful kingdom of Bengal in the north, ruled by Sultan Husain Shah and his successors in the early sixteenth century and taken over by Sher Shah’s Afghan forces in 1538. During the critical period of Akbar’s empirebuilding and the Mughal–Afghan rivalry for the control of eastern India in the second half of the sixteenth century, Orissa became ready once more for incorporation into a pan-Indian imperial structure. The period of Hindu rule in Orissa came to an end when it passed under Afghan domination in 1568, and was then annexed by the Mughals in 1592.

But, throughout this period, imperial incorporation remained regionally differentiated and ‘incomplete’. In the 1540s, the southern part of the kingdom had passed under the control of Qutb Shahi Golconda, and the Afghans and the Mughals could thus lay claim only to the areas north of the river Krishna. The agriculturally prosperous coastal territories were designated Mughalbandi, and apportioned into five sarkars—Jalesar, Bhadrak, and Katak in the north and Kaling Dandpat and Raj Mahendra in the south. Though claimed to be under direct Mughal imperial administration, the two southern sarkars remained effectively under Golconda’s control till Aurangzeb’s (p.17) conquest of the Deccan in the 1680s.8 The East India Company’s annexation of the Northern Circars did nothing to reverse this division between northern and southern Orissa. The latter—reconstituted into Ganjam district—remained part of the Madras Presidency for most of colonial rule, and was transferred to the newly created Orissa state only in 1936.

During the period of gradual Mughal disintegration following Aurangzeb’s death, the Mughalbandi tracts passed under the virtually independent nawabs of Bengal. In 1751, as part of a settlement with Raghuji Bhonsla of Nagpur, they were handed over to the Marathas who retained them under direct rule. During

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the Second Anglo-Maratha War, these tracts came to be occupied by the East India Company in 1803 and made into a Commissioner’s Division in 1818, with the three districts of Cuttack, Balasore, and Puri. In the 1840s it came to include the princely states of Banki and Angul, confiscated from their Rajas on the charge of ‘maladministration’.9 The administrative reorganization accompanying the partition of Bengal in 1905, again, took the district of Sambalpur away from Central Provinces and Berar and added it to the Orissa Division. The latter remained part of the Bengal Presidency until 1912, when it was tagged onto the new province of Bihar and Orissa. This arrangement continued till 1936 when Orissa became the first state in modern India to be constituted solely on a linguistic basis.

In 1881 British Orissa’s 9,053 square miles and 3.73 million people accounted for approximately 5 per cent of both the total area and the population of the Bengal Presidency.10 Owing to the inclusion of Sambalpur in 1905 as well as of Ganjam and Koraput in 1936, the area and the population of the new province had by 1941 more than trebled (p.18) and doubled, respectively,11 but through all these decades the number of town dwellers refused to grow beyond a steady 3 per cent.12 While late-nineteenth century Orissa’s few towns were basically temple-centres dependent on the regional pilgrimage economy, the development of railways along the eastern seaboard since the 1890s brought its coastal economy in closer connection with Calcutta’s burgeoning metropolitan economy. Yet, well into the twentieth century, most of Orissa’s towns—with the exception of large urban centres like Cuttack and Puri—performed very basic commercial functions, acting ‘simply [as] collecting and distributing centres for the surrounding rural area’.13 Even after Independence, Orissa continued to have the highest percentage of rural population among the major Indian states (95.9 per cent in 1951).14 At the outset of the present century, Orissa’s urban population remains less than 15 per cent, almost half of the national figure.15

Religious and Caste Configurations

A remarkable fact of Orissa’s identity politics in the last couple of centuries has been the noticeable absence of significant polarizations in its social and cultural demographics. The cleavage between Hindus and Muslims as religious communities, an increasingly volatile and ultimately explosive political issue in so many other Indian regions in the twentieth century, was hardly a divisive factor in Orissa’s colonial politics. Whereas neighbouring Bengal’s large Muslim population owed its origins mainly to local conversion, nearly two centuries of Muslim (p.19) rule in Orissa had left the region with only a small Muslim population. Between 1872 and 1941 Hindus made up between 97.5 (1881) and 94.67 (1941) per cent of British Orissa’s population, while Muslims accounted for between 2 and 3 per cent.16 At the outset of the present century, Muslims still hover just above two percent of the state population.17

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Through the twentieth century, however, this vast numerical inferiority has not necessarily translated into a correspondingly low social and economic standing. More of colonial Orissa’s Muslims lived in the towns, availed of the educational opportunities created by colonial administration, and had in general a higher standing than their co-religionists in Bengal.18 The communal distribution of Orissa’s major occupational categories reflected these differentials. The 1881 census contrasted an overwhelming Hindu predominance in agrarian occupations against a much greater proportional representation of Muslims in the ‘professional class’.19 Thus, the spectre of Hindu (p.20) majoritarianism— though always a possibility in sheer numerical terms—was not a concrete social and economic reality in Orissa’s colonial history, and did not hold enough alarmist potential for Muslims even in the days of militant political mobilization on communal lines in the run-up to the Partition. As recently as in the 1990s, a renowned anthropologist was struck during her fieldwork in Orissa by ‘the interpenetration and mutual influence characteristic of the meeting between Islam and Hinduism in the subcontinent’.20 It has only been with the rise of Hindutva politics and the Sangh Parivar’s increasingly strident activism among Orissa’s tribals in the late-1990s that communal politics has seeped along a new grid, with Christian missionaries being systematically targeted by orchestrated and murderously violent Hindu mobs. But Muslims have generally been off the radar of such fundamentalist politics.

Alongside this overwhelming religious homogeneity, Orissa’s social and political history has also been marked by an intriguing absence of the explosive fault lines of caste politics. The power of Orissa’s three dominant castes—Brahmans, Karans, and Khandaits—has always closely approximated their ritual precedence in the caste hierarchy. The caste structure in Orissa, notwithstanding its fairly elaborate and hierarchical structure, has never been so rigid as to rule out all scope for mobility. Pre-colonial Orissa’s ruling princes held supreme authority in caste matters in collaboration with advisory scholar-assemblies known variously as the pandit sabhas or mukti mandap sabhas 21 The local and even regional caste councils and assemblies had an extremely narrow range of interests, which revolved mainly around matters relating to kinship and ritual propriety.22 Given the extreme (p.21) territorial fragmentation preventing the horizontal, supralocal spread of caste solidarity, the traditional caste thus hardly functioned as a politically effective pressure group. The few caste associations that emerged in response to colonial political and economic change were different from traditional caste councils and assemblies in terms of organization and scale, but largely shared the latter’s preoccupation with ritual purity and commensal relations.23 No caste association in Orissa was so well organized as the Nair Service Society in Kerala or the wealthy caste associations of Gujarat. Nor could any of Orissa’s ‘Depressed Classes’—the colonial term for today’s scheduled castes (SCs), and constituting one-sixth of coastal Orissa’s population in 193124

—organize itself in the manner of the Nadars of Tamilnadu for instance, using its own efforts for upward social mobility to drive political change in the region.

It is little wonder, therefore, that Orissa has hardly been witness to the kind of non-Brahman cultural identities that has redefined the dynamics of social power in large parts of modern India. What does this tell us about the social organization of religion in this region? The social dominance of Orissa’s Brahmans, strikingly apparent to colonial officials, is undoubtedly a powerful factor in this. In 1875, William Hunter condemned the Oriyas as ‘a priest-ridden race, kept in subjection by the Brahmans and subject to all paralysing influences of religious superstition and caste prejudices’.25 This ascendancy of Brahmanical culture, surprising in a region that holds an iconic place in the history of early Indian Buddhism, merits further explanation because of the complexity of its origins and evolving dynamics.

Orissa’s Brahman population represents a mix of indigenous Brahmans and upcountry migrants, but the chronological landmarks in the historical evolution of such a mix are far from certain. Some scholars have tended to see state formation in ancient and early medieval Orissa (p.22) in terms of a model of ‘brahmanization’, in which Brahman settlements and temples established under royal endowment between the fourth and twelfth centuries played an important integrative role by nurturing a synthesis of Brahmanical and autochthonous deities, and facilitating Orissa’s placement in a pan-Indian network of places of pilgrimage or tirtha. 26 A new dynamic in this process was generated towards the end of the first millennium A.D., when large numbers of upcountry Brahmans— displaced by the political instability in contemporary northern India—made their way to Orissa.27 They were granted land—usually held rent-free or at a low quitrent (tanki-bahal)—in the Cuttack and Puri regions, and settled in concentrations known as sasana, which were very much similar in nature to the Tamil agrahara. 28

However, this influx did not by itself lead to a smooth ascendancy of Brahmanism. The Brahmanical omnipotence that William Hunter observed in the nineteenth century was not easily obtained. Though Brahmans played an important role in systematizing the legitimacy claims of the Hindu princes of Orissa’s medieval kingdoms—themselves often evolved from tribal chieftaincies —the indoctrination of tribal peoples made for at best a ‘partial integration’ along Brahmanical lines.29 For, the process allowed for a remarkable continuity of ‘eclectic (p.23) and polysemantic’ forms of worship in the temples of the local goddesses of the tribal chieftaincies.30 Moreover, the migration of upcountry Brahmans notwithstanding, indigenous Brahmans continued to hold sway in the region as a whole and in the semi-autonomous principalities or ‘jungle kingdoms’ of southern and western Orissa in particular. The colonial ethnographer-cum-civil-servant, Herbert Risley, noted several centuries later that the Dravidian ancestry of the poor Brahmans in Orissa’s jungle and hill

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regions prevented their recognition as ‘Aryans’—an epithet that came to attach to the Bengal Brahmans in spite of their dubious origins.31 Colonial officials attributed this ethnic peculiarity of Orissa’s Brahmans to the persistence of ‘unquestionable traces … of the totemistic beliefs … common among the Dravidian and semi-Dravidian groups’, which, in its turn, could be put down to ‘the adoption by immigrant Brahmins of Dravidian beliefs and observances’.32 There can be no doubt that the appearance of an unassailable Brahmanical ascendancy in Orissa hid within it a much more complex story of the accommodation of indigenous and immigrant traditions, of high-caste and subaltern beliefs, and of cultural strands from both India’s north and south.

Irrespective of their ethnic origins, Orissa’s Brahmans remained undoubtedly quite powerful and played a critical role in the process of medieval state formation, a role facilitated by the building of the great twelfth century temple of Jagannath at Puri and the latter’s subsequent emergence as one of India’s most important pilgrimage centres.33 Like (p.24) similar temples in the regional kingdoms of early medieval India, the Jagannath temple acted as a counterweight to the divisive forces of ‘samantisation’ in medieval Orissa’s deltaic kingdoms. By making use of the symbolic role of the Jagannath cult, Orissa’s rulers could exercise ‘ritual sovereignty’ over the interior, having in principle handed over the realm to the deity and thus ideologically insulating themselves against potentially rebellious feudatories.34 Symbolizing the transformation of a tribal god into a major Hindu deity, the cult initially retained a few tribals among its essential priests. But the famous Puri deity was identified with the Brahmanical deity ‘Vishnu-Purushottam’ and ‘Vishnu-Jagannath’, and by the fourteenth century non-Brahman priests were substantially replaced by Brahmans.35 Persisting Brahmanical domination, the growing importance of the Shankaracharya math at Puri,36 and the emergence of the Jagannath cult gave the Khurda-Puri region something of the character of a cultural core, which drew into its ambit various local-level cultures and thus performed the function of a ‘symbolic network’. Privileged Brahman groups that were given rent-free holdings called sasana villages helped to develop an administrative and sociocultural superstructure centred on the Puri temple but also incorporating (p.25) other important temples at Bhubaneswar, Konarak, and Jajpur.37 An assembly of such sasana Brahmans—called the mukti mandap sabha and situated within the Jagannath temple premises—not only carried on religious discourses meant exclusively for the Brahmans and the king, but also functioned as the highest authority in socio-religious arbitration.38 It has even been argued recently that the power of these Brahmans in arbitrating social and ritual conflict ‘designated them an alternative to the raja’s authority,’ and that they could even sometimes successfully challenge the king’s authority instead of upholding it.39 Apart from such Brahmans, this assembly also came to include influential mahantas or high priests from the Shankaracharya math at Puri, and remained a functioning organization for social arbitration until recent times.40

Though the importance of the Jagannath temple rose further in the colonial period, temple administration was bureaucratized and the king as well as the Sasana Brahmans reduced to ceremonial importance alone. The wealth mass tourism brought to Puri went to pilgrim guides and related mercantile establishments rather than to the temple’s traditional Brahman executives, while a number of Sasana villages without sufficient documentary evidence of religious donation had their revenues auctioned off to the tax farmers of the Calcutta market. (p.26) In spite of these disadvantages, it seems that Puri’s temple Brahmans were able to hold on to their own by entrenching themselves in various functions of the burgeoning pilgrimage economy,41 as well as by finding, by the turn of the nineteenth century, government jobs in the newly created schools. Largely in conformity with Brahman conservatism, such teaching positions yet provided access to Western intellectual developments. In 1909 Brahman educationists from Sasana villages, led by the prominent Puribased lawyer and social worker Gopabandhu Das, founded in Sakshi Gopal near Puri the Satyabadi school, based on nationalist ideals of education and social service. It made its mark through committed disaster relief work, and placed a significant emphasis on Oriya cultural heritage as well as the need for economic independence against Bengali sub-colonial dominance. The movement seamlessly merged with the burgeoning politics of Oriya nationalism championed by the Utkal Union Conference, and later allied itself with the Gandhian Congress.42

One remarkable feature of ancient and early medieval Oriya society was its distinctive regional variation of caste stratification, which deviated from the orthodox varna divisions that became the hallmark of northern Indian society. Recent scholarship has argued that Orissa, with the exception of the coastal areas, did not have the wide and rich alluvial plains needed to sustain the economic base for such a social order or pattern of stratification. Land grants to Brahmans and subsequent agrarian expansion over the long run transformed the autochthonous tribes into Sudra peasant castes. Through a process whose social ramifications have been seen in recent scholarship as deviating from a simple model of gradual ‘Brahmanization’, Hermann Kulke has shown how the ‘Hinduization’ of the ‘little’ or ‘jungle kingdoms’ of Orissa’s hilly hinterland led to the absorption (p.27) of tribal chieftains into Hindu society as ‘Kshatriyas’. 43 Akio Tanabe has similarly argued against a simple ‘eradication’ of indigenous tribal culture by the Brahmanical tradition. Instead, he shows that Orissa’s seventeenth and eighteenth century kings initiated close interactions between the state level and the local level by patronizing both the state god, Jagannath, and the local tribal goddesses—a policy that earned them a more broad-based legitimacy in the bargain.44 But these developments did not by themselves create a viable Kshatriya varna in a society that lacked such a tradition earlier. Nor did the Vaishya varna emerge as a distinctive category, because by the time of Orissa’s ‘Brahmanization’, the occupational distinction between Vaishyas and

Page 9 of 64

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Sudras had already become blurred in northern India.45 Thus, Orissa came to develop a more loosely organized two-tier caste structure, with Brahmans and Sudras arranged non-antagonistically in a society unmarked by rigid polarization. Not only did the ruling class endeavour to integrate the tribes and accommodate their culture,46 but the Sudras also received land grants and village assignments and participated in military service, (p.28) all of which provided them with significant avenues of social mobility. Religious movements like the Sakta-Tantrik cults, Vaishnavism, and the Natha cults, too, helped to play down Brahmanical caste hegemony and offered new channels of social and religious articulation to the Sudras.47

The decision of the medieval Vaishnava saint Chaitanya to settle in Puri in the early-sixteenth century helped to integrate Vaishnavism closely with the Jagannath cult and give it an eclectic spirit of bhakti. It also created a significant space for non-Brahmans, from whose ranks came not only Chaitanya’s comrades but also most of the other important orthodox exponents of the Chaitanya faith. The Chaitanya faith became very popular in Orissa’s coastal districts as well as in the adjoining hinterland regions of Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Dhenkanal, and Koraput. Despite being initially opposed to lower-caste dominance in the Chaitanya movement, coastal Oriya Brahmans were forced eventually to accept its huge popularity, and many of them were in fact led to adopting the Vaishnava surname ‘Das’ when they settled in or near Puri.48 Other non-Brahmans attracted more to the eclecticism of the Jagannath cult in general than to Chaitanyaite Vaishnavism per se, also made an imprint on Orissa’s social and cultural life—perhaps none more so than the late-fifteenth century lower caste author, Sarala Dasa, whose Mahabharata marked the emergence of Oriya vernacular literature.49 Sarala Dasa was bold enough to call himself a ‘sudramuni’ or ‘low-caste sage’, and his opus—a remarkable text, with tales of social integration across the caste spectrum woven into the epic’s ‘authentic’ high-Sanskritic version—marked a particularly significant point of departure towards the vernacularization of Sanskritic epic narratives.50

(p.29) Interestingly, the tribal origins of the Jagannath cult are still betrayed by the inter-caste distribution of ritual services at the Puri temple, and the coexistence of orthodox Brahmans and Savara tribals (daitas) among its priests.51 Nonetheless, the cult has over the years represented an upper caste or high-Hindu ritual hegemony in a populist garb, thus keeping potential nonBrahman ideologies at bay. The only genuine anti-caste movement in Orissa’s history, with a strong non-Brahman ideological orientation, was the Mahima (or Alekha) Dharma movement that became popular among significant numbers of the impoverished Oriya low caste, untouchable, and tribal groups, especially in the Garhjat region after the devastating Orissa famine of 1866. The famine shook up traditional faith in Jagannath as the protector of his devotees, especially at a time when the cult had already generated some social alienation due to its close association with royalty and discriminatory caste practices in the Puri temple.

Times of scarcity and disaffection in the feudatory states bred a groundswell of devotional faith with pronounced anti-Brahman elements. Originating as a reformist movement preaching total devotion to an omniscient and formless god, Mahima Dharma rejected the deities of the Hindu pantheon, dispensed with the Brahman’s role in mediating between god and humans, and contested idolatry and Brahmanical caste practices.52 In March 1881, the movement took a violent turn, with a group of followers making a futile attack on the Puri temple (p.30) in an iconoclastic bid to quell the supremacy of the Jagannath cult.53 This is only one instance of how an alternative social movement with a sound agrarian base, even in a predominantly agrarian state like Orissa, had little chance of success against upper caste ideological dominance embodied in the cult.

Through the period of colonial rule, the Jagannath cult provided nothing more substantial than a pool of symbols that could be drawn upon selectively by the regional elite and aspiring political leaders.54 It is instructive to note that in 1934 and again in 1938, at a time when the Orissa countryside was being rocked by wide-ranging agrarian discontent, even Gandhi failed to get the Jagannath temple doors open to the untouchables by means of advocacy, though he was unwilling to employ more assertive means to this end.55 The latter gained their right of entry to the temple not earlier than 1947, when the Congress Ministry headed by Harekrushna Mahtab upheld their demand.

(p.31) The Karans, who are traditionally scribes, record keepers and surveyors, are simply the Orissa counterpart of the Kayasths or writer caste of Bengal. They, too, were in the king’s service by the tenth century, serving as a distinguished and dominant functional caste generally referred to as Karanikas Where precisely did they fit into the seemingly two-tier Varna system consisting of Brahmans and Sudras? The question does not admit of a simple answer, and it seems that the Karans or Karanikas occupied at best an ambivalent position in the caste structure of medieval Orissa. Recent scholarship has tended to attribute indigenous origins to this caste. With the expansion of the state’s fiscal and administrative functions in early medieval Orissa—and particularly with constant transfers of land and land revenue being made to Brahmans, officials, and temples—a large number of writers and record keepers were needed to draft and maintain documents. These needs were probably met by recruiting, as Kayasths or scribes, literate members of the upper castes, and eventually from among the Sudra communities as well. With the number of land grants increasing in the tenth–eleventh centuries, the Kayasths emerged as a distinct caste, rose to the stature of a dominant caste under the later Eastern Gangas and adopted local caste names as Karanikas or Karans. Their rising importance was indicated by the fact that some of them came to occupy high civil and military positions, even hold feudatory status.56 Gradually they were given land for their services, and as participants in administration they became a powerful, though numerically small, section in society. During Mughal rule, when the structural framework of a revenue administration was built, the Karans worked

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not in time to cut down his enemy. He felt a terrific blow on the side of his head, his senses reeled, and he fell backward off the wall with the vengeful shriek of Gonzales ringing in his ears as the pirate ran the hostile through.

For several minutes he remained huddled on the ground while the fight raged about him, and then he began crawling to one side, following the wall, trying to get where he would not hinder the others, and remain away until he recovered strength.

Propped against the wall of the storehouse, he watched the conflict on the other side of the plaza, too weak to stand, his head swimming, scarcely able to lift an arm. Shadow-shapes came and went before him; the shrieks seemed far away.

“By the saints—!” he gasped. “A club—a club to render me senseless! Carlos Cassara, who has stood up to good fighters, to be beaten down by a common club in the hands of a gentile cur! A mere club! Hah! I shall go mad!”

He tried to wipe the film from in front of his eyes and peer at the wall. It seemed to him that the shrieks had redoubled, and he sensed that his comrades were giving way before the onslaught of the enemy. He tried to cry encouraging words, but merely made a rattling noise in his throat.

“Mere—club—” he gasped.

Someone rushed before him. A firebrand fell in the plaza—and by its momentary glare Cassara saw a man standing with a pistol a score of feet away.

“Wha—what—?” he began mumbling. And then, suddenly, realisation came to him. This man before him was Captain Fly-by-Night, the renegade. He was here, in the middle of the plaza! What did it mean? Had the attack on the wall been a subterfuge? Had hostiles invaded the church and now were attacking the defenders in the rear?

Fear for his comrades clutched at the heart of Sergeant Carlos Cassara. He gathered his remaining strength and tried to stagger to his feet, but could not. He still was sick because of the blow he had received, and from loss of blood. Huddled beside the wall of the storehouse, he drew air deep into his lungs, and expelled it in a series of shouts that rang out above the din of battle.

“Ho! Hah! Behind you, comrades! They are behind you! Captain Flyby-Night is in the plaza!”

The glare of the firebrand died out, and, as it died, Cassara saw Flyby-Night turn and face him for an instant, glance back at the wall, then flee toward the church and enter it.

“Behind you!” Cassara shouted again. “Fly-by-Night behind you!”

Now some of the men had run from the wall and were gathering around him, Gonzales at their head.

“He was—there! He ran into—the church!” Cassara went on.

Roaring a challenge, Gonzales rushed across the plaza with half a dozen men at his heels. Another firebrand struck inside, and its glare revealed every corner. Gonzales rushed into the church, weapons held ready. The men with him searched every nook and corner, but none was there except the two men left on guard. A soldier ran for the firebrand and carried it into the church contrary to orders; but its light revealed no renegade crouching and ready for sword play or pistol shot.

Gonzales and his men hurried back to the plaza and stood over Sergeant Cassara again.

“The blow on your head turned your wit,” the pirate said. “You saw Fly-by-Night, eh?”

“I swear by the saints he stood before me, watching you on the wall.”

“Take no oath by the saints until your head is better, sergeant mine, else you perjure yourself. There is no sight of the man in plaza or

chapel—and the men guarding the church saw no one.”

“I tell you he was here! Dios!Cannot a man believe his own eyes?”

“’Twas your imagination. The blow caused you to see this Fly-byNight along with stars and meteors.”

“I saw him——”

“Then you saw a ghost!” Gonzales declared. “Rest you easy, sergeant mine, and frighten us no more with old women’s tales of hostiles at our back.”

“I tell you——”

“Tell it to the ghost if he comes again!” Gonzales snorted; and hurried back to the wall, where the hostiles, beaten off again, were retreating to prepare for another assault.

Sergeant Cassara propped himself up against the wall of the storehouse and gazed into the darkness, half expecting the sound of a stealthy step near him. The weakness came again, and his head sank forward. He struggled in vain to keep his eyes open, keep his senses alert. And just before he lapsed into unconsciousness he gripped the hilt of his sword and moaned into the night:

“I shall go mad! By the saints! I shall go mad!”

CHAPTER XX

ANOTHER

VISITOR

The dawn!

Some trooper started the cheer when the first faint red streak began to show through the fog, and the others took it up, until all the defenders at the mission were hailing the day except the frailes busy with their prayers.

The dawn meant that no more could the hostiles approach under cover of darkness, make unexpected attacks in certain quarters, or slip up unnoticed until within a few feet of the walls. Now they could be observed easily on every side, and an open charge could be met by a concentrated defence.

As the day broadened and the fog began to lift a constant pattering of musket slugs beat against the walls, and flaming arrows were still being discharged. Neophytes carried food and water and wine to the men on the wall and at the windows of the buildings, and they ate and drank as they fought, trying to pick off enemies when head or leg or arm showed.

Every boulder had a hostile behind it, every pile of debris, and they were intrenched behind the wall of the orchard, from which comparative security they showered bullets against those of the mission.

Dead and wounded gentiles and traitorous neophytes dotted the ground on every side of the plaza. Eight defenders were stretched in a row near the wall, victims of the conspiracy. More than a score wounded had been quartered in the church, where the frailes

attended to their injuries as well as they could, for the church was where the last stand would be made if necessary.

A nervous, anxious comandante paced the plaza, scarcely speaking to his men. Ensign Sanchez, from a position near the end of the wall, had glass to eye, searching El Camino Real for a cloud of dust that would tell of the approach of the Governor and his force, fearing as he looked that it would not be possible for his excellency to arrive until the end of the day.

A great deal depended on what had transpired at San Luis Rey de Francia. There was a chance the Governor would have to stop and give aid there and could not continue to San Diego de Alcalá. It was certain the hostiles knew the Governor was coming, and would attempt to gain possession of the mission before his arrival.

Sergeant Cassara still sat against the wall of the storehouse, and Gonzales, down on his knees beside him, was holding a wine cup while the sergeant drank. Gonzales had suffered a minor wound, but made little of it.

“Together, we have not lost enough blood to dye a lady’s handkerchief,” he said. “’Twas the knock on the head made you faint, sergeant mine.”

“Carlos Cassara to be knocked on the head with a club!” the sergeant groaned. “I shall go mad!”

“Another man would have had his skull crushed by the blow. How feel you now?”

“Excellent well, good pirate, except my neck be so stiff I cannot turn my head.”

“Hah! Dost want to look behind you to pick out a way to run?”

“Now, by all the saints——”

“’Twas but a jest, Carlos, my friend. You are able to fight again?”

“Let the dogs but attack and I’ll take my place beside you,” the sergeant boasted.

“You have seen no more ghosts?”

“’Twas no ghost! ’Twas Captain Fly-by-Night himself, may the imps of evil seize upon him! Laugh, and you like! I saw him, by the light of the firebrand, standing in the plaza, pistol in hand.”

“We’ll say no more of it,” Gonzales proposed. “’Tis no thing to cause argument between friends. What is a ghost? Hah!”

The door of the guest house was thrown open, and the giant Pedro stalked out, followed by Señorita Anita Fernandez and Señora Vallejo. It was plain to be seen both women had been weeping. The comandantehurried toward them, cap in hand, and spoke with them for a few moments, then conducted them along the wall toward the church.

“Displaying the women folk,” Cassara whispered to his friend. “’Twill make the men fight better. What a girl that is!”

“’Twere hard to die as this Rojerio Rocha died, knowing death robbed him of such treasure,” Gonzales replied.

“He is dead, then?”

“It is assumed so. Why would hostiles hold him prisoner when they are running wild to kill other good men?”

“Why didn’t they slay him at the rancho with Señor Lopez and the others? Answer me that!” said Cassara. “How does it happen this Fly-by-Night got the women from the ranch-house and fetched them here? Answer me that! Why does this girl gasp and say it is too horrible, yet give no details? Reply to me concerning that! Hah! When this row is at an end there’ll be explanations enough to occupy a year of his excellency’s time!”

“The women are going into the church to pray,” Gonzales announced, for lack of anything better to say. “’Tis well. As for me, I do my praying as I fight. It is an excellent custom. I noticed a fray as dawn broke doing the same thing. Load and fire—then on his knees—arise—load and fire again. He kept it up for half an hour.”

“The bells of the mission rang as usual this morning, I noticed,” Gonzales said.

“And did you hear the fiends yell and double their volleys at the same time? Hah! Drown the sound of mission bells by shrieks and shouts? They’ll ring down the centuries, my good pirate—ring either in fact or fancy as long as two chunks of adobe cling together! Hah! I grow poetical, pirate! Is it a sign of approaching death?”

“It is a sign of approaching lunacy,” Gonzales answered, and stood to his feet to watch Señorita Anita and her duenna as they came from the church and crossed the plaza to the guest house again, heads bowed and hands clasped, a fray behind them, the comandantehovering near.

The crest of the hill behind the mission flamed red suddenly as a volley was fired. The cries of the besiegers were redoubled. The comandante and the ensign called commands. Gonzales picked up musket and hurried to the wall, and Sergeant Cassara got slowly upon his feet, balanced himself dazedly against the storehouse wall for a moment, then clutched his own musket and staggered weakly after his friend.

From all sides came the rain of bullets, while over the crest of the hill poured charging hostiles in a mad rush toward the plaza. Others remained at the crest and covered the charge with volleys, keeping the top of the wall clear until those concerned in the assault were within striking distance.

Then the top of the wall burst into flame, and the charge hesitated for an instant, recoiled, gathered courage and continued. Once more hostiles and defenders fought hand-to-hand with pistols and swords and knives.

More dead were stretched beside the wall inside the plaza, more dotted the ground outside. Additional wounded shrieked or groaned in pain. Half a dozen savages invaded the plaza, to be caught in a corner as in a trap and exterminated. The assault failed, as had the previous ones, but it had proved costly to the defenders.

Now there was quiet for an hour, except for the continual shots fired by hostiles under cover. Frailes worked frantically with the wounded. More ammunition was distributed. Ensign Sanchez swept El Camino Real with his glass, and turned away disconsolate. The comandante walked from post to post, cheering his men, his face contradicting the words he spoke.

“A few more charges like that,” Gonzales was saying, “and there’ll not be enough of us left to make a defence. No gentile had brains enough to cover an advance from the crest like that. Hah! If ever I meet this renegade who leads them——”

“The mere thought of standing before him makes me strong again,” Cassara replied. “I pray both of us will have pistols empty and be forced to use naked steel.”

A fusillade interrupted him, a renewal of war cries smote the ears of those in the plaza. Men raised weapons to fire, expecting another charge. And over the crest of the hill fled a man who waved a white cloth above his head and plunged down toward the mission.

“A white man! Don’t fire! A white man!” comandante and ensign were shouting.

Now the crest was alive with Indians, who fired repeatedly at the fleeing figure. Some gave chase until bullets from the wall cut them down. On and on raced the fugitive toward the promised shelter of the mission.

“’Tis this Rojerio Rocha!” Cassara shouted.

CHAPTER XXI

IN THE GUEST HOUSE

“Rojerio Rocha! He has escaped them!” Others took up the cry, and cheers from those along the wall greeted the flying man, cheers of welcome and encouragement. The Indians on the crest were still firing at him. He dodged from side to side as he ran. Now he dropped the white cloth he had carried, glued elbows to his sides, and ran on. He stumbled, fell, regained his feet.

“Help him!” the comandantecried. “Aid him inside, you men!”

The fugitive crashed against the wall. A musket was let down, and he grasped it, and they pulled him up and lifted him over—to see him collapse on the ground breathless, his eyes rolling, clutching at the breast of his cloak as if it pained him to try to breathe.

“He has been hit!” a fray cried; but the man shook his head. They gave him wine, and he drank, and gasped until he got his breath.

“The fiends!” he cursed. “They were holding me—expected to torture me—with Señorita Fernandez—said her father—had been cruel. I managed—to get free of bonds. They will—attack again!”

Even as he spoke the second attack came. Again a throng of savages rushed down the slope while others poured a volley at the wall. The hostiles in the orchard joined in the charge. They reached the corner of the wall, piled against it, made their way upward in the face of musket flashes and blades. Shrieking chiefs urged them on. One by one the defenders crashed to the ground inside. The ranks closed up. All other parts of the square were

abandoned as men rushed to the threatened corner. The man who had escaped the hostiles was forgotten.

He got upon his feet and stood against the wall for a moment, clutching at his breast as if it still pained him to breathe, and then he tottered toward the storehouse. A jug of water was on the step, and he lifted it and drank, then staggered inside.

One soldier had remained there to guard, and was standing at the wide window, musket ready, prepared to fire and give an alarm if the Indians attempted to gain entrance there. He whirled around as the other man stumbled against a counter.

“Thank the saints you escaped!” he cried. “It was a close call, Señor Rocha.”

“A musket,” the other demanded. “Weapon and ammunition! Am I to stand by idly while others fight?”

The soldier got a musket from the corner and handed it over, and turned for powder and ball. The man behind him swung the heavy weapon over his head and crashed it down on the soldier’s skull, and the storehouse guard was stretched on the floor.

It did not seem to pain him to breathe now, for he was done with acting. He hurried across to the window and worked frantically to unfasten the bars. For an instant he leaned out and waved a cloth.

A group of hostiles beside the orchard wall had been waiting for that signal. Now they ran wildly across the open space—a score of them —some falling on the way, men from other groups of hostiles joining them. Shrieking their battle-cries, they poured through the window the renegade had opened and plunged into the plaza.

At the same time hostiles swarmed over the end of the wall, enough of them to make a stand. Beset front and rear, the defenders stood back to back and fought courageously. More men fell. Loyal neophytes had been slain as they loaded weapons; and there was no time for the remaining defenders to load now, nothing to do