Kurmi is a traditionally non-elite tiller caste in the lower Gangetic plain of India, especially southern regions of Awadh, eastern Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar and Jharkhand. The Kurmi came to be known for their exceptional work ethic, superior tillage and manuring, and gender-neutral culture, bringing praise from Mughal and British administrators alike. A theory of Gustav Salomon Oppert (1893) holds that it may be derived from kṛṣmi, meaning "ploughman".
According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926), the Bengali word kuṛmī or kurmī derives from Sanskrit kuṭumbin. This view is endorsed in Ralph Lilley Turner's A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1962–1985), where he lists cognates across many Indo-Aryan languages including Bhojpuri, Bihari, and Eastern Hindi.
History
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
With the continued waning of Mughal Empire rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, began to appear more frequently in settled areas and interact with townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organisation lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Kurmi, were part of a social spectrum that blended only indistinctly into the elite landowning classes at one end, and the menial or ritually polluting classes at the other.
The Kurmi were famed as market gardeners. In western and northern Awadh, for example, for much of the 18th century, the Muslim gentry offered the Kurmi highly discounted rental rates for clearing the jungle and cultivating it. Once the land had been brought stably under the plough, however, the land rent was usually raised to 30 to 80 per cent above the going rate. Although British revenue officials later ascribed the high rent to the prejudice among the elite rural castes against handling the plough, the main reason was the greater productivity of the Kurmi, whose success lay in superior manuring. According to historian Christopher Bayly, <blockquote> Whereas the majority of cultivators manured only the lands immediately around the village and used these lands for growing food grains, Kurmis avoided using animal dung for fuel and manured the poorer lands farther from the village (the manjha). They were able, therefore, to grow valuable market crops such as potatoes, melons and tobacco immediately around the village, sow fine grains in the manjha, and restrict the poor millet subsistence crops to the periphery. A network of ganjs (fixed rural markets) and Kurmi or Kacchi settlements could transform a local economy within a year or two.</blockquote>
Cross-cultural influences were also felt. Hindu tillers worshipped at Muslim shrines in the small towns founded by their Muslim overlords. The Hindu Kurmis of Chunar and Jaunpur, for instance, took up the Muslim custom of marrying first cousins and of burying their dead. Earlier, in the late eighteenth century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, attempted to grant the kshatriya title of Raja to a group of influential landed Ayodhya Kurmis, he was thwarted by a united opposition of Rajputs, who were themselves (as described by Buchanan), "a group of newcomers to the court, who had been peasant soldiers only a few years before ..." the only time this was the case. In the United Provinces (UP), the Kurmi were classified under "Class VIII: Castes from whom some of the twice-born would take water and pakki (food cooked with ghee), without question;" whereas, in Bihar, they were listed under: "Class III, Clean Sudra, Subclass (a)." According to William Pinch, "Risley's hierarchy (for United Provinces) was far more elaborate than that for Bihar, suggesting that contending claims of social respectability may have been more deeply entrenched in the western half of the Gangetic Plain."</blockquote>
According to Susan Bayly, <blockquote> By the mid-nineteenth century, influential revenue specialists were reporting that they could tell the caste of a landed man by simply glancing at his crops. In the north, these observers claimed, a field of 'second-rate barley' would belong to a Rajput or Brahman who took pride in shunning the plough and secluding his womenfolk. Such a man was to be blamed for his own decline, fecklessly mortgaging and then selling off his lands to maintain his unproductive dependents. By the same logic, a flourishing field of wheat would belong to a non-twice-born tiller, wheat being a crop requiring skill and enterprise on the part of the cultivator. These, said such commentators as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt, were the qualities of the non-patrician 'peasant' – the thrifty Jat or canny Kurmi in upper India, .... Similar virtues would be found among the smaller market-gardening populations, these being the people known as Keoris in Hindustan, ....</blockquote>
Twentieth century
As the economic pressures on the patrician landed groups continued through the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, there were increasing demands for unpaid labour directed at the Kurmi and other non-elite cultivators. Simultaneously, newly constituted farmers' unions, or Kisan Sabhas—composed of cultivators and pastoralists, many of whom were Kurmi, Ahir, and Yadav (Goala), and inspired by Hindu mendicants, such as Baba Ram Chandra and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati—denounced the Brahman and Rajput landlords as ineffective and their morality as false. In the rural Ganges valley of Bihar and Eastern United Provinces, the Bhakti cults of Rama, the incorruptible Kshatriya god-king of Hindu tradition, and Krishna, the divine cowherd of Gokul, had long been entrenched among the Kurmi and Ahir. The leaders of the Kisan Sabhas urged their Kurmi and Ahir followers to lay claim to the Kshatriya mantle. Promoting what was advertised as soldierly manliness, the Kisan Sabhas agitated for the entry of non-elite farmers into the British Indian army during World War I; they formed cow protection societies; they asked their members to wear the sacred thread of the twice-born, and, in contrast to the Kurmis own traditions, to sequester their women in the manner of Rajputs and Brahmins.
Many private caste-based armies surfaced in Bihar between the 1970s and 1990s, largely influenced by landlord farmers reacting to the growing influence of left extremist groups. Among these was the Bhumi Sena, the membership of which was drawn mainly from youths who had a Kurmi origin. Bhumi Sena was much feared in the Patna region and also had influence in the districts of Nalanda, Jehanabad and Gaya.
Kurmis in Nepal
The Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal classifies the Kurmi as a subgroup within the broader social group of Madheshi Other Caste. At the time of the 2011 Nepal census, 231,129 people (0.9% of the population of Nepal) were Kurmi. The frequency of Kurmis by province was as follows:
- Madhesh Province (2.8%)
- Lumbini Province (1.6%)
- Koshi Province (0.1%)
- Bagmati Province (0.0%)
- Gandaki Province (0.0%)
- Karnali Province (0.0%)
- Sudurpashchim Province (0.0%)
The frequency of Kurmis was higher than national average (0.9%) in the following districts:
- Parsa (8.4%)
- Kapilvastu (6.3%)
- Rautahat (5.7%)
- Bara (3.9%)
- Banke (2.2%)
- Sarlahi (2.2%)
- Rupandehi (2.0%)
- Parasi (1.7%)
- Dhanusha (1.3%)
See also
- Kunbi
- Koeri
- Patidar
- Patel
- Kochaisa
- History of Backward Caste movement in Bihar
References
Notes
Citations