Kurmi
Encyclopedia
The Kurmi are a Hindu agricultural Jāti
(community) in India.
The group has been associated with the Kunbi
, though scholars differ as to whether the terms are synonymous. In 2006, the Indian government announced that Kurmi was considered synonymous with the Kunbi and Yellam castes in Maharashtra
. There are differences of opinion regarding the group's classification in the traditional varna system.
a tortoise avatar
of the god Vishnu
.
in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent
's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, increasingly interacted with settled townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such martial and nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organization lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Kurmi or Ahirs
, 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. It was not unusual in those times for a high caste Brahmin widow to remarry a tiller from one of these indeterminate backgrounds.
The Kurmi were famed as cultivators and market gardeners. In western and northern Awadh
, for example, for much of the eighteenth 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,
Cross-cultural influences were felt also. 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. In some regions, the Kurmis' success as tillers led to land ownership, and to avowals of high status, as noted, for examples, by Francis Buchanan in the early 19th century among the Ayodhya Kurmis of the Awadh. 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 Rajput
s, who were themselves (as described by Buchanan), "a group of newcomers to the court, who had been peasant soldiers only a few years before ..." According to historian William Pinch:
Although the free peasant farm was the mainstay of farming in many parts of north India in the 18th century, in some regions, a combination of climatic, political, and demographic factors led to the increased dependence of peasant cultivators such as the Kurmi. In the Benares division, which had come under the revenue purview of the British East India Company
in 1779, the Chalisa famine
of 1783 and the relentless revenue demand from the Company reduced the status of many Kurmi cultivators. A British revenue agent wrote in 1790, "It unfortunately happened that during the famine aforesaid a great proportion of the Kurmis, Kacchis and Koeris were in this district as well as in others supplanted by Brahmans ... " and bemoaned the loss of agricultural revenue in part due to, "this unfavourable mutation amongst the cultivators ... "
In the first half of the nineteenth century, economic pressures on the large landowning classes increased noticeably. The prices of agricultural lands fell at the same time that the East India Company, after acquiring the Ceded and Conquered Provinces
(later the North-Western Provinces
) in 1805, began to press landowners for more land revenue. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 created more fear and discontent among the landed elite, and may have contributed to the Indian rebellion of 1857
. Economic pressures also opened marginal areas to intensive agriculture and turned the fortunes of the non-elite peasants, such as the Kurmi, who worked them. After the rebellion, the landowning classes, defeated but still pressed economically in the new British Raj
, attempted to treat their tenants and labourers as people of lowly birth and to demand unpaid labour from them. According to historical anthropologist Susan Bayly,
The elite landowning classes, such as Rajputs and Bhumihars, now sought to present themselves as flagbearers of the ancient Hindu tradition. At the same time, there was a proliferation of Brahmanical
rituals in the daily life of the elite, a greater stress on pure blood lines, more stringent conditions placed on matrimonial alliances, and, as noted by some social reformers of the day, an increase among the Rajputs of female infanticide, a practice that had little history among the Kurmi.
The second half of the nineteenth century also largely overlapped with the coming of age of ethnology—interpreted then as the science of race—in the study of societies the world over. Although later to be discredited, the methods of this discipline were eagerly absorbed and adopted in British India, as were those of the emerging science of anthropology. Driven in part by the intellectual ferment of the discipline and in part by the political compulsions in both Britain and India, two dominant views of caste emerged among the adminstrator-scholars of the day. According to Susan Bayly:
Seeing caste as a fundamental force in Indian life, Risley, especially, influenced official views as expressed in the Censuses of British India as well as the Imperial Gazetteer brought out by Hunter. Risley is best known for the now discounted attribution of all differences in caste to varying proportions of seven racial types which included "Dravidian," "Aryo-Dravidian," and "Indo-Aryan". The Kurmi fell into two such categories. In the ethnological map of India published in the 1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India and based on the 1901 Census supervised by Risley, the Kurmi of the United Provinces were classified as "Aryo-Dravidian," whereas the Kurmi of the Central Provinces
were counted among "Dravidians". (See figure.) In the 1901 Census of India, the category of varna
, the four-fold graded system, was included in the official classification of caste, the only time to have been so. 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."
In the writings of the occupational theorists, the Kurmis and the Jats came to be extolled for their yeoman-like purposefulness, tirelessness, and thrift, all of which, according to writers such as, Crooke, Ibbetson, and Blunt had been largely abandoned by the landed elite. Crooke wrote about the Kurmi in 1897:
According to Susan Bayly,
movements, especially those based on Tulsidas
's Ramcharitmanas, the Kurmi largely resisted these demands. Their resistance, however, did not take the form of denial of caste or of caste-based imposition, but rather of disagreement about where they stood in the caste ranking. A noteworthy attribute of the resulting Kurmi-kshatriya movement was the leadership provided by educated Kurmis who were now filling the lower and middle levels of government jobs. According to William Pinch:
The first Kurmi caste association had been formed in 1894 at Lucknow
in order to protest against the police recruitment policy. This was followed by an organisation in Awadh that sought to draw other communities - such as the Patidar
s, Maratha
s, Kapu
s and Naidu
s - under the umbrella of the Kurmi name. This body then campaigned for Kurmis to classify themselves as Kshatriya in the 1901 census and, in 1910, led to the formation of the All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha
. 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 Lord Rama
, the incorruptible Kshatriya god-king of Hindu tradition, and Lord Krishna
, the divine Kshatriya guardian of cows, 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.
In 1930, the Kurmis of Bihar joined with the Yadav and Koeri
agriculturalists to enter local elections. They lost badly but in 1934 the three communities formed the Triveni Sangh political party, which allegedly had a million dues-paying members by 1936. However, the organisation was hobbled by competition from the Congress-backed Backward Class Federation, which was formed around the same time, and by co-option of community leaders by the Congress party. The Triveni Sangh suffered badly in the 1937 elections, although it did win in some areas. The organisation also suffered from caste rivalries, notably the superior organisational ability of the higher castes who opposed it, as well as the inability of the Yadavs to renounce their belief that they were natural leaders and that the Kurmi were somehow inferior. Similar problems beset a later planned caste union, the Raghav Samaj, with the Koeris.
Again in the 1970s, the India Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha attempted to bring the Koeris under their wing, but again a disunity troubled this alliance. Kurmi politician Nitish Kumar
fomed the Samata Party
in 1994, forming a backward-upper caste alliance with the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party
, which achieved only initial success. In 1998, politician Laloo Prasad Yadav took advantage of this lack of unity in the IKKS, portraying Koeri Shakuni Chaudhry as an incarnation of Kush. Under Yadav, the IKSS became less and less advantageous to the Kurmi, favouring instead the priorities of the Yadav caste, and this combined with the competition of the Kurmi-based Samata led to a divide between these intermittently allied castes.
. In Bihar
, Kurmi people speak Magahi and Angika, while in Uttar Pradesh they use Hindi. In other states they generally speak their native and regional languages.
Jati
Jāti is the term used to denote clans, tribes, communities and sub-communities in India. It is a term used across religions. In Indian society each jāti typically has an association with a traditional job function or tribe, although religious beliefs Jāti (in Devanagari: जाति Tamil:சாதி) (the...
(community) in India.
The group has been associated with the Kunbi
Kunbi
Kunbi is a generic term applied to castes of traditionally non-elite tillers in Western India. These include the Dhonoje, Ghatole, Hindre, Jadav, Jhare, Khaire, Lewa , Lonari and Tirole communities of Vidharbha. The communities are largely found in the state of Maharashtra but also exist in the...
, though scholars differ as to whether the terms are synonymous. In 2006, the Indian government announced that Kurmi was considered synonymous with the Kunbi and Yellam castes in Maharashtra
Maharashtra
Maharashtra is a state located in India. It is the second most populous after Uttar Pradesh and third largest state by area in India...
. There are differences of opinion regarding the group's classification in the traditional varna system.
Etymology
There are several theories regarding the etymology of the term Kurmi. It may be derived from an Indian tribal language, or may be a Sanskrit compound term krishi karmi, "agriculturalist." Other theories include its being a derivative of kṛṣmi, "ploughman", or KurmaKurma
In Hinduism, Kurma was the second Avatar of Vishnu. Like the Matsya Avatar also belongs to the Satya yuga.-Samudra manthan :...
a tortoise avatar
Avatar
In Hinduism, an avatar is a deliberate descent of a deity to earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being and is mostly translated into English as "incarnation," but more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation"....
of the god Vishnu
Vishnu
Vishnu is the Supreme god in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism. Smarta followers of Adi Shankara, among others, venerate Vishnu as one of the five primary forms of God....
.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
After the decline of Mughal ruleMughal Empire
The Mughal Empire , or Mogul Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were descendants of the Timurids...
in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, increasingly interacted with settled townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such martial and nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organization lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Kurmi or Ahirs
Ahirs
Ahir is an Indian caste. The term can be used synonymously with Yadav, as the latter term refers to Ahirs who have identified as Yadavs. The major divisions of Ahirs are: Yaduvanshi, Nandvanshi, and Gwalvanshi.-Etymology:...
, 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. It was not unusual in those times for a high caste Brahmin widow to remarry a tiller from one of these indeterminate backgrounds.
The Kurmi were famed as cultivators and market gardeners. In western and northern Awadh
Awadh
Awadh , also known in various British historical texts as Oudh or Oude derived from Ayodhya, is a region in the centre of the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which was before independence known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh...
, for example, for much of the eighteenth 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,
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.
Cross-cultural influences were felt also. Hindu tillers worshipped at Muslim shrines in the small towns founded by their Muslim overlords. The Hindu Kurmis of Chunar
Chunar
Chunar छुनर شُنَر, located in Mirzapur District of Uttar Pradesh state, India, is an ancient town. The railway tracks passing through Chunar leads to major destinations of India, including Howrah, Delhi, Tatanagar and Varanasi. National Highway number 7 also passes through Chunar...
and Jaunpur
Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh
Jaunpur is a city and a municipal board in Jaunpur district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.Jaunpur district is located to the northwest of the district of Varanasi in the eastern part of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. According to the 2001 census, Jaunpur district had a population...
, for instance, took up the Muslim custom of marrying first cousins
Cousin marriage
Cousin marriage is marriage between two cousins. In various jurisdictions and cultures, such marriages range from being considered ideal and actively encouraged, to being uncommon but still legal, to being seen as incest and legally prohibited....
and of burying their dead. In some regions, the Kurmis' success as tillers led to land ownership, and to avowals of high status, as noted, for examples, by Francis Buchanan in the early 19th century among the Ayodhya Kurmis of the Awadh. Earlier, in the late eighteenth century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah
Asaf-Ud-Dowlah
Asaf-Ud-Daula was the nawab wazir of Oudh from 26 January 1775 to 21 September 1797, and the son of Shuja-ud-Dowlah, his mother and grandmother being the begums of Oudh, whose spoliation formed one of the chief counts in the charges against Warren Hastings.-Life:A contemporary chronicler describes...
, the fourth Nawab of Awadh
Nawab of Awadh
The Nawab of Awadh is the title of rulers who governed the state of Awadh in India in the 18th and 19th century. The Nawabs of Awadh originated form Persia-Establishment:...
, attempted to grant the kshatriya title of Raja
Raja
Raja is an Indian term for a monarch, or princely ruler of the Kshatriya varna...
to a group of influential landed Ayodhya Kurmis, he was thwarted by a united opposition of Rajput
Rajput
A Rajput is a member of one of the patrilineal clans of western, central, northern India and in some parts of Pakistan. Rajputs are descendants of one of the major ruling warrior classes in the Indian subcontinent, particularly North India...
s, who were themselves (as described by Buchanan), "a group of newcomers to the court, who had been peasant soldiers only a few years before ..." According to historian William Pinch:
(The) Rajputs of Awadh, who along with brahmanBrahminBrahmin Brahman, Brahma and Brahmin.Brahman, Brahmin and Brahma have different meanings. Brahman refers to the Supreme Self...
s constituted the main beneficiaries of what historian Richard Barnett characterizes as "Asaf's permissive program of social mobility," were not willing to let that mobility reach beyond certain arbitrary socio-cultural boundaries. ... The divergent claims to status in the nineteenth century (and earlier) illustrate the point that for non-Muslims, while varna was generally accepted as the basis for identity, on the whole little agreement prevailed with respect to the place of the individual and the jati within a varna hierarchy.
Although the free peasant farm was the mainstay of farming in many parts of north India in the 18th century, in some regions, a combination of climatic, political, and demographic factors led to the increased dependence of peasant cultivators such as the Kurmi. In the Benares division, which had come under the revenue purview of the British East India Company
East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
in 1779, the Chalisa famine
Chalisa famine
The Chalisa famine of 1783-84 in South Asia followed unusual El Nino events that began in 1780 and caused droughts throughout the region. Chalisa refers to the Vikram Samvat calendar year 1840...
of 1783 and the relentless revenue demand from the Company reduced the status of many Kurmi cultivators. A British revenue agent wrote in 1790, "It unfortunately happened that during the famine aforesaid a great proportion of the Kurmis, Kacchis and Koeris were in this district as well as in others supplanted by Brahmans ... " and bemoaned the loss of agricultural revenue in part due to, "this unfavourable mutation amongst the cultivators ... "
In the first half of the nineteenth century, economic pressures on the large landowning classes increased noticeably. The prices of agricultural lands fell at the same time that the East India Company, after acquiring the Ceded and Conquered Provinces
Ceded and Conquered Provinces
The Ceded and Conquered Provinces constituted a region in northern India that was ruled by the British East India Company from 1805 to 1834; it corresponded approximately—in present-day India—to all regions in Uttar Pradesh state with the exception of the Lucknow and Faizabad divisions...
(later the North-Western Provinces
North-Western Provinces
The North-Western Provinces was an administrative region in British India which succeeded the Ceded and Conquered Provinces and existed in one form or another from 1836 until 1902, when it became the Agra Province within the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh .-Area:The province included all...
) in 1805, began to press landowners for more land revenue. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 created more fear and discontent among the landed elite, and may have contributed to the Indian rebellion of 1857
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...
. Economic pressures also opened marginal areas to intensive agriculture and turned the fortunes of the non-elite peasants, such as the Kurmi, who worked them. After the rebellion, the landowning classes, defeated but still pressed economically in the new British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
, attempted to treat their tenants and labourers as people of lowly birth and to demand unpaid labour from them. According to historical anthropologist Susan Bayly,
In some instances these were attempts to stave off decline by reinvigorating or intensifying existing froms of customary service. Elsewhere these were wholly novel demands, many being imposed on 'clean' tillers and cattle-keepers like the Ram- and Krishna-loving Koeris, Kurmis and Ahirs ... In either case, these calls were buttressed with appeals to Sanskritic varna theory and Brahmanical caste convention. ... Kurmi and Goala/Ahir tillers who held tenancies from these 'squireens' found themselves being identified as Shudras, that is, people who were mandated to serve those of the superior Kshatriya and Brahman varnas.
The elite landowning classes, such as Rajputs and Bhumihars, now sought to present themselves as flagbearers of the ancient Hindu tradition. At the same time, there was a proliferation of Brahmanical
Brahmin
Brahmin Brahman, Brahma and Brahmin.Brahman, Brahmin and Brahma have different meanings. Brahman refers to the Supreme Self...
rituals in the daily life of the elite, a greater stress on pure blood lines, more stringent conditions placed on matrimonial alliances, and, as noted by some social reformers of the day, an increase among the Rajputs of female infanticide, a practice that had little history among the Kurmi.
The second half of the nineteenth century also largely overlapped with the coming of age of ethnology—interpreted then as the science of race—in the study of societies the world over. Although later to be discredited, the methods of this discipline were eagerly absorbed and adopted in British India, as were those of the emerging science of anthropology. Driven in part by the intellectual ferment of the discipline and in part by the political compulsions in both Britain and India, two dominant views of caste emerged among the adminstrator-scholars of the day. According to Susan Bayly:
Those like (Sir William) HunterWilliam Wilson HunterSir William Wilson Hunter KCSI CIE was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service, who later became Vice President of Royal Asiatic Society.-Early life and education:...
, as well as the key figures of H. H. RisleyHerbert Hope RisleySir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of Bengal. He is also remembered for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of...
(1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar ThurstonEdgar ThurstonEdgar Thurston CIE was a British museologist and ethnographer working in colonial Southern India. In 1885 he was appointed to the Madras Government Museum, where he held the role of Superintendent...
, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William CrookeWilliam CrookeWilliam Crooke was an English orientalist and "the central figure in Anglo-Indian folklore" according to Richard Mercer Dorson. He was a member of a family that had been settled in Ireland for many years, with his father being a doctor in Macroom. County Cork...
(1848–1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil IbbetsonDenzil IbbetsonSir Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson KCSI was an administrator in British India and an author. He served as governor of the Central Provinces and Berar from 1900 to 1902....
and E. A. H. Blunt.
Seeing caste as a fundamental force in Indian life, Risley, especially, influenced official views as expressed in the Censuses of British India as well as the Imperial Gazetteer brought out by Hunter. Risley is best known for the now discounted attribution of all differences in caste to varying proportions of seven racial types which included "Dravidian," "Aryo-Dravidian," and "Indo-Aryan". The Kurmi fell into two such categories. In the ethnological map of India published in the 1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India and based on the 1901 Census supervised by Risley, the Kurmi of the United Provinces were classified as "Aryo-Dravidian," whereas the Kurmi of the Central Provinces
Central Provinces
The Central Provinces was a province of British India. It comprised British conquests from the Mughals and Marathas in central India, and covered parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra states. Its capital was Nagpur....
were counted among "Dravidians". (See figure.) In the 1901 Census of India, the category of varna
Varna
Varna is the largest city and seaside resort on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast and third-largest in Bulgaria after Sofia and Plovdiv, with a population of 334,870 inhabitants according to Census 2011...
, the four-fold graded system, was included in the official classification of caste, the only time to have been so. In the United Provinces
United Provinces of Agra and Oudh
The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh was a province of India under the British Raj, which existed from 1902 to 1947; the official name was shortened by the Government of India Act 1935 to United Provinces, by which the province had been commonly known, and by which name it was also a province of...
(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
Ghee
Ghee is a class of clarified butter that originated in South Asia and is commonly used in South Asian cuisine....
), without question;" whereas, in Bihar
Bihar
Bihar is a state in eastern India. It is the 12th largest state in terms of geographical size at and 3rd largest by population. Almost 58% of Biharis are below the age of 25, which is the highest proportion in India....
, 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."
In the writings of the occupational theorists, the Kurmis and the Jats came to be extolled for their yeoman-like purposefulness, tirelessness, and thrift, all of which, according to writers such as, Crooke, Ibbetson, and Blunt had been largely abandoned by the landed elite. Crooke wrote about the Kurmi in 1897:
They are about the most industrious and hard-working agricultural tribe in the Province. The industry of his wife has passed into a proverb
Bhali jât Kurmin, khurpi hât,
Khet nirâwê apan pî kê sâth.
"A good lot is the Kurmi woman; she takes her spud and weeds the field with her lord."
According to Susan Bayly,
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, ....
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. The landed elites' demands were couched in avowals of their ancient rights as "twice-born" landowners and of the Kurmi's alleged lowly, even servile, status, which required them to serve. At times encouraged by sympathetic British officials and at other times carried by the groundswell of egalitarian sentiment being espoused then by the devotional VaishnavaVaishnavism
Vaishnavism is a tradition of Hinduism, distinguished from other schools by its worship of Vishnu, or his associated Avatars such as Rama and Krishna, as the original and supreme God....
movements, especially those based on Tulsidas
Tulsidas
Tulsidas , was a Hindu poet-saint, reformer and philosopher renowned for his devotion for the god Rama...
's Ramcharitmanas, the Kurmi largely resisted these demands. Their resistance, however, did not take the form of denial of caste or of caste-based imposition, but rather of disagreement about where they stood in the caste ranking. A noteworthy attribute of the resulting Kurmi-kshatriya movement was the leadership provided by educated Kurmis who were now filling the lower and middle levels of government jobs. According to William Pinch:
The mantle of leadership in this phase befell the well-connected Ramdin Sinha, a government forester who had gained notoriety by resigning from his official post to protest a provincial circular of 1894 that included Kurmis as a "depressed community" and barred them therefore from recruitment into the police service. The governor’s office was flooded with letters from an outraged Kurmi-kshatriya public and was soon obliged to rescind the allegation in an 1896 communique to the police department "His Honor [the governor] is ... of the opinion that Kurmis constitute a respectable community which he would be reluctant to exclude from Government service."
The first Kurmi caste association had been formed in 1894 at Lucknow
Lucknow
Lucknow is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh in India. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of Lucknow District and Lucknow Division....
in order to protest against the police recruitment policy. This was followed by an organisation in Awadh that sought to draw other communities - such as the Patidar
Patidar
The Patidar are a Hindu ethnic group found primarily in the state of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India.Patidars are also known as Patel, a common surname with in the community.D. F...
s, Maratha
Maratha
The Maratha are an Indian caste, predominantly in the state of Maharashtra. The term Marāthā has three related usages: within the Marathi speaking region it describes the dominant Maratha caste; outside Maharashtra it can refer to the entire regional population of Marathi-speaking people;...
s, Kapu
Kapu
Kapu refers to the ancient Hawaiian code of conduct of laws and regulations. The kapu system was universal in lifestyle, gender roles, politics, religion, etc. An offense that was kapu was often a corporal offense, but also often denoted a threat to spiritual power, or theft of mana. Kapus were...
s and Naidu
Naidu
Naidu is a title used by various social groups of the Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu states of India. It is also used in Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa and Chattisgarh...
s - under the umbrella of the Kurmi name. This body then campaigned for Kurmis to classify themselves as Kshatriya in the 1901 census and, in 1910, led to the formation of the All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha
All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha
The All India Kurmi Kshatriya MahaSabha is a Social Organisation, established in 1910 for the welfare of Kurmi community.-Origin:The first Kurmi caste association was formed in 1894 at Lucknow in order to protest against the police recruitment policy...
. Simultaneously, newly constituted farmers' unions, or Kisan Sabhas—composed of cultivators and pastoralists, many of whom were Kurmi, Ahir, and Yadav
Yadav
Yādav refers to an umbrella group of traditionally non-elite pastoral communities, or castes, in India and Nepal which since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has claimed descent from the mythological King Yadu as a part of a movement of social and political resurgence.The term 'Yadav' now...
(Goala
Goala
Goala may refer to:*Goalla, or Gavli, an Indian herding caste*Vedea, Teleorman, formerly Goala, a commune in Teleorman County, Romania*Goala, a town in Burkina Faso...
), and inspired by Hindu mendicants, such as Baba Ram Chandra
Baba Ram Chandra
This article is on Indian Trade Unionist Baba Ram Chandra. For the Ghadarite leader and editor of Hindustan Ghadar, see Ram Chandra Bharadwaj.Baba Ram Chandra was an Indian trade unionist who organised the farmers of Oudh, India into forming a united front to fight against the abuses of landlords...
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
Bhakti
In Hinduism Bhakti is religious devotion in the form of active involvement of a devotee in worship of the divine.Within monotheistic Hinduism, it is the love felt by the worshipper towards the personal God, a concept expressed in Hindu theology as Svayam Bhagavan.Bhakti can be used of either...
cults of Lord Rama
Rama
Rama or full name Ramachandra is considered to be the seventh avatar of Vishnu in Hinduism, and a king of Ayodhya in ancient Indian...
, the incorruptible Kshatriya god-king of Hindu tradition, and Lord Krishna
Krishna
Krishna is a central figure of Hinduism and is traditionally attributed the authorship of the Bhagavad Gita. He is the supreme Being and considered in some monotheistic traditions as an Avatar of Vishnu...
, the divine Kshatriya guardian of cows, 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
Cow protection movement
The Cow protection movement was the movement that demanded end of cow slaughter in British India. The movement gained momentum with the support from Arya Samaj and its founding father Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Swami Dayananda and his followers travelled across India which led to the...
; 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.
In 1930, the Kurmis of Bihar joined with the Yadav and Koeri
Koeri
Koeri is an uninhabited village in Varbla Parish, Pärnu County, in southwestern Estonia....
agriculturalists to enter local elections. They lost badly but in 1934 the three communities formed the Triveni Sangh political party, which allegedly had a million dues-paying members by 1936. However, the organisation was hobbled by competition from the Congress-backed Backward Class Federation, which was formed around the same time, and by co-option of community leaders by the Congress party. The Triveni Sangh suffered badly in the 1937 elections, although it did win in some areas. The organisation also suffered from caste rivalries, notably the superior organisational ability of the higher castes who opposed it, as well as the inability of the Yadavs to renounce their belief that they were natural leaders and that the Kurmi were somehow inferior. Similar problems beset a later planned caste union, the Raghav Samaj, with the Koeris.
Again in the 1970s, the India Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha attempted to bring the Koeris under their wing, but again a disunity troubled this alliance. Kurmi politician Nitish Kumar
Nitish Kumar
Nitish Kumār is an Indian politician currently serving as Chief Minister of Bihar, an eastern state of India. He leads the Janata Dal party...
fomed the Samata Party
Samata Party
The Samata Party is a political party in India. Initially formed as an offshoot of the Janata Dal in 1994 by Nitish Kumar and George Fernandes. The reason given was that the Janata Dal had shifted to casteism...
in 1994, forming a backward-upper caste alliance with the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party
Bharatiya Janata Party
The Bharatiya Janata Party ,; translation: Indian People's Party) is one of the two major political parties in India, the other being the Indian National Congress. Established in 1980, it is India's second largest political party in terms of representation in the parliament...
, which achieved only initial success. In 1998, politician Laloo Prasad Yadav took advantage of this lack of unity in the IKKS, portraying Koeri Shakuni Chaudhry as an incarnation of Kush. Under Yadav, the IKSS became less and less advantageous to the Kurmi, favouring instead the priorities of the Yadav caste, and this combined with the competition of the Kurmi-based Samata led to a divide between these intermittently allied castes.
Language
The Kurmi of Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Assam commonly speak KurmaliKurmali
Kurmali or Kudmali is one of many languages which is spoken in Jharkhand, India. Kurmali is generally linked to the Kurmi community of Jharkhand. Kudmali is also spoken by the Kurmi people of Assam, and was brought to the tea gardens from Bihar, Orissa, and West Bengal...
. In Bihar
Bihar
Bihar is a state in eastern India. It is the 12th largest state in terms of geographical size at and 3rd largest by population. Almost 58% of Biharis are below the age of 25, which is the highest proportion in India....
, Kurmi people speak Magahi and Angika, while in Uttar Pradesh they use Hindi. In other states they generally speak their native and regional languages.