The Lalon era coincided with the establishment of colonialism in Bengal and India, the emergence of new local mercantile classes, and the fading away of older feudal ones. At the same time, class and community-based alliances and resistance were also developing against the same forces- colonialism. It was a period of turmoil in the rural areas as new tax policies were enacted, which significantly harmed the peasantry, and new estate managers (Zaminders) emerged. It was a proper social boiling pot.
While most agree that Lalon died in 1890, his claimed birth date and reported lifespan of around 120 years raise doubts. However, much is also hazy regarding his family background, place of birth, religious identity, the illness that led to his transition to being a Baul, the identity of his saviours, and even how he conducted himself as a Baul.
It’s not that pre-colonial Bengal was a period of peace and prosperity. It was a zone of agricultural surplus that attracted the attention of North Indians. Due to natural factors, it had become a fertile region that generated considerable profit for the rulers, mostly from there.
By the time the British came, the feudal system had declined, and so the mercantile capitalist class united with the colonial capitalists to oust the feudal Mughals from power. Colonialism meant that the English East India Company not only attempted to monopolise tax collection but also forced the cultivation of cash crops, promoted trade, and encouraged agro-capitalism.
But the colonial rule was, from the beginning, relatively inefficient. They could easily defeat the forces of the Nawab of Bengal in battle because the Nawab was even less efficient than they were and rife with internal factions. Over time, they were more than just traders; they were rulers as well.
In contrast, records indicate that they lacked the capacity for both tasks. It not only resulted in a loss of profit but also human suffering, forcing them to recall or adjust policies that created new challenges, which in turn caused more problems for everyone. In this scenario, some groups did gain i.e. the trading class. But the vast Bengal peasantry suffered, allowing the ousted members of the previous regime to mobilise forces and make life difficult for the new colonial regime too.
A Roll Call of Turmoil
Several events significantly impacted the socioeconomics of Bengal under colonialism from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. Some of them were:
The Company’s taxation rates, which were higher than before, replaced the older tax collection regime and focused on commercial agriculture, including the cultivation of opium. This caused general impoverishment.
– The denial of traditional taxation by religious mendicant groups- fakirs and sannyasins – which affected the two dominant faith communities and their informal clergy. It generated high hostility due to the loss of income amongst an influential group. The violent conflicts generated by both parties as a result of this policy unsettled social relations and networks in the rural areas.
– Enacting and participating in food grain trading directly and through local intermediaries severely damaged the food security system of rural households, leading to a massive famine in 1770.
The famine of 1770, produced by Company policies and inefficiency, resulted in widespread death, forced migration, and socio-economic devastation on a scale not previously seen. While the death figures were exaggerated according to scholars, the overall damage was high as it also destroyed rural institutions, which helped people cope with disasters.
-The administrative capacity of the Company was limited, but it gained the power to make economic and revenue policies, including the Permanent Settlement of 1793, relating to rural tax system that introduced a new form of landlordism, causing high economic and social turmoil
While British policies led to impoverishment, they also created a new class of intermediaries at various levels. The most significant were the zamindars or revenue collectors (1793), who were also loyalists of colonialism, many of whom were rooted in colonial mercantilism.
– Laws introduced to facilitate revenue collection were repressive, and the new landlords were poor performers in their task as well. Tax collection remained poor, but oppression was high.
– It also gave rise to another set of intermediaries – Jotedars lower down the ladder – who were better collectors and more connected to the peasantry, but over time grew in strength and began to challenge the zamindars as well, causing more social tension.
The ousted older revenue collector class, mostly of Turko-Afghan origin, retaliated and, over time, formed alliances with the discontented peasantry, sparking a series of peasant resistance that were a direct result of socio-economic suffering and further exacerbated social turmoil.
Thus, social divisions deepened in this era. It was not just class, but communities, cultures, and zones that had a hostile relationship with each other, caused by policies that created loyalist elites, competition between various elite groups, both old and new, for gaining colonial benefits and establishing dominance over one another.
Impact of Colonialism on Society
The above should not suggest that the turmoil in society began only after colonialism was established in Bengal, but rather that it accelerated. Life was always hard for the poor peasant, and social conflicts ran deep. The idea that villages were sylvan abodes of tranquillity, free of social antagonism, is a myth.
Conflict was not limited to just two or three social or religious groups, but also existed within these groups themselves. Lalon’s own trauma when his Hindu mother and wife rejected him for having eaten food at a Muslim home was symbolic of inter-faith relations of the era.
There were many levels and angles of this hostility, partly caused by the fact that most Bengali Hindu leadership could not fight the Turko-Afghans physically, but created a structure which allowed them to exert control over their own community.
The fear of social marginalisation of Hinduism under Muslim rulers was always there. It has been stated that one of the tasks of Vaishnavism was to dull the perception of Muslims overwhelming the traditional Hindu culture of Bengal. Moreover, Muslims never considered them as socio-theologically inferior, so hostility was inevitable.
At the village level, they coexisted but did not share a unified identity, whether as Bengalis or villagers. As early as 1760, when the Company cancelled the right of taxation for the mendicant faith communities of Fakirs and Sannyasins, it showed that these two faith communities paid taxes to their own faith-based religious tax collectors, rather than to mendicants in general.
These mendicants, who also carried weapons, were rural middle-class elite who were using the rural poor as an income source, which was common everywhere. These villagers were community-based believers, and their functional identities were closely tied to folk cultures. They had no structured knowledge of their formal faiths either. Both scriptural languages, Arabic and Sanskrit, were beyond them.
It shows that non-literacy does not lead to a common identity, and social division between the Hindus and Muslims was also fundamental and deep, reaching into the village huts.
Social Life, Cultural Contradictions
While social wars were absent, social tension was very much there. For the Hindu community, the most pronounced was the caste structure, rooted in multiple causes, including preserving religious traditions and ensuring a social structure. While caste was meant to signify status, it also signified a system of making social distinctions and divisions.
Rather than condemn it only as an instrument of repression, its continued presence was encouraged by Muslim Turk-Afghan rule. Consequently, the Hindu community had limited influence over the evolution of social aspects in society. Thus, it played a role in social continuity, allowing Hindus to develop a sort of alternative society outside the royal-state structure.
Interestingly, the power of the caste structure and the need to maintain it began to grow less as colonialism emerged, it took away State power from the earlier cluster –Mughal Muslims – to the British, who were the new rulers and anti-Mughals. Caste wise, the Company was anti-Kulin class, whose wealth it coveted, but it had much less interest in mid-level Hindu social structures. It also ushered in a period of reforms and education led by local colonial elites, powered by collaboration with the new rulers.
What trickled down to the villages were the new members of the landowning class, who were rooted in the commercial capitalism that was powered by colonialism. They were educated, English-friendly, and wealthy, and it did not matter what their caste was. They were upper-class, and it was this intersection where class and caste conflicted, with class prevailing. Villagers now faced subjugation and control through the machinery of class not castle.
There was no harmonious Bengal before colonialism, and it is better to say that it was not peaceful, but rather a non-violent Bengal. There was no physical conflict among groups and communities, but this changed when the balance of power shifted, affecting control over livelihoods. It was a far more decisive and desperate issue compared to cultural practices within and across communities before.
Social Violence
From 1757 onwards, we see the rise of social violence as landowners on one side rebelled against the agents of colonial powers or directly against the Company rulers. They were multi-class violence, and the violent landscape of Bengal ended. However, the conditions of conflicts were always present, particularly when the economic balance was so lopsided.
Thus, the colonial reformer class in Kolkata became part of the oppressive machinery that extended into the distant villages of Kushtia, as well as anywhere in Bengal. Ordinary villagers did not choose to be violent under the leadership of the ousted class, but the conditions under which the revenue collection system was established ensured that they were. A social distance existed between local people based on class. Through the process of Permanent Settlement politics, the chasm widened, ensuring the compartmentalisation of society both politically and socially among dominant groups. However, cultural interaction also increased as urban mercantilists were exposed to rural cultures as landlords, and many were impressed. The best example, of course, is the Tagore family, who ultimately became champions and promoters of Lalon and other Bauls in Bengal and later the western world.
Women
Women occupy a significant space in Bengali households, but their social status is often low or undefined. As narratives go, women occupied a substantial status in folk culture, including in the religious imagination, as goddesses, among others. However, in real life, this was not so positive. Denied by customary and religious law of property rights, the prevention of widow remarriage and early marriages made a woman’s life devoid of any sense of autonomy. While this applied to slightly better-off households, society was not a shared gender space, and amongst the poor, poverty ensured high misery.
What defined lives was poverty. While it is true that there was some improvement during the colonial era, this was marginal, and Bengal’s peasantry remained impoverished throughout. It is this structural repression that shaped the lives of all in general and women in particular.
That does not mean that inter-community and faith interactions were absent. Given that everyone was poor, the dominant cultural landscape was painted by imaginations of escape from poverty, which was far more universal than any other cultural construction. Within that framework, different layers of socio-cultural life existed.
It was an era of limited education, marked by a long history of folk beliefs and practices, as well as self-interpretations of theology and religious texts, which existed far removed from the literate world. People converted due to convenience or to avoid taxation, rather than because they were convinced that one faith was superior to another.
Forced by history to behave as people without choices, they produced both amity and hostility or whatever was necessary for survival. It was not without kindness or generosity, as Lalon’s life demonstrates. However, people lacked collective agency, a primary feature of the socio-economic profile of impoverished rural Bengal, which welcomed Lalon and his imagination of liberation, even if at the mystical level.
Author
Afsan Chowdhury