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86-708: The Dhanuk is an ethnic group found in India. In Bihar where they are significantly present, they have been categorised as the "lower backwards", along with several other castes constituting 32% of the state's population. In recent times they have been identifying themselves with the Kurmi caste along with the Mahto of Chhotanagpur . In Bihar, they are considered as a sub-caste of the Mandal caste and are often found using Mandal surname. In recent times, there has been attempt to forge

172-524: 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 to protest against

258-613: A BA degree. In 1871, Crooke passed the competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service (ICS). He arrived in India on 2 November and spent his entire 25-year tenure in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh , the area where the Indian Rebellion of 1857 had come close to causing the collapse of British control in India and which had resulted in jurisdiction being taken from the hands of

344-581: A burst of activity as a published ethnologist in the field. This began in 1890 when he took over a journal previously edited by Temple, who had moved to Burma. Over the next six years, Crooke's output in the field of ethnography was considerable, comprising the journal, two volumes of Popular Religion and Folklore and the four volumes that make up Tribes and Castes of the North Western Provinces ; in addition, he continued to contribute to journals produced by other people. Temple's journal

430-472: 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, .... As the economic pressures on

516-459: 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

602-645: 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 disunity troubled this alliance. 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

688-530: A member of the council of the Folklore Society , he was elected its president. Re-elected as president of the society in the following year, he then became the editor of its journal, Folk-lore , in 1915. He continued in this last position until his death at a nursing home in Cheltenham , Gloucestershire , on 25 October 1923. Crooke received various honours later in life, including degrees from

774-779: A paper – The Rude Stone Monuments of India – for the Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club in 1905. In 1911 he was President of that body and delivered his Address on the theme of The importance of anthropological investigation . He was also a member of The Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society , of which he sat on the Council in 1901 and 1917. Crooke was somewhat detached from his much younger wife, Alice, and their five sons, as indeed he had been when in India. They had married in 1884 and one of his grandchildren has said that "Well, it

860-559: A serious and accessible manner. Crooke conformed to the colonial program but gave it a new interpretation." Chaube, who was an intelligent scholar with a BA from Presidency College in Calcutta , subsequently claimed to have assisted with much information in Popular Religion and he resented that his input was not acknowledged by Crooke. His contribution to Tribes and Castes of the North Western Provinces , published in 1896,

946-574: A socio-political alliance between them and the twin castes of Koeri and the Kurmi , as a part of Luv-Kush equation . Dhanuks are found in the Indian states of Bihar , Haryana , Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh . Dhanka people in Rajasthan claim that their name is a variant and they are the same community. However, the veracity of this claim is extremely difficult to ascertain due to the numerous other claims. Their claim sometimes seems contradictory to

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1032-510: Is also supported by the accounts of William Crooke , who in his book Caste and Tribes of Northwestern India describes Dhanuks as people working as water carriers, guards, and musicians in marriages. Crooke also reveals several other synonyms used to describe this caste as Dhankara, Katheriya, Kedi, and Ravar. Bushman has described them as Martial race while Ispel has described them as "Dhanush wielding people", who later converted into guards, hunters, and weavers. Some people also think that Dhanak

1118-541: The (Royal) Anthropological Institute , he wrote books including Things Indian , and Northern India (for the Native Races of the British Empire series). He also edited several other works, such as the memorial edition of Risley's The People of India , Fryer's New Account of East India and Persia and James Tod's Annals of Rajast'han . Crooke was the editor of the second edition (published 1903) of

1204-627: The British East India Company in favour of direct control by the British government. During this time, he held charge as Magistrate and Collector of various districts such as Etah , Saharanpur , Gorakhpur and Mirzapur , and would have held sole power over around 300,000 people with regard to judicial and revenue matters. His near-contemporary, Richard Carnac Temple (1850–1931) described Crooke's work as an "uneventful though strenuous official life" and noted that Crooke had

1290-483: 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,

1376-653: The Madheshi people who are found in Terai Nepal. The state has a community called Dhanuk or Dhanushk, whose traditional occupation was watchmen. Like many other aspirational communities of India, the Dhanuk community also embarked upon the path of Sanskritisation by tracing their community hero in epic and historic figures. This made them find their community hero in Panna Dhai, the maid of Uday Singh's mother in

1462-532: The Mewar who sacrificed her son Chandan to save the life of her infant master. The legend of Panna Dhai has become a popular glory tale among the members of the Dhanuk caste, particularly in some selected pockets of Uttar Pradesh . The community – which is distributed in Kanpur, Ettawah, Farrukhabad , Manipuri and nearby areas – celebrates the anniversary of the Panna Dhai. According to social historian Badri Narayan,

1548-556: 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

1634-400: The 19th century, Dhanuks were among the communities of the region whose landless members were employed as agricultural labourers. Such labourers were considered slaves under the kamia system and were often referred to as Jotiyas . The Dhanuks had largely escaped the system towards the end of the century. Many of the former slave workers took up lowly positions in the industries and commerce of

1720-578: 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

1806-513: 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

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1892-460: The Dhanuk as a subgroup within the broader social group of Terai Janajati. At the time of the Nepal census of 2011, 219,808 people (0.8% of the population of Nepal) were Dhanuk. The frequency of Dhanuks by province was as follows: The frequency of Dhanuks was higher than the national average (0.8%) in the following districts: Kurmi Kurmi is traditionally a non-elite tiller caste in

1978-531: 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

2064-550: The Indo-Aryan Languages (1962-1985), where he lists cognates across many Indo-Aryan languages including Bhojpuri , Bihari , and Eastern Hindi . With the continued waning of Mughal 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

2150-545: 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,

2236-623: The Kurmi of the United Provinces were classified as "Aryo-Dravidian," whereas the Kurmi of the Central Provinces were counted among "Dravidians". 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 this was the case. In the United Provinces (UP), the Kurmi were classified under "Class VIII: Castes from whom some of

2322-651: 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

2408-602: The Mughals and this led them to migrate to the different parts of the country which include present-day Himachal Pradesh , Bihar and Uttar Pradesh . As described by them, they have roots in Rajasthan and several of their customs and traditions have Rajput influence. Some of the customs like taking the ring and jewelry of the bride and groom's striking ornamental archway reflect the impact of Rajput influence. The Dhanuk people claim that their ancestors in Rajasthan worked upon

2494-570: 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

2580-637: The North Western Provinces – the area now encompassed by Uttar Pradesh – were produced for the Raj government, as a part of the Ethnographic Survey of India project that had been initiated in 1901. It has been noted by modern academics, such as Thomas R. Metcalf and Crispin Bates, that Crooke was involved in a contemporary debate regarding the nature of caste. Whereas Crooke was among those who believed caste to be defined by occupation, that someone

2666-478: 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

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2752-555: 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

2838-404: The United Provinces may forget his name, but what he stood for will never be forgotten. Crooke did not seek self-advancement. He gave freely of his energies and abilities and of his means to the best interests of India. He made culpable ignorance of the Indian peoples no longer pardonable. Singularly staunch and loyal as a friend, he never wavered in his allegiance to the people under his charge, and

2924-461: 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 bloodlines, 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

3010-428: The bamboo to make bows and arrows, as well as baskets. They also depended upon other minor forest products for their livelihood and widespread deforestation in the later periods left them with no other choice to shift towards other subsistence activities. Those who moved to other states were employed in the grain market and started working as the cleaner of grains ( Dhan ) and also provided cheap labour to transport it from

3096-522: The bureaucracy. The journal ceased publication on his retirement from the ICS, with Rose noting that this was because of "the prevailing apathy and utter lack of official support". Crooke's Popular Religion and Folklore was more successful with the British audience than had been Notes and Queries . It was published firstly in 1894, quickly selling out and then being re-issued as a two volume revised and illustrated edition in 1896. This pair of volumes examined

3182-545: The content for the revised Notes and Queries format. One in particular featured heavily: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube . An eager Indian scholar, Chaube first contributed in 1892 and thereafter his input accounted for around a third of each edition, which was rather more than even Crooke supplied. It initially maintained Temple's coverage of a vast range of subjects, from antiquities through folklore, philology , history, numismatology , ethnology, sociology and religion, as well as examining fields such as arts and manufacture. However,

3268-410: The developing towns, aided by improvements in transport, but were ultimately no better off either economically or socially. The Dhanak of Haryana, also known as Delu (who became Bishnoi in 800 BC) , is a community of weavers. They have been granted Scheduled Caste status in the reservation system, and are found throughout the state. In Uttar Pradesh, Dhanuks are given Scheduled Caste status and at

3354-413: The dictionary of Anglo-Indian usage and loan words Hobson-Jobson , "add[ing] a few entries and some further quotations, and correct[ing] some etymologies" . Among his various studies that were wholly unrelated to India was a draft book called Homeric Folk-Lore ; although this was never published, an article on the subject was printed. Crooke also had an interest in archaeological matters and produced

3440-402: 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

3526-416: The fictional narratives that the rural society enjoyed, transmitted and produced." Notes and Queries may not have been well received by the governing elite of the day. Naithani has suggested that Crooke's provision of this outlet for the Indian voices which lamented the loss of the past and the drive towards what the British deemed to be civilisation could have been one reason why he was marginalised within

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3612-548: The first to look at the religion through eyes other than those of missionaries or the Hindu elite and was in the opinion of Naithani, "a counter to the established school of German and British indology, which was obsessed with scriptures, palm-leaf manuscripts and their translation, and the exact age of Indian civilisation ... [It] sought to fill a gap in European intellectual knowledge of India by documenting living traditions in

3698-486: The focus soon narrowed to cover four subject areas, being religion, anthropology, folktales and miscellany. The folktales section had been renamed from "folklore" and its emphasis changed from documenting ancient remedies and suchlike to recording traditional stories. The work on folklore was to prove important, according to Naithani, even though it came towards the end of a prolonged period during which various missionaries and British colonial officials had been documenting

3784-590: 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 , In some instances these were attempts to stave off decline by reinvigorating or intensifying existing forms of customary service. Elsewhere these were wholly novel demands, many being imposed on 'clean' tillers and cattle-keepers like

3870-588: The good he wrought will some day and in some manner bear fruit. Richard Mercer Dorson describes Crooke as "the central figure in Anglo-Indian folklore". However, in his role as an editor he has been viewed sometimes as adopting an interventionist approach, as with his work on Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India which Norbert Peabody believes under Crooke's hand may have become "a cipher for interpreting

3956-402: The groundswell of egalitarian sentiment being espoused then by the devotional Vaishnava 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

4042-467: The idea that birth-related work, indeed vitally important bodywork and trash work can be part of the same matrix of tasks". Sarah Pinto, an anthropologist has noted that most people are engaged in agricultural work. She believes that there is an "overidentification of caste with iconic labour", and is more a reflection of the worldviews of both Brahmins and the later British colonisers than of reality. The Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal classifies

4128-566: 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

4214-452: The key figures of H. H. Risley (1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston , 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 Crooke (1848–1923), author of one of

4300-630: 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 ..." According to historian William Pinch: Rajputs of Awadh, who along with brahmans 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

4386-434: The legends of Panna give the untouchable community a cause to consolidate their "caste identity". Anthropologist Megan Moodie narrates the caste history of Dhanuks, who is known by different names such as Dhanka , Dhanak, and Dhanakiya in different parts of India, through a pamphlet published by the community itself. According to their accounts, Dhanuk people claim that they have a special position among all castes and trace

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4472-451: The lower Gangetic plain of India, especially southern regions of Awadh , eastern Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar and Jharkhand . The Kurmis 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. There are several late-19th century theories of the etymology of Kurmi . According to Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya (1896),

4558-508: The market to its destination. Presumably, the association with the grain market brought them the name with which they were known later. Further, the occupational diversity in Dhanuks was much more pronounced than in the other castes who were fixed in a predetermined Varnasharma setup. The Dhanuks and the other associated subcastes also claim to have worked as water carriers, musicians, guards, shepherds, and agricultural labourers. This claim

4644-484: The material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke (1848–1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt . Seeing caste as a fundamental force in Indian life, Risley, especially, influenced official views as expressed in both the Censuses of British India and

4730-526: The most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt. Crooke left India in 1896 after 25 years service spent entirely in the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh. He received a generous pension, as was usual for employees of the ICS, and returned to England with a reputation for scholarship, particularly in the field of folklore. According to Horace Rose he

4816-461: 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

4902-475: 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

4988-414: 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

5074-472: The origin of the history of the word "Dhanak" from the scriptures like Rig Veda and Puranas . The community history claims that they were warring tribes who used to wear Dhanush (bow and arrow) in the ancient past. In the medieval period, they claim to have helped the Rajput kings in the fight against Mughals . Consequently, with the defeat of Hindu Rajas, they were harassed by the other rulers including

5160-442: The output was based on what were considered to be scientific principles of analysis and depiction. Naithani says of Notes and Queries that  ... in its concern with the real, it placed itself in the rural society — its everyday culture, its age-old customs, its local gods and godlings whose fame remained within the boundaries of the village and around whom no great religious institution existed or had grown — and in

5246-491: 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

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5332-548: The people of India, their religions, beliefs and customs. He was also an accomplished hunter. Although Crooke was a gifted administrator, his career in the ICS lasted only 25 years because of personality clashes with his superiors. He returned to England and in 1910, he was chosen to be the president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association . In 1911, having been for many years

5418-441: The phenomenon. Unlike many other such collections of the time, Notes and Queries generally acknowledged the people who provided folklore information, noted their precise location in the region and also tried to gather information from a broad spectrum of society, although this did not extend as far as including the input of women. It was work in which Chaube was heavily involved as a methodical collector, collator and translator, and

5504-519: 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

5590-822: The police recruitment policy. This was followed by an organisation in Awadh that sought to draw other communities — such as the Patidars , Marathas , Kapus , Reddys and Naidus  — 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

5676-488: The political compulsions in both Britain and India, two dominant views of caste emerged among the administrator-scholars of the day. According to Susan Bayly: Those like (Sir William) Hunter , as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley (1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston , 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

5762-507: The population of Nepal) were Kurmi. The frequency of Kurmis by province was as follows: The frequency of Kurmis was higher than national average (0.9%) in the following districts: Notes Citations William Crooke Crooke joined the Indian Civil Service . While an administrator in India, he found abundant material for his researches in the ancient civilizations of the country. He found ample time to write much on

5848-524: The present been extended so as to include, roughly speaking, that portion of India where the language of the people is of the Aryan type. We shall, however, insert occasionally notes and queries in connection with the Dravidian, Kolarian and Tibeto-Burman races." Although intended for the British audience in India, as were numerous other such publications of the time, it was Indians who provided almost all of

5934-412: The reality of Hindu worship in northern India from the perspective of its popular manifestation. In rural areas, practical Hinduism differed dramatically from organised vedic Hinduism and included cult worship of a multitude of local deities which were not formally recognised by the vedas but exerted a greater influence on the rhythms, meanings and decisions of day-to-day life. Crooke's study may have been

6020-465: 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

6106-543: 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

6192-434: The time of the 2011 Census of India , their population was 651,355 people. There is some ambiguity in the use of the term dhanuk in the state. As per some scholars, this cast was largely associated with the scheduled tribe Bhil. However, some scholars, like Professor Susan Wadley, have described the Dhanuk as a "midwife caste". Janet Chawla has noted that using the term for midwives and people who work with trash "highlights

6278-455: The time to demonstrate his skills in hunting tigers. In the aftermath of the 1857 revolt, members of the ICS such as Temple believed that if a similar event was to be avoided in the future then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of their colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas. Crooke engaged such a process, working with those subjects in his official capacity and also studying them, although he noted that it

6364-463: 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

6450-608: The universities of Oxford and Dublin and a fellowship of the British Academy . William Crooke was born on 6 August 1848 in Macroom , County Cork . He was one of three sons of an English family that had been settled in Ireland for many years. His father, Warren, was a doctor. He was educated at Erasmus Smith's Tipperary Grammar School, then won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin . He graduated from there with

6536-447: 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 and Jaunpur , for instance, took up

6622-554: The word may be derived from an Indian tribal language, or be a Sanskrit compound term krishi karmi , "agriculturalist." 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 Comparitive Dictionary of

6708-469: Was "too outspoken a critic of the mechanically efficient 'Secretariat' system" to find favour with his superiors, hence his relatively early retirement. Thereafter, Crooke spent his time working principally on matters relating to the study of India and of folklore generally. Aside from contributing articles for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics and for journals such as Folk-lore and those of

6794-528: Was a Rishi and his followers were later known as Dhanka/Dhanuk. The Dhanuk of Bihar are deemed to be an Other Backward Class in India's reservation system . In the early phase of history, this cast was said to be a warrior caste. They were frontline warriors who used bows and arrows as their weapons. But the consequent defeat in a series of wars forced them into slavery and forced them to be engaged in different kinds of occupation. Because they had not enough land, they started work as agricultural labourers. In

6880-666: Was a strange marriage". Three of the sons predeceased him, two of whom died in World War I . In 1919 Crooke was awarded a DSc by the University of Oxford and also became a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE). In 1920 he was awarded a DLitt, by the University of Dublin and in 1923 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Rose wrote of Crooke's contribution to studies of India that The Indian of

6966-415: Was born into a community that traditionally performed work such as cow-herding or barbering, Herbert Hope Risley believed that there was a racial definition and went to considerable lengths to collect anthropometric data to support his position. Bates believes that Crooke was Risley's "principal rival and critic" in this debate. According to Susan Bayly Those like (Sir William) Hunter , as well as

7052-509: Was impossible to do both simultaneously because if he asked any general questions during official business then he would be "met with coldness or distrust, or will suddenly find himself unable to make himself unintelligible in the local dialect." These amateur studies led to his 1888 book, A Rural and Agricultural Glossary of the NW Provinces and Oudh , following his contributions to The Indian Antiquary that began in 1882. Crooke had

7138-435: Was only briefly acknowledged in two footnotes. The relative contributions to the latter have been described by Chandrashekhar Shukl: "While Chaube was going places collecting information, Crooke used to sometimes delve into collecting tit bits." Crooke did, however, pay Chaube well and he did so from his own pocket. A third edition was in preparation at the time of Crooke's death. The four volumes of Tribes and Castes of

7224-408: Was renamed from Punjab Notes and Queries to North Indian Notes and Queries and first appeared under that new name in 1891. Published from Allahabad , Sadhana Naithani believes that the journal demonstrates "the emergence and growth of that brand of ethnography for which Crooke should be better known and in which he differs from most other colonial ethnographers." The defining feature of the journal

7310-465: Was that it considered its subjects in the context of the popular culture of the present day rather than dwelling on the past. Crooke changed the focus of Temple's journal, which had previously contained material from across south Asia but henceforth concentrated on the subject of North India and, in particular, on those areas where Crooke believed the dominant language to be of an Aryan variety. The April 1891 edition made this clear: The title has for

7396-535: 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. 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

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