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Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States of Saurashtra, India, around 1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Howard Spodek
Affiliation:
Temple University

Extract

During the past twenty years the major thrust of Indian historiography has expanded from its earlier concerns with imperial politics and sought to uncover the full range of actors within Indian political life and to identify the arenas in which they were active: local, regional, and national. One group of scholars has called particular attention to the diversity of elite groups, their interactions, and often their struggles for power. Their studies usually call explicitly for a broader understanding of ‘political’ activity outside the official levels of administration.

Type
Urban Systems
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1974

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References

Preliminary versions of this article were read at the South Asia Regional Studies Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, March 8, 1973, and the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, Illinois, March 30-April 1, 1973. Research for this paper was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Danforth Foundation.

1 In this first group I would include: Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966)Google Scholar; Bayley, C. A., ‘Local Control in Indian Towns—The Case of Allahabad, 1880–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, V, No. 4 (October 1971), 289311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Brenda F., ‘The Right-Left Division of South Indian Society’, Journal of Asian Studies XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 779–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calkins, Philip, ‘The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700–1740’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 799806Google Scholar; Frykenberg, Robert E., Guntur District 1788–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Gokhale, R. G., ‘Ahmedabad in the XVIIth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XII (April 1969), 187–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXX, No. 3 (May 1971), 569–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearson, Michael Naylor, ‘Commerce and Compulsion. Gujarati Merchants and the Portuguese System in Western India, 1500–1600’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1971)Google Scholar, and Political Participation in Mughal India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, IX, No. 2 (1972).Google Scholar

2 In the second group, I would include: Broomfield, John H., ‘The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern Indian History’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, III, No. 3 (1966), 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras Region’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXXXII, No. 3 (1962), 312–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Richard G., ‘Rajput “Clans” and Rurban Settlements in Northern India’, in Fox, (ed.), Urban India: Society, Space and Image (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1970), pp. 167–85Google Scholar and Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-Industrial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Musgrave, P. J., ‘Landlords and Lords of the Land; Estate Management and Social Control in Uttar Pradesh, 1860–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, VI, No. 3 (1972), 257–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shah, A. M., ‘Political System in Eighteenth Century Gujarat’, Enquiry, I, No. 1 (Spring 1964), 8395Google Scholar; Singh, Kashi Nath, ‘The Territorial Basis of Medieval Town and Village Settlement in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India‘, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LVIII, No. 2 (June 1968), 203–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stein, Burton, ‘Integration of the Agrarian System of South India’, in Frykenberg, Robert E. (ed.), Land Control qnd Social Structure in Indian History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 175216Google Scholar, and ‘The Segmentary State in Indian History’, Paper delivered at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, December 1971; Crane, Robert I. (ed.), Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study (Durham, N.D.: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1967).Google Scholar

3 Heesterman, J. C., ‘India and the Inner Conflict of Tradition’, Daedalus, CII, No. 1 (Winter 1973), 97114.Google Scholar Heesterman couches his thesis in the form of hierarchy vs. independence, in an effort to revise the perspective of Louis Dumont in Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); his argument is easily transposed to the landed-nonlanded argument I put forward in this paper.Google Scholar

4 Professor Holden Furber recently informed me that Hove's real, but secret, mission was to determine whether Indian varieties of cotton could be grown in the West Indies. The secret orders as well as the public ones, Furber noted, are preserved in the Public Record Office.

5 DrHove, ., Tours for Scientific and Economical Research Made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns in 1787–88: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, Vol. XVI, New Series (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1855), p. 77.Google Scholar

6 Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, XXXIX (New Series, 1856), 339. This volume was reprinted by the Government of Bombay in 1894, but renumbered as XXVII. This is confusing because in the same reprint series that volume XXXVII was renumbered as XXXIX. Thus two volumes were interchanged. Unless otherwise noted, the 1856 volumes and page numbering are used.Google Scholar

7 S. C. Misra points out that the continuing fragmentation of Rajput states in Saurashtra during the seventeenth century suggest that the Mughal authority was ‘superficial’. Gujarat State Gazetteers, Rajkot District (Ahmedabad), 1965, p. 37.Google Scholar

8 For a regional approach to Indian geo-politics, see Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society’, in Crane, Robert I. (ed.), Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study, pp. 537.Google Scholar

Histories of Saurashtra are few. Wilberforce-Bell, H., The History of Kathiawar (London: William Heinemann, 1916)Google Scholar is the only one in English. The standard gazetteer, Kathiawar: Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. VIII (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884)Google Scholar provides much useful information. Another useful set of books are the mini-gazetteers of five of the major states of the peninsula prepared by Watson, J. W. as background for the overall gazetteer of Kathiawar. They are entitled Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, S.A. ofJunagadh, S.A. of Porbandar, S.A. of Nawanagar; and S.A. of Dhrangadhra. All the volumes were published in Bombay between 1883 and 1885.Google Scholar An especially useful historical perspective is Amarji, Randhodji, Tarikh-i-Sorath (Bombay: Education Society‘s Press, [1882]), an English perioditranslation from the Persian. Ranchodji's father was one of the greatest diwans of Saurashtra's largest state, Junagadh, from the 1760s until his assassination in 1784. The most recent and comprehensive history in Gujarati is Shambhuprasad Harprasad Desai, Saurashtrano Itihaas (Junagadh: Sorath Shikshan Ane Sanskruti Sangh, 1968). It lacks, however, an integrated approach, tending rather to be a catalogue of events state-by-state.Google Scholar

9 Selections, XXXIX, 21.Google Scholar

11 Hove, , Tours, p. ix.Google Scholar

12 Kincaid, C. A., The Outlaws of Kathiawar and Other Studies (Bombay: Times Press, 1905).Google Scholar

13 Meghani, Jhaverchand, Sorathi Bahaarvatiyaa (4 vols.; Ahmedabad: Gurjar Grantharatna Kaaryaalaya, 1929).Google Scholar

14 Shri Yaduvansh Prakaash, p. 41.Google Scholar No publication data found. The bahaarvatiyos of Saurashtra correspond to the ‘Social Bandits’ studied in Europe by Hobsbawm, E. J. in Primitive Rebels (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1965), pp. 1329.Google Scholar Cf. Hobsbawm's, description of the conditions which give rise to social banditry: ‘It is rural, not urban. The peasant societies in which it occurs know rich and poor, powerful and weak, rulers and ruled, but remain profoundly and tenaciously traditional, and pre-capitalist in structure…. Moreover, even in backward and traditional bandit societies, the social brigand appears only before the poor have reached political consciousness or acquired more effective methods of social agitation. The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon and his strength is in inverse proportion to that of organized agrarian revolutionism and Socialism or Communism…. In such societies banditry is endemic. But it seems that Robin-Hoodism is most likely to become a major phenomenon when their traditional equilibrium is upset; during and after periods of abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars, or at the moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seize the static communities in order to destroy and transform them’ (pp. 23–4).Google Scholar

15 Selections, XXXIX, 21.Google Scholar

17 Nightingale, Pamela, Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 231Google Scholar. Cf. also Gense, J. H. and Banaji, D. (eds.), The Gaikwads of Baroda: English Documents (10 vols.; Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons and Co., n.d.), VII, 530.Google Scholar

18 Forbes, Alexander Kinloch, Ras Mala (London: Richardson and Company, 1878), pp. 394–5Google Scholar, and cf. also Tod, James, Travels in Western India (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1839), p. 305.Google Scholar

19 Fox, , Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule.Google Scholar

20 Selections, XXXIX, 109.Google Scholar

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23 Ibid., pp. 149–56.

24 Nightingale, , p. 206.Google Scholar

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26 Amarji, Ranchodji, pp. 298–9.Google Scholar

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29 Cf. Sjoberg, Gideon, ‘The Rise and Fall of Cities; A Theoretical Perspective’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, IV, No. 2 (September 1963), 107–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sometimes, however, in the absence of adequate governmental protection, merchants hired their own guards. Tod, James. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. 2 vols. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1914) I, 379Google Scholar, and Hove, , Tours.Google Scholar

30 Habib, Irfan, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963).Google Scholar

31 Moreland, W. H., The Agrarian System of Moslem India (Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1968).Google Scholar

32 SirSarkar, Jadunath, Mughal Administration (Calcutta: M. S. Sarkar and Sons, Ltd., 1935).Google Scholar

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34 The internal division of cities into separate distinct neighborhoods based on kinship or on occupation has been noted repeatedly in a wide variety of pre-industrial cities. Cf. Cohn, , ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India’; Lapidus, Ira M., Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Lapidus, Ira M., ‘Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies,’ in Lapidus, (ed.), Middle Eastern Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Eberhard, Wolfram, Settlement and Social Change in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), pp. 4364Google Scholar; Sjoberg, Gideon, The Preindustrial City (New York: Free Press, 1960), pp. 91103.Google Scholar

35 Selections, section on Jhalavad. Cf. also Gense and Banaji, VII, 496.Google Scholar

36 Cf. Neale, Walter C., ‘Land is to Rule’, in Robert Frykenberg, Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, pp. 316, for a general statement on this attitude of rulers.Google Scholar

37 Weber, Max, The Religion of India (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958).Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 64.

39 Ibid., and cf. p. 146.

40 Shah, A. M. and Shroff, R. C., ‘The Vahivanca Barots of Gujarat’, in Singer, Milton (ed.), Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959), p. 42.Google Scholar Cf. also Tod, , Travels, p. 264.Google Scholar

41 Cf. Forbes, , Ras Mala, pp. 353–5Google Scholar; Mehta, Gordhandaas Nagardaas, Saurashtra Itihaas Darshan (Palitana: B.P. Press, 1936)Google Scholar; and Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Bhavnagar on the one hand with Shri Yaduvansh PrakaashGoogle Scholar and Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Nawanagar on the other.Google Scholar

42 For a fuller account, see Commissariat, M.S., A History of Gujarat (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1957), II, 56.Google Scholar

43 See especially Jacob, , Western India, pp. 2255Google Scholar and Gense, and Banaji, , VIII, 329–49.Google Scholar

44 Tarikh-i-Sorath, p. 176.Google Scholar

45 National Archives of India (NAI), Western India States Agency File (WISA), Vol. VII on Gondal Agency.

46 Selections, XXXVII (New Series), 29.Google Scholar

47 Mehta, Kowshikaram Vighraharam (ed.), Gaurishankar Udayashankar Oza (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1903)Google Scholar. For a comparison with a similar group in South India, see Frykenberg, , Guntur District for his account of the Desastha Brahmins.Google Scholar

48 Affairs of Kattywar, Part II, p. 47. I have no further publication data on this volume. I found it in the District Library, Rajkot, along with other books deposited from the former archival deposits of the Rajkot Residency. The volume reprints a series of letters and reports on the status of Saurashtra about 18591861 as changes in administrative status were considered by the Bombay and central governments.Google Scholar

49 Sankalia, Hasmukh D., The Archaeology of Gujarat (Bombay: Natvarlal and Co., 1941), pp. 210.Google Scholar The presence of the Saurashtra banias in both trade and statecraft challenges Gadgit's, D. R. assumption that ‘In Hindu Society there was no mobility between the merchanttrader classes and the military, priestly, and ruling administrative classes’. Origins of the Modern Indian Business Class, an Interim Report (New York City: Institute for Pacific Relations, 1959), p. 23.Google Scholar

30 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Autobiography (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 3.Google Scholar

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53 Shri Yaduvansh Prakaash, pp. 267–86.Google Scholar

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56 For a similar kind of independence in the economic sphere in nineteenth century Poona, cf. Gadgil, D. R., Poona: A Socioeconomic Survey (2 vols; Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1945 and 1954), II, 3841.Google Scholar

57 Bhavnagar, the main port of the peninsula, reported imports valued at Rs. 1,294,427 and exports of Rs. 2,296,456 in 1799–1800. Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, pp. 1415.Google Scholar

58 Tod, , Travels, 429–43.Google Scholar

59 Forbes, , Ras Mala, p. 547.Google Scholar

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62 Forbes, , Ras Mala, p. 547.Google Scholar

63 Selections, XXXIX, 14.Google Scholar

65 Selections, XXXIX (New Series, 1894), 119–21.Google Scholar

66 For a view of the personality of a contemporary Rajput in a ruling situation, cf. Steed, Gittel, ‘Notes on an Approach to a Study of Personality Formation in a Hindu Village in Gujarat’, in Marriott, McKim (ed.), Village India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 102–44.Google Scholar

67 Drekmeier, Charles, Kingship and Community in Early India (l: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 7.Google Scholar

68 Weber, , Religion of India, pp. 29137.Google Scholar

69 Pearson, , ‘Commerce and Compulsion’.Google Scholar

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71 Rocher, Ludo, ‘Merchant-Ruler Relationships in Ancient India: The Hindu Norm’, A working paper for the Association for Asian Studies Meeting, Chicago, 111. March 30–April 1, 1973.Google Scholar

72 Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, p. 39.Google Scholar See also Mehta, (ed.), Gowrishankar Udayashakar Oza, for a fuller account.Google Scholar

73 Selections, XXXIX, 292.Google Scholar

74 Shri Yaduvansh Prakaash, passim.

75 Desai, , Saurashtrano Itihaas, p. 532.Google Scholar

76 Tarikh-i-Sorath, pp. 144–5.Google Scholar

77 Kadaka, Dhanjishah Hormasji (ed.), The Kathiawar Directory (rev. ed.; Rajkot: Damodar Govardhandaas Thakkar, 1886), pp. 411–13 and 493–4.Google Scholar

78 Tod, , Travels, p. 300.Google Scholar

79 Kincaid, , The Outlaws.Google Scholar

80 Cf. Tarikh-i-Sorath, p. 244.Google Scholar

81 Cf. Hopkins, C. Washburn, India Old and New (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1902)Google Scholar and Cohn, , ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India’.Google Scholar

82 Forbes, , Ras Mala, p. 418.Google Scholar

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85 Ibid., p. 89.

86 Gandhi, , Autobiography, p. 3.Google Scholar

87 Moreland, W. H., India at the Death of Akbar (Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 1962), pp. 186–7.Google Scholar

88 Census of India, 1911.

89 Forbes, , Ras Mala, p. 420,Google Scholar; Mehta, G. N., Saurashtra Itihaas Darshan, p. 54.Google Scholar

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91 Mirat-i-Ahmadi: A Persian History of Gujarat, trans. Lokhandwala, M. F. (Baroda: Oriental Institute, University of Baroda, 1965), p. 189.Google Scholar

92 Selections, XXXVII, 1214.Google Scholar

93 Ibid., XXXIX, 203.

94 Tarikh-i-Sorath, p. 216.Google Scholar

95 Mehta, G. N., Saurashtra Itihaas Darshan, p. 55n.Google Scholar

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98 Selections, XXXIX, 163.Google Scholar

99 Forbes, , Ras Mala, p. 420.Google Scholar

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101 Watson, , Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, p. 11.Google Scholar

102 Ibid., p. 24.

103 Wilberforce-Bell, , History of Kathiawad, p. 127.Google Scholar For an example from south India of a new state administration building up its capital city by attracting migrant, cf. Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’.Google Scholar

104 Tarikh-i-Sorath, p. 92 and passim.Google Scholar

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