M.J. Akbar



It was the time of Lagaan. My grandfather was 11 or 12 (the poor don’t celebrate birthdays, so age becomes a vague fact very quickly) when famine in his corner of Bihar made him an orphan. Starving, and alone, he left his village near Hajipur and managed to reach the outskirts of Calcutta, to a labor colony called Telinipara. It existed entirely because of the presence of a new factory built by Scotsmen from Dundee and named, appropriately for the era, Victoria Jute Mill. My grandfather was fortunate; he could easily have become one of the hundreds of thousands of Biharis who were being shipped off as slave labor for European planters in the West Indies, Fiji or Mauritius. Since the age of “emancipation” had arrived, thanks to the anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce, the practice was not called slavery. It was known as “indentured labor”. But that is what it was; slavery leavened by the fraud of pretense. And yet it was not entirely forced transmigration; the starving Bihari preferred the tears of departure to death at home. Biharis have been India’s foremost economic refugees for many generations.

A refugee, any refugee, evokes mixed feelings. There is resentment at the invasion of local space, at the competition for limited resources. But there is also some human sympathy for a refugee’s plight: No man leaves home willingly. When the victim has been uprooted by political or religious violence, the sympathy is proportionately higher.

The Bihari was doubly unfortunate, because while he got a job, he never got any sympathy since his only reason for migration was failure. He got a job for the most basic of reasons. He was cheap labor, as much in Calcutta as in Fiji. Of course Calcutta was better than Fiji. He could return home once a year, and perhaps hope to retire and die in his village as well. But he became the archetypal servant: born poor, illiterate and destined to die as he was born.

The European treated the Bihari with unconcealed contempt. The Indian converted him into an unconcealed caricature. Caricature too is a form of hatred. The joke that folds you into the embrace of laughter also lacerates the victim, particularly if he is required to join in the fun out of a “sense of humor”. When the joke becomes part of the mass idiom, a staple of Hindi cinema, and a cornerstone of advertising, then it has become more than a joke. It is now a stereotype.

How does an object of derision react to such derision? In the old days, docility was the preferred Bihari response. Fear of hunger ensured as much. But over the years docility had to evolve, and discover less supine manifestations. In different societies, local realities shaped this evolution. But in a very fundamental sense, the writer-polemicist V.S. Naipaul and the comedian-politician Laloo Yadav are two sides of the same coin.

Naipaul, a Bihari (the term, of course, extends to Bhojpuri-speaking eastern Uttar Pradesh) driven to the West Indies, is a genius who has never been able to outgrow his insecurity, which in turn induces bouts of intellectual self-loathing. Naipaul has two answers to his insecurity. First, he needs someone safe to love, and finds the British in Oxbridge. Protected by this security blanket, he then goes out in search of someone safe to hate. And so in An Area of Darkness he shines his torch upon the defecating Indian. It is the 1960s, and it is safe to hate the Indian who has won independence but is not yet showing much evidence of being able to do anything apart from groan under self-inflicted wounds. But gradually, India discovers a dynamic, and sneering is no longer very safe. So Naipaul transfers his disaffections toward Muslims. It is also more lucrative to dislike Muslims. But that is dyspepsia in an ivory tower. It is more interesting than influential.

Laloo Yadav, who must live or die by public support, turns caricature on its head by an extreme form of self-caricature. By living out the distorted image, he is also taking on those who have painted the Bihari into a psychological corner: “I will become what you have made me, and then deal with you on my terms.” But he too needs safety, a perch into which he can retreat when threatened. That social fortress is a limited alliance between the two most populous Bihari castes, Yadavs and Muslims (Bihari Muslims are, predominantly, a backward caste and therefore comfortable with Yadavs). Laloo Yadav’s success is both explosive and limiting. He can succeed where he stands, but he cannot move out. He can draw an audience, like any star (or film star); but he cannot draw a vote except in a demographic borough of Bihar. Wherever the Bihari went, circumstances forced him to survive in a ghetto. Today, Bihar itself has become a ghetto of India.

Why? It is silly to say that there is an IQ problem, although that is what the caricature suggests. Genes do not make a Bihari foolish, or, worse, a criminal. But history does. The most startling fact of Bihar is that it has not been a center of significant political power since the end of the Ashoka empire. Perhaps such glory demands the compensation of centuries of defeat: who knows.

The political map of modern India began to form during the two hundred years of stability in the north created by the Mughal empire, and in its chaotic aftermath when regional and sub-regional powers turned India into a complex chessboard. The only time when Bihar became a knight on this chessboard was when Sher Shah Suri took his Afghans to Delhi. But once that brief intervention was snuffed out by Humayun, fortified by Persian troops, the area between Awadh and Bengal was ruled by either Agra/Delhi or Bengal. Patna owed allegiance to the Murshidabad Nawabs before the British, and when the British established their power the Bengal presidency included the non-princely swathes of Bihar and Orissa. The Bihar feudals were sometimes, as in the case of Darbhanga, strong enough to amass substantial personal wealth, but never powerful enough to create an economy or a political base. Awadh, in comparison, was capable of doing so. All over the subcontinent, regional powers left their impress upon the destiny of their people: the surging Marathas in the west; the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Maharajahs of Mysore and Travancore; the great feudal kingdoms of the Central Provinces; the Sikhs in the northwest, to name but the principal powers. There was no equivalent in Bihar.

The British, who set the course for the 20th century, had no regional power to contend with when they converted Bihar into a swamp from which they periodically drained human labor. Ironically, Bihar had great natural resources (now transferred to Jharkhand), but they were exploited for industries that branched up along the Hooghly from the British capital of Calcutta. Nothing was kept for the industrialization of Bihar.

If you want to see evidence of how political power can create something out of nothing, read the history of Calcutta. Similarly, Delhi, which was an overgrown village till the sixties, has become an economic engine of the north thanks to political patronage. The Biharis who once knew only the road to Calcutta are now streaming to Delhi, Mumbai and wherever work is available — including Assam and Kashmir.

British Calcutta denied, and thereby destroyed, Bihar. It was entirely in order that Mahatma Gandhi should make Bihar the battleground of Indian nationalism, because the Bihari, without either people’s power or feudal power to defend his interests, was decimated by British colonialism. Gandhiji’s first victory against the British (surprisingly unknown) was the abolition of indentured labor. His second, historic, fight for indigo farmers launched the Independence Movement.

Could Bihar have reversed its history after freedom? “Could” is not the correct word; “should” is more appropriate. But during the first three decades after freedom Bihar fell into an abyss of corruption and political sleaze, complemented by public sector decadence and private sector loot. Everyone was to blame. The only golden lining was land reform, which, despite sabotage by grasping landlords, worked sufficiently to ensure agricultural growth. But agriculture by itself cannot meet the aspirations of Bihar. Since there was nothing else, the migrations continued.

The tensions that are now in ferment in places as far apart as Assam and Maharashtra come from a twist in the tale. As long as the Bihari in Mumbai or Guwahati filled the void left for cheap, manual labor, he was left undisturbed in the urban slum. But those “coolies” who went in search of sustenance now have adult children who want better, because they have the education that their parents missed. They also have the hunger for achievement that burns in the deprived. That is why they compete and get jobs. This turns into resentment that explodes into violence.

The Bihari is trapped between stagnation in Bihar and anger outside. In principle, a greater law should prevail: Indian unity is cemented by the spirit of a free job market. An Indian has equal rights anywhere in India. In practice, no region can continue to be a parasite on the rest of the body politic. There is only one way to stop Bihari deaths in Assam: Bihar must be reborn.