The Fakir and Sannyasi Uprisings (An Old and Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The uprisings of Sannyasis in North Bengal against early incursions there, of the East India Company's colonialist power, have been well known in British Indian historical literature since that redoubtable biographer of British late eighteenth and early nineteenth century imperialist worthies, the Rev. G.R. Gleig, published large chunks of Warren Hastings' letters. They included accounts of expeditions from Calcutta to quell 'Sannyasi" disturbances in Rangpur and Kuch Bihar at the time of, and immediately in the wake of, the Great Famine of 1770-71, which we in Bengal following the Bengali calendrical cra called "Chhiyattarer Manvantar" (i.c. the transition-al disaster of seventy-six). Gleig depicted the time of troubles as problems of transition from Nawabi rule to British authority, with the musket-wielding Hindu monks fighting among starving peasantry. Even when I had to read Gleig as a text for Schools in Oxford in 1956-7, this imparted an exotic flavour to the problems of new administration, as the Company's merchants exchanged sceptre for the scales of merchandise. This implicit romanticism was supplemented by the insidiously objective appearance of W.W.. Hunter's account of the local history of Birbhum and Bishnupur (modern Bankura District) in the age of the Famine and its succeeding decade of 1770s-1780s mentioning agrarian disturbances which resulted in the colonial repressionression and exploitation, which to the future writer of the Imperial Gazetteer of India and The Statistical Accounts of Bengal seemed to be a great achievement of imperialism towards welfare in general! Both were fused into an emotionally surcharged and somewhat chauvinistic saga of the Walter Scott type by Hunter's late nineteenth century contemporary, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. His Bengali bhadralok nationalist in-version into historiography of imperialist myth still fascinates the bhadralok epigoni scattered as subalterns in various parts of the Commonwealth. Anandamath was written about Sannyasis leading a proto-jacquerie against arrogant and brutal British subaltern officers. As the context for the great Hindu national hymn, "Bande Mataram", this position played a mobilising role in the Indian national movement, particularly in the early twentieth century.

But the history of the events, which Gleig, Hunter or Bankim Chandra used as pegs to hang their various morality tales from, was more complex. Another Bengali Deputy Magistrate working on North Bengal collectorate records, principally of Mymensingh on the borders of Assam and north of Dacca, and also on archives relating to Kuch Bihar, Rai Bahadur Jamini Mohan Ghosh wrote two important reports on the actual mercenary-cum-money lender-cum-meddlers in petty chieftaincy/landed-estate politics after 1757. He also gave clues to another element of the uprisings whom Gleig had called 'Faqueers'. The Sannyasis were Dasnami Naga Gosains of the Benares akhara, the leaders of whom bore the sobriquet of Giri Gosain. They wandered across Northern Bihar and Bengal, providing credit to indigent landholders, and also armament for chiefs and peasants in difficulties, particularly in periods of scarcity. The Fakirs were led by pirs of the Muslim Sufi orders, who also wandered, but as mendicant-cum-social bandits, in Central Bengal on a more southern east-west axis, parallel to the eastward course of the Padma river after the Ganga bifurcates north of Murshidabad. J.M. Ghosh, far more of a loyalist to colonialism than his senior cadre-confrere, Bankim Chandra, wrote of Sannyasi and Fakir "Raiders", of their role as disturbers of peace and banditti whom British imperialism put down as part of the Pax Britannica. But he supplied much useful pointers to their socially positive as well as negative, i.e. dialectical, role in the Bengal countryside.

Subsequent writers about these religious-yet-economically-and-militarily-secular auxiliaries of the landholders and peasantry in Bengal in their time of troubles have dotted the i's and crossed the t's in the story. Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri's account of rural revolts against British rule ignored them in the context of what he idiosyncratically called 'civil disturbances'. One recalls Professor Sushobhan Chandra Sarkar's introduction to Dr. Chaudhuri's Civil Disturbances During the British Rule in India (1756-1857) (Calcutta, 1955) who noting that it "demonstrated with sufficient material that the Pax Britannica in India was only a very relative peace and that there was plenty of opposition from substantial sections of the common people often enough" (loc. cit. p xiii-xxiii) also regretted that the Sannyasis had not been placed in that general context. It is noteworthy that the work on Dasnami Naga warriors in the 1750s and the 1760s, done in the 1950s by Prof. Nirode Bhusan Roy of Santiniketan and his preceptor Sir Jadunath Sarkar (in the latter's last years), described them as mercenary warriors fighting with the Awadhi levies of the Shahzada Ali Gauhar (later Shah Alam) out to reconquer West Bengal and Bihar between 1758 and 1764.

Even a general acquaintance with the contemporary documents on Bengal, relating to the second half of the 18th century, brings home a simple fact. From the beginning of the 1760s till the middle of 1800, armed confrontations were often taking place between a large group of people known as the Fakirs and the Sannyasis and the forces of the English East India Company in almost half the districts of present West Bengal and Bangladesh. These encounters have been generally grouped together and denoted as the Fakir and Sannyasi (or Fakir-Sannyasi) uprisings.

Historical research on these uprisings, however, appears to be somewhat insufficient. With the possible exceptions of writings of Jamini Mohan Ghosh, N.B. Roy and A.N. Chandra³, others like Jadunath Sarkar, J.N. Farquhar W.G. Orr, G.S. Ghurye, B.S. Cohn, D.H.A.Kolff, Surajit Sinha and D.N.Lorenzen who have dealt with certain aspects of the activities of the Sannyasis and the Fakirs did not specifically study their rebellious role in Bengal during the early phase of colonial rule. Ranajit Guha could not also include their uprisings in his recent research on peasant insurgen-cy in India. Suprakash Roy who had otherwise considered the uprisings in his general narrative did not devote much particular attention as was called for. A perceptive article by Suranjan Chatterjee, though breaking certain new grounds on the Fakirs and the Sannyasis, appears to be too didactic in approach and incomplete in essential details on insurgency.

Historical research on the Fakir-Sannyasi uprisings has not only been insufficient but also partial. Certain writings have remained preoccupied with the study of religious organisation and that, too, of the Sannyasis, by and large. Others were interested in the landholding, trading, moneylending and mercenary activities, relating mostly, again, to the Sannyasis. Among the authors, who specifically dealt with the uprisings, some have identified themselves so much with the colonial rulers that insurgency appeared to them only as a disturbing law-and-order problem in its various manifestations.