In 2020-21, a massive protest successfully rescinded three laws designed to deregulate India's agrarian economy. The epicentre was Panjab-a region long considered the subcontinent's breadbasket and home to a stalwart peasantry. In the public imagination, the Panjabi peasant is self-evident and timeless-a figure who has endured centuries of upheavals to arrive virtually unchanged into the present. This grand narrative assumes that peasantries have always existed everywhere in the world. Such claims conceal the modern transformation of agriculture and farmers.
NAVYUG GILL tells the story of how seemingly fixed categories of landowning peasants and landless laborers were produced, legitimized and challenged in colonial Panjab. The notion of a singular, caste-based and hereditary peasant emerged through a series of conceptual, racial, legal and monetary divisions. British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new agrarian order, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Labors of Division unsettles conventional histories to create possibilities for emancipatory futures.
IN THE LATE EVENING on October 20, 1893, over a hundred masked men armed with swords, hatchets, and spears gathered in the ravines out-side Isa Khel in the Bannu district of Panjab. Located 260 miles west of Lahore near the Indus River, the town had a population of almost nine thousand, who were engaged mainly in cultivation and animal husbandry along with weaving and cloth trading. At around 10:30 p.m. the crowd slowly entered the main bazaar from the south and began to attack, looting and burning certain shops and homes. One of the men who was specifically targeted managed to escape only by hiding in an old well with his young son while his house was in the process of being ransacked. As the crowd moved north, they destroyed over forty buildings, killed two people, and wounded at least fifteen. Near the main intersection they were confronted by a hastily assembled police force under the command of local notables. After a brief skirmish in which thirty rounds of ammunition were fired, the authorities managed to disperse the crowd and reimpose order by midnight.
A few days later the assistant district magistrate, Herbert Casson, arrived on the scene to investigate. His report, submitted two months later, offers several curious details about the incident and its aftermath. Ac cording to Casson, the attack occurred on the last night of the three-day Dussehra Festival, when most residents were distracted with liturgical recitals, musical performances, and celebratory bonfires. Such timing indicates it was not a spontaneous outburst but rather a premeditated attack, possibly with some degree of local support. The damages were initially estimated at 2.5 million rupees, though a statement provided by the victims afterward amounted to 950,000 rupees in cash, ornaments, and salable goods, which was further reduced to something under 600,000 rupees. Of the seventy-eight men arrested in the following days, twenty-one were punished with sentences ranging from a 500-rupee fine to nine years of rigorous imprisonment. Thirteen were identified as ""zamindars,"" while the remaining eight were deemed ""men of low caste."" More troubling for Casson was the lethargic response of local elites, suggesting either in competence or collusion. Although no misconduct was proved, some of these men came under suspicion and were strongly reprimanded for not having fulfilled their duties. As both a precautionary and punitive measure, five special police posts were established in the town and surrounding villages for a period of two years. Finally, Casson mentions almost offhandedly that the perpetrators were Muslims who shouted their ""Muhammadan war cry of 'Ali,' 'Ali!"" as they attacked their Hindu victims.
Despite all of these details-the organization of the attack, the extensive, if disputed, damages, the punishments; the doubts about loyalty, the police measures; and the fraught identities of those involved-Casson concludes the report, remarkably, by terming it a ""riot"" that was ""purely local and politically unimportant."" Further confounding rumors, that outside agitators secretly instigated the crowd, that some Hindus might have joined in the looting, or that sexual indiscretions with women and boys were committed by men on both sides, failed to elicit sustained at tention.
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