Notes on the Races, Castes and Trades of Eastern Bengal

James Wise, Ananda Bhattacharyya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138234857
• eBook ISBN: 9781351997393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

James Wise was Civil Surgeon of Dacca for ten years and in that capacity had great opportunities of observing the social life of the people of Bengal. During his stay there he collected material for a book which he published in 1883 after his retirement under the title Notes on the Races, Castes, and Trades of Eastern Bengal. It was printed by 'Her Majestry's printer Harrison and Sons', St. Martin Lane, London. Only 12 copies were originally printed. A doctor by profession and an anthropologist by vocation, the erudition and companionship of Wise even made the visit of the famous archaeologist Alexander Cunningham to Sonargaon and Vikrampur fruitful. The 'Wiseghat' on the bank of river Buri Ganga was named after him. James Wise died in July 1885.

The present volume is a reprint of the above noted book on colonial Bengal by James Wise. It is divided into five parts, viz, 'Muhammadan', 'Religious Sects of the Hindus', 'Hindu Castes and Aboriginal Races', 'Armenians' and 'Portuguese in Eastern Bengal'. The present edition has been reset and contains a comprehensive introduction by the editor. It places the volume in context and explains the relevance of the work for the present times.

The volume will be invaluable for scholars of colonial, cultural and anthropological history of Bengal.

Part I
Muhammadan

Muhammadan

The most interesting fact revealed by the census of 1872 was the enormous host of Muhammadans resident in Lower Bengal—not massed around the old capitals, but in the alluvial plains of the delta. In Dacca, for instance, the Muhammadans were very slightly in excess of the Hindus; in Maldah they formed 46 per cent of the population; in Murshídábád 45 per cent and in Patna only 12 per cent. On the other hand, in the swampy tracts of Bágirganj, Tipperah and Mymensingh they comprised nearly 54 per cent of the people. This result was unexpected and contrary to the conclusions arrived at from earlier inquiries, which, though obviously defective, were generally accepted as almost correct.

The history of the spread of the Muhammadan faith in Low and Eastern Bengal is subject of such vast importance at the present day as to merit careful and minute examination.

The farther we advance in our knowledge of the early history of Bengal the more certain is it, that previous to the eighteen century the Hindu inhabitants of Bengal far exceeded the Muhammadan in numbers, and as late as the sixteenth century three of the five Bhúyas, or leaders, of Lower Bengal, were Hindu chiefs commanding Hindu armies.

The enthusiastic soldiers, who, in the thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, spread the faith of Islám among the timid races of Bengal, made forcible conversions by the sword, and, penetrating the dense forests of the Eastern frontier, planted the crescent in the villages of Silhet. Tradition still preserves the names of Ádam Shahíd, Shah Jalál Mujarrad, and Kárfármá Cáhib, as three of the most successful and most bigoted of these enthusiasts.

As early as ad 1338 a Muhammadan king ruled over the Eastern districts from Sunnárgáon, and for a century and a half that city was the provisional residence of the rulers of Bengal. Although situated on the borders of the Empire, and surrounded by brave and aggressive races, Sunnárgáon attracted crowds of holy men and fanatics, whose mouldering tombs still mark the site of the ancient city. From it was summoned the preceptor, who trained the persecuting Jalaluddín in the doctrines of his intolerant creed, and to its families of Khwánd-Kárs, Eastern Bengal looked for its supply of Muhammadan instructors. During the five centuries and a half of Muhammadan rule in Eastern Bengal, we only hear of one wholesale persecution of the subject Hindus, and that was waged by Jaláluddín, the apostate, from ad 1414 to 1430. The only conditions he offered were the Korán, or death, and it is said that, rather than submit to such terms, many Hindus fled to Kámrup, and the jungles of Asam and Kachhar, but it is nevertheless probable that more Muhammadans were added to Islám during these seventeen years than the next three hundred.

In Muhammadan histories no mention is made of any large Muhammadan immigration from Upper India; and we know that in the reign of Akbar the climate of Bengal was consider so uncongenial to the Mughal invaders, that an order to proceed thither was regarded as a sentence of banishment. The Viceroys and nobles governing Bengal amassed wealth rapidly, and returned to spend it in the luxurious palaces of Delhi and Agra, while only a few officers and private soldiers, having married into native families, remained and settled in their new homes. While, therefore, each seat of government, and each military station, was in early times more or less a centre of missionary agitation, we find another agency from across the seas working towards the same ends, uninfluenced by the policy of the Delhi Court. On the south-eastern frontier of Bengal, a hardy and enterprising class of Muhammadans have been settled from the earliest historical times; and long before the first European landed at Chittagong. Arab merchants carried on an extensive and lucrative trade with its inhabitants, and disseminated their religious ideas among the people. How or when the dwellers on that coast became Mussulmán is unknown,⁴ but when Barbosa visited Bengal at the beginning of the sixteenth century, he found the inhabitants of the interior, Gentiles, subject to the King of Bengal, who was a Moor; while the seaports were inhabited by Moors and Gentiles. He also met with many foreigners, both Arabs, Persians, Abyssinians, and Indians, and adds, 'everyday many Gentiles turn Moors, to obtain the favour of the king and governors.'⁵ Caesar Frederick,⁶ and Vincent Le Blanc,⁷ who were in Bengal about 1570, also inform us that the island of Sondip was then inhabited by Moors. In the sixteenth century, therefore, Chittagong was a centre from which an unceasing propagandism was carried on.

Wherever Muhammadan rule exists, slavery is developed, and during the centuries of misrule and oppression, through which Bengal passed, slavery was accepted by the Hindus as a refuge for their troubles. Bengal has for its encouragement of slavery always possessed an unenviable notoriety, and the Delhi Court obtained not only its slaves, but also its eunuchs, from the villages of Eastern Bengal. The incursions of Assamese, and Mags, the famines, pestilences, and civil wars impoverished and hardened the people, and drove them in sheer desperation to sell their children as Mussulmán slaves. The treatment of these slaves was humane, and their position comparatively a good one, as they were allowed to marry, and their families, supported by the master, added to the number of Islám.

Stories of forcible conversion, such as the following, are however narrated by the Muhammadans themselves, without any feelings of shame, or astonishment. While the Muhammadan population was still scattered, it was customary for each house-holder to hang an earthern water-pot (badhná) from his thatched roof, as a sign of his religious belief. One day a Maulaví, after some years’ absence, went to visit a disciple, who lived in the centre of a Hindu village, but could not find the ‘badhná’. On inquiry he was told that the Mussulmán villager had renounced his faith, and joined an outcast tribe. On his return to the city, the circumstances being reported to the Nawáb, a detachment of troops was ordered out, the village surrounded, and every person in it compelled to become Muhammadan.

Another class of Hindus voluntarily turned Muhammadans, as the only means of escaping punishment for murder, or adultery, as this step was considered full atonement for either crime.⁸

In later times this compulsory system was still farther extended. The tyrannical Murshid Juli Khán enforced a law that any Amal, or Zamindár, failing to pay the revenue that was due, or being unable to make good the loss, should with his wife and children be compelled to become Muhammadans.⁹ Further more, it was the common law that any Hindu forfeiting his caste by a breach of regulations could only be reinstated by the Muhammadan Government, and, if it refused to interfere, the delinquent remained an outcast, ultimately taking shelter in the ranks of the Faithful. The same right was at first claimed by the English Government; but in 1769 it abandoned, ‘there being no longer the necessity of publicly asser the subordination of Hindus to Muhammadans'.¹⁰

As late as 1791, Dr. Robertson maintained that the Muhammadans of India were ‘the descendants of adventurers, who have been pouring in from Tartary, Persia, and Arabia ever since the invasion of Mahmúd of Ghazni, AD 1002’.¹¹

When English magistrates first came in contact with the people of Bengal, they arrived at the conclusion that the Muhammadans only comprise one per cent of the population,¹² and this estimate, formed on very insufficient ground, was generally assumed to be approximately correct.

In 1830 the first census of the city of Dacca was taken by Mr. H. Walters, who estimated the native population at 66,667, of whom 35,238 were Muhammadans, 31,429 Hindus.¹³ Even as late as 1839, Mr. Taylor asser¹⁴ ts that the population of the district consists of Hindus and Muhammadans in nearly equal proportions; but in the city the latter constitute the principal portion of the inhabitants, their numbers, in 1836, exceeding that of the Hindus to the extent of 4,309, in population of 60,617. The Revenue Survey, again,¹⁵ as the result of their inquiries, arrived at the conclusion that the population of the Dacca district, between 1857 and 1860, consisted of:

Hindus	4,55,182
Muhammadans	4,49,223
Christians	210
Total	9,04,615

These estimates, often wonderfully correct, indicate the conviction up to the taking of the census of the whole of Bengal in 1872, when it was discovered for the first time that, in Lower Bengal alone there were 1,76,08,730 Muhammadans, of whom 79,48,152 or 45 per cent, resided in the nine eastern districts, while the total number of Hindus in the same province was 1,81,00,438. The Muhammadan element was, moreover found to be strongest in Báqirganj (15,40,965), Mymensingh (15,19,635), Dacca (10,50,131) and Tipperah (9,93,584).

In the Dacca district, the Hindus only numbered 7,93,789 or 43.3 per cent of the whole population; while in the city of Dacca the population was 34,433 Hindus, to 34,275 Muhammadans.

These figures all point to the conclusion that it is to a change of religion, and not to the immigration of any Muhammadan race, that the existing predominance of the Mussulmán element in Eastern Bengal is due. While the proportion of Muhammadans in Hindustan and Bihár is comparatively low, it has in Bengal gone on increasing, until it has reached its present surprising height and ther is no present appearance of its diminishing.

The reasons which forced many Hindus to turn renegades, during the Muhammadan rule, have been specified; but as most of these influences have disappeared under English law we must look to other motives, still prompting the Hindu to change his belief. The most potent influence undoubtedly at the present day is the attraction of Islám itself. Bengal was never properly an Aryan country and the Aryans who did reside within its borders always held an uncertain footing among the aboriginal tribes, driven down the Gangetic valley by the conquering races of Hindustan. The Hindu priesthood was therefore forced to adapt the blood-stained deities of its neighbours, and to blend the more elevated religion of the Vedas with the barbarous rites of the indigenes. Nowhere was Hinduism so debased, and so corrupt, and nowhere have the masses who held aloof been treated with greater contumely and inhumanity.

When the Muhammadan armies poured into Bengal, it is hard to believe that they were not welcomed by the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that many a despairing Chandal and Kaibartta joyfully embraced a religion that proclaimed the equality of all men, and which was the religion of the race keeping in subjection their former oppressors. Hinduism had prohibited the outcast from residing in the same village as the twice-born. Brahman, had forced him to perform the most menial and repulsive occupations, and had virtually treated him as an animal undeserving of any pity; but Islam announced that the poor; as well as the rich, the slave and his master, the peasant and the prince, were of equal value in the eyes of God. Above all, the Brahman held out no hopes of a future world to the most virtuous helot, while the Mulla not only proffered assurances of felicity in this world, but of an indefeasible inheritance in the next.

Such appear to be the main reasons for concluding that the Bengal Muhammadan of the present day is a converted Hindu, and not a scion of any Mughal or Pathán stock; but farther, if we examine a crowd of Bengali villagers at the present day one, and only one, type of features, of complexion and of physique pervades them all, and it is impossible for the most practised observer, setting aside the different styles of dress, the beards, and the hair, to distinguish between a Muhammadan and a Hindu peasant. A careful examination of fifty Muhammadans, and fifty Hindus, selected indiscriminately from convicts of the Dacca jail, gives the following averages:

	Muhammadans	Hindus
Average age	33½ years	32½ years
Height	5 feet 3½ inches	5 feet 4 inches
Weight	7 stone 10 lbs.	7 stone 10 lbs.
Girth of chest	31 inches	32 inches

Although the Muhammadan religion has spread, and is still spreading, among the low Hindu castes of Eastern Bengal, it is not to be inferred that the Muhammadans are an united body, as is generally assumed, without any divisions, or internal dissensions. It would, for instance, be impossible for the Arab to connect the corrupt Hinduized rites he witnesses in Bengal with those celebrated at Mecca, or to discern in the veneration of Pírs any relation to the orthodox faith.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the only great divisions of the Indian Mussulmáns were the Sunní and Shíah, the former predominating, sustained by the royal families of Dilhí, Haiderábád, Tonk and Bhopál, the latter upheld by the dynasties of Golcondah, Lucknow, Murshídábád, and the Nawábs of Dacca.

The Shíah supremacy, lost during the anarchy of the eighteenth century, has never regained; but the Sunní has gone on increasing, not as one harmonious whole, but by separation into rival, through mutually tolerant, sects. At the present day four sects, differing in many important particulars, especially in their sentiments regarding Christianity, disunite the Muhammadan population of Eastern Bengal.

These sects are the following:

1. Sábiqí, who may be called the conservatives of the debased Hinduized religion peculiar to Muhammadan India. The majority of the landholders, and, with few exceptions, the descendants of the old Sunní families, belong to it.
2. Farazí, or those following the Farz, or divine command, Shari'atullah and his son Dudhu Miyán founded this, the most uncompromising sect of Sunnís, who, differing though little from the Wahábbí, repudiate that name and refuse to pray standing behind a person belonging to the first or third sect, or even to eat and drink with them.
3. Ta’aiyuní—from the Arabic Ta’aiyun, establishing or manifesting; or Ráhí, from the Persian for a traveller—are the followers of Maulaví Karámat ‘Alí and the Patna school, comprising the vast majority of the Dacca cultivators, thatchers, and hide merchants.
4. Rafi’-yadain, so called from their elevating their hands to the ears, each time that the words Alláh Akbar are pronounced in the course of prayer, while all the other sects only do so at the beginning of the invocation. They also fold their arms across the chest when praying instead of over the navel; and at the end of each supplication call out in a loud tone of voice Amín, or Amen. They are the real Wahhábís of Eastern Bengal, and are said to be already more numerous than the Sábiqí. Many of the most enterprising and prosperous traders belong to this puritanical body.

The first, or Sábiqí, sect is in some respects the most interesting. It is the oldest, the most corrupt, and, until late years, it represented the dominant state religion. By a study of its heresies and superstitions we acquire a truer estimate of the paralysis that penetrated throughout the Muhammadan faith in Bengal, when the revival of the present day first dawned upon the people.

In no other country have the Muhammadans embodied so many infidel rites and customs with their own creed as in India, and M. Garcin de Tassy, in his interesting Memoir 16 refers this to the too, great simplicity of Islám for a country where an idolatrous and allegorical religion, appealing to the senses and imagination more than to the mind and heart, was prevalent. But, perhaps, the causes that corrupted the Hindu religion, namely, contact with alien and despised races, each having a peculiar cult of its own, isolation from the cradle and centre of its authority, and the paucity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by Ananda Bhattacharyya
• Introduction by James Wise
• PART I: MUHAMMADAN
• PART II: RELIGIOUS SECTS OF THE HINDUS
• PART III: HINDU CASTES AND ABORIGINAL RACES
• PART IV: ARMENIANS
• PART V: PORTUGUESE OF EASTERN BENGAL
• Index