Post-colonial town called Deoria

S H A H I D A M I N

.....Post-independence, a few new district towns came into being, and somehow even these began to matter. Deoria, tucked away in the north-eastern corner of the province,was one such Sadr station of a new district carved out from the sprawling Gorakhpur, if memory serves me right, in 1949; as children we were told that both electricity and the Collector came to Deoria in the same year. Strange and predictable are the ways of memory: our new district was officially sawed off from Gorakhpur in 1946, but it took some time to take shape. The town received its power supply very definitely in 1949, and it is the difference made to quotidian and civic life by the 60-watt GEC bulb that cast its shadow on the remembered inexactitude that of us Deoria-born midnight child

Even in the mid-50's, a minion of the municipality would routinely clamber up a portable ladder, the sort that paid electoral publicists carry on bicycles for high-density poster warfare, to replenish and light the glass - encased oil-lamps stuck on bamboo poles at the head of the smaller lanes. We associated these light (battis) with the word 'public': such was our adolescent 'municipal' consciousness in an inadequately lit Deoria of the 1950s.The other sign of the early maturity of Deoria town was the well-swept, red brick-and-tiled K. E. Higher Secondary School; the initials originally stood for King Edward VII, but by the early 1950s King Emperor had been reduced to his initials by a linguistic artifice of post-coloniality. The abbreviation, when rendered into the local language was meaningless, unless one chose to indigenise it as the Hindi word kaee, meaning not one but several. The singularity of that imperial school, one each for every dusty district, was lost on us first generation post colonials, as we subordinated an historic nomenclature to the freedoms of juvenile word-play.The town electrified, the Indian Collector moved into his official residence on Kachahri (Court) Road on a highway that made its way to Barhaj, the important riverine mart, and teertha on the banks of the river Saryu-Ghaghra. It was on and off this pakki (metalled) road that the Courts and the Magistrate's offices came up, giving rise to a nai (new) colony where the Police Lines, the District Hospital and bungalows for the bureaucrats were to get sited.The much older tahsil building, further away from the highway and towards the old town,faced the railway station. Outside the Collector Sahib's Bungalow, the sprawling compound carefully tended with wheat and cauliflowers, stood a whitewashed angular pillar which listed the exact distance to Calcutta and Madras, Delhi and Lucknow. Litigants making their way to the courts further down the road took as much notice of this long-distance milestone, as Mauryan peasants would have done of the Prakrit homiletics of Devanampriya Priyadarshi, King Ashoka, bill boarded on ancient Indian trade routes.

The district distance-marker stood for the fact that a large-sized tahsil town had attained administrative puberty. It was telling us - but we schoolchildren did not care - how far our Collector's bungalow was from each of the several significant towns and cities of independent India. A second-class sadr station loathed by the bureaucracy for its insalubrious climate was in the moment of its birth being imbricated with the nation and the state.

The meter gauge railway track however meant that Deoria did not have a direct line of access to those distant places which were on the broad gauge. Delhi or Aligarh meant a change at Lucknow's Charbagh station; Howrah and Bombay a switch at Banaras andAllahabad. For long, I, a Deoria-born, remained envious of a Sultanpur or a Bara Banki, which had higher platforms and king-size rail carriages. Our premier super-fast train - the Awadh-Tirhut Mail - which curled all the way up to Siliguri in distant Assam - was poor substitute, I felt, for the inadequate width of our railway track! It was only in the 80's when Deoria station got an uplift and a new set of broad rails that my sense of having been worsted personally in the 'battle of the gauges' diminished slowly. Even now, when I am told that my hometown is connected directly to Delhi-Bombay-Cochin, I am not quite prepared to believe it . Deoria Sadr has come a long way from the day that the PWD (Public Works Department) stuck that all-India phallic milestone outside the District Magistrate's bungalow.

As an old tahsil town, Deoria had a rudimentary armature of the colonial state well before it became the headquarters of a new district on the eve of Partition-Independence. Selected as the headquarters of a new administrative subdivision in 1905,5 this small-time centre place with a population of 2000+, well below the average big village, had already a specialized bureaucratic and mercantile leavening. “In addition to the tahsil buildings, Deoria contains the court-house and lock-up of the sub-divisional officer, the munsif's court, a registration office, a combined post and telegraph office, a dispensary, an inspection bungalow, an Anglo-vernacular school, an upper primary school, a school for girls and a cattle pound”, noted the District Gazetteer in 1909. The tahsil and the sub-divisional courts had attracted a fair sprinkling of mukhtars and pleaders from the qasba of Machlishahr in Jaunpur, the long-settled locale of an important regional kingdom during the 14th-16th centuries. In its initial stages this was a forced migration to virgin areas in the same cultural zone in the aftermath of the Great Revolt of 1857. The locally dominant Brahmins and Thakurs supplied the bulk of the lawyers once the district courts became functional from the early 1950s.

The town was a leading retail centre of Manchester cloth; the advent of the railways in 1885 added further to the number and strength of mercantile-Marwari traders of Deoria.

The older metalled road connecting the productive Kasia-Padrauna area in the northeast to the entrepot town Barhaj on the Ghaghra passed through the older bazaar and was “flanked by the shops of wealthy Marwari merchants” who had built a dharamshala in the town and a fine masonry tank - Lacchi Ram ka Pokhra - named after the main benefactor. The railway line while pushing the Marwari masonry tank on to the wrong side of the track, brought the traders in closer proximity to warehouse at the station. The modern bazaar now beganliterally at the mouth of the railway godown at the crossroads called Rameshwar Lal ka Chauraha, named after a prominent Marwari cloth merchant. By 1900s Deoria had emerged as the centre of the wholesale trade in cloth and cotton stuffs on the eastern section of the BNW railway line, between Banaras and Gorakhpur.Marwaris provided an important financial and social support to the cultural, linguistic and communitarian initiates that reached Deoria from Banaras and Allahabad in the 1890s and early 1910s. The militant Cow Protection Leagues, the concerted (and successful)attempts to win for Devnagari Hindi the status of a language of the courts, the Sewa Samitis of the 1910s which ran Sanskrit Pathshalas, organized discourses on the Bhagavad Geeta, streamlined the organization of Hindu fairs and festivals - were funded largely by the Marwaris.Marwari wealth and charity both came wrapped in bolts of fine and coarse cloth.“Eh Marwari, khola kewari, tohre ghar mein lugga sari” (“Oh Marwari, open up, there are dhotis and saris stacked in your house”) was an old rhyme that was perhaps thought up by those knocking at the doors of cloth-bound charity.

Manufacturing was marginal to the generation of wealth in Deoria. A major centre of indigenous sugar production, a qasba called Rampur, was just five miles away across the railway tracks on the Little Gandak that had connected it via the Ghaghra to the riverine corridor of upper India all the way down to Calcutta. Deoria town was host neither to cotton weaving nor to the boiling down of cane juice into desi or indigenously made sugar.

The early 1930s saw the hurried erection of two sugar mills, one opposite the railway station, to the home market that the colonial government had created by slapping prohibitively high protective duties on foreign, notably Javan sugar. The station sugar factory, the Sindhi mill as it was called after those who had floated it, buying up second hand machinery, it was said, from a Java factory forced into liquidation by the loss of the India market, was well and truly 'sick'-and-dead by the late 1950s.

The violence of Partition sent a few Punjabi refugees even to our part of India, 750 miles distant from the new-and-permanent western borders of 1947. Not that this was the first contact between purabiyas (easterners) and Punjabis. Another historic convulsion - the Great Rebellion of 1857 and its suppression - had brought east-U.P. peasants face to face with Sikh landholders from the Amritsar village of Majitha, on a sprawling estate which included the famous riot-torn town of Chauri Chaura, 15 miles west from Deoria.The Majithias turned out to be the improving landlords that Cornwallis (buried in Ghazipur) had dreamt of in Calcutta in 1793. They improved drainage and irrigation, cultivated sugarcane and set up a large sugar mill and a rum distillery.

The Punjabi partition refugees that came to Deoria - the Nandas who graduated from selling bread and butter to a profitable photography business, Iqbal Singh who fast emerged as the most important 'general merchant', the Chopras who made their mark at the far end of the modern or nauki bazaar as fruiterers, and most importantly the Aroras, who by the 1960s had set up a cold storage and a truck transport network - all these migrants from and into a new nation impinged very directly on our district town. We bought our fruit from the Chopras, the youngest of whom gave private tuition to schoolboys of K.E., the Sewa Samiti and the Marwari School.

Iqbal Singh's store was the source of Eveready batteries for that novel contraption of the early 1960s - the National Panasonic two-band transistor that someone had gifted to me from America, and which was well worth it even if it could not catch Radio Ceylon on 25metre band quite as well as that durable piece of acoustic furniture, the multi-valve, full-size Philips radio. Popular Hindi film music and catchy ad-jingles were banned on the austere All India Radio, and it was the Trade Department of Radio Ceylon, barely outside the 12 mile territorial waters of the Union of India, that had stepped into the breach to provide us first generation post-colonials with the short-wave joys of 'hit' Bombay film songs.

After the assassination of Indira Gandhi in late October 1984, the cane fields of the Majithias were set afire, and the shop of Iqbal Singh in Deoria bazaar looted. Both these Sikhs, one a notable agro-industrialist, the other a hard seller of Knight Queen mosquito repellent, Clinic anti-dandruff shampoo, Maggie 2-minute-noodles and TV-friendly Uncle Chips, suffered their losses and went back to their businesses, acutely aware of the violent pedagogy of majoritarian nationalism, ‘Teach these minority bastards a lesson’. After ‘the incidents of December 6 1992’, or the ‘martyrdom of the Babri mosque’ (as the other perspective hasit), the killings in Ayodhya, Surat and Bombay were to teach the same lesson to the puta-tive descendants of the first Mughal emperor Babur in Deoria - through Distance Education,so to speak.In November 1984 Deoria was as much a part of a hideous national vendetta as was Trilokpuri in trans-Jamuna Delhi. One wonders whether it was the transmission of the stilled visage of Indira Gandhi from Teen Murti House, the residence of independent India's first Prime Minister, that was solely responsible for that macabre unification of India, linking Patparganj where I live to Deoria Sadr, 520 miles distant, on a direct route over the Nizamuddin railway bridge to New Delhi, the capital of the nation.

(S H A H I D A M I N: Post-colonial towns called Deoria)