Harry And The Bihari: Return Of The Native

“Sasuri kaa jagah hai Bihar, garibi khatame nahi hota hai,” (Bihar is a funny place. Poverty never seems to end!) Deepak said to me as I sipped tea at his roadside cart in Patna. Though Deepak was clueless about the reasons for his continuing misery, he ref­used to accept inherited karmic status of his deprivation and destitution. No wonder, the noto­riously hard-working, garrulous, the ambi­tious nat­ive and the émigré Biharis derisively taunted as Harrys or Bhaiyas, felt shattered by Niti Aayog’s recent report which said that Bihar has the most number of poor people in the country.  

Imagine this: 51.91 per cent population of Bihar is poor in terms of multidimensional poverty index (MPI). Believe it or not, once again Bihar has become what British civil servant John Houlton once des­cribed admiringly as the “heart of India”. Does it not sound chillingly Kafkaesque when you recall hundreds of thousands of jobless mig­rant Bihari workers walking back home with their pots, pans, blankets and tattered rugsacks in the first pandemic lockdown. “It is no wonder that Bihar is what it is today”, in the immortal words of late historian Arvind Das. The wonder is that bet­ween Jayaprakash Narayan’s “total revolution” (sampurna kranti’), and subaltern combo of Lalu Yadav-Nitish Kumar, Bihar has become more dev­elopmental, entrepreneurial and also aspirational, but it continues to remain trapped in familiar-unfa­miliar forms of poverty. This has led Bihar to take an extreme step to what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘purposive self-annihilation’—a confrontation bet­ween oneself and oneself. Or does it remind you of the infamous statement of M.V Kamath, editor of the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly, who said that Bihar had to be saved from Biharis!

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For the average Bihari, it is not breaking news; inc­idence of poverty has always been significantly higher than the national average. But what is shocking is the persistence of poverty. Is Bihar rea­lly ‘a fire alp­habet’, as Buddha called it? Or is it a pure blood history of poverty and hunger?

There is no denying that Bihar, a land of revolutions and revolutionaries, is also the most impoverished, unequal and violent land characterised by pernicious forms of ‘feudalism from above and feudalism from below’, in the words of historian D.D. Kosambi. And Bihar is the land where ‘permanent settlement’ permanently altered land rel­ations, revealing the brutal power of the upper castes over landless and agricultural lab­ourers. Therefore, persistence of poverty is primarily a political phenomenon if you consider the failure of land reforms and lack of aut­onomous lower caste movement in post-independence Bihar. In short, poverty in Bihar is largely rooted in the persistence of excessive inequality—an invisible, fluid, dead power that lives off the blood of living Bihar. And the Colonial-Brahmanical-Bureaucratic state order is fully complicit in this.  

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Let’s us not forget that modern Bihar was born not of normal labour pain but a suspect Caesarean operation supervised by colonial administrators and fostered by upper caste western-educated liberal nationalists. Therefore, it is crucial to remember that the poverty of Biharis also reminds us about the absence of Dalits and the marginalised in the initial moment of founding of Bihar.  Unra­velling poverty in Bihar is about peeling off layer after layer of multiple narratives of the history, politics and social mores of the Bihar and Biharis. And this inevitably calls for unpacking the identity of Bihari. Are all Biharis feudal landlords? Is it a land of so-called criminal castes such as Maghiya Doms? Are all Biharis gangsters? Are all Biharis Ranvir Sena warriors or Naxalites? Or they are all bureaucrats? May be, all Biharis are ricksha­w-pullers. Not quite sure. “Do Biharis really eat rats?” Rats?  You know what I mean. The often loud, diligent Bihari, one-who-tells-it-like-it-is-with-no-sugar-coating cliché is not a singular persona.  Despite their poverty, Frantz Fanon would have loved the ‘many and miscellaneous’ Biharis, forever masking and unm­asking their identities and resisting injustices. Biharis are noto­riously ancient, and yet retro-packaged modern at the same time. Hierarchy runs deep in Bihar. All the same, you have no idea how deeply entrenched the idea of equality is in Bihar. Visit ‘the flaming fields’ in Bhojpur for a taste of liberation. Biharis are Homo hierarchicus and Homo equalis; they are villagers and urbanites, coolies and babus, parochial and cosmopolitan, secular and bigots. The ancient land of Buddha may have exi­sted alongside the fab­led Vaishali rep­ublic, but the contemporary Bihar or Beharee is a modern construct, possessing none of the att­ributes of past or present; constantly separating herself from familiar and moving on to unfamiliar identity-in-making. Agree, Texas-style ‘bounty-hunting’ model of emp­owerment has not served Bihar well but shedding stereotypes of rustic kisan, poor mazdoor, power-hungry babu, feudal bahubali or the miserable rat-eater, the now quintessential Bihari has resurrected herself: dapper, stylish, bold, though often kitschy with an acc­ent. With false eyelashes and lip fillers, the new Bihari selfie has spread far and wide in real and virtual world simultaneously.  

Yup. Most Biharis are poor, and rustic. But Biharis are unconventional lovers too. So, consider the heart-wrenching tale of Madai Dubey who converted into the Dom (Dalit) caste to marry Sugmona. And don’t forget the Bidesia songs and lives of women of migrants.  By the way, if you are travelling by bus in Bihar, you are bound to get offended by the double entendre of Bhojpuri songs. No doubt, Bhikhari Thakur—known as the Shakespeare of poor migrants—would not have approved the raunchy Bhojpuri songs as the new aphrodisiac for poor migrants and desi Biharis. But the unvarnished satire, unc­outh jokes and slangs in colloquial Bihari constantly challenge the sensibilities of modern, urban neo-middle class Homo Sapiens.  

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Consider this Derridean aporia. There are still no jobs in Bihar but it is now called ‘the sunshine state’—a land of phenomenal talent and rising asp­iration. Though caste atrocities have not ceased,  the new generation of subaltern castes and classes have emerged, demanding aspirational new-age goodies like smartphones, free WIFI, smart classrooms etc. Therefore, a new identity of ‘backward Bihar’ is being constructed around the success stories of Biharis in the bur­eaucracy, IITs, IIMs, Bollywood, theatres, media, fashion, the publishing industry, academia and literature, including Anglophone poetry. Super30 and Patwatoli —a weavers’ village in Gaya district—have become factories of IITians. Almost every district in India has a DM or SP from Bihar, and many of them come from lower orders of the society. I recently attended a music festival in Patna, organised by Navras foundation of singer-cardiac surgeon Ajit Pradhan. I found poor rickshaw-pullers enjoying intricacies of classical music with poise and measured grace. And most significantly, poet Alok Dhanwa’s Bruno ke Betiyan (Bruno’s daughters) are now pedalling their way to empowerment in Bihar.  

Therefore, Niti Aayog’s prognosis of self-inf­licted miseries of Bihar is timely but it has missed the larger picture of irreversible social revolution in Bihar. Bihar travels everywhere, initially as a reminder of suffering, next as an opu­lent comedy of errors, and ultimately, as a saga of the indomitable spirit of revolt against all forms of injustices. That’s why every year, new-age Girmitiyas unite in their homecoming for the Chhath Puja—emb­lematic of rising waves of egalitarianism in Bihar. Festivities over, they travel to their adopted homes, where after bone-breaking hours of work, they cook litti-chokha, and croon their favourite songs from Bollywood. Surprised? Jiye tu Bihar ke lala, jiye tu hazar sala. O, son/ daughter of Bihar, may you live for a thousand years!

(This appeared in the print edition as "Reinventing the Bihari")

(Views expressed are personal)

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Ashwani Kumar is a policy researcher and professor at TISS, Mumbai. He is the author of Community Warriors: State,
Peasants & Caste Armies in Bihar