Paddy, or dhan, is the most important subsistence crop produced by farming households across Nepal's lowlands, regardless as to whether they are farming as tenants or as independent peasants (see Figure 5.1). Not only is it viewed as an essential food staple, but its production is central to the culture and way of life of the Tarai-Madhesh and the larger Eastern Gangetic Plains. This, it should be noted, is a food culture in which Morang's Adivasi peasantry has been integrated into since the clearing of the forest frontier and their transition from forest-based shifting cultivation to sedentary agriculture. It is planted in the monsoon month of Ashadh (June–July), and ropai, or transplantation, is a time of peak labour demand – a process which entails extensive exchange of labour between households, albeit usually in a monetised form. During the mid-monsoon months, labour is limited to periodic weeding and irrigating in the run-up to harvest as the rains subside in the autumn.

After the paddy harvest with the onset of the cooler, drier months of winter known as the rabi season, the farmers plant a crop of dhal, mustard or more often wheat (see Figure 5.2), the flour of which is used to make chapatti (unleavened bread), a secondary staple. Wheat is harvested prior to the pre-monsoon storms in April. The severe heat and thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months, known as the pre-kharif, mark a quiet period in the agricultural calendar nowadays.

The sub-Himalayan lowlands which make up the historic region of Morang have been shown to have a complex history, yet have emerged today with a clear geography of inequality. With waves of migration from the hills, the development of successful owner-cultivator communities to the north has been paralleled by the perpetuation of feudalism in the original Tarai- Madhesh settlements of the south – albeit with the rise of an absentee rather than local landlord class. However, even within the southern belt, which is the focus of this book, the peasantry is shown to be far from a unitary entity and is divided by land ownership status as well as a complex matrix of caste and ethnicity. These divisions are crucial to explore if one is to understand the contemporary interaction between the capitalist and pre-capitalist – and that is the focus of this chapter.

Before that, it is worth offering a bit more social and cultural context of the core field site and its diversity. The seven villages are located in the former Jhorahat, Bhaudaha and Thalaha VDCs, which in 2017 were merged into Gramthan and Katahari rural municipalities (see Figure 4.1). Travelling northeast from Biratnagar towards this cluster of villages on the recently widened road, the Singya Nadi river marks the northern boundaries of the built-up area. One passes some ribbon development, including new housing plots catering to urban dwellers, and a number of large agro-processing mills, and after 4 kilometres one reaches Jhorahat Bazaar (see Figure 4.2), the first settlement which is included in the study.

A well-wisher advises Aasman-ud-Dowla, the erstwhile Nawab of Hyderabad, presumably at the cusp of the fall of the Nizam's state, in K. A. Abbas's 1965 film Aasman Mahal (Figure 3.1). To this provocation, Aasman-ud-Dowla says that Hindustan is his mother, it has Taj Mahal, Bibi ka Maqbara, Ajanta Ellora, his ancestors’ graves, and his friends. This scene gives a glimpse into the communal politics of Hyderabad in the decade of the 1940s. The political events of those times are key to understanding the development of the film industry and their implications on Hyderabadi Muslims.

The 1940s were transformational on many fronts for the Indian subcontinent, and Hyderabad and the film industries of the subcontinent were also a part of these changes. In the context of the film industry in Hyderabad, the events we discussed until now slowly start moving into the background as other pressing socio-political conditions take centre stage. The nationalist movement and its politics shape Hyderabad in this period. This shift serves as a precursor to the post-colonial remaking of Hyderabad. The chapter first discusses these matters to place changes in the film industry in context.

This song from the 1957 film MLA, made almost immediately after the formation of the linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh with Hyderabad as the capital city, introduces the city to the Telugu public who until then did not really consider it as a part of the Telugu imagination. The song narrates the history of the city from its establishment by the Qutb Shahi Dynasty. However, interestingly, it omits the Asaf Jahi dynasty out of it. After the Police Action, several historical and cultural traces of the Asaf Jahi dynasty were erased.

Hyderabad, the capital city, was a new geography for the Telugus in Madras Presidency. The Telugus were politically active in several civil society organizations in Madras such as the Madras Native Association and the Madras Mahajana Sabha. They also played an important role in the Justice Party. Most prominent Telugu newspapers were published from Madras. The city for Telugu people was Madras until 1953 when Andhra state was formed. The Telugus made a claim for Madras as their capital city with the slogan ‘Madras Manade’, meaning ‘Madras is ours’, while the Tamils raised the slogan ‘Madras Namade’, also meaning ‘Madras is ours’.

The PSB's collection of paintings found its way to the Bhai Mati Das Museum through the efforts of Baba Harbans Singh Kar Seva Dilli Wale (1920–2011). He was a much-respected Sikh who organised kar seva (voluntary service) for the construction of gurdwaras, including the historic gurdwaras in Delhi, Darbar Sahib at Amritsar, Gurdwara Tarn Taran and Gurdwara Paonta Sahib, among others (Khatri n.d.). It appears that it was on his initiative that the building of Majestic cinema at Chandni Chowk was purchased by the DSGMC and replaced by a museum. The bank donated its paintings for the purposes of display, and the Bhai Mati Das Museum opened in 2001. There is little information available on the process of selection of paintings, curation of the display and the people involved. Initially, artist Amolak Singh (1950–2006) was in charge of the museum, but at present there is no artist or curator associated with it. The sevadars of the gurdwara act as caretakers of the museum, and their role is limited to opening, cleaning and closing it.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has 169 history paintings, each provided with a description in three languages, English, Hindi and Punjabi. Here, Sikh history is presented in chronological order, beginning with Guru Nanak (in the fifteenth century), covering the ten Gurus, the events of the eighteenth century that saw conflict with the Mughals and Afghans and subsequently the emergence of Sikh misls and Ranjit Singh's kingdom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Beyond this, the story is patchy, with a few canvases on the bhagats, whose verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ struggle against the British and their contribution to the army of free India.

It is clear thus far that rural poverty in southern Morang has complex roots. Unlike in many villages of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, there is not a local landlord class or a traditional caste-based land ownership hierarchy, where villages are divided into neighbourhoods by caste, with clear disparities of wealth in terms of housing and asset ownership. The region also does not experience the open political and ideological subjugation by a local dominant caste or landlord class at a local level, such as those which garnered support for the Naxalite struggle in Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s (Kunnath, 2017) or in the central Tarai-Madhesh during Nepal's People's War. However, the largely Adivasi peasantry experiences a silent drain of resources through a more complex and ‘distant’ network of feudal exploitation, with rents being appropriated in parallel by urban-based landlords and merchant capital.

It is important to now understand what this means for household livelihoods and the reproduction of rural poverty in southern Morang, as well as the long-term opportunities for ‘accumulation’ within the peasantry. The first section of this chapter explores the ability of households to meet their minimum subsistence needs or produce a surplus in the context of ground rent, distress commerce and usury. The second goes on to look at the implications of this drain of resource for investment on the land – in other words, it explores the constraining role played by the relations of production in developing the forces of production at a time of economic liberalisation and state-promoted commercialisation.

Why did I come to write this book? Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, reminds us that ‘we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts’. I was born about a couple of kilometres from Qadirabad Headworks Colony (in the district of Gujranwala–Punjab), one of Pakistan's largest 1971 wartime Bengali internment camps, which a former internee described as a place in ‘hell’. This residential colony, located on the bank of the Chenab River, was established in the 1960s by the governments of Australia and New Zealand for the workforce who worked on the construction of Qadirabad Headworks under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. I grew up playing cricket on the Qadariabad Headworks Colony School field in my early teens, and I remember going to drink water from a nearby nalka (traditional water pump). There was a rusted water tank, with the inscription ‘J [Joi] Bangla’ on it. I have heard stories about ‘Bengali qaidi’ (prisoners) being imprisoned in the colony. One story is that a Bengali was shot by a camp guard while attempting to flee from the colony and was buried in a nearby graveyard. As a boy I did not have the orientation to understand most of the ‘stories’ about ‘Bengali qaidi’; however, their residing in the colony has always intrigued me.

During the research for my previous book, The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, I found documentation about the 1971 wartime events in West Pakistan, the opposite of what I had anticipated to seek out.

The paintings in the Bhai Mati Das Museum have descriptions written in English, Hindi and Gurmukhi. I have provided the English titles and descriptions here, and as they appear in the museum. The text has been edited slightly to improve readability. The name of the painter and the year of creating the painting have been taken from the respective canvas. The paintings are numbered here in the sequence they may appear in to a viewer at the museum; no numbering is done at the museum itself.

In the first decade of independence, the weekly magazine Bichitra (est. 1972) presented itself as the arbiter of a new Bangladesh. Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined community’ through print publication was refracted through the geographic particularism of Bangladesh, which underwent three transformations in the twentieth century – the 1905 partition of Bengal province (reversed in 1911); the 1947 partition of British India, which renamed East Bengal as East Pakistan; and, finally, the 1971 Liberation War that birthed Bangladesh. In the British Indian era, Saogat (est. 1918) had promoted a ‘Bengali Muslim’ voice, and in the lead-up to partition, the feminist magazine Begum (est. 1946) was for a ‘new woman for the new nation’ in East Bengal's new identity as East Pakistan. With the end of the Pakistan era, Bichitra was founded in 1972 by the Bangladesh government. Over the next three decades, the magazine shaped popular attitudes towards governance, gender, culture, diversity, sexuality and more.

On 28 September 1973, Bichitra published a haunting cover with a photograph by Shamsul Islam – three passengers, two women and a young boy, descending airplane stairs. The cover headline was ‘Ora Fire Elo’ (They Have Returned), while the inside story carried a second headline of ‘Ora Ashche’ (They Are Coming). In its second year of publication, Bichitra's mandate for a new imagined community of Bangladesh had belatedly extended to the Bengalis who had been stranded in Pakistan at the end of the 1971 war – the ‘Prisoners of Pakistan’ that Ilyas Ahmad Chattha has written about in this book, breaking five decades of uneasy silence and discomfort.

When the separation was announced, Patna was named as the capital of Bihar and Orissa (see Map 5.1). The new province was hailed by Biharis as a deliverance from obscurity into a “flourishing new life.” While the Bengali papers complained, The Beharee jubilantly began to call Calcutta a “Provincial town” in the “mofassil.” One advertisement exulted, “Who Says Behar is Backward? Perfumes are made in Behar.” To many, Patna was the obvious choice for a capital. For others, though, it was not too late to make a last-minute pitch on behalf of another city. The separation offered many opportunities to maneuver for power and to try to rearrange spatial politics within the new province.

Skirmishes also broke out over the details of the province's boundaries. Linguistic, historical, and ethnographic claims were made to demonstrate the natural belonging of this or that territory to one province or the other. Bihari and Bengali papers warred over the fate of various districts. The interests and opinions of the adivasi (aboriginal) inhabitants of these territories were never brought up, except when, for example, the Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed its dismay at the inclusion of Manbhum in Chota Nagpur, when “the latter is inhabited mainly by half-savage Sonthals, while a large portion of Manbhum is the abode of civilized Bengali-speaking people.”

The final chapter of this book returns to the processes of household and lineage formation discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 to explore how these continued to unfold in southern Panjab during the late nineteenth century. It suggests that rural households continued to rely upon and build their networks of relations to variously extend and defend their control of land in the region, even as the contours and composition of the household were repeatedly renegotiated. The analysis proceeds along two axes. The first of these foregrounds lineage consolidation through the sale, lease, and mortgage of land. It suggests that ra‘iyati lineages deployed and consolidated their wealth of relations to take advantage of the contingent opportunities offered by the colonial rural economy. These opportunities included improvements in irrigation infrastructure, which in certain pockets created a buffer against drought without the attendant damage of rampant saline efflorescence, allowing lineages to expand their hold of land by attracting new members to their fold. Opportunities, however, also came in the form of a rival's misfortune, such as the sale of land occasioned by a village's inability to pay its revenues. In such an eventuality, afflicted rural communities would turn to their relations for loans or to step up as malguzars, or revenue payers, even as outsiders used their relations to attempt to gain a foothold in their rivals’ ‘alaqas.