SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

---

Staffan’s visit to Patna University, Friday 16 December 2005

University of Patna, the old Dutch Salpetre godown from the 17th Century.

Web page:
puonline.bih.nic.in/

The university was started in 1916-17, but before that there was the Patna College inaugurated in 1863 – one of the oldest colleges in India.
Today this is the smallest university in Bihar with about 10 000 students at four faculties, Arts, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Law.
Both undergraduate, graduate and post graduate programmes exist side by side. A medical college is affiliated, but engineering is separate in the National Institute of Engineering, Patna. There are about 1000 teaching positions, but many of them are vacant, since after retirement of many teachers the University has not employed new teachers.

The University is starved of funds and the state government interferes in all what is happening here.
The university buildings, class rooms and offices are in a poor shape. One feels like being in a dark cellar, when inside some of the premises. According to my host, Prof. Jha the whole situation is depressing to the teachers, who work without inspiration.
So the contrast is sharp between the hefty old buildings of the Dutch saltpetre go-down built in the 17th century and the Maharaja’s palace, which is now part of the university, and the newer buildings and their inside facilities.

Visit to the Department of Sociology

The first meeting was in this department, which is a post-graduate department with 4 teachers, 160 master students, and 10 PhD students. In the undergraduate department, there about 500 students and ten teachers.

After my presentation of SASNET, we had an interesting discussion about their research interests and the situation in Bihar. Several of those present are pursuing studies of rural development and agrarian relations. Two were interested in gerontology, one in tribal studies, one in gender relations, one in demography, and finally one, the oldest member of the staff, in research methodology. We had an interesting discussion about the Bihar situation, and the following is their analysis.

The Bihar situation is paradoxical. Bihar was the granary of India during the British period, with fertile soils, well developed irrigation system and an efficient administration. The problems started in the 1960s with the growing influence of caste on politics. ‘Nepotism took precedence over qualifications’ in the appointment of government officers. The administration is now so inefficient that it can only use 50 % of the funds allocated by the Union government for development projects! At the same time civil society is weak and dominated by the government which wants to have a say in everything.
This is one reason why there has been de-industrialization of the state and also de-peasantisation.

During the period 1995 – 2005 Bihar had an industrial growth of – (minus) 57 %, while the whole of India saw industrial growth at 17 % plus. Bihar once had the biggest sugar- and paper mills in the country, but now they are no more. When Jharkand in the South became a separate state, Bihar lost most of the remaining industries, the Bokharo Steel plant, mines, etc.
Through land reforms and fragmentation via inheritance, the landlords have become small peasants and petty farmers. The Naxalites have mobilized the agricultural labourers so that they demand very high wages. For the small farmers this is impossible to pay, so they now use mostly family labourers also women. But in the upper castes, women are not allowed to work on the fields, so they are suffering from the high wage demand of the labourers.
Today the only source of mobility is through education and government employment. In reality very few government posts are opened per year, so the real alternative is joining the army.

There is no strong Hindu fundamentalist movement in the state, and also no sharp conflicts between Muslims and Hindus. When Nitish Kumar won the recent elections in the state due to the support of the BJP, it was not a question of rising Hindu feelings but rather an incumbency vote. Lalu Prasad Yadav came to power representing the Yadav’s and other backward castes. With him there was 15 years of misrule, robbing the people in the name of the poor, speaking the language of the poor masses, etc. and behaving after the saying of Lalu: ‘For remaining in power there is no need for government.’
The whole rural infrastructure has deteriorated, irrigation systems have not been maintained, roads are bad, there is not electric supply to the villages, etc. When asked about it, Lalu used to answer: ‘If we build roads and supply electricity, who do you think will use them?’ The green revolution has not at all reached here also because the state administration was not interested in promoting it. At the same time, education and health delivery is poor, so there is no family planning to speak of. The population has risen fast and there are now 880 persons per sq km vis-à-vis 320 for the whole of India.
Also Women’ Self-Help Groups have failed here. The Banks are not interested to lend money to the women, and the government is not interested in letting the women really participate in the scheme.

There are a lot of unemployed educated youth. When they fail to get jobs they take to robbery, kidnapping with demand for ransom. NGOs are weak or corrupt, there are more than 10 000! Many of the educated youth join the Maoist movement, raise the flag and say they fight for the people, but in reality they are behaving like the criminal gangs. It is a myth that there are big landlords hiring gunmen, called ‘Ranvir Sena’. Even the big farmers may have only 10-30 acres of rain-fed land, hardly enough to sustain a family according to a dominant voice in the meeting. It is rather the politicians and local goondas (gangster) who hire gunmen to establish their hegemony.
The situation is worst in the South of Bihar. From outside one can only visit up to 4 pm in the afternoon. There are no marriages in the villages because neither women nor men want to get married there.

All in all, the bad situation in Bihar is what causes the large migration of people from Bihar to other states and also outside Bihar. Both educated and uneducated people go, they work hard and sincere and they earn a good reputation. Many of them settle in the new places with no intention to return to Bihar, even those with land here, which they sell out. Thus, there is also lack of a Bihari sub-nationalism or pride of belonging to the place.

Persons met with:
Hetukar Jha, retired Prof. of Sociology, interested in work on rural life in a historical perspective
P C Verma, Prof. Department of Economics, interested in rural development
V K Lal, Prof. of Sociology, Agrarian and rural development
A Dasgupta, Prof. of Sociology, Social Demography
Satish Kumar, Prof. and Head of the Dept. of Sociology, Gerontology and tribal studies
J P Singh, Prof. of Sociology, Demography, public health, gender relations and sociology of development
Gopal Sharan Sinha, Prof. of Sociology, Research Methodology

Meeting at the Department of History

This was a shorter meeting. They had all been called to the meeting in the Sociology Department, but had been unable to attend due to teaching and seminar assignments.
We first talked about research interest among the faculty:
Dr. Kameshwar Prasad is working on ancient Indian economic history and on the regional history of Bihar.
Dr. Barthi S. Kumar has worked on medieval Indian historiography ut is presently engaged in studies on gender relations. She is also active in the CPI-ML women’s organisation called All India Progressive Women’s Association. She is member of an editorial board publishing a women’s magazine.
Dr. Pramodanand Das is working on modern Indian history and on the tribal and agrarian history of Bihar.
Dr. Padmalata Thakur is working on international relations with special reference to Indian foreign policy in the pre- and post-independence era. Her Phd thesis was on Indian reaction to Fascism and Nazism, 1930 – 1939.
Also present at the meeting was Dr. S N Arya.

What then was peculiar about Bihar history, I asked to get more of the ‘story’.
Here is a short summary of our discussion and points made more or less by consensus:
It used to be that the history of Bihar was equal to “the history of India”. It was here that the first great empires of the continent were centred. Ashoka also ruled from here only, that is the city of Patliputra. Even today there Buddhist temples preserved from this era. The last empire, however, declined in the 7th century A.D. and the area was later invaded by Sher Shah who was a forerunner of Akbar the Great. Later onBihar was part of the Bengal Subha within the Mogul empire, which also included Assam and Bengal. People here played a great role in the first rebellion against the British in 1857.
In 1912, Bihar got its current administrative size including the Jharkand area. It was this region that ‘flowered’ during the later days of the Raj, known for its efficient administration. This good fortune continued after Independence and well into the 1960s. At that time Patna was one of the important intellectual centres in India with many professors and civil servants from other parts of India, especially from Bengal.
Bihar may have been on of the “pioneer” areas when caste entered politics in a big way. The whole social fabric crumbled. This was later reinforced by the rule of Lalu Prasad Yadav with his “family” rule in the name of social justice. Quality of the administration became the first causality when “lumpens” ruled based on caste mobilisations.
These political conditions have also severely affected education. Today there is hardly any functioning education system in Bihar and there is no work culture in the schools and universities. ‘We work against all odds,’ as the history professors I met expressed it.