Bihar Days

By Carolyn Brown Heinz

Prior to 1947, the Maithil Brahmans dominated North Bihar culturally, politically, and economically. Darbhanga Raj, the richest zamindari estate in British India, was owned by a family of the elite sub-group of Brahmans, the Srotriyas. The high prestige of this elite was based on a lifestyle prescribed by ancient law codes involving simplicity of life, daily Vedic rites, and intermarriage within a small network of lineages 24 generations deep. It was a highly conservative, inward-looking, isolationist community.

In 1980, anthropologist Carolyn Brown Heinz was privileged to see inside this elite community with a one-year grant from the Indo-US Subcommission and return trips over the next two decades. Independence had brought elimination of royal titles and dismantling of the vast Darbhanga Raj estate. The last king had died. These changes upended the old order, and she was able to observe the fall-out at close range. Told in first person, this is a highly personal account, told with grace and compassion.

An unexpected development during the same period was the emergence of a women’s art form known as Mithila or Madhubani Art, which Heinz was also able to observe at first hand and describe in this work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886938159

Carolyn Brown Heinz

Carolyn Brown Heinz is a cultural anthropologist and emerita professor of Anthropology, California State University, Chico. Her teaching and research areas are South Asia, religion, social organization, culture history, and women’s cultures. Carolyn is the author most recently of Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, 1999, 2018).

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About the Author

Carolyn Brown Heinz is a cultural anthropologist and emerita professor of Anthropology, California State University, Chico. Her teaching and research areas are South Asia, religion, social organization, culture history, and women’s cultures. Carolyn is the author most recently of Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, 1999, 2018).

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Carolyn Brown Heinz 2023

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Bihar Days

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Table of Figures

Prologue: 1919

1919 was a busy year for Maharajadhiraj Rameshwar Singh, said to be the richest zamindar in British India. His estate, Darbhanga Raj, covered 2400 square miles distributed across six districts of north Bihar. An income of around four million rupees per year underwrote his many projects, among them building a new capital thirty-five miles north of Darbhanga, the present capital, and furthering the cultural interests of Maithil Brahmans, of whom he was the most prominent member. He had two sons and also a single daughter, whose marriage was one of his projects for the year.

But 1919 began harshly. In June of the previous year, workers in factories and mills far away in Bombay began to fall ill after the arrival of a transport ship from Mesopotamia. India was used to epidemics of plague and cholera—the most recent plague epidemic had been in 1907—but this time the symptoms were different. Fevers lasting up to seven days; slow pulse rates; pains in head, back, and limbs; bleeding from nose and lungs; and respiratory distress that led to death in as few as three days. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 had reached India.

At first the Government of India was not particularly worried and thought it would soon pass. But this new disease spread much faster than cholera or plague. The epidemic spread rapidly north and east, finally stopping in Bihar and Orissa, wiping out in a few months practically the whole natural increase in the population for the previous seven years (Marten 1923:356). Sir Edward Gait, Lt. Governor of Bihar and Orissa Province during that period, described whole families and even villages laid low at the same time and there was no one left to tend the sick or to look after their food (Marten 1923:368). In Bihar 1.4% of the population died. In other places it was even worse: four percent of the populations of Bombay, Punjab, and the NW Frontier Province died; and 5.5% of Delhi was lost (Bala 2011; Public Health Reports 1919; Hill 2011). The months of September through December were the most devastating, but by the new year of 1919, though deaths continued, the force of the pandemic began to lessen. By the time it ran its course, twelve and a half million Indians were dead; India was the worst hit nation on earth.

Figure 1 Maharajadhiraj Rameshwar Singh

Rameshwar Singh may not have connected the dots that ran from the epidemic to food shortages, price rises, and political unrest that disturbed his realm along with the whole of India that year. Hardly anyone did then; there was little official documentation or analysis focused on the pandemic (Klein 1988; Chhun 2015; Arnold 2019), perhaps because so much trouble was coming so fast: World War I had just ended, followed closely by the pandemic, then the beginning of the anticolonial movement, and the massacre at Amritsar on April 13, 1919 that riveted the attention of the whole nation. These may have seemed like separate events. But these things were connected; the sickness and loss of life slowed the economy. Prices rose while wages stayed where they had been forty years earlier when the price of food was one-third of its current cost. The inadequacy of the official response led to discontent fed by a new class of anticolonial leaders. In north Bihar, 1919 marks the intensification of peasant protest that had previously been small-scale and sporadic but became more consistent and enduring under the leadership of Swami Vidyanand (Henningham 1990:113–127), who specifically targeted the Darbhanga Raj.

The true devastation of the epidemic did not become clear until the 1921 census, but talk about conducting the census was already beginning in 1919. Enumerating the entire population of India was an enormous project. In the twenty-one provinces and states, census enumeration was the responsibility of the head of each district, itself subdivided into circles and blocks of thirty to forty houses. The enumerators were almost entirely non-officials pressed into service for no pay. There was a good deal of resistance among both enumerators and enumeratees, large numbers of whom did not trust Government’s intentions when inquiring about characteristics of one’s most intimate private life. Government wanted to know about the household members’ sex, age, civil condition, religion, caste or race, occupation and secondary occupation, language, birthplace, literacy, and certain infirmities (Marten 1923:358). People didn’t like revealing all this, and enumerators didn’t like the forced and unpaid labor of collecting it.

Rameshwar Singh was not directly involved in conduct of the census throughout Darbhanga Raj, but the conversations about it may have stirred interest closer to home for him. He was not only a Maithil Brahman, but also a member of the most elite of its subgroups, the Srotriyas. How had they fared through the epidemic? There were few of them to begin with; a census had been conducted for private use in 1904 that showed a population of just 741 males. (Women and children were not counted).

The 1919 Census of Srotriyas asked very different questions than did the government census, and was conducted by a different process. For every adult male Srotriya it recorded their village birthplace, the name of their patrilineage, their gotra, their father’s name, and their mother’s father’s name. This was not a door-to-door operation but one conducted by a class of genealogical experts for which Maithil Brahmans are famous. Rameshwar Singh was closely involved with the work of the genealogists, for as maharaja and formal head of the Srotriyas, he and the genealogists determined the social rank of each man.

The census, when completed, was organized and displayed by rank order. The census was therefore not only a list of all living Srotriyas but also a semi-public document of the hierarchy of this elite group, from highest to lowest as determined by the genealogists and the maharaja. The document fixed and published in rank order the best of Brahmans.

If you guessed that the very best of Brahmans would turn out to be Maharajadhiraj Rameshwar Singh, you were mistaken. True, he was listed first, in red ink, as a special honor to him, along with his two sons, Kameshwar Singh and Vishweshwar Singh. But the very best of Brahmans was, in fact, Gariban Jha of Gangauli village, whose patrilineage was Dariharaya Rajauli and rank was Pratham, First. He had an additional title that—in a pool of similar titles that were also ranked—was named Ramdev Mishra after an ancestor of his. There were seven levels (shreni) of rank, and thirty-eight titles, called laukits.

The total number of Srotriyas in the 1919 census was 929, an increase of 188 men over the previous census fifteen years earlier, a 4.9% increase (whereas the overall population of Bihar declined by 1.4%). This may have provided some relief, if the devastation of the epidemic had been a concern.

The 1919 Census and its detailed rank order of all the top Maithil Brahmans had a number of uses. It could be consulted before a ritual feast (bhoj) to avoid the embarrassment of seating guests in the wrong order. When this happened, it could be more than an embarrassment; it could trigger a crisis in the community.

Even more importantly, the Census was essential to marriage, for the Srotriyas were a rigidly endogamous community and thus the census detailed the entire possible marrying community of the royal family and the Srotriyas. It was forbidden to marry outside this list except for a small number of unions allowed only by written permission (parmangee) of the maharaja himself.

Rameshwar Singh, as the conservative ruler that he was, was deeply committed to this system of marriage controls. As evidence of his commitment, when it came to arranging the marriage of his own daughter, he turned to the 1919 Census and picked the single highest ranked Srotriya of marriageable age. His only concern was this one factor: the groom’s rank among the Srotriyas. This fortunate young man was Mukund Jha of Biththo village. He was Pratham (First) Shreni. His patrilineage (mulgram) was Karmahe Behat. His laukit was Shankar Ray, sixth among the six laukits of Pratham Shreni.

There would not be another census of Srotriyas until 1975. By that time, Darbhanga Raj was gone, and its last maharaja—Kameshwar Singh—was dead. But there were then 3,131 Srotriyas, and a whole new eighth shreni with ten new laukits. By then the Srotriyas were re-making themselves without the leadership and protections of Darbhanga Raj.

The wedding of Rameshwar’s daughter, Lakshmi Daiji, would be an opportunity to show off the ornate new headquarters of Darbhanga Raj taking form near the town of Rajnagar. As the younger brother of the previous maharaja, Lakshmishwar Singh, he had been given the lucrative estate of Rajnagar as his share of the family wealth. The royal family practiced primogeniture rather than the usual Hindu custom of brothers sharing equally in their inheritance; however, Rameshwar’s share was unusually generous even for family custom. And when Lakshmishwar died unexpectedly in 1898 of a heart attack at the age of forty with no heirs, Rameshwar inherited the entire estate and the gaddi.

He set to work in 1904 building a new capital at his original estate, intending to move Darbhanga Raj headquarters to Rajnagar. The teens of the new century were a decade of capital-building; New Delhi was designed to express British India’s imperial power—and to escape from the political hothouse of Calcutta. The mood may have been infectious for Rameshwar. Italian architect M. A. Corone was hired to design many of the buildings, including an ornate Secretariat that would be the offices of Darbhanga Raj. Huge concrete elephants flanked its portico. There were eleven temples on the grounds, including a white marble temple to the family goddess, Dakshinkali, and temples to Shiva, Durga, and Ganesh. The Secretariat and Navlakha Palace were particularly impressive and highly ornamented, though built largely in brick, which was going to be a problem in 1934.

Although the Navlakha Palace was intended as a residence, there was an older and little noticed residence built toward the back of the main Rajnagar buildings. Because the maharajas of Darbhanga were traditional Brahmans, always maintaining Brahminic customs in their personal lives and family ceremonies, they built traditional Maithil Brahman homes where life cycle rites could be properly observed. This household style consists of four houses set in a square, with a central courtyard and a covered platform in the middle, the mandap. These compounds are seen in all Mithila villages where Brahmans reside. Poor Brahman families build small versions in mud and thatch, but the Brahman maharajas built to the same pattern on a much larger scale. One of the four houses is the gosaun ghar, usually in the west so that it opens to the rising sun like a temple, where the family gods and goddesses reside, especially the family goddess (kula devi). Another of these houses, usually in the south, is the kohbara ghar, or nuptial house, where bride and groom will consummate the marriage and eventually babies will be born. The house on the eastern side is the men’s house, opening to the village, where guests are received (and kept) with paan and conversation.

At Rajnagar, the marriage of Lakshmi Daiji to Mukund Jha took place in this older compound. The buildings are large, brick-built, with five arched openings into an inner verandah, and an ornamental stone railing along the rooflines. The central open space was large enough for elephants to arrive in procession and for the feeding of hundreds of Brahmans on ceremonial occasions.

The interior of the kohbara ghar in this traditional compound was decorated with the kind of wall art which all Srotriyas and Brahmans were accustomed to painting on their walls for marriage. These are intimate spaces; no one but lineage members may enter the gosaun ghar, the family shrine, not even the groom (except for a single event, the worship of Gauri at the bride’s house on the wedding day). The kohbara ghar is essentially a bedroom, also an intimate space; and it is here that the most elaborate paintings will be found. Some of these are symbols adopted from the fertility of aquatic life so prevalent around Mithila—water plants, lotus, insects, birds, snakes, turtles, bamboo—all intended to promote the fertility and love of the new couple who are meeting each other for the first time. In each corner of the kohbar ghar is painted a mysterious figure, a female known as naina yogin (eyes yogi) holding a fan and protecting the new couple from evil.

The paintings in the kohbara ghar of Rameshwar Singh for his only daughter’s wedding is of interest because these are the oldest extant examples of Mithila Art. Fifty years later, these traditions of wall art practiced by the two dominant castes of Mithila—Brahmans and Kayasthas—began to be painted on paper to be sold. At first women painters painted what they knew: the themes they always put on their walls, scenes depicting ritual events that were part of these marriage rites, and typical events of their own lives as women. Gradually, as world-wide attention came to focus on these women painters and their artistic styles, their visions enlarged, themes multiplied, and standards improved. The art became professionalized. Artists other than Brahman and Kayastha women joined the movement: men, and people of other castes, who brought in themes from their own traditions.

These two artifacts from 1919—the census and the kohbara ghar art—introduce the two principal themes of this book: first, the system that maintains the elites of Mithila, Maithil Brahmans and the Srotriyas; and second, Mithila Art, that grew out of the domestic arts of Brahman and Kayastha women, seen in the cover art of this book, the painting of Durga from the kohbara ghar at Rameshwar Singh’s Rajnagar compound.

The year 1919 is not the focus or beginning point of this study except for supplying a simple starting point, a way in. Although the core fieldwork was conducted in 1980–2000, this is a cultural history extending twenty-four generations into the past, as well as looking forward from 1919 to contemporary developments. That may sound like too extravagant a claim; my interest is in the creation over time of a community, the Maithil Brahmans, into a center of political power and cultural dominance in the region of Bihar known as Mithila. The system of rank and status was nurtured over centuries and utilized to mitigate links with external continental powers—the Sultanate, the Mughals, and the British—and acquire local overlordship of land, culminating in Darbhanga Raj. That is the sheer political power aspect of their history, a familiar theme in historical studies. In the course of establishing and living life in enjoyment of this hegemony, Maithil Brahmans’ cultural achievements established a certain ethos, the moral (and aesthetic) aspect of a given culture, the evaluative elements…the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; [an] underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects (Geertz 1973:127).

Geertz suggests looking for these abstractions in symbols and in symbolic action. This is where the people who live this life concentrate what most matters to them; an anthropologist had best look there as well. In this study, I focus on two cultural products: the genealogies and Mithila Art.

For Maithil Brahmans the text has been the source of deepest meaning. The Vedas of the second millennium BCE (then pre-textual, known only orally) are the foundation of all knowledge; Brahman identity originates in esoteric origin slokas in the Vedas. In the brahmacharya stage of life a Brahman masters at least one of the Vedas; best would be all of them. The later dharmashastras, especially Yajnavalkya, lay out in astonishing detail the moral obligations of human action for Brahmans and kings, applying cosmic notions of dharma to daily life. And then there are the later texts, the written genealogies, begun around the fourteenth century when the Kshatriya king was banished and only Brahmans were left to maintain social order. These texts identify and record the best of Brahmans: their best families, their best scholars, their best subbranches, where they settled, what villages are their homes, even what best means: karmakanda (karmic or Vedic works) and marriage (with other best families). Later, in the eighteenth century, ‘best’ had to be redefined as recovery after a few generations of slippage, for this has been all along the Kaliyuga, the era of decline of dharma.

In the texts there are Brahmans and then there are srotriyas (as in real life): Srotriyas are those who study the Vedas and know their ten ancestors (Yajnavalkya 54.117), that is, five on the father’s side and five on the mother’s side; and the bride of a Srotriya should be of a great family of Srotriyas whose ten ancestors are renowned, but not of a family, though prosperous, that has any hereditary disease or taint (i.e., that which enters the system through semen or blood via bad marriages).

These are the values behind Rameshwar Singh’s 1919 census: to identify and rank the Srotriyas in order of superiority according to these ancient values: study of the Vedas (and by extension the dharmashastras and other texts) and continuous monitoring of their genealogies.

Mithila Art is the other strand of meaning in this study, the other aesthetic: a world of visual symbols originally intimate, hidden in the interior of the compound, presiding over new conjugal love and emergent fertility. The gods are there, eyes wide open, encouraging and protecting. The fertility of nature is gathered together and depicted powerfully on mud walls. It’s about sacred generation: the men of the texts take to themselves daughters of the superior lineages to generate their next generation. The daughters—illiterate until recently—are custodians of domestic ritual life, they ornament floors and walls to bring the gods near. They are goddesses themselves: Sita Devi, Gauri Devi, Jayanti Devi.

The genealogical ethos and the imagery of the cosmos merge in marriage and other domestic rites. In this book I attempt to bring together these usually quite separate strands in order to understand some of Maithil Brahman cultural identity.

This, I argue, is the ethos and world view that lies behind what one sees in real life living in Darbhanga or Madhubani or any of the many villages where Brahmans live. It’s idealistic, but let’s also be realistic. There can be arrogance, contentiousness, and greed on the ground. The king previous to Rameshwar Singh, his brother Lakshmishwar Singh, grumbled in his diary in 1879:

There was a most indecent row on my verandah this morning. A lot of soties [Srotriyas] have been bothering to see me. I am much against seeing them often. In fact I would like never to see some of them at all. These are men of very low births and insist on thinking themselves my equals. I am gradually giving them the cold shoulder.

The row originated in the following way. The Bittho Soties headed by a man named [name was blocked from original publication] began speaking a lot of offensive things to other people. I hear that in every Bhoj (feast) in the Dehat some sort of row always occurs.

The few soties who are really gentlemen by birth and position are not liked by the rest who are nearly all uneducated and these people always quarrel with gentlemen soties. They think that gentlemanliness consists of being of high family or education. They even look down upon pandits.

My plan is to see them once or twice every week for about 15 minutes in a sort of Am Darbar. (J. S. Jha 1972:142)

The Bittho Sotis that Lakshmishwar found so annoying were certainly Pratham Shreni in the 1919 Census, and close relatives of Mukund Jha, chosen by Rameshwar for his daughter, but the name was deleted in publication, probably by Jata Shankar Jha, the author of Biography of an Indian Patriot, indicating that this family was still powerful in 1972 when the book was published. The passage demonstrates that very modern class differences had emerged. Lakshmishwar did not have a high opinion of the quarrelling Sotis because of his very English education seen to by the Court of Wards that took control of the two heirs in 1860, supervising the upbringing of the four- and two-year-old as English gentlemen. The Court of Wards also set to work modernizing the Darbhanga Raj bureaucracy and making it lucrative by the time Lakshmishwar reached maturity. The British managers of the estate were pleased at the outcome. A pack of fox-hounds, which were got out from England, gives [Lakshmishwar] much amusement…he plays at Polo, Lawn tennis, and billiards…[he] has taken to driving, and can already guide a four-in-hand team very creditably. He has very nice quiet gentlemanly manners and is in every way well-fitted to take his high place in society with great credit to himself (J. S. Jha 1972:13). He spoke English fluently.

These class differences would divide Srotriya from Srotriya, and Maithil Brahman from Maithil Brahman over the next century, and were very much in evidence during my period, 1980–2000. They tacked back and forth; Lakshmishwar was progressive, Rameshwar was conservative, and Kameshwar was again progressive. Their vast wealth insured that conflicting values would both be financed and would undermine each other and divide their heirs in bitter conflict when Darbhanga Raj was abolished with the Bihar Land Reforms Act, 1950 (Jannuzi 1974).

Sixty-one years after the year that produced the census of Srotriyas and the kohbara ghar art, I arrived in Darbhanga with a very narrow project in mind, and with no idea how interesting and complex the place I had come to study was. But I was soon using the term byzantine to describe the complexity and convolutions of a society I was hardly prepared for. Anthropologists often find themselves in places where hardly anything seems to be happening. Fieldwork can be boring. Not in my case; I was in over my head from the very start.

To sum up what I thought I was doing: I went to Mithila to attempt to answer a very narrow question: I wanted to know what happens when a caste has rules for marriage that are too complicated for the size of its population. I had just completed a PhD dissertation in the Fiji Islands where immigrant Indians from the late nineteenth century, drawn from all over India, had not been able to reproduce a caste system, since there weren’t enough individuals from any one community to organize into in-marrying communities on the Indian model. In India I was looking for three very small castes where I could study the adjustments that had to be made under such circumstances.¹ That’s what brought me to the Srotriyas of North Bihar. I knew only that Srotriyas were a very small elite of a much larger group, the Maithil Brahmans.

Brahmans, I knew, tended toward rigorous adherence to rules laid out in ancient lawbooks, the dharmashastras. How did such ideological rules interact with material constraints like demographic factors? This project was very much based on demographic questions rather than moral, critical, or political questions, such as whether inequality was moral or achieved by fair means, or was good/bad for individuals, or was hindering to economic or political betterment of society.

Soon after I arrived in Darbhanga, my narrow project was overwhelmed by the astonishing complexity of social life among the Maithil Brahmans and the Srotriyas. To wit: were there complicated marriage rules? Unbelievably complicated; it took a class of specialists, the genealogists known as panjikars, to keep track of them all. Did these rules really matter? They mattered so much that they were vigorously enforced by the power of the royal family of Darbhanga Raj and the ever-watching eyes of senior Srotriya leaders; the 1919 Census was only a small part of that. Outcasting was the penalty for offenses, which meant eradicating your name and your descendants forever from the genealogies that were at this point twenty-four generations long, and that defined one as a Maithil Brahman and a Srotriya, a process that also tended to reduce the size of an already small community. And, in my demographic question, were the rules too complicated for the size of their population? This question seemed not to be clearly in peoples’ consciousness, but there was tremendous pressure to go outside the community, down just a step or two to the highest ranking families of the next lower group, the Yogyas. The 1919 Census may have been partly a stopgap effort to head off this movement. Rameshwar Singh’s son, Kameshwar Singh, himself had led in this controversial development, marrying two of his three ranis from the Yogyas, a category just below Srotriyas. My simple and purely theoretical question and interest turned out to be the lived experience and gripping social dynamic of an entire population. It sunk in quickly that I had a tiger by the tail.

I arrived as this world was falling apart as a result of radical post-colonial transformations: the withdrawal of the colonial power and the establishment of the Republic of India; the abolition of the zamindari system which eliminated the great estate of Darbhanga Raj; the death of Maharaja Kameshwar Singh; and the abdication of his heirs from responsibility for maintaining social controls over the Srotriyas. Everyone seemed to be gripped by this falling apart, as the wealth of Darbhanga Raj was being fought over and sold off, and the Srotriyas tried to maintain their former privileged status after the raj—meaning not the British Raj but Darbhanga Raj—had disappeared.

This has absorbed a great deal of my career as an anthropologist. The Maithil Brahmans, one of the five great north Indian Brahman groups (the others are the Saraswati, Gauda, Kannauj, and Utkal Brahmans), are famed as scholars and philosophers. Their luminaries from the medieval period made contributions to most of the theological and philosophical traditions of India. Mithila prides itself on having been once a center of Tantric practice (though the extent to which this is ongoing became one of my puzzles). The Mughals knew the region as Tirhut—between the Gandak and the Kosi, the Himalayas and the Ganges. Two Brahman dynasties, the Oinivaras and the Khandavalas—dominated the region from the first arrival of the Delhi Sultanate, by collecting revenues for the imperial power, and turning themselves into local rajas. In British times, one of these families became even richer and higher ranking: the Khandavalas, who began in the sixteenth century as local revenue officials and by the end were granted the title of Maharajadhiraj.

Throughout all of this, the genealogies were recorded, generation after generation, the marriage rules kept getting modified in the direction of greater complexity, and control was more concentrated in the hands of the Darbhanga rulers.

Where did this stop, as far as my research went? This book may be the answer to that. I have not reached the end, but I had to write it at last. I’ve tried before to find the right format for telling this story, but each version seemed to present an abstract, over-intellectualized blueprint of social machinery that did not show what it was like for real people to live in the machine. My life in Mithila was with real, engaging, interesting people, almost all of whom I liked a great deal. I invariably made social errors, some of them shocking. There could be—and were—misunderstandings; but everyone I came to know seemed happy to help me understand their society. Some I am still in touch with—on Facebook! In this book, rather than present the machine, I’ve tried to tell the story as a narrative of coming to understand the beautiful complexity of Srotriya and Maithil Brahman society.

Much that has been written about society in north Bihar and the Brahman place in it has been negative; even angry (e.g. Das 1996). This is a society in which inequality has been the operating principle. This principle is now in the descendancy, and the widespread cross-caste pride and participation in Mithila Art is partial evidence of that. The Indian constitution has tried to produce a modern state of equality of all before the law; Brahmans themselves are ambivalent about their own world that is dissolving rapidly without the centralization of Darbhanga Raj. Political power in Bihar is now shared among high and low castes in a way that never was possible before, a transition that occurred midway in my period when Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1990 overturned the long hegemony of Brahmans, though factional electoral politics are still deeply caste-based. Things maybe are not better or worse, but different now. My account takes place in a time midway between the end of the old (Independence, zamindari abolition, the death of the king) and the present (political power shared, a new anti-Brahmanism at work). This work recounts a moment in time, a moment seen only through my eyes, an outsider who was for a brief time privileged to be a guest in Mithila.

This book is based on documents made during my four fieldtrips to Mithila in the period 1980–2000. There were formal fieldnotes, such as jottings during casual conversations and more formal interviews that were later written up in coherent form, transcripts of taped interviews (not too many of those, at least from the first two trips), or memoranda written soon after a conversation that contained memorable information. I kept a detailed personal journal of events that happened each day, as well as I could each evening or the next morning. I sometimes fell behind in this effort, and occasionally several days went by before I’d just pick up where I was and carry on. Days were often so filled with events that I couldn’t keep up. I have used this daily journal as the structure for this book, trying to present life in Mithila as it unfolded day by day, rather than topically, which would be the more usual structure for an ethnography. Finally, there were 119 letters written to family members, who saved them and gave them back to me later. These were filled with accounts of events swirling around me, complaints and worries, yearnings for home and normalcy. In all three kinds of documents, I put the emphasis on details, descriptions of settings, and dialogue. In this book, where I report dialogue it is derived from these contemporary records. I have not recreated any dialogue ‘from memory.’ I don’t have a particularly good memory, and most of the events that I failed to record at the time have been forgotten.

The names I mention are real names; this is a society in which identity matters; names are recorded in the genealogies, and everyone knows each other. I was once chastised by the genealogist for using pseudonyms in a published article, so I have not created any pseudonyms here or any compound characters. In some places I have obscured actual persons’ identities to avoid embarrassment.

*

I have many people to thank for the work I was able to do in Mithila. I start with my mentor at the University of Washington, political science professor Paul Brass, who knew of a very small group in Bihar, and introduced me to his friend, Chetakar Jha. Agehananda Bharati supported my project with the Indo-US Subcommission on Education and Culture, whose generous grant was essential to this work.

Chetakar Jha was my sponsor and host, who made everything possible. He was at that time president of Patna College, inviting me into his home, and giving me into the care of his family in Darbhanga, who lived in his ‘cottage’ on the edge of little lake. I am grateful to Bhoganath Jha and his wife Chhabi, and their children, Choti, Kiren, and Ashish. Later I met their married daughter, Putul Singh, who helped me in interviews when my interests turned to the women painters around Madhubani. Her small son Chumu joined us on these jaunts. Also Sati Jha and her daughter Tiku were part of the daily life of the family at Diwani Takiya.

The person who taught me the most, and with infinite patience, in nightly evening meetings over four months, was Pandit Harinandan Jha, the panjikar to the Srotriyas. He would open his books of genealogies, unwrapping them from their cotton covers to explain how the rules of marriage worked. He had the entire genealogies of every single Srotriya fully memorized and could recite them on request. Maharaja Kameshwar Singh? It takes fifteen minutes. Bhoganath Jha? About the same. He was the great gift to the Srotriyas, all of whom respected him tremendously, and consulted him on every single marriage (but didn’t pay him enough).

I hired various assistants from time to time, but above all I must thank Prahlad Mishra, a graduate student from Meerut University who helped me during my first trip with my many encounters and interviews in Mithila, and shared more than anyone my efforts to adapt and understand life around me. Together we learned from Harinandan Jha, and in the process Mishra, too, became something of a genealogical expert. There was also Chandrakanth Mishra and Jivendra Mishra who went to Saurath Sabha with me to interview grooms. On my second trip, Binayanand Jha in Mangarauni assisted me with Mithila artists, and his elderly mother, who knew every detail of every Brahman ritual, patiently described every ceremony that I failed to see for myself.

In Darbhanga, I had many friends who taught me in formal interviews and entertained me with visits and dinners. Maninath Jha, and his wife Jayanti Devi, who presented me with a complete set of arpanas drawn by her on black paper; Buddhakar Jha, the brother of Chetakar, who was employed by Darbhanga Raj; Tantranath Jha, whose mastery of all details of his society contributed to many an MA thesis and also to my work; sociologist Ugranath Jha at Mithila University, who wrote a book about the panjis and was a rich source of arcane information. Also in Darbhanga I was treated to a marvelous evening of dinner and conversation in old Darbhanga Raj style by Dwarkanath Jha, the head of the Raj Darbhanga Trust, and I was invited to a memorable tea with the Choti Maharani, Kamasundari Devi, who as I write, is still living in advanced old age.

When I returned in 1984, I stayed in the mansion of the Madhubani Babus, Ranti Deorhi, where I had many memorable and helpful conversations with Sashidhari Singh and his son, Srutidhari Singh (whom I knew as Arvind). Sociologist Hetukar Jha arranged this for me, and also helped me sharpen my insights through a number of conversations in Patna.

I can hardly mention everyone in the villages who gave generously of their time and knowledge, but I must note Navachandra Thakur and his family at Saurath, direct descendants of the great poet Vidyapati, who invited me to the marriage of their daughter at the end of the Sabha. At Ujan I was invited by the family to witness the shraddha for Barjunath Jha, something that normally an outsider would not be allowed to see. At Sarso Pahi, Sitnath Jha and Tosman Jha; at Bhiththo, Badrinath Jha (the highest ranking living Srotriya and brother to Mukund Jha); and many others.

In addition to Darbhanga Raj, another Maithil Brahman zamindari family in the eastern Purnea District figured in folklore as competitors to Darbhanga Raj. I was helped to understand this competition through the cooperation of Durganand Sinha in Patna, the son of Raja Kirtyanand Sinha, and Girijinand Sinha, author of Banaili, Roots to Raj, who shared generously of his genealogies and photographs.

I was fortunate to meet and interview Mithila artists, some of whom had achieved great fame and won national awards: Jagdamba Devi, Sita Devi, and Baua Devi of Jitwarpur, and Mahasundari Devi of Ranti. Gauri Mishra was a good friend who shared her knowledge of the development of the art through the 1970s and the founding of SEWA Mithila. Thanks also to Ray Owens, a fellow anthropologist who worked in an applied mode to create a market for the artists of Jitwarpur in the United States through the Ethnic Arts Foundation, and David Szanton, who took over this labor of love after Ray’s death.

None of this would have been possible without the assistance of a substantial grant from the Indo-US Subcommission in 1980, and smaller grants for shorter trips from Whitman College and California State University, Chico.

All these and more aided my effort to understand the life of Maithil Brahmans and the Srotriyas. My family patiently endured several long separations, though as children they enjoyed living for a time in western UP. My husband Donald Heinz, fellow academic and scholar, joined me in Mithila in 1998 and encouraged me to complete this book after its long incubation.

That I have still so many questions, I attribute to my own limitations and the shortness of life.

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¹Carolyn Henning Brown [Heinz], 1981, Demographic Constraints on Caste: A Fiji Indian Example, American Ethnologist, 8:2:314–328.↩︎

1. Solar Eclipse

February 16, 1980. Soon the solar eclipse will begin. Within the hour the sky will blacken, along with other dangers like earthquakes, tidal waves, and floods, as Rahu begins gobbling up the sun. The newspapers have been filled with scary information for days. Watch out for snakes. Discard all food in the house so it won’t spoil. Wear green bangles for your husband’s life. I have mine on. We went to the bazaar for green bangles last night, soon after I arrived; they are glass and I am pretty sure I’ll