Agrarian society, markets, caste, and labour

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and labour Beyond the self-contained village The agrarian history of Mithila, Vajji-country, and Anga cannot be reconstructed from the image of an isolated, self- sufficient village. Periodic markets, fairs, ferries, river ports, roads, railway stations, pilgrimage centres, credit networks, and seasonal migration connected cultivators and labouring households to district towns, Patna, Bengal, Nepal, Assam, and wider commercial circuits. Anand A. Yang's work on Bihar's bazaars is especially important because it treats the market as a social and political institution rather than a mere place where prices were formed (Yang 1998). The village nevertheless remained a crucial arena of production, tenancy, caste power, household reproduction, and local dispute. The methodological point is therefore not to replace 'village' with 'market,' but to reconstruct the traffic between fields, households, estates, courts, haats, transport routes, and migration destinations. The archive is socially uneven Settlement reports, rent cases, estate papers, gazetteers, censuses, agricultural vocabularies, and statutes were produced for different purposes. A cadastral survey sought legally actionable classifications; a gazetteer compressed official knowledge; an estate record followed income and control; Grierson's Bihar Peasant Life catalogued material culture and vocabulary; later social histories read these records against the grain. No one source can be treated as a transparent photograph of rural society (Grierson 1885; Kerr 1926; Yang 1989). The people most visible in durable records were not necessarily the people most numerous in the countryside. Landless workers, women, sharecroppers, artisans, itinerant traders, herders, and people whose claims rested on oral custom 351 often entered the archive mainly when a dispute, survey, debt, crime, tax, or administrative enquiry made them legible. Agrarian zones were not identical North Bihar's alluvial plains, the Kosi belt, the Ganga corridor, Bhagalpur-Munger tracts, and the margins toward Purnea and the Tarai differed in flood risk, soils, transport, crop possibilities, estate structure, and labour demand. A category established in a Darbhanga settlement report cannot automatically be exported unchanged to a Kosi diara or to southern Bihar. This chapter therefore uses comparison without flattening regional difference. Darbhanga