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Kurmis Caste

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Neha Rathod
Kurmis Caste

The Kurmi is a Hindu farming caste in India and Nepal. Kurmi caste is the representative of the cultivating caste of the country. They are mostly found in the central province of the country. As per Hinduism, Kurmis is the name of one of the castes or Jatis of the Hindus. The Kurmis are known as the chief ancient agricultural caste of India. The Singraur, Umrao, Chandrakar, Gangwar, Kamma, Kanbi, Kapu, Katiyar, Kulambi, Kulwadi, Kunbi, Kutumbi, Naidu, Patel, Reddy, Sachan,Verma and Vokkaliga all belong to Kurmi caste. Kurmis are regarded as the descendants of some of the earliest Aryan immigrants.

With the continued waning of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, began to appear more frequently in settled areas and interact with townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organisation lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Kurmi, were part of a social spectrum that blended only indistinctly into the elite landowning classes at one end, and the menial or ritually polluting classes at the other.


The Kurmi were famed as market gardeners. In western and northern Awadh, for example, for much of the eighteenth century, the Muslim gentry offered the Kurmi highly discounted rental rates for clearing the jungle and cultivating it. Once the land had been brought stably under the plough, however, the land rent was usually raised to 30 to 80 per cent above the going rate. Although British revenue officials later ascribed the high rent to the prejudice among the elite rural castes against handling the plough, the main reason was the greater productivity of the Kurmi, whose success lay in superior manuring. According to historian Christopher Bayly,Whereas the majority of cultivators manured only the lands immediately around the village and used these lands for growing food grains, Kurmis avoided using animal dung for fuel and manured the poorer lands farther from the village (the manjha). They were able, therefore, to grow valuable market crops such as potatoes, melons and tobacco immediately around the village, sow fine grains in the manjha, and restrict the poor millet subsistence crops to the periphery. A network of ganjs (fixed rural markets) and Kurmi or Kacchi settlements could transform a local economy within a year or two.

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Neha Rathod
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