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‘The Omnipresent Bania:’1 Rural Moneylenders in Nineteenth-Century Sind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

David Cheesman
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Extract

After revisiting Sind in 1876, Sir Richard Burton wrote, ‘The Hindu's reed-pen is a rod of iron and abjectly the unhappy Sindi trembles before it.’ By ‘Hindu,’ Burton meant the Hindu bania, the trader and moneylender, and by ‘Sindi’ he meant the Sindhi Muslim zamindar (landholder), the perennial debtor. The creditor tyrannized over the debtor, imposing ever harsher and more inequitable terms on him. What is interesting is that Burton scarcely appeared to recognize the Hindu banias as Sindhis at all; he wrote as if they were interlopers on the Sindhi scene. It was a colourful summary of the average British official's attitude towards debt. Twenty years later, Evan James, the Commissioner in Sind, quoted Burton's remark to lend support to his own argument that debt was an intolerable burden on Sindhi Muslims in general and the great zamindars in particular.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 1982 , pp. 445 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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