Rarh · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
Rarh's periods are set by its geology and by its position on the western edge of Bengal, not by the national calendar. Its ancient period is genuinely ancient - the chalcolithic settlement on the Ajay at Pandu Rajar Dhibi runs from about 1600 BCE - and it ends around 1200 with the Sena collapse. Its medieval period is the long one, and it belongs to the country's own houses rather than to any empire: the Mallas at Bishnupur, the Bardhaman Raj from 1657, the Panchakot line in Manbhum, all of them governing laterite uplands that no imperial army wanted and no imperial revenue system found easy. Its modern period begins in 1760, five years before the Diwani and a full century before anything the national narrative recognises, when Mir Qasim ceded Burdwan and Midnapore to the East India Company - which is why Rarh was a Company district when Awadh was still a Nawabi and why the first coal mined commercially in India came out of the ground here in the 1770s.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The laterite country was settled early and continuously. Pandu Rajar Dhibi on the Ajay, excavated between 1962 and 1965 and again in 1985, produced six occupation levels from a chalcolithic base of about 1600 BCE through an iron-using phase to Pala-period layers - the fullest single sequence for prehistoric Bengal. Jain tradition records Mahavira travelling through a country called Ladha, made up of Vajjabhumi and Subbhabhumi, which is generally identified with this tract and described as hard going. By the Pala and Sena centuries, Uttara-Rarha and Dakshina-Rarha are administrative names in copperplate grants. What the land could not give was building stone, so the temple tradition that developed here was brick from the start, which is the technical fact behind everything Bishnupur later became.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1600-750 BCE | The chalcolithic settlement at Pandu Rajar Dhibi on the Ajay in Bardhaman district, later overlaid by iron-using and early historic levels. |
| c. 5th century BCE | Jain tradition records Mahavira's travels through Ladha, comprising Vajjabhumi and Subbhabhumi, generally identified with the Rarh country. |
| early 7th century CE | Shashanka rules Gauda from Karnasuvarna, on the western bank of the Bhagirathi near Chiruti; the site was identified and excavated in the twentieth century as Rajbadidanga. |
| 8th-12th century CE | Under the Palas and Senas, Uttara-Rarha and Dakshina-Rarha appear as named administrative divisions in copperplate grants. |
| 10th-12th century CE | The brick temple tradition of the laterite country takes shape, using moulded terracotta plaques in place of the carved stone the region has none of. |
Rarh spent the sultanate and Mughal centuries as a frontier: too dry to be prime revenue land, too broken to garrison, and inhabited at its western end by Bhumij, Santal and Kurmi communities whose chiefs the administration dealt with rather than displaced. What filled the space were local dynasties. Mallabhum, centred on Bishnupur, was the largest of them, and under Bir Hambir at the turn of the seventeenth century it did two things that fixed the region's culture - it allied with the Mughals under Man Singh, and it turned Vaishnava after Bir Hambir's meeting with Srinivasa Acharya. The Vaishnava turn is why Bishnupur built temples for the next century and a half, and why they were built of brick and clothed in terracotta. The period ends badly: five Maratha incursions between 1742 and 1751 crossed exactly this country, and Rarh's memory of them survives in a lullaby.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1565-1620 | Bir Hambir rules Mallabhum, allies with the Mughal campaign in Bengal under Man Singh, and builds the Rasmancha at Bishnupur in about 1600. |
| c. 1600 | Bir Hambir's meeting with Srinivasa Acharya turns the Malla court Vaishnava; the worship of Madan Mohan is established at Bishnupur. |
| 1643 | Raghunath Singha Dev builds the Shyam Rai temple at Bishnupur, the fullest surviving example of the terracotta-clad brick temple. |
| 1657 | Abu Rai is appointed to a revenue and police office at Rekabi Bazar in Bardhaman; the post becomes hereditary and grows into the Bardhaman Raj. |
| 1694 | The Madan Mohan temple is built at Bishnupur under Durjan Singh Dev, completing the town's principal group. |
| 1742-1751 | Five Maratha incursions cross Bardhaman, Birbhum and Murshidabad; contemporary and later estimates of civilian deaths in western Bengal and Bihar run to several hundred thousand. |
| 1751 | A treaty ends the incursions; Orissa is ceded and the Subarnarekha fixed as the boundary, and an annual chauth is agreed. |
Rarh entered the colonial period earlier than almost anywhere else in India. Burdwan and Midnapore were ceded to the Company in 1760, the Diwani followed in 1765, and the famine of 1769-70 fell hardest on exactly this dry, thin-soiled country. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 then fixed a revenue demand that the western uplands could not reliably meet, and the result was the longest running rural disturbance in Bengal - the Chuar sequence in the Jungle Mahals, from the 1760s to Ganga Narayan's rising of 1832-33. Underneath it, the same laterite that made farming precarious was sitting on coal: found near Ethora in 1774, worked systematically from 1820, and organised into the Bengal Coal Company in 1843, which made this the first industrial district in India. The region's contribution to the national movement was mostly personal rather than territorial - the people it produced acted in Delhi, in Lahore, in Tokyo - with the one collective exception of the Manbhum districts, where a school headmaster and a lawyer built the movement's local institution out of an ashram at Purulia.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1760 | Mir Qasim cedes Burdwan and Midnapore to the East India Company; Rarh comes under Company administration five years before the Diwani. |
| 1769-70 | Famine across Bengal, remembered as the Chhiyattorer Manvantar; Birbhum and Bardhaman were among the worst-affected districts, and estimates of mortality vary very widely. |
| 1774 | John Sumner and Suetonius Grant Heatly find coal near Ethora in the Raniganj tract and seek permission to work it. |
| 1798-99 | The Chuar disturbances reach their height in the Jungle Mahals under Durjan Singh and others, against revenue demand and the auction of estates. |
| 1832-33 | Ganga Narayan Singh's rising unites Bhumij and other communities across Barabhum and the Jungle Mahals; he was killed on 6 February 1833, and the administration reorganised the tract afterwards. |
| 1820-1855 | Systematic coal mining begins at Raniganj under Alexander and Company in 1820; Dwarkanath Tagore takes over the collieries in 1835, the Bengal Coal Company is formed in 1843, and the East Indian Railway reaches Raniganj in 1855. |
| 1863-1921 | Debendranath Tagore establishes the ashram at Santiniketan in 1863; the school follows in 1901, Visva- Bharati in 1921 and the rural reconstruction work at Sriniketan in 1922. |
Rulers and commanders
Named in Malla tradition as the founder of the line, with the dynasty's era counted from 694 CE. This is tradition rather than record; the Mallas are historically visible from about the sixteenth century.
Dynasty: Malla. Seat: Laugram, later Bishnupur
Ruled Gauda from Karnasuvarna, on the western bank of the Bhagirathi, and is the first ruler to hold a unified Bengal polity under a single authority. The main narrative accounts of his reign, in Banabhatta's Harshacharita and in Xuanzang's travel record, were written by parties hostile to him.
Dynasty: Gauda. Seat: Karnasuvarna
Supplied troops to the Mughal campaign in Bengal under Man Singh, and after his meeting with Srinivasa Acharya around 1600 brought the Malla court into Gaudiya Vaishnavism. He built the Rasmancha at Bishnupur in about 1600; the temple building programme that made the town runs from his reign onward.
Dynasty: Malla. Seat: Bishnupur
Built the Shyam Rai temple in 1643, the most completely terracotta-clad of the Bishnupur group and the standard against which the region's brick temple work is measured.
Dynasty: Malla. Seat: Bishnupur
Appointed to a revenue and police office at Rekabi Bazar in 1657. The post became hereditary, and the estate that grew from it - the Bardhaman Raj - was among the largest zamindaris in Bengal under the Permanent Settlement, holding much of the region's grain surplus country.
Dynasty: Bardhaman Raj. Seat: Bardhaman
With John Sumner, found coal near Ethora in 1774 and applied for permission to work it - the first move towards commercial coal mining in India, and the beginning of the industrial belt along the Damodar that distinguishes Rarh from every other part of Bengal.
Seat: Birbhum
Led the Chuar disturbances at their height in 1798-99 across the Jungle Mahals, with Lal Singh and Mohan Singh, against revenue demand and the sale of estates for arrears. The disturbances were agrarian and pre-national, and ran for decades rather than seasons.
Seat: Raipur, in the Bankura uplands
Brought Bhumij, Kurmi and Santal villages of Barabhum and the Jungle Mahals into a single rising in 1832-33, briefly holding much of the tract. The administrative reorganisation of the Jungle Mahals that followed his defeat closed the long Chuar sequence.
Seat: Barabhum
The history of Rarh from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)