Nawal Kishor Kumar 
Beyond politics, the Bihar caste survey is a revolutionary document.
A public document, the first ever after 1931, allowing for people to stand up and be counted.
We go down to the wire, on what each of the numbers unveiled mean.
Who are the people referred to by percentages in the survey?
Today we look at Kumhar (1,834,418 people).
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One cannot pinpoint with certainty as to which community was the first to inhabit this earth. However, it does appear that potters, or Kumhars – the caste group which we are going to discuss today – must be among the earliest inhabitants who understood the power of speed. They also must have been the first to recognise the significance of clay. As a result of this understanding, they must have invented the wheel and gone on to create various types of utensils. They were also the ones to make earthen lamps, to light the way in darkness. This is perhaps why they are also called “Kumhar Pandit” – because the literal meaning of panditya is ‘creation’ and it is a word which is related to knowledge.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
If one looks at representations of the Stone Ages, one will find potters with their wheel and plenty of clay. They are a most important link to the development of human civilisation. But it is not easy to create something.
Potters have existed in different forms not only in Bihar or India, but in all the civilisations across the world. The utensils unearthed from Egyptian sites are an evidence of it. People made utensils and terracotta sculptures during the Harappan period too.
But it is also true that despite being skilled craftsmen, potter have been a neglected. There are other artisan groups, too, which are not mentioned in detail in history books. The connection of kumhars to the Ajivaka religion, before Buddhism, is established through Ajivaka Sanjay Keshakambali, who hailed from a potter family. But there are no more details available about it in Buddhist texts.
In Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal potters are counted as pawaniya just like nai, lohar, badhai and kahar. The job of pawaniya people is to serve. That’s what the kumhars also do. When people get married, potters make clay elephants, horses, birds, and other such figures for them. They also make the kalash, a pot in which water is kept as part of a Hindu wedding ritual. Earlier, they used to get money and clothes in return. But times have changed now and there is a price on every item they manufacture.
Kumhars comprise both Hindus and Muslims. But, in Hinduism, Brahminism has snatched their identity from them and now they are referred to as ‘Prajapati’. Vedic stories have been concocted so that this community with tribal roots can be Hinduised.
The people of Kumhar community follow tribal traditions. In the Hindu religious text Yajurved, they have been highlighted as ‘Prajapati’. Prajapati was the son of Brahma, the way Saraswati was his daughter. Brahmins consider both Prajapati and Saraswati wise.
But this does not establish that Kumhars are the descendants of Prajapati.
The fact is that in the original term ‘kumhar’, where ‘kum’ stands for pond or water body.
The term must have resulted from the fact that potters require both soil and water for their work. But not every type of soil sticks to the wheel, especially the sand-mixed soil found on the banks of rivers. They require loamy soil or black soil, which is sticky and moldable. It can be assumed that they dug the earth and saw that the pit thus formed when filled with water during rainy season gives a suitable clayey soil. Even today, potters often live on the banks of ponds and reservoirs which have stagnant water.
However, their name was changed according to the things they made. For instance, a pitcher is called kumbh in Sanskrit and so, they were called kumbhkar instead of kumhar. So, considering that the people of this caste group make lots of other things like pots, lamps, utensils and idols, and not just kumbhs, why were they referred to as kumbhkars? One does not know.
In Dravidian traditions, too, they are called Kumhar. In today’s Pakistan’s Punjab province, they are also called kulal. Their community is spread across every state of India. They are not treated as untouchable in most of the provinces, and they do not enjoy social prestige. In Hindi-speaking states, especially Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, they are counted among the Pawaniyas and are specially given place to settle so that they can serve the ‘upper’ castes. Moreover, had they been considered untouchable, who would carve the idols of gods?
But this does not mean that they have equal rights to resources to which social prestige is directly related. They are not settled in villages like other Other Backward Class or Dalit castes. Sometimes, villages have only a couple of Kumhar families. There is not a single village in Bihar and UP which belongs solely to the people of the Kumhar caste. At some places one can see a Kumhar Toli or Kumhar Tola but the size of the colony is very small.
In present times, social prestige is also related to numbers. In Bihar, a state with a population of 13 crores, the number of the people of Kumhar caste is only 1,834,418, according to the caste-based census report of 2022 released by the Bihar government recently. The share in the total population is 1.40%. This number has zero significance when it comes to political interference.
However, in Bihar they have been categorised as an Extremely Backward Class, while in other states of the country they are included in backward class lists. Only in Chhatarpur, Datia, Panna, Satna, Tikamgarh, Sidhi and Shahdol districts of Madhya Pradesh are they classified as Scheduled Castes.
In the present mechanical age, their traditional craft of moulding clay is dying out. But sometimes things change for good. As mystic poet Kabir once said –
“Glad that my earthen pot broke,
I am spared of the responsibility of filling it with water.”
The truth is harsh. Landlessness and non-availability of employment have forced them to work as daily wage labourers or to become migrant labourers and move to other cities and states. Only those who know what it means to create something can understand their pain.
Translated from Hindi by Naushin Rehman. Read the Hindi original here.
Read earlier parts of the series on the following communities by clicking on their names: Ghasi | Santrash | Madaria | Koeri/Kushwaha | Chaupal | Nai/Hajjaam | Pasi | Rangrez | Chamar | Gorkan | Jutt | Yadav | Kamar | Chik | Bari and Bauri | Dhuniya | Donwar | Sinduria Baniya | Bhathiyara | Dabgar.