With the Land Acquisition Bill in Parliament and the Opposition parties marching the streets, we all seem to have an opinion on land, how much it should cost, what use it is, and what should or should not be done with the pesky little farmers or tribals, or whoever is sitting on all this land. Stepping back may not really be an option for politicians or journalists, but it might be for the rest of us. In digging up the history of my hometown, Gorakhpur, perched on the north-eastern corner of Uttar Pradesh, I was struck by how much of it revolved around land ownership — how it was given and how its ownership was either accepted or contested.

The history of Gorakhpur goes further back than the known history of land ownership — or at least any recorded history of it. We know that the last Jain Tirthankara attained nirvana here, past the Ghaghra river, past the Rapti. The Buddha came here to breathe his last, as well he should have, since this is the land that brought forth his mother. The ground is so rich with artefacts that people find them while ploughing their fields. These do not tell us too much about land ownership patterns though, or social interactions.

Old Communists mention the gana sangha system, in which patches of land were communally owned. But there is no real way of knowing how much of the Mauryan Empire was gana sangha land. There were other forms of land ownership such as the sita lands, which were state-owned and worked on by hired labour or leased out.

A thousand years later, and we are on somewhat firmer ground, though it is still largely sourced from legend and myth. At this time the great Nath guru, Gorakhnath, enters the scene. Legends place him from the 11th century to the 13th century, legends also state that a grant of land was made by the Delhi Sultanate that led to the foundation of the temple that gives Gorakhpur its name.

It was a common practice among rulers wishing to enlarge their prestige beyond their territory to grant land to holymen. The land for the Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Harmandar Sahib, was reputedly granted to Guru Ram Das, the fourth Sikh Guru, by the Mughal emperor Akbar himself.

Akbar, or at least the Mughal empire, also had a direct effect in expanding the contours of Gorakhpur. It was, at that time, the outer edges of empire, heavily wooded and revenue-poor. The Mughal emperor instituted a policy that those who could clear the forests would be entitled to claim the land for themselves. In this way hardy souls set out to carve their little niches at the far reaches of settled lands. It remained a volatile boundary though. The Gorkhas — also deriving their name from Gorakhnath — claimed the territory too, and if a person were to flee imperial displeasure in India, he or she had only to get past the Ghagra. Ghagrapaar meant you were in another jurisdiction. To hunt down rebels from Jaunpur, Moazzam Shah, the son of Aurangzeb, came to Gorakhpur, ostensibly on a ‘hunt’, but with such a large army that a new part of the town was created, called Moazzamabad. Grants of ‘maddad i ma’ash’, or ‘help to the people’, were made in the form of tax-free land to the great and the good, which, many decades later, created a literary culture of which Munshi Premchand, Raghupati Sahai (better known as Firaq Gorakhpuri) and Majnun Gorakhpuri are proud examples.

Before the rise of illustrious authors and poets came the British. In 1801, the Nawab of Awadh, Asaf-ud-Daula, signed over these lands to the British, who used these first to grow opium for their Chinese buyers, and then indigo to sell to the world. It was not an easy conquest. There were the forest-dwelling Banjaras who resisted, and then, from 1806, a series of skirmishes that led to the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814-16. No sooner had the dust settled from these wars than came the great 1857 Uprising, in which Mohammad Hassan of Jaunpur ousted the British from Gorakhpur and, with the support of Bandhu Singh, a captain of Raja Sattasi, governed Gorakhpur as a free dominion in the name of Bahadur Shah Zafar. The British had their revenge, and for almost a year the great tree near the Jama Masjid was used to hang ‘rebels’, and their lands given away. Naturally it was here, or next to here, in Champaran that Gandhi launched his satyagraha in 1917. And it was here that the Parliamentarian Shibban Lal Saxena of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party rose in fame to demand land to the tiller.

All these stories come out of the ownership of, and disputes over land. They are our history, who we are, and how we understand ourselves. And while the politics of the Land Acquisition Bill will keep us arguing for some time yet, it might be useful to recall that that is not the whole story.

(Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan)

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