When we think of Bihar today, it is usually in terms of migration: the apparently-endless stream of workers heading to Punjab’s farms, Delhi’s construction sites, or the Gulf’s shiny stadiums. But this mobility is not new. For centuries, Bihar has been one of India’s great reservoirs of manpower, supplying soldiers and peasants to empires near and far.
To understand why Bihar works (and votes) the way it does, we need to understand the long history of its migrant labour: from fifteenth‑century mercenaries in Malwa and Gujarat, to indentured workers shipped to Mauritius and Fiji, to today’s migrants in Dubai. The story is the same: Bihar’s labouring castes have always been mobile, and their mobility has always shaped politics.
Regionalism and fluid markets
While we often look to imperial moments to understand Indian history, the fact is that regionalism is much more the norm — and it is only by understanding regional interactions that we can understand India’s most enduring trends. This is especially the case with military labour. In the 1400s, the old juggernaut of the Delhi Sultanate had splintered into smaller, competing regional polities, among which the most important were the Gujarat and Malwa Sultanates — prosperous regions, but not populous.
In Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of The Military Labour Market in Northern Hindustan, 1450–1850, historian Dirk Kolff argues that Sultanates’ solution was to rely on mercenaries from the Gangetic Plains, specifically eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. Kolff describes this region, once called Purab, as home to an “armed society”: depending on supply and demand, peasants might seek employment either as warriors or cultivators.
The Gujarat and Malwa Sultanates particularly relied on Purbiya Rajputs from Bhojpur as mercenaries. Family networks and local strongmen helped funnel young men to battlefields where they could make a career, a fortune, or simply a living — before eventually returning home to their family farms. Some of these strongmen, like Silhadi Singh, started off as military entrepreneurs and eventually declared themselves kings.
So it’s unsurprising that the most important military man of the early 1500s came from this region: Sher Shah Suri, whose home was Sasaram in Bihar. Amidst the fray of strongmen in North India at the time, Sher Shah was the most formidable because his army had a secure source of military labour in Bihar. After defeating the Mughal adventurer Humayun in 1540, Sher Shah broke the autonomy of Purbiya warlords such as Silhadi Singh and absorbed their mercenary networks. He also ordered revenue surveys and direct assessment of peasant farms, reducing their ability to engage in seasonal warfare.
The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) soon proved to be Sher Shah’s heir in more ways than one. By establishing a system of zamindars and mansabdars, he made military labour in the Gangetic Plains more rooted to land and aristocracy, rather than peasant entrepreneurship. Mughal zamindars and bureaucrats, as we’ve seen earlier in Thinking Medieval, were notoriously extractive, meaning that young peasants had little option but to stay on their family farms. Even so, the route to military careers was not entirely cut off. Mughal mansabdars were required to maintain cavalry in return for revenue rights to land parcels, but they also frequently recruited infantry and retainers from these lands. It was only with the unravelling of Mughal power that Bihar’s labour would once again be unfettered — but not necessarily in an empowering way.
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Indenture and globalisation
The next major stage in the evolution of Bihari labour migration began in another period of regionalism: the eighteenth century, when the Mughal imperial apparatus unravelled dramatically. As CA Bayly writes in Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, the fraught political and economic situation created a reciprocal dependence.
Peasant refugees, fleeing marauders, needed new homes and lands; zamindars needed funds to pay off smaller and more regionally-focussed states. Extraction intensified: rents rose, grain was diverted, and coercion deepened. Ever-expanding mercantile and financial networks offered credit to peasant cultivators. All this created the conditions for a new mobility: since village subsistence was no longer possible, peasants were forced back into seasonal migration.
Bihari households sent members to Bengal’s indigo fields or Awadh’s harvests, where wages could be earned in cash to pay off creditors. Social networks — kinship ties, caste solidarities, and village brokers facilitated this circulation, ensuring that migrants could return after the season. Some castes remained entirely itinerant, working only as shifting cultivators. And so, even as landowning castes like Purbiya Rajputs and Bhumihar Brahmins could seek military service in elite organisations like the East India Company, Yadavs, Kurmis, and Dalits became the mobile workforce of eastern India.
In earlier editions of Thinking Medieval, we have seen how colonial employment not only allowed Bihar’s Bhumihars to consolidate land ownership but also made them more mobile as warriors in the 1800s. Simultaneously, debt slavery drove already-marginalised Bihari workers to Mauritius, Fiji, and the Caribbean — they came disproportionately from the Chamar, Dusadh, Ahir, Kurmi, and Koeri castes. What had been seasonal circuits within north India became oceanic migrations across the British Empire.
Caste, labour and politics today
The long history of Bihar’s labour markets shaped the region’s politics into the Freedom Struggle and beyond. In his paper “From Peasant Soldiering to Peasant Activism”, historian Walter Hauser argued that the martial ethos of Purbiya Rajputs and Bhumihar Brahmins allowed them to mobilise in organisations such as the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929–42); they continue to play a central role in the NDA, through their support of the BJP, even today.
Similarly, the earlier rise of the Rashtriya Janata Dal party relied on the mobilisation of Yadav peasants, while the Kurmis, having become more prosperous in recent decades, tend to vote for the Janata Dal (United). Meanwhile, the same oppressed castes — primarily Dalits and Ahirs — who once migrated to British plantation farms now migrate to Punjab, Delhi, and the Gulf. One could argue that the trends of colonial labour have never really ended: intermediate and lower castes provide the backbone of Bihar’s mobile labour, while upper castes consolidate political power at home. From swords to sickles to suitcases, the histories of caste, power and migration have always been intertwined in Bihar.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)