When P Sainath met Jagdhishwar Jeet Singh, the ‘man-eating’ landlord of Jharkhand

Daltonganj, Palamau (Bihar): “The public promoted my cheetah to a lion – thanks to journalists like you – that’s why I got such a bad image. You are interviewing me now. But I hope you know that your editors won’t publish your story unless it contains a few gaalis (abuses) against me?”

Meet Jagdhishwar Jeet Singh, the Manatu Mhowar (Maneater of Manatu). Once the most feared of the tyrannical landlords of Palamau – and perhaps of all Bihar. Also, the subject of documentaries, and stories by the BBC, among a host of others. A holder of the world record for the number of bonded labour cases brought against a single person (96 at one point). And a Jharkhand Party candidate who lost his deposit in the 1991 assembly polls.

The terror of the Manatu area of Palamau, the Mhowar allowed no one outside his family to construct a pucca house in his fiefdom for decades. He levied fines and taxes on villagers and ran an empire of thousands of acres on forced and bonded labour. His reputation – fully earned – was terrible. Villagers dreaded the man who kept a cheetah for a pet.

“Look, some people raise goats and some people gardens. Now goats devastate gardens, don’t they? But I like to raise both gardens and goats, all creatures. I only kept a simple cheetah (it died in 1982). People say I threw peasants to it. If so, could I have let it run about free in my house, endangering my own family? But you journalists need a sensation. So my cheetah became a lion, and I a man-eater.

“You charge me with bonded labour, but we live in an era where even a man’s son feels no bond to him. So how can anyone remain bonded?

“Are you taking my photograph? Get the angle right. I have to look sufficiently wicked. You’ll probably have to touch it up, you know. The last journal did that – apparently, I didn’t look evil enough for their story.

“And let me stand for a photograph in front of my car.” The car is an ancient, decrepit-looking Dodge that has not seen the road in a long time. “You see my wealth and splendour? Like car, like owner. Both are in the same condition.”

How does the actual record fit with such seeming simplicity? With the charm and the easy humour? Badly. Across the villages of Manatu lies a trail of bloodshed and pain. A trail of families bonded ages ago for having borrowed Rs 5. Of people subjected to unspeakable terror. And of cases falling flat in court due to witnesses being too afraid to appear against the mighty one of Manatu.

But the Mhowar’s downfall began in the late 70s and accelerated in the 80s. It came about more from the loss of forced and bonded labour than perhaps any other single factor. Anti-Mhowar officials and a vigorous CPI agitation in the 70s made it very difficult for him to retain bonded labour. By the late 80s, Naxalite groups had become active in his area. And today, squads of the extremist Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) stalk his domain, forcing him to spend more time in Daltonganj than in Manatu.

The actions of a block development officer, Bumbahadur Singh, put Jagdishwar Jeet Singh under a great deal of pressure in the 70s. The landlord found himself bogged down. All of a sudden, he was fighting a whole lot of cases brought against him. The charges ranged from large-scale timber smuggling to atrocities against villagers. Bumbahadur Singh also curbed the landlord’s habit of trampling on the common property rights of the villagers.

“Bumbahadur? Only the first bit of his name goes well. He was anything but bahadur (brave). I defeated all his cases. They were motivated by caste and personal jealousy,” claims the landlord. (The officer was a Rajput and the Mhowar is a Bhumihar.) Nevertheless, those battles seriously eroded his position.

Why join the Jharkhand Party? “Because they are for the poor, the oppressed and the tribals. I too am oppressed. I’m an old man (now about 70) who has lost so much land and who just wants to live in peace. The Jharkhand Party wants a separate state and development for the adivasis. And I am for that.”

But he is hardly an adivasi? “Don’t confuse the Jharkhand Party with other Jharkhandi movements like the JMM. The Jharkhand Party sees all of us living in this region as adivasis.”

“He joined the Jharkhand Party,” says a leading businessman of Daltonganj I met after the interview, “because he wanted to save his land. For that, he needed some political clout. The Congress was not strong enough to help him after the 70s. And he had alienated the Janata Party and its successors.”

Jagdishwar Jeet Singh has still managed to hold on, by one estimate, to about 1,200 acres of land. That is over thirty times the legal limit. And the filthy, decaying house where I interviewed him in Daltonganj sits atop property worth Rs 30 lakh. Yet, he has gone to seed. As a peep at the backyard disclosed, the “man-eater of Manatu” is selling buffalo milk – he has a sizeable fleet of bovines there – to earn an extra buck. What explains the combination of wealth and decay?

“He has money,” says the businessman, “but even he knows his reign is over. This sort of landlord simply cannot make the transition to the new situation. Some feudal tyrants have made that transition cleverly. But this sort doesn’t want to pay anyone anything. They have been used to terror, forced labour, and unpaid services all their lives. When these are curbed, they become pathetic. Only a part of the land with him is cultivated. If he wants to resort to forced labour, he has to contend with the Socialists, the Communists, and the MCC. So he just decays. His fangs have been drawn.”

Once in a while, he still does try enforcing his writ. The Chhotanagpur Samaj Vikas Sansthan – a local NGO – had successfully overseen the distribution of some of his surplus land last year. This had gone to eighty poor families in the Pathan block who officially received pattas to that land. Even as I was interviewing the Mhowar, I am later to learn, a group close to him attacked those families. The local police, charge villagers there, are either with the landlord or seeking bribes from them. But as I am leaving Palamau, an angry deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police seem to have called the Mhowar’s bluff. The poor families retain control of the land.

“Palamau,” says a local political activist, “will prosper when the curse of people like these is removed. We have to wipe out these feudal vestiges in land and agriculture. Else, there is no future for us.” All the evidence suggests he is right.

“So you are leaving?” asked Jagdishwar Jeet Singh at the end of our interview in the morning. The man-eater who could be on his way to becoming the toothless tabby of Palamau, waved goodbye: “Don’t forget to give me those gaalis in your article. Your story won’t be complete unless you throw in some abuses against me. And I can’t do anything. What’s the point of taking on journalists? If I take on one, the rest will start giving me gaalis.”

Excerpted with permission from ‘Despots, Distillers, Poets, and Artists: Characters of the Countryside’ by P Sainath, in In Search of the Indian Village: Stories and Reports, edited by Mamang Dai, Aleph Book Company.