Arampur’s residents relate a variety of narratives about the past of their village, the region, their state, and their country. They learn many of the ones about Bihar and India through whatever formal education they receive, if they get any, through government schools and private schools. Residents learn other narratives through their families, friends, and neighbors. The specifics of these narrated pasts often conflict with one another and audience members at times question, doubt, or outright contradict what someone claims. In this way, Arampur does not differ from anywhere else.

Once the term “history” gets used to describe these narratives or the events they describe, issues of truth and verification automatically come to the fore. English speakers often juxtapose “history” with “myth,” “legend,” and “fable.” Each of these terms qualifies the actuality of the claimed event and its participants. Bhojpuri, Hindi, and Urdu speakers likewise have terms to qualify the stories they hear and relate. What one person declares to be history (tarikh, itihas) another may declare a myth or mistake (galati). While most Arampur residents explain how Shastri Pandit became a brahm, traveled to Delhi to summon the sultan there, and instigated the military defeat of the local raja, some will disparage this as not history but a tale.

There is little use in arguing here for the historical truth of any specific event. The scenarios section allows the user to search for and hear a variety of narratives as given by individuals in Arampur. Instead, following the conventions of the academic discipline of history, this section will outline the broad political patterns that Arampur experienced as established by contemporary documents and archaeology. Besides some architectural edifices and the abandoned fort mound, Arampur residents know of little historical materials that describe life in Arampur from even a few hundred years before the present. Even these relics lack inscriptions that provide more than but a few clues as to their patrons and builders. However, no one has delved into the surviving documents of pre-modern rulers to determine what evidence might exist for the village and its environs from this period.

No evidence for the existence of Arampur in ancient times is known. However, the area where it stands was under the control, at different times, of the kingdoms of Kashi, Magadha, the Mauryans, the Nandas, Kushana, the Guptas, the Palas, the Ghurids, and the Mamluks. In about 1200, the Turkic general Bakhtyar Khalji inadvertently provided the name by which the entire region would be known up to the present day – Bihar – after he referred to his destruction of a Buddhist monastery (vihara) elsewhere in the area. The area later came under the power of the Tughluqs, Sharqis, Lodis, and the Mughals as these groups succeeded one another in controlling the Ganges Valley from Delhi to the Bay of Bengal. Judging from the age of the monumental mausoleums found in the area (such as that reputed to contain Bakhtiyar Khilji), it appears that Arampur became a place of some political and/or military consequence although it remains unclear why or when. By the seventeenth century, Arampur was a significant enough place for a Mughal pargana (a subdivision of a district) to be named after the village and a military command to be centered there.

By this time, European travelers began to pass through this area (even through Arampur itself) as merchants sought new products to bring to western markets. The French, Dutch, and British all sought their individual advantage as competition among them intensified. However, the British took a long step toward their ultimate victory in this race when the East India Company defeated the Nawab (“governor”) of Bengal and Bihar at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The Mughal emperor recognized this victory and awarded this royally sanctioned English commercial concern the right and responsibility to collect taxes in the entire region. They quickly moved to monopolize all the trade and agricultural production in the area. Unfortunately, this led to rapacious practices by some British collectors and the disruption of previous patterns of food distribution so that in 1770 the district that included Arampur suffered a terrible famine that led to reports of abandoned settlements, social chaos, and wide scale starvation. If and how this situation impacted Arampur is not clear. The British later took steps to ameliorate the worst of these abuses in order to avoid similar situations in the future. Nevertheless, the zamindar of Arampur joined in a rebellion against the British led by the Raja of Banaras in 1781 that proved unsuccessful. A famine two years later eclipsed the suffering of the one in 1770 though, again, with unknown impact on Arampur.

In 1809-1810, the British civil servant Francis Buchanan (later, Buchanan Hamilton) surveyed Arampur for the East India Company. Reflecting the brevity of his visit during his long tour through a vast country, Buchanan estimated that the village had from 600 to 1000 houses. He also recorded the narrative of Shastri Brahm and the fallen raja. Meanwhile, opium (long a local crop) continued to be cultivated in the district. The opium grown in Bihar and Banaras enjoyed such a reputation for quality that the British prohibited its cultivation outside of these areas until 1816. An opium factory existed in the town neighboring Arampur as early as 1799 while the British developed the market in China. Another local export was manpower. The British recruited a relatively high percentage of men to serve in the police and army from the district. The rule of the East Indian Company would terminate as a result of the Rebellion of 1857 when Indian sepoys (soldiers) defied their British commanders and assaulted Britishers throughout North India. Arampur’s district would be the only one in Bihar to revolt although, reflecting the lack of unanimous support for the rebellion, a thakur (landed proprietor) in Arampur rebuffed the rebels. They returned better armed and plundered Arampur. When the British finally regained control the next year, they followed bloody reprisals with a new government directed by the British crown instead of the East India Company. Nevertheless, food shortages plagued the district throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

In 1881, the significance of the huge mausoleum locally attributed to Bakhtiyar Khilji brought Arampur to the attention of the newly constituted Archaeological Survey of India. The ASI sought to record and preserve historical monuments throughout India in an effort to “know” and “save” India’s history in ways Indians did not seem willing or capable of doing themselves. When William Crooke reported the narrative of Shastri Brahm just before the turn of the century, he would do so in his collection of “legends” and “popular superstitions”; not the stuff of historian but of the ethnographer.

Meanwhile, British cultivators promoted indigo, a plant used in dyeing cloth but which offered no nutrition in times of crop failure. Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi would later (1917) initiate his first agitation against the British in India when he protested abusive indigo planting practices in a Bihar district to the north of Arampur. At the same time, the experience of serving among British forces throughout the empire during World War One somehow shook the commitment of many area men to army and police service. The British began to curtail their recruitment in Bhojpuri-speaking areas. After the war, protests against British rule began to mount in the district and Gandhi visited the neighboring town in 1927. He promoted the use of home-spun cloth and the eradication of untouchability (he would coin the term Harijan [“God’s children”] as an alternative term for low-castes, a title still used among those in Arampur even as it has been rejected by many others throughout India). When the Second World War began, the district would often lead others in the state with the number of arrests for civil disobedience. Saboteurs harassed the British infrastructure throughout the district by cutting telegraph wires, attacking mail carriers, and otherwise disrupting everyday operations.

As the Second World War ended and Indians prepared to finally receive complete independence from British rule, Arampur’s district largely missed the vicious bloodshed in many other states and Bihar districts as some Muslims agitated for their own homeland, Pakistan. When Partition and the creation of Pakistan occur at the moment of India’s independence (14 August 1947), few Muslims leave Arampur for Pakistan.

Post-independence Arampur has encountered significant changes, as reflected in many of the website’s interviews. Perhaps most significantly, when the Indian central government chose to forego the economic protections from foreign imports and liberalize the national economy at the end of the 1980s, a swell of consumer goods and business opportunities followed first in India’s cities, and then in at least some of its villages. As the interviews and update sections on this website demonstrate, this has ushered in changes that accelerate in degree. Although the first telephone lines were laid only in 1994, international calls could be made from a phone booth in the bazaar by 2000, and by 2003 cell phones became available with a tower positioned near the bus stand. And in 2002, the son of an Arampur-born father found his village on the world wide web through an earlier version of “A Virtual Village.”