{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02334152334152334, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013513513513513514, 'mean_word_length': 4.789099526066351, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Bazzar India, Markets, Society and the Colonial State in Bihar. By Anand A. Yang. pp. xi, 305. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998.

It is probably because of its backwardness that the Indian state of Bihar has drawn the attention of some of the best historians of the agrarian and rural history of South Asia. Yang definitely ranks high on the list of historians who have made Bihar their preferred area of study. He has written on the limits of colonial rule, the power of the local magnates, formation of religious and communitarian identities and law and policing in rural Bihar. Some of these themes reappear quite prominently in the present book. But in terms of the period covered (1757 to 1947), the range of information supplied and the depth of analysis offered, Bazaar India is a novel and refreshing approach to the interpretation of the history of the region. Yang has discarded caste and village, two of the favourite parameters, and has embraced the prism of the market to reconstruct the history of rural Bihar. He has successfully shown that most of the themes so far analysed through the former categories changing focus of power, grouping and regrouping of castes, formation of new identities, exercise of authority and control and the linkages between the local society and the outside world are better analysed through the "template" of the Bazaar. Secondly, while the emphasis is on the long-term structural changes, Yang has uniquely reconstructed the history of the Bihari bazaar by recovering the voices of the subjects who have recorded their engagement with the market place. Three such accounts from three eras form the main chapters of the book. Chapter two, on the city of Patna, is based on the account of the contemporary historian Sayyid Ghulam Husain's (1727/28 to 1797/98) Seir Mutaqherin (View of the Modern Times). Against Husain's contention, Yang reiterates that during the first century of colonial rule in Patna, bankers, moneylenders and the trading classes became more powerful. Their decline began from the late nineteenth century as Calcutta emerged as the main commercial and business centre of the empire and railways reduced the importance of Patna. Within the region the lower markets assumed many of the roles of higher markets and smaller market towns developed at the cost of Patna. Enugula Veeraswamy's account of his pilgrimage to north India (Kasiyatra Charitra) in 1830/31 is