Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 PDF

Making Peace, Making Riots The decade of the 1940s was a turbulent one for Bengal. War, famine, riots and partition – Bengal witnessed it all, and the unique experience of each of these created a space for diverse social and political forces to thrive and impact lives of people of the province. The book embarks on a study of the last seven years of colonial rule in Bengal, analysing the interplay of socioeconomic and political factors that shaped community identities into communal ones. The focus is on three major communal riots that the province witnessed – the Dacca Riots (1941), the Great Calcutta Killing (August 1946) and the Noakhali Riots (October 1946). However, the study does not limit itself to an understanding of communal violence alone; it also studies anti-communal resistance, especially the Gandhian model of peace-keeping to enable a complete understanding of a communal riot. It analyzes the Bengal famine, tracing the nature of breakdown of Bengali society, and their dependence on relief and rehabilitation – which came thickly coated in communal colours and transformed community perceptions into communal identities. These events were closely tied with the politics around the Secondary Education Bill and the transformation of the Muslim League from an arm-chair organization to a more popular party demanding Pakistan, with a distinct socialist colouring and a support base not just among Muslims but also some sections among the Scheduled Castes. This book moves beyond the binary understanding of communalism as Hindu versus Muslim and looks at the caste politics in the province, and offers a thorough understanding of the 1940s before partition. Anwesha Roy is Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Gandhian Politics at the Department of History, King’s College London. She completed her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and was a Charles Wallace Scholar to Britain in the year 2014. Making Peace, Making Riots Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940–1947 Anwesha Roy University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 to 321, 3rd Floor, Plot No.3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108428286 © Anwesha Roy 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-108-42828-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Maps and Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xiii Glossary xv Introduction 1 1. The Dacca Riot, 1941 26 2. Famine 1943 – Towards a Hardening of Community Identities 68 3. From Community to Communal: The Bengal Secondary Education Bill and the Idea of Pakistan 104 4. The Great Calcutta Killing, August 1946 148 5. Noakhali Riots, October 1946 184 6. A Test of Faith: Gandhi in Noakhali and Calcutta 1946–47 214 Concluding Remarks 247 Appendix 1 251 Appendix 2 253 Appendix 3 259 Appendix 4 260 Bibliography 263 Index 271 Maps and Figures Maps 3.1 Published in Mujibur Rehman Khan’s Pakistan (Mohammadi Book Agency, Calcutta, 1942) 134 3.2 Detailed map showing Muslim population in the different districts of Bengal, prepared by East Pakistan Renaissance Society in 1944 135 5.1 Map showing Noakhali, Tippera and adjoining regions 187 Figures 6.1 Cartoon in Dawn, 3 November 1946 227 6.2 Cartoon in Dawn, 2 November 1946. The image shows the Viceroy looking through a special microscope, provided by Gandhi that magnified the Noakhali casualties thousand times. Under such an influence, he ignores the plight of Muslims in Bihar 228 6.3 Cartoon in Dawn, 22 October 1946. The Cartoon depicts Gandhi using a ‘Book of Tricks’ to win over Muslims of Noakhali 228 Acknowledgements This book has come out of the research conducted while I was a doctoral scholar at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I owe my gratitude to Professor Tanika Sarkar, without whose guidance and support this work would have been truly impossible. I would like to thank some of the other faculty members who were a source of inspiration, support and encouragement throughout my doctoral years and later as well – Professor Janaki Nair, Professor Kunal Chakrabarti, Professor Indivar Kamtekar and Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya. The National Archives of India (New Delhi) and the West Bengal State Archives (Kolkata) have been crucial in the course of my research and I am grateful towards their staff. I owe special thanks to the staff of Intelligence Branch Archives (Kolkata) and the Special Branch Archives (Kolkata) (which almost became my second home during research) for their ready assistance all the time. I also thank the staff of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi), Central Secretariat Library (New Delhi) and National Library (Kolkata) for ready access to all the important sources that have been used to construct this work. A fellowship from the Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) enabled me to visit the UK for field work in 2014. I was also assisted in this by the Indian Council for Historical Research. I am grateful to both for all their support. I must mention Mr Richard Alford, secretary of the Charles Wallace India Trust, who not only facilitated my visit to the UK but also helped me in all my scholarly endeavours while I was in London. I specially thank the staff of the British Library in London and the Centre of South Asian Studies Library in Cambridge for making my field work remarkably effortless and memorable. My heartfelt gratitude for the staff of the Dhaka University Library for providing me ready assistance during my field trip to Dhaka in 2013. A Teaching Assistantship at Ashoka University in 2015 brought me in contact with Dr Aparna Vaidik and Dr Gwen Kelly. They have been most helpful in every possible way. I hold my students at Ashoka University very close to heart – with them I have had some of the most intellectually stimulating discussions. Since xii Acknowledgements 2016, I have been a Marie Curie Post Doctoral Fellow at the Department of History, Kings College London. I am greatly indebted to the faculty members of the department for all their support. Special thanks to Dr Jon Wilson who has read parts of the manuscript and commented on it. I have had numerous discussions with him on some of the key concepts and ideas explored in the book, that have not only helped me to write better, but also have opened new avenues in my mind. Publication of this book has been made possible by Cambridge University Press, and I must thank them for their guidance at every step during this incredible journey. Sohini Ghosh and Aditya Majumdar deserve special mention, for patiently bearing with my endless queries and making the process of publication so smooth. My greatest debt is to my family. I am grateful to my parents, Amitava Ray and Tanuja Roy for always allowing me to follow my heart. My grandparents have been a great support for me, especially during the time of field work in Calcutta. I cannot express enough love for my sister Ashavari for believing in me and always showing great interest in my work. My parents in law, Sucheta Das and Pranab Kumar Das and my sister in law, Paromita have always supported me in all my academic endeavours. Prasenjit has forever been reordering my chaos and been my constant pillar of strength. I truly cannot express enough gratitude to him. Innumerable discussions with friends and fellow researchers helped to open new ideas in my mind and made research work stimulating and enjoyable. I thank Aksad Alam for his extremely valuable suggestions and an endless supply of reading materials during my stay in Dhaka. I must also mention Khademul Huq and Rita apa for their heart-warming hospitality, which made research at Dhaka very comfortable. I thank Neha Chatterji, Anubhav Sengupta, Anirban Bhattacharya and Anwesha Sengupta who have always been ready to discuss the questions and doubts that I presented them with from time to time while writing this book. I am especially grateful to Ishan Mukherjee, with whom I have had endless debates regarding the themes of the book. My understanding of several aspects of my work has evolved as a result of interactions with him. Archive- hopping in Kolkata and the UK would not have been so much fun without him. Shreya Goswami has endured my manifold eccentricities and literally looked after me on several occasions. She has been the most understanding friend. Farha Noor and Swarnim Khare have been my support structure and my gratitude for them cannot be expressed in words. Sourav Mahanta deserves special thanks for helping me out with field work in Delhi, and I would have been lost without him. And last, but not the least, I thank Arti Minocha, Rajarshi Chunder and Ranjeeta Bhattacharya. Abbreviations AICC All India Congress Committee AIML All India Muslim League AIWC All India Women’s Conference BPCC Bengal Provincial Congress Committee CWMG Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi DIB District Intelligence Branch FIC Famine Inquiry Commission GOB Government of Bengal IB Intelligence Branch MARS Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti NAI National Archives of India NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library SB Special Branch SC Scheduled Castes SDO Sub-Divisional Officer WBSA West Bengal State Archives Glossary Abala helpless woman Abwab fines or cesses levied by the landlord upon the peasants. Ahimsa non-violence Akhara gymnasium/ a place for wrestling Andolan a movement/ struggle Atar also called itar, is a sweet smelling oil or perfume Bhadralok a social class among Bengalis, generally comprising of prosperous, well-educated people. Bhog food offerings to Hindu deities Bhookh Michil Hunger March Brahmacharya celibacy Bustee slum Chadar cloth Chheni Chisel Dal-bhaat lentil curry and rice, a staple diet among Bengalis Darshan the auspicious act of seeing a holy person or a deity Ejahar Complaint Ghar Wapasi Homecoming; usually refers to the ‘re-conversion’ to Hinduism, of ‘lower’ castes, who had earlier been converted to Christianity or Islam. Ghat a flight of steps leading down to the river, often a place where Hindu cremation ceremonies take place. Goalas Milkmen Godown a warehouse Goonda a thug or a bully Gulail catapult Hartal closure of shops and offices as a sign of protest. Hat a local, rural market Janmashtami Hindu festival celebrating the birth of the God Krishna Jauhar Hindu practice of mass self-immolation by women to avoid capture/rape by invaders, usually after defeat in a war xvi Glossary Jumma Friday Prayer of Muslims Kalma the Muslim confession of Faith Kalwars artisans working with scrap metals Kasai butcher Khals small water bodies Khichuri also called Khichdi, is a dish made in South Asia by boiling together lentils and rice. Kripa grace or mercy Krishak farmer Lathi a long and strong stick Lungi a loose garment wrapped around the waist, extending to the ankles, usually worn by males in South Asia. Madad-i-maash Tax free lands given by Mughal Emperors as charity to pious/ religious/worthy recipients. Malechha or Mlechha, is a derogatory term for one who does not practice Hinduism. Mochi shoe-maker Mofussil countryside Mohalla neighbourhood Mussalman Muslim Namaskar a form of respectful greeting among Hindus Namaz Islamic prayer to be observed five times a day Patha male goat Phen starchy water that is drained out after the rice has been boiled. Pir a Muslim holy man Prarthana prayer Purdah Veil Ram-dhun Singing the name of Ram Ramzan the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and observed by Muslims across the world, celebrating the revelation of the Holy Quran to Prophet Mohammad. Rathajatra a Hindu festival, signified by the symbolic pulling of the ratha or chariot of the God Jagannath. Sadhana disciplined practice Salam salutation, usually also a form of greeting among Muslims Sangathan unity Sankharis Conch-shell workers in rural Bengal. Shiva Ratri a Hindu festival celebrated annually in honour of the God Shiva Shuddhi purification Teata Multi-mouthed Lance Thana a police station, often refers also to the area that comes under the jurisdiction of a particular police station. Introduction 1 Introduction Let me begin with a bit of personal history. I grew up in a Bengali family that had seen the horrors of the partition of Bengal. Although I did not live in West Bengal (my father was posted in Bokaro Steel City, Jharkhand), on my frequent trips to Calcutta I was surprised to find how strong the Bengali Hindu identity there was, not just for my family, but also amongst most Bengalis living in the city. Probing deeper, I found that they consciously tried to reinforce this identity through ‘customs’, ‘traditions’, attire, food and cultural practices. Discussions about a glorious ‘Bengali’ past would often go beyond literary geniuses like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay; equally important was to remember ‘historical’ personalities who had ‘fought’ valiantly for our freedom. Interestingly, amongst many such ‘freedom fighters’, one name would figure prominently at the top of the list – Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the well- known leader of the Hindu Mahasabha from Bengal and, later, also the founder of the Jana Sangh. Hailed as a ‘saviour’ who prevented the Balkanization of Bengal, his politics of the Hindu Mahasabha were considered by the Calcutta Bengalis to be just and even necessary in the face of partition. In contrast, there was also a very conscious attempt to vilify Gandhi as one who had bartered away ‘India’s’ integrity to appease Muslims. My grandparents had migrated to Calcutta from East Bengal after being compelled, like many others before and after them, to flee their homeland after the partition of Bengal in 1947. The ugly communal riots had stirred their apprehensions about a future in East Bengal. I had heard stories about the Great Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali riots from my grandfather in which he would repeatedly recount how Hindus were butchered in thousands by their Muslim neighbours, and friends turned foes overnight. This perplexed me even more, because Hindus too had killed their Muslim neighbours in thousands. This selective amnesia, which I found not just among those who had witnessed the partition but also amongst the next generation who had only heard stories about it, drove me to seek an understanding of the deeper 2 Making Peace, Making Riots currents that ran through the formation of such apparent ‘fixed’ categories as Hindus and Muslims. I also noticed the almost instinctive exclusion of Muslims from any ideas of the ‘Bengali community’. ‘Bengali’ was always and almost matter-of-factly equated with being Hindu. A more immediate brush with communalism was the Sikh massacres in 1984 which had affected even a small town like Bokaro Steel City quite badly. My parents had witnessed the riot and my father had narrowly escaped getting hurt. Community ties, with a strong sense of Hindu-Muslim-Sikh divide has since existed in a palpable way in this very small city1. My personal experiences of communal violence are located in the Gujarat massacres of 2002. The nature and scale of the violence were incomprehensible and the recurring newspaper images of a badly injured Muslim man with folded hands at a police station haunted me. I questioned the rationale behind such acts of violence, personalized vividly in the exalted faces of Hindu rioters with swords in their hands. In more recent times, the ‘saffron wave’ in almost the all of north, west and eastern India and parts of southern India in the wake of the Central Assembly polls of 2014 and in its aftermath, has made the reemergence of the Hindu Right in Indian politics a much more palpable reality. The repetitive harping of the Sangh Parivar about ‘rebuilding the Ram Temple’ in Ayodhya and the use of social media like Facebook and Twitter to reach out to the nation’s youth with its programme of Hindu cultural nationalism have also acquired new dimensions since the pre-poll mobilisation drive of 2014. Moreover, the recent insistence of extreme Hindu right-wing groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) upon ‘Ghar Wapasi’ (homecoming) for people who had apparently ‘strayed away’ from Hinduism (which invariably focuses on the Dalit converts to Islam and Christianity) is also glaringly reminiscent of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Sangathan movement in the 1940s, especially in Bengal. In the setting of present day Bengal politics, the retreat of the Left has led to increased opportunities and subsequently attempts of the Hindu right-wing political groups to capture its base. This work is therefore the outcome of a long-standing urge to understand communalism, its growth, sustenance and, also, its limits in a plural society. HISTORIOGRAPHY I. Debates around Communalism C. A. Bayly has argued in favour of a ‘pre-history of communalism’ in the land wars of eighteenth-century India. He makes a distinction between two Introduction 3 situations. One, where religious buildings and festivals were the chief objects of conflict and rulers played an important part in initiating and resolving disputes. Second, where economic and social conflicts occurred predominantly between groups from different religious affiliations.2 In the former case, Bayly argues, ‘savage destruction and slaughter could take place between groups who continued to venerate the shrines and holy figures of each other’s traditions, but fought strenuously for immediate sovereignty of holy places. Sikhs may sometimes have vilified Muslims as ‘Turks’, but it seems unlikely that any monolithic communal identity existed or was in the process of emerging’.3 In the second case however, the conflicts between the religious communities which assumed the form of ‘land wars’ could be expressed in the vocabulary of ‘communal antagonism’. Bayly cites a couple of reasons behind classifying these land wars as ‘communal’. Firstly, the nature of the declining Mughal state and administration had ensured that holders of privileged tenures like madad-i-maash grants were mostly Muslims, while their local competitors belonged to ‘Hindu agricultural castes’ like Rajputs, Bhumihars and Jats’.4 Secondly, these land wars often assumed the form of savage attacks where demolition of mosques, graveyards and Sufi shrines along with houses of the Muslim gentry became the primary objective. He concludes that ‘The land wars of the eighteenth century which saw the rise of agrarian Sikh and Hindu peasantry against Muslim rural gentry were apparently no more or less ‘communal’ than the riots in eastern U.P. in the 1920s or eastern Bengal in the 1930s and 1940s’.5 There are some obvious contradictions in Bayly’s statements. On the one hand he asserts that no teleology should be established by which the conflicts of this period are stretched out to provide the background for Muslim or Hindu-Sikh contentions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 Yet, he uses an eighteenth-century milieu to trace the genesis of communalism in the colonial period in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By tracing what he calls a ‘pre-history of communalism’, Bayly seems to suggest an unbroken trajectory from the eighteenth century to the end of the colonial rule. He negates the experience of colonial ‘subjects’ in structuring their own notions of community through indices introduced by the colonial state like the Census, formalized educational ventures, print culture and institutionalized politics from 1937. The importance of specific political configurations at historical junctures and the importance of the historical juncture itself in providing the scope for the development of communalism and communal politics are also clearly overlooked in his argument. 4 Making Peace, Making Riots Bipan Chandra argues precisely in the opposite direction. He argues that it would be incorrect to treat communalism as a ‘remnant of the past’.7 He sees communalism as a byproduct of colonialism. Chandra defines communalism as ‘the belief that by virtue of following the same religion, a group of people have common social, political and economic interests’. Situating the rise of communalism in the British colonial impact, he argues that both nationalism and communalism were ‘modern phenomena’ and the products of social change witnessed during colonial rule.8 Chandra says that lack of deep penetration of nationalist ideology has contributed to the prevalence of communal ideology 9. Communalism was a ‘false consciousness’ as it presented reality in a distorted form; it was not just a ‘partial view of reality’ but a ‘false view’. Objectively, no real conflict between the interests of Hindus and Muslims existed.10 This false view, according to Chandra, developed because of the failure of certain sections of the Indian society to ‘adequately develop the new national consciousness’. In Chandra’s analysis, therefore, what constitutes true consciousness is inevitably nationalism. He argues that the acute shortage of superior jobs carrying high salaries and social status, along with rising prices during the World Wars, filled the middle classes with anxiety about their future and led to a sense of loss of identity as well. This often created an atmosphere of violence and brutality which, triggered by a religious issue, turned into communal riots. Such a sense of destruction of identity, when paired with lack of faith in the national movement, led individuals and groups from the middle classes to seek short term solutions. Here, the use of religion to posit one community against the other or blame one community for the failure of another was facilitating. On the other hand, Chandra claims, the ‘masses’ were attracted to communalism by ‘having their religious fervour excited’, for in their case, communalism involved or projected ‘none of their real life demands or interests’. In their case, the fear complex could be fully aroused not by claiming that their interests were in danger, but by insisting that their religion itself was in danger.11 Here, a certain elitist bias is evident in Chandra’s argument. Besides the obvious problems in treating the ‘masses’ as an amorphous category, he seems to imply that religion solely ordered the world view of the ‘masses’, whereas the ‘middle classes’ were concerned more about jobs and educational opportunities. He oversimplifies how the dynamic nature of communal ideology and identity formation could actually negotiate with ‘real interests’ of the ‘masses’, like economic and social betterment and mobility. Introduction 5 Chandra’s statement that ‘communal tension was spasmodic and usually directly involved the lower classes only’12 is also problematic in that he sees the ‘lower classes’ as naturally susceptible to communal propaganda. He points out that participants in and the victims of a communal riot were ‘necessarily the urban poor and lumpen and goonda elements, though in a few cases peasants were also involved. There was seldom any physical participation of middle and upper classes, though they often lent material and moral support to the lumpen and goonda participants’13. My dissent with this view is that if we accept that the ‘lower classes’ can be easily or naturally swayed by propaganda, we inevitably also accept the fact that they do not have the agency for rational thinking of their own. Moreover, the physical absence of middle and upper classes in a communal riot that Chandra emphasizes, was negated by the presence of Bengali Hindu businessmen, ‘influential merchants’ and students who had been arrested on charges of rioting during the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946.14 Although he argues that communalism and communal riots are different, his statement that ‘the overwhelming majority of Indians, especially in the rural areas, were unaffected by communal tensions’15 betrays a subconscious compulsion of looking at the extent of communalization through the prism of riots alone. This is especially true in the context of Bengal in the 1940s, where issues around the Census, education and famine relief resulted in thriving communal tension. In Chandra’s view of communalism, all other social identities are either denied or, when accepted in theory, are either negated in practice or subordinated to the religious identity.16 Here, Chandra once again oversimplifies the myriad ways in which communalism relates to and negotiates with such identities. Another problem with his line of argument lies in seeing communalism simply as the other of anti-colonial nationalism and seeing ‘nationalism’ as a monolithic homogenous category. He points out that nationalism acquired its validity because it was ‘the correct reflection of an objective reality: the developing identity of common interests of the Indian people, in particular against the common enemy, foreign imperialism’.17 Here Chandra negates the subjective experiences of ‘Indian people’ in constructing both their own versions of ‘interests’ and ‘common enemy’ in the course of their ‘developing identity’. He falls into the trap of seeing the ‘Indian Nation’ as a single, natural given category. Prabha Dixit, too, offers a similar understanding of communalism and the development of communal organizations. She argues for the singularity of nationalism, positing nationalism and communalism as mutually exclusive 6 Making Peace, Making Riots categories, communalism as the opposite of nationalism. She goes on to state, in a very different vein from Chandra, that Muslim communalism stood in the way of the development of ‘Indian’ nationalism (emphasis mine), thereby treating ‘Muslims’ and ‘Indians’ as separate binaries and falling within the communalist trap herself. Her contention is that ‘Muslim communalism in India did not arise as a reaction to Hindu communalism, nor was it religiously inspired. It was an independent political movement which developed as an antithesis of Indian nationalism’.18 She sees Muslim communalism arising as a political doctrine amongst the Muslim elite, as the only plausible and available way to safeguard their class interests, because they had lost out to the Hindus in the race for democratization and modernization. This elite then manipulated the ‘ignorant masses’ into falling in line with its political doctrine. Once again, we see the negation of agency to the ‘masses’ by treating them as ‘ignorant’ and naturally susceptible to the elite’s manipulation. Gyan Pandey offers a completely different take on the relationship between nationalism and communalism. He locates the rise of communalism in the Indian context in the 1920s. ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ political mobilization, he argues, had been seen in the past as necessary in the early stages of building Indian nationalism. But from the 1920s, such politics became the ‘chief flogging horse of Indian nationalism’.19 Thus was born the ‘nationalist version’ of the concept of communalism. According to Pandey, Indian nationalism was conceptualized only in opposition to the concept of communalism. This view challenges the view of nationalist historians who hold that communalism developed in opposition to Indian nationalism.20 The language of the ‘purely national’, unaffected by pulls of caste, class or religion, was put forward by leaders of the Indian National Congress, especially Gandhi; it elevated the concept of the Indian nation to a different plane, one that pushed its foundations beyond the notions of religious communities, castes and class.21 The idea of an essential ‘unity of India’ was put forward by the nationalist enterprise, and centuries of Muslim rule before the arrival of the British were also incorporated within this narrative along with ‘Hindu’ rulers like Ashoka and the Rajputs. Examples of the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir and the sixteenth-century Mughal ruler Akbar were celebrated to show the unity, syncretism and synthesis inherent in the ‘Indian’ cultural fabric.22 Communalism became everything that nationalism was not. This was the othering of communalism; it was seen as regressive, reactionary and essentially born out of the machinations of the colonial regime. Introduction 7 However, Pandey points out, this nationalist enterprise was fraught with oversimplification. The nationalism being professed by the Congress reconstructed its past to establish in it the unity, uniqueness and pride of the ‘nation’23. But not all ‘nationalisms’ reconstructed their past in the same way (emphasis mine). Thus, Pandey makes space for the subjective conceptualization and construction of nationalism by different social groups. As he says, ‘one person’s nationalism was often another’s communalism’24. Moreover, the historical reconstruction of the past and its ‘unity’ by the nationalists was premised on great rulers of India – the Mughals, the Rajputs etc. What was completely overlooked in this narrative were common people as ‘historical agents, who were struggling to realize their many versions of truth, honour and just life.’25 Precisely because of this lacuna, nationalism was ‘forced into the kind of statist perspective’ that colonialism itself was promoting. Colonialist and the nationalist perceptions about communalism also overlapped. Both nationalists and colonialists accepted the ‘given-ness’ of communalism ‘as a more or less tangible phenomenon whose causes can be readily identified, and of its other – rationalism or liberalism, secularism or nationalism, however one chooses to put it’.26 Pradip Kumar Datta offers a nuanced understanding of communalism and communal identities. He argues against the singularity of collective identities in any form. He asserts that different identities are not necessarily hard boundaries that can never be transgressed. Even communal collective identities relate in different ways to class, gender and caste affiliations and what needs to be studied carefully are the vulnerabilities of such identities, the ways in which their ‘hardness’ has to mediate, compromise and suppress in order to produce ‘tentative unities’ that proclaim themselves to be ‘bonded monoliths’.27 Datta studies identity formation in a more dynamic form, arguing that communalism as an ideological field is fraught with inner tensions, in which it wrestles with the claims of other collectives. Therefore, communalism constantly engages in a process of displacing or actively opposing claims of other collective identities; it has the capability of submerging all vertical social divisions, but in this process it has to compete with rival identities and engage in a multiplicity of relationships with them, in order to neutralize their alternative structures of possibility and absorb them into itself. Moreover, communalism, unlike fascism or other political doctrines, lives in self-denial of its explicit objectives, where it can only imply what its principal characteristics are. It can never name itself directly as communalism. In the communal ‘imagery’, all symbols and meanings that are created become non-antagonistic and reinforce each other in their orientation towards a common adjective.28 8 Making Peace, Making Riots II. Debates Around Riots and Collective Violence Sandria B. Freitag, argues that the tendency of historians of communalism to extrapolate values and meanings from organizations alone leads to an incomplete understanding of the nature and development of communal consciousness. Further, a constant distinction between elite and popular reactions, labelling the latter as ‘violent’, implies a value judgement that renders popular protest suspect, less than legitimate, or even irrational: the ‘insensate violence’ of the bazaars and mohallas.29 She lays emphasis on the fact that participants also construct their respective communities for which they act, and in the process create their own ‘other’. Riots, in her analysis, occupy an important place because they typify public arena activities and enable the scholar to understand the nature of a particular community to which the participants of the riot conceive themselves as belonging. Riots constitute an essential component in a framework of social interaction that regards violence as one of a range of legitimate options of group action.30 Riots also measure the extent to which public arenas remained a viable form of negotiation and expression of urban socio-political relationships.31 Collective action, according to Freitag, is motivated by the participants’ perceptions that they belong to some kind of a whole, whether relational or ideological.32 She lays emphasis on gatherings in public arenas which create new social ties and emotional bonds, which could then be used as methods of mobilization. This last aspect is particularly important in studying the Noakhali riots and the Great Calcutta Killing, where such gatherings happened in public spaces. In these gatherings, the maulvis/pirs and local peasant leaders like Golam Sarwar spoke at length to the local populace. The public spaces and the activities that constituted it, then, become an important component in the mobilization of local Muslims of Calcutta and Noakhali in 1946. Moreover, by looking at the way participants themselves constitute and reconstitute their respective communities and the way they relate to it and act collectively, Freitag provides insights into the nature of a communal riot and reiterates the fact that any identity, whether communal or not, is never fixed. Patricia Gossman focuses on the rise of communalism amongst Muslims of East Bengal. She correctly argues that they never constituted a monolithic community. What is important to understand is how Bengali Muslim political leaders, especially those of the Muslim League, between 1905 and 1947, could successfully create symbols that cut across religious and class divisions.33 She focuses on the role played by the local pirs and religious leaders, who, in an attempt to forge a greater Muslim identity, were creating a new kind Introduction 9 of community cohesiveness, cutting across the Ashraf and Atrap differences within the community. Gossman also studies the role that violence plays in acquiring its own symbolic and ritualized place in political mobilization. This, in turn, creates opportunities for the formation of new identities. Violence during riots facilitates leaders’ contest for legitimacy against one another. Violence, she asserts, is an effective tool for political mobilization because it cuts across other divisions and generates solidarity against threatened aggression. Representations of violence become a symbol which helps freeze popular constructions of identity34 at a certain point. Those who protect their communities during riots become heroes and in this context, the study of the ‘criminal elements’, e.g. the goondas, becomes important. Arguing that activities of leaders in inciting collective violence do not merely imply that riots are the outcome of elite efforts to manufacture mass support, she suggests the importance to couple the study of riot ‘with an analysis that stresses human agency’.35 Gyan Pandey, while studying the violence that accompanied partition, asserts that it can be seen in two forms: the first being the ‘violence of the state’, which is often presumed to be legitimate, organized, carefully controlled, whereas the second form, i.e. the ‘violence of the people’, is seen as being diametrically the opposite of the first – it is chaotic, uncontrolled, excessive and, likewise, illegitimate. Violent actors are often described as masses, rabble or mob. This precludes the possibility of any sense of rationality and agency that such a group might possess. Looking at violence as a representation of lack of reason and will on the part of those who actively participate in this is essentially a colonialist (or statist) discourse. Riots in this narrative, then, become ‘aberrational’ or ‘extraordinary’ cases, seen as ‘a temporary madness’ or a ‘temporary suspension of reason’. This is the ‘othering’ of violence, because reason, progress, modernity, rational thought, all belong to the purview of the state. Violent ‘masses’ are the ‘other’ who need to be controlled. Riots, therefore, often in colonialist discourse, and later in nationalist discourse as well, became a law and order problem, as was witnessed in the official records during the riots of Bengal in 1946-47. Moreover, the emphasis on the ‘criminal elements’ such as the goondas during a riot overlooks the important fact that at times, there is tacit support given to them by ‘respectable’ people. In such instances, they often become heroes and are looked upon as protectors of the community. We shall study this in greater detail when we analyse the Great Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali riots in Bengal in 1946-47. 10 Making Peace, Making Riots I return once again to the work of Pradip Kumar Datta. Riots occupy a prominent place in his study as well, although he points out that they are not the terminal points of the process of communalization but one of the interrelated elements in an entire process. He focuses on how, during a riot, the body itself becomes communalized36. His work is important for an understanding of the meanings that are attributed to symbols (including symbols placed around the body, like clothing or a beard), that in turn become the chief markers of communal antagonism during a riot. Datta argues that any riot derives its source of power from the dangers posed to the body, and that riots ‘take to their [il]logical conclusion... the burden of meaning placed by the urban gaze on the communal signifiers of the body.’37 This argument is a key component in my understanding of communal violence in the riots of 1941 in Dacca and in 1946 in Calcutta and Noakhali, when attacks on the body of the ‘other’ attained an unprecedented gruesomeness. Taking a cue from the examples of go-korbani (cow-slaughter) that Datta cites38, and the assertion that during a potential riot situation the power of a communalized discourse is derived from its ability to problematize the relationships within a lived social space, I extend the argument to the case of the Great Calcutta Killing. The mass rally organized by the Muslim League on Direct Action Day turned an abstraction of the achievement or non- achievement of Pakistan into a visible reality. This visibility in a social space becomes very important in the case of a communalized society. Visibility ensures the display of power relations within society or an inversion of existing power relations. The mass meeting of Muslims in a vast open field at the heart of the city was precisely a symbolic assertion of power in a public space. Hindus retaliated by keeping their shops open and preventing the rally from reaching the Ochterlony Monument at the Maidan. A riot scenario then implicitly becomes a power/authority contest over public space. From rights over ‘sacred space,’ which trigger riots on issues regarding music around mosques, to rights over non-sacred civic space, all are moored eventually in power struggles. III. Historiography of Communalism and Communal Riots in Bengal Sumit Sarkar has traced the development of Muslim separatism and the roots of Muslim communalism from the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08. He points to the ruptures under an apparent syncretism that defined the Swadeshi andolan in Bengal, arguing that ‘social barriers and taboos remained sufficiently formidable for both communities to retain always a sense of separate identity Introduction 11 even at the village level.’39 He points out that the disparities in the ‘middle- class’ development amongst the Muslims and Hindus in Bengal regarding education and, consequently, appointment in government jobs constituted a fertile source of communalism. In the early period of the Swadeshi movement, patriotism came to be identified with Hindu revivalism, and the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘national’ became almost synonymous. Muslims came to resent Hindu assumptions of superiority increasingly, and when, under the influence of Syed Ahmad Khan, they gradually began to take to the ‘modern’ form of English education, far from contributing to secular nationalism, it stimulated in the Muslims a fear of being left behind the Hindus in the race for jobs and political influence.40 The Wahhabi and the Faraizi movements already had profoundly ‘Islamisized’ the rural Muslim society. They denounced syncretist trends like the rural Muslims’ participation in Hindu rites and festivals. Hindu revivalism too, with its emphasis on the Ganapati Utsava, the anti-cow- slaughter campaign and the Urdu-Nagari controversy ‘supplied fresh wind to the sails of the separatist movement being promoted from Aligarh.’41 Even when Swadeshi activists used Hindu-Muslim unity as one of their principal themes, there were several problems. On the one hand, communal harmony was notionally celebrated. But on the other, the evocation of traditional Hindu symbols went ahead on an unprecedented scale. Bipin Chandra Pal propounded his theory of ‘composite nationalism’ wherein the future progress of India was dependent on the advance of particular communities along their own lines. He visualized a ‘federal India’ in which units were not to be language based nationalities but were based on religious communities.42 Sarkar remarks that if the ‘federal India’ of the future was to have religious communities as its constituents, a basic disagreement between them would open the door for a partition of the country on communal lines; ‘only one short step thus logically divides Pal’s “composite patriotism” from the two-nation theory’.43 Eventually, the Swadeshi ideals had only a limited appeal for the Bengali Muslims. However, what made communalism dangerous in Bengal was the ‘incongruous Muslim combination of aristocratic leadership with anti-landlord demagogy.’44 The riots of 1906 –07 in Mymensingh, Jessore and other areas of the East Bengal countryside found an increasing response from Muslim lower classes and Sarkar sees an aggravation of the problem in the anti-zamindar and anti-mahajan tone of communal propaganda.45 The agrarian background in East Bengal districts, where peasants were mostly Muslims while zamindars and mahajans were Hindus, made this a potent possibility. Sarkar argues that from the Muslim point of view, the main lesson 12 Making Peace, Making Riots of 1906–07 was that in order to be significantly effective in Bengal, Muslim communalism must have an agrarian base.46 This lesson was well learnt by the Muslim League, as we shall observe in this book. Kenneth McPherson traces the rise of Muslim communalism in Bengal to the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation movement from 1918–22. He points out the limitations that the communal rapprochement faced during Khilafat and Non-Cooperation days and also identifies the attitude of the Hindu Bhadralok as a cause for the growth of Muslim communalism. He argues that although Muslim support for the boycott (organized in Calcutta as a part of the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation) was overwhelming, Hindu support was slacked. There was half-hearted support amongst Bengali Hindus for Khilafat and this plagued the rapprochement in Calcutta that had been attained briefly under the leadership of the Ali brothers and Gandhi.47 The reason behind this was that within Bengal, the Hindu urbanized middle classes and landowners were ‘nervously aware’ of the economic hegemony they exerted over the Muslim masses. ‘They feared to encourage Muslim political activity in case they themselves were threatened...’48 By the end of 1923, communal relations were in ruins and this was manifest in communal riots in Calcutta over issues like go-korbani and music before mosques. Communal tensions were further fuelled by the rise of the distinctly anti-Muslim Arya Samaj and the Shuddhi and Sangathan movements from 1923. C. R. Das’ Hindu-Muslim Pact in December 1923 met with lukewarm response and, in some cases, even with outright opposition amongst the Hindus of Calcutta. Public meetings were held to denounce the Pact as one sacrificing the Hindu interests. Even the Congress refused to ratify the pact in the face of strong opposition from Gandhi himself. Such reactions to the Pact, which was clearly conciliatory towards the Muslims, argues McPherson, confirmed the belief of many Muslims in Calcutta that the Congress was dominated by Hindu communalists.49 The Khilafat movement had politicized Muslims profoundly and created a sense of community solidarity hitherto not so clearly defined. Communal rapprochement during Khilafat and Non-Cooperation had provided the Muslims with much needed allies for their cause in the Congress. But once the Khilafat issue settled itself and the latent tension between the two communities came to the fore, communal antagonism resurfaced. McPherson sums up thus: the uplift and regeneration that the Muslims of Bengal ultimately sought, once the red-herring of the Khilafat had vanished, ‘was defined in negative terms of seizing the positions of economic power and influence held by their former allies, the Hindus.’50 Introduction 13 Suranjan Das makes a distinction between religious and communal identities. Religious identity concerns ‘personal allegiance’ to a set of dogmas and practices in search of rewards from a ‘transcendental reality.’51 Communal identities, on the other hand, identify individual commitment to special interests of a religious community for gaining ‘worldly advantages’ at the expense of other communities.52 Communal animosities, argues Das, are primarily motivated by conflicts over political power and economic resources. In this sense, Das critiques Bayly’s understanding of Indian communalism, stating that what Bayly characterizes as ‘pre-colonial communal riots’ were more religious than communal.53 Studying riots in Bengal from 1905 to 1947, Das looks at the transformation of the nature of communalism. Riots form the most important component of communalism for him through which he tries to understand communal consciousness. He argues that from 1940 onwards, as the Pakistan movement gained momentum, Hindu elites of Bengal became more apprehensive about losing their ground in provincial politics. From the 1940s, beginning with the Dhaka riot of 1941, a new pattern of riots emerged. Local maulvis and pirs were no longer active in inciting the crowd to violence. Instead, those who became significant were leaders of particular religious communities who were directly involved in promoting communal dissentions, and their cadres joined the crowds in violence.54 It is here that he notes a conjunction of ‘elite and popular communalism,’ where ‘the unorganized world of communal tensions was drawn into the realm of organized communal politics and the riot assumed important political overtones.’55 Das also notes some other points of difference between the riots of the 1940s and the ones that preceded them: assaults on women, rapes, abductions and forcible conversions, which got magnified during the Great Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali riots in 1946. This made it clear how communal consciousness had become increasingly tied up with the demand for Pakistan. Because of this connection between the riots and the Pakistan movement, Das labels the riots that took place in Bengal from 1946 as ‘Partition Riots’. He explores how these were carefully organized instead of being spasmodic incidents. Religion played an important role in mobilization of the masses and in legitimizing such violence. Summing up, Das argues that what happened in Bengal in the 1940s was a ‘psychological crystallization’ of communal identity among Hindus and Muslims.56 Hindu and Muslim community consciousness ‘assumed a distinct political identity, nourished by propaganda and hardened by riots.’57 However, there is a problem with Das’ mode of 14 Making Peace, Making Riots understanding communalism through the prism of riots. Riots are only an index of communalism. Studying the transformation of communalism through the nature of riots alone negates the influence of other indices like education or caste politics that shape communal consciousness. For Rakesh Batabyal, communalism is a modern and new articulation – the product of the new colonial presence.58 He lays importance on the political structure and processes at a specific historical juncture which shape the articulation of communalism, as well as the transformation of communalism itself into new forms and phases. 59 This makes the understanding of the ‘primacy of politics’ a corollary to that of communalism. With this understanding, Batabyal argues that by the 1940s, Muslims in general and the Muslim peasantry in particular, came to see an anti-Hindu pattern in the injustice and backwardness they had faced. This got translated into an idea of one community in opposition to the other. He sees the Bengal famine as a conjuncture which could have created new opportunities for transforming communal relations for the better, but political parties used the famine as a bargaining counter to drive home their respective demands, win electoral success and discredit rival parties. He also studies the elections and election campaigns of 1945 carefully and points out how mobilization and campaigning took place based on community lines, which also fed into the already brutalized consciousness that had emerged due to the famine. Like Das, Batabyal also studies the nature of violence during the riots, assaults on women, forced conversions and abductions, showing how communal consciousness had taken a firm hold on the people by mid-1946. An important component of Batabyal’s analysis revolves around Gandhi and his peace mission in Noakhali. Joya Chatterji’s work marks an important departure from the earlier studies on the partition of Bengal that looked at the prospect of partition as the inevitable conclusion of Muslim separatist politics. She provides fresh insights into the history of communal strife in Bengal, focusing on political and social processes that led to the demand for the partition. Her focus is on the growth of Hindu Bhadralok communalism. She shows how the Hindus of twentieth- century Bengal were not helpless bystanders or victims to the division of their homeland. Chatterji argues that in contrast to the Bengal partition of 1905, in 1947, the partition actually was actively supported by the Hindu Bhadralok. It was designed to maintain their traditional superiority in a province where they were a numerical minority. Partition was perceived and propagated by the powerful Bhadralok section of the Hindu society in Bengal as the only way to regain influence and wrest power from the Muslim majority, a power that the Introduction 15 Muslims had gradually come to exercise with the Communal Award and the rise of the Muslim League in Bengal after the elections of 1937. Chatterji propounds that the Communal Award of 1932 brought about important and far reaching changes in the politics of Bengal. It reduced the Bengali Hindu Bhadralok to an ‘impotent minority’ in the Legislative Assembly, by assigning to them far fewer seats than they had expected, compared to the Muslims whose share exceeded that of the Hindus by a substantial margin.60 The Award attracted widespread opposition from Bhadralok Hindus as they considered it a ‘frontal attack’ upon their position. The Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC), which was dominated by Bhadralok Hindus, opposed the Award on the lines that the interests of the Hindus had been sacrificed and that it would render the province economically, politically and, most importantly, ‘culturally’ impotent. The prospect of culturally ‘inferior’ Muslims gaining power was seen as a greater evil than British rule itself.61 As Bhadralok power gradually waned with the loss of economic power as well as with the rise of prosperous Muslim jotedars, Bengal society was increasingly polarized on class lines, which soon took on a communal colouring. The elections of 1937 and 1945 further showed the growing influence of the Muslim League, which intensified Bhadralok Hindus’ fears of Muslim domination in an undivided province. With the outbreak of the Great Calcutta Killings in August 1946, Bengali Hindus saw ‘a threat much closer to home against which they were ready to fight to the death.’62 Studying the riots that followed for five days after the Direct Action Day in Calcutta, Chatterji has done well to point out Hindu culpability as well in the riots. IV. Debates Around Gender In Partition Historiography Although partition histories have been studied and narrated in various forms, what has only recently begun to be analyzed is how women negotiated with and lived through partition. The exploration of the differentiated and manifold experiences of women during partition began with feminist historians who have made a real difference by looking at how certain categories of victims – women and children – were typically victimized by men of their own communities as well as of other communities, and by their nation states. Women were one of the worst affected groups in partition and the exodus that followed it.63 I analyze three important works that look at partition through the prism of gender. Urvashi Butalia explains her dissatisfaction with reading the history of partition simply through the political developments that led up to 16 Making Peace, Making Riots it. Experiential aspects of the millions of people who lived through the pain, trauma and partition - what she calls the ‘human dimensions of this history’64 – were thereby left aside. She argues that what needs to be studied, therefore, is how people remember the ‘facts’ of such history and how they represent them. The sources that could be used for the reconstruction of such histories, argues Butalia, are the ways in which they have been handed down to us through fiction, memoirs, testimonies and individual and collective memories that partition and the violence that accompanied it had unleashed. She recognizes the problems with such sources, because memories are never completely ‘pure’ or ‘unmediated’. What is more important is how an individual or group chooses to remember such a history. Oral history ‘tends to burn the somewhat rigid timeframes within which history situates itself ’ as such narratives tend to flow into each other in terms of temporal time.65 Partition did not become a closed chapter with 1947. People live with it even today and they go back to it when communal riots erupt now. In this context, Butalia argues that the study of women in partition is of primary importance because reading women’s narratives alongside or against the grain of official discourses of history gives feminist historians a different and alternative view of history. Women relate to partition and partition violence in a completely different way from the way men do and this area needs to be recognized and analyzed. Butalia also recounted the kinds of violence that children and Dalits faced in Punjab. Community discipline in this context assumes violent forms over community members. In a similar vein, Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta point out that the ‘Grand Narrative’ of the history of partition, concentrating on politics and negotiations regarding boundaries, ignores the ‘human aspect’ of partition, the saga of the struggles and tribulations, and also the triumphs that common people, especially women, experienced in the course of the violence and the migrations that followed the communal carnage. They show how women in both Punjab and Bengal were targeted as prime objects of persecution, because the female womb became conquered territory and attacks on them became a direct attack on the honour and integrity of the rival community – ‘women are identified as the main objects of ruthless conquest.’66 However, even raped and abducted women displayed resilience, fortitude and strength during migration that immediately followed the Noakhali riots and continued for a long time thereafter. Refugee women often became the sole breadwinners of their newly displaced families and asserted themselves in a new country with new roles. Therefore, the authors argue, one must not study women’s history only with Introduction 17 an exclusive focus on women’s sexuality, but also with a new focus on women’s migration histories and new workplaces where they created and asserted a new presence and in post-Independence political mobilizations where women began to figure in greater numbers.67 Gargi Chakravartty argues that partition stories are poignant because of their direct and indirect forms of violence. Rape, abduction and forced marriages during the Noakhali riots left permanent scars on women who were the worst affected groups during the communal carnage. Noakhali riots were especially traumatic for women, because violence here was legitimized by religion and the fear psychosis created by the actual and rumoured abductions and rapes of women led to major changes in everyday lives of women. Young girls were withdrawn from schools and were often forcibly married off at a young age to men of their own community to escape violation. Moreover, as Chakravartty notes, ‘The Noakhali violence marginalized women, who became victims of male chauvinism.’68 Not only men of rival communities, but men of their own communities used the prevailing chaos to take advantage of and exploit women. She studies how migration on both sides began much before August 1947, with families divided and moving away to ‘safer places’. Many Bengalis in East Bengal actually did not believe that the partition of Bengal in 1947 would be a permanent factor, just as the partition of Bengal in 1905 had not been that. Through interviews and oral testimonies, Chakravartty captures the essence of the trauma of women in partition, who were forced to migrate as a result of communal violence and state policy, yet never ceased to long for their erstwhile native homeland. Many of them, in the hope of returning someday, buried their utensils and other forms of property underground, with a hope of recovery that never got fulfilled. Her focus is, simultaneously, on the pain as well as on the activism of uprooted women in the rehabilitation process. THE PRESENT WORK This book embarks on an analysis of the last seven years of British rule in Bengal with the purpose of understanding the interplay of multiple socioeconomic, religious and political factors in the rise of communalism and communal politics in the province. Throughout the book, I have tried to argue against the singularity of any identity, be it that of class, caste or community. Through the analysis of community identities and communal politics, I have tried to maintain a focus on the ever-fluid nature of identity formations. Here I shall 18 Making Peace, Making Riots attempt to give a brief overview of the chapters and themes explored in the present work. The book opens with the first major riot of the decade, the Dacca Riot of 1941. Suranjan Das calls it ‘the transition to a new phase.’ Indeed, a close study of this riot reveals a certain pattern of violence that later also came to characterize communal disturbances like the Great Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali Riots of 1946. Forced conversions, large scale killings, rape and molestation of women, which were exceptional in riots of the earlier decades, became the norm from the Dacca Riot of 1941. Links with the issue of Pakistan were obviously new. However, the riot still retained some class-based characteristics of earlier disturbances of 1926 and 1930, like attacks on the properties of the Sahas, the chief Hindu trading community in Dacca. Hence, the riot stood at the cusp of transformation in the nature of communal violence in the province. It acquires importance in understanding how community consciousness was shaped by communal politics around the Secondary Education Bill of 1940 and the Census of 1941. As Pradip Kumar Datta explains, the census resulted, to some extent, in the stabilization of identities around new religious orientations, backed by institutional facilities such as reserved education and employment quotas.69 The Mahasabha and its various volunteer wings like the Bharat Sevarshram Sangha saw in the caste-wise classification of Hindus in the Census the possibility of a breakdown of ‘Hindu unity’. Hence it began to intensify its Sangathan activities amongst the Depressed Classes of Bengal, urging them to register themselves as only Hindus and not by their different castes. The introduction of the Secondary Education Bill by the League-dominated Bengal Government also crystallized such fears of ‘Hindu’ disintegration. In Bengal, higher education was a field dominated thus far by Caste Hindus. Franchise, social mobility and employment, all depended on educational qualifications. Education, in this sense, was a coveted political weapon as well. Hence, the attempts by Muslims to wrest greater control in the sphere of secondary education only aggravated communal politics, with Caste Hindus labelling it as an attempted ‘Pakistanization’ of the province. The Mahasabha, the Congress and the Muslim League rallied public opinion in the province strictly on communal lines directly leading to a surge on the communal barometer. Chapter 2 focuses on the Bengal famine of 1943. There have been significant studies of the causes of the famine and of the nature of the consequent economic and social dislocation of Bengal. However, none of them focuses on the possibilities that the famine created for community based mobilizations. Introduction 19 Rakesh Batabyal has studied the Bengal famine as a conjuncture which could have created new opportunities for transforming communal relations for the better, but organized political parties used the famine as a bargaining counter to drive home their respective demands, win electoral success and discredit rival political parties. However, Batabyal keeps the focus limited to the high politics of ‘organized political parties’. There is a need to revisit the famine in light of the deep impact it had on communal politics around the process of relief and rehabilitation. The complete breakdown of Bengali society created a black hole where the meaning of existence itself got sucked in. In such a calamity, community association became the only thread that the ruptured society could hang on to. The chapter therefore studies in detail the nature of the dislocation in Bengal in terms of how the constant exposure to death, disease and hunger created a total dependence upon relief measures. An analysis of the nature and complexities of relief/rehabilitation is then drawn up to show how communal politics inserted itself deep into the relief process. This precluded the scope for the development of secular politics, in spite of serious attempts made in this direction by the Communists. Hence the famine became the most crucial juncture in the 1940s, which consolidated community based mobilizations not only by organized political parties but also by various volunteer Hindu organizations like the Bharat Sevashram Sangha and the Hindu Mission. This was also the time when these volunteer groups were able to consolidate their slogan of ‘Hindu unity’ amongst the Depressed Classes. While the ‘lower’ caste Hindus were generally poor and had suffered terribly due to the famine, the Scheduled Caste MLA in the Nazimuddin Ministry, Mukunda Behari Mullick, supported the Ministry and did not champion the cause of the Scheduled Castes during the food debate in the Assembly.70 This alienated the famine-affected ‘lower-caste’ non-Muslim peasantry in rural Bengal from its organized leadership and made the Sangathan work of the Mahasabha and other Hindu volunteer groups more effective. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has shown that in the 1940s, Dalit politics at the grassroots had begun to show distinctive changes, and at a more general level ‘the Namasudra masses at this stage were developing a greater identification with the Hindu community and this Hinduization was gradually overshadowing their caste identity.’ 71 Concentrating only on high politics of the famine, hence, overlooks how community identity and communal politics reinforced each other in the everyday domain of relief processes. Studies of communalism, more often than not, tend to focus on the great divide between Hindus and Muslims, giving almost a bipolar view of communal 20 Making Peace, Making Riots politics. The caste factor complicates such a view and provides an interesting insight into the ways through which communalism mediates multiple identity indices. In Chapter 3, I have analyzed how the Scheduled Castes of Bengal navigated between their identities in terms of caste and religion. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s research has shown that the Scheduled Castes of Bengal, especially the Namasudras, had been politically active before the 1940s in asserting a separate identity. But throughout the 1940s, especially after the famine, we see a closer association of the Depressed Classes of Bengal with the Hinduization attempts by the Mahasabha and its various volunteer wings. The chapter studies the participation of the Depressed Classes in the educational politics of the province in the form of the Secondary Education Bill (SEB) of 1944. They had also been active in the controversy around the Education Bill of 1941. But in 1944, the League Ministry, in a desperate search for allies after its pathetic handling of the famine, made more definite overtures to the Scheduled Castes. Going beyond the rhetoric of religion, the League projected both Muslims and Scheduled Castes as common sufferers of Caste Hindu domination in the sphere of education and, hence, jobs. A distinct socialist message of the League became evident now. The elected members of the newly proposed Secondary Education Board were to be returned by separate electorates of Hindus, Muslims and Scheduled Castes. The response of the Scheduled Caste leadership in the Assembly was mixed, with one section directly opposing the Bill because they felt that they had not been given adequate representation. The inclusion of separate electorates was the biggest bone of contention for Caste Hindus, who saw in this a diabolical move to break ‘Hindu unity’. Not only political parties like the Mahasabha and the Congress, but also teachers and students across the province were drawn into severe protests. The ‘attempted Pakistanization’ rhetoric was used freely. What is interesting is that throughout the 1940s, every contentious issue between the two communities involved Pakistan in some way. By 1946, this had become the only issue. Whatever be the high politics, 1944–45 witnessed an increase in the number of communal disturbances between Muslims and Namasudras. The Bharat Sevashram Sangha and the Mahasabha had been actively translating the SEB into the trope of Hinduism in danger. In the aftermath of the famine, playing on the fear psychosis of attempted disintegration of community found a more receptive audience. It only fostered the consolidation of the Sangathan work of the various Hindu wings. The chapter also studies in detail the development of the Pakistan movement in Bengal and analyzes how the League transformed itself from an armchair Introduction 21 organization to a mass-based party. I have traced the socioeconomic and political climate specific to Bengal that provided for the gradual emergence of the ‘socialist’ or populist self-image of the League, especially during the election campaign of 1945–46. The undefined and ambiguous nature of Pakistan, as formulated in the Lahore resolution of 1940, eventually came to have different dimensions for different groups within the Muslim community. In the extremely difficult scenario that existed for the peasants after the famine, it was easy for the League to turn the Muslim peasantry’s discontent against exploitative Hindu zamindars and mahajans, and give the class conflict a communal colouring. Also, the total failure of the Congress in Bengal to support agrarian reform proposals and the militant zeal with which the Mahasabha and other Hindu groups carried on Sangathan, went a long way in garnering support for the League. However, it is equally important to trace the differences and divergences within the Pakistan movement. Bengali Muslims and their different representative organizations, especially the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, vehemently opposed the imposition of Urdu and advocated Bengali as the official language in East Pakistan. Linguistic and ‘cultural’ differences between Bengali Muslims and their counterparts in the North West were emphasized. Hence, while the League was propagating a two-nation theory and a common Islamic brotherhood, Bengali Muslims were already talking in terms of their internal differences. Chapter 4 and 5 explore the Great Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali Riots respectively, two of the worst riots that Bengal had witnessed till then. The scale of violence in both the riots was unprecedented and directly linked with the Pakistan issue. While the Calcutta riots witnessed unprecedented killings amongst both Hindu and Muslim communities, the Noakhali riots were less about killings and more about large scale destruction of temples, forced conversions to Islam and attacks on women, forcing Hindus to flee the district. The horrors that these two riots unleashed and their sheer magnitude left no doubt that the bridge between the two communities had indeed crumbled. The mutual distrust that stemmed from them led people to cluster into the ‘safety’ of their own communities, freezing identities into solid blocs. Thus, territorial separation began even before partition was announced. The Calcutta and the Noakhali riots can also be categorized as ‘partition before partition’. On 21 October, Walter Gurner, the commissioner of Civil Relief in Bengal, stated at a press interview that according to the latest information in possession of the Bengal Government, more than 20,000 refugees had taken shelter in the three relief camps opened by the Government in the affected areas of Noakhali 22 Making Peace, Making Riots and Tippera.72 The Hindusthan Standard reported on 25 October that the total number of refugees to have reached Calcutta thus far was 12,626.73 Taking the subcontinent as a whole, both communities ended up inflicting atrocities on each other in equal measure. Noakhali happened to be an area where Muslims led the aggression. But this in no way indicated a general pattern. Calcutta saw rioting on both sides and the Noakhali situation was reversed soon at Bihar, where Muslims were largely the victims and which, moreover, was ruled by a Congress government at that time. At the same time, coming just before partition, the events of Calcutta and Noakhali did prefigure many of the features which accompanied the division of the country. The trend of migration of refugees to ‘safer’ zones elsewhere in East Bengal and also to Calcutta, along with the panic resulting from the Noakhali riots, created internal borders even before partition. In terms of violence, segregation, migration and patterns of relief work, Bengal in 1946 was a dress rehearsal for the formal division of the subcontinent. Words that were associated with the formal partition of 1947 had already become common: relief, relief camps, mass migration, refugees. Segregation and ghettoization of living patterns of 1946 were a foretaste of the new territorial boundaries and borders. Violence accompanied both processes in equal measure and all political organizations were complicit in their making in different ways. However, while it is important to study the shifting nature of communal violence, it is equally important to focus on anti-communal resistance, relief and peace efforts by both common people and organized political parties in the event of a communal riot. This is an aspect that has been totally ignored in the existing historiography of communalism and communal violence. The resulting lacuna has led to an incomplete understanding of communalism and an overarching focus on communal violence. Studying anti-communal resistance is important for understanding the limits to communal violence. My work, therefore, focuses in a major way on peace efforts and anti-communal resistance in the event of serious communal violence, like the Dacca Riot of 1941 and the Calcutta and Noakhali Riots of 1946. The study of Gandhi has been undertaken in the last chapter. Since I have studied anti-communal resistance and peace efforts extensively, it would be impossible not to engage with Gandhi and his politics of combating communal violence in Bengal in the final year before partition. I have attempted to explore the different layers in Gandhian nonviolence in this context through a study of his Noakhali peace mission (1946) and his Calcutta fast (1947). Research into the complexities of Gandhi’s peace mission and his fasts as the ‘ultimate tool Introduction 23 of the Satyagrahi’ also unexpectedly revealed a strange undertone of hidden violence in certain aspects, especially in his messages to women. Moreover, the reception of Gandhi amongst Bengalis reveals interesting insights into the difference between Gandhi as a politician and Gandhi as the ‘Mahatma’ that he was generally perceived to be. The enchantment and the success of Gandhi lay in the fact that he knew when he had to deploy which side and when he had to merge these in order to achieve maximum results. Noakhali and Calcutta were examples when both were at work – his ideal of nonviolence and of using fasts as an infallible weapon to make an emotive appeal to the ‘erring parties’ (emphasis mine). The study of the ‘cult of the Mahatma’ hence becomes important in this context. ENDNOTES 1. This is in no way to suggest that the internal social divisions of caste, class and gender have ceased to co-exist. 2. C. A. Bayly, ‘A Pre-History of ‘Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700- 1860,’ Modern Asian Studies 19, No. 2 (1985), p 190 3. Ibid, p 189. 4. Ibid, p 192. 5. Ibid, p 202. 6. Ibid, p 190. 7. Bipan Chandra, ‘Historians of Modern India and Communalism,’ in Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, ed. Romila Thapar et al. (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1977), p 41. 8. Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (New Delhi:Vikas Publishing House, 1987), p 20, 34. 9. Chandra, ‘Historians of Modern India,’, p 43 10. Chandra, Communalism In Modern India, p 23. 11. Ibid, p 163. 12. Ibid, p 4. 13. Ibid. 14. This composition of the Hindu crowd during the Great Calcutta Killing has been studied by both Suranjan Das and Joya Chatterji. See, Suranjan Das Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), p 183; and Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p 239. 15. Chandra, Communalism In Modern India, p 4. 16. Ibid, p 2. 17. Chandra, ‘Historians of Modern India’, p 40. The letters in bold are by Chandra. 18. Prabha Dixit, Communalism: A Struggle for Power (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974), p vii. 24 Making Peace, Making Riots 19. Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism In Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University press, 2006), p 235. 20. Ibid, p 236. 21. Ibid, p 239. 22. Ibid, p 248. 23. Ibid, p 252. 24. Ibid, p viii. 25. Ibid, p 253. 26. Ibid, p 13. 27. P. K. Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology In Early Twentieth Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p 10. 28. Ibid, p 15. 29. Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p 12. 30. Ibid, p 93. 31. Ibid, p 94. 32. Ibid, p 89. 33. Patricia A.Gossman, Riots and Victims: Violence and the Construction of Communal Identity among Bengali Muslims 1905-1947 (Boulder, CO, Westview Press,1999) p 3. 34. Ibid, p 8. 35. Ibid, p 102. 36. Datta, Carving Blocs, pp 108 and 259–260. 37. Ibid, pp 259–260. 38. Ibid, p 245. 39. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), p 409. 40. Ibid, p 414. 41. Ibid, p 416. 42. Ibid, p 423. 43. Ibid, p 424. 44. Ibid, p 443. 45. Ibid, p 455. 46. Ibid, p 462. 47. Kenneth McPherson, The Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta, 1918 to 1935 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974), p 58. 48. Ibid, p 59. 49. Ibid, p 79. 50. Ibid, p 60. 51. Suranjan Das, Interrogating Politics and Society: Twentieth Century Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), p 2. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. Introduction 25 54. Das, Communal Riots In Bengal, p 148. 55. Ibid, p 148. 56. Das, Interrogating Politics, p 31. 57. Ibid. 58. Rakesh Batabyal, Communalism in Bengal, From Famine to Noakhali 1943-47 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), p 58. 59. Ibid, p 50. 60. Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp 20–21. 61. Ibid, p 26. 62. Ibid, p 232. 63. I must mention here that I do not look at refugee migration and rehabilitation as it falls outside the purview of my time period. This is in no way to negate the importance of this history. 64. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1998), p 7. 65. Ibid, p 13. 66. Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, ed., The Trauma and The Triumph: Gender And Partition In Eastern India (Kolkata: Stree, 2003), p 3. 67. Ibid, p 9. 68. Gargi Chakravartty, Coming Out Of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005), p 9. 69. Datta, Carving Blocs, p 25 70. Proceedings of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, Vol. 65, 14 July 1943, pp 418–421 71. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal 1872–1947 (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997) p 210 72. Hindusthan Standard, 23 October 1946. 73. Hindusthan Standard, 25 October 1946, Statement given by the president of the Central Relief Co-ordination Committee. 26 Making Peace, Making Riots 1 The Dacca Riot, 19411 The 1940s in Bengal were marked by a steady rise on the communal barometer. It is only fitting that I begin this study with an analysis of the first major riot of the decade. The Dacca riot of 1941 engulfed not only the city of Dacca but also the countryside, specifically the thanas of Raipur, Shibpur and Narsinghdi. It was in a way a harbinger to the horrors that would unleash in 1946 – the Great Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali riots. Described as ‘a transition to a new phase’ by Suranjan Das, it quantitatively and qualitatively ushered in a new kind of violence in the province. Hence it is, in several ways, key to understanding the later riots that shook Bengal a year before independence and partition. It is necessary to provide a background sketch of the various socioeconomic and political factors that led to the riot.2 Like most districts of East Bengal, Dacca too had a substantial Muslim population. In 1872, census enumerations had found that Muslims constituted 56.5 per cent of the population and each successive enumeration showed a marked increase in this percentage.3 Their rate of population growth between 1872 and 1901 was found to be nearly twice as much as that of Hindus.4 Muslims predominated in almost every part of the district, but their population was highest in the northern thanas of Raipura and Kapasia, and lowest in Dacca city, where they were outnumbered by Hindus.5 The proportion of Hindus was lowest in the Narayanganj sub- division. Namasudras were the dominant Hindu caste. They were numerous throughout the district, but mainly concentrated in Srinagar, Nawabganj and Keraniganj thanas.6 In the 1941 riot, this pattern of population distribution significantly determined the nature of violence. Hindu rioters were the chief aggressors in Dacca city, whereas Muslim rioters wreaked havoc in rural areas. Dacca had also been strongly inf luenced by the Wahabi and Faraizi movements, with their emphasis on avoidance of Hindu and other syncretic rites and rituals. Although numerically a minority, Hindus formed the bulk of the upper and middle classes in the city, with wealth and education being The Dacca Riot, 1941 27 largely concentrated in their hands. In Dacca, like everywhere else in East Bengal, Hindus dominated trade and moneylending. The ratio of moneylenders was the highest in Dacca as compared to the rest of Bengal. It was estimated to be about 280 per lakh of persons as compared to 40 in Burdwan or 26 in Bankura.7 Although some Muslims were petty shopkeepers, they did not have the capital to compete with the Hindus in the wholesale and quasi-wholesale trade. The cream of commerce had consequently passed into Hindu hands.8 Moreover, due to the Islamic taboo on usury, Muslims were hardly engaged in moneylending. In time, the city had seen the Hindus become richer, while the condition of the Muslims had remained roughly the same.9 The sharp contrast in their socio-economic statuses was marked ‘most obviously’ by the different kinds of houses inhabited by the people of the two communities. Muslim residential areas were fast turning into overpopulated, insanitary slums. On the other hand, Hindus were building ‘palatial residences’ on the best urban sites.10 Before the 1941 riot, Dacca had already suffered two major communal disturbances in 1926 and 1930. A brief reference to them will provide an understanding of how the 1941 riot stood apart. The 1926 riot broke out after a large number of local Muslims protested against the playing of music around mosques during the Janmashtami festival.11 A Muslim hartal was organized on 8 and 9 September, which coincided precisely with the days of Janmashtami procession.12 The primary motive for the hartal was to prevent Muslim carriage drivers and cartmen from providing services to Hindus during the festival. Hindus carried out a smaller procession nonetheless. They shouted slogans like ‘Hindu Dharma ki Jai’, and on 10 September, organized a retaliatory boycott of Muslim carriage drivers. Trouble really started when during the boycott, the Hindus forced passengers to disembark from carriages and burnt down hackney carriages. Muslim carriage drivers predictably responded with a counter offensive. Disturbances went on for almost three days. The upheaval was predominantly an urban disturbance.13 The riot was marked by sporadic stabbings and attacks on Sahas, the leading Hindu mercantile community in Dacca. Instances of Muslims looting Hindu shops were limited, and there were no reports of rape, large scale murders or forced conversions. But nevertheless, a new development began from the 1926 riot, i.e. the desecration of images and idols of Hindu gods. Suranjan Das, who has conducted an in-depth study of the riot of 1926, observes that ‘The Janmashmati procession at Dacca... was a “time-honoured institution” where Muslim musicians and labourers were employed, wealthy Muslims lent their elephants and horses, and Muslims from surrounding villages crowded 28 Making Peace, Making Riots the streets to watch the ceremony. But in 1925–26, this spirit was rapidly undermined.’14 Studying the Dacca riot of 1930, Tanika Sarkar has remarked, In Bengal... due to the rather peculiar configuration of property relations and social tensions conflicts did have a marked tendency to correspond to the contours of a communal conflict. Sectionalist politicians and Government officials played upon this peculiarity for all they were worth. The violence that ensued can be partially isolated from the undoubted pressures and strength of a distinctly religious response to a different community.15 The riot of 1930 was directly linked with the onset of the Depression from 1929. Dacca belonged to the heart of the jute belt.16 From 1926 the product market in jute had begun to wobble, and by 1930 it had completely collapsed. If in the year 1929 the index of jute prices is taken to be 100, in 1928 the index number was 107.3. But in 1930 it went down to 54.9, and crashed to 50.4 in the following year.17 The rural credit system completely collapsed. With the ‘cataclysmic drop’ in crop prices, the primary producers, especially the jute cultivators, found it extremely hard to obtain cash and make ends meet.18 Moneylenders simply refused to advance necessary cash loans. The rate of transfers of raiyati holdings picked up from the mid-1930s. In 1934, the approximate number of sales was 1,47,619, and of mortgages, 3,49,400. In 1936, this had increased to 1,72,956 sales and 3,52,469 mortgages.19 An official report from the district magistrate of Tippera described the situation thus: In normal times they would have tided over the crisis by resorting to the village mahajan, but on this occasion this source of supply was practically dried up. The village moneylenders scarcely have much accumulated balances; they deal in fluid cash, lending, realizing and lending again. In 1930, the arrangement was reversed; they realized little, their debtors could not pay and prospective borrowers could not get relief.20 The pattern of violence in Dacca in 1930 was typically marked by attacks on Hindu property and on the propertied class. The Hindu business centre at Kayettuli bore the brunt of repeated Muslim attacks. Loss of property was the primary Hindu grievance, not so much murder.21 The primary targets of the rioters were the houses of Sahas and moneylenders. Apart from numerous cases of tearing up debt bonds, there was also a massive plunder of a local hat (market) and Hindu property worth Rs 2,43,182 was destroyed.22 Several rice godowns were also attacked. Sugata Bose best describes the peasant mood: ‘If The Dacca Riot, 1941 29 the availability of the credit disguised an exploitative, symbiotic relationship in a benevolent garb, its scarcity destroyed the justification for the exploitation and therefore the very basis of the ties between the peasants and the mahajans.’23 The cash famine was one of the major factors contributing to attacks on mahajans in the riot of 1930. Communal tension did spread to rural areas, but arson was fairly limited. There were no reports of rape or forced conversion. ‘Self-restraint, quite remarkable in a riot situation, was in fact evident when a huge armed Muslim gang attacked a Hindu house where four young girls were alone by themselves. The girls just lost their jewels.’24 Hindu moneylenders, and not so much landlords, were the main targets of attack. The probable reason behind this, according to Sarkar, was that the rent burden was not so heavy in Dacca. Moreover, as Sarkar remarks, ‘landlords were perhaps vested with some amount of customary legitimacy or authority in peasant minds, whereas mahajans, often forming a distinct group, external to peasants, and displacing them from their lands, would form no part of their patriarchal moral universe.’25 The rioting crowd also demonstrated an ‘alternate concept of fair deal,’ aroused more by a sense of undoing economic injustice than communal antipathy.26 Rioters did not necessarily always appropriate the looted property, but sold it at very low prices. As we shall see later, there was a shift from this in the pattern of violence that characterized the communal riot of 1941 in Dacca. The self-restraint that was visible in 1926 and 1930 was remarkably absent in not just the Dacca Riot of 1941, but also in all the major communal disturbances of the 1940s. In fact, attacks on women became the norm in the communal violence to come. 1930–31 was marked by a spate of hat looting and attacks on mahajans. As the downward spiral in the price of jute and other agricultural commodities continued, peasant purchasing power only crashed further. The looting of hats or bazaars which stocked these relatively expensive articles was, thus, an ‘expression of threatened consumer consciousness.’27 As Sarkar argues, the entire hat was seldom looted. Shops that stocked the more expensive items were isolated for the attack.28 Hat looting was rampant in Rajshahi, Dinajpur, Jessore and Faridpur. At Munshiganj subdivision of Dacca, a group of around fifty peasants attacked a hat at Tangibari in March and looted clothes and food items. But this form of hat looting was soon replaced by a more organized form of protest – the refusal to pay rent and pay back agricultural loans. The general peasant militancy of the 1930s crystallized into mushrooming of numerous Krishak Samitis. The prevailing economic distress and real shrinkage of credit as well as extortionate acts of village mahajans and smaller 30 Making Peace, Making Riots landlords in the past prepared the ground for Krishak Samiti activities.29 Dacca was also one of the important nerve centres of Krishak Samiti Activities. An official report from the district magistrate of Tippera in December 1931 read: ‘Samitis have been started in almost every village with their own presidents and secretaries. Almost everybody in the village is a member of the Samiti except the mahajans.’30 These samitis demanded that mahajans had to surrender their documents and that they would decide when and how debts had to be repaid. As the decade waned, meetings of these samitis became more frequent, and they demanded the early establishment of Debt Settlement Boards. At a Samiti Conference held at Dacca in April 1936, Fazlul Huq, an important Krishak Samiti leader, helped to bring together most of the Krishak Samitis of almost all districts. Thus was born the Krishak Praja Party (KPP), in an attempt to unify Samiti activities throughout the province. This was also the beginning of an organized peasant politics in the province, which then exercised an important yet fluctuating influence on the politics of the province. A brief overview of the political scenario of the province is important here; it will be discussed in detail in chapter 3. Elections to provincial legislatures were held for the first time in 1937. In Bengal, the three main players were the Congress, the Muslim League and the KPP. In its election propaganda, the League stressed the need for Muslim solidarity as a prerequisite for making provincial autonomy meaningful to Muslims in Bengal.31 The main plank of the KPP propaganda was the abolition of zamindari without compensation. It promised ‘dal-bhaat’ to all in Bengal, a slogan devised to endear itself to the common-man.32 The Congress mainly talked of Swaraj, political change and constitutional reforms. In the elections of 1937, Fazlul Huq defeated the League candidate Nazimuddin by a big margin.33 The Muslim League got 39 seats (out of the 82 contested), KPP got 36 seats (out of the 75 contested) and the Congress got 54 seats, making a sweep in the general constituencies. Although the Muslim League obtained more seats, the percentage of votes polled was less than that of the KPP. Huq, being the leader of the KPP, opened negotiations with the Congress to form a coalition. However, talks between the two parties soon broke down. The Congress insisted on giving immediate importance to the release of political prisoners while for the KPP, the settlement of agrarian debt was the primary concern. As negotiations between the KPP and the Congress broke down, the KPP saw no option but to form a coalition ministry with the League, with Huq as the Chief Minister.34 However, this turned out to be the biggest political blunder for Huq – the selection of personnel of the Ministry The Dacca Riot, 1941 31 was not in his hands, and nine out of eleven members were from the zamindar class. This was deeply resented by other members of the KPP, who soon began to distance themselves from the new coalition party. Faced with severe criticism from both the KPP and the Congress for completely deviating from his electoral promises, Huq joined the Muslim League in October 1937. With this, the ministry practically became a League ministry. Shila Sen observes, ‘Within six months he realised that to save the ministry, it was necessary to join the Muslim League and to satisfy the Muslim League it was necessary to arouse communal, i.e. anti-Hindu passions.’35 After coming to power in 1937, the League-dominated Bengal Government, under Fazlul Huq, passed certain legislations which directly benefitted the Muslim cultivators at the expense of the Hindu zamindars and moneylenders. The Bengal Tenancy Amendment Act of 1938 abolished the landlords’ transfer fee and the realization of abwab by the landlord or his agent was made punishable by fine.36 The Bengal Money-lenders Act of 1940 also curbed the activities of the Hindu moneylenders by abolishing compound interest, fixing maximum rates of interest and providing for repayment by instalments. This Act was specially lauded by the pro-League daily the Star of India as one which carried with it ‘a message of hope for those who have been for years plunged into dark despair of ever releasing themselves from the clutches of the avaricious and unscrupulous moneylender, who, with his extortionate usury sucks the lifeblood of the people.’37 This was the beginning of a number of pro-peasant legislations passed by the Bengal Government under the League leadership, which began to take the wind out of the KPP sails. Bengal in 1940 was already a communally charged province. Suranjan Das argues that outside the world of politics, some short-term changes in population and prices had made members of both communities ‘restive.’ The Census of 1941 reported that between 1931 and 1941, Dacca District had registered a population growth of 18.34 per cent and the city of Dacca alone had seen an increase of 35.03 per cent.38 Wages in the agricultural sector remained low, but the cost of living in Bengal increased by nearly 200 per cent compared to the pre-war years.39 Rice imports from Burma had been stopped because of the war, and low output meant reduced supply and rising prices of major food-grains. Allegations were also levelled by Muslim merchants against their Hindu counterparts of ‘cornering cloth’ and other essential items for higher profits later.40 Das argues that

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