The Wire 21 - February 2017
Ajay Verghese’s The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence looks
at the colonial past to understand why some parts of India suffer from
communal conflict while others suffer from caste conflict.
In the past two decades, economists and political scientists have
increasingly turned to India’s colonial past to understand the present.
Scholars such as Abhijit Banerjee, Lakshmi Iyer, Nathan Nunn and Shivaji Mukherjee
have shown how colonial indirect rule and land administration policies,
often implemented with little consideration of local conditions,
explain how levels of conflict and economic development vary so much
across South Asia today. The very randomness of these colonial policies
makes them ideal ‘natural experiments,’ it appears, for estimating the
true effects of different kinds of government interventions.
The latest work in this area, Ajay Verghese’s The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India,
looks to the colonial past to understand why some parts of India seem
to suffer from communal conflicts while others suffer from high levels
of caste conflicts. Generations of historians have pointed to religious
divide-and-rule policies as perhaps the most distinctive and damaging
aspect of British colonial rule. But Verghese’s revisionist thesis
emphasises the role of the colonial administration, after 1857, in
highlighting caste identities in its provincial governments and
policies, most importantly in its land settlement and land
administration policies. These provincial policies, he says, led to an
increase in caste polarisation and conflict in British India. The
cross-cutting nature of these caste cleavages also had at least one
unforeseen benefit, however, by helping to defuse larger religious
conflicts in the provinces between Hindus and Muslims. In princely
India, by contrast, Verghese argues that rulers sought religious
legitimacy and also practiced religious discrimination in their
administrations, therefore increasing long-term religious grievances and
conflicts but in doing so, also helping to reduce caste conflicts.
Independence did not represent a sharp break with these patterns, but
rather helped to entrench them. Areas that that had been part of British
India continued to have higher levels of caste conflict, while former
princely states had higher levels of communal conflict.
The most important evidence for Verghese’s thesis comes from his
careful historical analysis of two pairs of cases, the former princely
state of Jaipur and the British territory of Ajmer in present-day
Rajasthan, and the former princely state of Travancore and British
district of Malabar in Kerala. He argues that Jaipur had high levels of
Hindu-Muslim tension and conflict before independence, but low levels of
caste conflict, and that these levels continue today. Ajmer on the
other hand had very low levels of communal conflict before 1947 but
higher degrees of caste conflict, and these patterns too have continued
after independence. The story in Kerala is much the same. He argues that
the British in the Malabar region de-emphasised religion and
highlighted caste inequalities and identities, which continue to
dominate politics today, while the princely state of Travancore
highlighted religious identities and discrimination, which continues to
dominate politics in that area. Such differences explain, for instance,
why the RSS and BJP have done better in Travancore, and why Naxals are
more prevalent in Malabar.
There is a lot to like in this book. Verghese is surely right to
highlight the fact that different identities were important at different
levels of the colonial Indian state, and that, through the prism of the
1930s and partition, we tend to assume that religion was much more
central to colonial policy than it might have been, and that we are too
ready to discount the importance of caste and other identities. One
other very appealing aspects of the book is the way in which Verghese
integrates so many different kinds of evidence – fourteen months of
archival research and fieldwork, careful historical and case studies, as
well as large-n analysis. Verghese also anticipates some of the
possible counter-arguments to his analysis, for instance by conducting a
fascinating historical study of the former princely state of Bastar, to
explore the reasons why that state has such high levels of tribal and
Naxal conflict despite seemingly possessing the (princely state) factors
that elsewhere in the book associates with religious conflict.
But, as is often the case with revisionist arguments, Verghese
sometimes pushes the evidence a bit too far in support of his thesis.
First, outside the province of Madras, where the post-1910 backward
caste revolution and Justice Party rule in the 1920s and 1930s make a
clear case for the importance of caste identities, it is hard to sustain
his overall thesis that caste was more important than religion at the
provincial level throughout British India. We can in fact point to a
very large number of British provincial policies, from separate
electorates in provincial governments, to religious reservations in
state police and civil service employment, to language policies
declaring the use of Urdu versus Hindi, which did focus on religion
rather than caste, and which therefore help to explain the large amount
of conflict along religious lines in British India. The UP
administration, as Francis Robinson, Paul Brass and others have
explored, recruited many staff on the basis of religious preferences
before independence – Muslims, with 14% of the population, were
guaranteed a third or more of the positions in the police and civil
service – but had far fewer preferences on the basis of caste. The same
was true in most other provinces. The legislative debates from provinces
like Bengal, Punjab, Bihar, and CP before independence also have a lot
more questions about religious proportions in government service, and
religious conflicts, than they do about caste cleavages, which again
suggests that these identities were more important than caste identities
to politicians and their constituents. Hindu-dominated elected
governments in Congress provinces after 1937 were accused of favouring
their co-religionists in a very similar way to the rulers in princely
states, as publications such as A.K. Fazlul Huq’s, Muslim Sufferings under Congress Rule (Calcutta, December 1939) make clear.
A second issue is that teasing apart caste from communal motivations
in order to prove that princely India equals religious conflict and
British India equals caste conflict, is harder than it seems. Verghese’s
argument that the Malabar was an area of relative communal peace before
independence, for instance, will likely come as a surprise to readers,
because the Mappila rebellion of 1921 has frequently been characterised
as one of the worst instances of Hindu-Muslim conflict before
independence. Verghese recognises that the Malabar is a problematic case
for his argument, and he therefore goes to considerable lengths to show
that the rising was at its core driven by caste and economic concerns.
He uses the fact that many Muslims were low caste converts, that many
landlords were Hindu upper castes, and that some low caste Hindus were
involved in the uprising (albeit in the initial stages) to argue that,
“At its core, the Mappila unrest was agrarian…in essence an expression
of long-standing agrarian discontent, which was only intensified by the
religious and ethnic identity of the Moplahs and by their political
alienation.” This caste interpretation may be plausible, but he provides
no conclusive evidence to show that this is the only reading possible
for events that clearly had a variety of economic, caste, agrarian and
religious motivations, nor for his contention that communal tensions
dramatically declined in Malabar after 1921 and 1947, while caste
identities remained salient.
A related question, while we are on the subject of categorisation, is
how we can we squeeze the fluidity and complexity of history into the
hard categories of social science and especially statistical analysis.
In his Bastar chapter – my personal favourite – Verghese argues that the
exceptionally high violence in pre-1947 Bastar was not really an
exception in terms of his overall characterisation of princely India,
because Bastar had actually been run for much of the pre-1947 period
directly by the British. The British controlled the region’s forests,
exploited the natural resources and the tribal populations and, when it
suited them, took over the princely state directly for long periods on
some pretext or other. Thus, the distinction between the British and the
princely is not as clear as we may think. Some British territory was
clearly administered differently and with more of a nod to local
precedent, interests, rulers and customs than others and on the princely
side some areas like Bastar clearly had much less autonomy than others,
and were administered directly or indirectly by the British for long
stretches.
But if we do accept that distinctions such as British-princely,
indirect rule-direct rule, or Zamindari-Ryotwari-Mahalwari land systems
are really continuous variables, with lots of regional and local
differences in policy and implementation, rather than hard-and-fast
categories, then is the recent large-scale use of such variables in
statistical analysis –including by Verghese in this book – defensible?
In truth, as Verghese’s qualitative analysis makes clear, some states
such as Hyderabad had enormous autonomy, others much less so, while in
other states rulers were autonomous for some periods but were under
heavy British supervision or even direct rule for others, in a way that
makes statistical dummy variables seem inappropriate.
A third point, in any study that wants to establish continuity with
the past, is the question of whether we are we sure we have got the past
right? Verghese seems confident on the basis of his archival work that
he has his facts about the past correct, and that others do not. He
argues that scholars such as the historian Ian Copland,
who have argued that Ajmer was as communally sensitive as Jaipur before
independence are just wrong: “Ajmer had only two minor riots prior to
Partition” while Jaipur experienced several more riots than listed by
Copland. Verghese himself however has missed a few riots in Ajmer. In
addition to the two ‘minor’ riots he lists in 1923 and 1936, by my count
there seem to have been at least three more in Ajmer before the end of
1947 – one in 1926, a riot in May 1928 in which 25 Muslims were injured,
and one in December 1947 in which more than 50 persons, mainly Muslims
were reported killed December 1947. In addition there was a reported
Hindu-Muslim riot over a Holi procession at Bhinai, outside Ajmer,
listed in the 1912 administration report. There may, of course, be more
cases. So overall it is hard to see Ajmer as a complete bastion of
communal peace prior to India’s independence, and without that clear
difference the ‘continuity’ argument that Verghese makes between levels
of communal peace before and after 1947 in Ajmer starts to look more
doubtful.
One final question is about the role of post-1947 politicians in
determining the pathway that these different regions have taken? If we
focus so much on past colonial policies in explaining outcomes such as
caste and communal conflicts, or the number of roads and schools in a
region, does that absolve the post-1947 politicians, parties, and agents
of the state from blame, and what does that mean in terms of our agency
to change things in the present? Verghese properly acknowledges this
tension, but one thing I would have liked to see more of in the book is a
more explicit consideration of how much he thinks the historical
institutions he explores gave post-1947 Indians, and Indians today, the
freedom to change things, and reduce levels of conflict, Naxal and caste
violence today.
Steven Wilkinson is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian
Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at
Yale University.